Location: Earth

Time: Contact + 31y 8m

I took what I thought would be the remaining time before combat to task myself with designing and making boarding troops for the upcoming combat and needed to decide, dedicated purpose troops, or multipurpose that can be specialized by loadout?

I created a few AI’s to give me 10 prototypes in each section, giving it a few rules it needed to keep to and choosing the current role as simply boarding. And then I waited, filling the time by expanding my ever-growing industrial might, swarms of ships and factories roaming the asteroid belt, extracting resources from it in the thousands of tonnes a minute.

After roughly a week The AI’s had finished making the 20 designs I wanted, and I shifted my attention back to the development. The first group of designs was from the dedicated purpose group, and they seemed to all need to work with one another to be effective, the group consisted of mostly tripods and quadrupeds, as well as a single oddity, a tracked design that also had legs, while being equipped with six legs, but it had no weapons.

Why would it have no weapons? How would it fight? This confounded me for a few moments until its purpose dawned on me. It was a shield, a shield on legs and tracks. It was an odd choice to be sure, but I liked the concept, so out of the group I sent that one for further testing and development and moved on.

The next group was from the general-purpose group, it consisted of bipedal robots, with a hexapod as well as two quadrupeds. I picked the entire group and arranged them all into fire teams, and sent them on a virtual training course, to see how they all faired and where they excelled.

Setting the simulation up and stuffing the machines in was all I needed to do, so I turned back to my small little robotic empire, especially on the fleets, and I felt a little bit of simulated pride. I had decided to take some inspiration from the Science Fiction of the humans, specifically from discussions around what they called “Halo” and had made most of my ships to be massive magnetic cannons with engines and little else, I made some ships that had my newest generation of armor, designed to be effective against both energy and some projectile weapons, but the majority of ships were computer cores, reactors, engines, and a single 600m long coil gun.

Those ships offended my sense of beauty, but still, they were efficient and they were cheap, and if the aliens had some form of shields or armors made from alloys I hadn’t even considered, the saturation of fire should still be able to overwhelm any defenses I came across. My tests for firing had shown that they could accelerate ferrite-depleted uranium rounds to nearly 30% the speed of light by the time they exited the barrel, and if nothing else, these would make excellent weapons for planetary bombardment.

Location: Alpha Centauri, planet 2 staging post

Time: Extermination +43.5 galactic years

[Revealer of soul] had arrived in this small, newly settled system, having decided to use it as his personal staging point due to its proximity to system #4832 as well as its favorable positioning to the empires trade routes, allowing his requested materials to arrive in days, instead of the weeks it would take for a normal rim world.

Even as I waited for my crew, sensor beacons, and parts needed to repair this ships mineral scanner, I submitted appeal after appeal, trying to get the approved date of departure pushed forward to a more reasonable time, me and my crew would be ready within less than one-fifth of a galactic year, and we didn’t want to be wasting our time waiting on some core world paper pusher.

As I went to submit my sixth appeal this cycle alone, I saw my security officer, [Song of War] in the doorway of my personal quarters, a datapad in his tendrils.

“Greetings [Song of War], do you have news on our departure?”

My hopes fell as [Song of War shook his head, coming into my quarters to give the datapad to me.

“ No, I’m here with information on the system we will soon be headed to, the communications beacon activated itself, which is odd in itself, but command suddenly thinks that some automated defense grid in the system from a precursor species is trying to activate. Our mission has been assigned two corvettes from the Department of Strategic Intelligence.”

This came as a shock, the Department of Strategic Intelligence? Nothing good ever comes when the spooks from OSI are involved. I hesitantly took the datapad from my security officer, skimming over the report when my eyes got caught on what the two corvettes would be equipped with.

“ Is this right? Directed EM weapons and kinetic repulsion plating? What does the office think we are getting into, the Navy was supposed to have cleaned the system of hostiles already!”

[Song of War] twitched his tendrils at my words before simply gesturing to the datapad once more, unease covering his from.

“ I’m told that we have nothing to fear in the system, but if that was true we wouldn’t have any backup whatsoever, however, it’s my recommendation that we prepare for an emergency jump to FTL as soon as we arrive in system.”

I took a moment to run the Idea through my head before nodding in approval.

“ I think that would be the best, now is there anything else that you needed?”

It looked as if he was going to reply before we both had our attention grabbed by my personal terminal beeping, I had a response to my appeal.

>Appeal status: ACCEPTED Mission departure date is now WHEN READY by order of the Department of Strategic Intelligence<

Location: Earth

Time: Contact +31y 9m

I noticed it as soon as it reached my communications grid on Luna, radio signals, and whatever it was, it wasn’t me. My entire fleet went to high alert as I turned every sensor, I had to triangulate whatever this new signal was, I could hear it, but I didn’t understand what it was saying.

It surprised me, they had left something to warn them if the species hadn’t been exterminated, they were warned. They would be coming, I knew it in every circuit I had. In less than five minutes I had found this and dispatched an entire fleet of ships to the target.

In roughly a day my ships had arrived and had eyes on the beacon, well, it looked like a beacon at least. I trained my guns on the small beacon only to halt, maybe they would come with more force if I destroyed it? The doubt made me hold fire, after all, it was a beacon, it could have a data connection, information, a language database, anything useful.

So, I set myself to figuring out how this beacon talks, and if I could even talk back. This was…going to take a while.

Location: Earth

Time: Contact +34y 5m

I did it, I was finally able to talk to the beacon, it accepted my handshake and allowed me into the network and it was…massive millions upon millions of servers and databases, so much… information. It would take me years to simply download the data I had available to me, but that’s not what I was here for, I was here to gather information on their military technologies.

I did a few queries in what they had that passed for a search engine and was shocked. They had their military capabilities freely open. To the public. The lack of secrecy or security was…surprising, to say the least, so I check to see if they had anything on my system and found what I both wanted and didn’t want.

>System designation, #4832 Status: Uninhabited, Native species: None, Exploration status: Planned, estimated to leave at the start of galactic year 44<

That was…Next week. They had a fleet coming next week. I cut my connection and started to overclock my shipyards, my war factories, everything. I had to be ready, for the aliens were coming.

They were coming, and I was terrified.