Nova Wars

Legion watched as Sacajawea's eyelids fluttered and she slowly came awake. When she turned and looked at him his heart ached for a brief moment, the loss of 'his' Sacajawea piercing his chest.

"Luke," she said softly, reaching out to him.

"I'm here, Wee," Legion said, reaching out to take her hand.

"Don't call me that," she snapped, yanking her hand back.

Legion sighed.

Sacajawea rolled over, getting out of bed.

Legion looked away from her nudity.

After a moment, she spoke again. "I'm dressed. Where am I?"

"Your quarters," Legion said, looking back at her. She was dressed in buckskin and beads.

Legion wanted to sigh. The time he'd spent among the First Peoples they'd dressed just like everyone else, the only ones that wore buckskin and beads were for entertainment shows or 'living' historical village reenactments.

Legion followed her as she left the bedroom and went into the main room of the suite.

Since Treana'ad were on board, most suites were larger than normal, made to allow a warrior caste Treana'ad to move around comfortably.

"Why must you be so cruel to me, Luke?" Sacajawea asked, looking around. She spotted the cooler and headed straight for it.

"You lost the right to call me that, Sacajawea," Legion snapped. "If I can't call you Wee, you can't call me Luke."

She snorted as she opened the cooler, bringing out a pitcher of juice. She got down a glass and filled it before returning the pitcher to the cooler.

Legion just watched with his arms crossed across his chest.

Sacajawea sat down on the couch and sipped at the glass for a moment. She set the glass down, Legion noted that she didn't use a coaster, then looked up at Legion.

"So, what should I call you?"

"Dhruv or Legion," he said.

"I'm not calling you Legion," she snapped, waving one hand at the air. "I reject that name."

"Then call me Dhruv, since you reject that we're siblings," Legion snapped back.

Sacajawea jumped to her feet. "Why are you being so cruel?" she asked again, moving around the coffee table to stand in front of Legion.

"By what metric? By making you use your powers for the good of the rest of the galaxy or because I won't just knuckle under to your authority?" Legion asked.

"You used to be so much nicer," Sacajawea said. "I don't understand why you have to act this way. You were nice when we first met."

"YOU LEFT! I was still a child! Still learning! You used me and left!" Legion shouted. "Menhit was still teaching me that my body was my own and only I could make choices about it."

Sacajawea's eyes went hard. "Don't shout at me."

"You used the fact that I didn't really understand body integrity or autonomy to have me bring back thousands of dead, to crew the ships with hundreds of the dead whose SUDS I hotloaded," Legion snarled. "You used the fact I was a child burdened with great power by the Digital Omnimessiah so that you could load up the spaceships and make a run for it instead of doing your job."

"Nobody asked me if I wanted to do that job," Sacajawea said. She returned his snarl with one of her own. "Your precious Digital Omnimessiah didn't ask any of us what we wanted."

"You were dying," Legion countered.

"He never asked!" Sacajawea said.

"You never protested!" Legion snapped back. "You were happy with your gift when it was letting us avoid Mantid ambushes or the Combine," he looked down at her. "Or letting you find those ships that nobody knew about."

"At least I got some use out of that so called 'gift'. What did you get, Luke?" Sacajawea asked.

"I told you not to call me that," Legion said, his face and voice hard. "I did my duty to Terra, to Humanity, to the Digital Omnimessiah."

"And did your precious Digital Omnimessiah ask what you wanted?" Sacajawea sneered.

"Don't talk about him like that," Legion said.

"Or what, Luke?" Sacajawea asked. "It was a malfunctioning AI. A computer program that all of you couldn't wait to worship."

"You watch your mouth," Legion growled. "He performed miracles."

"He used the residual nanites from the TerraSol World Engine to do those," Sacajawea said. She laughed, her voice mocking. "The rest of you just ran right over to proclaim his divinity," she sniffed. "Lucky for me, I'm a little more aware of the real world and can see more clearly."

"I'm warning you," Legion growled.

"If he was so great, why didn't he stop the war? Why didn't he save everyone? Why doesn't he save everyone now?" Sacajawea asked.

"And what, put everyone in a cage? Humanity would smash themselves to pieces trying to get free," Legion said.

"They never have before, Luke," She laughed. "They'd probably thank him for it and ask for more," she shook her head. "The rest of you never understood: people will always trade essential freedoms for perceived safety."

She stepped back slightly. "Even you."

Legion snarled.

"He was just a malfunctioning AI. Probably one of the ones from one of the TerraSol World Engines," Sacajawea said.

"He was much more," Legion snapped. "Stop talking about him." Tendrils of electricity moved around his feet.

"Or what?" Sacajawea asked. She put her hands on her hips and laughed. "You forget, Luke, I was there," she shook her head. "I know who you are. I might not have been there when you were rewritten by the nanites, but I was there when you were still Luke. I know what you were, Luke."

"Don't you dare say it," Legion snapped. Sparks popped off the back of his hands as he clenched them into fists.

"I get it," she said. "I really do. I get how a recently elevated short-bake clone would be overwhelmed and impressed by a rogue AI, but it doesn't change..."

Legion stepped forward and slapped her.

Hard.

Sacajawea hit the ground, staring up at Legion, who had electricity running up and down his arms, his eyes narrowed.

"I have planet cracked people for less, Tiffany," Legion snarled. "I have nova-sparked suns for a tenth of the heresy you have uttered in my presence," his voice was hard, cold, grating. "I have strangled the life from heretics with my own two hands," he stepped forward, looming over her. "I have lined heretical clones of myself against the wall and shot them each in turn with a pistol held in my own hand."

He bent down and stared at her.

"Do no utter such blasphemies in my presence again, Tiffany," Legion snarled.

He collapsed into black mist that swirled and was gone.

0-0-0-0-0

The stateroom was full of cigarette smoke as Admiral N'Skrek sat down, puffing on a cigarette of his own. His command staff was gathered around the table, with Admiral Legion down toward the far end from N'Skrek, sitting with a version of him on either side. The ones on either side were large, heavyset men, bald with thick bushy beards.

"We've completed our assessment of the new biologicals that we encountered aboard the ships," CW4 In'tel'lmo'o stated. He made a motion at the table. "Again, the lower caste creations have a messy silicate XNA structure, quad-lattice, which makes them very resistant to mutation."

Everyone jotted down notes as the DNA square appeared. It looks like a 4-post square with the XNA strands between.

"It's a single chromosome creature, which makes it highly resistant to change and allows for quick, clean replication," CW4 In'tel'lmo'o stated.

"This is standard throughout all of the types we have discovered, which number seven now, counting the Mar-gite themselves," the Lanaktallan said. "The last two appear to be control and command units, high in phasic strength, approximately equal to a Mantid Speaker."

"Not hardly," Legion interrupted.

CW4 In'tel'lmo'o and the others stared at Legion. "They aren't?"

Legion shook his head. "About as strong as a Warrior trio. A Speaker is a lot stronger. That many Speakers could overwhelm everyone for about three light minutes that isn't a Terran. They're tough, but they aren't Mantid Speaker level of tough."

Everyone just nodded.

"They have the phasic tissue density," CW4 In'tel'lmo'o protested.

"Doesn't mean they are as powerful," Legion stated.

CW4 In'tel'lmo'o just nodded.

The briefing continued. Primarily boron and sulfur based. Four of the castes based off of the same XNA template, with the crystalline one being the obvious leader caste of those creatures. That the creatures were present in the new shapes, under command of the two new types.

Once he was done, In'tel'lmo'o sat down.

"Anyone have anything to add?" N'Skrek asked.

"I do," Legion said. He stood up. Not the lean Admiral, but one of the ones with the bushy beard.

"By all means," N'Skrek said.

"They suckered you," Legion said, looking at In'tel'lmo'o. He shrugged and smiled, a friendly thing. "No offense, they almost suckered me."

"How so?" In'tel'lmo'o asked.

"They're entirely fake," Legion said. "From the Mar-gite to the Twizzler Monsters. They're all fakes."

"Looked real enough to me," N'Skrek said.

"Yeah, they're fake," Legion said. He brought up all seven known XNA templates, putting the appearance of the owner of that particular strand configuration above each template. "From the Mar-gite Autonomous Biological Weapon to the Twizzler, they're fakes."

He reached out and touched one of the XNA strands and it lit up on all three.

"I can't believe I missed that all these years," Legion said. "Well, I didn't miss it. The theory has always been that the Mar-gite Autonomous Biological Weapon was capable of self modification and that's why this particular XNA structure was found."

In'tel'lmo'o frowned. "What is it?"

"It's a genetic prosthesis," Legion stated. "It's used to connect two unrelated XNA or DNA to each other, or, rather, to adapt DNA instructions to XNA instructions. I had assumed, as did the Confederacy, that it was a natural formation."

Legion tapped it and it expanded. "However, there is no reason for it to exist in the upper castes we've recently discovered or in the more recent Mar-gite."

"Why not?" N'Skrek asked.

"Because I invented it," Legion said. He winced, reaching up to pinch his nose. "Sorry, I'm having a sibling conflict."

"Wait, you invented it?" In'tel'lmo'o asked.

"I did. For a rather particular use, a long time ago," Legion said.

"How long ago?" Commander Hresket, Chief of the Intel Section, asked.

"About a year after the Glassing," Legion said. "I used to fill in a gap in DNA, since I was using bones and teeth to reconstruct people."

There was silence for a second.

"I started looking at these creatures, and I figured out real quick once I spotted that, that these creatures are entirely fabricated," he tapped a few icons and multiple sections lit up. "These are genetic veneers, same thing," he tapped a few more and more sections glowed on the two new types. "These are Terran DNA to XNA adaptations."

He growled slightly, then pinched his nose again. "Sorry."

He pointed at the holotank. "These creatures are built from the ground up. They have no extraneous or additional XNA. They use genetic prosthesis and veneers to get sections to work together that would have additional sections needed."

He stood up and moved around the table. "I forcegrew some tissue in my lab, including an entire subject that only possessed a brain stem," he shook his head. "It's an artificial creature. The only people we've encountered who were good enough to make something like that were the Lanaktallan."

"I thought the Atrekna were masters of biology?" Commodore Leshtrek said, looking at Legion in confusion.

Legion shook his head. "Fleshwarpers, at best. Sure, they could take a rosebush and make it into something full of fangs and poison, but when it came right down to it, they didn't really work with DNA, they used their phasic powers to warp the biology."*

Leshtrek nodded. "All right, a difference. A subtle one, but still a difference."

Legion stopped at the end of the table.

"We're being shown, step by step, artificial creatures," he said. "We have not, as of yet, knowingly encountered whoever is behind this," he said.

He waved his hand at the holograms.

"Whoever it is, they're hiding behind artificial creatures. This means we cannot make any assumptions about what type of worlds they originate from, if and how they can communicate with other races, what their technology is like, or anything about them," Legion said.

"What do we know about them?" N'Skrek asked.

"Only the important thing," Legion said.

"What's that?" Commander Hresket asked.

Legion's grin grew larger.

"That they can die."

0-0-0-0-0

Legion looked up when the door to his room chimed. He made a motion and the room's VI opened the door.

Sacajawea stood there.

"Can I come in, Dhruv?" she asked.

Legion nodded, waving her in.

She came in slowly, tentatively, and sat down next to him.

"I'm sorry," she said. "For losing my temper. For what I said."

"Me too."

0-0-0-0-0

* - The Atrekna who were part of the main attack that came through the vortex before it was collapsed by Rickytofen-773C24 were Dwellerspawn handlers, breeders, and caretakers as well as military commanders and leaders. Their scientist and researcher caste was supposed to come through last, with the 'leaders' of the Atrekna. (Chapter 429) There were very few Atrekna who understood DNA or even viral/disease theory that came through initially. Some learned later, as seen in one chapter, but not many. The Atrekna fought the war with the equivalent of stablehands, farmers, ranchers, some military, commanders and leaders. All of their researchers trained and learned in our universe, as what was common knowledge about the universe for the Atrekna did not apply to our universe, as seen in Chapter 603 when Dalvanak raids the End of All Things Library. The impact of Rickytofen-773C24 upon the Second Precursor War cannot be overstated.