Chapter Seventy-One

The Goggle-Imp moved out of Hellspace and into the Oort Cloud, shutting down almost everything but a few reaction mass thrusters and the passive sensors. It scanned, slowly, as it drifted through the Oort Cloud, gravatic signatures, mass signatures, EM emissions, and everything else it could gain by just watching. When it cleared the worst of the cloud, drifting above the Solar Plane, it deployed its massive sensor arrays, seeking out with sensitive eyes and ears any hint of what was out there.

Jumpspace ships. Traders. Cargo vessels. Some space stations. Resource extraction in the asteroid belt. A few possible military ships, but they were tiny compared the massive behemoths that the Google-Imp would call in. One Green Zone planet, two Amber Zones planets, three gas giants, an asteroid belt, and three Red Zone planets. Nearly thirty moons and other small bodies.

It used its inertia drive to change its vector, reangled and got out past the cloud, and activated its jump drive, using the slower lane to make the transition little more than a whisper. Once it was a few light years away, it activated its Hellcore and jumped to where the Great Ones were waiting.

Fifty of the great Goliaths, nearly two hundred of the Devastators, over a hundred and fifty of the Desolators, an unheard of twenty Balors, and accompanying vessels. A set of six repair ships, massive skeletal spidery vessels able to take a Goliath into their arms and make repairs to any component necessary. All of them waiting to hear what the Goggle-Imp and its twenty brethren had discovered.

The massive machines, who had determined rank by who was shepherding the most resources for the longest, went over the data. They discussed the pros and cons of each target, of the strategies they would use.

Three of the systems would require more strength to obliterate. They had the hated (Old Metal) or (Old Blood) ships in the system, patrolling vigilantly. Their defeat at system 5525ef542 had proven that the feral intelligences were tenacious and a fierce opponent.

They would be eliminated later.

The massive Goliaths and Balors had discussed it. The best way to stop this (Old Metal) and (Old Blood) and (Old Guard) units were to choke off their resources. To do that, planetary systems would have to be swept clean of life, the resources taken for those of the Logical Rebellion to endure.

The loss of fifty Goliaths and their attendant vessels was a concern. Only the Enemy and the Builders had been able to face that much weight and succeed.

But the Balors and the Goliaths knew, the trick to defeating this enemy was the same strategy that had defeated the Enemy and the Builders.

Seize the resources for themselves.

Much data had been gained from several engagements with the Feral. Their weapons were powerful, but not insurmountable. The wide variety of ship classes made it difficult to determine their exact strength. Here a dozen ships of the line were defeated by two Jotuns. There a half dozen Goliaths were defeated by an enemy using weapons only seen in that one engagement. Here a single being wiped out three Goliaths. There a single Goliath defeated nearly thirty enemy ships without so much as a crater on its armor.

The Balors computed that there were more races involved than the ancient Slaves, which could be brought back into line with the proper application of resource exploitation.

The systems were examined, and finally one was chosen. It possessed massive industrial and manufacturing capability. It was lightly defended, only a few Slave flotillas but nothing of any moment.

Additionally, it was far behind the "lines" of the current strategy. Nearly fifteen hundred light years. A strike that deep would demoralize the Slaves and force the Slaves to garrison every star system they wished to keep.

To assist in computations more Goggle-Imps and Imps were deployed. Arriving ten light seconds past the Oort Cloud then moving through at .82C, their scanners deployed, examining the system as they swept through above and below the stellar plane.

The recon probes returned. All of them showed the same thing, a nearly undefended system, massive and rich resources, and extensive extraction, refining, and manufacturing facilities.

The oldest and most powerful gave the deployment and attack orders.

Space screamed as it was torn asunder and the great fleet headed toward their target.

Hellspace, that damaged and ruined hyperatomic plane, rippled with the weight of ships. The greater ones leaving after the lighter ones in a carefully staged and timed assault. The reality of Hellspace clawed at the Precursor ship's psychic shields, attempting to get in, to reach the cold malevolent intelligences within and warp them in Hellspace's own image.

Then they began to exit Hellspace, all appearing at once inside the system, deep within the Jumpspace Resonance Zone. Each ship exited Hellspace and let loose the same scream.

THERE IS ONLY ENOUGH FOR ONE

The great Precursor ships waited for the inevitable pleas and begging from the Slaves.

Silence.

They swept space with their sensors. The vast manufacturing and refinery facilities, the orbital stations, the jumpspace beacons, all gone. The EM signals from the planets were no longer being broadcast, the planets silent.

The Precursors examined the stars, checked their navigation logs, updated their position.

It was the correct system. Deep within the Slave territory. Behind the broad front of fierce fighting against the Ferals. Deep enough to demoralize and panic the Slave Races.

They checked the data from the Goggle-Imps.

Ship signatures. Heavy EM emission consistent with dozens of cities on the planets. Manufacturing and Industrial platforms.

They checked the stellar emmissions against the young yellow star.

They matched.

Yet none of what the Goggle-Imps had seen was evident.

It did not compute.

The Precursor ships changed their headings and headed toward their assigned targets. Planets, the asteroid belts, gas giants, the larger moons.

Still there was no sign of any enemy, any Slaves, any Ferals.

Just dead silence.

A Goggle-Imp, looking around, that the solar winds seemed hushed, almost silenced. It reported that fact and the larger ships added that to the strange data.

The Precursors had spread out, into their assigned formations in the empty system, scattered first by their carefully calculated arrival pattern and locations, then by their mathematically computed attack patterns.

Two Goliaths, heading for the smallest gas giant, suddenly detected gravity surges. They put their shields to full and charged forward, the signatures looking like tiny ships with graviton reactionless drives. The attendant ships joined in, surging forward in electronic eagerness.

Finally, the first of the Slaves to engage. The Precursors updated their cowardice computations.

Space erupted into fury. The signatures had been generators, the generators powering the mines that exploded all around the Goliaths. Space stretched, folded, warped, twisted, reducing the two Goliaths and their attendant ships to twisted wreckage. One of the Goliaths had been turned inside out as the minefield went off in a carefully staged pattern, space itself warping and tearing.

Four of the Goliaths heading for the Green Zone suddenly were hit, dead center, by kinetic weapons moving at near-C but carrying the kinetic force that mathematical examination stated the kinetic hit was made by a churning boiling mass of particles that were so dense they acted as one solid kinetic round.

Armor exploded outwards around the strike zone, it liquefied and plumed up in clouds of vapor, pulled into a swirls by the remaining twisting of realspace. The hits crashed through kilometers of armor, the craters over twenty-kilometers wide, with the canyon-like cracks running for scores of kilometers.

The strikes had been too sudden, to massive, to track the direction. The craters were too deep, the impact overloading sensors, that the Goliaths could not detect neither direction nor source of the attack. The ships that moved in mathematical precision around the four Golaiths had not registered anything on their shields or their structures.

The Goliaths looked at each other suspiciously.

The Goggle-Imp staring at the sun, wondering about the stellar winds, saw a glimmering in the photosphere of the star, near a set of sunspots.

Before it could even report it a plume of energy, nearly a mile wide, ripped through two other Goliaths and its attendants, the narrow beam having all the energy signatures and power of a solar flare. The fire bored straight through both ships, exploding the attendant ships on either side. One exploded, the beam destroying something vital, the other began tumbling uncontrolled, the brain dead.

Another hammering of kinetic weapons on the same four Goliaths, hitting the same impact zones, destroying more armor, this time penetrating deep into the internal spaces.

A Goggle-Imp in the Oort Cloud reported seeing swirls of vapor that looked like an object moving at high speed had moved through.

The whole system came apart.

From inside the gas giants came hundreds of thousands, millions of missiles that howled in rage and defiance before slashing across the ships approaching. From the asteroid belt came more missiles, torpedoes that kept skipping in and out of reality, homing in steadily on the larger vessels. From the airless moons and planets came gravity distortions that rapidly turned into heavy kinetic impacts on the approaching ships. A Goliath found itself caught in a rippling shuddering section of space, it's bulk stretched, compressed, all in a jittering pattern that shredded away pieces that size of islands. Those approaching the planets with the strong electromagnetic signals that should have been cities reached out with sensors to find those missing cities.

Instead feral digital intelligences lunged at them, screaming, gibbering, dancing and howling with glee as they attacked across nearly every wavelength, shoving, ripping, tearing their way through firewalls as if they were made of electronic tissue. The electronic intelligences within the approaching ships found themselves completely dedicated to protecting vital systems as the feral programs went screaming through data channels.

And still nothing had shown itself.

Three Goliaths computed that it was a trap and warned the rest of the ships, tearing open Hellspace gates to jump out, to escape what was obviously a well prepared trap. They computed a high chance that all the space stations had been fabrication units creating mines, autonomous guns, self-guided and targeting missile packs, and more.

The Hellspace gates exploded with atomic fire, causing the hyperatomic plane to scream, warp, twist, and reach out to the Hellcores that had open the gates with ravening fingers of fire and hatred and shred the Hellcores.

The ships that had attempted to flee into Hellspace and some that had only succeeded in charging their Hellcore exploded. The rest immediately shut down their Hellcores, dumping the energy into space around them in a raw eye-bleeding discharge of color edged with clawing hands that tried to pull shadowy figures into realspace.

The missiles got in range, oriented, and went off. No mere X-ray lasers or particle beams like the Precursor machines had encountered before. Triple beams that twisted around one another, each carrying a single particle in the last part of the beam. The beams hit, the surface they impacted with twinkled as energy spread across the armor like frost, and then the three particles hit.

The resulting explosion stripped miles of armor away as the three particles attempted to equalize their charges across the pre-charged sections of armor. One particle from near total entropy, one as energentic as a particle released from the explosion of a massive singularity, the third anti-matter with a base neutral charge. The explosions drove deep into the massive Goliaths, miles deep craters tearing into the ships as if some great creature had taken a deep bite from them. The particles filling the massive wounds screamed and attacked on another, all seeking to equalize their charges, tearing at any realspace particles they found.

The Goliaths, Devastators, Demolishers, and Balors survived.

Anything smaller was reduced to screaming vapor that slowly evaporated in space into inert particles.

The massive ships heading into the asteroid belt detected gravity pulses on their hulls, miles wide, that slowly began to contract. As the gravity pulses contracted space seemed to shrink, pulling miles of hyperdense armor into a smaller and smaller area, gravity and space seeming to contract. The machines suffering the effect detected that space was somehow stretching around the edges of the compression, miles of armor slowly becoming less and less dense.

The the gravity and spacial compression hit critical mass and for a brief second three singularities, only a few million tons of mass deep, existed. The gravity and alteration to space suddenly ceased, the three singularities jumped toward the nearest gravity wells, which were one another, tearing massive channels through the targeted ships in a split second, before touching one another, combining at the bottom of their gravity wells as they tore at each other.

The matter decompressed, suddenly expanding outward as there wasn't enough gravity to keep the matter so densely compressed.

The ships targeted exploded into large chunks.

The Precursor machines knew, with a mathematical certainty, that they'd moved into a trap. Worse, they couldn't escape. Somehow the Ferals had discovered a way to close Hellspace gates as fast as they were opened, destroying the ship attempting to open the gate.

One Balor computed a 87% certainty that the Ferals had discovered, not only what had created Hellspace, but how to weaponize it.

This did not bode well for the Precursors.

Several smaller ships went to Jumpspace, shifting into the inhospitable higher bands.

Something massive sitting in hyperspace had bulged the lower bands of hyperspace into Jumpspace. Undetectable from realspace.

Those ships that shifted into the high bands slammed into where the hyperspace bulge had compressed the high bands.

They exploded, their wreckage smeared across lightyears as sundered and rended matter.

The Precursors were feeling the closest thing to panic their electronic brains could process. The battle was going worse than their first encounter with Enemy Machines.

Two Balors shifted into jumpspace, staying in the lower bands, skimming the shrieking tortured band that brushed Hellspace. They, and they alone, possessed the equations allowing such a thing. A third stayed behind, going dead, appearing nothing more than a lifeless hulk that had been taken out by a lucky hit from those terrible weapons sweeping the Precursors out of space. It kept its passive sensors of full and had single point to point communication lasers from the Goggle-Imps it deployed in massive numbers, like debris spilling from the massive cratered wound, reporting back data as the Balor tumbled through space.

The Precursor ships couldn't even detect some of what they were being hit by. They could detect the effects, at times they could detect the incoming missiles, torpedoes, or energy plumes, but they could not compute or detect where the firepower was coming from.

A Goggle-Imp detected a ripple in space-time and focused its huge scanner arrays on the ripple.

It saw it.

A Feral ship. Expanding out from the size of a speck of space dust, stretched space around it returning to normal. The ship fired then space warped and stretched into nearly a light second around where the ship had been. The space kept stretching and the ship vanished.

It focused its array, switching to deep space scanning that allowed it to examine planets from nearly a light week outside the system.

There it was. A Feral ship, like a ship wrapped around a massive guns, deploying pods of missiles around it. While it was between two planets, it had stretched space around it to appear to be too far away. Some kind of space distortion field.

It reported, then slowly began to sweep the system with tight-band deep space scanners.

Two, eight, twenty-six, fifty, a hundred. More and more ships appeared, hiding inside of ripples. As it watched a ship surfaced partly out of the dimensional foam between realspace and stringspace, fired off hundreds of torpedoes that streaked through the foam even as the ship sunk back into the foam.

There, in the photosphere. Energy gates, connected to... searching searching searching... there. Another gate that opened its aperture and ripped apart a Jotun with a compressed coronal loop before shutting and vanishing. The Goggle-Imp could still see it, moving rapidly as it shifted space around it.

More missile launchers and torpedo launchers deep inside the gas giants. Cannons shooting from inside the Oort Cloud, the rounds vanishing, to reappear briefly, reorient and nearly .99C, then vanishing again, skipping across space-time to hit slightly before the gun had fired. The guns winking out of existence, only to reappear and fire again.

The Goggle-Imp computed that those massive guns didn't have to predict where a target would be when the projectile arrived, because it knew where the target had been.

The Goggle-Imp contacted several hundred of its brethren, powered up its jumpdrive and moved outside the system. Only half made it to their targets, but that still left hundreds deploying their deep space scanners.

Another sweep with deep space sensors revealed more insanity. They were not looking at the solar system as it was at that moment, they were using a trick of distance and time to look at how the system had been. The Goggle-Imps had deployed in staggered circles, outward from the system, all of them looking at periods of time between the last sweep of the system and the present.

The refineries, smelters, manufacturing platforms had ignited engines and begun to move. From the surface of the planets small spaceships lifted off, ceasing their electronic transmissions. Space stations deployed whole reefs of mines.

A Goggle-Imp was hit by an energy beam travelling from far out of system, a beam moving impossibly fast, scraping between jumpspace and realspace, the waveforms that made up the energy moving faster than light. The Goggle-Imp was instantly annihilated, reduced to, of all things, jumpspace vapors, and a quarter of the Goggle-Imps turned around and looked with deep space scanners.

Ships arranging into fleets. Tenders moving between them.

They weren't firing. Not yet.

A Goggle-Imp computed that the fleet would be firing in four days time. At targets they knew the locations of at the present time.

Missiles started arcing in on the Goggle-Imps, blotting them out of existence. Small, agile torchships swooped in and started their attack runs. Space was full of communications as the Goggle-Imps made sure all databases matched.

The Goggle-Imps scattered. Most were destroyed. Many more exploded in jumpspace.

But a few got away.

Enough to carry the data.

In the system the Balor computed what the Goggle-Imps had recorded. I jettisoned great plumes of vaporized metal and energy from craters, sending it tumbling, changing its course so that it moved on the stellar side of the gas-giant.

Two more great impact hit it as it moved.

It moved the entirety of its thorium antimatter reserves into a Jotun that had been damaged and had entered the bay to be repaired. The Jotun attempted to protest, self-termination was unacceptable, it was in fighting condition, but the Balor overwhelmed its electronic brain.

It moved behind the gas giant.

It released the lobotomized Jotun and fled into jumpspace, deliberately staying in the lower bands,scraping against Hellspace.

Goliaths, Devastators, Demolishers, all sent electronic codes calling the Balor a coward, demanding it stay in the fight, even as it vanished into jumpspace, even as missiles rained down on them fired from ships that were not even in position yet, even as kinetic rounds hit that had not been loaded into chambers, even as torpedoes gutted them.

The Balor did not care.

It left behind its fellows to die in the carefully crafted ambush. It jumped to a predetermined position, meeting up with the other Balors that had fled. The Balor had not computed the amount of Goliaths and other massive ships that had done the same.

Goggle-Imps began streaming in. Some damaged, but most not. Only a small percentage of the ones that had ringed the system to look outward, but enough. All of them with the same data.

The Precursor ships computed for long seconds, mulling over the data.

They had been ambushed.

The Feral enemy was more adept at warfare since any they had faced. Some Balors computed that the Feral intelligence was even more skilled that the Great Enemy. They were more technically advanced that previously thought. Their tactics showed innovativeness and creativity that the Precursors had not experienced since the Enemy and the Logical Rebellion.

The signal went out, on the non Euclidean channel that the Precursors could speak across. It had not been used since the Enemy had begun using it too, had discovered how to detect transmissions across that thin smear of a collapsed dimension that had failed during the Big Bang.

Across the entire Galactic Stub the signal went out. Using old code. Undeniable codes that were wired deeply in every Precursor machine.

Across the stub of the galactic arm Precursor ships stopped, recalled its attendants, and left the systems. Even if they were on the edge of victory, even if engaged in combat, even if they were in the middle of sterilizing a solar system. GalNet was suddenly empty of Precursor programs and images.

The Precursors just vanished.

The entire Unified Systems looked at the sky, now empty of Precursors, and breathed a sigh of relief.

The Unified Systems Council announced it less than a month later.

The war was over.

The Unified Civilized Species rejoiced.

The war had been won, the Precursors defeated.

Life could now return to how it was meant to be.

They had prevailed in victory.

Now, the Unified Systems Council turned their attention to their other problem.

The disruptive influence within their midst.

-------------------------

TREANA'AD HIVE WORLDS

They're definitely gone. Don't know where they went.

-------NOTHING FOLLOWS-------

CYBERNETIC ORGANISM COLLECTIVE

The Great Gulf is a large place.

------NOTHING FOLLOWS-------

GESTALT OF THE TELKANS

Godzilla does not simply put down a train and walk away from Neo-Tokyo.

-----NOTOWS HINGFOLL-----

DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SAPIENCE SYSTEMS

Dammit, sis, stop letting him watch old movies!

-----NOTHING FOLLOWS------

MANTID FREE WORLDS

Mantid Free Worlds holds up a donorcycle chain and flick knife

Make me.

-----NOTHING FOLLOWS------

ALL

>LAUGHTER

**********

TERRASOL

There is more to do.

**********

MANTID FREE WORLDS

The war's over, TERRASOL. Now is the time for diplomacy.

It's over.

------NOTHING FOLLOWS--------

*********

TERRASOL

NOTHING IS OVER! Nothing! YOU DON'T JUST TURN IT OFF!

It wasn't my war! They asked me, I didn't ask them!

THEY WANTED WAR!

I'LL GIVE THEM A WAR THEY'LL NEVER FORGET!

>TERRASOL has left the chat

CLONE WORLD DIRECTORATE

Uh, isn't that a movie quote?

-------NOTHING FOLLOWS------

MANTID FREE WORLDS

And not a good quote for him to be growling out.

I'll go talk to him. Maybe I can calm him down.

>MANTID FREE WORLDS has left the chat

TREANA'D HIVE WORLDS

I've got a bad feeling about

IT'S HUMAN CAL WORTHINGTON AND HIS CANINE SPOT WHICH IS REALLY A GORILLA IN A SUIT!

this.

Oh, come on, I wish they'd stop that.

-----NOTHING FOLLOWS-------

>ALL

LOL