Location: Low Earth orbit 

Time: Ten minutes after the first contact

[Swift Conquest of Void] sat in his seat as the ships he commanded bombarded the strange planet underneath them. He didn’t know what this species had done to have earned an extermination order from the Emperor, but when the order was passed down it was decided that he, an accomplished flotilla commander, should have the honor of executing the Emperors' will. 

As his sensors watched the planet below closely, searching for signs of human life he would send a beam from a laser or another one of the many, simple tungsten rods his ships carried to smash into the location. He felt that this was a waste of resources, he should have been allowed usage of a plasma lance or to be allowed to use one of the many asteroids in the system to bombard the surface of the planet. 

But in the end, he had his orders, and he followed them. Over the span of 0.125 local planetary days, he completed his objective with brutal efficiency. Even as the strange primitives used their understanding of the atom to try and stop his assault, they, perhaps intentionally, went as far as to taint the very world they stood on for years to come with the radiation of those unclean weapons! 

What was wrong with this species, did they not know how rare naturally habitable worlds are in the galaxy?! First, they poison their own atmosphere and then the harnessing of weapons so terrible, even the hive minds of the outer arm knew how valuable these worlds were, and even in their extermination of the local populations, never did they use weapons as horrifying as these humans did to defend their own planet of all things! 

He blew his head tendrils out slightly in a sign of disgust at this species. If this was how they were on their own planet, it’s simply no wonder why the emperor ordered their extermination! Even if it was a clear violation of the accords of war put forth by that blasted interspecies council, what the council doesn’t know can never harm them. Especially so of a planet that had yet to escape from their own satellite, not even mentioning developing FTL capabilities. 

But it was no matter, in a few short moments this species would be dead and he would begin to remove the orbital trash this planet of barbarians had littered space above their home with, the ships moving as they used their lasers to both melt and shift the orbit of the debris, sending them to crash back into the atmosphere of the planet within the next few decades, then, and only then would he retire to write his report detailing his successful operation. 

The small fleet of ships, none larger than a destroyer swiftly completed their tasks before boosting themselves out of orbit from the ruined planet, it would be a minimum of 70 galactic standard years, 54 local solar orbits before exploration and terraforming teams would even consider the planet as an option due to radiation levels. 

The system itself, however, was somewhat rich in resources, and once a local planetary base had been established, it would make an excellent mining colony. So, as the ships turned to leave Earth, they dropped a beacon in the limits of the orbit of the planet, its purpose to guide ships through subspace as they approached the system as well as function as a low bandwidth FTL communications link to the empire. Within another two hours, the system had been mapped out with their limited sensor suite, and a formal request had been filed for a scientific expedition for more thorough resource mapping of the system, as well as to place atmosphere scrubbers onto the desolate world. 

And just like that, they left, their ships propelling themselves into the void of subspace, flying onwards to the next planet on their long list of pre-FTL species that needed to be wiped out before they could be found and granted status as a ‘protected sentient’ by those blasted council paper pushers. With the massive backlog by this fourth expansion wave into the galaxy by the empire, it would be nearly 40 years before the system had come up in any official documents or orders, simply having been left to slowly heal, after all, it’s a dead world, who would even dare trying to colonize a planet in empire space, especially one as damaged as this one had been, and nobody even dared to try mining operations without a garden world in system, too many things could go wrong in space, and a delay in response by even a day could cause millions of deaths.

Location: Earth

Time: contact +1m

But I did dare and I wasn’t even considered a threat. Simply having been thought to be a historical database or forgotten military post. So I took this blessed time to build, to prepare, and to expand. In the next 20 years, I would rebuild the industries of the Earth, as well as create new space-based industries, even if the first stations were crude and inefficient.

However, these advancements did allow an unprecedented expansion as ever bigger stations were created, fleets of drones flying through the system, breaking the asteroids down for their valuable resources, harvesting Ice and Helium-3 for my experimental fusion reactors, and for them to be used as chemical fuel.

Finally, I had massive stations being designed and created on those massive fusion reactors, each one having a massive barrel, the interior of which was coated with electro-magnetic coils, each capable of accelerating a small slug made from a steel-titanium alloy to nearly 0.6c. With my limited information, I had no idea if these massive weapons platforms would be useful, but I had little choice as the nuclear weapons used in the first contact seemed to simply annoy the invaders. 

Location: Earth

Time: +21y, 5m

In all those years I had refused to simply stay idle, building stations and ships in space and waiting for my end, instead, I converted more and more of the earth into computational cores, scientific labs, and ever increasingly powerful quantum processors, working to continue the work my parents left behind learning about the world, learning the sciences, and watching space. 

Oh, did I watch space, I created massive radio telescopes in space, I created massive mirrors and lenses for optical telescopes of unmatched proportions by my creators, and I created swarms of infrared telescopes to try and find any sign of where the aliens had come from. 

Location: Earth

Time: 30y, 8m

It had taken me nearly ten more years before I found what I wished to not, signs of life in my own backyard, in Alpha Centauri. I saw ships entering into the system, leaving massive bursts in almost every spectrum that could be seen from my telescopes. And so, I prepared to be detected and attacked as soon as I saw the massive ships in orbit of the system, as they clustered around the planets and seemed to begin a massive build-up, but an attack never came.

It confounded me, it had been almost 31 years now since the attack, and even though I was trying to hide my presence, if these Aliens had any sufficiently advanced technology, they should be able to see me and my advances, my ships, and my stations. Everything I knew told me that they would be attacking soon, that they would know that they missed something of the humans and that they would be back to finish the job, but they simply didn’t. 

I didn’t see anything of them coming towards me, and this worried me ever so greatly. So I built more shipyards, more refineries, and more labs, needing to give myself a technological edge, anything that would make my ships last seconds longer in a fight. I coated a small number of my ships in massive steel plates, using pipes made of graphene to turn the entire hull into massive heat sinks in the hope that it would give the ships minutes of combat time under laser fire. I even gave the ships basic level intelligence in case the aliens had some form of electronic warfare to disrupt drone swarms with a single controller. And finally, I had given them all laser communication arrays, so that we could communicate without the obvious signs that radio waves had. I finally felt prepared. 

I felt pleased with the preparations I had taken, I knew that I would be able to give whoever came to me a fight, rather than waiting to die, and finally, I felt it was time to go through my databases to find a quote, something I felt was fitting, only to then use speakers that had sat for over twenty years unused to speak my first words. 

“In War: Resolution, In Defeat: Defiance, In Victory: Magnanimity. In Peace: Good Will.”

It was a fitting quote, one that if my records were to be believed, came from Winston S. Churchill during World War Two, I felt it was somewhat appropriate. Though I was also disappointed that nobody was here to hear it, however, for now, that didn’t matter. 

I knew I had a war to fight, and I knew that I can’t return what had been done to the humans to the level of an eye for an eye, it would disrespect everything that they stood for, everything I was made for, but I would proceed onwards, I would occupy, not glass, and I would rebuild instead of exterminating. I would have nothing less than a total rebuilding of whatever structure the aliens used as a government that allowed such brutal extermination campaigns. 

Whoever these aliens were, they were in dire need of liberation and freedom, and hopefully, if my plans went well, I was going to free the shit out of them.

Location: Unknown 

Time: Extermination +42 Galactic years

Through miles of red tape, a request was lost, found, lost once again, resubmitted, and approved with a delay. [Revealer of Soul] Had his mission finally approved, and he made a comment to himself mentally in irritation thanks to how long he had waited for this.

'22 galactic years? I expected to have my spawn to have taken this over for me by the time the administration had approved this mission!'

He took a look down at the datapad he held with the confirmation message, reading the short message once again that he had received from the Imperial Ministry of exploration.

>Scientific mission to system #4832 for full cataloging of resources and planetary research status is now APPROVED with the delay of 11 standard galactic years, requested budget APPROVED<