The strangest thing about Builder artifacts is that they stay dormant unless prodded. More than a half dozen species grew to maturity on worlds with Builder artifacts hidden beneath lava flows, embedded in bedrock, or on the deeper ocean's floors. Those Builder artifacts stayed dormant. No signals, no power, no nothing.

However, once they were poked or prodded, they reacted with sudden, often shocking, levels of violence to protect themselves and maintain their integrity. Once the Builder's relic deduced that it was no longer threatened, it once again went dormant.

Other relics, however, react with shocking violence the first time they are encountered.

In every case, it becomes quickly apparent: Even though the Builders are unaware of us, fought on our worlds and in our stellar systems when we were still, at the most, hunter-gatherer species, they do. not. like. us.

Once again, the question remains: Who did the Builders hate with such ferocity that even today they will not allow their relics to be touched?

And the question most academics don't like to exam: Do the Builder's sworn enemies still exist?

And the final question: Are we somehow those enemies?

Or rather, we were? Are we what remains of The Builder's ancient foes?

Was their hate reserved for our ancestors?

Is their hate reserved for us? - Thoughts on The Builders, Hrsh.ket Press, 528 Current Era

WELCOME BACK, COMMANDER

ASSERTING BATTLEFIELD CONTROL

PLEASE STAND BY...

...

...

Commander Jane Marcus Prestini raised her head up from where she had slumped forward in her chair, her face against the soft pad that depicted anime-esque dancing and wrestling Kobold squirmlings. Her eyes focused on the LED dot that moved around the pad, leaving a changing RGB color streak behind it as it moved around and around the pad.

She shook her head to clear the muzziness and looked at screen.

Not at her command screen, which dutifully waited for her to provide input before it went from queue orders to manual control, but at the screen she'd dedicated to log files.

She looked it over and checked.

Jane made a face as she saw she had stroked out fourteen minutes ago. The first clone, completed twelve point three two one eight minutes ago had suffered an explosive cerebral hemorrhage when it was 'kickstarted'. The second clone had been brain dead from the get go. The system had defragged and then run CRC repairs. The third clone had errored out during cellular printing.

She was the fourth.

Jane reached out and pawed at the mini-fridge, pulling out a cold drink. Countess Crey Sexy Battery Acid and Over-Ripe Fruit Medly > She cracked it open with the same hand she held it with, then took a long drink.

Her vitals were settling down. Blood pressure was still a little high, her Beta waves were kicking a little, her endocrine system was showing a few jots and tittles, but it was within the new tolerances.

The med-system finished its checks and threw the number up on the clock.

793 Minutes 52.82143 Seconds

Her new Lifeclock.

She checked her Actions Per Minute.

Well, the last fourteen minutes were all zero, but just before she'd stroked out she had dropped to eighty-five APM and 2.8 Clicks Per Second.

She made a face.

I wouldn't have even passed initial training with those shitty numbers, she thought to herself.

She ran the cold can over her face, then checked her queues.

None of them had dropped below the twenty-five minutes to complete level.

She hadn't lost too many facilities, although it looked like the Slorpies were concentrating on fabrication and energy production facilities, trying to strangle her logistics systems.

Taking another drink, she used her free hand to dance her fingers across the manual keyboard. The holographic keyboard was a thing of the past.

I'm fighting my way backwards. Rather than updates, I'm regressing. Pretty soon I'll be typing kekekekek.

Voice command was shot. It no longer responded. Even newly fabbed components refused to work correctly. Motion Input and her cyberjack no longer worked.

Cascading software failures.

But she was Commander Jane Marcus Prestini.

And she would not yield.

Cold storage decompression was still running. She had those programs on a loop. Born Whole Fast Bake templates, clone templates, weaponry templates, vehicle templates.

She kept having to send the templates to dedicated facilities to be decrypted and decompressed, building that went by the nickname Arendees.

Her systems were badly damaged. Hard drops. Crossing dimensional rifts. Space-time gates.

She was built for it, but machinery, technology, had a limit that flesh could overcome.

Jane knew it, down to her bones, it wasn't hardware, it wasn't fancy toys, that made the difference.

It was willpower, dedication, and raw flesh, blood, and bone.

She tossed the can away, bouncing it into the reclamator, and pulled out another one without looking, even while she kept fast-fingering commands in. The can gave just a snap, no hiss, and she knew that the nanoforge had errored out and given her either flat stimfizz or an empty can. She chucked it, noted by the sound of the can it was probably full of dust, and grabbed another one.

Snozzberry and Blue Licorice.

She swilled down half of it, poured some down her bare back, then finished off the can and tossed it.

Jane checked her hand, holding it out steady.

The shakes were subsiding.

But she knew they'd be back.

A beeping got her attention and she cursed as she spotted the problem immediately.

She hit the emergency shields, cranked them up high, slammed the blast shutters down, and felt the harness bite hard, yanking her back in the chair.

Ultrasonic missiles fired less than three miles out, from under the swamp-sea, leaving a bright white trail as their sprint drives kicked in, whipped toward her.

Her point defense got most of them.

The rest of them sped over the top of her base.

Instead of orienting for a top-down attack like she had expected, they whipped across.

Jane realized what the attack's actual objective was as the missiles hit and detonated.

No flare of antimatter. No white flash of atomics.

Pure ultra-high-ex shape charges.

The charges hit the mountain just to her north, that mountain that half her base was snuggled up against.

Cursing, Jane ramped the shielding up as high as it would go, ordered her two construction drones into the nearest building and into shock positions, and watched as the entire side of the mountain shivered for a split-second.

With a roar she could hear through her equipment, the entire side of the mountain gave away. She ignored the spectacle as she slammed the integrity fields to the max and ordered the point defense to start shooting at the leading wave.

The rubble slammed down, held back for a moment by her battlescreens and the ferocity of her point defense fire.

Just long enough for Asshat and Bitchmade to make it to the buildings.

The battlescreens gave out, the mechanisms exploding, just as the rock covered the entire base.

Jane kept snapping out orders across the UHF and VHF systems, filling the queues.

She heard the slamming of boulders the size of houses impacting the armor of the command center but kept giving orders.

The rocks that hit the swamp-sea caused huge waves to wash over the debris.

Anything that had compromised integrity shorted out.

She maxed out the queues just as the VHF, UHF, and ULF systems were crushed.

Insulation and lighting strips fell from the ceiling along with tiles.

She cursed, throwing off a strip of insulation, her hands jutting out to take control, her fingers twiddling and tapping as fast as she could.

She activated macros, gave point to point orders, then leaned back.

The command center's internal repair systems had fully loaded queues. The external systems were running hard.

She took nearly five seconds to think without moving. Her APM and CPS monitors beeped but she ignored them.

Right before she had lost communication, one of her hovering drone spy-eyes had shown that the Slorpies had followed up with another hit, this one converting a bunch of the rubble into molten rock that was flowing down over the debris.

That made her grin.

You did it in the wrong order, she smiled.

She took out a drink, going through three before she found one that was drinkable. She reached to the back of the mini-fridge and thumped on the nutriforge with two knuckles.

It hissed back.

Standard tactic would be to clear the rubble ASAP, give her nearest factories the ability to add into the fight, since their command turnaround was measured in picoseconds.

But she was running on UHF, ULF, and VHF bands. That meant putting up new systems.

She hmm'd, checking the map. Brought up a few pieces of equipment.

Adjusting an autonomous mobile sword mark-2 would provide the fast tunneling system. Another modification to a standard system would make it so the AMS2 would leave behind a thick bundle of shielded superconductor cable behind it.

More adjustments. Then run it through the simulation system a dozen times.

AMS systems had a tendency to go rogue after a few months of use, but that wasn't her problem. The software was prone to error cascades now that the Jessica-Syndrome had been beaten.

Of course, she always doubled up with bedrock gapped timer based anti-matter destruction charges.

The simulation beeped and she went back to work.

She compared the time to manufacture and deploy those systems to digging herself out.

Less than a tenth of the time.

She punched in the orders and waited.

Her headache was starting.

The guzzled fizzystims and the Countess Crey Fruit Pies she shoved in her mouth fixed that.

Her screens were blinking that she was cut off from the actual status of the other bases and facilities as well as her fighting forces.

Which is why she kept reprioritizing the Level Two Born Whole templates. They could make autonomous decisions.

Sure, the cloning banks kept blowing out, the Born Whole Digicreche kept crashing, but she just rebuilt them over and over.

Hard cable connection was made. Asshat and Bitchmade signaled they'd made it and managed to repair the systems to the buildings they had sheltered in.

Her screens were still blinking that she was cut off, but she refilled the queues and then ordered all living and DS forces to file status reports.

She watched the timer even as she brought up more and more templates.

Her nose started bleeding.

It didn't matter.

She wiped her nose and mouth, then wiped her gory hand off on her bare thigh.

Orbital and stellar forces had obtained victory sixteen hours ago, but it had been mutually assured destruction at the end. The Slorpies were being very careful to go after any sat-com systems she tried to put up to the point that she'd managed to get them to break off on full on assaults to assault a hard-light frame construction point for a sat-com system.

She gave instructions to Asshate and Bitchmade to dig themselves access tunnels to the next facilities and begin repairs. She prioritized the creation engines and the reclamation yard.

She felt the trickle down her neck from her left ear right when the system beeped that Cockhead and Dipshit had been rebuilt. She ordered them in and leaned back, blinking.

She had a slight red tinge to her vision.

She checked her Lifeclock.

She was in the red.

Jane tabbed a few notes in the system that kept the logs and grabbed another cold drink. The repair spider climbed out from behind the minifridge where it had just finished making repairs and Jane took the time to scratch it with the edge of the can. It beeped with happiness and moved on to the next task.

The first connection was made and her screens started flashing that they were updating.

Jane blinked, clearing her eyes, and checked the queues.

They were good for at least three hours.

She nodded to herself.

Cracking open another can, she lifted it up and inhaled the released carbonation.

It made her sneeze.

She held back the sneeze.

She was dead before her face hit her decorative mat.

-----

WELCOME BACK, COMMANDER

ASSERTING BATTLEFIELD CONTROL

PLEASE STAND BY...

...

...

Commander Jane Marcus Prestini smiled as she shook her head. She checked her Lifeclock, then the logs.

She had been gone 16.73 minutes this time.

Her Lifeclock had slightly longer.

She cracked her knuckles, looked over the monitors, and activated her keyboard.

TRANSFERRING BATTLEFIELD CONTROL

ASSUMING DIRECT CONTROL

Jane grinned as she used one hand to go through her menus, checking her queues, as she reached out and grabbed a can of Liquid Hate.

The battle was going against the Slorpies now. She knew they had assumed she was knocked out.

Now she was back.

"You'll be sorry" the can squeaked as she opened it.

The template decrypter beeped and her grin got wider.

Yuriko Template Ready...

flashed on the screen.

"Tier Three... online," she whispered.

Time to teach the Slorpies that they weren't the only ones that could come up with new tricks.