Editing Slaugth (Hektor Heresy) (section)

===A Failsafe Mechanism===

For you see, millions of years spent around the perils of the Galaxy taught them extreme caution. When the Old Ones spawned countless warrior races to pit them against the Necrons, they built failsafe mechanisms into each one of them, making sure that they don't become a nuisance once the undead machines are defeated. They instilled a nagging animosity towards anything that moves and a predisposition to anarchy into the Krork to guarantee that the green-skinned warriors could never unite as a race. They gifted the Jokaero with a burning wanderlust to ensure that they never settle down in one place and establish a star empire to rival that of their own. To the Eldar, they gave curious and artistic minds, more interested in self-expression than in power and expansion. But of all the races born in the geneforges of the Old Ones, the Slaugth truly got the shortest end of the stick.

The geneurges behind the Slaugth project understood full well that they were creating a race whose psychic powers rivalled those of their own. A probable Slaugth rebellion had the potential to be as damaging to the empire of the Old Ones as the War in Heavens itself. The geneurges were instructed by their superiors to prevent this outcome by any means necessary. Therefore, the maggot men were from the beginning on made a dying race, doomed to wither quietly away within millennia. It was with a heavy heart that the Old Ones gave life to a sentient race that they themselves robbed of any future - after all, they felt a sort of parental attachment to every species that originated in their laboratories. But of course, the glory of their empire took priority over everything else, and so the Slaugth had to die once their usefulness was exhausted.

Of course, the Old Ones did their job as subtly as possible - so subtly, in fact, that the Slaugth never even realised that they were predestined to go extinct. Instead of integrating a pathological sequence into their DNA or programming it to deteriorate over time, they simply made reproduction extremely hard and inefficient for the Slaugth. To begin with, the maggot people have whole eight genders, all of which are required for the elaborate mating rituals that can last for weeks. To make matters worse, the reproductive organs of the Slaugth have a severely limited number of charges spent on copulation which never regenerate, so the total number of mating rituals a Slaugth can take part in during its lifetime is finite. The periods of sexual activity are very short and different for all the eight genders. Slaugth pregnancy takes several years and always results in the death of the mother. Miscarriages are extremely common, and even if the pregnancy is successful, only a small part of the litter usually survives into the adulthood, not enough to keep the population stable.