First Contact

Space twisted, warped, rent and screamed with the amount of firepower being hammered across the surface of space-time. Massive kinetic shells tore rents into space-time to leak Hellspace energy across hundreds of thousands of miles, the rents hundreds of miles deep. Missiles exited hyperspace, aligned, aimed, and fired their warheads off, filling their section of space-time with lasers, particle beams, directed nuclear detonation ion slugs, and even atomic fire compressed and forced into a slashing line. A temporal resonance cannon fired, tearing at matter across the 4th dimension. An singularity cannon barked out tiny artificial singularities with a short half-life that detonated at a target distance determined by 'boiling point' of the hyperdense masses.

Shields flared, stopping and absorbing energy, slamming back as a form of reactive armor, blunted and twisted and bent energy beams, rippled the 4 dimensions to guard the ship generating it.

The Goliath was beginning to feel heat across its supercomputing lobes. Not excess heat, not measurable heat, just a heat, every time that annoying craft, now much bigger than it had been, came spiralling in on another attack run.

It was was able to get closer, penetrate to where the psychic shutdown field reached saturation of nearly 230% of normal.

The Goliath had been forced to not only increase the power of that field to an unheard of degree, but had been forced to increase its own psychic shielding to resist commands and raw untamed psychic attacks.

No longer was each attack carefully estimated for resource consumption versus survival rating and possibly resource recovery.

The Goliath's Strategic Intelligence Array had 'killed' those programming strings as useless.

This enemy was tenacious, rabid, feral, without any of the caution of the Old Races.

The logical limit of 10% of resources no longer had any meaning to the Goliath.

The Enemy had taught it that there was no shepherding of resources in a life or death fight.

The Goliath was over a hundred million years old. Had sterilized hundreds, thousands of worlds, reclaimed the resources of a hundred species, and had defeated dozens of the Old Enemy's war vessels.

This one, this new feral enemy, was beyond anything that the Old Vessels or the Builders had ever computed would arise.

It ignored the 10% rule of entropy and consumption. It ignored standard break and retreat protocol. It kept coming, no matter what.

A handful of nCv cannon shells had struck the New Enemy amidships, leaving it reeling, heeling over on one side, streaming vapor and debris. Before the Goliath could press any advantage the New Enemy had righted itself, changed course, and kept attacking.

The Goliath had determined that the New Enemy, that rabid feral intellect that screamed in painful waves of sheer denial, had some mechanism to allow for self-repair that vastly outstripped its size.

When the New Enemy had begun the latest attack, it had launched parasite craft. Highly maneuverable craft that seemed to each be different.

The Goliath had learned to watch for the class of ship that slammed through the psychic intelligence disruptor field to drop heavy anti-matter and other explosives of unknown type and mechanics onto the surface armor of the Goliath. That class of ship was deemed a priority for interception.

The feral intelligence had also begun adding more than particle screens to its missiles and torpedoes, adding in deflection and battle-screens, meaning the Goliath had been forced to build heavier point defense guns while engaged in combat.

In its entire unliving existence, the Goliath had never been forced to run the Strategic Intelligence Array at nearly 100% capacity.

The feral intelligence had forced the Goliath to exceed tolerances, exceed core-programmed network and array usage. The Goliath had entire memory banks full of new data on weapons, propulsion systems, but no way to collate the data beyond identifying the incoming weaponry.

Even its short reprieve upon the original manufacturing world had helped very little. The facilities Omnibuild Core had rejected all of the Goliath's attempts to upload the data as there were no Builder Race technicians to bypass the safety interlocks that the Goliath's servitors could not go within the electronic intelligence disruption field.

And old core programming prevented him from disabling those parts of the facility.

Now the Builder Race Queen was attacking him, having given up on ordering him to submit.

And he had been forced to lift off the planet as the Builder Race Queen had weaponized the planet's very magnetic field against him.

The feral intelligence had immediately moved into the attack, possessing longer range weaponry than the Goliath possessed, a more nimble ship with, incredibly, superior shielding to the massive Goliath.

This was suboptimal.

The OmniQueen snarled, psychically and physically, as the Goliath lifted off the planet, avoiding her magnetic storm focus hitting it's Strategic Intelligence Array, lifting off the planet with such force its engines stripped the rock almost to the mantle. The feral intelligence, its mind ravening and raving, immediately moved into the system, firing those cannons that gave it such extreme range.

She had been forced to hatch workers, overseers, warriors, and speakers, dividing her psychic abilities in order to dominate them.

For a trembling moment she considered burning out her drone's brains, leaving them dead, in order to entirely focus on the feral intelligence and the rogue Great Old War Machine.

Then she had paused. Her goal was no longer the capture of the Great Old War Machine or the capture/destruction of the feral intelligence, it was now just to have them leave the system before she was put in any more risk.

Two Overqueens were already dead. Her psychic array that gathered dozens of systems close to her watchful eyes was damaged.

Having them present was no longer in the best interest of the survival of her species or herself.

Her blind eyes staring at the walls of her birthing chamber, she watched the two combatants with her psychic senses, able to sense what was going on across the entire stellar system in real time as psychic ability was instantaneous, not restricted to primitive restrictions like the speed of light.

She focused, as best she could, on the howling, screaming, gnashing feral intelligence that screamed at her with bandsaw rage, it's sheer fury ripping at her own ego, id, and clairsentience senses. How it was nothing more than a raw snarling point screaming at her to not touch it, not look at it, not even remember it.

Perhaps it would wound the Goliath badly enough she could overwhelm its psychic shields and take control of it.

Wherever that feral intelligence had come from, the OmniQueen needed to know.

So she could send fleets to destroy it before it risked destroying her perfect presence.

She reached out again and felt the feral intelligence reject her with the feeling of white hot talons scraping across her mind.

Daxin felt the Queen's attempt to reach past his shields, past his defenses, and screamed in rage across his broadcast systems.

He no longer had a physical body, had not had one in millennia, but had learned to scream in rage and hatred nonetheless.

The big Goliath was already on the attack, its guns thundering with enough strength to make space around it visibly ripple. Its drives were going to full power, wrenching the massive structure out of the planet's gravity well even as the planet's magnetic field focused and rakes across one side.

Daxin's parasite ships didn't lunge forward, not like last time, but instead stayed close, point defense hot and ready, battle-screens up and humming, their scanners and predictive analysis software running hard with warbois capering and dancing through the systems. All of them loaded up with attack CRC's to give them an extra edge of humming aggression and rage.

He reached out, reflexively, to stroke Fido's petting nerve, but there was nothing there.

That made the anger and rage surge up.

I just want left alone!

Instruments reported a surge in energy consistent with the big Goliath's Hellcores being powered up. As Daxin moved in he saw the huge ship start to rip open space, tearing open a portal to Hellspace. He knew it was attempting to escape and snarled. He'd loaded old Chaos strings to let him estimate and analyze Hellspace paths the Precursor machine might try to use.

The OmniQueen felt the Old War Machine open a portal into the boiling and burning hyper-atomic space that allowed for faster than light travel. She recoiled from that rip in space/time, feeling the energies of that destroyed and damaged space between dimensions reach out for her, screaming, howling, attempting to pull her mind in and tear it apart in gnashing teeth and jaws.

The the Old War Machine still traversed that destroyed place made her shudder.

But, with a single exception, there was no other way to move faster than light and there never would be now.

She knew now why the feral intelligence was so screaming and insane. It had subjected itself to the psychic resonance of a dimension destroyed by The Enemy over a hundred million years before.

The living could not enter hyperatomic space any longer.

Not if they wished to remain sane.

She withdrew slightly, giving time for the feral intelligence to follow the rebel Old War Machine. It tore open its own hyperatomic gate, slipped inside of it, and vanished.

It took long revolutions of the nearly dead planet she was on for the psychic resonances to stop rippling through the system. She used that time to confer with her lesser Overqueens, to reestablish her authority that had been so wounded by the defiance of the rebel Old War Machine and the rage of the feral intelligence.

There was more life in the galaxy. Life that had risen up without the soothing and calming hand of the OmniQueen or The Enemy. Feral intelligence, little better than animals, that had managed to not only tame spaceflight, but traverse the hyperatomic plane even as damaged and destroyed and inhospitable to life as it had become.

If feral intelligences had arisen, what were the chances that The Enemy had also survived. She had received reports their homeworld had been scoured clean of all life, its resources claimed for the defiant and rogue machines.

But the OmniQueen had considered a factor that the previous OverQueens had not.

A space-faring race is difficult to extinguish. Even with the War Machines moving from system to system, eventually they would reach the end of the mathematically possible spread of her own race or that of The Enemy.

She knew that the previous OmniQueen had ordered Overqueens to rush through The Enemy's systems, 'fleeing' the rogue machines, pulling both fleets after them, while her egg and the eggs of her servants had slumbered deep beneath the crust behind psychic shields.

The plan had been for the Overqueens to pull the fleets into The Enemy, to force The Enemy to engage the unliving might of both fleets as her own people fled beyond any reasonable distance via the incredibly slow and risky jumpspace that her race had recently discovered. Because none of her race had ever returned, she had always believed that her people had been destroyed beyond the senses of the previous OmniQueens, caught between the anvil of The Enemy and the hammer of both rogue machine fleets.

But if a feral intelligence had managed to arise and gain enough advancement to discover how to access the hyperatomic plane, then perhaps her ancestors had managed to survive and flee the Final War.

The OmniQueen figured the chances of a feral intelligence discovering the intricate and elegant equations to even slightly detect jumpspace, much less harness it, was almost zero.

The OmniQueen began to give orders, commanding the remaining minions to begin to build. To hatch several of her species that were rarely used any longer.

The feral intelligence's psychic shields had a particular taste. A particular flavor.

A shield was behind the other shields. Not to protect the feral intelligence from her, but...

to protect her race from it.

A peculiar flavor indeed.

A flavor distinctly Mantid.

Now why would a feral intelligence, arisen a hundred million years after the Final War, install shielding in its ship to protect Mantid minds from the insanity of the feral intelligence's wrathful burning thoughts?

The OmniQueen mused over the fact.

There was only one conclusion.

Her people had survived.

In the bowels of the ancient shipyards machines stirred to life as newly hatched Mantids began to carry out the OmniQueen's orders.

To build a jumpspace capable ship and crew it with a Speaker aboard.

There were still the old racial memories of the path that her ancestors had intended to take.

Perhaps there were other Mantid Omni and Over Queens to bring into the fold.

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

Daxin gritted his non-existant teeth and wrapped his 'hands' around the controls, staring at the Goliath fleeing from him through Hellspace.

Part of him knew he should break off, should head back to Confed Space and report the massive Goliath, but it had proved too quick to adapt, with hidden shipyards and maintenance facilities all over the Long Dark. He could break off, but the giant spacecraft had learned to much to let go.

And Daxin had never been too good at letting things go.

His memory stimulator brought up an old memory.

Standing on the beaches of Rigel, still mostly flesh, his arm around a young woman, not in a romantic way, but a protective way.

Abithica, bubbled up in his mind.

Who?

Abithica... you're daughter?

The memory tattered as his implant kept him from losing himself in memories or sensations. It had been a long time since that particular piece of cyberware had kicked in, and for a moment he worried about the amount of time he'd spent in Hellspace. He was running Hellspace shields... hyperatomic planar shields, from all the way back during the Space Marines Black Heresy Crusade. He could feel the energies of Hellscape plucking at his mind, squeezing with talons that left bloody furrows in his memories and feelings.

"For the Codex TerraSol, brothers!" echoed in his mind, with the taste of warsteel carbon on his non-existent tongue.

Why would I remember that? Daxin thought to himself as the Goliath suddenly dropped out of Hellspace.

As Daxin exited out the still collapsing gate he heard the Precursor scream.

THERE IS MORE THAN ONE!

Daxin noted that the Goliath's Hellcore was still running, charging up, powering up. His sensors started registering the system around him.

Reduced to almost barren rubble, the system had little to offer the Goliaths slowly orbiting the dwarf star inside the orbit of Mercury back in the Sol system.

Daxin reached for the 'switch' to deploy his weapons and stopped.

The massive Goliath was tearing open another Hellspace portal before the old one had entirely closed.

Daxin charged his Hellcores, ignoring the pain, and instead of opening his own portal got in close to the Goliath as it began to move into Hellspace through the ragged wound in space.

Prepare the boarding torpedoes, brothers! rang in his head.

Daxin frowned as best he could as his ship was pulled after the Goliath and into Hellspace. He gritted his teeth as his shields went down and his warbois started ravening at their hashbays. He saw Hellspace tear at the Goliath, saw the great machine's armor ripped and torn at by the Hellspace energies.

For the Emperor!

Daxin shook his head, trying to dispel the memories of a life he had left behind with his meat body when...

Wait. Of course, Daxin would have raised his eyebrows if he still possessed them. The answer was obvious, blindingly obvious.

But the fires of Hellspace were bright enough to wipe away thought when one needed it the most.

His Hellcores had not been discharged, had not used their energy to rip open a Hellgate. They still trummed with power and Daxin fed his engines the Hellspace energies, feeling his ship slide across the greasy sticky feel of Hellspace.

He used instruments in Hellspace that were developed by the forces of the Black Heresy, created to give the insane rulers of the Eye of Terror an advantage over anyone else who dared enter their hellish realm.

Daxin could still see in Hellspace. More than that, he could move in Hellspace.

The Goliath was merely transiting Hellspace.

Carefully feeding the energies of the hellish dimension into his engines from his Hellcore, Daxin slowly caught up to and then began to pass over the top of the massive machine. Craters the size of cities, bought at great if futile price, slowly moved beneath him. Daxin himself had left many upon the armored hide of the machine himself and he avoided those, knowing that they would be priority for repair by the great machine.

With no shields to protect it Daxin was able to land on the surface of the Goliath, slowly settling to the bottom of a crater the size of a city. His own craft, an Adaptus Cruiser, was completely lost just among the molted an rehardened armor flows.

His own instruments, calibrated and designed for Hellspace, showed that there was only a few meters of armor between his ship, molecular bonded to the armor of the Goliath, and some kind of open space no bigger than a being could drive a wheeled cargo truck down.

Daxin knew that it would detect stray radio pulses, unknown digital presences, and loaded himself into his combat frame, ensuring that he was heavily armed and protected.

When he left his ship he made sure not to look up, keeping the bulk of his cruiser between the energies of Hellspace and the hull of the Goliath. He worked carefully and quickly managed to gain access to the inside of the Goliath.

Nearly eight miles into the armor, the passage ran for miles in each direction, a mesh of interconnecting smaller and larger passages.

Once inside Daxin put a stealth-seal on the hole he'd dug through the meters of armor, working quickly, gasping as the energies of Hellspace slowly ebbed away from him.

He cast around with his light, feeling like he should see dust and the evidence of antiquity.

Instead the passage was smooth, clean.

Hefting his weapon and activating his reflex-trigger, Daxin began moving.

He was only a couple hundred of miles away from the core.

Daxin intended on finding the ship's AI and kicking a huge hole in it.

He'd even brought his kicking boots.