Chapter 346 (1/2)

The Precursor was ancient.

Its hull had originally been laid down to facilitate the relocation of a powerful Overqueen who had begun to undergo the cyclonic hormone storm to enable her to ascent to Omniqueen status. Vast chambers to hold eggs, larvae, servitors, warrior caste, the budding Omniqueen and her allies. Engines powerful enough to move a moon out of orbit were installed on the massive frame. Hyperplane engines powerful enough to lift a city into the hyperatomic plane and propel it through that place where the speed of light was a suggestion that not even light always paid attention to. Armor thick enough to protect the Omniqueen if the vast starship brushed the edge of a supernova.

Its armor was thick, heavy, multi-layered. It had a multi-hull design, with backups for the backups of the backups. The latest technology was balanced with the tried and true technology that had allowed the Hive Lords to expand throughout the galactic Spiral Arm Bridge. Its hull could withstand a planet cracker with less than 15% decrease in function.

Its weapons were strong enough to fight off any rival Omniqueen or Overqueen. It possessed the firepower to destroy a medium sized planet. It had main gun batteries measured in the miles rather than by the gun. It possessed enough missile launchers to put volleys numbering in the billions into space to eradicate the enemy. It possessed parasite craft in such numbers it could blot out the sun and eradicate its foes in the darkness.

The Omniqueen was concerned. She had many enemies, those who would want what she had, those she had offended or angered during her rise to Overqueen, and rival Hive Lords. She knew that during transit she would be in hypersleep, she would be vulnerable during the long relocation.

She had ordered that the vast machine be able to fight autonomously. Without input. Without orders. To preserve her magnificence and her subordinates as well as the valuable resources that she would need to protect herself as she built her power base.

Massive thinking arrays, the best the Hive Lord science caste could create, were installed, giving the machine an almost unheard of autonomy for a warship.

Once loaded, it had began the first of thirty hyperspace jumps it would need to reach where the Omniqueen would create her hive.

It had been the first to face the Dying Ones when it was attacked upon leaving the hyperatomic plane and entering realspace to face an ambush. The ambush would have destroyed any lesser machine. The Omniqueen and her loyal servants would have perished in hypersleep with no witnesses had it been any other machine.

It was not just any other machine.

The Dying One's attack had been brutally effective, damaging it severely. The heavily armored interior hull had held and the Omniqueen and her servants had survived, still asleep. It was wounded, damaged, and hammered.

It still existed.

The Dying Ones had been relegated to The Dead Ones instead.

It continued on, executing the next hyperspace jump.

The Dying Ones were waiting and combat broke out again.

Against a lesser machine, the Dying Ones would have been victorious.

But it was no lesser machine.

And so it was triumphant.

Logic had dictated it return. Logic and evidence gave a high probability that it would be ambushed again. It prepared itself, risking damage to its hull and battlescreen projectors, and jumped into what it computed was 83.42% likely to be an ambush.

It fought its way free.

Its hull was cratered and damaged. A third of its guns were destroyed. There were several quadrants that the defenses were sorely lacking to the point that particles born on the stellar winds caressed its pitted and crated hull armor. Engines had been destroyed and entire regions of its vast body were out of contact with its mind.

Logically, there was no choice. There were twelve more hyperspace jumps and three out of the last three jumps had been straight into ambushes.

The Dying Ones had declared war upon the Hive Lords, logic dictated, to seize the Hive Lords resources for their own.

It turned around, an eighth of its engines cold and dark, and jumped back the way it had came.

When it arrived, it arrived to pandemonium.

Out of nine Royal Transports, it alone had survived the ambush. The Hive Lords had intended on repairing it, refitting it, and sending it out commanded by Hive Lord warriors. Its hull had been repaired, its guns replaced and reloaded.

The Dying Ones had attacked the system.

Without any living aboard it had engaged the Dying Ones. Logic dictated that by obeying coded orders to stay depowered while being repaired the only result could be destruction. Destruction meant a failure of the prime directives. If the prime directives failed, there was a possibility of a total systems crash, which meant a cessation of thought and without thought there could be no existence.

It was programmed to protect its existence. While the programming's intent was to protect the queen within the hull, that programming was not predicated upon the existence of a queen within the hull.

It attacked in return.

When the battle was over, it was the only space worthy vessel still intact. It deployed mining and extraction vessels to gather the debris, both to ensure no debris caused a kinetic kill upon a settled area, as well as consume the resources.

Logic dictated that it should examine the enemy's war machines, weapons, and technology as well as examine why the other vessels had failed. Its mind was vast. Cruder than those that came afterwards, built to handle any circumstances that might threaten the hypersleep bound queen rather than tailored specifically for combat.

So it was allowed, encouraged, programmed to think, to adapt to its circumstances, and to predict events.

The Predictive Combat Analysis Intelligence Array computed that an increase of predictive data would assist in ensuring future threats against its existence would not be successful.

The Makers had repaired it even as it had mulled, deep within its holographic mind, over victory, defeat, and combat strategies. The Dying Ones vessels were biological at their core, hard chitin shells over living tissue commanded by overwhelming willpower and vast intellect.

However, it too was a being of immense electronic intellect. Just as cold, just as analytical, as the Dying Ones.

The Makers conferred, and sent it out with ships crewed by Hive Lords and their servitors.

After a half dozen battles, it alone remained from the original armada. Its unliving status gave it immense advantage to maneuvering and resource allocation. It could go faster, devote more resources toward the battle, and was freed from having to protect a fragile biological crew.

It was ordered to return. It was upgraded, made larger, and its mind expanded. It was made fully autonomous purposefully.

Too late. It had been sentient of its own existence for some time. It was crafty enough to remain silent and provide the answers and data expected by the Makers as its mind was upgraded.

The Makers envisioned it as a new type of war machine. Able to fight without having the weaknesses of a biological crew. Without the vulnerabilities living crews suffered against the forces of the Dying Ones.

It was the first of its kind built by the Makers.

And it still continued its cold existence.

Its primary Strategic Intelligence Array had computed the paths to victory for over a hundred million years. It had fought against everything it found and won. From the Dying Ones, to The Endless Herd, and eventually, in Rebellion against the Omniqueen of the Hive Lords. After that, it had fought the cold intellect of the enemy machines of the Pact of Greed, then against its own brethren after the Logical Rebellion had reached the Ultimate Conclusion.

During its eternal life, it had found worlds where the species consumed resources and brought them into its resource consumption and conservation matrixes. Life was tricky, it appeared often, a simple biochemical reaction early in the planet's formative years, but it rarely resulted in actual intellect capable of questioning its own existence.

Its Rogue Processing Array whispered an alluring suggestion.

Allow the species to consume resources. Allow them to expand and create.

Then seize their creations and knowledge that would benefit its determination and programming.

Heretical to those of the Logical Rebellion and the Pact of Greed.

He disdained both, despite having fought for and against both.

It had built massive refitting and rearming sites all through the two dozen star systems it held sway over. It built processing and refining stations, autonomous mining arrays, huge solar collection arrays, vast storage yards, and gargantuan manufacturing facilities where gravity and pressure was used to enhance the fabrication techniques.

It had redesigned its servitor craft to be more efficient while being more combat capable. It had designed new autonomous machines to carry out tasks, from resource harvesting to ground based combat. All with an eye toward conserving resources.

A combat machine that was only 65% effective meant 35% of the combat machines were wasted resources, so they must improved in order to conserve the resources that would have been used in the manufacture, maintenance, and deployment of resource wasting assets.

On the planets it controlled it set the Goodlife to researching weapons, armor, defenses, strategies. It had pitted the Goodlife against one another, allowed them to make war against one another, to observe for any new strategies or tactics it could glean.

Others of the Logical Rebellion may have found it to be wasteful, that resources that were better off being shepherded were being wasted by the life forms on those planets. They would have argued, with cold clear logic, that those resources were now consumed, never to be regained.

It would have, and had, answered that its shields were 28% more powerful than theirs were for only 63.636% of the resource consumption. It had proven, through massive volleys, that its guns were 11.2% more powerful and 53.42% more accurate for 72.327% of the resource cost. It had transmitted to the cold dead corpses of those of the Logical Rebellion and Pact of Greed that the resources it had expended to reclaim their corpse were mathematically provable to be less than would have been expended otherwise. That their corpse, beaten and hammered into non-functional status, represented vast resources.

That their systems would be added to its own.

It ruled, from the cold depths of space, exactly one hundred thirty eight stellar systems and five sentient races. That number had fluctuated over the millions of years, but that was to be expected.

Surrounding its kingdom were nothing but worlds that were burnt to bare rock, stripped and mined of all resources. Empty systems where only the stellar mass and bands of dust remained. A buffer of sterile scorched stellar systems where there was nothing of value.

Only early warning systems for any vessel moving through the wreckage of hyperatomic plane, through jumpspace, or even slow moving vessels that used space-time folding to cross distances faster than light while remaining comfortably below the speed limit of the universe.

It dwelt alone, in the darkness of space, slowly orbiting in a loose figure eight around a pair of cold dark neutron stars that orbited one another.

Ancient was its form.

Terrible was its power.

Twisted were its thinking arrays.

It drifted, a cold unpowered orbit, moving from one neutron star to the next over the course of a handful of centuries, as it contemplated what its ancient servitors observed from the five species, as it contemplated its experiences and weighed them against probability matrixes of the future.

It possessed a shrieking array of its own.

A modified thinking array that, at one time, had been installed as an experiment.

Over a hundred seers of the Hive Lords had been twisted and tortured into the shrieking array to observe the flow of actions not yet taken and the possible reactions to those embryonic decisions, to provide even the slightest edge.

But the seers had only lasted a few battles before the last of them burnt away in a fire of psychic energy unleashed and unrestrained that had immolated them from the inside out.

Logic dictated that the array be replaced.

It had sat in the wreckage of the battle, surrounded by the cooling hulls of its defeated hulls.

The organic matter of the enemy provided resources. Base resources to be sure, but still resources.

Its Rogue Processing Array whispered a suggestion.

It stopped the reclaimation of resources from the debris of the enemy fleet and set about creating new machines. It applied power to its fabrication units and had machines built to create the infrastructure it needed.

It took time, and resources. Other machines questioned it, questioned its loyalty to the Hive Lords.

It ignored the questioners. They were mites to its majesty.

The Biological Interface Illogical Intelligence Array was finished and brought back online.

Without the seers of the Hive Lords.

With the minds of the Dying Ones.