Itikipi Lattice

**This article, Itikipi Lattice, was written by Entirelyalive. It may be linked to any page without asking for the author's permission.**

## Location

### System

???

**Itikipi Lattice** is a colony of the minor xenos race called the Xilikates. It is upon a world which was formerly an Ork world known as Gork's World, but as of 100.M42, it is almost completely ruled by the Xilikates. The Xilikates have no need to name the world separately from the Lattice that is upon it, unless more than one Lattice forms on that world. Hence, the world now no longer has a name as far as its new masters are concerned.

## Overview

There are many worlds in this galaxy which bear the name Gork's World. Like most of them, the inhabitants often got confused and decided it was named Mork's World instead. There is no feature in common between any of these Gork's Worlds except that they are, each and every one of them, overrun by Orks. This particular Gork's World, situated in the northern end of Segmentum Tempestus, was a veritable paradise for the battle crazed Orks, it being a death world. The entire southern hemisphere was filled with acid pools and acid geysers, in which spawned a lizard species unique to that world. The Imperium had never encountered this minor xeno, and thus had not given it a name or genocide designation, but the Orks called them Craklas, because their claws secreted a small amount of combustible fluid that caused a small explosion when claw met flesh.

Orks do not have much concept of time, but they had been on that planet for a very, very long time by the end of the 41st millennium. Ork spores were destroyed by the acidic atmosphere of the southern hemisphere, and so the Orks were never able to completely over run the spawning grounds of the Craklas, and while the Craklas could never push the Orks off the world, so too were the Orks unable to finish off their sparring partner. As far as the Orks were concerned, this was fantastic, for the Craklas always gave a good fight, even if the air down there was particularly unpleasant, and an Ork was as likely to die from acid splash as he was from straight combat. This was the situation when a shardling landed clear in the heart of the southern acid swamps.

When the first shardling landed on the ground, the unintelligent Crakla lizards did not even notice, being unable to distinguish it from the rocks in their environment. The small impact crater around it had cleared away the plant life, and the shardling grew out to cover the bowl of the crater, slowly gaining the awareness that it was surrounded by biological xenos. Though they appeared different, much less intelligent than the Eldar, it had for the shardling only been a few subjective months since the destruction of the homeworld. The idea that this second xenos species it had ever encountered was any different from the first was hard to countenance. But as it grew from a shardling into the core structures of Itikipi Lattice, it knew it was yet too weak to engage the beings that surrounded it. And so it grew carefully, slowly, pushing most of its bulk into the earth, and allowing its surface form to grow only in thin, creeping tendrils, just enough to absorb the sunlight for further growth.

Itikipi took a gamble, for there was no way to know the geology of the world without revealing itself. It minimized breakage, growing as few independent forms as possible, and began to slowly push its way downwards, down down down, absorbing the rock beneath and allowing only four tiny, almost insectile forms to carry away the waste material secreted at the surface level. After years and years, decades of slow growth with restricted access to sunlight and no external support, it could finally feel heat differential. This planet did indeed have a magma filled interior, and a thankfully shallow one at that. The first shard of Itikipi Lattice had turned itself into a Megalith Piercer, and could now finally produce and energy surplus sufficient for the growth of a greater Lattice.

This Lattice, like the initial shardling, kept itself mostly underground, only allowing its mobile surface forms to grow ten centimeters tall. Even this began to attract the attention of the attention of the Craklas, who instinctively saw them as prey to be attacked, though never bothered trying to eat the little forms, since they tasted like rock. These attacks, seemingly for no reason, did nothing but confirm the suspicions of Itikipi Lattice that all xenos were monsters and would need to be annihilated for the safety of the Lattice.

And so Itikipi Lattice slowly, carefully, constructed more Megalith Piercers, far sooner than needed. The planet had a great surplus of exotic minerals in its soils, likely thanks to eons of interaction with the acid geysers whose drops could easily annihilate a small Xilikate if the wind blew the wrong direction suddenly. A single Megalith Master was risked, and grew slowly to as not to provoke the unintelligent animals. And when the Lattice had brought together enough gemstones, high metals, and trace elements to the top of the original Piercer, Itikipi collected shardlings and grew out an army of war forms faster than it had believed possible. Fed directly from the energy surplus of the world's core, the shardlings were able to grow into their inclusions in a matter of weeks, the first ranks of Quartzites and Silverclaws finally clearing the hated xenos out of the Lattice after so many planetary rotations of being disgracefully trod upon.

This agitated the Craklas, forcing the lizards to see these new entrants as a threat, and lizard herds from miles heard the cries of conflict and came to join the attack. In the initial rush the early forces of the Lattice were forced to give ground, but with most of the key support Xilikates buried underground, the lizards did not even know they were there to attack, and ground could be freely given while reinforcements grew. Soon enough though, the second wave stabilized a ring around the Lattice, and the well stocked, highly energized war form feeding platforms grew shards into ever more and more advanced forms. Soon the Lattice was running up against the same problem the Orks had hit, they could achieve local superiority against the Craklas, but the hazards of the acid swamps prevented more substantial gains.

However, Itikipi Lattice had an advantage the orks lacked, the ability to grow through the ground and analyze the geo-chemical content of the acid geysers. It turned out that the subsurface chemical content was like a small factory which took the waste products of the lizard nests, as well as those of the other, less notably aggressive species which lived in the swamps, and converted them into acids, which pressurized and burst into the air, which then catalyzed them into a new form suitable for consumption by the Craklas, who then created waste products. It was a natural cycle quite like the weather feedback loops of the homeworld, except here the Itikipi Lattice quickly saw that if it extended crystalline absorbent roots beneath the acid pools, it could absorb many of the key elements, enriching the Lattice and interrupting the cycle, halting the production of new acid.

In this way, over the next few years, the Lattice was able to drain the acid swamps in the area and truly establish itself above ground for the first time. As a proper Lattice, it could muster the numbers of war forms required to finally make a serious dent in the Crakla population. But this, it turned out, only lead to a greater problem.

With the Crakla numbers thinned out, the Orks who occupied the rest of the planet were able to push more freely into the acid swamps. It was here, even before the lizards had been fully driven out, that Itikipi Lattice encountered their ancestral enemy for the first time. Bipedal, destructive, with a certain level of intelligence, but wholly lacking in civilization, these new Eldar may have been much greener and broader than the Xilikates remembered, but the idea that there could be two different species of biologicals who were both similarly shaped and equally evil was beyond the Xilikate imagination. An observer from the Imperium of Man, another race who was similarly shaped and similarly genocidal, would have called these forms Orks, but Itikipi Lattice never did learn to distinguish between different humanoid species.

In any case, there was only one possible way to interact with this new threat, through a massive increase in war forms and a greater focus on draining the acid swamps to allow the Lattice to expand further. The harder the unsleeping Xilikates fought, the more orks arrived, for on the far distant parts of Gork's World, Orks heard about the new fight in the south and were drawn to it in ever growing numbers. Two centuries after the Craklas had been made extinct, the fight still continued. The Lattice gained ground, but it wasn't until fully investigating and observing the Orkish lifecycle that they were able to solve the problem of xenos infestation on their world.

Just as with the lizards, the Orks existed in a continual natural cycle, though this one was a fungal one in which spores landing on the ground would create underground egg/womb structures, nearly invisible to one looking purely on the surface, out of which would pop out all the creatures of the orkish ecosystem. And just as with the lizards, Itikipi Lattice found a solution to their problem by creating creeping tendril roots just beneath the world's surface. This time, however, it required a much larger scale set of growths than had been required for draining the acid swamps. This time, the Lattice would be forced to grow just beneath the surface of every square inch of the planet, a feat no less daunting than creating a great Megalith.

But a Xilikate has a much different perspective on time than a biological, one much closer to geological standards than anything born mortal could achieve. A century to fill a continent sized area with lattice roots was nothing, so long as the enemy could be held at a stalemate in the same time. The orks never even seem to have noticed that the shiny roots just beneath their feet were anything at all of consequence, but the slowly growing feelers learned to react quickly to the presence of a growing orkling, penetrate into the fungal egg, and grow into the fetus, splitting it apart into scrambled egg within its womb sack. No ork could grow where the Lattice had spread its roots, and the orks had no systematic way of stopping the roots, aside from the occasional, mostly accidental damage they did it with their regular spates of undirected violence.

By the coming of the present day, circa 100.M42 by the Imperial calendar, a good half of the world of Itikipi Lattice has been scoured clean of Orkish presence, and the Lattice Masters are beginning to turn their thoughts towards peacetime objectives. The construction of the Primary Calculating Megalith is being planned, and Masters are being grown to sufficient size to direct its growth. The orks of the world are visibly diminishing, losing battles far more regularly and shrinking in both size and technological complexity. Ultimate victory on this world is now only a matter of time, and every Xilikate on the world feels an energetic tingle at the thought that they may be able to build Megalith Launchers of their own and preserve the species with a second round of seedling bursts. This time, they tell themselves, they will be able to launch without interruption for endless years, and this one world will be able to shoot out a Shardling for every planet in the galaxy, and another for every distant galaxy that the greatest Glassiks can spot. It will be an immortality that even the hated Eldar will not be able to take from them.