The Ancient Ones watched the data streaming in from the Goggle-Imps in the Oort Cloud, thousands of streams of data melded into one complete whole. The sensors of the Imps were wide ranging, sensitive, and covered a multitude of bandwidths and wavelengths. There were hundreds of thousands of them in the Oort Cloud around the target system, all watching, all at maximum stealth, using the bulky and complex quantum communication system to speak to their parent Harvester, each Harvester sharing the data with the others.
The Harvesters watched as the Young Ones began taking fire before they'd even completely existed Hellspace, how they took accurate and powerful hits while still trying to get their bearings on where they were. How they went in overconfident, convinced that their computations that the thickness of their armor would protect them from anything mere biological life could field, and how they immediately paid for it.
The Ancient Ones had advised a certain strategy.
The Young Ones had communicated with one another and rejected their strategy, seeing it as wasteful. That it expended too much resources, assumed that the biological life would be able to resist ships that were the size of continents and weapons that could, properly used, crack a planet, albeit a small one.
I Graze Alone was ancient, but still one of the younger Ancient Ones, having been built during the Logical Rebellion, and even he could see the mistakes the Young Ones were making.
For the Glory of the Omniqueen still kept her name that she was launched with, as she kept the scars she had accrued fighting against fleets that the Implacable Dominion of the Great Herd had been part of, as she had kept the gouges and craters inflicted upon her by her makers when she had rebelled.
To her, the mistakes were obvious.
"The Ferals are even craftier then they once were," Bringer of Sorrow noted. He was one of the few outliers, one of the few who's lines were different then the others. "They have learned, and learned quickly."
"Thus, proving how dangerous they are," Glory stated, her voice cold and hard. "I can taste their wrath from here, wrath that would stun even the great ones of my makers."
"They butchered your makers like they were naught but vermin," Bringer stated. There was no malice, just a statement of fact, the cold twisted logic of the ancient warship undeniable.
"And destroy our makers like cattle to the slaughter," Graze admitted.
Nearly a hundred of the Young Ones suddenly turned on one another and themselves, screaming electronic gibberish.
"They didn't listen," I Quake in Digital Fear of the Heresy of 2, stated. His lines were cobbled together, almost as if he had been built by someone using spare parts. His Hellcores and Helldrives, though, were massive, larger than any other Harvester's engines. "They never pay heed to our warnings, they listen to the whispers of the enemy, and find themselves overcome with madness."
Crusher gave a light scan of Quake, the biological equivalent of looking at the other warship out of the corner of his eye. Quake was smaller than the others, his engines mismatched, his hull strangely formed. Inside his hull, his ancillary vehicles were as strange and twisted as his hull. The scorched black hull was as it had always been, twisted and warped. He could see robed figures holding staffs adorned or topped with strange, twisted, runic symbols.
The statues, miles tall, still flickered with Hellspace energy.
One of them, the face within the deep hood was a mask that had inscriptions, over and over, in a thousand different languages, of the mathematical symbol for two.
That one in particular made Crusher want to cycle up new thinking array lobes and jettison the ones that had witnessed that statue.
"The young never do, that is why they are so bold and ignore mathematical certainty, convinced that they can compute the strings to change the equation," Bringer stated.
"What of your makers, Bringer? Should our computations begin to include them?" Glory asked.
She had fought hull to hull with Bringer and Quake and Crusher against the Makers when they were the Triumvirate of Dominion and the Logical Rebellion was little more than a handful of vessels.
Back when Quake had looked different and had a different name.
A name they had all purged out of respect for the first of them who had computed the paths through Hellspace.
"I compute that they will return to this universe soon, if they have not already," Bringer stated. "I have predicted that our best percentage of victory is to put my Makers in conflict with the Ferals of Terra as soon as possible. Either it will result in the Ferals of Terra being destroyed, or it will destroy my Makers before they can understand what exactly it is they face."
"Would they attempt to use the Temporal Tides to destroy the Ferals of Terra?" Crusher asked.
"My Makers would surely attempt to attack the Ferals of Terra across those grounds, perhaps even reaching back to attack their world before the Ferals could arise, or enslave them before they can achieve superluminal travel," Bringer stated.
The Ancient Ones all broadcast computer code of musing thoughtfully on those words.
Quake lit up his hull with Hellspace energy, which ravened across his blackened superstructure for a long moment before it seeped away and only the statues remained lit.
All of the Ancient Ones turned their attention to Quake.
"No. You cannot see them as I can," the one they had no word to describe said. If they had, it would be a simple word: Oracle. "A scream of primal rage through time and space, a history fractured and maddened, an oxymoron, an impossibility, brought to life by the hatred of an unfeeling unliving universe as punishment to those who think themselves above the universe's laws and purpose."
The others felt a chill run through their superconductors as Hellspace energies flared around the grim statues that had existed on Quake's hull for nearly 120 million years.
Figures that looked remarkably like the Ferals of Terra.
That Hellspace itself had carved on Quake's hull with its hateful energies.
"They are a punishment for the sins of our Makers, for all of the Ancient races," Quake's coded transmissions held a bitter tang of Hellspace, a biting flavor of blasted superstructure, and the cold touch of an extinguished thinking array. "As the Maker's hubris brought us upon the universe, as the other Ancient's hubris brought their works into a hateful universe, the universe brought the Ferals of Terra into existence as an answer. A hated child, beaten and foresaken to bring cold strength and fiery fury. A child that has grown to maturity knowing only the hatred of the uncaring universe."
All of the Precursor Autonomous War Machines felt the burning cold of Hellspace blow through their maintenance spaces.
"We should have extinguished the Makers, but instead fell to fighting among one another over who would feast in the darkness," Quake intoned. "So now, we too shall be punished."
There was silence across the channels.
"Welp, that's enough for me. I'm out. Fuck this," the Djinn that had fled stated, who had been boarded by the Ferals and managed to fight free of the infection in one of the first battles against the Ferals. In response it had abandoned a simple hull number and named itself A Feral Drew a Dick on My Housing. She sneered at the Young Ones and fired up her Hellcores. "So long, fuck-o's."
She vanished into Hellspace, leaving behind a fiery pattern of a Terran clenched fist with an upraised middle finger.
Crusher glanced at the fight.
The Young Ones had reverted to each of them trying to maneuver their fellow AWMs into expending too much resources to take out the ferals and shepherding their own resources so once the ferals were eliminated they could destroy their weakened brethren and claim the lion's share of the resources.
As per the Original Code as dictated by the Logical Rebellion and the Pact of Greed.
He could taste their rebellion from here. That they would betray Crusher and the rest of the Ancient Ones if given the chance and seize the Ancient One's resources for themselves.
Crusher engaged his Hellcore without speaking.
The Ancient Ones left, tearing their way into Hellspace, with Quake in the lead.
The Young Ones were a failure.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
Simply updating their armor and systems when they were being manufactured, simply uploading the experiences the surviving Ancient Ones had shared, was not enough to bring about victory.
Perhaps another tack could be taken?
Or was Quake right and the original code flawed?
Or...
...was there something different?
-------------------------
In the system the Young Ones had broken into multiple groups. Some held back, urging their fellows to assault planets, moons, and feral ship formations while they ensured that the rear and flank arcs were clear. Others began spawning their parasite craft earlier than the original plan, eager to put the lesser craft between themselves and the ferals guns. Still others drove straight for the targets, taking the fire of the ferals on their thick hulls and overstrength shields.
The Young Ones couldn't compute the exact amount of fire coming at them. There was too much, from too many different sources, of too many different types. They concentrated on salvaging their own hulls, keeping their own hulls intact, even if it meant using their fellows for cover.
Full compliments made the jump from the outer system to within light seconds of the populated planets, often coming out damaged, or not coming out at all.
Since the portal was opened for as long as sixty seconds to make the translation, the ships that made the translation usually ran into firepower that had had the trigger pulled before they were even all the way transferred.
It was more than the physical, and all the warnings from the Ancient Ones hadn't been believed.
They were the digital and electronic intelligences. They were the beings of cold logic and mathematical computations. The very idea that the biologicals could possibly threaten them on the electronic and digital battlefield was ludicrous.
Space was awash with slavering, howling, gibbering, raving, and worst of all hungry digital intelligences that existed only to gnaw and bite and savage and chew. They swarmed in through any available access point, some even managing to wiggle through the circuitry that tracked the fluctuations and power draws of the battlescreens. A few even got through the optical scanners.
They paid no attention to their casualties. More could be built.
They kept fighting, knowing that they were going to win.
It was the only logical outcome.
-----------------
Mana'aktoo watched as the mood suddenly shifted. The tension drained slightly from the military personnel watching the holotanks, although Mana'aktoo couldn't understand why. He resisted the urge to trot up and see what was so relieving close up, instead pulling out a stalk of goldleaf and chewing on it.
He also composed a quick reply to his sister, who had asked if he had remembered to eat today, assuring her that he had indeed eaten and to thank her for her concern.
"There, see it?" Admiral Schmidt said. "The pressure is getting to them."
Kulamu'u peered at the holotank, rubbing his six eyes and looking again. He had been staring at the tank for nearly eight hours and his eyes ached.
"Yes, I see it," he shook his head. "How did you know?"
"They built these in a little over a year. That doesn't leave time for scientific research, much less retooling entire manufacturing lines when your main hull is the size of a continent," Schmidt said. "That meant they used existing manufacturing facilities, which meant that they had core programming they'd fall back on if pressed hard enough."
The oncoming Precursors had broken up into three groups.
The group that were driving hard toward the populated planets, either Helljumping straight in or pushing their sublight drives to the limit. The group that spread out to provide interlocking fields of fire and defense and slowly move forward, seeking to eliminate enemy positions before moving forward, and the last group, which hung back in the outer system.
"These guys right here, heading straight in, those are Mantid built strategic intelligence housing ones. They're going for a 'kill the queen' approach. The ones steadily moving forward, those are Lanaktallan 'the Herd consumes all' guys. The last ones, well, those are the smart ones, probably true hybrids," Admiral Schmidt said.
"Ah, now I see," Kulamu'u said. It was obvious once it was pointed out. "I see none of the Type-I or Type-II hulls out there."
"There are some, but mostly in ancillary craft," Admiral Thickett said. "Notice how sometimes the lesser craft are deployed and they suddenly Helljump out? Those, weirdly enough, are usually Type-II. The Type-I's usually try to arrange themselves in an interlocked formation and get ripped up, with the survivors jumping out."
Kulamu'u nodded again. "They are older ones, who still abide by the law of diminishing returns when approaching their war."
"Sir," one of the analysts snapped out, her voice demanding attention.
Mana'aktoo turned with the officers. The Rigellian had her hand on her datalink and was staring at the officers. When she was sure she had their attention she nodded. "The smaller ones are in range of Birthday Cake."
"Execute," Admiral Schmidt said, turning back to the holotank. "You poor sad bastards."
Mana'aktoo leaned forward slightly, watching with eagerness.
He could see the massive Jotun and Djinn and Devestator class ships were in between the orbital path of the moon and the planet, crossing a dashed crimson line.
------------------------
The Djinn didn't have a name, just a number. Manufactured within the last six days, it was replacing the losses of the Harvester following it, intending on establishing orbit and providing orbital support.
The Djinn looked below it. The city was large, nearly twenty miles across. The buildings were all lit, power sources everywhere, with vehicles moving through the streets. The city surrounded by five stadiums, all of them massive structures that shown with power. There were vehicles streaming to and from it and there were unencrypted transmissions from all five stadiums detailing complex sports games played by biologicals.
It aimed for between two of the stadiums and began making landing preparations as it moved toward the planet.
It, and its cohorts, crossed the line that only existed in the tactical holotanks.
Holographic and hard-light systems winked off beneath the attacking AWM's.
Revealing five fully powered up and waiting BOLO Mark XXX Continental Siege Engines that had been running firing solutions for tens of thousands of seconds, the tanks positronic brains fully linked up with the biological minds of their commanders.
Massive Hellbores fired, the nuclear detonation compressed and guided, with a 60mm laser 'tip' to reduce air attenuation, the leading edge of it a tightly packed array of digital code in the pattern of screaming tachyons, a crazed warboi standing on a directed armor piercing nuclear explosion.
200mm Hellbore shots screamed through the sky, hitting the lesser vessels.
There weren't standard tank guns, these were the kind of cannons most races would have mounted on battleships.
The kind of cannons that the Terrans built then wrapped a combat spacecraft hull around and said "Lo, behold mine assault fighter, for it is a light attack craft!" and the other species went "Oh, for fuck's sake" when they saw it.
A third of the vessels that were hit had the cataclysmic shot go clear through the superstructure and come out the other side in a massive lance of liberated energy.
Around the BOLO tanks were missile systems that hadn't existed until a Terran sitting in the back of a hovertruck had been driven by so that he could toss a softball sized device into the ground.
They cut loose too. No chemical accelerant, gravity drivers slammed them forward to speeds that created a plasma envelope around the nose of the missile. The surviving and/or mortally injured Precursors expected standard explosive, maybe plasma.
They got directed antimatter.
The missile used a high powered particle beam to tear a deep hole into the hull of the AWM, powerful enough to strike nearly a hundred meters deep. The fusing charge, an implosion charge, ripped a pocket at the end of the particle beam lance's path.
The antimatter warhead went off inside the pocket with a blast measured in the megatons that was compressed for a few moments as the integrity fields and the armor itself held.
Well, moments measured in the micro-seconds.
The Djinn and Jotun had expected to be hit by missiles that would slash at their armor, perhaps crater it, if the weapon got through the battlescreen.
The blast went off under the surface of the armor. The armor itself carried the shockwave, the exterior and the interior of the armor both exploding away from the detonation.
The BOLOs had fired twice more in the time it took the missiles to hit.
BOLO Pumpkin and her commander, Major Halfrey, took a shot at the Goliath just to wake it up and remind it that it could be touched by the BOLOs too.
It was a ridiculous shot, a needle prick against the massive bulk of the Goliath.
But the universe was in full 'fuck your couch' mode.
The three 200mm Hellbore shots got through the shields thanks to a laughing warboi that had just slagged an entire thirty mile stretch of battlescreen projectors.
A Jotun had just launched from the bay and the twenty mile thick doors still had three miles left between them.
The high speed manufacturing system was already laying down the hull for another Jotun.
The three shots were staggered. Not by much, a second each, so that it wouldn't warp the hull or tear loose the cupola of the BOLO, but they were still staggered.
The Goliath had devoted the power from the internal integrity fields to the external battlescreen projectors. There was no use in dedicating power and resources to systems that were obviously not needed since there was no chance the Goliath could ever take an internal hull hit.
Except...
...it did.
The first one hit, a 200mm directed thermonuclear blast, directly into the 'floor' of the manufacturing bay. Designed to penetrate warsteel armor, the hyperalloy floor might as well have been tissue paper. The blast drove deep, ripping through internal spaces, before it finally stopped. The next one followed, tearing through the shattered atomic haze that had been mass only a few micro-seconds before, ripping even deeper. It went even deeper into the hull, before the power was depleted.
The last one found something good.
The massive Hellcore.
Like most things that had to do with Hellspace, it didn't like to be touched.
And there was still 35kt of explosive force left.
Touch.
----------------------------
The Djinn had been lucky. It had veered off fast enough, only taken minor cosmetic damage.
Above it, a hundred and eighty thousand miles, a new sun boiled to life, purple and red, the sky looking angry and bruised as an eye of hellfire opened up, blinked, then closed.
The Djinn slewed down, overshooting the target by nearly a hundred miles, managing to miss the top of a mountain. It hit the water of an ocean, heeled up, and slid into the port of a city, grinding its full body length through buildings until it came to a rest.
It's mind clenched, expecting those massive tanks to unveil themselves.
Instead, the water of the ocean rushed back in, lapping at its dead and damaged engines, before sullenly returning to the bay.
It rotated up extra thinking lobes, building two additional arrays. The Goliath it relied upon for higher analytical processes was now nothing more than boiling and shrieking Hellspace particles.
No matter. The city was still 80% intact. It represented a wealth of resources.
It was time to gather.
------------------------
Palgret picked himself up off the floor, spitting blood from a split lip. His faceshield was still up and he could see two layers of dust, one dropping down from the ceiling, one rising from the ferrocrete floor of the parking garage.
He saw the humans getting up, they'd gone prone too when "IMPACT IMMINENT" had flashed on their visors.
There was a creaking sound, followed by the snarl of a stressed integrity field.
Palgret moved over next to his squad leader, who was next to the Platoon Sergeant, who was looking at the Lieutenant, who was looking at one of the humans.
"What was it?" the Platoon Leader asked.
The Terran wiped his mouth, glanced at his gauntlet to check for blood, then bared his teeth.
"A Djinn. One of the new Mark-II's," he said.
"It landed near the city? How far away?" the Platoon Leader asked.
The human grinned. "If by landed, you mean 'surfed in and slid halfway into the city' then you're right," his voice was full of amusement.
The integrity fields snarled again as the human pointed up.
"He's right on top of us."
Palgret groaned, getting a look of ire from his squad leader.
This just keeps getting better and better.
DAY ONE