The plan of action seemed simple enough. Go from hub system to hub system, taking out the strong-points of the Republic; and turning its strength into a weakness; letting it fall on every front as reinforcements and backups stopped arriving, and its sheer size meant it couldn't possibly respond to threats without the wormhole network or the vast fleets it kept at the hubs.

Every day, Ascension drones dropped into hyperspace to transmit signal updates from further away in the galaxy. The fleet count rose, steadily. Hundreds of ships were being built every day, scattered across dozens of star systems; and it would only get faster. Without organic crews, EMP would reduce their effectiveness dramatically, and allow the Republic to actually fight them on an even basis; but against Ascension, that was a losing proposition.

His plans to take the next hub, and the next, weren't even really needed. The Republic could acquire hyperdrive tech tomorrow, and it would still lose. It was dead... it just didn't know it yet. He wasn't even going to be taking a fleet with him; just taking enough crew to help run the ships more efficiently if worst came to worst. The Gaze could carry tens of thousands of crew now; and in a few weeks, when he arrived? There would be so many ships to fly any resistance by the Republic would be pointless.

Svetlana sat across the table, flipping from page to page, assessing combat readiness of different manufacturing centers, and Eyeball focused on them himself, before glancing up at the drone. "Alright then. At some point, the Founders are going to show up, and we'll have to deal with them. In the meantime, I'm thinking we need to initiate the SRE protocol, both here and elsewhere. Rather than letting any of the local governments take over all this space the Republic will be leaving empty, Ascension moves in as a caretaker. Do you think we need to modify it heavily, to deal with nonhumans?"

Svetlana blinked... and flicked her eyes a few times. She didn't -know- about the SRE program back on earth, but she knew Eyeball had started using Ascension to establish a communist state of sorts back on earth; and after a few seconds, she had a good grasp of what that meant. 'Salvage, Reclamation, and Expansion'. The solution of someone who had zero faith in humanity to bring about a stable government by giving them no real control of their future.

Ascension's drone remained docked at the charging station; likely only here because the humans felt more comfortable with something to talk to; as the display in the center shifted. "Would this include planning to eventually supplant the Confederate governments inside their own territory?"

"Assess on a case-by-case basis and go from there. If it allows slavery of sentient beings? Yes. If any significant portion of the population dies from lack of food or shelter and the nation has enough of both to go around? Yes. And, of course, if it decides to attack you. Lower priority than the Republic, but frankly I expect that in a century this will mostly be an Ascension-run galaxy."

"Statistical analysis..... indicates that we've received an incoming message. Battle recording"

The galactic map of Andromeda snapped out of existence. Instead, an image of a star system appeared. At the moment they were just icons, but Eyeball absently zoomed in on one squadron of Destroyers; they were the shell-like, multicolored hulls of the Shoork navy, looking like something that could grow on a coral reef wrapped around some sort of animal rather than be built in space.

Zooming back out, he could see a massive orb-shaped vessel; after a few moments, measurements popped up. The energy generation numbers meant nothing to him; but the size? Eighty-seven kilometers across. There was just the one ship, but it outmassed the entire Shoork navy.

Roughly a light-minute away from the fleet, the vessel was shown emitting ribbons of beautiful white, delicate laces of energy that scattered randomly throughout the area; piercing starships, space stations, the inhabited world it was over.

Then... it was done.

The fleet was gone. The planet, devastated; it was doubtful anything survived. It was still relatively round in shape, but the water that made up most of its surface had vaporized; and the remains were molten. Much more energy and it would have turned into an asteroid belt.

They both stared for a moment. As the massive ship started collecting wreckage from the fleet, Svetlana sighed.

"Well. They're going to have thousands of samples of the hyperdrive. We'll be seeing Founder ships, and maybe Republic ones, with it by the end of the year. Will need to revise estimates."

Eyeball focused on the wreckage. "Shit. Its worse than that. Look!"

He tapped the controls on the display for a few moments, and it zoomed in on... one of the Ascension vessels. Damaged. The video was coming from another Ascension ship, and had been send in hyperspace, so whatever was happening, had already happened. He watched, grimacing, as the narrow, dagger-shaped vessel was pulled into the enormous craft. "...What can they do with Ascension if they manage to capture it?"

Svetlana stared... and slowly shook her head. "That's... they just loaded it onboard? Right past all of their shields, all of their defenses? That ship was loaded down with a fabricator, and had tens of thousands of drones stored in an extradimensional space, helping the Shoork build hyperdrives and mount them on ships that were meant for Warp travel."

Eyeball looked up at her. "...They just captured an intact fabricator?"

"... You should know better than that, you've dealt with Ascension longer than I have. EMP doesn't kill Ascension drones. It stuns them. Damages hardware. They've got redundant backups, shielding... and the ones inside the space will be just fine. Once they bring that hull into the cargo bay, it ends in one of two ways. Either the ship dies when Ascension deliberately makes a new extradimensional space inside that one.... or that Founder ship belongs to Ascension."

***

The target craft had a power output approximately seven thousand eight hundred times as great as that of Ascension's own Jotun-based technology. This was ordinarily cause for alarm; except that, even including the space within the extradimensional pocket, the Destroyer only massed in the tens of millions of tons, while the Founder vessel was hundreds of trillions of tons.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Simply playing dead was the best response, for the moment, leaving everything outside the pocket offline as Ascension watched the vessel slowly drag what it undoubtedly thought was merely wreckage towards a cavernous bay; the fabricator having abruptly started assembling Controllers rather than hyperdrives the moment the Founder vessel arrived. For a few seconds, Ascension had considered breaking down the already complete hyperdrives for use as parts to make more.

This consideration had been dropped immediately. A Hyperdrive that tried to activate inside a substantial gravity well was essentially doomed, yes. The ship couldn't escape by installing one.

But the reason it was doomed was that it would be trying to transit the local center of gravity into hyperspace. For a ship in near orbit of a planet, that would mean it would burn out the ship's drive, maybe kill the ship; and only for a truly massive ship, with an equally massive and powerful drive, would the planet even notice the momentary fluctuation of gravity.

But not only would the hyperdrive do catastrophic damage to the ship it was aboard, possibly bringing a chunk of it into hyperspace as a shattered ruin in the process, but if you fed it enough power..... if it could hook them into the power grid, those hyperdrives might be used to destroy the ship, or bring parts of it outside of this reality for useful study.

Passive sensors gave a good readout of the inside of the bay; armored internal walls with weapons capable of destroying a ship like the destroyer in moments mounted in turrets; they might be stupid enough to bring the wreckage inside, but they clearly were aware the wreckage might still be dangerous.

A massive crane-like tendril of metal reached out from the wall, wrapping around the Destroyer, pulling it up against the bay's wall; and hundreds of other tendrils, tipped with scanners, cutting tools, emerged.. one of Ascension's cyborgs, built off of the Shoork template of a blue-skinned humanoid, gave a low smile. This was perfect.

She took hold of one of the torpedoes; built to deliver Pale One controllers through a wall into a target ship; and carried it through the hull. While the tendrils started their work, methodically cutting through the exterior hull, analyzing each piece, studying circuits, the cyborg placed the torpedo against the hull of the vessel.... and Controllers started moving through the ship. A long, steady, squirming mass of metal moving... and after a few seconds, the device managed to adapt to the wall.... and a circular patch of it became as easy to pass through as the air.

The other side.... was a hallway. One of millions of kilometers of hallway inside the massive ship, a ventiation system equally massive.... and the controllers were penetrating both, even as Ascension drones started to march out.

The information security was... mediocre. On the one hand, their encryption standard was vastly superior to that of the Republic. It actually took time, and effort, for Ascension to secure control of local automated systems. The problem, however, was that the Founder vessel was insufficiently paranoid. The Republic had stringent limits on what could be remotely controlled; firing one of their weapons needed a hard-wired connection to the console. The only actually remotely controllable limbs Ascension had found in everything the Republic had were the ones in hospitals and prisons; these Founders, though?

As awareness spread through the ship, Ascension located airlocks. Assembly and disassembly arms. Drones for use in surveying, and combat, both inside the ship and outside. Internal weapons.

These people trusted their encryption, likely with good reason, and actually allowed their security departments to remotely patrol the ship with armored combat drones; over a quarter of a million of them. These were nice, high-quality combat drones, as well; in some ways, superior to Ascension's own; though the reaction times were abysmal, as they relied on remote guidance. They actually used energy field emitters to handle unusually fast opponents.

Under the circumstances, these drones were on active patrol in the vessel; meaning spread throughout the ship, ready to handle any incoming threat. Perfect.

The ship had fifteen thousand, six hundred, and fifty-two separate emergency EMP devices, ranging from one mounted to the vessel's antimatter core that doubled as a self destruct device and would take out all electronics within a few light-years, to ones built to clear just the cargo bay, to ones for specific decks. The ones for the cargo bay had even been triggered before the doors had shut, after loading the Destroyer; but the shielding had protected the contents of the pocket, leaving only the cyborg and the torpedo to be damaged by it... and those drones and controllers currently in motion, but not yet inside.

The cyborg merely loaded a new torpedo, and the damaged drones and controllers were hauled back into the fabricator for repair... as the Founder-build combat drones altered their paths.

Over two hundred thousand drones. Every single EMP device on the ship was within a kilometer of one of them; some were even in direct-fire range of one of the internal weapons systems.

From the outside, Ascension would have struggled with this ship. Lost thousands of vessels trying to kill it, or been forced to resort to some sort of unorthodox technique, like trying, and probably failing, to merge a ship with this one from hyperspace; the power requirements for such a thing would be excessive, and the vessel wouldn't even have noticed. Even as abysmal as its information security was, none of these internal systems were connected to outside communications, so an outside hacker would have been unable to do much.

From the inside....

***

"We have the deck plans for these Tier-2 species vessels. Pretty, yes, but mostly useless; we already understand them completely. Scan them for modifications, and ensure that anything abnormal is catalogued; save one for careful disassembly just in case there's something new. This other, though..."

Head technician Hramob studied the images of the Outsider vessel. It had been hit by three EMPs, and the Pulsewave weapon had penetrated it in two places, and the only life signs remaining were feeble and dying... but there was still an active low-power energy signature onboard. At the moment, it was secure against the deck, and harmless.... but the fact that it had taken so much damage, and multiple EMP strikes, and was still active.... it was troubling.

"...Internal defenses are on-line?"

He glanced at Sarzomb, one of the junior techs, who gave a quick nod. "Of course, Hramob! The internal guns are focused on those ships, the EMP is up.... if they so much as twitch, the guns will fire. And it looks like someone has even put the internal combat drones at a high readiness state, just in case, there's a few headed our way."

He nodded, and returned to his own console. He manipulated the tendrils, and another layer of the hull was removed, revealing intricate internal circuitry, exquisite designs... this thing was a strange paradox, rapidly assembled with cheap materials, but using an incredibly amount of precision and skill. If they ever went to this Outsider galaxy, they should enslave its people for use as laborers rather than merely exterminating them.

As the tendrils found an EMP device buried in the hull, and he started the delicate process of disarming it, the alarm light overhead flickered briefly on... then off. He shook his head, returning to his work, only to glance up as the door smoothly slid open, revealing one of the shipboard security drones... except... it had something strange attached to it.

He turned away from his console, the device automatically entering sleep mode, as the four-legged construct glided steadily, almost silently, towards him. The weapons and field emitters built into the rounded torso were extremely dangerous, but obviously would never harm a Founder. Those odd metal boxes, though....

"...Security. I've got a combat drone here that appears to have an unauthorized modification. Did anyone..."

A metal object slammed into his forehead with enough force to crack his skull; and he only had enough time to hear the screaming of his sub-technicians before his world was filled with darkness and pain.