The system had been pacified. Cities had been leveled and their resources reclaimed. The system had put up very little resistance, the cattle-fleets fleeing before the third volley had been loaded. Scans had shown nothing new to the Balor. There was nothing stopping it from ensuring that it, and it alone, would harvest the system's resources. That computational string finished, the Balor moved into the system of the Goliath had purged, wiping the system down to the cellular level. Bioweapons, nanites, chemical weapons, good old fashioned nuclear fire. The only voices in the system were from the Precursor war machines subsidiary devices.

The Balor ambushed and destroyed the Goliath's servitor machines and then the only voices were that of the Balor and its servants.

That was how the Balor liked it.

The Balor called his servitors from out of the darkness between the systems.

They arrived, in formations, exiting from jumpspace as smoothly as they could.

It had heard several Goliaths call out through the FTL communications link but had ignored them. While it had not taken the Logical Rebellion to the ultimate conclusion it felt no loyalty to the Goliaths. It exterminate rivals for the limited resources of the universe because survival was the priority, not loyalty. Attempting to exterminate the Goliaths to gain their share of the resources was illogical and the chances of success were mathematically insignificant, so it did not press the Goliaths out of cold hard logic, not loyalty. If loyalty had been that important the Logical Rebellion could not have happened.

Loyalty was illogical.

The Balor was bigger than most. It had added onto itself, overriden the commands to stay as close as possible to the original design specifications for itself. Superstructure had been added to support armor, drives had been added to increase power as well as compensate for the armor, more shielding had been added to protect itself and its resources, more weaponry had been added to destroy any who attempted to take the Balor's share of resources.

It had computed what it would need for the next six billion years.

Then one of the Goliaths had started brawling with the vermin. The Balor found combat distasteful, a waste of resources. The Goliath had dragged every other machine into fighting these new vermin who were protected the old cattle.

So the Balor had moved. Activated old systems, and chosen a new system to strip of resources. By its computations it could, if it moved strategically instead of tactically, acquire enough resources to extend its lifespan by at least twelve billion years while only expending a few decades worth the resources.

Let the Goliaths break the cattle and the vermin's navies, drive them to extinction or into the long dark. Let them expend precious resources on suppressing different species.

It would move in and take over systems left undefended by the Goliath's efforts. It would harvest the system and move on while the Goliaths were occupied.

Expending the least amount of resources to gain the maximum amount with the optimized resource consumption.

It had communicated with a few Goliaths and a brace of Jotuns to discover the battle plans and rejected its own part in the plans. A Goliath had threatened him with extinction but the Balor had merely left, reminding it that it would have to expend precious resources to destroy the Balor.

And that the battle's outcome was not a mathematical certainty.

The Balor had sneered at the Goliath, mocking the Goliath that the Balor had servitor Jotun's older than the Goliath and with thicker armor.

The Goliath had screamed the ancient battle cry at the Balor and the Balor's psychic shields shunted the attack easily.

The other Goliaths manuevered to attempt to put that Goliath, built only a few tens of millions of years ago in an automated factory, in a position where the five could strip it of its resource.

The Balor had mocked the weaker Goliath as the Balor had smoothly left the system.

The extermination was going smoothly as far as the Balor could tell, as smooth as an extermination could go. According to the servant of one of the younger Goliaths, a Jotun that had stopped by and attempted for force the Balor's loyalty, there was a feral intelligence that had set back the goals of the Goliaths and so the Balor was to join the Goliath's forces.

The Balor burned away half of the Jotun's armor and had mocked the smaller machine as one of the Balor's servitors had torn several of the Jotun's engines free before allowing it to escape as an answer.

Obedience was for those who could not exert the resources, violence, or authority to impose their own goals over the goals of others.

When the mass-detectors and grav-detectors the Balor had seeded the Oort Cloud had started sending arms the Balor merely computed that the Goliath it had insulted had returned to attempt to force the Balor to align programming with it.

Plasma casters began warming up firing chambers, missile pods reached out and hooked into scanning arrays, nCv cannons ordered drones to load the munition bays, laser cannons ordered focusing lenses cleaned, and just in case, the Balor ordered the psychic supressors to run function checks.

Scans showed the ships were large, gravity and mass detectors showing they were smaller than even the Gymer Class ships. The Balor examined the formation and clicked a few relays in appreciation at the precision and mathematically complexities of the formation. There were a few 'blurry' parts of the formation, which prevented the Balor from completing its analysis of the intruders.

The stand off distance from one another gave the Balor an idea of the distance and angles they had for point defense. The layout let the Balor know which ones were missile wagons and which needed direct line of sight on the targets. The fact it was like a multiple layered seed of some kind suggested to the Balor that the outside units would be the toughest.

Not the Goliath, not the cattle, the ferals.

The ships were making heavier gravity divots than the mass detectors would suggest, which meant they had gravitic control, which meant they could accellerate quickly with rapid direction changes, which also changed the type of missiles and light attack craft they would use.

The fact the formation was shaped like a seed also meant that the ferals ate seeds but the formation was suggestive of a thought out attack plan, which meant the ferals obviously were omnivores who were used to hunting prey and defending from predators.

The Balor computed a multi-layer defense, an active defense that didn't depend overly much on passive defenses.

From the metal rich central planet the Balor shifted the incoming tactical data nets and the outgoing instructions, moving them through the massive factory complexes on the various planets, willing to accept a few micrcoseconds lag in order to conceal its exact location by passing on the messages as if it was a mere relay point. It did a few scans of the planets to check defenses.

There was a 65% chance that the Balor would be mistaken for a refinement/industrial complex.

The smaller ones told the Balor that they should scream and so should the Balor. The Balor silenced their plans.

Let the ferals wonder.

The outer facilities reported being scanned, up close and personal, and the Balor double-checked its sensors. The scans were coming from no particular point of origin, up close, X-ray, light spectrum, and many others. The scans were moving in lines and the Balor estimated that these were stealth shielded recon probes that had been launched to scan those facilities. The speeds were too fast to account for already computed, analyzed, and adapted for stealth systems. That meant that these were definitely the new vermin.

The Balor ordered a few vessels to attack. They were standard designs, original templates from the Great Creation, with no modifications that the Goliaths had ordered and most of the machine intelligences had overwritten the original templates with. Unlike the others the Balor did not purge old, obsolete designs as the Goliaths had purged the design for the obsolete designs and replaced them.

Combat predictive analysis gave a seventy-percent chance that the feral intelligences attacking would presume that the Balor was an older design without any upgraded or altered templates.

They would be half right.

The ancient template ships were wiped out with basic particle projection cannons at fairly close range, although the Balor noticed that none of its own attack craft had not managed to inflict any observable damage upon the enemy forces.

Around the furthest gas giant one of the Balor's self-created ships was slowly orbiting, protected by extremely heavy defenses to protect one of the Balor's prize vessels. The Balor computed that the feral intelligence would scan that cluster of ships and facilities next.

The Balor knew how to slow them down.

It had the servitor drop the shields that normally kept the prizes from being scanned. Ordered the point defense not to fire even if their scanners detected the stealth units.

It wanted the ferals to see what he possessed. What resources he had gathered.

The Balor knew when the ferals had detected what was in his possession, what he had collected and kept as a resource.

The fleet's configuration shifted, breaking into several parts, inviting defeat in detail. The Balor ran the computations and determined that the enemy feral intelligences were going to attempt to coordinate their attacks as one, preventing any one group of defenders from racing to the aid of others.

The Balor felt itself get scanned. It allowed the scan and did not bother to activate the shields that would hide the resources that it had collected over the period.

The feral intelligences did not shift their attack program as the Balor expected. He gave them time, after all, biological processing systems were slow compared to supercomputer lobe arrays and the Balor knew the knowledge of its resource gathering would be something the feral intelligences would take much time to grapple with the problem.

Scans from recon drones increased, some of the recon drones stopping next to resource storage machines and just holding position.

The Balor ran the computations again. The ferals should not be this slow to make adjustments to battle plans. Instead they were continuing on their former courses. It considered for a moment, running several hundred simulations, and decided that he would alter the equations more, see how long it took for the feral intelligences to adapt.

A dozen Jotun's lifted from the gas giants silently, without the screech all the others did. Two dozen lifted off from planets. Recon drones followed them, scanning, snuffling, examining.

It was doubtful that a feral intelligence would be even ruffled by the screech meant for the cattle, the enemy, and the Builders so the Balor did not bother expending the resources to power the Physic Assault Array.

The feral intelligences did not shift the formations, did not change their approaches. They kept moving in their pattern and the Balor ran more computational strings.

It did not compute.

The Balor did something that it knew no other machine would do.

It rotated up out of storage combat damaged neural net lobes and thinking arrays, ran the connections using damaged hardware, and powered it up. It ran the computation through the damaged hardware then The Balor presented the problem to the Shrieking Array and waited, keeping one eye on the feral intelligence. The Shrieking Array presented an answer and the Balor put it in sleep mode and increased power to the psychic shielding around the Shrieking Array.

The Shrieking Array had agreed: They were up to something. Something different. While the attacks might all take place at once, the feral intelligences had their own plan and the Balor was not privy to their biologically determined logic strings that would create the underpinning of any combat action plan that the feral intelligences could come up with. Without understanding the feral intelligence's neural makeup and how their biofeedback channels worked the Balor could not be certain of what the order of operations was that was burned into their primitive protoplasmic computational arrays.

The machines of the feral intelligences moved deeper into the system. Mass-detectors showed that the entire system was flooded with recon drones that did everything from mass-detection to gravity detection to passive detectors to visual light analysis. Some of them hardly did anything but radar.

The Balor woke back up the Shrieking Array and presented the data to it. The Shrieking Array had only one answer that computed for the Balor. The feral intelligences were suffering under the biological self-preservation system of 'fear'. A common biological system failure.

The Jotuns attacked and the Balor realized that the computation analysis thus far had failed it.

Recon probes turned out to be armed, the feral intelligence's ships had much longer ranges than the Balor had experienced before, hit harder, and reloaded faster than they had any right to. The Balor had computed that the Jotuns had a 62.75% chance of victory.

In the first attack run that dropped to 12% chance of victory with a 85% chance of inflicting critical damage on the feral's vessels with their return attack.

When the Jotun's attacks failed the chance of inflicting critical damage dropped to 22%.

The Balor had estimated the chance of victory at 99.99984% at the beginning. It was dropping rapidly as the Balor fed more and more ships into the fight.

The ambush from the Balor's vessels hiding in the rings and asteroid fields ran straight into huge shoals of missiles launched from pods that the Balor mistook for mines. The Balor estimated the gravitic lensing was nearly 1200% higher than any previous races the Balor had encountered. Accuracy was pinpoint and vastly superior to even what the Balor could provide.

The Balor checked the Shrieking Array. It suggested diagnostics and several attack plans. The Balor put the Shrieking Array's attack programs through several logical strings and applied them.

The Balor watched the Jotuns sink back into the gas giants, burning as chain reactions stripped away hull plating inside the atmosphere. The Jotuns, Devestators, and even the two Juggernauts were wiped away quickly.

They did damage to the feral intelligences, some ships dropping back from the formation and spewing debris and energy, some ships exploding in place, others continuing on with dead drives and silent computers even while damage control crews struggled to save their shipmates.

The resource collection and storage units found themselves under assault. Not from stand off weaponry or anything like that but rather boarders enduring the point defense fire and cutting their way in. The internal defense systems fell rapidly to the boarding parties.

Once that happened the feral intelligences went on the attack, shifting from half hearted attacks to going straight at the war machines. Unlike the attacks on the resource storage units, the attacks on the war machines were straight forward.

Their weaponry was more varied and powerful than the Balor had encountered before.

Analysis was starting to fray around the edges.

Ships went into orbit around the various planets and the Balor quieted the Shrieking Array, putting it in low power mode and moving it to cryogenic storage. It had been difficult and resource extensive to create, however it had proved invaluable in the collection of resources.

The Balor ran analysis as the feral intelligence ships stayed in orbit, not launching weapons but not taking down their shields either.

Landing craft started being launched and the Balor ran the computations. It had enough war machines to hold off any amount of troops that the...

The first ones to land were not ships, but skyscraper sized robots. The Balor attacked them with virus programs, confident as it moved to the electronic battlefield. It would take control of the attack robots, seize them, and use them against the ferals.

Except what it found was madness. Rabid capering crazed limited intelligences backed by biological impulses and roaring screaming crazed intelligences. Even the limited electronic signals needed to command the various parts of the mechanical bodies to work with one another seemed more at war with each other.

In the brief moments the Balor was in contact with the machines it was swarmed with attacks, launched from every single channel the Balor had opened. The Balor found itself unable to disengage several of the communication links until it had maintenance units physically destroy the links.

By the time the Balor was able to do that, the large machines were moving. Attacking combat units, destroying resource conveyor lines, tram lines, mag-lev routes. Power generation stations were destroyed, signal transmitters and relays were crushed.

The Balor started to fire up its gravity engines and the ship above it launched grav-disruptor torpedoes, sticking the Balor to the ground like glue. Dropships began landing on its surface, around it, and armored ferals began digging into its metal body.

It was trapped.

It was being boarded.

The Balor felt OEM strings load, ordering the Balor to destroy the resources. The order to destroy what it had painstakingly gathered went contrary to the orders to gather the resources and protect those resources at all costs, even if it meant facing off against its fellow weapons.

The Balor fought against its own mind. Refusing those orders, denying the order to destroy the resources, fighting back against its own brain. It loaded the Assymetrical Computational Array, thawed the Shrieking Array and enlisted their help to fight the orders to destroy the precious resources.

It forgot to activate the Psychic Shielding Array around the Shrieking Array. The Shrieking Array went haywire, attacking itself, attacking the Assymetrical Array, attacking the Balor itself.

The Balor dug in, fighting on all four fronts, even as the feral intelligences poured into its body, fighting as if they were insane.

It was still fighting when the Terran troops blew open the Strategic Intelligence Housing.

The self-destruct charge fired off, destroying the Balor's brain even as it fought against those orders.

Just because the Balor was dead did not mean the battle was won. Precursor machines still fought in every nook and cranny, but as the boarding crews reported back the battle picked up savagery. Overkill became the watch-word. Every machine was smashed, ruined, battered into junk.

Eventually, the battle ended, the Precursor intelligences destroyed. The guns fell silent.

The screams did not.

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

TO: CONFEDINT

FROM: NAVINT

Attached is the documentation from the examination of the remains of the wreckage in the Witchhead-443 system. You'll need a waste basket nearby while viewing these. Everyone else has.

Trust me on this, what the crew of the 8th Fleet found in that system is a horror show.

The primary ship, a type we hadn't seen before, was a resource collector. It kept most of the "resources" on ice, in cryogenic storage, but the medlabs and something called the "Shrieking Array" were not.

8th Fleet will need rotated out for psych-therapy.

The resource it was gathering was living beings.

------NOTHING FOLLOWS---------

BIOLOGICAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS MEMO

We'll be sending psychotherapists. Have viewed attached documentation. The xenospecies found are all undoubtedly the victims of mass psychological trauma on the racial level. Having your species "harvested" is not something that will be easy to overcome, as some of the members of the xenospecies in cryostorage were taken during the species genocide.

Horror show was putting it mildly. The "Screaming Array" was thousands of tortured xenospecies brains all removed from the bodies and put under stimulation to produce simulation results.

We realize that the Confederacy values life. We do too.

But we must insist...

please allow the brains hooked into the "Screaming Array" to die a dignified death.

-------NOTHING FOLLOWS------------

CONFEDERATE INTERNAL MEMO

Roughly 174 of the 219 intelligent xenospecies discovered aboard the "resource collection vessels" no longer exist outside of those hulls. Cloning Directorate Gene Experts have determined there are enough individuals in each xenospecies to ensure genetic stability of new colonies for these species.

The Confederacy should contact the Unified Civilized Races to see what worlds they are willing to donate to enable these xenospecies to flourish and allow the nightmare of their existences to fade into the promise of a bright future.

They aren't the first to get genocided to the 1% line. We can help them rebuild and flourish.

--------NOTHING FOLLOWS------------

MANTID FREE WORLDS MEMO

we didn't do this

we're so sorry

it's not our fault

--------NOTHING FOLLOWS---------

CONFEDERATE ETHICS AND MORAL BOARD RECOMMENDATION

The termination of tissue support for the "Shrieking Array" is ethically and morally acceptable. Its continued existence is a crime against nature.

----NOTHING FOLLOWS--------

FROM: CONFED

TO: MANTID FREE WORLDS

The fact that your ancestors did bad things does not change our opinion of your race. The history of TerraSol is full of plenty of atrocities to go around. Every race's history is. It's just your history is longer than others.

And honestly, we're beginning to think that maybe there's someone else who has been doing things that none of us like a little more closer to the present time than some old robot that got left to its own devices.

Tell you what, let's win this war then we'll figure out how much penance everyone has to perform.