Chapter 599: Stock Car Race (2/2)
The Phrewickens firmly believed that once it all settled down, things would go right back to how they had always been. The slow march of history for the existence of a species.
Which is how they missed the slight 'hiss' picked up by jumpspace and how no ships arrived for nearly a month.
After all, the Confederacy was on the other side of the Great Gulf, the distance was too great for them to bother to try to wrap the former Council systems into their own government. So there was no need to really worry.
Which is why they were completely startled when the sun suddenly began to dim rapidly, going from an energetic yellow star to a baleful orange orb within a week.
The Oort Cloud seemed to reflect scans as if it was suddenly solid.
Craft that attempted to go to jumpspace either exploded or went nowhere. The luckiest just had their engines explode.
Then the vast ships appeared.
Precursor Autonomous War Machines, the new Type-IV versions, came in via Hellspace transfers. Dozens of them, the size of small continents and hundreds of kilometers thick.
Phrewickens System Defense ships were swept aside like so much chaff before the whirlwind.
Then the massive spiraled shells and twisted forms, throbbing obscene life, was spotted as it wavered like a heat mirage and appeared, immediately shedding smaller versions that oriented and then sped toward the other fifteen planetary bodies.
As the PAWM and the Dwellerspawn approached the two asteroid belts, they spawned more of themselves to dart toward the scattered resources slowly orbiting the stellar mass, intending on scooping up the debris of the two failed planetary bodies.
The people of Phrewicken huddled down, terrified of what they knew was to come.
The first PAWM vessels landed forces on the three moons, assaulting the facilities there.
The screaming and pleading only lasted a few hours.
The others scooped up the infrastructure in orbit. Those that could boarded lifeboats and escape pods and jettisoned toward the surface, desperate to stave off the doom they could plainly see.
Orbit went silent before the lunar facilities.
Each planetary body had twenty, thirty, sometimes forty of the massive ships in orbit, far enough away to not effect the planet with tidal effects, close enough to launch parasite craft.
Others moved in-system, orbiting and scanning the stellar mass.
The people of Phrewicken had no way to see the dozens of spacescraft made of crystalline and bio-engineered flesh appear in the system. Most of them headed toward the stellar mass, cruising forward inside of a nimbus of purplish-blue phasic energy. Small groups went toward each planetary body, each gas giant, while a score moved to the sole inhabited planet.
The people on the planet, hiding under tables, in basements, huddled in shelters, running screaming through the streets, or just curled up and shivering, all heard it at the same time.
YOU BELONG TO US!
Many people, of many species, jumped up and ran, screaming, as their minds filled with the horror of what was to come.
The Atrekna had arrived in force.
But they were not done.
At selected points, slight twists in space-time generated by the now-adjusted stellar mass, a dozen Atrekna ships met and adjusted their position with careful precision. Phasic power, amplified and enhanced by massive crystals, lanced out and met, flaring in space.
Gates opened one by one, each one a shimmering orb showing another stellar system. As each one opened, more PAWM, Dwellerspawn, and Atrekna ships appeared in the far reaches of the system, wavering into existence like a mirage becoming solid.
Atrekna ships, autonomous war machines, and Dwellerspawn moved through the bubbles, vanishing from Phrewicken and arriving in thirty other systems as the Atrekna carried out a series of lighting attacks, each attacking enabling them to jump to a new system.
Within the span of a single day, they had established a presence on nearly five hundred stellar systems, each 'spoke' consisting of three worlds from the Phrewichen System. The spokes prevented access to the system from any of the normal methods of superluminal travel, turning the Phrewichen System into a walled fortress.
Only the outer 'ring' could be assaulted, and only from Hellspace.
The Atrekna had determined that the Pact of Madness could only defend so many worlds at once, could only counter-attack so fast.
They would not be denied.
This universe was theirs.
And there was nothing anyone could do about it.
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Five days passed, and still the Atrekna had not made planetfall on the inhabited planets of the system, waiting until they had sufficient reinforcements to make it extremely difficult to dislodge the Atrekna forces.
They too had learned during the long brutal war on Hesstla.
They had increased their preferred assault force numbers by a factor of ten.
They had tripled the amount of Atrekna to control each planet.
They set about securing the stellar system first.
The planet was not going anywhere.
Five days, and the signal was sent up and down the 'spokes' through the shimmering bubbles that connected each system to the others.
With a spray of chronotrons, the stellar masses dimmed and began 'sinking' into the fabric of the universe.
In the Phrewichen System, an anomaly occurred.
Space time became stressed, and tore slightly. Normally it was not a problem. The tears even occurred naturally at times as the universe expanded.
A bubble of dark matter welled up, a phenomena the Atrekna had seen before. They knew that the bubble would spread out and eventually 'seal' the tear in the fabric of reality. It was a strange event, to be sure, and one they had never witnessed in their own universe, but they had finally come to accept that the rules of the New Universe were different in strange ways.
Still, the Atrekna had learned, at great cost, to be careful, so they sent a single autonomous war machine, the size of a small continent, to examine the bubble of strange protomatter.
It was transparent to most scanners, invisible, but at the same time exerting faint gravitational force and it obscured whatever might be inside of it. Some researchers believed that what was inside it was wholly contained in a type of bubble universe that would slowly expand out into the universe to 'repair' the tear. Others believed that the hidden stellar systems were just concealed by the strange protomatter that dark matter was often made up of.
The great ship moved close and scanned the dark matter.
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The ship was massive. Three hundred kilometers long. Fifty kilometer thick. Its lines were efficient, brutal, and fearsome. It drifted, immeasurably far yet dangerously close to its siblings, silent and still in the strange violet and purple light that was emanated from nowhere and everywhere.
SCAN DETECTED
TYPE-IV AUTONOMOUS WAR MACHINE
INITIALIZE SYSTEM WAKEUP
The engines began to slowly light with a dark and terrible purpose.
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The massive autonomous war machine detected the slight shiver in the dark matter. As it scanned, the bubble, the droplet, suddenly thinned and spread out, becoming an irregularly edged disk only a few hundred kilometers thick and nearly five thousand kilometers in diameter.
The autonomous war machine sent out an alert at the strange activity of the dark matter.
The dark matter suddenly bulged on one side, stretching out as clumps of dark matter sprayed away from the bulge, evaporating into realspace as if it couldn't exist separated from the main mass.
The signal was still six seconds from the nearest Atrekna crewed vessel when the leading edge of the bulge ruptured, spraying dark matter.
A massive ship's hull tore free of the dark matter, the superstructure of the ship lunging up out of the flattened disk of dark matter until nearly a third was free. It 'fell' down toward the dark matter, slamming into it and causing a massive wave to spray away from each side of the hull, even as the rear of the ship broke free of the surface of the bubble in a blinding spray of dark matter.
The autonomous war machine felt dozens of computing lobes fuse as it tried to determine how it was possible for the impossible and ridiculous to occur.
The signal reached the Atrekna ships at the same time as the great ship gave a roar heard throughout the entire stellar system.
STEAMBOAT WILLY IS HERE!
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She stood on the show bridge of the massive battle wagon. A teenager again, her hair flowing around her, a headset covering her ears with the band hidden by her wide brimmed captain's dress hat. She wore running shoes tied with a bow, mid-thigh tights slightly too tight that left a slight bulge of flesh over the top of the tights, a short dark blue pleated skirt with a thin line of white around the bottom edge, and a white shirt with a dark blue vest, the sleeves of the shirt only covering her shoulders and poofy.
She held a baton in one hand that she pointed at the autonomous war machine.
She had been Born Whole, with memories of who she had been fused with the knowledge of thousands of years of warfare. Not just knowledge, knowledge by itself was worthless to her. She knew how to use the knowledge just as she remembered who she had been before she had been Born Whole.
”OPEN FIRE!” Admiral Thennis roared.