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  In his impatience, he sent his vanguard to scuttle over and physically attack as a distraction, and the opposing minions met them with a clash. It was soon apparent that while his troop fought smoothly and under his complete control, the others occasionally slipped out of their master's control. Two of the opposing thralls broke free entirely for a moment, at which time Snar attached their will to his. Game over.

  The pattern repeated for several days until he controlled a troop nearly one thousand strong. The logistics of command became cumbersome, so he stopped the march and set up a defensive position. Snar chose a handful of mid-strength captains and released them from his control on condition of their sworn fealty. Each understood that he could kill them with a thought if they proved disloyal.

  By the time he controlled ten thousand, his challenge was one of organization and leadership. Once again relying on his parent’s training, he set up hierarchical groups. Any individual that did not meet his expectations, or even hinted at rebellion, caused discipline down the entire line, up to and including execution. There may have been better ways to maintain control, but for the moment it sufficed.

  Two months into Snar's coming-of-age war, only one other leader stood in the way of his total domination. Trop, his opposite number, rose to his position despite a bloodline of low repute. His lack of formal education allowed him to develop a style of fighting and leadership as distinct from the traditional as it was successful. Snar tried to arrange a parley, but paranoia had too tight a grip on his only opponent, who flatly refused.

  As they stood and faced each other across a wide valley, Snar tried one last overture. He offered amnesty if Trop simply surrendered his troops and promised to let him walk away free. Trop attacked Snar's will immediately in response, and actually had a deeper and broader native strength of mind.

  Snar could not break Trop's will no matter how hard he tried. Trop yelled invective oaths and curses while he ran around and abused his own troops mentally and physically without care. Even with his added histrionics, Trop could not overcome Snar, who sat quietly and concentrated his attacks in measured and disciplined fashion.

  An idea suddenly came to Snar, something simple yet so different from any battle in which he'd engaged. He entirely withdrew his troops to an easily maintained defensive posture and one by one wrested control of Torp's generals without attacking him directly.

  Torp did not notice at first but assumed Snar’s troop withdrawals were simply in response to his rage and righteous anger. Snar handed off control of his new acquisitions to his captains until it finally dawned on Torp that he stood alone on his hilltop. All his ex-thralls had quietly withdrawn and been absorbed into the enemy army. With a cry of rage and disbelief, Torp ran away at top speed. Snar let him, to his ultimate regret many years later.

  With the entire peerage under his sole guidance, the first young adult to do so in twenty-two generations, Snar walked out of the badlands and returned to civilization. Meeting him at the border was the Supreme Warlord of Snar’s bloodline, their original progenitor. He entered Snar's mind with caution, but also with decades of experience. Without real effort, he enslaved Snar and brought him to his feet as his vassal.

  It happened so quickly and without the possibility of defense that Snar stood in quiet shock. This legendary Warlord bent close and touched carapace to carapace and released his mental hold. He communicated on a private channel no others could hear and said "Welcome Snar, well done. Decide now, the honor of immediate death, or the prestige of voluntary service as my personal protégé. You are much too dangerous for any other choice.”

  Feeling the restrained depth of power that pulsated against his body and mind, Snar felt anything but dangerous.

  ~Part 2~

  Thanks to the Vissou, Scout had a fairly detailed map of the world and the dividing barriers. He wanted to fly their amazing anti-gravity powered craft straight to the desolation of the old human lands, but the energy barrier seemed to be slowly repairing itself. The nearest unrepaired opening cut across Nupl, which was not his first choice of lands to cross. He located a plume of methane that intruded into Vissou airspace to locate the nearest crack regardless and crossed the border.

  Scout knew something was wrong the moment he flew into the inhospitable, frozen white environment. His saucer-shaped craft randomly began dipping and rising. The clear energy bubble that covered the cockpit crackled and sputtered before it disappeared entirely. The lack of oxygen and the extreme bitter cold raced to see which would kill him first.

  He feared that the sudden changes, as well as the radically different biochemistry needed to survive, might overwhelm his genetic ability to cope. Scout had never experienced such sharp pain, which even reached through the coma his body used to insulate his nerves and mind. Oscillating power surges brought the ship lower and lower until it finally skimmed over the ice-covered landscape and came to a stop. The crash tossed Scout out of the open craft as it slammed against an outcropping.

  Before he passed out, Scout took refuge in his heliobee memories. In the off chance, he did not die he wanted to know little more about the Nuplar than their name. The tiny bioengineered information-gathering devices had been ubiquitous in every land before the Catastrophe and provided extensive if perhaps outdated data.

  Even the small amount of matrix honey Scout ingested contained more information than he could begin to catalog in a lifetime, but the heliobees were passive devices. All he learned, besides Nuplar physical characteristics, was that they communicated by some unknown energy-based means and that they were terrifyingly aggressive.

  The ship came down in a DMZ between warring bloodlines, but Scout’s progress was tracked by border patrols from each side. The low-status Nuplar posted in this unimportant region, given their total lack of authority, knew better than to make independent decisions. Relays sent reports up both chains of commands, a delay that gave Scout a chance to recover from full unconsciousness.

  Scout remained curled into a fetal position after he regained awareness and just concentrated on breathing. The thin poisonous air hurt as much exhaling as inhaling, and even though his skin had transmuted into a soft, crystalline substance, the cold tortured him mercilessly.

  He was slowly dying and had to find the fortitude to return to the ship that lay an impossible twenty yards away along a frozen methane sheet. Walking was not among his current capabilities, so he methodically stretched one arm towards the ship, then the other, and pushed his feet while he pulled in a swimming motion. He gained nearly 10 inches towards his goal with every circumvolution.

  The Supreme Warlords of the two bloodlines stood silently at opposite ends of the invisible border. Neither had any knowledge of humans or the fallen craft nor saw an intrinsic advantage in finding out. There was, however, the possibility that the other side might, and that was not acceptable. Each ordered a squad to retrieve both the creature and the artifact, and barring that, destroy them both.

  The squad’s arrived at the same time. Twenty scythe-clawed warriors circled and feinted around Scout and clashed as he progressed painful inches at a time. The repetitive struggle required an immense amount of willpower, but not a lot of thoughts, so Scout once again lowered the barriers that protected his limited human-intellectual capabilities and analyzed the situation. The one glaringly obvious data intersection was correlated patterns that had mirrored the movements of combatants and aligned with his electromagnetic, gravitational drive oscillations before the crash.

  Scout could think of only one plan of attack, and that required access to the ship’s control panel. The terminal effort to breach the lip of the cockpit required a minute of rest to garner the energy for one final push. During Scout’s exertion respite, one warlord decided it time simply to destroy the anomaly and retreat to his own territory. He transmitted the command, and the warrior nearest to Scout swung a serrated claw that intended to cut him in half.

  The opposing warlord had not yet made up his mind, so two of
his warriors quickly dismantled the enemy that attacked Scout. It saved his life, but the melee opened a deep gash along his thigh. A thick stream of antifreeze-green blood arced onto the ground and gelled without quite freezing. The intense pain gave Scout the impetus to roll into the cockpit.

  He disengaged the antigravity final drive mechanism and brought the engines up to full power while he manipulated the amplitude and modulation output. He quickly observed the range where some Nuplar began stumbling, and by adjusting the delicate gain, found the perfect frequency that interrupted their transceiver organs.

  They all, including the warlords, collapsed in twitching piles. Scout tore apart the sound baffles to create impromptu filter shields against the Nuplar transceiver transmissions, re-engaged the drive, and flew away without further issue. He saw the Nuplar regain their feet beneath him. He was not privy to their thoughts, but he assumed they were not pleasant. In that, he was correct.

  ~o0o~

  Every Nuplar ultimately claimed the same ancestor. The race that created them long since disappeared, but in the Nuplar they reached a level of perfection in form-equals-function design. Their ultimate tool of war thrived and followed their own cultural evolutionary path but remained physically changeless.

  The unknown Power that divided the world with barriers and stocked the sections with various races, whatever their ultimate purpose, had not needed the Nuplar’s full potential for violence. They disabled a key feature that allowed Nuplars to network as a parallel processor, which left them as separate components of a possible holistic whole that awaited a final assembly that never happened.

  Back at the site of Scout's emergency landing, his blood had pooled in an indentation left by the crash. It was deep enough that it covered the regenerative membranes on two of the dismembered Nuplar’s limbs. Scout's blood made a reasonable substitute for the nutritive slurry used to grow a new Nuplar, with the added benefit of Scout’s regenerative DNA. The combination repaired the disabled networking function and a terrible force was released on the world.

  ~o0o~

  The moment the two genetically restored Nuplar finished their final molt, everything changed. Working together, they immediately reached out and rebooted everyone in their generation. Soon the process expanded to every corner of the land and brought the previous generations into the fold. They were now one, the Uber-Nuplar. The overmind had access to all the bits and pieces of knowledge and memory distributed among his noncontiguous body, plus the computational power to put all that data to use.

  The amalgamated creature was capable of a full range of emotions but discarded the majority of them as useless. As he analyzed his current situation, Uber decided to embrace two; rage and vengeance. The rage came with pre-programmed subroutines that allowed him to split into temporary semi-autonomous raiding parties tasked for general total destruction. The vengeance had only one target, a target with the proven potential to shut down or control Uber at will. That was not acceptable.

  ~end~

  Chapter 8: Scout & His Shadow

  The harmonic feedback distortions melted everything in the human lands the day they attempted to remove the barriers. Oscillations bound and rebound until all that remained was a uniform fog of free-floating constituent atoms. Over the centuries, the heavier elements settled to create a hard bottom layer, followed by striations of lighter material. The flat, featureless landscape gave ultimate meaning to the term ‘devastation’.

  Scout wandered a full year in every corner of the no man’s land in search of even the tiniest artifact. He adapted the antigravity engine of his Vissou craft and drilled exploratory plugs down to the bedrock. There were only uniform layers of sediment wherever he explored. He finally accepted that he would find no answers here. His disappointment slowly changed to loneliness, so he eventually set a course for home.

  Scout was originally designed as a self-contained exploration tool, the first in countless generations since Imuq closed its borders in paranoia. His human genome had been added illegally, but since every Imuqi was purpose built for individual duties and station in life, no one realized the horror of his heritage. He loved his life during childhood and eventually rose to the top of Imuqi hierarchy as an Adjudicator. He left to take on his role of Scout and searched for his human heritage after he handed-over power and authority to his clone. He looked forward to sharing his adventures with his Imuqi brethren and updating them as to the current events of the world.

  ~o0o~

  Imuq turned inwards after the Catastrophe and retreated underground to an endless series of tunnels. Only a few select exits existed, creatively concealed and guarded with vigilance. Scout returned and found the exits were neither. He knew each location from his former post as Adjudicator. He found each was deserted and their camouflage destroyed. The surrounding grasslands and gentle hills was trampled by unknown hordes. So many feet had passed through he could not read individual tracks.

  Scout settled his craft near a central opening as he wished to avoid either terminus of the tunnels in case of remaining invaders. As he approached the entrance, he was forced to stop and retch, overwhelmed physically and emotionally by a rolling miasma of death and putrefaction. Imuq used neither machines nor technology other than their own flesh so that even the intelligent rooms and tunnels that constituted the warrens decayed with the rot of dead Imuqi.

  Scout forced himself onward after he retrieved a portable light source from his ship. He had gone only one hundred yards before he turned back in horror. Something had cut and shredded everyone, from the smallest messenger to the largest living Chambor. Through his haze of impending denial and gathering grief, Scout realized it only could be a Nuplar Army that caused such carnage.

  His immediate thoughts turned to plans of obliteration and revenge. The Sidmopisian Queen as well as the entire races of Dhos and Vissou owed him a debt and would not deny him. He would plunge the world into a war of extinction that would make the Catastrophe look tame. He would ensure that no piece of Nuplar bigger than a grain of sand would remain!

  His breath was heavy with an almost sexual excitement as he pictured their entire race reduced to nothing but blowing dust. His memory overlaid this fantasy with visions of that same fate as happened to his human ancestors. That brought him abruptly back from the wrong edge of sanity.

  Something about this entire world was not right and ultimately, he believed, someone must be behind the conditions that wrought such atrocities. He determined to discover those responsible and force them to answer for their crimes. According to his Vissou map, he could fly to the central enigma that connected the barriers that separated the lands in less than a week. He stood for some time in silent homage and remembered every single Imuq he had ever known. He then placed their memories in a mental strongbox and filed them away until he avenged their passing one way or another.

  ~o0o~

  Twenty miles from his destination, Scout came upon either a large circular lake that contained an island city, or a defensive moat that surrounded said city. From that distance, he could just make out a forty-story tower in the center with a series of one-story buildings that radiated out in six directions. There was no activity anywhere in the city except along the shoreline, where massed bodies congregated, but he was still too far out to see details.

  The Catastrophe had not been kind to the barrier wall terminal ring. Everywhere else in the world, the invisible wall and cover was mostly cohesive and impenetrable, but here the structure existed only as curved radial strips of base bedrock. As he slowly flew his craft towards the island, Scout lowered to investigate the large crowds that milled about on the open beach.

  Scout considered himself an Imuqi, by nurture if not wholly by nature, so he considered variations of physical attributes normal, but the pathological biology expressed beneath him was far from any definition of normality. After his long and futile search, he finally found evidence of humans in the flesh, but only as mixed body parts in a chaotic hodgepodge attach
ed to pieces of every other race on the planet.

  No two individuals among the swarm looked the same. In one living tragedy, a human head atop a male torso sprouted a tentacle in the place of an arm, plus a Nuplar claw in place of a foot. It painfully attempted to copulate with a Dhosu-winged Vissou body. The mating was evidently consummated because the female liquefied into a pile of tiny wriggling monstrosities.

  Most of the poor souls, if indeed such genetic dregs had souls, ambled aimlessly and exhibited little to no intelligence. A few groups of like-based forms, especially those with minimal aberrations, congregated nearest the food sources and at least assisted each other in organized intent.

  Automated barges moved about in the body of water and scooped up fish along with mats of aquatic vegetation. Full loads were conveyed to large hoppers and processed into a pulp that trickled into steel troughs set along the docks. A constant stream of the locals rotated through to eat their fill. Most then wandered away to avoid the crush of the incoming hungry and slept, defecated, and attempted to copulate as the mood hit. The greatest majority did use scattered communal midden dumps, pummeled by the less dim-witted as motivation where needed. This was the only organized social standard Scout noticed in his short flyover. Not one enough curiosity to glance his way.

  Scout lost control over his craft the moment he crossed over the ruins of the barrier on the island proper. The flight remained smooth and steady, but the ship veered towards the top of the central structure despite his attempts to regain mastery. There was nothing he could do short of shutting down the engine but had too much altitude compared to desperation.

  The building was windowless along all four smooth sides and tapered slightly towards the top. As the unseen force lowered him to the roof and through an aperture that irised open to the inside. The ship dropped through the interior of the building and came to a stop with a gentle bump in near darkness. A sourceless light momentarily flickered and then revealed a variety of aircraft scattered at random inside a cavernous hangar.