Chapter 359 - Far Future, Ch. 69 ??? Your Stairway Lies on the Whispering Winds (1/2)

Of course, with power came knowledge and responsibilities.

I had Philius and Sir Dorval as information sources if I was so inclined to pursue things, but they tacitly kept hands off my operations, and I didn't inquire into the things they were doing other than to see what I could do to support them. The first Ranthas and G&G kids were entering the new Coronal and Umbral Guards to see what could happen, and senior Strikers were throwing off their mechanical implants to hit Seven and get the Null Status themselves, and all the things that it led to... especially them extra decades. The Coronal Knights and Squires suddenly had some remarkably improved members to add to their Cohorts and Striker Teams.

One thing that I became more rapidly aware of now was the status of the conflicts in the greater galaxy. There were wars and battles going on all the time, and the major and minor players of the galaxy were always going at it. While specifics were beyond my current clearance, information about who and where wasn't that important, and indeed, most of it was simply declassified historical data. Current data had to come in by telepathic cycle to the Beacon, or be run in by ships using FTL. Even with psionics, there was no talking across the galaxy unless you were Way Up There... and wanted stuff listening in at the same time...

Human forces devoted to the Warp, stemming from the massive schism of the Emperor's sons six thousand years ago, still existed, and infected the Empire like plague maggots, hungering for souls and immortality in service to their mad gods. Civil wars, rebellions, uprising, invasions, raids... it was all going on all the time.

The Tekrons I had run into were a terrifying, mysterious force, combining the horrors of undead, AI, and impossible technology. They dwelt in cold, forgotten places and dead worlds, stirring to life when their vaultworlds were disturbed, and generally annihilating the responsible parties. The appearance of a Tekron generally meant the extermination of everything living in the system.

I began to plan accordingly...

The third looming threat was the Xenosyms, the biological eating machines of this reality. Bioengineered for utter and total war, they were believed to be the most effective children of Shug-Niggurath, were known to work with races of the Mythos like the cerebrovores, and otherwise devoured everything the Tekrons would destroy. They were the locust horde of the stars, threatening the whole galaxy with great fleets sweeping past the Milky Way cautiously, wary only of the influence of the Warp and what it might do to them.

The Mythos races were generally split between those that venerated the Elder Gods, led by the extremely racist Great Race, Cerebrovores, and Cephallids, called the Horrors from the Void; and the various races that served the Great Old Ones, such as the Mi-Go, Yth, and Deep Ones, called The Aberrants... who as often as not loathed one another, too. In the psionic world, they were shadows and devils afflicting the psionically-aware population, even more then the Warp Gods, who could do nothing to these entities from Beyond Creation with their inscrutable motivations.

The Goblins in their tripartite glory were the rapacious barbarians of the galaxy. They were gene-coded for war, their technology as much instinct as learned. The dark-skinned hobgoblins were the most intelligent and organized, building great motherships and amassing the armies of the greenbloods on war after war of conquest.

The smaller green-skinned goblins were the foundation and innumerable troops of the race, giving birth to the other two subspecies constantly, and blessed with an incredible idiot savancy for harnessing and using fire. Goblin engines were some of the most powerful of their types known, and their ships were overloaded with plasma-spitting cannons and fusion bombs of all types, filling the skies with flames.

The urgobs were the largest, cleverest, cruelest, and sneakiest of the goblins, but not the most organized, equal parts shock troops and assassins. On their own, their cloaked ships were assassins and raiders. As part of a goblin army, they would be the ones in power armor crashing through lines with astonishing speed and power for the glory of the race.

Eternally on the warpath for conquest and plunder, the Goblins raided and fought, driven by racial superiority and lust for territory, having only allies of convenience they soon turned upon.

Their Empire long shattered by endless Goblin assaults, the Ruk (our space dwarves are different!) were a former major power reduced to shadows in the stars. They sailed the stars in planetoids carved into massive mountains by endless labor, mining worlds, asteroids, comets, and anything else they could process and trade for what they wanted. Supposedly some core tenets of human tech were based on Ruk tech, and they were the only alien race that was not kill on sight for most of the Imperium as a result.

Naturally, there were space elves, simply called the Elvar and the Dark Elvar, or drow. A naturally psionic race, the Elvar had fallen to the Warp Gods at least eight thousand years ago as their decadent culture shattered along lines of Ennui, Death, Pride, and Hedonism. They had also once been the predominant power in the galaxy, suppressing all other races and controlling the stars, keeping even the Aberrants and Horrors at bay, but their increasing self-indulgences and obsessions had super-charged the Warp Gods. When the Warp Gods, and Amourae especially, came into their full power, their apotheosis instantly slaughtered ninety percent of the elvar alive, including the heart of their civilization.

The Elvar culture was now split between those pale-skinned folk trying to resist the pull of the obsessions of the Warp Gods, and those dark-skinned of their kind who sought to endlessly feed those very gods to stave off the pull on their own minds and souls. The former were arrogant, elitist, incredibly proud survivors of a fallen glorious realm, torn between trying to reclaim what they had left and evading the hungers of the Warp Gods they had afflicted the whole galaxy with. They were blessed with awesome psi-tech and an incredible heritage and lifespans of centuries to millennia.

The latter were the drow, the Shadows in the Void, the bane of every other race in the galaxy, living to feed the Warp Gods on the souls of their victims. Their arenas were the largest in the galaxy, and decent exhibitions could result in the slaughter of a million slaves and monsters culled from across the stars.

There were other minor players: the Drakken, a reptilian hegemony; the Omic Collective, an alliance of many alien races united to preserve their homeworlds in an idealist unity against the aggression of all the other races; the Singularity, the names for multi-dimensional aliens of various types who dwelled in gas giants; and the Anti-Life, the moon-sized protean beings of Dark Matter who dwelled deep in space and rarely entered star systems except to obliterate those people (and their star systems) who thought playing with Dark Matter was a productive use of their time.

Oh, and there were orcs, but they hadn't adapted to space at all, and were basically slaves and cannon fodder for other races to throw at their enemies. Being stupid chaotic brutes didn't work well in the space age...

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So, those were the major players. Xenophobic slaughter was alive and well, cross-species cooperation was exceedingly rare, and everyone had thousands of years of misunderstanding and resentments against everyone else, broken treaties, rampant hatred, destroyed worlds, battles and wars won and lost...

Yeah, it was a shitty place out there.