Chapter 601: No Time for Tears

"Any captain, too filled with rage, or who cleaves too iron-fisted to their duty, or who serves in the presence of the Black Fleet, may find their soul chained to the commander's chair of the newest addition to the Black Fleet." - Mantid Legend

"So, you think you know humans, which means you think you know what the Black Fleet is about if you believe that it exists. Some type of Terran fleet using their Born Whole system to replicate entire crews as well as Captains and their vessels.

"The truth is far stranger, and far more human. A captain and their ship, if they be worthy, they shall become the dark shield of Humanity. Fight unto death on a battlefield where hope is lost and yet you are unbowed, stand tall against overwhelming odds and say that the price of warsteel and blood will be paid ten fold. Die on a field of battle where the Master of the Black Fleet bears witness, and you might be taken as blood to their blood, and your ship as warsteel to the forge. Cursed they cry to battle eternal, but perhaps blessed to strike where sword is broken and stubber silent. From final stand to eternal guardian, no, legend and shield and final weapon in one." - Terran Historian Scotshammer to a Captain's Tactical Course.

"If you let Terrans set the battlefield, set the pace of the battle, set the terms of the engagement, you have already lost. If you think you are winning, you may be closer to defeat then ever. If you think you are losing, you are right and must disengage for retreat, repositioning, or manuever." - Treana'ad Military Academy, War of Terran Aggression

"...and they will not stop until you, and everyone like you with a weapon in their hand, are dead. They will rip off your faceshield, reach down your throat, and pull your fucking heart out." - Most High Mu'ucru'u

"The skulls they use for armor face plates are not just to frighten their opponents. When a Terran puts on what, in their words, may be the last suit they ever wear, that skull face plate changes them into the manifestation of death. That a grinning human skull shall be the last thing their enemy sees, and an acceptance that this may be the last face they wear, the face beneath the fabled Terran war face." - Governor Mana'aktoo

"There is room in this grave for you." - Terran Descent Humanity

The roar echoed out across the star system, shattering and smothering the cry of "You Belong to Us" beneath its raw red rage. The star itself reverberated with the howling fury in those four simple words. Spacetime rippled around the ship, which was built massive for any species but the Precursors.

It roared out as it tore free from the dark matter, treating protomatter as if it was the surface of a planetary ocean.

STEAMBOAT WILLY IS HERE!

The few massive autonomous war machines that were near the newcomer drove forward, toward the ship that still had dark matter streaming off of it like water. Their Strategic Intelligence Arrays and Combat Predictive Arrays pushed the massive ships at flank speed toward the new warship, eager to reach engagement range before the new ship could bring up its full defenses.

The chance of reaching the ship before it could engage its shielding died as the ship's battlescreens threw off the dark matter in multicolored sprays.

The closest autonomous war machine ran the analysis. Despite its massive size, much larger than any Terran ship on record, heavier batteries and shields than any Terran vessel on record, it was still obviously Terran.

The autonomous war machine knew it was already in range of the Terran guns at sixty light seconds. Not just the guns but the missiles, torpedoes, and other esoteric weapons. The autonomous war machine had never been present at any fight against the Terran War Machine, but it had files and simulations and records of ships that had been toe to toe with the Terran War Machine.

It knew it had reinforcement on the way, nearly a hundred Harvester Class vessels were within sixteen hours of being able to engage support.

But that would do little good when the autonomous war machine was already in range of the highly effective weapons of the Terran War Machine.

Scans were coming back and the autonomous war machine shuddered.

Three hundred kilometers long. Fifty kilometer thick. Battlescreens so thick that it was difficult to get readings even on the engines. The lines were twisted, malformed, misshapen. No, they were further than that, there was something wrong even on a mathematical level, something off and wrong with the lines of the great craft.

The autonomous war machine realized that for some reason, some unknown, strange reason, the barrels of the massive gun batteries on the ship had been carved, decorated, as if bound and screaming individuals of dozens of species were somehow made giant and impaled upon the massive barrels. Molten red Substance W flowed from the 'mouth' of the graven figures and from where the gun barrels pierced the bodies.

The view sent shudders of illogical code through the arrays dedicated to processing the signal returns of the scanners. More than a few of the arrays gave screaming torrents of gibberish and melted down.

The Harvesters and Gatherer class warships speeding toward a fight they did not understand but eagerly threw themselves toward took longer to get back scans from the massive ship.

What they got back using superluminal scanning arrays was an impossibility.

The ship was twisted and warped, bound by chains of raw energy, its body twisted and malformed. Biomechanical constructs, black chitin, glossy black flesh, and mechanical parts all melded together into something that appeared to be a screaming Terran female.

The Ancient Ones and the Young Ones present scoffed at the idea of a ship the tenth of the size of the vast Harvesters and half the size of the Gatherers posing any threat to the system.

Then the bellow reached them and their communal mind shattered as fury, hatred, and rage washed over them. A handful of the Old Ones got their shielding up in time, reeling out of the communal mind, gasping and often falling to the ground as their psychic powers were snuffed out. The Young Ones cried out in pain and agony as the bellowed roar smashed into them, some of them falling dead as their defenses collapsed and their minds were assaulted by visions of planets burning, suns exploding, cities on fire.

The Ancient Ones had faced the Herd Lords and the Hive Queens and they had scoffed at the Old One's tales of the power of the rage infused bellowing of the Mad Lemurs of Terra.

They weren't laughing as the warcry of STEAMBOAT WILLY IS HERE smashed into their minds. Beings over a hundred million years old, pulled forward or copied into the present, found their protections and mental shields to be inadequate to staving off the tsunami of rage and hatred that came with that announcement.

The Ancient Ones staggered, many lost control of their ships, but they all recovered.

The Ancient Ones Atrekna ordered the autonomous war machines and the Young Ones to engage the single ship that had appeared.

The Old Ones examined the geometry of the system, where the new ship had come up, looking for something that the Ancient Ones or the Young Ones had missed.

A few of the Old Ones had faced the Mad Lemurs of Terra before. They recognized the taste of the roar, the unique flavor of the hatred that infused the bellow. While the Young Ones flocked toward the twisted ship, eager to prove that the reputation of the Mad Lemurs was overblown and the Ancient Ones tried to collect themselves even as they screeched their fury, the Old Ones took stock of the situation.

**It is a Mad Lemur vessel. The same type that took part in the last incursion** one Atrekna said.

**Where the Mad Lemurs seek combat all is not as it seems** another added.

The system was scanned again. Gas giants to use as breeding farms. Warp-Bubbles to move to the next systems, heavily guarded. Asteroid extraction and refining. One world capable of supporting indigenous life. The system was just being sunk, the sun an orange color.

**Our protections in the burning hyper-atomic plane, jumpspace, and the upper hyperplane have failed** another observed. **The Mad Lemur used protomatter to somehow effect a transfer. This is something new**

**Are the warp bubble gates in danger** one questioned.

**how can they be? Phasic energy is required to move. A phasic drive is the only way to effect a transfer through the warp bubble** another added.

**the Lemurs' phasic powers are confined to their bodies, their phasic energy manipulation is crude at best** one put forth.

**they are a war servitor of the Hive Lords, which makes it risky** yet another said.

**We will remain ready for any phasic signature of a Hive Lord. We will prepare a response so that when the Hive Lord reveals itself we will be able to strike immediately** one that had spoken previously stated.

"Beware, Dalvanak the Defiled One had warned that the Mad Lemurs of Terra are not the servitor species everyone insists they must be** one warned.

**Dalvanak is insane** another stated.

**if so he is insane from delving into forbidden secrets of this universe** one snapped.

**you are an adherent to the Cult of the Malevolent Universe** one accused.

**how can you not be** another asked, the mental tone full of disdain.

**Dalvanak the Defiled One is misinterpreting the data he has observed like any other Atrekna who has begun to suffer from madness and senility** another stated.

**yet Dalvanak has faced the Mad Lemurs and won can you say the same** one snapped.

**the data that the Lemurs themselves defy** another asked.

**wait** one suddenly pushed in. **what is the intruder doing**

All of the Atrekna joined into the communal mind turned their attention to the system.

The closest autonomous war machine had engaged or rather had been engaged.

The massive, for the Terrans, warship had fired its gun, but the shells had exploded less than a thousand miles from the end of the guns. Missile pods exploded less than two thousand miles from the launchers.

The autonomous war machine ran the numbers and realized that the massive amounts of transdimensional inhibitors must have somehow disrupted the enemy ship's ability to fight. It drove in hard, pushing all of its massive engines to maximum power.

With the anomalous ship's weapons disabled the only protection it had was its battlescreens and armor.

The AWM pushed forward, diverting power from shielding to the engines.

It would get within optimum engagement range and destroy the supposed Lemur vessel.

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DEEP LEVEL MULTI-BAND HYPERSPACE INTERDICTION DETECTED

DEEP LEVEL MULTI-BAND JUMPSPACE INTERDICTION DETECTED

MULTI-LEVEL ARTIFICIAL GRAVITY SHADOW DETECTED

C+ SYSTEMS RECONFIGURING

KENTIA CAPTAIN RECONFIGURING

TRANS-SPACIAL WARP BUBBLES DETECTED

LAUNCHING REINFORCEMENT REQUEST

//TACTICAL OPERATIONS INTERRUPT - DEATHKAWAII KENTIA CAPTAIN OVERRIDE

//LOADING FIREPLAN

//EXECUTIING

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The iris opened up on the deck, between the Show Bridge and last guns of Echo Battery, between the massive grav-launchers attached to a combination cloning bank/creation engine on either side that went on for nearly five kilometers.

She rose up out of the deck, her hair bone white, her skin pale as death. Purple face paint covered her features in a skull. Her clothing, her uniform, had been replaced by all black with dark purple edging. Her eyes were in the middle of black circles and glowed a dark purple. She held her crop in one hand as she stood on the deck of the Steamboat Willy, staring at space around her with more than just eyes.

At her orders torpedoes were launched. Aimed at the shimmering bubbles scattered around the system. The gun batteries' targeting systems followed her eyes as she looked at each target with senses beyond mere sight and assigned priority to each of them. The massive creation engines below decks came to dark and terrible life, building the munitions she ordered.

Below decks the crew of school girls, their skin pale, their lips bloodless, worked to load the guns with the massive shells, larger and more muscular ones cracking whips and ordering them to "put your ever widening hips and fat asses into it, you scurvy dogs!" Wide eyed girls stared at the targeting arrays, their fingers on the triggers, pale and bloodless bottom lip held between flawless white teeth. Chubby teenage girls, stripped to the waist and coated with grease and sweat, hefted massive shells up into breeches, slammed them shut, and called out 'GUN READY!' to the whip cracking overseers.

Compressed strange matter was shoveled into furnaces by hand by girls wearing striped shirts and white pants, covered in soot and sweat. Crystallized dark matter was slammed against warsteel anvils that burned with the hate of a 1,000 suns, hammers of Cole-Bunch Imperium-X were slammed down onto the dark matter by girls with cybernetic arms and goggles pushed up on their pale and bloodless heads.

The Atrekna knew none of this. They only knew of the torpedoes streaking toward the Einstein-Rosen bridges. The torpedoes were too far away for any point defense to reach before they would come into range of the bridges.

The Atrekna felt alarm until they saw the torpedoes attempt to enter the upper hyperwave plane and explode. The Lemur ship rolled in place and started shedding parasite craft. Not aimed at the AWM closing in on it, but rather in small sprays toward the oncoming fleets, toward the gas giants.

The Ancient Ones watched closely as the small sprays of parasite craft moved swiftly across the system, ripples of alcubierre systems twisted and warped from the slightly stretched disk into a twisted blade in the front and a rounded back side that seemed to twist and warp space before snapping it back to normal behind them.

They had never seen such a thing.

The Young Ones sneered. Alcubierre systems were easy tech, old tech, easily countered and even used to the attacker's advantage.

**there is no apparent danger it stands to reason the lemur ship will be destroyed for no advantage to the extinct lemurs** An Ancient One stated.

**do not underestimate the lemurs** an Old One stated.

**they have been eliminated from the universe already this is merely the spasms of a corpse** a Young One added.

**there is no tactical reason for the ship to have attacked to our eyes thus the dead eyes of the lemurs have seen something that we have not** an Old One stated.

**you are over-estimating the ability of a dead species to effect the universe perhaps you may be alarmed by the lemur's shadow but we have no such dread** an Ancient One stated. **we faced the Hive Lords and the Herd Lords and we will face the lemurs as well**

**you lost** one Old One stated. **the Hive Lords endure the Herd Lords endure you were defeated and forced from this universe**

**and harvested much of this universe** the Ancient One protested. **this time burning a hyperatomic plane will not save them**

**they do not fear the burnt hyperatomic plane they embrace it as if it was a lover** an Old One stated.

**they are an extinct species** a Young One interjected. **they are of no moment**

**yet they have a ship here** an Old One countered.

**it will make no difference** an Ancient One stated. **we will destroy the ship sweeping away the last of the lemurs from this universe and then we shall destroy the remnants of the Hive Lords the Herd Lords and begin the Great Harvest**

**you grow fearful in your age but are not old enough for wisdom** the Young Ones mocked the Old Ones. **the ship's weapons are of no use, we have developed counter-measures against their most powerful**

With a bright purple flash the torpedoes entered realspace with a splash of dark matter spraying out in a funnel from the entry-point.

only a few thousand miles from the warp bubbles!

The communal mind shuddered as the Old Ones suddenly withdrew.

Before any of the point defense systems could do anything the torpedoes erupted with shields of phasic energy and the onboard graviton engines drove them into the bubble with a single cry that sounded as if it was torn from the throat of an enraged and excited female lemur.

NYAA!

The torpedoes lunged into the bubbles, driven by phasic energy and the phasic imprint left by the strong hands that had loaded them into the launcher.

The Ancient Ones and Young Ones watched in suddenly amazement as the weapons did not explode against the rippling gravity bands, did not just fly through the psychically generated bubble-gates. Instead, they streaked forward, into the bubble, to reappear in the connected system.

In each of the systems the torpedoes jetted from inside the bubble, out into the system, and detonated.

The Atrekna within those systems watched with confusion as the torpedoes exploded mere tens of thousands of kilometers from the bubbles. A shower of chronotrons, dark matter that fizzled, smoked, and evaporated with a scream of rage, and a spike of pure fury, white hot incandescence that was not visible to standard scanners but was easily detectable by psychic sensing arrays.

The Atrekna tensed, but nothing happened.

Back in the original system, the Atrekna ship computed that the strange ship had no chance as it drew within fifteen light seconds. Fifteen light seconds was not enough for a three hundred kilometer long ship to avoid an nCv barrage fired by batteries that were longer than the target ship.

Three batteries, each five hundred miles long, consisting of ten guns a mile, opened fire on the black ship.

The black ship turned, rolling, and slid between the fifty mile gap between the two barrages.

The AWM snarled. It had turned much faster than it had any right to, had accelerated into the fire rather than tried to accelerate past the field of fire.

The black ship opened fire again with the guns and the AWM knew that it would do no good. The AWM felt a slight bit of scorn that the black ship could not modify its tactics when a weapon system was of no use and instead chose to fire the same weapons that had proven ineffective.

Before the AWM could do much more than load the next rounds the rounds fired by the black ship hit home.

Bypassing the heavy battlescreens, bypassing the integrity fields, bypassing the armor, the heavy rounds exploded inside the massive AWM with the energies of Hellspace mixed with the flat energies of a stillborn reality.

The AWM reacted with shock, several of its predictive analysis systems crashing, as the energy liberated inside of its hull blew outward through two hundred miles of armor on both side of the massive war machine. The AWM realized that it had errored in its predictions that the lemur vessel would lack the bare bones systems of an AWM.

It answered with a barrage and again felt an electronic sense of outrage when the huge ship seemed to slide to the side, then rotate, somehow roll over the nCv barrage without the rounds touching the black ship.

The Old Ones, disconnected from the communal mind, watched with interest as the black ship hammered the AWM, one of the newest models, into scrap metal with only two more barrages.

What they were more concerned with was the signal the black ship put out even as it moved to intercept the largest group of AWM driving in-system to clash with the black ship.

The Old Ones were familiar with lemurs, knew the lemurs always had a reason for what they did, even if the reason was not obvious to the Old Ones.

The Cult of the Defiled One viewed the code streaming from the black vessel, pouring a jar of dirt mixed with tiny biting insects over themselves. The pain, the agony of the tiny pinchers biting into sensitive flesh, the sight and sound of lemur code, and they reached deep into the howling rage contained in a small piece of substance W they all held.

The signal was aimed at the planet. It was surrounded by percussive and atonal screeches.

Awaken, take the land, that must be taken, awaken, devour worlds, smite forsaken, rise up from your Enraged sleep, break forth from your grave eternally, I command you to rise, rise, rise, there is room in your grave, awaken awaken rise rise.

Aimed and focused at the planet.

Old Ones who had faced the Mad Lemurs before quietly slipped away on their vessels when the heard the Cult of the Defiled One repeat the message being broadcast to the planet.

It made no sense.

Which meant it was a lemur weapon.

It was new, it was different.

And that meant dangerous.

The Cult of the Defiled One and the Old Ones who had faced lemurs before all slipped out, without only a few exceptions who had agreed to stay behind..

On the planet, the only inhabited planet, eyes that had been closed opened to reveal burning red eyes.

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It was a purple place, violet that stretched on to eternity and into nothingness and only a handspan away. It was a place where the Big Bang had more than failed, had been stillborn.

A place where there was no life would ever be born.

But a place, if one had the will, had the rage, life could exist.

In a fashion.

The things there, watching, waiting, not awake but not asleep, in dreamless eons with fixed and bloody eye.

The signals were seen by eyes that never slept, never dulled, never clouded.

Great engines lit off. Ships oriented on the spray that lit up like a flare in the endless purple less than nothing.

Thirty ships lit their engines.

Thirty ships listened to the code that accompanied the signal.

Thirty ships followed the signal, followed the flare.

In thirty systems a bubble of dark matter appeared, bubbling up in a stress tear in the fabric of space time.

In each system the autonomous war machines moved to investigate.

In each system the dark matter stretched and warped.

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HAVE GREAT FEAR! THE MIGHTY 'MO IS HERE!

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The Atrekna who were devotees of the Cult of the Defiled One knew it was coming. They had heard it before.

If this was not a feint, it was not a distraction, the Cult of the Defiled One knew they would hear it.

They knew the whisper would come.

They did not seek to shield themselves from it, they did not seek to avoid it.

They waited to embrace it.

As the strange black ship changed course and the tiny parasite craft suddenly lit gravatic engines, the devotees heard it and knew that the lemurs had arrived.

this grave has room for you