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They sang the death of Kalus and Ria before sending them into the Reintegration chamber: two beautiful minds, forever Lost to the Integrity.
Jian made itself watch as the two minds it had come to love were torn apart and reshaped into their new body: a body type honed by trial and error throughout the Race's countless millenia of existence. Their slender, small bodies were disintegrated, their brain matter reassembled into the massive brains needed to control the massive, artificially constructed War Body in which they would live and die.
They would be large, as large as the Rift could allow, so as to tower over any threats they might encounter. They would be armed with powerful claws, to destroy any vermin that might oppose them. Their blood would carry the terraforming agents that would turn the new world into one that could sustain the life of The Race. Everything about their new body would be formed to serve the migration of The Race, the endless flight from the Threat That Followed.
Kalus and Ria stepped through the Rift during its first period of stability. It would be barely one cycle later that Jian felt their deaths through The Integrity: torn apart by vermin with thermonuclear weapons.
This Migration would be a more difficult one.
Jian consulted The Integrity. The Integrity counseled war.
Jian and its fellow minds acquiesced, and prepared.
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It was after the Fifth Interdiction that the nature of the Migration changed.
The vermin had constructed War Bodies of their own. Crude devices made of metal, powered by even cruder power cores harnessing the deadly power of nuclear instability.
For the first time Jian could remember, The Integrity had no pre-planned course of action. Not since the Race's first encounters with The Threat That Followed had any vermin race been able to match the power of the War Bodies.
Jian consulted The Integrity. The Integrity counseled escalation. Jian agreed. Jian assigned itself to the study of this vermin race. It keenly felt the importance of this duty.
Migration was drawing near. The new homeworld needed to be properly prepared for The Race. . . for the Integrity. . . to survive.
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It was through the final memories of The Lost that Jian learned of the vermin's nature.
Through their fragmented and inconsistent response to the Interdictions, Jian learned that the vermin did not have Integrity, but were separate minds. Through the way that even their weak technology hurled itself into battle against the War Bodies of the lost, Jian learned that some among the vermin, at least, did not fear death.
Jian studied every moment of every battle that The Lost fought against the vermin and their metal War Bodies. It searched for the point of view, the center of balance, the place that served as the brain for their War Bodies. It thought it found it at about the same place that the vermin had their brains. Appropriate, it supposed.
Jian hand-crafted the War Body that Talu and Kash Reintegrated into. It was given a long, broad cranium, designed to slash through the steel armor of the vermin War Bodies. It was given strong, dorsal armor to protect itself against the energy weapons of the vermin.
Talu and Kash's last memories were of victory: the control center of the enemy War Body torn apart, and one of the two minds that drove it destroyed. An entire upper limb of the device destroyed, rendering it unusable in combat.
Jian knew, then, that the war could be won, and it felt a modicum of relief at the thought.
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The war was going very well when the first Double Interdiction was carried out.
The two War Bodies that Jian sent through were two of its finest. One had vast hollow spaces and broad wings, allowing it to fly. The second, however, carried the weapon that Jian considered its true masterpiece: an electromagnetic pulse that should disable all of the vermin's electricity-based technology.
The Interdiction was just about to begin when The Event occured: a sudden, unexpected intrusion into The Integrity. Horror rippled through the entirety of the Race's shared consciousness: the interloper was vermin! The vermin had learned to breach the Integrity!
The Integrity nearly descended into panic. The vermin had violated the sanctity of The Race. Even more worrisome were the faintest hints of a supposed plan to assault The Rift and bring the fight to The Race. The very idea that death could come through the Rift, threatening the very heart of the Integrity. . . !
The plan was changed. Though the primary goal would still be to exterminate as many of the vermin as possible, a secondary goal would take priority: the vermin must be retrieved, and brought back to The Integrity if possible. If not, the vermin must be destroyed, so that its mind could no longer share the information that it had learned from its intrusion into the Integrity. . .
The battle went disastrously wrong. The last memories of Dian and Tash were that of a vermin War Body tearing them apart with a bladed weapon. A short time later, the Integrity was once again rocked by an intrusion from the vermin. . . this time, two of them, working together.
And then the true horror of what the vermin were planning was made known to Jian. . . the true nature of the vermin's horrifying plan.
To detonate a bomb inside The Rift, sealing it shut, making the Migration impossible. . . and dooming The Race to death at the hands of the Threat That Followed.
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Six of the finest minds would be sacrificed in this final venture. Six brilliant and beloved personalities, sacrificed so that The Race could win. . . could live.
The three War Bodies that Jian constructed were the finest that it could ever imagine. Powerful and gigantic, specifically designed to take advantage of the fluid medium in which the war would be fought. This was the final defense of The Race against the death being carried to them upon the backs of steel war bodies.
Jian had no concept of gambling. If it did, it might have likened the mood in the Integrity to that of a poker player who has just gone all in against an opponent, waiting to see the last card on the table. It did recognize that this was a momentous moment, a single moment in time when two destinies collided.
Jian, and all of Integrity, waited, watched, and hoped.
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"It's beautiful," was the last thought that Jian sent to the Integrity, as it saw the half-broken steel giant descend through the Rift, its crude, fission-powered core glowing as bright as a sun in the final moments before detonation.