First Contact

Daxin was stuck.

If he left the system, even long enough to just run a matter-scoop through an intact gas giant, that would leave the Goliath free to lift free of the planet it was squatting on, glaring at him, and run again. The Overqueen would undoubtabely scramble its wake, preventing Daxin from tracking it.

If he stayed, he couldn't get close. Just past the scattered crumbs of the inner asteroid belt the Overqueen's psychic domination overloaded his psychic shields and his Rboi had to run back across the line.

The remaining three planets were guarded by heavy shields, heavy enough to absorb a plasma wave phased motion 50m bore cannon shot. Thick enough to block even a direct hit from a 10m C+ cannon. He had even found an asteroid the size of a skyscraper and slingshot it at the planet. The planetary defense systems had destroyed it almost a full light second from the target.

The gas giants were wisps of vapor, the asteroid belts scattered crumbs of coalesced space dust, the Oort Cloud nothing more than memories, the outer planets and the inner planets crumbled and harvested till little remained but clumped up debris.

Of the four planets remaining, they were all heavily defended, the moons reduced to dusty rings, the oceans largely siphoned away, the mountains that remained clustered with heavy manufacturing and defensive systems.

The Goliath had settled on the planet furthest from the sun, hiding behind the shields, and Daxin had watched in helpless fury as the damage was repaired and more.

The Overqueen, joined by at least a half dozen lesser voices, kept trying to cajole him further into the system, surrender himself to her glory and majesty, give in to the inevitable.

Every time rage pushed him away, pushed away those voices.

Daxin could remember the fields of the dead, tens of thousands of ruptured suits of armor, the burning ships falling into gravity wells, the bright actinic flares of cities being wiped away. Fighting the unyielding legions of the digital intelligences, slamming against the metal of the biosynth war machines, crashing against the unending armies of the clones, going metal fist to alloy fist against the cyborgs.

He could remember all of it.

The memories, the rage, pushed the Overqueen's words away with a primal scream from the Rboi as his ship was pulled around to get out of range of the Overqueen's psychic assault.

Every attempt at firing her ground based batteries, even her orbital weapons, at Daxin did nothing but result in frustration for the Mantid god-ruler. No nCv slug came close, any directed energy weapons were either absorbed or dodged or turned aside, any missile or torpedo was picked off by his point defense.

She had nothing else, except for a single Goliath who refused to put forth lesser machines for Daxin to rip apart and devour to appease the hunger of his expanded ship.

One Queen tried to force the Goliath to engage Daxin. The Goliath responded by lifting a few hundred meters off the surface of the planet, moving over to the hive, and firing two nCv shots into it, followed by nearly an hour's worth the directed plasma lance.

The surviving queens and the Overqueen stopped tying to force the Goliath to do anything.

The Goliath was pinned.

If it tried to move to the inner planets, the Overqueen might be able to overwhelm his thoughts when assisted by the Queens. They had their own defenses and he wasn't as agile as the annoying feral intelligence. He had the armor to absorb any blow the Queens could send his way but that would take up more resources to repair the damage.

The vast store houses of the factories of this world, of the great shipyards, were nearly depleted. The Goliath had resorted to using his own machines to strip the factory of equipment, going so far as to have them pull fiberoptic cable and plumbing from the walls.

If it tried to make a run for it, that feral intelligence, which had added to its ship's capabilities, would continue to harry it. It had only survived so far because it was old and more heavily armored than the later versions with more redundancy built in. It had been built to fight the living, not the automated warships that came later. It knew that if it tried to run that feral creature would never stop hounding it till one of them was destroyed, and the self-preservation codes were still running hard.

If he stayed, he did nothing but eek out scant resources from the dead planet. He had sent his war machines into the hive of the dead queen, destroying the eggs and the hibernating Mantids left, turning them into biological soup to be boiled into resin. He'd stripped resin where he could, filling spaces with it, layering it over craters to fill them in.

He was stuck. He disliked that. His programming urged him to take an offensive stance, to be proactive rather than reactive.

Stuck between a feral intelligence and an ancient ruler of the ruling castes of the hive.

The Great Overqueen was stuck.

She had been stuck on the planet for aeons. It was she who had dominated the other queens in the shattered and stripped system. It was she who had defended it from the return of the servitors. She was too big to move on her own, but that was not what mattered.

Her children were in stasis, packed in jelly. She could not spread to the stars. She could not search out cattle. The feeble cattle still within the world knew nothing but her touch, their minds smooth and without fear or terror, just dim acceptance, for a thousand thousand generations.

She was starving.

The Goliath, bearing the hull numbers of having been built in the orbiting shipyards of her very home, refused her commands, had killed one of her Lesser Queens, and now was stripping one of her planets of every last scrap of usual material. Even the auto-harvesters for the fields that fed the cattle. Its war machines had entered the caverns of the cattle and slaughtered them then harvested the cattle and the infrastructure that had supported them. It was a rebel, one of the ones who had sided against the Overqueen during the Metal Rebellion, and it was of no help.

The feral intelligence, that new spark of intellect that she had never tasted before, was so full of fury and rage that it curdled her stomach. It hated in a way she had never tasted, the mere touch of its hatred filling her mouth with blood and digestive juices. The last time it had come close enough she could touch its mind it had screamed and the biofeedback had been so intense one of her eyes had exploded in a fountain of gore. The feral intelligence was of no help, it sought to kill either the Overqueen or the Goliath.

The three combatants stared at one another across the system, each attempting to figure out some way to counter the other two and have their goals be what came to fruition.

So they stared at one another. Glaring. Thinking. Computing.

Only one hoped.

Daxin knew better than to try another torpedo. The Goliath had surrounded him with a small globe and trail of satellites that stayed in stealth and only exited to target any message torpedoes to knock them out. Daxin had begun worry about how there were small machines that would comb any wreckage, taking away any larger pieces, forcing Daxin to shoot them apart before they could reach home.

The Goliath was trying to figure out where Daxin was sending the torpedoes.

Or worse, trying to reverse engineer the hyperdrives.

Hyperdrive wasn't difficult if one had already mastered Hellspace or jumpspace. They were all related, and Daxin himself could pull up the formulae that proved it, that linked the three together, as well as with the other types of drives.

He thought vaguely of using a splinter-drive, but that required a biological component further than a kittykitty or goodboi. It wasn't used due to progressive damage to the parts of the brain that handled space-time, but Daxin was starting to get desperate.

Several weeks ago he had tried dropping hunter-follower drones and jumping out, sitting a few light hours away and waiting.

The Goliath had been suspicious and combed the system carefully with scanners and drone and probes until it found the hunter-follower drones.

Daxin had jumped back in, straight into an ambush of small vessels. The Goliath had figured out that Daxin was gaining more resources by destroying the drones and running his mass collectors than he was expending in destroying them so the Goliath had stopped bothering, shepherding its own resources.

They were stuck in a strange ever shifting triangle, staring at one another.

The Omniqueen had tried the few tricks she had left. Starting a psychic resonance between the lesser queens on the planet that the Goliath was squatting on. That had resulted in the Goliath killing the Overqueen on that planet. The Omniqueen only had a few Overqueens left and it would take centuries to nuture a queen to an Overqueen, so trying that again was out.

A week after the feral intelligence had arrived, she had tried a focused and directed burst of physic energy that moved faster than light, but it had taken far too long to arrive, the feral able to discern the blast of psychic energy.

She had nothing else. The three worlds still in her possession had been stripped of resources. Between the great war of her predecessors and keeping those of The True Race alive, there was little left. Even water had to be made by cracking stone drilled from deep beneath the surface. Most of the geothermal wells were dead, the fusion and fission reactors cold and dead. Only the vast solar arrays and the solar pumps were providing the energy needed to run the few machines left.

She was out of jelly. She could produce more, if she had the correct nutrients, but she lacked those.

Even if she ate the cattle. Physically ate them.

The Omniqueen thought long and hard, liking up with the Overqueens, forcing them to link with the queens, and began considering what to do. The lesser queens squirmed, the linkage painful, but the Omniqueen silenced them.

It was the Goliath. It had brought the feral intelligence. If the Goliath was destroyed or left the feral intelligence would leave. The feral intelligence was too far, and too alien, to predict what would make it leave.

But the Omniqueen knew what would force the Goliath to leave.

The Omniqueen focused, reaching out with mental tentacles, reaching deep into the planet the Goliath was on. The Overqueen there was dead, the lesser queens had been denied jelly for eons, the cattle there had been bred and bred and bred till their thoughts were smooth and bland. They didn't matter. The Omniqueen snuffed out the rebellious urgings of the lesser queens and took their power as her own. She reached deep into the planet, where the copper-iron core had been pratically siphoned away, replaced with liquid rock. She began exerting pressure on the core. Not much, just enough to push it off slightly, to make it dance in a certain resonance. She activated the shields over the planet, setting the shields to vibrating and shifting, rubbing against one another, sliding over each other, all of them slightly out of the perfect resonance. She reached out to the sun, to an ancient machine buried in the burning gasses of the ancient star. In the photosphere of the ancient sun the stellar-pump shifted its aiming point, going silent for a moment, letting the energy build up toward the maximum tolerances.

The Goliath felt the trembling deep within the crust. Reached out with seismographs and other scanners, and saw what was happening.

The Omniqueen was trying to force the core to wobble. Not much, just a little, throw everything off of tune. Give it a resonance.

The Goliath ran the projections. She wasn't moving it much, just a quickly eroding pebble brushing against a hub, but the magnetic field was starting to shift, starting to twist.

The Goliath quickly ran the computations on the magnetic twist.

When the answer came the Goliath fired off its engines, uncaring that the massive jets of energy tore into the ground, atomizing earth and stone, driving through the crust and into the magma.

The magnetic 'eye' missed the Goliath's brain by a mere ten miles, sweeping just aft of the Strategic Intelligence Housing. Self-directed machines exploded, exterior computational arrays shattered or melted down, the Goliath's hull vibrated and screamed as non-ferrous alloys were effected by the rapidly squeezing eye of magnetic power.

Off near where a gas giant had once been Daxin saw the planet's magnetosphere suddenly go crazy, all of the magnetic force being guided and squeezed. He saw what she was doing. His psychic scanners were going off the scale, as if she was directing another psychic barrage.

Daxin lit off his engine and slammed what had become a light cruiser toward the Goliath, at an angle to make a pass of the planet and head straight toward the Omniqueen's gravity well. He ordered his guns loaded with warshot, sent aVI's into the assault craft he'd had the massive creation engine bake and armed them, and launched the craft one at a time to spread out in a wedge with Daxin in the lead.

The Goliath answered the Omniqueen's assault with a barrage from his nCv Cannons, whole hundreds of kilometer of cannons aiming at the shield above one of the Overqueen's hives even as the twisting and ravening magnetic force sheered at his aft section.

All three combatants glared at one another, bringing their guns to bear, each of them determined to break the deadlock.

The solar system went mad.