Chapter 337

The room was dimly lit and smokey, the lights turned down to bring out every detail in the holotank and to ease the eyes, the smoke from the three Treana'ad naval officers. Mana'aktoo felt that the atmosphere was very apt as he watched Kulamu'u conversing with the primates and insects.

He knew enough to understand some of the words, to grasp the concepts, but he could see the difference between his knowledge and how the Sword Hoof Navy and the Space Force officers applied their knowledge.

There were eight holotanks surrounding the big one, all with officers clustered around them. What surprised Mana'aktoo is that there were Army, wet Navy, Marine, and Aerospace officers at each holotank, watching urgently.

Admiral Thickett was standing next to Kulamu'u, staring at the tank.

"These ones operate a lot differently. Before, when fighting the clankers, their targeting was all over the place, their fire inaccurate, and they depended on the weight of their guns and the thickness of their salvos," she was saying.

Mana'aktoo was glad he wasn't part of the conversation, the pause while she took a breathe and consolidated her thoughts would have been just long enough for him to ask something that would probably be blindingly obvious.

My dear Admiral, are the Precursor Autonomous War Machines some kind of robotic entity? he thought to himself in his own mind, visualized the astounded looks his question would bring forth.

"Now, they go for interwoven tactical command, their fire control is better by about 80%, and they manuever as a whole, not rushing in," she said. She tapped an icon, showing one of the Goliath Class Harvesters. "The armor's thicker. Before, they had a kilometer to two kilometers of armor. Now they have literal miles of armor thickness. Before, you could hit them with a C+ cannon and start pounding their internals as soon as their screens failed, now, they just take interior armor damage."

A green mantid stared and opened a cube in the holotank. He twiddled as everyone watched, silently.

Mana'aktoo had grown to appreciate the little green mantids.

Everyone nodded. "Air gap with a battle-screen. Not much use for us, since you'd need fifty meters of gap or so, but when your armor is measured in the miles because you're a few hundred miles thick, that's nothing," Kulamu'u nodded. "A couple of layers of that, they could hold off your cannon rounds."

"Normally, we'd hit them with missiles, drop the shields, pound them into junk. The battle's a bit different now," Thickett said. She tapped another box. "Their point defense is up, a lot thicker than it used to be. My gunnery officer estimated the newer ones have between sixty and eighty times the amount of point defense they used to. Counter missiles have longer legs and faster sprint times."

"I told Space Command that letting them retreat for a year would bite us in the ass," Admiral Schmidt growled. He tapped a few icons. "Look at that, they've discarded their 'bare minimum resources' approach and shifted to 'get thar furstest wit da mostest' attitudes."

"Another thing to point out, is that these are obviously new designs," Thickett brought up two fairly large craft. "The Djinn have been reworked. Same with the Jotun. The Charmander Class is gone now, but it looks like they replaced it with something we're calling the Avalanche Class, which means they swapped out heavy plasma cannons for massive missile volleys."

Mana'aktoo just filed the data away, standing there quietly.

"These ones, the Type-III, if they use late generation Type-II tactics, they come directly at the planet. They don't bother to try to seize complete control of the orbitals. They learned in the Telkan System that plan doesn't work," a Treana'ad said, exhaling smoke around his feet. "They break up into three distinct groups. Group One will work at holding open the space lanes and pulling forces from the planets. Group Two will lag behind slightly, letting Group Three suck up the damage as they make for planet-fall. Group Two will use orbital strikes and establish sections of orbital control."

"But we didn't have the Dinochrome Brigade seeded as heavy as we do here," another Treana'ad was saying at a different holotank.

"...on Telkan we learned that once a Djinn or Jotun is crippled, its entire robotic force goes for strategic mineral and manufacturing reserves in hopes of bringing the main machine back," a Rigellian was saying.

Mana'aktoo listened to it all, absorbing it, and learning how to apply the data he was hearing to what he needed to do.

Right now, he didn't need to do anything.

But he would.

If the Forgotten Ones were merciful.

"We got Googly Eyes in the Cloud!" came the sudden shout. "Two thousand, five thousand, many many point sources!"

DAWN OF THE FINAL DAY

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The Crushing Weight of Inevitability listened closely to the data code whispers coming from only eight light years away. The bulk of the fleet around him was listening with him, but only he could give the command.

The newer ones were all suffering the electronic and computerized equivalent of urgency and excitement. The system was rich in resources and would make an excellent operations base to push further into the territory of the Enemy.

Crusher threaded the data again. Something about it bothered him.

It took four more look throughs to realize what it was.

The feral fleet had jumped into that system, but there was no hint of it.

Which meant they were hiding.

The rest of the armada insisted it was because the ferals were scared of the might of the armada.

Crusher conferred with the other remaining Ancient Ones.

The ferals were afraid of nothing. They fought to the last man.

If they were hiding, it was to conduct an ambush.

But an ambush only works if the ones being ambushed hesitate, the new machines insisted, flexing their more advanced strategic intelligence systems.

On quiet back channels, the Ancient Ones conferred.

The young ones needed blooded, needed to learn beyond simulations.

The only way to believe just how fierce the ferals were was to face them.

It was decided. If the Young Ones were so confident of their victory, they could rush ahead but...

The Ancient Ones didn't even get to finish what they were saying before the Young Ones were jumping into Hellspace.

"At least their mass and resources can be claimed after the battle is won," Gatherer of Much for One transmitted. Gatherer was ancient, but young by the standards of the Ancient One, built during the Logical Rebellion.

"If the ferals don't figure out how make it into poison debris," Crusher added.

"Should we go and help?" Hoarder of All asked. She had been asleep in the middle of an asteroid belt, having been there so long that she resembled a planetiod made up of gathered asteroids rather than a war machine that had cracked planets open to feast upon them.

"In time. Let them learn. This is only the first battle," Crusher stated, giving the equivalent of a shrug.

"What if they lose?" Bringer of the Herd's Might asked. He had been awoken only a few months ago, roused from a deep dreamless sleep at the bottom of an ammonia ocean.

"One battle is not the war," Crusher said. "We have the resources to pursue this war to the end."

The others signaled confirmation as the reports from the Google-Imps picked up.

All of the Ancient Ones felt the electronic version of grim satisfaction as the reports came back.

Crusher had been right.

It was an ambush.

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Wu'undurmo'o was the Sixth Most High of System Naval Defense. During the Executor Uprising thirty years prior he had commanded a Sword Hoof dreadnought, pinning the Executor Fleet against the supermassive gas giant "Tulgan's Eye" and hammering it into junk until they had surrendered. While he had been offered his old command, when the Most High Mana'aktoo asked him if he wanted to join the Terran command staff of one of the smaller task forces, he had jumped at the chance.

He had only had sixty hours of training to familiarize himself with how the Terrans operated, had chewed a lot of stimcud and learned until he got headaches, but to him it was all worth it.

If nothing else, this vacuum suit was worth all the work, he thought to himself as he leaned back in the modified crash cradle. The vac-suit was comfortable, armored, with a search and rescue beacon, maneuvering thrusters, and even had a nifty holographic sash to display his rank and awards.

A Terran green mantid had taken his measurements, worked for about a half hour while Wu'undurmo'o got a medical check, and then presented the Lanaktallan with it.

It fit perfectly.

Now he was watching the holotank in the middle of the Neegley's Hope, a Terran heavy battlecruiser.

The Precursors were jumping into the system by the dozens, the score, the hundreds. The Hellspace gates were opening across a space nearly a light minute across.

He sensed anxiety, but overlaying that was anticipation. The Terran's eyes slowly went from amber to a dull red and he could sense their tempered excitement.

"According to Admiral Thickett's data, they'll jump again once they get a good look," Commodore Eidelson said.

"Task Force Glory is firing," another Naval officer said.

Wu'undurmo'o had to admit, the C+ cannons made things slightly weird. The shells were already impacting, despite the fact they had just been fired from four light hours away.

It was obvious to the Lanaktallan naval officer that learning how to run gunnery control on such a weapon would require years of training, computer assistance, and an entire staff. The idea that a kinetic weapon was immediate impact instead of minutes or hours was just strange.

Wu'undurmo'o noted that the guns were having a heavier impact on the Precursors than the data he'd seen from the other task force.

"Warbois deployed," a Treana'ad said. Wu'undurmo'o knew that that simple statement meant that the highly effective and almost amazingly aggressive electronic warfare attack programs were being deployed through transmission, missiles, and even flashing lights.

"Fishyfish away," a Rigellian said, referring to automated drone swarms. Wu'undurmo'o had to admit, he didn't see the use in deploying small shoals of VI run craft, but the Terrans seemed to like them.

"Enemy are Type-III only. No sighting of other types. Repeat, no sighting of other types," a large reptillian that Wu'undurmo'o had learned was a Hhrundarak said, his deep bass voice perfectly calm.

"Hellcore charging detected. Looks like they're about to redeploy," Commodore Eidelson said.

"Alert command. Order all ships, rig for silent running," Captain Leafkick ordered.

"Aye aye, sir, rigging for silent running," another officer said.

The bridge went hushed and Wu'undurmo'o nodded.

The discipline appealed to him.

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Space warped and twisted, screamed and tore, revealing orbs made up completely of fire that burned despite the vacuum. Black, shadowy hands reached out in some cases, in other cases talons were thrust out of the fire, and in the flame twisting writhing figures could be seen. Each orb bulged on a side and the massive hull of a space craft the size of a small continent and hundreds of miles thick pushed their way out of the dimensional rip.

The two thousand Type-III Harvester Class Precursor Autonomous War Machines jumped into the system in one large group spread out over nearly a light minute. Their sensors were still jangled and confused and it took a minute for them to clear the Hellspace energies.

The massive C+ shells, fired when the bulge in the Hellspace Gate was seen, started impacting before some of them were all the way out of the rift.

Most of the recipients of the massive shells, that exited hyperspace as more of a wave-form of churning half-phased particles then the massive warsteel jacketed shells they had been when they were fire, shuddered as the massive shells impacted on the first layer of internal protective screens.

Three broke up not even outside their Hellspace rift. Two dozen others twisted and screamed as the shells pounded deep.

THERE IS ONLY ENOUGH FOR ONE! rang out across the system.

The leaders, massive in size, with more processing power than the others, snarled at the ones that screamed.

THEN DIE ALONE! came the return scream that blew out psychic processing arrays across nearly three hundred ships.

The rest shuddered under the impact of the return scream. They'd been brought online with the taste of the return scream that the others had suffered under before, but this was different.

Thicker. Deeper.

Angrier.

The Type-III's realized too late what the Ancient Ones had tried to tell them. There was no way to compute where the shells had been fired from, since scanner returns would take long minutes to answer, maybe even hours. They didn't even know where the ships were that had fired the rounds.

REDEPLOY the order came across.

The Harvesters, still under assault, began to charge their Hellcores.

More C+ cannon impacts, hitting the ones that hadn't broken up. Shields that had just spun up shattered, requiring more screen projectors to be rotated up before a followup salvo could do critical damage.

This time missiles joined the fun, and the Harvesters found themselves desperately trying to hold off shoals of missiles that came streaking in out of the darkness at nearly lightspeed. Their intercept speed was too fast, they split up into too many, the jamming was too strong to stop them all.

Nearly 80% got through.

60% wasted themselves on the shields before the shields failed.

The rest of them, hundreds of them, hammered the armor of the Precursor vessels. The missile launch system activated the magnetic acceleration system and turned the body of the launcher into a nCv slug that hit with enough force it drove the crater nearly eight miles deep, a plume of vaporized metal streaming up nearly twenty miles and causing the battlescreen to fail even as a replacement was brought online.

The Type-III's gnashed their electronic teeth, ordering one another, through the order of battle, to redeploy. To force the ferals to defend the planets. They brought up their tactical net, feeling slightly smug that none of the Ancient Ones were there to whine in obsolete code about the danger.

They made the jump further in-system.

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

For only a handful of seconds the Hellspace insertion gate and the excursion gates were both visible at the same time, the Harvesters visible at both locations as they made their way into the gates.

The Autonomous War Machines had gotten cocky. Had decided they were the only ones who could come up with new war material, new strategies, new weapons.

While, to be fair, it was true that it had taken the Precursor Races decades, even centuries, to develop spinoff technology of technology they already possessed, they should have realized that the feral intelligence of Terran Descent Humanity adapted too quickly to take too long to develop new weapons.

The C+ rounds hit the Harvesters coming and going.

The missiles pounded into armor suddenly exposed as the battlescreens went down due to the Hellspace transition.

The Harvesters weren't worried. Their armor was nearly a hundred miles thick.

For a split second, the battle tactical network was being broadcast from two points by each Harvester with the exact same time/date stamping.

Slavering warbois licked their chops at the sight.

They pulled on their sheepskins, covering themselves in the same code as the enemy was transmitting, climbing inside messages that were being transmitted from two different points, not counting inside Hellspace.

They trotted out into the digital battlefield, wrapped in sheep's coding.

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They still had over two thousand.

Two thousand and five was still mathematically more than two thousand.

The ferals had pounded nearly two hundred of them into junk before they could even make it further in-system.

For a moment, the system was still, almost as if it was holding its breath.

Beyond the system, listening to the whispers of the Goggle-Imps, the Ancient Ones tensed, electronic anxiety coursing through their Strategic Intelligence Array Housing.

They had each been right there. In the perfect moment of silent stillness.

They knew what was coming.

The Young Ones, in the system, rejoiced. The enemy fire had stopped. The guns had gone silent.

They had never been there before, in that moment.

The moment ended.

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C+ cannons fired, plasma wave phased motion guns hammered, missiles screamed, particle beams howled, as everything seemed to shoot at the Harvesters at once. Even the ones that held back further, planning on engaging space navy vessels found themselves getting hammered on from all directions. The ones intending on taking the high orbitals found themselves under attack while they were still two light seconds from the planets.

The plan, the new method, was to wait to deploy the smaller units until combat was engaged, to shield the smaller units inside the bulk of the massive Harvesters.

Three Harvesters opened their bay doors and ordered the smaller ones out.

The Jutons took one look at the hellfire outside and refused.

Two Djinn started throwing fake error codes, complaining of drive failures.

The Harvester thinking arrays blinked and ordered them out again, opening additional data channels to force the others to obey their command.

The wolves pounced, pouring through the suddenly open gate.

One Djinn, older than the Harvester it was inside of, heard the electronic baying of the wolves, heard the bloody tooth digital snarls, heard the raving laughing gibbering of Terran warbois.

He got the fuck out.

The Harvester was too busy fighting with feral electronic code that ripped at every computer system in the Harvester's body when it felt the Djinn fire up its Hellcore. The Djinn refused all attempts at communication, locking down its electronic systems.

Before the Harvester could complain too much, the Djinn opened up a Hellgate, inside the body of the Goliath. It wasn't the Djinn's problem, as it leapt through the fiery portal that suddenly manifested, pulling everything for over a mile around it into its thirty mile maw.

SO LONG, SUCKER! the Djinn thought, not daring to broadcast.

The baying of electronic wolves receded as it jumped back to the original staging point.

The Ancient Ones could hear the echoes of the wolves howling on the Djinn's hull and gave electronic nods of sagely agreement.

They didn't even chastise the Djinn for using a feral expression.

Fuck that.