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  Tanuhr’s thoughts were focused. Precise. He saw creation through seven eyes. The largest was a massive shark’s eye at the point of his hammerhead face where such a shark had a snout. Two eyes peered from the ends of the characteristic hammerhead shark projections. Another, slightly wider, set of eyes and projections extended beneath those. A pair more narrow than those completed all six sets of eyes. Tanuhr’s hammerhead foils could curl in unison like the hood of a cobra. At times they undulated as he thought. He typically pitched his head forward, as if in constant motion.

  Below his head, Tanuhr took on the aspects of another water creature. His body was that of a massive toad made to stand upright. Two additional arms grew beside a short dorsal fin on his back and reached forward over his shoulders. These arms were not amphibian limbs. They were the front legs of a mantis, but made from muscle and internal bone and not hard, outer shell.

  Tanuhr’s body was an inefficient design. There was no logic in the synthesis of his parts. It was a disconnection between his body and mental order. Without the twisted imagination of the Dark Urge using arcane means, he would not be impossible. Yet this did not violate his purpose, for he was a creature born in Hell. There, infernal machines had cast his original armor. Tanuhr redesigned it as a functional uniform of steel. The plates were plain and free of ornaments and scrollwork. The suit’s main purpose was to provide the General’s odd yet powerful masses with protection and support.

  The world Tanuhr neared had little protection. Mendek watched data and images of the target planet on several screens. Tanuhr preferred to receive the ship’s sensory input directly into his brain. It was the fastest processing method. The target was another sea world. They were prevalent in his campaign arc. It was a coincidence or perhaps irony that their bringer of death was fashioned from aspects of ocean life. The idea was lost to Tanuhr beneath an inflow of data.

  He had allowed his Field Master, Bannok, to debark with a strike wing and assault the planet ahead of the ship. Tanuhr calculated such an attack would not incur a significant loss of time. He recognized the joy in Bannok’s eyes when he gave the order. Tanuhr had ignored that waste of energy and set about plotting the most efficient means to kill the world once Bannok and his force returned to the ship. Tanuhr marked the moment that would occur. He adjusted the timetable. A variable approached. An alien counterattack moved to intercept his ship.

  Just below the water’s surface, Krkrtek looked up to the sky. He climbed out from the dark umber water on a rock that rose just above the gentle roll of the tide. It was large enough to give purchase for his oblate mass, and at the right angle for his massive eyes to peer up without straining. He retracted most of his jointed legs while still gripping the surf-worn rock with his tarsal tines. He rested his ventral plate on the rock and worked his mind again to accept what was to come.

  Krkrtek was glad the clouds were high, thin, and few. He wanted to see the attack against the invading ship. It was visible as a large red mass shimmering with energy his scientists could not fully comprehend. Krkrtek was not sure he fully understood his own, present actions. Still, he felt driven to bear witness to the events as best he could. His last act as an ambassador would be a post to oblivion. Despite entreaties, attempted appeasements, warnings, and now a final strike by his people and their off world allies, the ship still came. It was known as doom’s envoy across many systems. Krkrtek knew his world was going to die. This was the last hour everything alive on his planet would ever know.

  Krkrtek was at intellectual peace with the eschaton. Emotionally, there were too many feelings and each was too strong to control. He submerged them in his mind and focused on the hostilities high above. His people were still mostly ocean dwellers. He was a Spinopod. They were a complex collection of arthropod limbs and soft tissues. Krkrtek was male, and happy to be so. His sex was rare among his kind. A moneran parasite turned the majority of his species’ males into juvenile females. It had also triggered longevity that aided his kind to develop culture, record history, and create technology even in the cool seas. That technology was also complex. It was fused with the scientific remnants of another sentient lifeform that once dominated the dry surface. The Spinopods called the extinct species Mons. From the Spinopod perspective, the Mons lived atop the exposed summits of mountains. The Mons saw themselves as masters of an island chain. Krkrtek’s people ventured forth into the remains of the Mons cities. Their mastery overland showed in their most interesting architecture. They Mons erected huge buildings, but built them at angles over the ground, not straight up as kelp or trees rose from their holdfasts. Krkrtek’s people never understood the reason and found no explanatory record. Krkrtek had postulated it was less about efficient engineering and more about artistic expression with steel and glass. Only a few Mons structures still stood on the surface. Many had been destroyed in that bizarre act called war.

  The Mons had also known an invasion eons before Krkrtek’s phenotine was selected to be sentient. The Goratch attacked the Mons before they had become full users of spaceflight. The quadruped Mons in their angled towers fell when the Goratch infused the atmosphere with an infectious microbe. The Mons repelled the invaders, but could not thwart their biological weapon. However strange the idea of war was to the Spinopods, the Goratch had enabled the rise of Krkrtek’s people as the dominant intelligence and inheritors of the mountaintops. Some Goratch war machines had preserved themselves in cocoons once their users had fallen. Now the Spinopods recharged, reprogrammed, and redeployed them against the red ship.

  Krkrtek knew that soon the creatures inside the burning, red ship would torch the surface once contested by Goratch and Mons. The seas would follow. He found the red ship’s creatures very odd in shape. He had seen them up close and without his visor’s magnification. He had dared approach a city shore where they had landed in a probing attack. Their limbs could not contract into their shells. In fact, they had no shells save for spiny skins and fins that caught the air to permit flight. Data showed they could also fly in vacuum like a ship. Perhaps then they were small ships. They were ugly creatures. The city attack seemed more sport for them than a necessary assault. Perhaps their leaders permitted amusement, even if such amusement brought the destruction of a city and all who could not flee into the water in time.

  The Spinopods were a proud people, but aggression among their sentient members had become only a display of foreclaws in geometric patterns to attract mates. And that was only done in private within a mated cluster. Krkrtek knew his people would be no sport for these invaders. He knew there would be no future for his kind. To fight they accepted the help of other aliens. The Ooreull had ships and weapons and a warrior class. They had evolved among asteroids and could also soar in space. Krkrtek watched the streaks of weapons high above in space, so bright they were visible in daylight. He realized they, too, would fall to the red ship and its ugly creatures.

  The strangest alien Krkrtek had met had no body. She was composed of a web of photons and other, unknown waves. She promised to record the world’s culture and ecology to one day seed life on another world. Krkrtek served as ambassador. When the curtain of light said she was finished, she expressed sorrow to Krkrtek for the loss of his life and his world. He had wanted the luminous creature to reveal a true afterlife waited after the coming annihilation. But the sunray being only reiterated her sorrow. Krkrtek found her statements as substantive as her form. She said time and plans were just not right, and departed.

  Krkrtek felt sorrow he would never again know the pleasure of spawning among his cluster. All the females were ever receptive to his issue. He would never feel the pleasure of their soft calipers caressing him into a sexual trance. He would never feel the satisfaction of seeing one or more of his offspring selected into their civilization, and not consigned to life outside the colonnade as instinctuals. Many Spinopods now gathered in a massive cluster to spawn a final time. They vowed to release gametes in so massive a cloud that it would drown the ocean. Yet, Krkrt
ek wondered, what would be the point? However, his own actions were as ultimately pointless. No. Rather, he considered they were both better ways to spend final moments other than cowering in fear.

  Krkrtek would continue to indulge his curiosity, even at the end of his species’ days. He flexed his gills. Seawater flowed out. Air coursed in. He then wished he had held the sea while watching the eschaton. He could taste the burning city. He saw a distant flash. It wasn’t in space. It was on the continent. A massive rush of heated air blew over him as the sparse clouds vanished in the upper atmosphere. Krkrtek felt a sudden urge to dive. He resisted. He flicked water over his eyes to clear them. Another flash nearly blinded him. This detonation was much closer. He gripped the rock tighter with his claws and legs as heat seared his outer shell. Krkrtek saw an oncoming ripple cross the sea an instant before the blast wave took his life.

  Tanuhr observed the arc of warhead clouds rising from the hemisphere below his ship. All resistance had been annihilated on the surface and in orbit. His ship was designed to assault and defeat not only planets but stellar empires. The attacking fleet was now only debris. This system was pacified. His ship would make the scythe and part it for consumption by his dark mother in Hell. Sundering the worlds was a General's most tedious and time consuming task. For a moment, he looked at the boiling oceans close to the continent’s shore and wondered what moving through them as a whole shark or amphibian would be like. In the next second, he ordered his ship to make the scythe and destroy the world.

  The sections of the Spinopod world were set on course for the long and ultimately odd journey to Hell. Tanuhr set his ship’s course for the next target. It would prove a devastating campaign for more than the system’s civilizations.

  Tanuhr was the Victorious, again. False signals and energy signatures from reactors lured even the meticulous General into an ambush as he sought a phantom armada. The reactors were rigged as thermonuclear mines. The enemy tactics were stages of deceptions and delays. The system’s forces wished to afford the inner planets time to mass a fleet should their ambush fail. Some Generals would appreciate such tactics. To Tanuhr they were delays of the inevitable. Delays wasted time and thus deterred efficient execution of his purpose. Fascination not firepower did work in the enemy’s favor. They employed a warship Tanuhr found truly interesting. The ship was old, but not from Hell. That was the first curious and intriguing fact. The etheric and radiation traces indicated it was not from this system, or any local system. It was a derelict when captured by his latest enemy, but still under power. Its energy distributors showed a regenerative property similar to Hell’s dreadnoughts. The prevalence of weapons marked it as a purpose-built warship. Thus a war had existed before the Dark Urge had sent out her Generals. This was also curious to Tanuhr. He wondered if other forces with similar technology waited to ambush him or another General. The enemy ship was more than a curiosity. It was a strategic threat.

  The enemy ship could survive high-energy impacts at great speed against its hull even if its robust system of field projectors failed. Its frontal hull was a doubled, circular shield. The shield was near absolute black as it still absorbed energy even if that was only faint light from the distant, dual suns. The shield sat in front of a series of four cubes joined by cylinders of equal mass. Tanuhr’s precise return fire had sundered the hull of each cube. No fire had been wasted against the massive shield save for its missile tubes and particle beam array nested at its center. A secondary battery rested on the cube before the massive network of loops and girders stretched to the drive unit. The ship’s stern region was a smaller set of concave disks pierced at the center by the expansive aperture surrounding of its main drive unit. But the drive could not generate enough radiation to penetrate the hull. Nor was it the ship’s sole power source. Like Tanuhr, this ship was a chimera. The second, almost undetectable second ship was ensnared in the loops and girders. It was the true power source and focused Tanuhr’s curiosity.

  The second ship seemed to either warp visible space around it or be cast from it. Its surface was the inverse of his ship’s aegis. Its surrounding field also tapped arcane energies and gave off emissions similar to his ship. That was strange. It should be impossible. It was fascinating.

  The enemy engineers had managed to use the second ship’s energies. Both ships shared power distribution components. Conduits appeared to pop into real space within the ensnaring loops from a ripple of heated atmosphere. Tanuhr wondered if ancient allies had built the fused ships. The flow of their mutual technology certainly began with the caged ship. Both vessels may have drifted docked together when found ages later by the local intelligences. The original crews were long perished or at least far away. If the engineers that found the ships had been able to activate the weapons of the ensnared ship, the battle would have been a more balanced event. However, Tanuhr did not indulge in reimagining events. He focused on detecting the origin of the second ship. Such data was of strategic value. If its civilization still lived, Hell would find their world. And destroy it.

  Tanuhr considered the images sent from his Field Master, Bannok. The demon’s barks to his platoon and the looks on their thorned faces showed they all enjoyed their time off ship. The first ship had an interior much like its outside surfaces. It was a maze of right angles and flat surfaces. It had a bridge that maintained functional control with physical and visual interface units. The keypads were vaguely similar to the control dais used by Mendek. The fixtures and passageways were designed for creatures near demon size. It was a sterile environment violated by the oblong, dead masses of the latest, failed crew. The equipment was slightly more advanced than most space faring creatures. As expected, curious additions to tap energy from the second ship were installed by the local enemy. Most interesting was the ship’s age. It had sailed the stars and fought a battle before Tanuhr took to war. He was not the oldest General, but measuring the decay from cosmic radiation bombarding the hull suggested the ship was likely older the Sutuhr. Sutuhr was old. He was also petulant and venomous. Tanuhr halted his assessment of his brother General and refocused on the incoming images and information.

  Bannok’s platoon left the first ship. They followed the conduits’ path and entered the second ship. The demons prowled through its frigid interior. Remarkably, original lighting units illuminated the scene. Tanuhr noted the massive space devoted to the interior. The crew was likely as large as the Generals. Tanuhr had never fought a species of other giants. Comparatively tiny interface nodes of the local aliens floated at junctures with the ship’s systems. Discs on pedestals appeared to be the ship’s secondary work stations. No alien interface nodes floated nearby. Perhaps the local aliens could not reactivate those stations, or the local engineers focused on powering a weapon, not a library. If that were the case, Tanuhr could respect the floating dead.

  Tanuhr decided to visit the ship. Deciphering the data would be a mental puzzle to entertain him and perhaps make good use of time as the armada from the inner planets came to attack. Mendek had observed their amalgamated fleet throwing off vast amounts of muons and plasma to reach them. They obviously had no interstellar drives, and would be softened by a lengthy transit. Lengthy, at least for the lifespans of the hive mind and bioengineered holothuroideans. Both put their own war aside to fight Hell, together. Their federation only made their fleet’s destruction more efficient. The fact they traveled a single trajectory showed they also had no experience in conducting fleet warfare. Not that it mattered, Tanuhr mused.

  When Tanuhr entered the strange ship, he had no idea that his life and view of all he held dear would be threatened. For the General, time collapsed and also seemed to freeze after he reactivated the ship’s information systems. What froze him were the history files he retrieved and read. He snatched a floating holothuroidean body with its pseudopods extended. He crushed the corpse into cold dust inside his amphibian fist. The information now in his head was blasphemous. Impossible. Nevertheless, there could be no trick and no corru
ption of the ancient ship’s data core. Still, Tanuhr fought disbelief. Logic crushed the idea of this data being a trick or planted. The age of the ship was authentic. Its chronology register was accurate. Plus, technology necessary to access the data and then alter it was virtually impossible to any creatures not possessing knowledge and power from Hell. Unlocking the files was difficult even for his well-focused mind. And what strategic purpose would such deception serve? If it was truly blasphemous, the Dark Urge would surely strike him down for considering it true. He almost wished she would strike him down. He still stood. Thus, the information must be part of her design for creation.

  The impossible was indeed fact. The shock was Tanuhr’s alone to bear. He could not tell even his Field and Ship Masters. They could not fathom its implications, and it would certainly fracture their faith. Tanuhr’ own mind needed to find meaning in the revelation. For once he wished to hear another’s viewpoint. He reasoned the best perspective would come from Anguhr. The information dealt directly with him. Yet the information may destroy him. All Generals were powerful. Anguhr loved war. If driven mad, he may love trying to kill Tanuhr. It would be a worthy fight. Yet, Tanuhr wanted Anguhr’s thoughts before cutting his head away. It would be difficult to communicate with him after that.

  Tanuhr thought the best method was to talk directly to one another, free of technology, free of their hordes, and even free of personal weapons. Tanuhr did not know if he could get another General to agree to such terms. He would take the risk. The information may destroy him, too. He needed to act quickly. Time was now a cutting blade and Tanuhr felt its pressure.