First Contact

Chapter Twenty-Four (Daxin)

The Goliath and Daxin did the electronic and scanning equivalent of glaring at each other across the space of two light seconds. Each had submerged themselves into a gas giant, converting the gasses within to fuel, energy, resources. Both were performing repairs and diagnostics on their beaten and battered bodies.

Both had forgotten how long they had been fighting. It had stopped mattering to each combatant. For the Goliath, OEM programs had loaded up, never used before, dealing with unstoppable attackers. For Daxin, there was nothing but a single thought.

Around the Goliath's gas giant was a network of 24 small satellites, each over a million miles from the outer wisps of atmosphere, circling the massive superplanet in such a way that the Goliath was always forced to stay on the move. They were armed with massive explosive charges that dropped from the satellite and attempted to strike the Goliath. Even a near miss compressed the gas giant's atmosphere and the shockwave pummeled the subcontinent sized spaceship.

Daxin just stayed so he could stare at Leviathan's gas giant. The satellites orbiting his gas giant possessed point defense weapons and interdiction missiles, frustrating the Goliath's attempts to attack Daxin with missiles.

THERE IS ONLY ENOUGH FOR ONE

the monstrous artificially intelligent machine roared out.

I JUST WANTED LEFT ALONE!

Daxin raved back.

The great machine's computer core took a moment to compile and run a rogue program. A program that asked a question it had never thought of asking, that its creators had never thought of asking, a question that would have its brethren burning it apart for heresy.

IF I LEAVE YOU ALONE WILL YOU OR I LEAVE?

Daxin heard the upper atmosphere of the gas giant echo that howl.

Daxin responded with a single answer, without even thinking. He knew that it would never leave him alone, would never leave anyone it found alone, until it was alone.

NO

The Leviathan shuddered deep inside the gas giant, where pressures were so intense that methane rained down in frozen liquid shards, the rogue program and the answer purged from memory.

THERE IS ONLY ENOUGH FOR ONE

it roared out again.

THERE IS STILL ROOM IN HELL FOR YOU

Daxin screamed back at it. He checked his reserves. Protomatter at 100%, collapsed via graviton generators until the tubular module held thirty times his ships mass in an area the size of a single three liter storage area. His engines were repaired, reinforced, upgraded via illegal programs he'd stumbled upon for sale by a sleazy DAIS salesman nearly a thousand years ago. He'd reloaded his modules and expanded on and reconfigured his ship.

He'd gone from light frigate sized to the size of a heavy cruiser.

Daxin checked his VI creche and nodded with satisfaction. He'd run military grade hash compilers on an entire new batch of VI's, the base seed of the hash a combination of random particle decay of an isotope, the audio of the atmosphere of the gas giant playing over his damaged hull when he'd first arrived, his own personal chaos seed generator, and an hour worth the dreams when he'd triggered deep REM sleep.

The medical nanites had healed the damage to Daxin's biological brain, reconnecting dendrites, clearing static and rogue electrical impulses that didn't match from his SUDS checksums. Repaired his cybernetic implants and reloaded his customized firmware. The medical VI's had gone over the times his upper brain functions had shut down, cross referenced it with archives, and matched the signal with the telepathic "omnisignal" of the Mantid Overlord castes. They had the files and built the jammer than Daxin had worn during the Mantid War, fitting it in like a missing piece after altering it for the wavelengths and signal the Leviathan used.

The ship's VI had rebuilt the encryption code for the entire ship's systems with an entirely newly generated algorythm, doubled the backups, and when given the space by the ship's reconfiguration, had installed another set of backups as well as adding local control VI hash storage systems.

The reactors, rebuilt, replaced, improved, were all operating at maximum efficiency. He'd unpacked the biggest creation engine he possessed the template to craft, packed the psuedo-matter, stacked and racked the nanites, and added secondary supercoolant arrays to all of them.

Daxin had ensured his heat disposal systems had redundancies stacked on top of redundancies, going so far to even add field of fins to his surface and almost triple the amount of heat sink arrays he had possessed prior. The thermal core's were deeper, more resilient, and arranged to be loaded into missiles or torpedoes to weaponize ones that were at max capacity.

He'd done what he could with the resources he'd built from the tools he'd built with the tools he had when he'd first sunk gratefully into the cool gasses of the giant planet.

With a single thought he ordered the satellites around him to sink into the gas giant and load themselves back into ships stores. The ones around the gas giant that Leviathan was inside of he ordered to merge above Leviathan and reconfigure.

Leviathan watched the satellites gather above him with a suspicious electronic eye. The feral intelligence chasing him had proved too resourceful, too tenacious to ignore a single thing it did. As it was, its repair and refit kept being interrupted by those explosive charges sending waves of compressed gas giant atmosphere to crash over it.

The Leviathan fired up its engines as it detected the enemy's engine signature, which Leviathan had slowly learned how to detect and had been forced to build a dedicated detector array for, lifted clear of the gas giant's atmosphere and the ship began moving toward him.

Leviathan realized that somehow its opponent had grown larger, which meant it had more resources than before. It created and dedicated a strand of computer coding to estimate and predict what kind of resources and abilities the opponent would possess after such an alteration.

The satellites above Leviathan had finished re-configuring, oriented, and fired. Antimatter charges exploded, the massive piston was driven back into the explosion to compress it, graviton generators spun up, repulsor fields sprang into existence, and gravity lenses formed just long enough take an omnidirectional blast, compress it, and fire the entire blast as a ravening physical slug of screaming atomic particles aimed at one point. The blast consumed the satellite, but its work was done.

The slug smashed through space, hit the upper atmosphere of the gas giant, exploding the atmosphere to the side as it drove deep into the gas giant, creating a dish-shaped crater as it drove deeper and deeper into the gas giant's atmosphere.

The blast, a replication of a Star Blazer class Battleship's main gun, hit the Leviathan dead center as it lifted into the upper fifth of the atmosphere, rising to meet the bolt that was blasting into the crater into the surface of the gas giant the size of Jupiter's Red Eye.

There was barely time for even an electronic intelligence to react as the bow-wave of compressed gas giant atmosphere reached the ship. It put all power to the shields, cranking up the improved shield generators to maximum then pushing that limit as the ancient computer realized what was on the other side of the bow wave. The Leviathan's shield took the hit of the compressed gasses, shunting them aside easily.

Then the bolt hit.

Atmosphere plumed up from the side of the gas giant, plasma fires flicking along the entire plume.

Daxin cleared his own gas giant, kicking in his afterburners to accelerate his larger than before craft toward his massive foe. He fired off a shoal of variable warhead missiles, the missiles spending only a few seconds under anti-matter fueled drive before going into ballistic stealth, offsetting their own mass signatures with tiny marble sized graviton generators.

The Leviathan rose from the gas giant with a scream of rage, a crater fifteen miles deep and as wide as Los Angeles megalopolis on its subcontinent sized surface, the core of it still glowing white as armor was reduced to atoms that were devoured by the rampaging plasma fires.

The Mantid War continues, Daxin thought to himself as his scanner arrays picked up the missiles that the Leviathan threw at him. They numbered in the tens of thousand, but it was a pinprick compared to the massive volleys of the Combine War and the chosen warboi VI's were sulky when Daxin assigned them with point defense.

He'd seen with his own eyes the land/air/space defense of the Mantid Omniqueen go down, had sprinted madly for cover and barely made it before the Ninth Task Force had gotten into position and begun firing their orbital batteries at the massive hive/palace.

The piece of firmware, back from the past and embedded in between his brain hemispheres, was like an old familiar friend in his mind.

All you had to do was leave me alone.

A wave of missiles had bypassed him, trying to be sneaky, and lit up their engines to come around behind him and engage him with hopes of hitting his engines.

The warboi had seen them and knew what they were going to do. The minute the lit off their engines they were intercepted by spheres that blew free their covers, oriented their apertures, and spat a stream of tungsten darts that shredded the missiles before they could start altering their velocity and heading.

The system they were fighting in was an empty one. Any witness exterminated a hundred million years ago. The oceans and atmospheres had been boiled away, the life crawling, hopping, swimming, flying on them exterminated. Moons had been cracked, continents buckled, rings scooped up and devoured. Nothing alive was left, down to the microscopic level, not even the building blocks that might one day become life were left.

The system had been dead a long time, so Daxin had no fear of using his heavier weapons.

ONE > 1

Leviathan screeched as it started its Helljump.

ONE WILL BE WITHOUT YOU

Daxin bellowed back, firing up the Hellcore he'd configured three systems ago. He hated doing it, but it beat forcing his ship through it without the shielding the core provided.

It still hurt, it still burned. It felt like being submerged in boiling acid that coated and lubricated blades that flensed the skin and soul and thoughts away as the boiling acid slid between organs and vessels between heartbeats and blood, between inhalations and exhalations. It seared his body, peeled the cornea from his eyes, stripped away the flesh under his nails with burning iron, burned at his core.

It went on and on, longer than any jump before, and Daxin squirmed and screamed as Hellspace ravaged and tore at him.

It tore at his memories, summoning up his worst one.

TerraSol burning as the Mantid ships glassed entire cities and billions died as he watched from a battlefield on Mars.

Instead of the memory filling him with despair as Hellspace wormed deep into him, seeking out his worst moments, his weakest moment, the moments where he had failed the worst.

New York, Los Angeles, Moscow, Delhi, Beijing, Sydney, Rio, Lagos, Berlin, London, the list went on and on, all of them snuffed out in the blazing light of a new star erupting on the surface of Terra Sol. Billions boiled out of existance as even Soulnet staggered and howled in pain, even as the SolNet screamed, even as every Terran troop on every battlefield everywhere saw the horror in their minds, broadcast by the Omniminds that had brought war upon Terra, how he'd gone still and stared...

Hellspace energy found that memory, caressing it, licking at it, whispering to it to come out of the little black ball it had become deep in Daxin's soul, suckling at it to encourage it to blossom and force Daxin to relive the memory.

It exploded, that little black ball forced deep into Daxin's memory.

The Leviathan left Hellspace, it's long journey over, its surface ravaged and damaged by the length of its travel through Hellspace, by the eternally long moment of its Helljump.

Daxin followed just as the little black ball inside of him exploded.

The Leviathan felt it, it's empathy circuitry still drunk from the whirling chaos of Hellspace. Felt the last tiny wisp of Hellspace around Daxin's vessel find a black ball inside of the feral intelligence's soul. A black ball that the feral kept even from itself.

Sensing a possible advantage, the supercomputer reached out with its weapon that it was loathe to use, that took up so much energy, heated up so high that it could damage even the AI, and caressed Daxin's craft before it could bring its shields up.

The core programming, the hunger behind the grasping hands that had built them as bladearms were cleaned by mandibles drooling at the thought of the minds that would be snuffed out in agony by the mechanical behemoth, sizzled in electronic greed as the beam touched Daxin himself.

The black ball exploded.

The Leviathan reeled, heeling off the side, trying to roll and flip to put as much armor and shields between Daxin and itself, the meta-psychic circuitry of the intelligence dominator exploding as the wave of psychic energy from Daxin himself rolled over the ship.

Rage. Pure. Clean. An axe-blade of raw fury. Incoherent and all consuming. Rage crashed across the Leviathan's ancient psychic shields, crashing them down, crushing them, mangling them. Hatred came next, a tsumani torrent that snatched up the psychic shields and chewed on them till blood ran down from mangled lips and shattered teeth. Wrath came next, pouring across the exposed psychic core of the Leviathan.

In his own ship, Daxin screamed in howling fury as he relived that agonizing moment when he had seen TerraSol savaged by the Mantid warships and the Overminds across the galactic arm had gloated and spread the image to every living mind in reach.

The Leviathan managed to right itself, managed to arrest its uncontrolled tumble, hastily got its shields and point defense up just before the feral intelligence's attack hit. It staggered from the physical assault even as it streamed a plume of psychic energy from it.

It's Artificial Psychic Intellect Assault System was nothing more than boiling matter eating into the surrounding hull spaces. It pumped supercoolant into the area to save missile bays even as it dove for the inner system, screaming for help.

Daxin gritted teeth he no longer had as he managed to get his ship under control. The warbois and scanbois were all capering and shrieking for his attention. He was reaching to release the Vipers when he realized what he was seeing.

The Vipers, small craft that used old and outdated technology, clenched in anticipation as Daxin mentally reached for the launch lever. They were outfitted with ripple drives in addition to standard reactionless drives, able to stretch or compress space as if it was cloth, enabling them to cross light seconds in moments while only moving at lower C speeds. Their main gun, what the little ships were wrapped around, was a hyperspace point to point gate that their computers had already established coordinates for the photosphere of a white dwarf so that they could transfer the plumes of energy in the photosphere into the chamber where the energy would be compressed by gravatic lensing into a directed beam of energy. They had standard debris shields and projector shields, but relied on the ability to stretch and shrink space, shunt mass and energy into jumpspace, for their primary protection. Jumpspace was connected to their inertial and kinetic compensators, providing limitless energy and a place to shunt excess energy to prevent overloads and then siphon it back as needed.

They were eager craft, an older design, easily countered by hyperspace disruption, jumpspace stabilizers, and realspace gate anchors, but Daxin hadn't seen any evidence of the enemy possessing those weapons.

Daxin had almost launched them when his scanners reported the system back, what they'd seen across the ancient system. He triggered another scan, bringing his "finger" back from the trigger to launch the Vipers.

It was an ancient system. Twelve words. The asteroid fields littered with discarded mining vessels that had long since run out of resources to devour. Ancient stations cobwebbed with millions of years of dust accumulation. Gas giants mined down to wispy echoes of what they had been, the ancient extractors long since shut down and left to tumble through the dark.

The four planets in the green zone, all of them close to one another, were nitrogen heavy worlds, mostly desert. Daxin double-checked the atmospheric contents to be sure. Double-checked the gravitic scan of the planet surface.

ANTHILL ANTHILL ANTHILL

His memories screamed as he looked at the scan.

He had never seen it. Nothing in his DNA had ever seen the system.

Yet he knew what he was looking at even as the psychic wave crashed over him.

THERE IS ONLY ENOUGH FOR ONE

the Mantid Overqueen trilled to him as her psychic tendrils reached for his brain, touched him, and recoiled in agony as the backwash of rage from the memory of TerraSol burning washed over the elaborate hive on the longest inhabited planet. Her tendrils touched the rage, the wrath, the fury, the HATE still reverberating through his mind.

The Mantid Overqueen, the last of her kind, screeched in pain, shock, and indignation at the touch and taste of Daxin's emotions, raw emotions it had never felt before. Raw emotions that dared assault her, dared strike at her, dared to crash into her mind and lash at her psychic core, dared to deny her, the triumphant creation of the universe.

shit, Daxin thought.

He launched the Vipers, ordered the Creation Engine to build heavier psychic shielding and install it, ordered it to build more Vipers, install psychic shielding, and prepare the SUDS array. The warbois danced with glee as he goosed his engines and headed in-system.

THERE IS ONLY ENOUGH FOR ONE AND YOU ARE NOT ONE!

Today is a good day to die, he thought to himself as he opened up the broadcaster he'd built that matched what was aboard a Confederate vessel.

On the planet every surface vibrated, every electronic squealed, every speaker thundered, every psychic resonator roared the same answer.

The Overhive Omniqueen screamed in rage and pain as a broadcast crashed down on her for a change.

WE ARE MANKIND

WE ARE NOT HERE TO HELP

FOR TERRASOL

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

MANTID FREE WORLDS OPEN BROADCAST

THE GODS PROTECT US!

SHE HAS AWOKEN!

SHE LIVES!

SAVE US, BROTHERS, SAVE US FOR THE SAKE OF OUR SOULS!

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

CONFED TRANSMISSION

TO ALL

CC: MANTID FREE WORLDS

FOR TERRASOL

FOR FREEDOM!

IN BLOOD AND STEEL, OUR BROTHERS!

FOR OUR MANTID BROTHERS AND THE GALAXY ITSELF!

LET LOOSE THE DOGS OF WAR!

RIP AND TEAR!

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