Fergunakil

Fergunakil (disambiguation)
Fergunakil might refer to: - The fourth book of Andrew Hindle's science-fiction series The Final Fall of Man. Available in e-book and paperback.

- An aquatic species belonging to the Six Species.

''"From what I gathered, this is the middle book of the series. This entry has an almost Empire Strikes Back feel to it, in the most abstract sense possible i guess. You could say Bunzo's was the Death Star of the last book, but now the Rebellion (heh) is starting to face some real turbulence. Character (and species) development, as always, is superb, and one relatively new character in particular truly makes the book. This entry was also just as funny as the first three, with liberal, clever dosages of wit and humor. It is also the most mysterious of the books, and leaves a lot of stuff unanswered but teased. Overall an amazing entry in the Final Fall of Man series. Andrew Hindle really knows how to craft a story and a sci-fi universe, and I can't believe his books are still free for Kindle. The hype will catch on I am sure." - jod on Amazon''

''The Fergunak were a species of enormous, frighteningly savage, paradoxically-technologically-advanced sharks originating from somewhere in the Core, where they had survived eradication by Damorakind by the simple expedient of siding with them and committing atrocity after atrocity, obscenity after obscenity, for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. They had also scattered out into the galaxy, however, and formed an uneasy alliance with the Molran Fleet at about the same lost-in-the-mists-of-time period as the aki’Drednanth alliance. It was all ancient history and more or less irrelevant, as far as Sally was concerned. The main point was that with the Molren, a large population of Fergunak had escaped the Core and eagerly – some might say pestilentially – settled the oceans of most planets discovered thereafter. - Sally-Forth-Fully-Armed, ''Fergunakil

Fergunakil (species)
The Fergunak (singular Fergunakil) are fifty-foot cybernetically-enhanced sharks and the only aquatic member of the Six Species. There are no known sentient aquatic dumbler species and the general understanding is that aquatic sentients are extremely rare. While there were said to have been three separate sentient aquatic species on the Fergunakil homeworld, this is widely believed to be a statistical fluke.

Enslaved and integrated into the Damorakind civilisation shortly after their rise to sentience and industrial advancement, the Fergunak are still widespread in the galaxy's Core and in Damorakind vessels. They act as an analogue to the synthetic intelligence and computing networks for Damorakind technology, in some unexplained way, since the Damorakind do not use synthetic intelligence.

A population of Fergunak was liberated from a force of Damorakind vessels when the aki'Drednanth performed their historic rescue of the Molran Fleet, and the species has since spread to numerous aquatic environments in Six Species space.

Species origin
''The Fergunak homeworld, the Fergumod as they called it, was an almost-entirely-aquatic Core world. /.../ [T]he world consisted of three great oceans separated by two encircling tectonic ridge-continents. The Fergunak evolved in the antarctic ocean, almost entirely isolated. They didn’t even bother to cross the subtropical land-belt until the final three or four hundred years of their existence.''

''They encountered the Wogonak in the vast equatorial sea. The Fergunak decided there was something missing from them, something that prevented them from being real creatures. The Wogonak were a vastly populous shark-like species, much smaller than the Fergunak and primitive into the bargain, although they were developing communities and early tool-use. They were hunted, eaten and subjugated for fifty years, and were extinct before the Fergunak had been in the equatorial ocean for a hundred.''

''At about the same time, the Fergunak ventured up across the tropical land-belt. There, in the arctic ocean-cap, they met the Aaoine.''

''The Aaoine were sea-bound mammals, and rather more advanced than both the Fergunak and the Wogonak. They’d been aware of what was going on elsewhere on their planet for some time, but they were peaceful and reflective and comfortable, and they spent too long debating what should be done. The Fergunak, they thought, were rational beings and ought to be happy with their majority share of the planet, and would not bother the Aaoine. And if they did, well. The Aaoine had weapons right out of nightmare. They could blast the Fergunak back into their piss-filled puddle of an ocean, pile up nuclear waste on the dividing ridge, and let the mindless monsters eat themselves for another ten thousand years.''

There was something missing from the Aaoine.

/.../

''The Fergunak discovered in themselves a natural affinity for electronics, and their huge bodies and their relentlessly pure, violent minds were uniquely suited to taking on heavy loads of cybernetic augmentation that would over-stress a feebler creature. They thought in straight lines. They found their way into the Aaoine systems and, while the Aaoine were playing and laughing and pretending everything was fine, the Fergunak obliterated them.''

''That wasn’t the end of the Fergunak rise, although it was close. In the final thirty years of their existence as free beings the sharks took to the skies, and then to the stars. They encountered the Walking Things on a neighbouring planet in the system, a planet their astronomers had named the Atamod and of which their philosophers and hypothesisers had long since considered the life-bearing possibilities. It had some lakes and small oceans, but nothing of value to the Fergunak. The only thing of interest was its native sentients, a land-bound species so utterly alien and horrifying and enraging that the Fergunak almost destroyed themselves in civil war arguing over how to kill them. Needless to say, the pre-industrial Walking Things were missing something. And the Walking Things were eradicated, with horrifying brutality. The solar system of the Fergumod and the Atamod was rich and dense, as so many in the Core were. What the planets lacked in water, they made up for in materials for the growing Fergunakil empire.''

Before they could become interstellar – the Fergunak had no relative capability, and were still working out the difficulties of longterm space flight – they came to the attention of the Damorakind.

''And finally, the Fergunak knew a species that was not missing anything. The Cancer enslaved the Fergunak and made them into components in the great thinking machines of their starships, and in the vast water-cooled tower-minds of their planets.'' - Fergunakil

Fergunakil schools
Fergunak societies are divided by school, large interrelated tribal groupings with traditional roots in the Damorakind machine components into which the school's ancestral members were integrated.

Some older schools can trace their line back to semi-mythical school divisions in the oceans of the Fergumod.

Younger schools are divided according to the planets on which they have settled, or the Six Species starships on which they have formed tribal bonds. These vessels can be either AstroCorps vessels or Fergunakil vessels.

Fergunak and the Six Species charter
The Six Species charter's treatment of the Fergunak, as far as the landbound species are concerned, is as a series of accords listing the aggressive acts Fergunak are not permitted to commit on sentient beings, the violation of which is legal grounds for the summary destruction of the offending Fergunakil school.

It doesn't work all the time, but it's the best anyone has been able to come up with.

Fergunakil starships
All Fergunakil starships have water atmospheres instead of air, including water purification and circulation. Landbound passengers are required to adapt to this, as Fergunak vessels rarely incorporate air-environment habitats. Larger Six Species vessels typically integrate a Fergunakil section or sections, including chambers and tubes with water.

Fergunak schools commonly use the following classes of starships:

1. Torpedo ships, single-pilot vessels without relative drive capability, used as fighters or even as disposable suicide attackers. This usage is uncommon in the Six Species, but often used by Damorakind ships as an alternative to missiles guided by sentient computer systems.

2. Fast-clippers, single-pilot relative-capable vessels used for high-speed transportation and information courier purposes.

3. Gunships, single-pilot or small-group relative-capable vessels with a heavier armour and armament quotient, the equivalent of a combination of a torpedo ship and fast-clipper. The closest Fergunak are permitted to a warship-class vessel, as arming Fergunak has long since been determined as a bad idea.

4. Leviathan, large relative-capable vessels mostly used as habitats for larger groups. The equivalent of Chrysanthemum class hubstations.

5. Great Grey Leviathan (outmoded carrier-class supership), a leviathan capable of folding her hull out and extruding water from collected stellar and cosmic gases to create an aquatic habitat the size of a small moon.

Fergunak also have a number of specialised intermediate vessels, most of which are outlawed by the Six Species charter. These include so-called blood comets, small constructions capable of producing water and heat around a gravity exchange analogue. The extrusion freezes on contact with hard vacuum but remains liquid close to the core, allowing Fergunak to drift almost undetectably and attach themselves to enemy ships. Blood comets are primarily used in near-planet and close-quarters situations, as their usefulness in deep space and across large distances is limited.

The devices are classified as an emergency life-preserving method by the Fergunakil schools. It is important to note that the Fergunak classify eating landbound sentients, as well as one another, in the same way.

''This entry is a stub. To be continued. Hur hur hur, stub.''