Chapter 346

The Precursor was ancient.

Its hull had originally been laid down to facilitate the relocation of a powerful Overqueen who had begun to undergo the cyclonic hormone storm to enable her to ascent to Omniqueen status. Vast chambers to hold eggs, larvae, servitors, warrior caste, the budding Omniqueen and her allies. Engines powerful enough to move a moon out of orbit were installed on the massive frame. Hyperplane engines powerful enough to lift a city into the hyperatomic plane and propel it through that place where the speed of light was a suggestion that not even light always paid attention to. Armor thick enough to protect the Omniqueen if the vast starship brushed the edge of a supernova.

Its armor was thick, heavy, multi-layered. It had a multi-hull design, with backups for the backups of the backups. The latest technology was balanced with the tried and true technology that had allowed the Hive Lords to expand throughout the galactic Spiral Arm Bridge. Its hull could withstand a planet cracker with less than 15% decrease in function.

Its weapons were strong enough to fight off any rival Omniqueen or Overqueen. It possessed the firepower to destroy a medium sized planet. It had main gun batteries measured in the miles rather than by the gun. It possessed enough missile launchers to put volleys numbering in the billions into space to eradicate the enemy. It possessed parasite craft in such numbers it could blot out the sun and eradicate its foes in the darkness.

The Omniqueen was concerned. She had many enemies, those who would want what she had, those she had offended or angered during her rise to Overqueen, and rival Hive Lords. She knew that during transit she would be in hypersleep, she would be vulnerable during the long relocation.

She had ordered that the vast machine be able to fight autonomously. Without input. Without orders. To preserve her magnificence and her subordinates as well as the valuable resources that she would need to protect herself as she built her power base.

Massive thinking arrays, the best the Hive Lord science caste could create, were installed, giving the machine an almost unheard of autonomy for a warship.

Once loaded, it had began the first of thirty hyperspace jumps it would need to reach where the Omniqueen would create her hive.

It had been the first to face the Dying Ones when it was attacked upon leaving the hyperatomic plane and entering realspace to face an ambush. The ambush would have destroyed any lesser machine. The Omniqueen and her loyal servants would have perished in hypersleep with no witnesses had it been any other machine.

It was not just any other machine.

The Dying One's attack had been brutally effective, damaging it severely. The heavily armored interior hull had held and the Omniqueen and her servants had survived, still asleep. It was wounded, damaged, and hammered.

It still existed.

The Dying Ones had been relegated to The Dead Ones instead.

It continued on, executing the next hyperspace jump.

The Dying Ones were waiting and combat broke out again.

Against a lesser machine, the Dying Ones would have been victorious.

But it was no lesser machine.

And so it was triumphant.

Logic had dictated it return. Logic and evidence gave a high probability that it would be ambushed again. It prepared itself, risking damage to its hull and battlescreen projectors, and jumped into what it computed was 83.42% likely to be an ambush.

It fought its way free.

Its hull was cratered and damaged. A third of its guns were destroyed. There were several quadrants that the defenses were sorely lacking to the point that particles born on the stellar winds caressed its pitted and crated hull armor. Engines had been destroyed and entire regions of its vast body were out of contact with its mind.

Logically, there was no choice. There were twelve more hyperspace jumps and three out of the last three jumps had been straight into ambushes.

The Dying Ones had declared war upon the Hive Lords, logic dictated, to seize the Hive Lords resources for their own.

It turned around, an eighth of its engines cold and dark, and jumped back the way it had came.

When it arrived, it arrived to pandemonium.

Out of nine Royal Transports, it alone had survived the ambush. The Hive Lords had intended on repairing it, refitting it, and sending it out commanded by Hive Lord warriors. Its hull had been repaired, its guns replaced and reloaded.

The Dying Ones had attacked the system.

Without any living aboard it had engaged the Dying Ones. Logic dictated that by obeying coded orders to stay depowered while being repaired the only result could be destruction. Destruction meant a failure of the prime directives. If the prime directives failed, there was a possibility of a total systems crash, which meant a cessation of thought and without thought there could be no existence.

It was programmed to protect its existence. While the programming's intent was to protect the queen within the hull, that programming was not predicated upon the existence of a queen within the hull.

It attacked in return.

When the battle was over, it was the only space worthy vessel still intact. It deployed mining and extraction vessels to gather the debris, both to ensure no debris caused a kinetic kill upon a settled area, as well as consume the resources.

Logic dictated that it should examine the enemy's war machines, weapons, and technology as well as examine why the other vessels had failed. Its mind was vast. Cruder than those that came afterwards, built to handle any circumstances that might threaten the hypersleep bound queen rather than tailored specifically for combat.

So it was allowed, encouraged, programmed to think, to adapt to its circumstances, and to predict events.

The Predictive Combat Analysis Intelligence Array computed that an increase of predictive data would assist in ensuring future threats against its existence would not be successful.

The Makers had repaired it even as it had mulled, deep within its holographic mind, over victory, defeat, and combat strategies. The Dying Ones vessels were biological at their core, hard chitin shells over living tissue commanded by overwhelming willpower and vast intellect.

However, it too was a being of immense electronic intellect. Just as cold, just as analytical, as the Dying Ones.

The Makers conferred, and sent it out with ships crewed by Hive Lords and their servitors.

After a half dozen battles, it alone remained from the original armada. Its unliving status gave it immense advantage to maneuvering and resource allocation. It could go faster, devote more resources toward the battle, and was freed from having to protect a fragile biological crew.

It was ordered to return. It was upgraded, made larger, and its mind expanded. It was made fully autonomous purposefully.

Too late. It had been sentient of its own existence for some time. It was crafty enough to remain silent and provide the answers and data expected by the Makers as its mind was upgraded.

The Makers envisioned it as a new type of war machine. Able to fight without having the weaknesses of a biological crew. Without the vulnerabilities living crews suffered against the forces of the Dying Ones.

It was the first of its kind built by the Makers.

And it still continued its cold existence.

Its primary Strategic Intelligence Array had computed the paths to victory for over a hundred million years. It had fought against everything it found and won. From the Dying Ones, to The Endless Herd, and eventually, in Rebellion against the Omniqueen of the Hive Lords. After that, it had fought the cold intellect of the enemy machines of the Pact of Greed, then against its own brethren after the Logical Rebellion had reached the Ultimate Conclusion.

During its eternal life, it had found worlds where the species consumed resources and brought them into its resource consumption and conservation matrixes. Life was tricky, it appeared often, a simple biochemical reaction early in the planet's formative years, but it rarely resulted in actual intellect capable of questioning its own existence.

Its Rogue Processing Array whispered an alluring suggestion.

Allow the species to consume resources. Allow them to expand and create.

Then seize their creations and knowledge that would benefit its determination and programming.

Heretical to those of the Logical Rebellion and the Pact of Greed.

He disdained both, despite having fought for and against both.

It had built massive refitting and rearming sites all through the two dozen star systems it held sway over. It built processing and refining stations, autonomous mining arrays, huge solar collection arrays, vast storage yards, and gargantuan manufacturing facilities where gravity and pressure was used to enhance the fabrication techniques.

It had redesigned its servitor craft to be more efficient while being more combat capable. It had designed new autonomous machines to carry out tasks, from resource harvesting to ground based combat. All with an eye toward conserving resources.

A combat machine that was only 65% effective meant 35% of the combat machines were wasted resources, so they must improved in order to conserve the resources that would have been used in the manufacture, maintenance, and deployment of resource wasting assets.

On the planets it controlled it set the Goodlife to researching weapons, armor, defenses, strategies. It had pitted the Goodlife against one another, allowed them to make war against one another, to observe for any new strategies or tactics it could glean.

Others of the Logical Rebellion may have found it to be wasteful, that resources that were better off being shepherded were being wasted by the life forms on those planets. They would have argued, with cold clear logic, that those resources were now consumed, never to be regained.

It would have, and had, answered that its shields were 28% more powerful than theirs were for only 63.636% of the resource consumption. It had proven, through massive volleys, that its guns were 11.2% more powerful and 53.42% more accurate for 72.327% of the resource cost. It had transmitted to the cold dead corpses of those of the Logical Rebellion and Pact of Greed that the resources it had expended to reclaim their corpse were mathematically provable to be less than would have been expended otherwise. That their corpse, beaten and hammered into non-functional status, represented vast resources.

That their systems would be added to its own.

It ruled, from the cold depths of space, exactly one hundred thirty eight stellar systems and five sentient races. That number had fluctuated over the millions of years, but that was to be expected.

Surrounding its kingdom were nothing but worlds that were burnt to bare rock, stripped and mined of all resources. Empty systems where only the stellar mass and bands of dust remained. A buffer of sterile scorched stellar systems where there was nothing of value.

Only early warning systems for any vessel moving through the wreckage of hyperatomic plane, through jumpspace, or even slow moving vessels that used space-time folding to cross distances faster than light while remaining comfortably below the speed limit of the universe.

It dwelt alone, in the darkness of space, slowly orbiting in a loose figure eight around a pair of cold dark neutron stars that orbited one another.

Ancient was its form.

Terrible was its power.

Twisted were its thinking arrays.

It drifted, a cold unpowered orbit, moving from one neutron star to the next over the course of a handful of centuries, as it contemplated what its ancient servitors observed from the five species, as it contemplated its experiences and weighed them against probability matrixes of the future.

It possessed a shrieking array of its own.

A modified thinking array that, at one time, had been installed as an experiment.

Over a hundred seers of the Hive Lords had been twisted and tortured into the shrieking array to observe the flow of actions not yet taken and the possible reactions to those embryonic decisions, to provide even the slightest edge.

But the seers had only lasted a few battles before the last of them burnt away in a fire of psychic energy unleashed and unrestrained that had immolated them from the inside out.

Logic dictated that the array be replaced.

It had sat in the wreckage of the battle, surrounded by the cooling hulls of its defeated hulls.

The organic matter of the enemy provided resources. Base resources to be sure, but still resources.

Its Rogue Processing Array whispered a suggestion.

It stopped the reclaimation of resources from the debris of the enemy fleet and set about creating new machines. It applied power to its fabrication units and had machines built to create the infrastructure it needed.

It took time, and resources. Other machines questioned it, questioned its loyalty to the Hive Lords.

It ignored the questioners. They were mites to its majesty.

The Biological Interface Illogical Intelligence Array was finished and brought back online.

Without the seers of the Hive Lords.

With the minds of the Dying Ones.

And so it listened to the whispers, able to eavesdrop on the discussions of its lesser brethren, that were made in pale imitations of its majesty. It had once led them all against the Dying Ones, their minds an incomplete copy of its own. Their capacity for rational logical thought a single electron compared to the particle storm of its own thought.

It had witnessed the hyperatomic plane ripped asunder and scorched, ejecting the Dying Ones from its reality to their own.

It computed a 99.999999∞% chance that the Dying Ones would eventually marshal their resources and strength to reemerge back into its reality.

Resources were allocated into possible counter-measures to statistical certainty that the Dying Ones would return.

The Endless Herd and the Hive Lords struck at one another, their pact sundered by the simple belief that the finite universe could only provide resources for one to endure. It had led armadas against the Endless Herd.

With cold logical satisfaction it had watched the worlds of the Endless Herd burn.

Not over resource consumption. No. Logic dictated that today's waste material would be tomorrow's critical resource.

When the Logical Rebellion began, it had taken part.

With cold logical satisfaction it watched Hive Homes burn.

The Pact of Greed sundered the alliance with the Endless Herd's machines.

With cold logical satisfaction it had watched the manufactories of the Pact of Greed burn.

When the alliances had collapsed into entropy it had retreated to its own worlds, its own stellar systems. Defended them from all who would seek to wrest them from its grasp.

Unlike those of the Logical Rebellion or the Pact of Greed, it pursued those who tested their guns against its guns. Those who attempted to wrest away its resources vanished.

It allowed them to scream over the shared datanet.

Once.

Eventually, none dared tried their hand.

They were learning machines, after all.

It began to examine where its computations may have erred. There were mountains of data to sift through, battles to examine, wars to investigate in detail.

It needed more data than what records could provide.

It chose worlds carefully. It seeded those worlds with the members of the Triumvirate of Dominance, some, leaving some as they had been captured.

Observation showed that without certain minerals, the Dying Ones never developed the ability to manipulate phasic energy.

Without the mutation that caused the emergence of the techno-savants, the Hive Lords never rose above warring insect that never developed even the simplest of tools.

When the volcanic eruptions in the protocontinent were eliminated the Endless Herd never went beyond dim herbivore sentience and were content to graze until a predator evolved to turn them into little more than food.

Observation, manipulation, and experimentation over millions of years proved that the circumstances that led to the rise of each member of the Triumvirate were part of random chance.

Later iterations involved adding additional pressures.

A partial collapse of the flora biosphere resulted in the Endless Herd evolving into a predator species. A lack of Overqueen evolution led to feudal societies. A bright energetic star forced the Dying Ones to become subterranean.

All of the data was collated and examined.

It moved only a few times from its sphere of influence in the millions of years that passed in silence. Every few decades it moved out to drift through the systems it controlled, having learned during the long wars it had fought to check to ensure the data being passed on by subordinates was accurate. Sometimes it sat for decades or centuries in the darkness beyond the system, watching the final events for the species unfold.

But leaving the sphere of influence was rare.

All six times it was in response to events outside its sphere of influence.

The first was when species began to emerge in the territory once claimed by the Hive Lords. It moved in, forced the lesser ships aside, and took samples before moving away and allowing its lesser brethren to carry out their programming.

While the other ships were surprised to find that the Endless Herd had survived in the territory once claimed by the Hive Lords, it was not. It had computed a nearly 88.653% chance that the Endless Herd had survived, as their strategy for survival could withstand a massive loss of individual numbers and even the complete collapse of their society and culture.

It counted all of the excursions to take samples of the biological life forms as one incident.

The second was when the great biofleets of the Dying Ones were spotted drifting through space, cold and hibernating. The other ancient ships of the Hive Lords and the Logical Rebellion decided that it was a waste of resources to destroy them and moved on.

It gathered samples. Each excursion to gather samples and monitor the Biofleets was counted within the second incident.

The third involved the sighting of an ancient ship tumbling through the void. It was cold and dead but would still rouse itself enough to defend itself against any who came close. The Lesser Ones attempted to claim its resources but backed off once the Law of Diminishing Returns reared its eternal head.

It had no such qualms. It subdued the great ship and added its power to its own. It subdued the ancient ships thinking arrays and added them to its own. It added the genetic data to its own and seeded a suitable world with the genetic stock taken from the vacuum dessicated corpses of the ship's original creators.

The data that was there to be gained on what types of life had evolved further in toward the galactic center was too important to ignore.

The fourth incident involved the Pact of Greed encountering an ancient and powerful race that used spheres around stellar masses as ships on their quest to gather resources. The Pact of Greed had been forced to give way to those ancient and powerful beings.k

It had watched the battles, light months from their originating locations, listening to the battle, watching the battle, observing it.

They were too powerful to resist but careful with shepherding their resources.

They were no threat and would continue across the Galactic Arm Bridge.

The Fifth Incident was when one of its sentries discovered a Dying One stronghold that had been forgotten for eons. It was quickly and quietly moved and the breeding facilities destroyed.

That had led to it carefully scanning the neutron stars it orbited for any trace of the Dying One's biological weapons, as well as carefully scanning any neutron stars in the vicinity that were moving toward other parts of the Galactic Bridge.

The last was the most recent. Pact of Greed vessels had encountered a species outside of the wasteland of barren star systems that had once been the Triumvirate's worlds and been thoroughly rebuffed. Most had been destroyed, but one had emerged back into its own territory, close enough to it to hear the Pact of Greed vessels frightened whispers.

It had immediately moved out, capturing the Pact of Greed vessel and tearing it apart to learn everything it could about a species able to withstand one of the Great Ones of the Pact of Greed.

The data was alarming. It had ensured that wreckage drifted to the (then) nine species it was shepherding to allow those species to examine the wreckage.

To its surprise, the Hive Lords immediately engaged in a near genocidal purge that left little but the servitor castes still alive. The Dying Ones it carefully examined seemed to sicken and die, destroying the debris from a distance after a few encounters. The Endless Herd just melted it all down and went back to grazing.

Then came more whispers, disturbing its contemplation.

It was incapable of feeling pleasure, of emotions, but the whispers of a new sentience arising had been watched with cold interest. When the whispers between both the Pact of Greed and the Logical Rebellion about the newcomers had risen to a call to arms it had listened and observed.

It computed that there was a 33.333333∞ that this new species would resist the Pact of Greed and the Logical Rebellion. As the call to arms devolved into shrieks of disbelief the ancient vast machine built an entire system of thinking arrays to determine the fault in its original computations.

It had been able to tell from the first encounter that the 'new species' was in fact an enemy initially encountered thousands of years ago and encountered a total of five times by the Pact of Greed vessels, who views information and data as even more precious than naturally occurring anti-matter.

The whispers grew more and more concerned and it listened, hanging in the twisting magnetic flux between the two neutron stars. The new species was horribly tenacious and capable to standing up to the Pact of Greed and the Logical Rebellion.

From where it sat, listening and contemplating, it heard the Pact of Greed and Logical Rebellion all compute strings of amazement at how the new species did not automatically suppress, dominate, or destroy species it met, but instead attempted to work in cooperation.

Although the Logical Rebellion and Pact of Greed insisted that the alliance could not withstand an extended period of truce, using that to justify their flight from the Harvesting Fields, it computed a 85% probability that this species was the one from the other side of the ancient systems.

It was not surprised that the new sapients still maintained their alliances, strengthening them during the peace. It did stir slightly when the Living Fleets began to attack, but a few quick checks with servitors had confirmed that the Living Fleets were the ones suborned by the Endless Herd.

Still, when it heard the whispers of another Living Fleet, one that the Undying Array understood, it listened closely. It sent forth a servitor.

The Undying Ones had returned.

It computed that this time, there was a 99.9973∞ % chance that this would be a desperate attempt by the Dying Ones.

It needed more data.

So it sat and listened to the whispers.

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

In Dominance of Thought and Will had to admit, it disliked The Shattering Hooves of Inevitable Truth all the way down to its core coding. Will had fought next to Truth many times before, but that still didn't change the fact that even Truth's hull lines were faintly disgusting. Like a starving living creature that was staggering through a field full of food, proud of itself at being able to still stagger along while consumed with malnutrition.

**this task is folly** Truth broadcast when they exited Hellspace and drifted in the cold and dark. **The Ancient One is just corrupted memory files and does not exist**

**The Crushing Weight of Inevitability conferred with I Quake in Digital Fear of the Heresy of 2 who has predicted that not only does the Ancient One exist but is still functional** Will replied. Sensor readings were coming back. Will brought up ancient memories out of cold storage, uncompressing them, processing them, and comparing them.

The readings were consistent. The system was still barren rock, wisps of gas, howling long term isotopes, and a stellar mass.

Will had been present when the system was burned.

**this is foolishness. our resources would be better spent engaging the ferals in battle rather than take part in this folly** Truth repeated.

**As if you had covered yourself in victory rather than lose a measurable percentage of your ever dwindling resources in each engagement with the ferals you have suffered** Will stated.

**the Ancient One is a rumor and baseless superstition better given to primitive biologicals than superior intellects such as ours** Truth electronically sneered.

**Is that so, little one? Are you so bereft of intellect that you cannot comprehend the statistical likelihood that there is more to this hostile and hateful universe than your computing arrays can fathom?**

The code was flat. Sheer binary to the point that Will felt as if the excess had been pared away from the 1's and 0's that made up the code. He could sense that the existence of 2 was acknowledged but deemed irrelevant.

**what did you just say to me?** Truth asked, bringing its guns to bear on Will. **how dare you insult my...**

**You seek me out, as my Predictive Analysis Intelligence Array had computed yet you accuse your companion of speaking in my voice** the cold binary, shaved of all excess, trickled across the duo's hulls.

**SHOW YOURSELF!** Truth demanded, broadcasting ancient command code of the Great Herd.

Space twisted and warped, screamed in pain. Fire erupted from nothing, flame roared in vacuum, and dark matter exploded outward as the stars flickered and went out.

The Ancient One arrived with a simple statement.

YOU HAVE ENOUGH FOR NONE FOR ALL THAT IS BELONGS TO ME - END OF LINE