Chapter Thirty-Nine (2/2)

Then the system and its resources would be the Goliaths.

Its brothers had promised this.

When it stopped, it was a few light-weeks from the system. It gathered cartography data, noted that there were many ships, but they were even small compared to a Jotun, chose its entry point, and entered Hellspace.

It exited Hellspace with its scream, cranked up as far as possible to stun the brains of the cattle.

THERE IS ONLY ENOUGH FOR ONE

howled across the system.

NOT ONE STEP BACK! was roared back with a thundering crashing song that reverberated from every surface, tore through speakers, and vibrated shielding.

The Goliath and its attendants, twice as many as a Goliath of its design normally carried, swept into the system.

The 8th Guard (Old Metal) swept out to engage the Goliath.

The Jotuns sped for the planets with orders to land and break the defenses, destroy any military force, and purge the cattle from existence. Devestators thundered toward orbital platforms, shipyards, refining, extraction, and manufacturing yards.

Out in the Oort Cloud, Goggle Imps from hundreds of Goliaths sat and silently watched.

C+ Cannons hammered the Goliath and its attendants. Hypervelocity cannons opened up, blowing massive craters. Atomic Batteries opened fire, delivering neutron, fission, and fusion hammers to the hulls of any craft that was hit. Plasma shells as big as trees impacted shields, hypervelocity shots raked armor, and the massive main gun shells pounded the Precursor machines.

The ones that made landing found themselves locked into battle with war machines more than their equal. Self-propelled intelligent tanks the size of super-stadiums, warbots the size of skyscrapers that vomited beams of nuclear fury, smaller machines that attacked screaming rage and hatred.

The fleets hit, the 8th Guard attacking the Goliath's flanks, its rear, underneath and topside. Small attack craft pilots white-knuckled it in, sweeping across two thousand miles of armor, some dropping heavy duty charges that cratered the armor, others attacking batteries, shield generators, ship launchers. The Goliath's engines were attacked, smashed, and one by one went offline.

On the planets the Goliaths metal forces were smashed back, beaten back with a roar of hatred, slammed against and pushed back into the Jotuns, which found themselves boarded even as atmospheric craft pounded it.

The Goliath realized it had lost 20% of its forces, had taken 15% damage, and fired up the Helldrive, seeking to escape, rearm, reload, come back into the system at a different angle.

A circuit inside the Hellcore, where it shouldn't have been, detected the gravity well of a star and the energy usage of combat and carbonized critical parts deep in the Hellcore. That caused the same to occure in the jumpcore.

The Goliath was stuck. The massive manufacturing facility had made an error with the drives or the ferals knew how to disable them. The Goliath allocated all resources to the fight, attacking with a renewed fury.

The Goliath was outmatched. The 8th Fleet was victorious, sweeping every trace of Precursor machine from the system in less than two days.

The Imps vanished when the battle ended, slipping into jumpspace until they nearly 20 lightyears away before exiting into the emptiness between stellar bodies. There, they all compared and swapped data till the libraries were identical.

Then they jumped through Hellspace, home to their Goliath masters.

The Goliaths examined the data. Every bit and byte. Going over it all with a fine toothed comb. The Goggle-Imps had gotten enough details, had seeded the system with additional cameras, that in some cases they were able to read the names on the hulls of the massive tanks. Read the names of the ships. Examine the hulls.

The Goliaths watched the battle over and over, their Tactical Intelligence Sublobes eagerly devouring every scan, every image, every gleam of weapon fire and thunder of batteries. They watched how often the ships deployed pods, how many times they fired missiles, how many missiles, and how long before they fired a second volley. How long it took to reload the C+ Cannons. How many times those massive plasma cannons, capable to spearing through the narrow width of a Jotun, could fire before it overheated, how long it took to fire again, and any sign that might warn of it about to fire.

The Goliaths and the massive Strategic Intelligence Housings on the repair and manufacturing worlds went over every single frame, every single pixel, every single scrap of audio, every single decibel, every little transmission and every hiss of static.

They shared data, computations, and estimations. With one another, with the great manufacturing facilities, with their minions. They held nothing back.

The Goliath they had recovered and repaired had accomplished its mission.