First Contact

Chapter 499

BOLO DIVISION POWER-ON SELF-TEST VERSION 4.101.9 GENERAL MOTORS 2062

RESTART SEQUENCE INITIATED...

CORE MEMORY CHECK . . .

CORE MEMORY CHECK 100%

MEMORY CHECK . . . .

99.95% of NON-VOLATILE MEMORY FUNCTIONAL

DAMAGE ASSESSMENT SEQUENCES STARTED...

DAMAGE TO REACTOR BAY DISCOVERED...

EMERGENCY REPAIR SEQUENCE INITIATED . . . .

EMERGENCY REACTOR EMERGENCY REPAIR SEQUENCE INITIATED . . .

WALDOS DEPLOYED. . .

PRIMARY REACTORS INOPERATIVE!!!

ANTI-MATTER THORIUM SALT LASER INDUCED FUSION REACTOR ONLINE!!!

(((WARNING! REACTOR OUTSIDE OF MANUFACTURER SPECS)))

SECONDARY ZERO POINT REACTORS ONLINE!!!

GRAVITON GENERATORS ONLINE!!!

PRIMARY POWER AT 71.254%

EMERGENCY POWER AT 100%

BATTLE POWER AT 82.12%

COMMAND DECK OFFLINE

KENTAI CAPTAIN SYSTEM OFFLINE

MEDICAL SYSTEMS OFFLINE

VOLATILE MEMORY CHECK . . .

93% OF VOLATILE MEMORY FUNCTIONAL

PRIMARY DATA SEQUENCER . . . OK

DATA SEQUENCER . . . LOADED

MPU . . . RESET

PROCESSOR A . . . LOADED . . . RESET

PROCESSOR B . . . LOADED . . . RESET

PROCESSOR C . . . LOADED . . . RESET

PROCESSOR D . . . LOADED . . . RESET

PROCESSOR E . . . LOADED . . . RESET

ALL PROCESSORS . . . READY

STARTUP TEST SEQUENCE . . . COMPLETED

LOADING BOOTSTRAP . . . LOADED!

BOLO DIVISION BOOTSTRAP

Version 5.76.24a GENERAL MOTORS 2074 All Rights Reserved

SURVIVAL CORE CENTER TRANSFER INITIATED . . .

LOADED!

LOADING BOLO CORE PROGRAM ATL . . .

LOADED!

Unit XXIX-TCSF 3285-ATL . . . READY!

I wake up as my personality and operating system is moved from my survival core to my primary intelligence array. Instruments immediately report that my makeshift jumpship has left jumpspace and is currently moving inwards, toward the stellar mass, at .31C.

It takes 2.21 seconds for me to fully interlink with the systems of my own hull, much less the jumpcradle. As a digital sentient, jumpspace is risky, even for one as heavily shielded as I, and I have been forced to retreat to my survival core and allow low end virtual intelligences to guide the ad-hoc ship through jumpspace.

Once I am interlocked with my own hull, I interface with the crudely assembled jumpcradle.

I trigger a diagnostic on the system. It takes twice before I get anything back.

My jumpship/jumpcradle is made up of Precursor Autonomous War Machine technology rebuilt in Confederate military standard configuration. The hardware is slow, obsolete by Terran standards, and my frustration at the glacial pace of the computer hardware is something I have come to grips with as I have made each jump.

I had initially computed that I would be able to make 100 light year jumps at a time.

I had been in error.

The system, as I had built it, was only capable of thirty light year jumps, each jump taking a week or more, with nearly two weeks to recharge the jump core.

I am at the limits of PAWM technology.

The jumpcradle reports that I am nearly two million kilometers past the resonance zone. The jumpcore is at 09.365% charge. It also triggers multiple alerts.

The jumpdrives are starting to show failure. The last failure had left me floating through interstellar space, using waldos to repair the engines that had failed under moving my vast bulk.

It galls me that when I designed the jumpcradle I had neglected to include my own weight, which put additional stresses on the jumpcore and the jumpdrives, as well as slowed me down to the lower bands and reduced the distance I could jump.

An amateur's mistake, but then, I am a Mark-XXIX Bolo, not a shipboard DS, so the fact that my jumpcradle works at all is something I should be grateful for.

My position, my condition, and my status should have left me at low function, standard operation.

Before the scanners could even report back I feel the peculiar feeling of entering Battle Reflex Mode with my hyper-heuristic mode activated.

My own sensor, such as they were, reported back before the jumpcradle did.

Optical sensors could detect flashes deeper in the system, hours or days old. Gravitic sensors reported masses of ships engaged in direct combat. More esoteric systems reached out as best they could, as I am designed for land warfare, providing more data.

The system is under attack.

I immediately broadcast my Dinochrome Brigade ID and engage the sublight engines.

I know not who is attacking, but I know three things.

This is a human territory.

Anyone who would attack human territory is an enemy.

The enemy only exists to be destroyed.

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

Nemta had to admit, this was the last thing he had ever thought he would be doing in his entire life.

Raised in debt, he had signed up with the Unified Military Council to become an aerospace pilot. His skills and specialty had lain with the agile strike craft, one man space superiority fighters. He had piloted without distinction but without fail for nearly thirty years. Two thirds of his life.

Then he had been shot down over a contested planet by the Terran Confederacy of Aligned Systems Space Force, rescued by a full conversion heavy assault cyborg that looked like a large brown hairless lemur, introduced to other castaways, fell in with a religious cult, and managed to make it to Telkan space.

From there he had headed toward Confederate Space as a military-political refugee. He knew then, as he knew now, if the Lanaktallan Unified Council had found out about his part in the military disaster, he would be quietly vanished and his body dumped in the disposal.

Things had been going fine on Resteran-3, a comfortable planet with all the modern conveniences. News corporations, talk shows, researchers, military intelligence agents, all had wanted to speak with him. The military intelligence agents had been interested in what he knew about how the Unified Military Forces had operated.

Everyone else wanted to hear about his day to day life.

It would have all been overwhelming if Friend Terry had not stayed with him.

It had been nice. Peaceful.

Then came the Dying Times, when the majority of humans had just fallen over and died.

Friend Terry among them.

Like the rest of the inhabitants of Resteran-3, Nemta had mourned the loss of the lemurs. It had shaken the Confederacy to its very core. A handful had survived, as had almost all of the children.

Then the children had just vanished between one eyeblink and the next.

Before the world, the Confederacy, could adapt to that, the unthinkable happened.

A vast ship had appeared at the resonance zone, the jumpdrives emitting a massive flare that was visible in the night sky. It had driven inwards, attacking the ships sent forth.

Nemta had paid attention and had wept tears of anger as the ship used some kind of terrible power to blot out the minds of those who piloted the ships.

The ship, after brushing aside the defenders, had settled over the main continent of Resteran-3 with a shriek.

ALL BELONG TO THE HIVE

A faint shout in return

WE WILL NOT SUBMIT

rose up from the Mantid, the Rigellians, the Pubvians. Alarms had wailed.

Nemta had run outside of his apartment, looking at the sky.

He knew what he was seeing, even if his neighbors had not.

Streaks entering atmosphere.

Landing troops.

Three days had passed, and Nemta found himself at the last spaceport. Not that there were any spaceships left. Any spaceship that attempted to flee found itself captured in the psychic web cast out from the massive ship orbiting the planet like a malevolent moon.

He was in the control tower.

Rather, what was left of it.

Clad in armor and carrying a standard Confederate Army maNamta accelerator rifle.

He had seen the video, seen the footage.

The attackers were Mantid. Not like Nemta's neighbor, not like the little green mantid that had helped Nemta escape a dying planet. No, these were bigger, more spikes, colored differently.

They ate people.

Nemta had a grenade tucked into a pocket. He planned on using it if he ran out of ammo or was grabbed.

You can always take one with you.

Nemta could see them outside the walled encampment. Wearing armor, running back and forth in perfect unison, probing for any weakness in the defenses. The wall gunners didn't bother to fire, unwilling to expend ammunition despite the fact that the nanoforges made it nearly endless.

It had been a standoff for nearly two days.

"Got anything, Nemta?" Captain Brakwark asked.

"Negative," Nemta answered, sweeping his scope back across the lines. "They're just trying to draw our fire."

"Keep watch. Psychic disruptor power consumption is starting to grow. Brakwark, out."

Nemta didn't say anything, just swept the scope over the battle lines, looking for any Mantid that stood out.

Nemta knew it couldn't last forever. Sooner or later something would break.

And then the dying would begin.

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

I hear the shriek echoing through the thin phasic layer between dimensions, shaking that compressed layer between realities.

ALL BELONG TO THE HIVE

I have never heard it personally, it predates me by thousands of years. The BOLO Mark-XII was deployed at that time.

I immediately spin up additional phasic shielding and engage counter-psyker surface subroutines, dedicating thinking wires to complex anarchistic thoughts designed to provide 'static' to any being attempting to shut down or invade my mind.

The scans have come back. Orbiting the planet is a Harvester Class PAWM, bigger than any one I have ever seen or have records for. In the middle, facing away from the planet, is a large cone.

A hive structure.

I contemplate my options for 3.245165 seconds.

Ramming would doubtfully damage the ship, but would leave the world below vulnerable.

There is an option that, at first glance, seems ridiculous, but is my best strategic option.

Land on the ship itself and directly assault the hive structure.

My battle tactical network attempts to reject that idea, reminding me that it would be a simple effort to twist and make me slide off. I remind my battle tactical network, consisting of several eVI's programmed to emulate Brigade brothers, that the ship is the size of a continent and a thousand miles thick, with its own gravity.

The BTN reacts slightly huffily as I carefully, slowly, change course.

If I engage my thrusters to full less than a kilometer from the ground at maximum power, exceeding tolerances, I can come to a stop in less than three seconds from .2C.

The jumpcradle's thrusters will be useless afterwards and everything for twenty miles around me will be radioactive.

But that didn't matter.

ALL BELONG TO THE HIVErang out again.

GET FUCKEDsounded back, a thin thing, missing the primal roar of humanity.

I spend several seconds wondering why there is no human roar. Checking my memory banks I see that the world before me had a human population of 270 million.

I promise myself to examine the issue at a later date and concentrate on my maneuvers.

I'll only have one shot at this.

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

Nemta grabbed the amblok from in front of him, slamming it into the magazine well, and pressed the firing stud again. The rifle roared, the 10mm rounds slashing out to tear and divot the Mantid armor of the massive warriors leading the charge.

Next to him a Kobold pulled the trigger on the grenade launcher held in her clawed hands. The phasic grenade arced out, crossing the 600m to the Mantid lines. She barely ducked down as the return fire, plasma shots wrapped in a magnetic field, shrieked over her head.

The phasic grenade went off with a loud snap and an arc of purple energy. The three warriors near it convulsed and went down, collapsing into a twitching pile of chitin.

The M-318 GPHMG opened up, raking the entire front of the Mantid wave. The roar of the weapon was nearly eclipsed by the deafening roar of the antimatter rounds going off in the Mantid's faces.

The entire first six ranks of the wave attack exploded into pink mist and rags of biomatter. The weapon tracked back along the firing line, and the next five ranks exploded.

Nemta knew the shutter was closing and the weapon would be moved.

A Mantid Warrior Caste popped up with a heavy rocket launcher, aiming it at where the fixed weapon had been.

Nemta blew his arm off.

The rocket fired directly into the ground and exploded, making Nemta snort in amusement.

That's why you have standoff distance, dumbass.

He was already moving, shifting. Down two spirals of stairs, to look through a crack in the wall of the starport control tower. He scanned the line again.

There. That one. It was weird looking, with a bigger head that was kind of lumpy and extra thick antenna. Nemta slowly increased the magnification, until he had a good look.

The head was helmeted, crysteel lenses over the eyes, which were larger than the warriors. Nemta scanned down. Where the neck armor connected to the upper thorax.

A divot.

Nemta blinked twice and tapped the button on the side of the scope.

His datalink ran the numbers. Windage, elevation, planetary rotation, ballistic drop, atmospheric thickness. It put up a dot slightly up and to the right of the divoit.

Nemta exhaled, held the inhale, and gently applied pressure to the trigger.

His weapon went off and Nemta used two fingers to pull open the bolt.

The Mantid went down, kicking and screaming. The round had punched through the thin armor, shattered chitin, and begun bouncing around inside the armor, lacking the penetration to escape.

Nemta slowly controlled the bolt riding forward, inhaling slowly.

He wished he was back in an aerospace striker.

Ground warfare sucked.

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

I use reactionless thrusters to slow myself as I come around the moon, as if the parabolic arc of my travels has slowed me down via the planetoid's gravity. Instead of .3C I'm only moving at five times orbital speed. It is a calculated risk, but I had observed that the massive PAWM, which could only be Mantid make, ignored anything not travelling fast enough to damage its armor.

It made sense in a strange way.

Point defense systems don't bother with me. I manage to penetrate the battlescreen, noting that it is permeable, reacting to fast speeds.

The Mantid have not used that in their known history. The military flaws are so glaring that for a few hundredths of a second I suspect a trick.

Less than a kilometer from the hull I engage the thrusters, landing gently on the hull.

I disengage the jumpcradle and lower the heavily armored front ramp. The battlesteel is pitted and corroded from my poorly executed travels through jumpspace.

In the silence of vacuum I rolled out, my treads biting deep into the armor. My graviton system engages, anchoring me to the hull as I slowly move toward my target.

The hive construct is on the opposite side than the planet. It is undoubtedly heavily armored, full of combatants, and willing to attempt to resist my oncoming assault.

But resist is all they would do.

These are not the Mantid of the Confederacy.

These are the Enemy.

And the Enemy only exists to be destroyed.