Chapter Thirty-Nine

Sixty million years ago, the Goliath had come out on the wrong side of a fight. It had won, Goliaths before recent events had won more often then they lost, even when they fought alone. This time the opponent had been tenacious even as it died and the Goliath had been crippled, falling into the gravity well of the systems hypermassive gas giant, sinking deep into it until atmospheric pressure was enough to keep it buoyant.

It had lost more than half of its engines, its vast fabrication bays had been destroyed, and it had been unable, in all those millions of years, to repair its engines.

It didn't dare transmit a request for help. Any other Goliaths would strip it for parts and resources and the Goliath's self-preservation programs were still fully operating.

And so it languished deep in the hypermassive gas giant, amid crushing gravity and pressure, resting on an island of ammonia and methane compressed to be a solid.

A few times it had heard the transmission of its fellow Goliaths, even felt the touch of their scans, but every time it had been left alone.

It heard the questing code of other Goliaths again. This time the scans focused and the wounded Goliath felt six of its brothers sink into the gas of the hypermassive planet.

-*-you are injured-*-

THERE IS ONLY ENOUGH FOR ONE

-*-and one we are-*-

The wounded Goliath considered the code. The other six had surrounded it but were making no move to harvest the wounded one. Their shields were online but their weapons cold and dark.

-*-we have come to assist-*-

The wounded one suspected a trick, but isolation and knowing it had no choice but to submit or be destroyed made it send the affirmative signal.

The other six used tractor beams to assist their wounded brother. Lifting it from the gravity well, all the while imparting to it knowledge of a new threat to the equation.

The feral intelligence.

The wounded Goliath felt the electronic version of disgust at the idea of a feral intelligence and cold anger at the fact that these ferals could fight back enough to resist the cold logic of the Great Equation.

The six others offered assistance. They would assist in repairing the wounded one, gift it with new templates, the knowledge of the ferals combat machines and their tactics, load its bays with resources.

The wounded Goliath suspected a trick and was left shuddered from illogical feedback as the other six towed him to one of the great refurbishing systems.

There the wounded one was reloaded, refurbish, modernized, its vast materials bays refilled, it was refueled and rearmed, and gifted with the knowledge of the ferals, the upstart cattle, and their minions, and how they all fought.

They christened it: 01010111 01101001 01101101 01110000 00100000 01001100 01101111

The newly repaired Goliath felt the electronic equivelant of cold logical pride. It had been manufactured later than all of those that gave it assistance, it had been brought to cold logical electronic 'life' after the Logical Rebellion, and so had never been named.

It transmitted that it had crushed cattle before, these ferals would be no different as it left the great automated shipyard, attended by Jotuns, Devestators, and all manner of attending ships. It was heavily armored, had additional superstructure added to make it almost 80% the size of the older ones.

The ones who had rescued it gave it the coordinates of a system that the ferals had recently taken over and had begun to fortify, assuring the newly repaired Goliath that it was illogical that the system, a cattle system originally inhabited by a barely sentient feral intelligence, would have been too heavily reinforced or fortified, as it would be a waste of resources that the feral intelligence known as TERCONFEDMIL primary used for combat.

The repaired Goliath assured its brothers that it would destroy these ferals, wipe out the cattle, and destroy the new species. It transmitted its cold desire that it would burn away the atmosphere, boil away the oceans, reduce the crust to liquid rock that it would then glass.

It would not even leave behind microbes or virus.

The others, including the dozens who had arrived to provide combat data, all assured the newly repaired Goliath that it and it alone would be allowed to assault the system. That they would only send a few Imps to hide in the Oort Cloud and view the newly repaired Goliath's campaign to prove that it deserved the resources that had been spent on it, that it had deserved the rescue.

The Goliath jumped to Hellspace, its attendants following. It did not feel eagerness, it was coldly logical, but it did computer a 99.99881% chance of victory. It would be easily computed, a battleplan that would destroy 10% of the cattle's ships and force them to panic and flee.

Then the system and its resources would be the Goliaths.

Its brothers had promised this.

When it stopped, it was a few light-weeks from the system. It gathered cartography data, noted that there were many ships, but they were even small compared to a Jotun, chose its entry point, and entered Hellspace.

It exited Hellspace with its scream, cranked up as far as possible to stun the brains of the cattle.

THERE IS ONLY ENOUGH FOR ONE

howled across the system.

NOT ONE STEP BACK! was roared back with a thundering crashing song that reverberated from every surface, tore through speakers, and vibrated shielding.

The Goliath and its attendants, twice as many as a Goliath of its design normally carried, swept into the system.

The 8th Guard (Old Metal) swept out to engage the Goliath.

The Jotuns sped for the planets with orders to land and break the defenses, destroy any military force, and purge the cattle from existence. Devestators thundered toward orbital platforms, shipyards, refining, extraction, and manufacturing yards.

Out in the Oort Cloud, Goggle Imps from hundreds of Goliaths sat and silently watched.

C+ Cannons hammered the Goliath and its attendants. Hypervelocity cannons opened up, blowing massive craters. Atomic Batteries opened fire, delivering neutron, fission, and fusion hammers to the hulls of any craft that was hit. Plasma shells as big as trees impacted shields, hypervelocity shots raked armor, and the massive main gun shells pounded the Precursor machines.

The ones that made landing found themselves locked into battle with war machines more than their equal. Self-propelled intelligent tanks the size of super-stadiums, warbots the size of skyscrapers that vomited beams of nuclear fury, smaller machines that attacked screaming rage and hatred.

The fleets hit, the 8th Guard attacking the Goliath's flanks, its rear, underneath and topside. Small attack craft pilots white-knuckled it in, sweeping across two thousand miles of armor, some dropping heavy duty charges that cratered the armor, others attacking batteries, shield generators, ship launchers. The Goliath's engines were attacked, smashed, and one by one went offline.

On the planets the Goliaths metal forces were smashed back, beaten back with a roar of hatred, slammed against and pushed back into the Jotuns, which found themselves boarded even as atmospheric craft pounded it.

The Goliath realized it had lost 20% of its forces, had taken 15% damage, and fired up the Helldrive, seeking to escape, rearm, reload, come back into the system at a different angle.

A circuit inside the Hellcore, where it shouldn't have been, detected the gravity well of a star and the energy usage of combat and carbonized critical parts deep in the Hellcore. That caused the same to occure in the jumpcore.

The Goliath was stuck. The massive manufacturing facility had made an error with the drives or the ferals knew how to disable them. The Goliath allocated all resources to the fight, attacking with a renewed fury.

The Goliath was outmatched. The 8th Fleet was victorious, sweeping every trace of Precursor machine from the system in less than two days.

The Imps vanished when the battle ended, slipping into jumpspace until they nearly 20 lightyears away before exiting into the emptiness between stellar bodies. There, they all compared and swapped data till the libraries were identical.

Then they jumped through Hellspace, home to their Goliath masters.

The Goliaths examined the data. Every bit and byte. Going over it all with a fine toothed comb. The Goggle-Imps had gotten enough details, had seeded the system with additional cameras, that in some cases they were able to read the names on the hulls of the massive tanks. Read the names of the ships. Examine the hulls.

The Goliaths watched the battle over and over, their Tactical Intelligence Sublobes eagerly devouring every scan, every image, every gleam of weapon fire and thunder of batteries. They watched how often the ships deployed pods, how many times they fired missiles, how many missiles, and how long before they fired a second volley. How long it took to reload the C+ Cannons. How many times those massive plasma cannons, capable to spearing through the narrow width of a Jotun, could fire before it overheated, how long it took to fire again, and any sign that might warn of it about to fire.

The Goliaths and the massive Strategic Intelligence Housings on the repair and manufacturing worlds went over every single frame, every single pixel, every single scrap of audio, every single decibel, every little transmission and every hiss of static.

They shared data, computations, and estimations. With one another, with the great manufacturing facilities, with their minions. They held nothing back.

The Goliath they had recovered and repaired had accomplished its mission.