“What is it?”

“It’s a new form of temporal weapon.”

“So, a special issue time bomb.”

Temporal weapons were not new to them.

“Something like that.”

“How does it work?”

“It explodes but instead of dealing damage directly it ages everything in the blast radius for a thousand years within ten seconds. It will indirectly damage the target beyond repair and the target will fall apart. Its occupants will die from old age on the spot.”

“Powerful.”

“Very.”

“Entropy is beautiful.”

“Indeed.”

The two weapon scientists of the military were tasked with helping dislodge the foreign invaders. This temporal weapon that they came up with one of many such weapons developed by the Warwavham People on Warwavhamma, their name being translated as “Person-Upright-Ground”, and Hamma being translated as “Ground Home”. They had teams of people beneath them to help develop and build the weapon but the main calculations were centered around the two.

The Warwavham People were a humanoid offshoot of Old Humanity that lived in the base of the Orion Arm. Superficially, the Warwavham People looked human but had a more pronounced brow ridge. Their main biological uniqueness was their immunity to temporal shifts. Their home world, and surrounding sector, was part of a temporally shifting region of space. Some places times went faster, some places time went slower, and some places time did not work at all.

The Warwavham People were effectively immune to these shifts and over time was able to utilize the shifts into their technology, including weapons. To which they carved out a neat little empire around their home system.

Then, invaders from beyond the stars came and settled on their worlds. Several spaceships for each world, a total of thirty counted across the entire territories. The Warwavham People were not able to communicate with the invaders and for the most part left them alone as the invaders left them alone but there was always a wary outlook towards the invaders. This administration wanted them gone, though. They would not stand for invaders on their turf. All must submit or be destroyed.

“This weapon, will it work on them?”

“I don’t see how it wouldn’t. Everything exists in time. And over time, Entropy will break everything down. The weapon simply speed up the process.”

“Okay. We ready for mass production?”

“Yes, sir. We can make them. And oust those invaders from our home.”

“Good. I can’t wait for that day. Warwavham for the Warwavham.”

The scientists saluted each other and went their separate way. One went to tell their superiors of the news. The other went to prep the factories for production.

Months went by. Other scientists and weapon developers calculated, designed, and produced weapons of war for ousting the invaders. The military was very satisfied with their results. The original prototype basically accelerated anything in its blast radius a year or so. The standard production model for tanks and aircraft did a hundred-years-worth of entropy. Naval warships went up to one thousand years. Strategic weapons had a ceiling of ten thousand. Each weapon would add to any other weapon that exploded right before or at the same time, extending the power of entropy into the target. A thousand tank-level temporal weapons would result in a hundred-thousand-years-worth of entropy.

Then the day came, the day that they would finally kick the invaders off their planet and beat them back to the stars in which they came. Those invaders came from beyond the stars, deployed large structures and made themselves at home without permission. Today was the day they would be pushed back to the stars.

“Are we ready, commander?”

“Yes, general.”

“Start the final preparations. I can almost feel our home back under our control but I want to be sure everything is ready.”

“Of course, sir. Working on it.”

The weapons commander sent communications to all weapon stations to do final checks. All of them confirmed they were working on final checks.

All in all, the Warwavham Military had hundreds of missile launchers and batteries being erected in view of the invaders’ ships, backed up by thousands of temporal gun batteries and flak arrays. To anyone else, it was really obvious that some attack was being planned. The invaders did not notice.

“Pretty pattern!”

“Yes, Little One, the locals have set up a pattern that looks nice on the eye.”

“Pattern move.”

“Yes, pattern indeed move.”

An expeditionary force of Catalum had set up in the neighborhood intended to survey the region for its temporal shifting properties. They were a single destroyer, a frigate, and a small escort fleet of corvettes and probes. Altogether, there were twenty imperial ships, discounting the probes, which were unmanned ships and attached to the destroyer and frigate as “defense fighters”, despite being many kilometers in length. The destroyer was elsewhere in the region surveying the local nebulae and the frigate was busy setting up an official contact with another civilization.

Technically, the expeditionary force did invade the personal airspace of the locals, but also, the empire made it clear that the whole galaxy was part of the empire’s territorial holdings and it was through their permission individual civilizations could live and grow. Every civilization that achieved interstellar travel was given the same notice. Sometimes some civilizations needed to be reminded, though.

They were going to give it another hundred solar years before initiating renewed contact with these locals, the ones who called themselves the Warwavham People. There was no need to establish contact with them for now, since they were not doing anything at the moment that concerned them. The Little One aboard the corvette was free to explore the surrounding area while the ship stood visible watch.

The Warwavham People disagreed.

“FIRE!”

Hundreds of missile launchers and thousands of guns roared into action. Thousands of individual missiles and hundreds of thousands of shells were launched at the first corvette.

A second wave of missiles and shells erupted against the second ship. Then a third wave against the third ship. The temporal weapons left massive smoke clouds that engulfed their targets and obscured them from visual detection. The total weight of weapons should have accelerated the age of their targets by one-and-a-half-million-years.

“Confirmed hit?” asked the general in charge of the whole operation.

“Confirmed, hit,” responded the main weapon coordinator.

“When the smoke dissipates, we shall have our answer, Miss Prime Minister. The Warwavham People used a government most similar to a parliamentary democracy for their government.

“Thank you, general. Today stands the day when we oust the invaders from our soil and airspace.”

The dust surrounding the first ship started to settle.

The Warwavham Military was horrified. Soldiers and officers started to panic as their realized that their military seemingly nothing to the spaceships, and that since it was an act of war they initiated, there would be a response.

The ships hovering over their planet looked untouched. One-and-a-half-million-years-worth of entropy looked to have done nothing.

“No! Tell me the weapons did SOMETHING!” screamed the prime minister.

“We’re working on it, Miss.”

The prime minister’s security team immediately started to move her to safety.

“Come on, Miss. We need to get you to safety.”

“Go, Miss, get to safety. I will safeguard our people,” said the general. He started to bark orders to the technicians and soldiers nearby.

Meanwhile, the smoke fully dissipated from around the three ships. They looked untouched. No sign of entropy. The military looked to have failed.

Back inside the lead corvette, the ship conversed with its puppy dog.

“Registered one-thousand-three-hundred-and-forty-two hits. GHYRW5PR and ZXYT672R registered similar numbers of hits. No damage. Appear to be temporal weapons. Will do longer-term analysis,” said the ship.

“Damage?” asked the Catalum.

“None whatsoever.”

“Okay. That good.”

“The locals did technically attack us. We should probably respond.”

“But no damage.”

“Correct, no damage.”

“Nothing need then.”

“You’re saying we should do nothing?”

“Yes. They no damage ship. No need respond.”

“They will still be registered as a threat, because they made the attack in the first place.”

“No damage, no threet.”

A second Catalum appeared in the room, teleported in by its ship. This one was from the frigate in the expeditionary force.

“Contact made with Ten-Der-Runs,” said the second puppy dog. The actual name of the other empire’s people was Tandurans, as their planet was named Tandura. The Tandurans were a human species of demons. Catalum had some difficulty pronouncing words.

The second one continued: “They local people. They un-der-stand tem-por-rel e-fetts.”

Catalum had the tendency to ignore potential issues in favor of current issues so this one, which was why the one with the frigate did not bother to acknowledge the temporal attacks, either. The frigate could have easily swept aside the entire Warwavham Military but since the specific Catalum didn’t register them as having done anything, the frigate didn’t bother to reveal itself. It was only just the three corvettes hovering above the Warwavham homeworld that were visible to the Warwavham People. The rest of the Catalum expeditionary force was hidden or otherwise elsewhere.

“These local people too.”

“They different local. Not other local.”

“Okay.”

The two puppy dogs conversed in what they were going to do and what the people and places were like. The two ships, however, were a little more apprehensive about what was going on.

“We just going to stand here while these people, apparently named Warwavham, lob weapons at us?” asked the corvette.

“Not much we can do. You heard your charge. Nothing really happened. Oh sure, you and the other two aged a million years. But imperial ships go thirty million years between factory checkups and overhauls. They need to attack you at least twenty more times before it’s time to go back to an upkeep station.”

Upkeep stations were smaller multi-purpose factory space stations. They couldn’t build any ships above the size of a destroyer and didn’t have dedicated assembly lines for the few smaller ships they could be tasked to build. Their main purpose was to provide maintenance and upkeep to the smaller ships in the region. Upkeep stations were the size of a large rocky planet.

“Unless the people outside used non-temporal weapons, such as nuclear weapons, there isn’t much hope to get your charge to react negatively to them,” the frigate finished its reasoning.