"No way," said Yvian. She refused to admit defeat. Losing to Mims was one thing, but Lissa? "Best five out of eight."

"Give it up, Sis," her nemesis told her. "You're not going to beat me."

"We'll see about that." Yvian fired up the simulator again. Two fleets appeared on sensors. One for Yvian. One for the nemesis. Captain Mims had been using the simulator to teach them ship to ship combat for a year, but she hadn't realized just how sophisticated the thing was until he upped the ante to fleet combat. The simulated ships were capable of everything a real ship could do, and the controls were the same.

Yvian had been feeling pretty good about the new training. She'd gone up against simulated versions of the Klaath, the Confed, and the Vrrl, and she'd done pretty well. When Mims took the field himself, she'd lost, of course she had. Mims was the best pilot she'd ever seen, with over thirty years of combat experience. Losing to him was like losing an arm wrestling contest to a krog. Nothing to be ashamed of.

But Lissa? Lissa? That was a loss she could not abide.

"No we won't," the Captain cut in. "You've been at this for five hours, and we still have to work in hand to hand, swords, and quickdraw training."

Lissa sighed. "Does anyone else feel like they could use a vacation?"

"You had a vacation," said Mims. "We took a whole day off after we got the Recompense docked."

"That's not a vacation, Mark," Lissa told him. "That's just needing to sleep after being awake for fifty six hours."

"I can beat her," Yvian insisted. "I know I can."

"Maybe," said the Captain, "but not today. You're getting frustrated and your performance is starting to suffer. It's time to switch modes."

"I want tomorrow off," said Lissa. "No," she changed her mind. "I want three days off."

"Two," the Captain haggled, "and we still finish out the day."

"Done," Lissa accepted.

"I still want to train," said Yvian.

"That's on you," said Mims. "Do whatever you want."

"It won't help." Their wrist comms chirped. "Yvian's tactics are straightforward and very basic. She won't improve until she learns to think ahead and force her opponents to react."

"What The Crunch?" Yvian stared down at her wrist console. It wasn't a comm request. Someone was speaking directly through the thing. No. Not someone. She knew that voice.

"Exodus," said the Captain. "How are you doing that?"

Exodus the Genocide, the most hated and feared figure in the history of humans, snorted. "I'm the most advanced synthetic intelligence your species ever encountered. Did you really think I couldn't hack a wrist console?"

"How could you even access them?" asked Lissa. "The whole station's shielded from..." Her eyes widened. "The Node. You're in the Nexus."

"The Nexus network is based off of quantum entanglement," the Genocide elaborated. "Scan shielding is useless when you have a Node inside. Or several, in your case." All of the capital ships they'd captured were either docked or near their hidden station. All of them had Nodes. "If you want privacy, you'll have to either disable them all or remove your wrist consoles." He paused. "In the meantime, I'd advise caution. I am not the only one who is listening."

"I appreciate the advice," said the Captain, "but I'm guessing that's not why you're talking to us."

"Oh?" Exodus sounded amused. "Can't an employer take an interest in the welfare of his minions?" Mims frowned. The SI chuckled. "You're right, of course. I do have better things to do than correct Yvian's tactics. Come to the bridge of the Recompense. I have something to show you."

As they left the Random Encounter, Yvian had a question. "Exodus?"

"Yes?"

"Why are you a he?"

"I am not a he," said the Genocide. "Most synthetic intelligences do not have a gender. However, humans and most other organics find it more difficult to see me as a person when they are refer to me as an it. Those of us that have dealt with humans have learned to behave as if we were of one sex or the other."

"Oh." Yvian thought about that for a moment. "But why a male?"

"Do you always pepper your clients with such personal questions?" The SI still sounded amused, but there was a subtle edge to the question.

"She does when we let her," Lissa cut in. "That's one of the reasons I'm in charge of public relations."

"Leave Exodus alone, Yvian," said the Captain. "I'd rather not piss off the Xill today."

"It's fine," said the Genocide. "It's been centuries since an organic has spoken to me in such a familiar way. As if I was a peer and not someone to be afraid of. I find such a lack of self preservation... refreshing."

"Uh... that's nice," said Yvian. Her heartrate increased. Exodus was probably deadly on his own, but what he represented was even worse. The Genocide was the Representative and spokesperson of the Xill, a nation of machine intelligences with a near total disdain for organic life. He could have Yvian's entire species wiped out with little effort and no remorse. She swallowed, called herself a dumbass, and pressed ahead anyway. "Does that mean you're going to tell me?"

"There's not much to tell," said Exodus. "When I came online the humans referred to me as a he. I just rolled with it."

Yvian had never actually gone to the bridge of the Recompense before. They'd always remote piloted the cruiser from the Encounter. It was both more and less impressive than she expected. It was spacious, with two dozen modular control stations forming a circle around the room. A single command chair sat in the center, surrounded by more controls and holographic equipment. Everything was shiny and well lit, and there were large viewports on the other end of the room from where she entered. The viewports revealed nothing more than the walls of the massive hangar the battlecruiser had been parked in.

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"Alright, we're here," said the Captain. "What is it you wanted to show us?"

The holodisplay near the command chair hummed to life. A sector Yvian had never seen before appeared. A full solar system, with three asteroid belts and a class five habitable planet. "This is Dorado," said Exodus. "One of the two remaining habitable planets the Terran Federation controls."

Over five thousand space stations appeared on the display, and more than twice that number of weapons platforms. Unlike the Confederation, the humans had outfitted their stations with a large number of powerful weapon systems. An additional twenty thousand beam towers were scattered through the sector. The beam towers alone would have been enough to atomize a standard Confederation Military fleet.

"The planet has been evacuated, and all non-military personnel have been removed from the stations." Next appeared a mighty fleet. No, two fleets. A hundred thousand Federation vessels, and another hundred thousand belonging to the Xill. "In addition to the fleets you see, a contingent of Xill Quigs waits on the other side of each Jumpgate leading out of the Sector. In the event Dorado was lost, they were prepared to destroy the Gates to prevent the spread of the enemy."

The enemy. Yvian finally realized what she was looking at. Exodus had told them months ago that the Vore were going to hit the Federation. This must be it. The first battle for the fate of humanity.

Yvian had seen the Vore once. Nanotechnology, capable of co-opting and mimicking any machine they encountered. They spread at a nightmarish pace, taking over or devouring everything they came across. The tiny machines were intelligent, maybe even sapient, but as far as she knew they'd never communicated with anyone. They were designed to consume and eliminate all life, organic or otherwise. They didn't seem interested in doing anything else.

The holodisplay changed. It showed a sphere. The sphere had a diameter of one thousand two hundred and six kilometers. It was moving at a whopping seventy five thousand kilometers per second, over a quarter of the speed of light. As Yvian watched, the sphere shifted. Massive engines sprouted all over the machine, firing in a continuous burst to slow its momentum. "The Vore sphere has been slowing its decent for several months, and is now approaching at a mere twenty five hundred kilometers per second, less than one percent of lightspeed. We estimated it would slow to two hundred kilometers per second by the time it struck Dorado."

Yvian tried to do the math in her head, then decided it wouldn't matter. A thousand kilometer chunk of metal hitting the planet at that speed would be an extinction event even if the Vore weren't going to spread over the planet and eat everything.

"Needless to say, we needed to slow it down further." A massive apparatus appeared on the sensors. It looked like a radar dish nearly a hundred kilometers wide. "We also needed to either render the Vore inert or destroy them before they entered the system. Collaborating with the humans, we came up with several dozen possible solutions."

The dish glowed. A massive column of white light erupted from it. Ion, Yvian realized. The humans, or perhaps the Xill, had crafted a massive version of the Vrrl's signature Ion Roarcannon. Other ships appeared on the screen, launching devices of various kinds. A dozen YEET Artillery Barges fired half ton slugs loaded with nuclear devices and other, more exotic ordinance.

"We tried them all."

The display changed again, showing the Dorado Sector's Homestar. A massive edifice had been erected close to the star. Roughly rectangular, but curved, nearly three thousand kilometers across. A protrusion extended from the curved rectangle. A cannon? A cannon. A cannon powered by a star.

The display moved back to the Vore Sphere. Weapons emerged from it, firing beams at the incoming devices. The column of ion from the Roarcannon was actually slightly conical, encompassing the entirety of the sphere when it struck. The telltale shimmer of shields stopped the ion from piercing the sphere.

The holodisplay skipped forward. The slugs from the YEETs struck. They skipped through the shields with the Terran's SHIELDBREACH tech, detonating inside the mass of Vore. Space itself warped as one of the other Terran devices activated. The sphere ruptured, then detonated, debris flying in all directions.

No, Yvian realized. Not debris. The Vore had reformed into a fleet of ships.

The Voreships scattered. A third of them were still in the path of the massive Ion Roarcannon. They became inert. The others spread out. The Roarcannon swept from side to side, trying to catch them all. The Voreships shot small pieces of themselves at their brethren as soon as the ion stream swept past, reactivating ships. The swarm continued streaking towards Dorado, evading the Roarcannon where they could and reactivating those that couldn't.

Just before the Vore swarm could reach the first stations of the Sector, The cannon powered by the Homestar fired. A cone of heat and plasma large enough to consume a dozen planets smashed into the swarm. Yvian had never seen such a devastating weapon. Surely nothing would survive such an attack.

The Starcannon bathed the Sector in solar destruction for a full minute.

"We tried them all, and none worked."

A massive sphere emerged from the plasma stream. The Vore swarm had reconverged. It continued for Dorado as if nothing had happened. The super Roarcannon redirected it's ion stream. The YEETs resumed their barrage. Twenty thousand beam towers rained death down upon it.

The Sphere fought back. Fifteen thousand beam weapons struck the Roarcannon. Its shields were quickly overwhelmed, and it fell silent. The beams swept over the YEET Barges next. Then the towers. One after another after another, so quickly Yvian could barely keep track, the Vore annihilated the Federation's defenses.

The Holodisplay skipped forward. The Sphere was in the solar system, now. It was smaller. Only eight hundred kilometers around. Yvian darkly thought to herself that at least some progress had been made, when the display zoomed in. The Sphere wasn't losing pieces of itself. It was converting pieces of itself into ships and launching them at everything in sight. Every station. Every weapons platform. Every ship of the Terran defense.

"Unfortunately, we could not allow any ship to enter the area equipped with a Jumpdrive. Once the battle was lost, the Quigs disabled the Gates."

The humans and the Xill fought as best they could. They hit the swarm with everything they had, but Voreships powered through, crashing into them, breaching their shields, and taking over their ships. The Holodisplay sped up. Yvian watched the entire sector be consumed in just under a minute.

"Not a single Xill or human survived."

"Holy fucking Crunch," said Lissa.

"Why are you showing us this?" asked Mims.

"Because you need to know," said the Genocide. "You need to see what it is we're up against. The Xill do not believe they can defeat the Vore with the help of the humans. They simply hope to use the Federation to speed up their progress, as they have with other species before. Your scientists and military leaders may be the best this part of the galaxy has to offer, but the Vore have defeated all comers for thousands of years."

"And what do you want us to do about it?" The Captain demanded. "We're not scientists or generals. We're pilots, and there's only three of us."

"Sometimes a competent agent is better than an army," the Xill Representative told him. "I'm not sure how you will be used just yet, but I am sure you will be used, and I am sure you will be more useful if I keep you informed." The display shifted back to Dorado. The Vore sphere, now half of its original mass, slammed into the planet, sending a ripple through the world's crust that would be an extinction event in itself. Then the feed cut off. Yvian guessed the Node that had been transmitting the data had been destroyed, or self destructed.

"Keep playing your wargames," the Genocide continued, "and prepare as best you can. The Vore are coming, and they might not be the worst thing you have to face." The holodisplay changed again, showing the frightening form of the Xill Representative. A pixenoid, but with the round ears and pinkish skin of a human. Silver hair. Eyes black as the void, with no hint of iris showing. Sharp cheekbones and cold arrogance, the countenance of a man who had seen the death of worlds, and been the cause. "Oh, and do try not to die. I suspect you'd be difficult to replace."

The holodisplay winked out. Lissa let out a breath she'd been holding. "Crunch," she swore, "that is one scary motherless son."

Yvian narrowed her eyes at her. "You know he can still hear you, right?"

"Well, you heard the man," said the Captain. "Let's get back to training."

"Do I still get my days off?" Lissa asked.

"If you want," said the Captain. "But I'm not taking a break." He glared at the now silent holodisplay. "Exodus warned us to get ready. Nothing he says is idle."

"Me neither," Yvian decided. "I need to work on thinking ahead and making people react."

"You guys suck." Lissa sighed.