Ungud Locn-dus’g, overseer of the Evengi GalaxSec planet-dropped base, suppresses a sneeze. The object pressed into the arched roof of his mouth tickles at a nerve cluster that makes him want to expel his mucous pockets. Clutching the double grips with two hands, he uses another hand to rub at the flaps covering his sacks. Shuddering at the relief he feels, he fumbles for a button on the object with his fourth hand.
Ungud breathes in, the air acquiring a distinct smell of ozone as it passes by the item he is sucking on. Everything is almost ready now, he only needs to finish the rather complex button sequence, and all will be done. He fumbles with that last switch, his greasy fingers slipping on the sliding lever as he tries pushing it.
The dust on his door falls as a furious pounding shakes it in its magnetic frame. Ungud fumbles as he jolts in fright, resetting the entire procedure with a miss click of his third thumb.
Ungud snorts in irritation, spraying a thin film of slime across his desk as he pulls the item from his mouth. One of the protruding bits snags at his second row of teeth. He spends a few seconds whimpering in pain while clutching his four hinging jaws.
He then glares at the unholy sight of water disappearing as the desk's nanofilm removes the splatter of snot he accidentally spilled. Everything around him is going to shit, but useless features like these keep functioning. Ungud stands up, hauling his bulging moisture glands over the edge of the uncomfortable chair. He waddles towards the door while dropping the sticky object he is still clutching on his desk. He puts a hand to the faux wood and steps back as it slides open.
Silence can be harder to bear than the most cutting remarks sometimes. Four arms hidden behind its body, the one person who Ungud has known for all his life is standing there, looking at him. Unable to bear the piercing glare any longer, Ungud breaks the silence. “What’s broken?”
“Reclaimer…”
“Okay. Let’s go then. Let’s not do the Histaff’s work for them.” All four shoulders slumped, he starts walking. He moves through dull grey stone hallways that are just a bit too narrow for his wide frame. The few people he comes across all squeeze by, wiping at the slime stuck to them from having to move past the only two examples of the Shmee-Shmeelah race on this enlightenment-forsaken planet. Ungud rearranges his mucous flaps as he stops looking at the latest humanoid that shivers while wiping away the slime as it walks away from the duo. “Decaying Shmee’s, Histaff take them…” he hears the gangly insectoid mutter as it polishes one of its segmented thoraxes.
Ungud's depression deepens as he thinks of his race's glorious name, so filled with meaning, tradition and such deep history. Its pronunciation has a large amount of inflexion behind it, being so much more than the simple translation the rest of the galaxy uses. His people fought against oppression, becoming a shining example of honour, glory, and martial prowess to an entire sector!
Once… And it was so long ago…
Now other races shudder and cross the road in order to avoid his people when they are about to walk past them. A noble history of martial prowess reduced to being tech support. Ah, it’s enough to want to kill oneself. Not that it matters now anyway.
“Which one is it this time?” Turning his attention to his only friend, he studies the other Shmee-Shmeelah for a bit. It hasn’t chosen a gender yet, even at its ripe age. Ungud really wonders when the cranky git is going to settle down and spawn a brood or five. That might take off the ever-angry edge it has had since they both hit their races’ version of puberty.
“Fifth… Water damage. We won’t make the week without it…” Here it visibly falters a bit. Ungud rustles his slime flaps. Their race has brains spread all over their bodies, allowing every single one of their species an average thinking capacity in the upper percentile of all species known in the galaxy. Pausing to think is a rarity for beings that can rival some cheaper supercomputers. Ungud's friend has been pausing its speech for seconds now, indicating an extreme amount of thought has gone into the sentence. “I won’t make the week without it.”
Ungud clears his mucous flaps with a grunt, and steps into the narrow corridors of the base’s fifth reclaimer. A single look at the simple thing is enough to tell him it’s an easy but time-consuming fix. One of the base's useless occupants must have gotten a sticky substance all over the sensitive parts of the air filter, either alone or with the help of another of the useless layabouts. Ungud pulls on a handle on his toolbelt. The personalised piece of hardware transforms its top part into a microfiber brush, and he starts gently wiping the slime away from the clogged components.
“I’ll be a while,” he splutters towards the being silently staring at him. It bubbles a bit and turns around with stomping feet.
It takes Ungud hours to clean the air scrubber. Every single species in this cramped hideout needs another type of breathable molecule in the air, providing for all their discreet biologies with their needed materials is a rather important task. The large amounts of air reclaimers can barely keep up with the needed synthesizations. Overpopulation problems are so bad now that a single of the precious machines is keeping hundreds of sapients alive at a time. The failure of one will slowly kill everyone here.
Tired but slightly happy at a job well done, Ungud makes his way back to his private room hours later. He happily osmoses with the air, glad that he won’t suddenly suffocate in his sleep. No, dying from terminal head trauma is much preferred to gasping for days while all his engineered fail-safes and low power modes keep him on the edge of consciousness. The first thing he does when he gets back to his bunk is to grab the item he left on his desk. He puts it inside his segmented mouth again.
Happily gurgling a melody to himself, he once more starts the arming procedure. The weapon he is holding in two of his hands while sucking on the barrel is a rather standard plasma generator. It contains a large number of energy cells, which he charges through the complex patterns of buttons he is once again pushing. The barrels flow from the dual grips in an organic manner and contain two parts. One is a simple charging chamber, a place where large amounts of energy is imparted on a small amount of air. This hypercharged air is then guided through the flux-conducting barrel at high speeds, vaporising everything in its way.
Ungud feels quite happy, knowing that all the endless thinking can stop once he finishes the sequence. He is located on a planet overrun by Histaff, after all. The initial infection was reported to come from space, some doofus dumping trash into the atmosphere at speeds too low for it to disintegrate at reentry. This trash contained traces of the complex bioweapon, dooming the entire planet only days later. The infection spread rapidly, as it tends to do. It was discovered too late as it easily avoided the rim planet’s simple detection apparatus.
The end came quite fast. All the important and rich sapients had started evacuating days before the infection happened, a rather clear indication that the Histaff threat was known well before the actual shit hit the fan. This left a rather large populations without any access to ships. And every single one of these sapients tried to find shelter in Ungud's base.
So here he sits, inside a GalaxSec planet-dropped base, every single centimetre of publicly available space crammed full with refugees. The swiftly fading connections to the outside universe have painted a rather clear picture to the overseer. Each accessible camera showed the same visage of melting biological compounds and slowly growing red slimes. All life in any form, from native plants to engineered cyborg, is infected and killed in short order once the infection got access to them. All beings with a sapient mind got turned into goop and bones, while all the animals got turned into more cannon fodder, sent to the front lines.
Ungud has calculated the entire scenario four hundred ninety thousand and twenty-one times now. He personally thinks that a predicted survival percentage of a zero with a few hundred zeros after the comma before finding another number is too low a chance to risk it. So he hums to himself as he goes through the overly complicated firing procedure of the weapon he is chewing on.
He is nearly done with the arming procedure again when an alarm goes off. His desk lights up in large red symbols and a single green blob. Taking the weapon out of his mouth - again - Ungud accepts the call. The red labels vanish as the creased brows of one of Ungud’s subordinates appears above the table.
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"Overseer Ungud, sir. Reporting Histaff units. Complete reworked of the first class have been sighted. The rapid destruction of all remaining mechanical items indicates-"
“It has a mind already, I understand, invigilator Klattio.”
“What do we do, sir?”
“Don’t call me sir. I’m just a head agent.”
“Yes, sir.”
Ungud turns away to blow his chin flap for a bit. All this stress is making his skin go dry. “Nevermind. Any data on when the next class will show up?”
“Nothing conclusive, sir. Scanners have seen class two amalgamations closing up, but none have even shown hints of emerging yet.”
“So we’ve got a few weeks, then.”
“Yes, sir.”
Silence pervades the room for a bit. Ungud warbles in resignation. “So how’s the mob doing?”
“The Histaff has them scared and docile, sir.”
“Right. I don’t believe that at all. How many tried to take over today?”
Klattio’s ridged face wrinkled further as the sapient looks away, a clear indication of shame in his species. “Fourteen sapients tried to fight us, sir. We’ve put them all in med.”
“Good riddance. That thing won't let them go until they are as healthy as a baby.” Ungud actually smiles as he thinks of their fate. The automated med bay is a marvel of technology, and is often used as a temporary prison. A little tweaking with the thing’s settings, and it won't let anyone leave until their physical form is literally brimming with health.
“Yes, sir.” Klattio obviously wants to say something, but Ungud nods and closes the call.
He then happily starts trying to kill himself again. The second class of reworked Histaff beings will start popping up in a few weeks, and the base’s defences won’t stand a chance. Hyper-acid coated blades will carve away at the C-steel doors and bulkheads until the entire base is filled with red slime and bare bones. Ungud calculates the chances of his survival once again, and finds them unchanged.
His hands deftly follow the required pattern for activation once again. He really should curse the way his own species design weapons, but he simply can’t. The schmee’s have to make their own weapons a hassle to use, or their race would have offed themselves millennia ago. Melancholy and bouts of depression are so frequent in his race that their cultural need for overly complex weapons is a necessity.
This fact is shown once again as Ungud is interrupted yet again. More dust flies from his door, making the slimy creature wonder where it all is coming from. The pounding continues until he tiredly puts the weapon down and walks over.
“What?”
“Servers are down.”
Rolling his eyes, Ungud decided to humour his oldest friend. “Which servers are down?”
“Core is unstable.”
“Did you really destabilize the core in order to… Alright, lead the way.”
The squelching duo walks through the warren of corridors once again. The dusty and neatly cut stone makes way for the metal of the original base. GalaxSec a widespread and pervasive organization with a long history, their equipment has been standardized ages ago. The same with their buildings. When the first settlers made planetfall, a GalaxSec base core fell along with them. Automatically excavating the planes’ main nexus of defence and security, the semi-autonomous land-dropped base carved out a home for the galaxy’s finest.
The actual area GalaxSec is the finest in is a topic of much discussion and ridicule.
All in all, this means that Ungud, a mere head agent suddenly promoted to overseer when all his direct superiors suddenly went on a holiday, is now responsible for the massive base. This also means that he is the only one with access to the central core of the base, the only place from where the server admin accounts can be accessed.
Ungud starts typing away at the ancient screen, scrolling through pages of diagnostic data with inhuman speed. His distributed nervous system starts glowing as he uses it in a slightly serious manner. One eye looking backwards, Ungud studies his friend. It’s not unheard of a Schmee to delay their naming, but this one has been holding it off for a long time now. Feeling like social conventions don’t really means much when he - hopefully - will be a cooling corpse hours from now, Ungud decides to be rude. “Why didn’t you ever choose a gender?”
His friend lights up, its entire nervous system visible under its goopy grey flesh.
“You don’t need to tell me, but reinforcements are years away and we won’t even survive level two reworked, let alone behemoths. I don’t believe you don’t have access to those files, agent, you know how late it is.”
“What gender are you?”
Ungud blinks his eyes a few times. Hearing that horrendously rude question being asked so casually throws him for a loop for a bit. Instead of delving into the massive faux-pas they both just made, Ungud decides to answer. “Ah, I’m a spreader, why?”
“Okay. I’m choosing to be a grower then.” And with the most beautiful smile Ungud has ever seen, his friend decides to become a female. Her entire body freezes as the long-delayed process ravaged through her body with a vengeance. Ungud is frozen in shock. Asking any gender-related questions is only to be done to and by true lovers, by Schmee’s that have sworn to live their lives together.
And now his friend, the being that he had to refer to as ‘it’ his entire life just chose to be a carrier of life just because he randomly chose the masculine version of their species sex?
Ungud’s entire body glows too now, his physical form slowly overheating from all the shocked thinking he is doing.
In the background, ignored by all, a timer counts down. Ungud had been scrolling through the server’s logs and quickly found the problem. He had found the access logs conspicuously empty, a feat that only another Schmee could have accomplished in a reasonable amount of time. Ungud had fixed the problems of the overheating cores by resetting everything to their factory default, wiping the small overclock virus from all systems.
Then Ungud decided to poke around a bit. Some functions of the basic but functional computer systems are only accessible from inside the original ship. Ungud had never gotten access to this place until he inherited the title of overseer. One of these functions not even visible from the outside had turned out to be a stasis field. He had initiated the startup procedure to get a look at the software functions it would start running, knowing that he could have stopped it at any time. He had been reading through the thing’s documentation when his old friend suddenly decided the gender it was based on his own.
This has caused Ungud to forget the ticking timer. Running over to the egg his friend is morphing into, Ungud touches the hardening shell just in time to be frozen in time. Starting at the original core, an electronic freeze field is expanded over the entire base. This field does not just block all electronics but instead targets the actual electrons themselves. Electrons need to spin, after all. It does not matter whether one looks at these spinning particles through the lens of rotating orbs or from a field of superpositions. Freezing them freezes the entire atom. This freezes the entire molecule, and thus every single bit of solid matter.
The base has expanded much over the centuries, the entire thing covered in a dense web of cables, tubes and field generators. The electronic freezing field travels through and across every single iota of infrastructure, halting the entire base in their molecular steps.
Ungud and his gender-changing friends are frozen first. Then the original ship stops moving in time, the only exception being the fusion core and the field generator. Then the rest of the base is frozen, thousands of sapient refugees stopping all motion as their elemental particles are arrested in space and time.
Shortly, not a single mote of dust moves in the base. The ancient fusion core hums quietly, generating the needed power to keep everything still. The Histaff up above continues scratching at the massive doors closing off their access to the tasty-smelling beings inside.
Weeks later, many large white shells of bone start cracking. The places were the population used to be the densest have the highest quantity of these items. The newly born army of larger Histaff reworkeds all use their various senses to make their way to the place with the freshest scents, namely the frozen GalaxSec base. They start clawing at the door at one, managing to make deep scratches with relative ease. A few centimeters in the metal, their process halts. The freezing field protects half the door, only letting the level two Histaff reworked shave off a part of the bulwark.
Years later, the first Histaff behemoths emerge from large amalgamation pools. They too make their way over to the GalaxSec base, sensing the large number of reworked still working at the doors. None of the massive behemoths has any success with this last bastion of resistance, however.
Decades later, the dense crowd of white and red beings loses interest as the last traces of scent fades from the area. They start roaming the landscape, either collecting into heaps and forming even bigger reworkerd or just wandering aimlessly.
Below the earth, the GalaxSec’s fusion core winds back down, the constant assault at the freezing field costing it a lot of power. On the terminal Ungud initiated the field from, the last page of the generator’s manual is still displayed, frozen in time. Ungud did not have to time to properly process the contents of this page, else he would probably have shown a bit more caution with the field generator.
The warning that the use of the field should only be a last-ditch measure is unread by all. It further tells of the need to have massive amounts of specialized medical equipment at the ready when unfreezing, or death of all within the field is a guarantee.
Time goes by as the planet continues to spin. Its previous blue and green colour scheme is slowly transformed into a palette a good deal less filled with life. The oxygen is stripped from the atmosphere slowly, turning the blue sky red. Water is drained from the planet as large pools of Histaff amalgamations strip the planet of all usable resources. Small Histaff infection beings are elevated into the atmosphere by complex semi-biological mechanisms, only for them all to be shot down by a certain patrolling ship.
Then, far above, a metal skull plunges into the atmosphere, a small metal horn following shortly after.