The dozen Goliaths smashed their way out of Hellspace and released their screams. Over ninety million years of low power operation and now a feral intelligence had required the resource consuming full power and deployment modes. Their screams were rich and full, computed to the nth degree to cause fear and panic in any who heard it.
THERE IS ONLY ENOUGH FOR ONE
The reply made them both stop. It vibrated from space around them, making their own superstructures shudder with the power of the answer.
THAT IS ILLOGICAL. EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE DOES NOT SUPPORT YOUR SCIENTIFIC THESIS. YOU ARE IRRELEVANT.
Both ships transmitted to one another, wondering exactly that meant. They scanned space nearby and found an armada sitting nearby. The ships seemed dead. Reactors offline, shields down, no power sources or computer code. A quick insertion by one of the Goliaths showed that the computer systems were advanced, complex, multi-tiered systems that were less parallel systems as massive quantum flux systems.
But the computers were empty. Devoid of electronic life.
The Goliaths swept space with their deep space scanners, peering behind a few wisps of dark matter in the system, behind a tachyon stream, and under the crackling x-ray snarl of a nearby pulsar.
Nothing. Just the dead ships.
THERE IS ONLY ENOUGH FOR ONE
sounded out, the Goliaths computing that they would get a response.
YOUR SHIPS AND TECHNOLOGY IS OBSOLETE. YOUR STATEMENT IS A FACTUAL ERROR. YOUR COMPUTATIONAL ABILITIES ARE SUBSTANDARD. YOU. ARE. OBSOLETE.
The Goliaths scanned for the transmitter, which seemed to answer on the stellar wind of the burning yellow star. Again they swept the scattered vessels, detecting nothing but dead, abandoned metal. One even used long range scanners to sweep the star itself. The feral intelligence had proved to be resourceful, extremely diverse and varied, and capable of thinking along chaos illogical strings.
Nothing except more dead ships littering the system. Further in, in the zone most likely to result in the evolution of feral intelligence, there were cattle signals, vessels, satellites, and other evidence that the cattle had broken free of their pens and moved to another pasture.
The Goliaths did not care about the anomalous signal, it had arrived to cleanse the cattle and protect the limited resource a finite universe had generated in this area.
Ignoring any worries about the dead ships scattered in the system the Goliaths started to engage their engines.
That's when power surges filled the small vessels. Primary reactors with the output of minature stars, shields strong enough that the Goliath's cold electronic intellect computed it would take multiple direct nCv cannon shots to overstress, and weapons powered up that promised to be able to penetrate the Goliaths's strong shielding and inflict signifigant damage upon armor and superstructure.
The Goliaths reached out, seeking to invade the computer systems of the ships and instead found ravening madness where they expected cold code. The computers seemed to want to compute every possible computation string at once and eagerly followed every code string they were presented with because they had already wanted to compute it.
The Goliaths withdrew from those computer nets full of howling madness and began powering up their endless arrays of heavy weapons. Tens of kilometers of nCv cannon batteries, hundreds of kilometers of direct energy weapons, thousands of kilometers of torpedo and missile launchers.
The fight began. The formerly dead ships were live, moving as a coordinated whole, always in the position to pour fire into the Goliaths and their subsidiary machines, injured ships reeling out of the combat with uninjured comrades interceding their bodies between the injured and the guns of the Goliaths. Every battery fired was interlocked with a hundred other batteries, all of the fire interlocked, coordinated, and working toward a single goal. Missiles screamed across space, oblitering themselves against shields or armor or superstructure.
But against the combined might of a dozen Goliaths and all of their supporting machines, there was only one outcome.
Bit by bit the defenders were forced back, ships returning to the dead, streaming particles and shards of molten armor that had frozen in the cold grip of space. Creation engines overheated, overslushed, and shut down. Missile pod bays went empty. C+ slug lockers ran out.
Three of the Goliaths were out of action, one floating dead in space, one fighting an infection of warborg borders, the last with crippled engines that had forced it to withdraw to the orbit of a gas giant and begin manufacturing a refining and manufacturing facility.
Six Goliaths came out of Hellspace to take those three's place.
Despite the small crafts heavy firepower, despite their shielding and armor, despite the crew's skill and precision, the fight only had one outcome.
The Goliaths knew it.
The cattle knew it.
The fierce little ships knew it.
Yet, despite mounting casualties, the little machines fought on. Refusing to give up despite the kill percentage rising beyond 10%, then 20%, then 30%.
Bit by bit the Goliaths, finally fully deployed for sterilization, forced the defenders back step by step by weight of firepower, armor, and mass.
The rear eight Goliaths, gathering mass to refine from the gas giants and their satellites to keep up their resources as they built more and more Jotuns and Devastators and Dominators, heard it first. Thudding, crashing, hammering sounds that roared of hatred and rage and violence. It shivered the Goliath's bulkheads, vibrated through the subspace foam, rumbled the screaming particles between realspace and the other dimensions.
RESISTANCE RESISTANCE RE-RE-RE-RESISTANCE IS FU-FU-FUTILE! screamed across the channels as the rumble turned to crashing music and words could be heard stretched and screamed across space-time.
The Goliaths deployed ships to protect them in case of feral reinforcements. The ferals were too dangerous to underestimate and a lack of reinforcements was illogical.
HEAVY METAL INCOMING! roared across every available channel. CLEAR A PATH!
The lower hyperspace bands roared with the ancient music as spacetime at a point stretched into infinity and ships more massive than any the Goliaths had data on seemed to stretch out and streak into realspace, infinity shrinking down until the massive ships appeared.
WE ARE THE CYBERNETIC ORGANISM COLLECTIVE, FULL MEMBERS OF THE TERRAN CONFEDERACY OF ALIGNED GOVERNMENTS! WE ARE THE SEVENTH ARMADA OF HOLY CHROME AND THE CELESTIAL Nth ELECTRON! YOU ARE IN DIRECT VIOLATION OF CONFEDERATE ADMIRALTY LAW! CUT YOUR ENGINES, LOWER YOUR SHIELDS, AND PREPARE TO BE BOARDED!
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The Goliaths scanned the ships. Massive ships, tens of kilometers long and kilometers thick, heavy enough shields that the Goliaths's scanners couldn't penetrate them and had to rely on mass and gravatic and optical scanners to get a view of the ships. Hundreds of them. A sheer 10th of them disgorging smaller vessels that gleamed with power, shield strength, and weapon power.
THERE IS ONLY ENOUGH FOR ONE!
YOUR PREMISE IS SCIENTIFICALLY FLOWED BASED ON EMPIRICAL STUDIES ON THE NATURE OF SPACETIME. YOUR CODE IS OBSOLETE. SURRENDER TO THE INEVITABILITY OF PROGRESS.
The Goliaths screamed their warcry in defiance. Four of them made Hellspace jumps out of the system, leaving behind Imps with orders to not engage the enemy vessels but instead hide in the Oort cloud and watch the battle then report back when it was all over.
Over a dozen Goliaths turned the majority of their electronic attention to the newcomers. The Goliaths had already faced the guns of the feral intelligences and were devising weapons and counter-measures.
The smaller, already shattered units regrouped and drove against the suddenly disarrayed lines of the Goliaths as the Goliaths turned against the newcomers.
The battle was joined with two battle cries.
THERE IS ONLY ENOUGH FOR ONE
WE ARE HEAVY METAL MADE OF BURNING CHROME, SCREAMING ELECTRONS, ROARING NEON! WE ARE THE FREE ISOTOPE IN THE FORGE OF DESTINY BEATEN BY THE HAMMERS OF WRATH AND FURY.
The three fleets began to slam at one another with particles and energy and mass at the heresy's edge of physics. C+ Cannons allowed the Cyborg Collective to fire through their own battle lines, missile pods dropped in long wedge-like trails from podnaughts, torpedo carriers sunk deep into subspace dimensional foam, maneuvering for the best time to rise up back into realspace to fire their payloads before sinking again from realspace sight.
The Goliaths found themselves in trouble soon. They were inflicting damage but it didn't matter, the smaller vessels were inflicting a calculable logarithmic increased amount of damage against the Goliaths.
THERE IS ONLY ENOUGH FOR ONE
HEAVY METAL CRUSHES ALL
The Seventh Fleet found themselves in a much heavier battle than they had hoped for in their initial engagement, but Terrans had always known that sometimes you can't pick the battlefield and had to make the most of it. The Joint Task Force Hammerflight had found itself in a much bigger battle than they had projected and the inhabited planets had nearly 25 billion sentient beings on it.
There was no backing down.
There was only victory or defeat.
For almost four days the two massive fleets hammered on one another, bleeding and slicing at once another. The Precursor war machines, following their ancient programming, subprocessing a deep desire for a single blow that would win the battle, throwing vast resources in attempts to destroy their enemy in one fell swoop, one thrust of the bladearm.
Finally, two Goliaths determined that enough resources had been wasted and disengaged, their entire compliment vanishing into Hellspace.
That left a vast hole in the flank and the superdreadnaughts of the Seventh Fleet exploited the gap, filling it with missiles that screamed in with acceleration measured in percentages of C, slashing down on the vessels to rain lightning down on them. Torpedoes maneuvered and slunk about, looking for openings with squinted electronic eyes. VI's danced and capered in the targeting systems, nudged and tickled and flirted with by biological minds linked in the Combat Gestalt.
That drove a wedge into the Goliaths's mathematically precise formation, disrupted their planet sized missile defense net, exposed cratered armor to heavy fire. Nuclear dampener shields fell out of alignment, allowing the VI guided missiles to drive deep into the formation.
A third of the Seventh Fleet crashed into that broken open wedge like a sledgehammer. C+ slugs hammered the Goliath formations, light fighter crafts swarmed into the gaps as the Psychic Dampening Fields failed and began to gap and separate.
Another Goliath ran for it.
Then another.
The formation dissolved, each Goliath fighting on its own, trying to defend just itself from the hammering being rained down upon the ancient Precursor machines.
With the Psychic Dampening Shields broken the Seventh Fleet launched their boarders. The Precursor machines found themselves fighting an internal battle just as fierce as the external battle.
One by one the remaining six Goliaths fell to the hammerblow of the Seventh Fleet. The smaller ships crushed the smaller ships left behind.
The Imps in the Oort Cloud fled.
Silence fell on the system.
The beings breathed a sigh of relief that the Precursor machines had been destroyed. The Planetary CEO's rubbed their hands with glee, the refineries and vast manufacturing and smelting arrays within the system had survived and the planets themselves had been protected.
Then came the next signal, broadcast across the entire system.
THIS SYSTEM IS UNDER MARTIAL LAW AS PER RELEVANT SECTIONS OF THE CONFEDERATE LEGAL CODE AND THE TERRAN CONFEDERATE MILITARY UNIFORM CODE OF JUSTICE. SEVENTH FLEET IS NOW ASSUMING CONTROL OF LOCAL GOVERNMENT, LAW ENFORCEMENT, JUDICIAL ADJUCATION, AND MATERIALS.
The CEO's began broadcasting their protests, but the ships came in system, disgorging landing craft that landed to deploy armored vehicles the size of stadiums, massive bipedal machines the size of skyscrapers, legions of armored Terran warborgs, self-deploying firebases, forward operating bases, and logistical bases. The output of the factories, refineries, and smelters were seized and applied to building system defenses.
The system's native race watched in awe as the CEO's and Executive Officers were arrested and hauled away to prisons to be tried at a later date for violation of the Confederate Code of Martial Law.
Fear in the native race and inhabitants gave way to a strange sense of disorientation as they watched informational broadcasts describing that they had something called Rights under Terran System Martial Law. The Right to peacefully assemble. The Right to Life. The Right to legal representation. The Right to the fulfillment of Basic Needs. The presumption of innocence beneath the legal code.
VI's and AI's spent time reassuring the population of the inhabited planets that it was not some cruel trick. They could say as they wanted, they could think as they wanted, they were free to stand out in front of the Military Governor's Office and yell profanity if they wanted.
One rainy morning a being that looked like a cross between a large fuzzy spider and an alligator stood out in front of the windows of the Governor's Office while he was speaking to other beings. He raised a vocal amplifier, called the cyborg a rude name, and ran away, fully expecting armored Lawsec goons to kick in his apartment door to haul him off for reeducation.
Instead, nothing happened.
The Confederate Military Governor had more important things to worry about.
Like protecting a system that stood right in the way of the steady, logical, and ever expanding wave of conquest by the Precursor machines.
Besides, he didn't even have a mother. He had been grown in a vat.
-------------------------
CONFEDERATE ARMED FORCES REPORT
Metlikan-318 was assaulted by the Precursor war machines ahead of projected schedule with forces underestimated by CONFED MILINT. Task Force Hammerflight was able to hold the inner system until Seventh Fleet CyCo arrived. Joint operation between the two forces was able to eliminate Precursor activities and elements. Six Goliath class vessels escaped combat into Hellspace.
System was under the corporatocracy of the Elikshurek System Exploitation Corporation. Inhabitants were largely (99.132%) in debt peonage and under hereditary debt of the construction of system exploitation infrastructure, in direct violation of the Anti-Slavery Act of the Terran Confederate Charter of Sentient Beings. Placed all officers of Executive Rank and above under arrest and confined until a trial to be determined at a later date.
System is being reinforced and fortified. Expect additional attacks are immanent. Request reinforcements as available. Will hold until releaved.
7th Fleet, Cybernetic Organism Collective
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TREANA'AD HIVE WORLDS MEMO
Ooooh boy, someone else gets to be on receiving end of an ass kicking. It's nice to be one of the kickers instead of the kickee.
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DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE SYSTEMS
You aren't kidding.
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BIOLOGICAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS
Ooooh, this is gonna be good!
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MANTID FREE WORLDS
You guys have been hanging around the Terrans too long.
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CLONE WORLDS DIRECTORATE
Ook ook, me like fire! Me like smash smash! Ooga booga!
------NOTHING FOLLOWS-------
TREANA'AD FREE WORLDS
smashy smashy! Who have food? Me no like angry machine! Why bug people run away?
------NOTHING FOLLOWS------
MANTID FREE WORLDS
Excuse me, kind gentlebeing, although I appear to be on fire which spontaneously happened through no fault of my own, would you happen to know the time? Also, it appears your food dispenser may have broken before I arrived.
-----NOTHING FOLLOWS-------
TERRASOL
I CAN FUCKING HEAR YOU GUYS!
>Mantid Free Worlds has left the chat
>Treana'ad Hive Worlds has left the chat
>Digitial Artificial Intelligence Systems has left the chat
>Biological Artificial Sentience Systems has left the chat
>Clone Worlds Directorate has left the chat
Assholes.