Chapter 589: Stock Car Race

"For those of you raised under the iron fist of the Executor Council and the Unified Council's laws, the Confederacy's insistence of "Innocent Until Proven Guilty", with the burden of proof relying on the prosecution and State rather than upon the accused, with the burden of proof being 'beyond a reasonable doubt' and sometimes 'overwhelming', is a horrible shock.

"The Terran Confederacy believes it is better to let a hundred guilty beings go free than punish a single innocent being.

"Which is why it took me so long to understand exactly what was being prosecuted during the history Trial of General Trucker." - Former Grand Most High Sma'akamo'o, from I Have Ridden the Hasslehoff

The station drifted around the dark neutron star, a strange and twisted thing of bioengineered structure and mechanical engineering. Extruded resin melded with welded battlesteel meshed with throbbing organs pulsating with unnatural life that were joined with strange and esoteric machinery in such a way that it gave both a dark and disturbing life.

Docked to the station was a twisted living ship, a great scar upon its hull where a Confederate Naval C+ cannon had been merged with the ship, twisted engines that could move through time, dimensions, jumpspace, hyperspace, stringspace, and despite the danger, hellspace.

Inside the strange and twisted station was a single Atrekna, his needs and desires seen to by carefully grown servitors instilled with dark life and purpose by the Atrekna researcher.

Formerly the researcher, who had taken to thinking of itself as a 'him', had investigated the relatively simple discipline of temporal mechanics.

But that was in the Old Universe, which was gone, destroyed by the Mad Lemurs of Terra.

Now, temporal mechanics was a demanding and difficult discipline, each discovery, each breakthrough, leading to greater danger and stranger questions.

But the Atrekna, who had labeled itself Dalvanak despite the fact that Atrekna identified one another by psychic auras rather than anything so crass as audible speech, found the increased difficulty, the danger, the questions, and the hard work to be strangely satisfying in a way he had never experienced.

Unlike his fellow Atrekna, Dalvanak scavenged lemur wreckage when he could. Carefully gathering it up like a junkie sidling up to a dealer they aren't sure is a cop. Each item, each treasure, he carefully examined in his lab deep in the gravity well of the neutron star where time itself warped and twisted.

Dalvanak found it useful, despite the occasional screams of wrath, hatred, and agony from the magnetic field of the neutron star that had once held a complete biosphere of steadily growing slavespawn.

It had taken Dalvanak the equivalent of decades to break the secrets of how the Mad Lemurs created their molecular circuitry of such compact design that they used stretched electrons as 'wires' within their circuitry.

It had taken him centuries to understand Mad Lemur programming languages.

Personally, Dalvanak was pleased with his cleverness.

Where his peers and rivals would have tried to take a Mad Lemur prisoner to learn, or attempted to learn it from blasted and damaged wreckage, Dalvanak had approached it much differently.

He had maintained careful concealment and stealthily snuck onto a planet that had once been inhabited by the Mad Lemurs but was now full of the walking dead and Enraged Maddened Angry Lemurs. He had covertly infiltrated a former urban area, researched and stealthily approached and entered a repository of treasure.

After rifling through the pockets of the dead to find their credsticks and credit cards.

Once inside the Space-Mart he moved through the dark aisles carefully, selecting each treasure with utmost care and caution. He then approached the animatronic sales device, quickly purchasing everything he needed.

He did not make haste leaving, he did not want to attract the attention of the always hungry walking dead.

Once he had reached his dark and terrible research station he had carefully examined the strange tomes and the crude hieroglyphics of the Mad Lemur writing.

He read each instruction manual carefully.

Once he had accomplished that, he had logged into the interstellar information network using his carefully acquired hardware that he had spirited away from SpaceMart without paying tarriffs. A fantastic accomplishment in his own eyes.

He had downloaded, in its entirety, each 'distance learning course', rubbing his hands over the steady increase of his knowledge.

He learned each programming language, learned how to create amazing devices with the "1001 Science Experiments" portable laboratory he had spirited away.

Twice he had carefully infiltrated the same planet, each time rifling through the pockets of corpses for more credsticks and credit cards. He discovered, using the terrible Mad Lemur pistol, that he could disable a Hungry Deceased Lemur, then suck out its thoughts with psychic ability as long as he resisted the urge to consume its cerebral tissue.

He did find carrying around the severed hand of a Mad Lemur distasteful, even if he could use his psychic powers to fool the life sensors, but he did so anyway in order to access bank accounts.

Automatic Teller Machines near the banking institutions were a boon to Dalvanak, although he was always careful to make sure the Hungry Deceased Lemurs were nowhere near as he drained dead lemur's accounts to put on credsticks.

Then he would choose a repository of treasures and loot it.

Once his hold was full of stealthily acquired treasure he would race back, plunging deep into the gravity band, to the bubble his personal research station floated in. He would then shift time, so it passed faster inside the bubble than in the rest of the universe. He would study, learn, wrest the secrets of the lemurs from their artifacts and crudely written documents.

He often watched three dimensional holograms that had been encoded on crystal wafers, watching the daily lives and adventures of the Mad Lemurs of Terra. It had been difficult for Dalvanak to determine how the crystals were deciphered until he had seen an establishment with wafer display machines in the window.

He had looked around quickly, seen none of the Hungry Hungry Lemurs, ran inside the building, grabbed three boxes of the wafer display machines, and rushed out of the building even as the automatron gibbered and shrieked at him to come back and provide financial renumeration for his taking possession of the devices.

He had hurried back to his station, carefully consulted the instruction manuals, and realized he had to make another trip. This time to acquire a display unit. Again, he rushed out, yelling out "SO LONG, FUCK-O!" as he left the establishment and ran down the street yelling "WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP!" A tactic he had learned confused the automated defenses of the necropolis.

Once it was working, he sunk his laboratory into the time stream to allow time to run faster inside his research station than the universe outside.

The New Universe didn't seem to mind that so much, as long as when he left he changed the charge state of the station so that time went by slower in the station.

Dalvanak had discovered that the New Universe demanded that each action have an equal and opposite reaction in all things.

Dalvanak felt quite accomplished that no being knew that he, Dalvanak el Tentáculo se Enfrentó as he had taken to calling himself, was not really a one of the Mad Lemurs, even though he had made the Dean's List and the top ranking of the grading system for ReFry GalNet Online University.

Such information was to be had.

He always kept up his experimentation, to learn the rules, learn the mechanics, behind the New Universe.

As such, the sudden excitement of the chronotrons he was watching caught his immediate attention.

Dalvanak had been examining the outcome of temporal adjustment upon something called an 'texarkana fire ant farm' and how adjusting the temporal particles and temporal structures quickly caused the worst possible outcome for those who had initially benefited, attempting to learn if there was any way around such a stricture.

All he had proven was there was some kind of cold dark malevolence, an almost gleeful hatred, that he could almost comprehend that was behind it.

When the worst outcome manifested itself by the biggest of his insect farms falling from the shelf and exploding, covering him in red biting insects, he could have sworn he heard faint howls of laughter as he screamed in agony as the insects bit his flesh, burrowed into his clothing, and committed rude acts of attempting to eat him.

He had regretted killing all of them that were on his person, but it had to be done.

For science.

Of course, many had escaped into his lab and he had quickly learned that leaving out any food seemed to attract thousands of them.

Twice the tiny creatures had devoured a slavespawn that had gone into hibernation.

Dalvanak was fascinated by their rapacious hunger, their ability to travel long distances and return to their home, to lead others of their kind to food.

He had quickly surmised that if tiny insects such as the 'ants' were so rapacious and implacable, then all of the Terran biosphere must have been a pressure cooker of eat or be eaten and adapt or be eaten.

Dalvanak developed the theory that the Mad Lemurs of Terra had been forced to develop tools in order to compete with a biological pressure cooker that forced evolution quickly if a species didn't want to get eaten.

To Dalvanak it explained so much about the Mad Lemurs.

The data wafers, full of holograms, would have been dismissed by his peers. Dalvanak found himself delving deeply into what he quickly discovered was a mixture of mythos, history, fantasy, and speculation. He noted down what the Mad Lemurs of Terra could survive, what predators they could have had in their history.

It was watching that data that he determined that the Mad Lemurs of Terra had the most fearsome predator anyone could ever imagine.

Other Mad Lemurs.

It made sense to him.

The lack of cooperative consensus driven civilization had simply added the Mad Lemurs of Terra to the evolutionary pressure that formed the entire species.

He tried to explain it to the other Atrekna. They merely scoffed at him, jealously complained about the finery he had taken to draping himself in, and ignored his wisdom and knowledge.

Of course, he only had to shoot two with that marvelous 'mag-ac pistol' before they remembered to leave him alone.

He was performing more experiments after another futile attempt to convince the others that the Mad Lemurs of Terra were dangerous in a way the Atrekna had not seen since they tamed the Old Universe, that they had possibly never seen in their hundreds of billions of years of existence. It was as delicate experiment, one that Dalvanak believed to assist him in understanding how the Mad Lemurs of Terra functioned as a temporal anchor and a temporal dissonance system to the point that their mere image, even an ancient echo, could alter things.

It involved a careful observation of chronotrons as the holograms emitted by the display device played. He had quickly discovered that his own attention would make chronotrons around him change their spin, their charge, and their patterning.

The chronotrons he was examining suddenly erupted in a spray, fountaining out thousands, millions, billions more chronotrons that all danced and vibrated and shivered.

Dalvanak quickly ran to his other labs, observing the chronotrons.

They were all shivering and dancing and vibrating.

Dalvanak realized what it meant.

Something big was happening.

Something so big that it would hammer a spike the size of a supermassive galaxy into the time stream of the New Universe.

Dalvanak wondered what, and where, in the universe it could be as he began recording his observations and the changes to his experiments.

He adjusted his nifty new attire, which he had stealthily made off with. It was pale white with intricate beadwork and embroidery, frilly, with delicate sprays of complexly woven white thread at the cuffs, at the collar, down the back. It had a gauzy cape and train. It had wonderful room to move and the tiny piezoelectric crystals in the fabric glimmered when he used his psychic powers. He had found a building still manned by automatons that had been full of such regal and impressive attire. After careful planning he had managed to spirit away nearly two dozen such outfits.

Clad in his expensive clothing, which he wore for important research, he watched the chronotrons dance and sparkle.

Yes, it was good he was wearing the proper attire. The Wedding of Knowledge, Fact, and Proof was something that should be Dressed for.

Still, he wondered what cataclysmic event would alter the entire timeline of something so vast that the mere through of it made it so that Dalvanak adjusted the veil over his face.

What could it be?

-------------

"I thought I'd find you here," the voice was raspy, with a slight clicking to it.

The large Treana'ad sat down on the bench, staring out at the carefully cultivated lake where local waterfowl were paddling around.

The Terran next to him, one of six on the entire planet, just nodded, spitting into a bottle he held in one hand.

"The judge said their almost done with their deliberations," the Treana'ad said.

Again, the Terran just nodded.

"I told the MP's I'd escort you back," the Treana'ad added. "It's time."

The Terran stood up, tugging at the bottom of his uniform jacket and checking his sash to make sure everything was in place.

"I'm with you, Manuel, no matter what," the Treana'ad said.

"Thanks, Smokey. Let's go find out the verdict," General Manuel Trucker said.