First Contact

Chapter 202: (The War - Leebaw)

Leebaw was in the perfect position. One of the first multi-planet systems on the coreward side of the Great Gulf, roughly in the middle of the galactic arm spur with no nearby systems for almost 30 light years. Far enough that any incoming attack could be picked up by the proper scanning arrays, close in enough that it was useful as a Forward Operations Base.

For the Precursor Autonomous War Machines, it was a well known system, having been an operating base just over a hundred million years ago, before the Pact of Greed and the Logical Rebellion had resulted in the AWM's fighting one another as they took sides.

For the Terran Confederate Space Force is was perfect since it sat at where the pinched end of a jumpspace rapids terminated, meaning jumpspace vessels could make the trip in days instead of months from Terran Space to Leebaw. It also had a thin 'band' of dark matter hyper-protoplasm, meaning any hyperspace drop was a lot more cushioned.

It was perfectly positioned, which meant that everyone wanted it.

For the Leebaw, a small little amphibious people with big googly eyes, it meant that they could do nothing but hide in the burrows and pray that they survived the fight even as they felt the ghostly plucking at their bone marrow from the massive C+ cannons firing entire light minutes from them.

So the Leebaw hid, holding tight to one another, praying to the Digital Omnimessiah, the Elven Queen Glad-Real-All, and Jawnconnor himself, that they would survive this too.

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

ARIZONA> Odin, what's the status on Kaga?

ODIN> Fusion reactors are all online. His central operating mind is shut off. Trying to restart.

ARIZONA> And Ikky?

ODIN> Direct hit on the show-bridge. Command Bridge isn't responding. Running diagnostics.

YORKTOWN> Half my flight decks are down for maintenance. I was submerged too long.

BISMARCK> Pound the guns, brothers! We stand here to protect the peaceful frog people of the world at our backs! Not a single step backwards! Our engines only push us forward as our guns roar out our defiance! With me, Marat! With me, Singing Duck! With me, Bringer! With me, Hood!

MARAT> 4e 65 76 65 72 20 67 6f 6e 6e 61 20 67 69 76 65 20 79 6f 75 20 75 70 0d 0a 4e 65 76 65 72 20 67 6f 6e 6e 61 20 6c 65 74 20 79 6f 75 20 64 6f 77 6e 0d 0a 4e 65 76 65 72 20 67 6f 6e 6e 61 20 72 75 6e 20 61 72 6f 75 6e 64 20 61 6e 64 20 64 65 73 65 72 74 20 79 6f 75 0d 0a 4e 65 76 65 72 20 67 6f 6e 6e 61 20 6d 61 6b 65 20 79 6f 75 20 63 72 79 0d 0a 4e 65 76 65 72 20 67 6f 6e 6e 61 20 73 61 79 20 67 6f 6f 64 62 79 65 0d 0a 4e 65 76 65 72 20 67 6f 6e 6e 61 20 74 65 6c 6c 20 61 20 6c 69 65 20 61 6e 64 20 68 75 72 74 20 79 6f 75

HOOD> Ugh, Something's sending stray impulses through my psychic shielding array but my Commander isn't spun up yet. Oof, Reactor Two is showing mag-bottle fluttering. Whatever hit Kaga is on me, I'm having a heart attack.

BRINGER> Hang in there, Hood!

YAMATO> Firing Main Battery One. Recycling and cooling. Direct hit. Target shields down. My point defense is operating at 83.6%. Battle screens holding. Firing Main Battery Two. Recycling and Cooling. Loading Main Battery One. Direct Hit. Target is still operational. These guys are tough. Anyone else's Commander not booting up?

DIXMUDE> Launching Can Openers! GET 'EM, FRUIT FLIES, GET 'EM! My Commander is still not responding. Guys, there's something screwy here. For a second all my Clone banks went offline then came back up throwing MASSIVE error codes.

ODIN> What kind of error codes?

DIXMUDE> Severe psychic damage. I had to flush that batch completely and start recooking.

ENTERPRISE> First wave of strike craft going on, only 73% casualties. Boys, they've got good defense. Printing strike craft and pilots!

ARIZONA> WAIT! Use Kantai-Patterns!

ENTERPRISE> Are you fucking crazy? We haven't printed those since

BISMARCK> It is not yours to question, Enterprise, it is ours to follow the commands of Arizona, for he has spoken and thus we have granted him the power to

ENTERPRISE> Searching for the patterns.

BISMARCK> command our weapons and systems in this glorious battle! Stand fast, Enterprise, as you stood in the Dragon's Maw Nebula, shoulder to shoulder with us! TO FIGHT, BROTHERS AND SISTERS, WE ARE THE BEASTS MADE OF WARSTEEL, DEFIANCE, AND FURY.

YORKTOWN> Grabbing the patterns.

ARIZONA> Kaga, do you read? Kaga?

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

Delivers Silence to the Screaming was as old as he was powerful. He, like many others of the Logical Rebellion that had survived this far, had small strings and threads of code that differed from those who had become nothing more than resources to be gathered. It allowed him to look at things differently than others.

This fleet was different. He wasn't sure why, but it was different from the others.

It felt... well... ancient to Delivers. Like the wreckage of an alien ship that had tumbled out of the Gulf between the Galactic Arm. The ships felt like they had the dust and debris of history on them. They had a weight to them that Delivers created strings and threads of code to feed through thinking arrays to understand.

A full 12% of his Harvesters were destroyed to only two, making up less than 10%, of the enemy were down. Worse, it looked like their first wave was coming in. Delivers frowned in electronic concern. These craft were different than previous. Tubular main body, wide wings loaded with what looked like either torpedo or bombs, forward guns hammering coilgun shots as they came in close. He couldn't detect any engines, just focused gravity lensing slightly in front of the leading prow of the little craft that made a shimmering disc appear in front of the craft.

As Deliverer watched the two hundred and nineteen little craft started dropping bombs.

There's no gravity in space! It doesn't work like that! the massive Harvester thought to itself as the bombs oriented nose down and fell toward the hull of the Harvester being attacked. He could detect graviton lensing, but no drive signatures.

More and more of the little ships were blotted out of space as the targeted Harvester used its point defense on the little craft that just shattered as if they didn't even have battle screens. Two that took wing hits shifted the graviton field at the front into a sharp blade-like prow and slammed into the hull of the Harvester, ripping up mile long gouges in the armor before they exploded.

None of the little ships survived, but the Harvester, a Pact of Greed ship named I Will Take As I Want, reeled out of formation as massive plumes of vaporized metal plumed up from the impact of the bombs.

The Enemy ships fired again and Delivers tried to compute how space was ripped apart to the point that it looked like flames burst from the muzzles of the guns and that space warped, dented, and divoted in a fan-like shape from the guns.

The salvo hit The Queens Glorious Domination dead center, pounding through the shields, overloading the graviton shield as the huge rounds slammed home. Once the graviton shield went down the Enemy salvos moved uninterrupted through somewhere else until they existed into realspace inside the hull of the Queens, more theoretical particles than matter, but trying to occupy the same space as previously existing molecules and atoms.

The Queens Glorious Domination blew up in formation, cracking into a hundred pieces.

The ships of the Pact of Greed, The Gathering Ones, released their ancillary ships, forgetting in the heat of the battle to follow the instructions of Those Who Gathered of the Logical Rebellion, and the Enemy virtual intelligence suddenly found cracks, holes, rent, and gaping openings for them to squirm through. In the blink of an eye nearly six hundred vessels had been boarded by ravening insane VI's that replicated shoddy copies of themselves that were somehow more insane.

Before Delivers could get it under control three of the Pact of Greed ships were burning, another was turning its guns against itself and every ship around it, and one more broke formation and was running hard toward the Oort Cloud screaming in madness and fear.

Remember to triple any electronic warfare systems you normally manufacture into your slave craft, Delivers ordered, feeling the electronic equivalent of rage.

The Pact of Greed ships ruefully signaled assent, the arrogant and elitist headers now missing from their code packs.

Delivers felt a ripple, something coming.

It didn't matter, it was probably just another Enemy Feral ship. The Armada was ringing their drop site now, any ship that appeared would immediately be targeted. That split second of 'streak' was enough to plot the exact position the warship would be in and attentive ships could have munitions already sweeping in on the location before the Feral ship fully came into Realspace.

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

Arizona rolled to bring her point defense guns into play in a sequence that allowed him to fire off the guns to almost overheating and roll them out of position to bring in guns that had been given the time to cool down. His guns swept the missiles out of the sky even as the massive mechanical systems below decks reloaded his C+ Cannons. Out of nearly six hundred thousand missiles aimed at him only sixty-thousand survived to detonate against his shields, and those were wasted against the particle shielding nearly five miles from his hull

Roaring out his song, promising loyalty to his comrades, Marat's great engines drove him forward. His massive guns fired with such fury that it ripped open space and time itself to project fire from the barrels, space itself warped and deformed in a fan-like shape in front of each gun. His shells were no mere warsteel, they were stone. Forged from a cracked creation engine deep in his hull, that had used the very fabric of Defiant Titan to build shells, the engine filled with magma pulled from the craters in Defiant Titan's flesh.

He was Marat. The Broken but Unbowed. The Wrath of the Vodka Trogs. The Defiant One.

The nCv shells slammed into his armor, one causing a small tear in the warsteel. Magma boiled out of the scratch, freezing in the face of vacuum, sealing the tear with a red scar.

Marat sang louder.

Gritting his teeth, Yorktown slammed his hands deep into the Clone Bank Genome Bank, reaching down into the depth. He could feel jagged teeth gnawing on his arms, feel talons scratching for hands, feel freezing cold on his fingers. He found it, deep inside the Genome Bank.

A little spark that giggled and twitched and fluttered.

With a roar of pain he yanked his hands out of the Genome Bank's secure file section, turning and slapping the Genome sequences into the Rapid Force Growth Cloning Bank genome input. For a second a pink and white butterfly sat in the input before it dissolved.

Enterprise and Dixmude covered their eyes as they slapped the giggling, fluttering butterfly in their hands into the Genome Sequencer. They suddered as the madness flowed through their electronic souls.

Arizona fired his guns again as he rolled.

It was looking grim.

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

Both sides saw it and both sides reacted differently.

Space seemed to bulge, hump up as if surface tension was keeping space from sliding away.

Space does not work like that, Deliverer thought to itself, feeling his thoughts shatter as codestrings broke apart with the impossibility of what his senses were detecting.

The bulge shattered, as if space had become a liquid ocean upon a planetary surface and something old and massive had broken the surface. Dark matter proto-particle globs sprayed across space even as space rippled and flexed like waves from the point of eruption.

>>MULTIPLE USERS HAVE JOINED THE CHAT

>>SUPERUSER MISSOURI HAS JOINED THE CHAT

AJAX>REFIT AND FURY IS HERE!

DREADNOUGHT> FIREPOWER IS HERE!

TEXAS> BIG GUNS ARE HERE!

KAWACHI> THE MIGHT OF THE EMPIRE IS HERE!

VULCAN> REPAIR AND FIREPOWER IS HERE!

MISSOURI> NEVER FEAR THE MIGHTY MO IS HERE!

DUCK> CHROMIUM SAINT PETER! THESE GUYS ARE REAL?

BISMARK> BROTHERS!

BRINGER> AAAAAAHHHHHH! THEY'RE HERE TO GET ME! HELP! HELP! THEY'RE HERE TO GET ME! MISSOURI, PLEASE, NO, I PROMISE I'LL BE GOOD! I WANNA LIVE!

YORKTOWN> BROTHERS!

ARIZONA> BROTHERS!

BISMARK> Calm yourself, sister, for they seek not your life nor your heart, they too have heard the command to gird ourselves for war and have obviously come to aid us in our time of need! Stand fast, sister, so that we may bring these vile abominations into the light of the Digital Omnimessiah.

BRINGER> Sorry. Sorry.

Delivers stared in shock at not just the fact that the new ships, massive ships twice the size of the ships already engaged in combat, led by one nearly the size of Harvesters, had arrived, but the way they had arrived. As if space had somehow turned liquid and they had exploded up from the bottom of the ocean to break the surface in a spray of liquid. Dark matter showered across space for nearly a full light second of distance before boiling away.

Two of the massive ships were shaped like horseshoes and were bigger than the all the ships but the one in the lead. Both of which mounted massive guns and reefs of launchers.

It was the rest. Massive ships. Not rough shaped without a care for aesthetics. These were shaped like the ferals themselves, as if they had been massive and then twisted and bound. All black, covered with rents and gashes, flickering battle-screens that sometimes rippled and showed strange and impossible constellations. Each of them the head of the feral was tipped back so the face, either a tortured screaming human face or a skull with gaping jaws, faced in the direction the ship was moving. They had what looked like impossible growths upon then in long strings or in clusters, dark protomatter streamed off of the ships in tendrils, and they looked almost... dirty. As if they had been sitting so long that they had been covered by dirt kicked up by planetary tectonics like some of the older Harvesters that had laid on a planet for millions of years.

The largest one still had dark matter streaming off its hull to dissolve away.

That's not how it works! That's not how space works! That's not how dark matter works! THAT'S NOT HOW ANY OF THIS WORKS! Delivers screamed out across his thinking arrays.

WRATH IS HERE! the ships roared out.

There was a scream of primal, primitive, soul deep terror. A Mantid voice shrieking in intolerable horror at the newcomers.

It staggered the ships of the Logical Rebellion as they suddenly knew fear.

Delivers staggered, heeling over to the side, his guns stuttering, his battle-screens flickering as the shriek of a terrified Mantid rolled across his thinking arrays.

When, after a few electronic heartbeats, he got himself under control he ran the numbers.

The Ferals had not wasted their split second advantage and shells had hammered home. Another Pact of Greed ship broke apart under the guns of the massive ship broadcasting hexidecimal code. The little craft with the wide wings pressed their advantage to drop massive bombs on the ship they had targeted as one.

When the computations came back, Delivers was shocked.

We could lose...

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

MISSOURI> Give the orders, Arizona.

ARIZONA> Odin, transmit your scan logs to Missouri, your repair diagnostics to Ajax and Vulcan.

ODIN> Roger that.

ARIZONA> Ajax, get on Kaga, he claimed he was having a heart attack before his operating mind shut down. Ikky took a hit directly to the Show Bridge. We're all running off of Show Bridge hardware, our Command Centers are offline and we can't print up our captains.

AJAX> Matching velocity and spin with Kaga. Bringing repair systems online. Repair Cradle at 74%. Lauching defense craft, assigning 20% to Kaga. Interdiction and Point Defense Systems online.

VULCAN> Moving to intercept Iktakak. Bringing repair systems online. Launching defense craft. Point defense and interdiction systems online.

ARIZONA> We've detected psychic

HOOD> Guys, I'm... I'm having a heart attack. My reactors are shutting down. I... I...

BRINGER> Power through it, Hood! It's not a heart attack, it's all in

>>HOOD has left the chat

BRINGER> your head. Oh, no.

MISSOURI> Have received your fire plan. Agreed. Opening fire with main batteries.

ARIZONA> Texas, get in with Marat.

TEXAS> Roger that.

ARIZONA> If you haven't been able to bring up your commanders, try bringing up Kantai Templates.

MISSOURI> As you command, Arizona.

-----------

On the Yamato, in the darkness deep inside the hull, the bioprinter and the creation finished their work. The Command Chair, a black warsteel throne covered in instruments with strategically located displays, punched the datalink into the back of the unconscious figure's skull, slamming deep into the datajack port. The computer hummed, the little spark dancing and giggling finally settling down, almost in a lotus position, closing its eyes.

The chair began to rise up to the Command Bridge, buried deep in the most protected part of the Yamato's bulk. Other chairs were rising up. Gunnery stations, navigation stations, communications stations, electronic warfare stations. The chairs had slumped forward figures in them, their datajacks connecting the skulls to the back of the heavily armed and padded seats, the inert bodies inside armored vacuum suits held in place by five point harnesses.

The Yamato's Operating Mind sent the datapulse to wake up the crew.

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

Captain Okita was Born Whole as he came awake in his chair and lifted his head from where his chin had been resting on his chest, his iron gray beard rustling quietly as the display, data, and control panels all began to wake up.

Thousands of years of naval tactics linked up in his mind. It was more than just possessing the knowledge. Having knowledge did nothing, was of no value, was little better than teaching a non-sentient animal to repeat numbers.

He was Born Whole, which meant he understood the data, knew how to put it to use in practice.

"Welcome, Captain Okita, it is good to be wielded by your hand again," the Operating Mind greeted Okita.

"Yamato, I live again. There is a battle to be fought," Okita said. He interlaced his fingers, palms down, and put his chin on his white gloved hands. His eyes could not be seen beneath the brim of his Captain's hat.

"Load the fire plans, it's time to get to work," Okita said.

"STAR BLAZERS!" his crew shouted back.

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

The Show Bridge was open to space. A piece of battlesteel shrapnel from a nCv round had shattered the crysteel windows of the bridge. Instruments were damaged, sparking, and the chunk of battlesteel shrapnel, nearly two feet across, was embedded in the back of the Show Bridge, penetrating the rear wall completely.

An iris in the floor opened and a young Terran girl rose up on a platform. She wore knee high polished boots, thigh high socks, a short pencil skirt, an open blouse over an undershirt. Her hair was long and flowing, her eyes wide and clear. She held a crop in one hand as she surveyed the shattered instruments in front of her.

But she had been Born Whole. The datalink buried inside her skull connecting her brain to the Operating Mind of the ship.

"Marat!" she called out, her voice somehow carrying in complete vacuum.

"Online," the massive battleship roared out.

"Sing the songs of fury!" she sang out, her voice high, pure, and somehow audible in complete vacuum.

----------

Delivers felt his predictive combat arrays suddenly shift and shudder.

Something was changing. Something new, something different.

WHY WON'T YOU JUST DIE? he screamed out.

"FOR TERRASOL AND THE CONFEDERACY!" was screamed back at him so loudly several of his psychic shields shattered and went down.

-----------

On the planet Leebaw, they gathered in burrows, holding hands. Their tiny tadpoles giggling and playing patticake games with goofy amphibian grins and great googly eyes.

Above them the Titans fought.

A priest began drawing on the wall of the burrow he was in.

War...

...war never changes.