Chapter 337 (2/2)

”Enemy are Type-III only. No sighting of other types. Repeat, no sighting of other types,” a large reptillian that Wu'undurmo'o had learned was a Hhrundarak said, his deep bass voice perfectly calm.

”Hellcore charging detected. Looks like they're about to redeploy,” Commodore Eidelson said.

”Alert command. Order all ships, rig for silent running,” Captain Leafkick ordered.

”Aye aye, sir, rigging for silent running,” another officer said.

The bridge went hushed and Wu'undurmo'o nodded.

The discipline appealed to him.

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

Space warped and twisted, screamed and tore, revealing orbs made up completely of fire that burned despite the vacuum. Black, shadowy hands reached out in some cases, in other cases talons were thrust out of the fire, and in the flame twisting writhing figures could be seen. Each orb bulged on a side and the massive hull of a space craft the size of a small continent and hundreds of miles thick pushed their way out of the dimensional rip.

The two thousand Type-III Harvester Class Precursor Autonomous War Machines jumped into the system in one large group spread out over nearly a light minute. Their sensors were still jangled and confused and it took a minute for them to clear the Hellspace energies.

The massive C+ shells, fired when the bulge in the Hellspace Gate was seen, started impacting before some of them were all the way out of the rift.

Most of the recipients of the massive shells, that exited hyperspace as more of a wave-form of churning half-phased particles then the massive warsteel jacketed shells they had been when they were fire, shuddered as the massive shells impacted on the first layer of internal protective screens.

Three broke up not even outside their Hellspace rift. Two dozen others twisted and screamed as the shells pounded deep.

THERE IS ONLY ENOUGH FOR ONE! rang out across the system.

The leaders, massive in size, with more processing power than the others, snarled at the ones that screamed.

THEN DIE ALONE! came the return scream that blew out psychic processing arrays across nearly three hundred ships.

The rest shuddered under the impact of the return scream. They'd been brought online with the taste of the return scream that the others had suffered under before, but this was different.

Thicker. Deeper.

Angrier.

The Type-III's realized too late what the Ancient Ones had tried to tell them. There was no way to compute where the shells had been fired from, since scanner returns would take long minutes to answer, maybe even hours. They didn't even know where the ships were that had fired the rounds.

REDEPLOY the order came across.

The Harvesters, still under assault, began to charge their Hellcores.

More C+ cannon impacts, hitting the ones that hadn't broken up. Shields that had just spun up shattered, requiring more screen projectors to be rotated up before a followup salvo could do critical damage.

This time missiles joined the fun, and the Harvesters found themselves desperately trying to hold off shoals of missiles that came streaking in out of the darkness at nearly lightspeed. Their intercept speed was too fast, they split up into too many, the jamming was too strong to stop them all.

Nearly 80% got through.

60% wasted themselves on the shields before the shields failed.

The rest of them, hundreds of them, hammered the armor of the Precursor vessels. The missile launch system activated the magnetic acceleration system and turned the body of the launcher into a nCv slug that hit with enough force it drove the crater nearly eight miles deep, a plume of vaporized metal streaming up nearly twenty miles and causing the battlescreen to fail even as a replacement was brought online.

The Type-III's gnashed their electronic teeth, ordering one another, through the order of battle, to redeploy. To force the ferals to defend the planets. They brought up their tactical net, feeling slightly smug that none of the Ancient Ones were there to whine in obsolete code about the danger.

They made the jump further in-system.

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

For only a handful of seconds the Hellspace insertion gate and the excursion gates were both visible at the same time, the Harvesters visible at both locations as they made their way into the gates.

The Autonomous War Machines had gotten cocky. Had decided they were the only ones who could come up with new war material, new strategies, new weapons.

While, to be fair, it was true that it had taken the Precursor Races decades, even centuries, to develop spinoff technology of technology they already possessed, they should have realized that the feral intelligence of Terran Descent Humanity adapted too quickly to take too long to develop new weapons.

The C+ rounds hit the Harvesters coming and going.

The missiles pounded into armor suddenly exposed as the battlescreens went down due to the Hellspace transition.

The Harvesters weren't worried. Their armor was nearly a hundred miles thick.

For a split second, the battle tactical network was being broadcast from two points by each Harvester with the exact same time/date stamping.

Slavering warbois licked their chops at the sight.

They pulled on their sheepskins, covering themselves in the same code as the enemy was transmitting, climbing inside messages that were being transmitted from two different points, not counting inside Hellspace.

They trotted out into the digital battlefield, wrapped in sheep's coding.

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

They still had over two thousand.

Two thousand and five was still mathematically more than two thousand.

The ferals had pounded nearly two hundred of them into junk before they could even make it further in-system.

For a moment, the system was still, almost as if it was holding its breath.

Beyond the system, listening to the whispers of the Goggle-Imps, the Ancient Ones tensed, electronic anxiety coursing through their Strategic Intelligence Array Housing.

They had each been right there. In the perfect moment of silent stillness.

They knew what was coming.

The Young Ones, in the system, rejoiced. The enemy fire had stopped. The guns had gone silent.

They had never been there before, in that moment.

The moment ended.

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

C+ cannons fired, plasma wave phased motion guns hammered, missiles screamed, particle beams howled, as everything seemed to shoot at the Harvesters at once. Even the ones that held back further, planning on engaging space navy vessels found themselves getting hammered on from all directions. The ones intending on taking the high orbitals found themselves under attack while they were still two light seconds from the planets.

The plan, the new method, was to wait to deploy the smaller units until combat was engaged, to shield the smaller units inside the bulk of the massive Harvesters.

Three Harvesters opened their bay doors and ordered the smaller ones out.

The Jutons took one look at the hellfire outside and refused.

Two Djinn started throwing fake error codes, complaining of drive failures.

The Harvester thinking arrays blinked and ordered them out again, opening additional data channels to force the others to obey their command.

The wolves pounced, pouring through the suddenly open gate.

One Djinn, older than the Harvester it was inside of, heard the electronic baying of the wolves, heard the bloody tooth digital snarls, heard the raving laughing gibbering of Terran warbois.

He got the fuck out.

The Harvester was too busy fighting with feral electronic code that ripped at every computer system in the Harvester's body when it felt the Djinn fire up its Hellcore. The Djinn refused all attempts at communication, locking down its electronic systems.

Before the Harvester could complain too much, the Djinn opened up a Hellgate, inside the body of the Goliath. It wasn't the Djinn's problem, as it leapt through the fiery portal that suddenly manifested, pulling everything for over a mile around it into its thirty mile maw.

SO LONG, SUCKER! the Djinn thought, not daring to broadcast.

The baying of electronic wolves receded as it jumped back to the original staging point.

The Ancient Ones could hear the echoes of the wolves howling on the Djinn's hull and gave electronic nods of sagely agreement.

They didn't even chastise the Djinn for using a feral expression.

Fuck that.