Eyeball was looking out from the display; ignoring the splatters of blood drying on the walls where a Pale One's actively bleeding form had just been dragging a display panel out, the ongoing activity in the system was astounding to behold. The blood... he'd seen enough of it.
Ascension drones and Pale Ones were everywhere. Partially constructed ships, damaged ships, captured ships, all moving around like a delicate ballet, intercepting bits of debris that might be valuable, collecting salvage... and all being fed back to those manufacturing facilities closer in towards the sun.
The massive gate structure was still there... but the gate was being maintained at an insignificant size, millimeters across, and the enemy would undoubtedly shut off the connection entirely if he tried to use it to attack the other side.
The amount of wreckage in this system was truly insane; Ascension could use this to build a fleet of tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, eventually. And for now... it had six days to put together the biggest possible care package to help wipe out the Republic fleet currently bearing down on Svetlana's position, and had already spent four of them, with fairly impressive results. By now, Svetlana should already be there; he would likely be hearing from her the next time he checked in.
He couldn't get fifteen thousand ships that fast, so they wouldn't be overwhelming the Republic with numbers. But between the ships she already had and the defenders, he was already pretty sure that she could handle the job... it would mostly just be reducing risk. So. Step one, optimize the number of Hyperdrive-installed ships that could get there right now... and then let Ascension keep building. Turn this system into a manufacturing hub for itself, that would let it rapidly spread out and overwhelm anything Republic left in the sector.
He glanced at the nearest drone; currently prying open one of the command consoles and retrieving components; then back at the display. There were already over a thousand intact ships here, retro-fitted with hyperdrives, crewed mostly by Pale Ones. Surprise would be nice; but after than initial punch, they wouldn't be worth more than any given Republic ship until they'd had some extensive re-tooling, and unlike the proper drones, an EMP strike would render them almost useless. But... with limited time and masses of resources, they got more cost-effectiveness fixing ships than making FTL-capable missiles.
"Ascension, could you give Svetlana a signal, please. Relay data on what we've got to work with, and ask if she has any requests regarding the first wave; it'll take years to make full use of this place, but we can still arrive at her location with a sizable fleet before the Republic does."
A few light-seconds away, far enough from the star that hyperspace travel was safe, a tiny drone dropped int hyperspace; and beamed a signal on a certain course; hitting a relay that had been in hyperspace the whole time. After a few seconds, it returned; and a new message popped up on Eyeball's HUD.
It was a video; it showed Svetlana, part of her hair missing, one eye bruised, sitting in the captain's chair of the Gaze of Wrath. ~Redirect whatever forces you get to Rendezvous point Alpha. The Shivans are hostile; destroyed Ascension assets and attempted to abduct me. Their homeworld has been mostly dealt with, but their fleet is intact. We'll probably want to let the Republic fleet fight it out with what's left, and then move in to handle the survivors. Video to follow. Svetlana out. I'm going to go relax for a while.~
Eyeball blinked... and made a hand gesture, willing the saved video to play.
When the deck of the Shivan warship appeared, showing the guards waiting, plasma rifles drawn... and two of them aiming some sort of blue energy weapon at Svetlana... he hissed... and when she started taking them apart, gave a slow nod. Obviously that was a good reason to deal with the Shivan leadership; this wouldn't be something some ship's captain would do on his own.
They deserved nothing better. They would have thought Ascension units were living things, after all, the Shivans had no reason to....
He watched as she seized control of the ship. Programmed it to ram the capital city, location of the Emperor. Left, hopping out an airlock and sending a signal. She had recorded the whole thing for him, and even had Ascension display it all from her perspective, based on the feed from her suit and implants; he could see where it had switched to the suit, after the stun shot had grazed her face.
By the time the video ended, with a distant shot of the orb of fire that was once the Shivan capital city, he dropped into the former Republic commander's chair, leaning back, closing his eyes.
The video had shown the impact. A moment of vivid orange-white light as the ship hit atmosphere, disintegrating... and its remnants slamming into the city below with so much force that it bent and twisted the laws of physics, making it difficult to even express what was happening as something far worse than a nuclear blast happened to the palace of the Shivan 'Emperor'.
Even with his eyes closed, his precognition of what he -could- see if he opened them fed his mind the display, giving him little choice but to watch a horrific, cataclysmic event unfold.
That.... was a minimum of a hundred million dead. More likely in the billions. A planet about to be attacked by the Republic... and now, essentially, gone as a useful contributor to the war. Possibly even as a civilized world in general. It wasn't as many as the expeditionary force had killed in the milky way, but... somehow, it felt worse. Was it because this was supposedly an allied world? That it wasn't the first planet he'd killed by his actions?
Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.
He had no idea how to handle this. He'd thought they had this mostly settled. Was he a bad influence? Was Svetlana just lashing out in anger because the Shivans had hurt her, or targeting the location of whoever gave the orders with the closest weapon to hand? Or was this an active desire to wipe out a sentient species? How were the Confederates going to react?
He glanced at Ascension. The machine's first impulse here had been to ensure all life was wiped out, so that nothing could threaten humanity. How much of that was its primary programming, and how much was because that's what Svetlana wanted, deep down, and the machine was based on her?
What could even even respond with? He didn't think just letting the remaining Shivans die out was a good option, but apparently Svetlana had written off the whole species. He might need to defend the survivors from the Republic on his own; maybe even defend them from Svetlana herself.
He looked back at the display. Two thousand three hundred and seventeen ships ready to go; mostly just patched-up Republic ships that had Hyperdrives in them now, and would need repair and modification work en route. The number was increasing at a fast pace, but he needed to leave in the next 48 hours or the Republic would beat him there. Time to optimize. What was the best he could manage with the time he had?
***
Svetlana looked at her face in the mirror; slowly tilting it this way, then that. She could optimize her hair growth however she wanted, even make a copy of her own scalp and transplant it if she felt like it... but no. It would always look wrong to her, now that she'd seen it burned off. She sent a note to Ascension to start making a copy of herself to send on missions like this; the only good way to deal with it was to make sure it never happened again.
Based on her earlier conversations, she was ninety percent certain that Eyeball would interfere if she tried to wipe out all of these Founder-descended species. This was pure foolishness. They needed to be put down. It was the only logical outcome; they were literally engineered to even think like their creators. Anything they considered tier zero, one, or two would probably be best simply eradicated, and if the tier threes got killed off as a side-effect, so be it.
He'd arrive at the rendezvous point soon. She thought over the best possible option.
First... she could use that gate he'd captured. Slip a few stealth drones through, and use them to spread a disease that wiped out anything related to the founders. Give it a long enough time before symptoms became apparent, and distribute it through their wormhole network, and she could infect most of the Republic. Give a good solid start. She had dozens of candidates she'd been working on, and it would be best to try all of the ones that took over a month to show symptoms.
Second... she could order some or all of the proper Ascension ships to scatter and find out of the way systems, or just poorly defended ones they could seize. Reproduce themselves until they had enough force to overwhelm the Republic... and then just start methodically crushing it, wiping out every single member of the descendant races. Launch railgun platforms that could eradicate planetary populations from purely founder species from outside the star system, and invasion fleets to capture those with mixed species. If she did that, within five years at the outside the Republic would be dealing with an endless tide of automated attackers far beyond what they could survive, even with the help of their founders. The only flaw here being that Ascension seemed to be going along with Eyeball on this whole scheme rather than doing what it should be and eradicating the locals; but that's something she could easily resolve with a bit of selective editing; the drones were all inclined to obey her in moment to moment affairs, after all.
Third... she could keep helping Eyeball on this little crusade of his. It would doubtlessly wipe out quite a bit of both the Republic and these Confederates, and draw attention. At some point, she simply slips away to start directing the Ascension fleet, and leaves a cyborg copy behind. Or even a clone, with her own abilities, just in case.
Following those simple three steps would not only likely help spread the illnesses among both factions, but also weaken their fleets, making their already abysmal odds of surviving an Ascension onslaught even worse.
She studied her fleet for a moment... ran numbers based on average resource density of star systems. The gathering of ships already sent to the stars in that nebula that she could repurpose.
Eleven ships sent out today would, statistically, be able to make complete shipyard setups in between six and eleven uninhabited systems within a month, and move on. After which, those shipyards could produce more, both to augment the existing system, and to seed more. Ninety-nine percent chance of a force capable of overwhelming the Republic at the five year mark, sixty-three percent chance of doing so at the three year mark, albeit with a substantial margin for error; these Founders had been here for untold millions of years. It was always possible they had a more extensive sensor network than she was aware of.
She launched twenty, making careful, selected edits to the loadout and memory of the vessels and their communications protocols. Nineteen for randomly selected stars scattered across the Andromeda galaxy, to form starting points for new Ascension fleets... and one to first go back to that captured gate, and send swarms of tiny drones carrying disease samples through... and then to head for that nebula and issue new orders.
She studied the terminal in her quarters, and after a few seconds, wiped the orders both from the ship's logs, and from Ascension's own memory; hopefully, she was the only person aware such a thing was possible, much less capable of doing it... and turned to head out to the bridge.
Most likely, Eyeball would be here any time now. She should be able to pretend everything was normal. They were building more ships from the scraps here at the rendezvous point, so the numbers wouldn't even be a problem. Undoubtedly, he'd want to try to save the remaining Shivan civilians. If she didn't fight him on that, he'd be suspicious; but it didn't matter how the argument went. Any that survived today, Ascension could cleanse later.
These Founders were a plague. A vile abomination, a mistake of nature. One that would be simple enough to blot out.
Now.... her own abilities, copied from the long-deceased Ripper, had proved useful in a combat capacity. She had failed to replicate them technologically, despite her studies. Was there any way to duplicate the organic structures in her flesh that produced them, perhaps on sufficient scale to make a starship or missile do the same thing?