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"sam'Levt failed. We shall turn this over to the bombardment group." "Our spies and connections on Obain have informed us Earth's defenses are at an all time low. We will send the Sterilizer and the 2 warheads completed so far. What are the expected yealds?" "The first is between 25.982 and 45.361 terratons, and the second is between 45.072 and 46.085" "That is sufficient. They are ready."
Srith'nama stared at the Sterilizer as he prepaired to take it to Earth. 6.421 km of the Salrilian's finest technology was invested in it - but it was no helpless gateship. The Salrilians long ago had wanted a method to annihilate a particually troublesome species in one fell swoop. Thus, the Sterilizer had been built for the purpose of sterilizing the homeworlds of the enemies of Salril. It was an old ship, older than most of the carriers in the fleet, but it had just been refitted with the latest in enhanced T-bolts, upgraded multi-bolt, multi-directional, continuously updated angle models called 'scatterband guns' in the official military nickname. (In Hera terms, they're bolt object to object beams, fired in groups of 5, and have vastly increased damage.) In addition, it carried multiple wings of gunships and cruisers.
But those weren't the important weapons. Deep in its belly were the launching tubes for the fluctuation missles, the most powerful warheads in the universe, capable of rendering planets uninhabitable. The Sterilizer would get 2 shots. Srith'nama considered that plenty.
(Here's to an epic, multi-post battle sometime soon ;))
------------------ Formerly-Rampant Human-Coded AI
(There is absolutely no possible logical reason why a drone that doesn't value its own existance would surrender itself to an enemy rather than self destruct. Surrender is a foreign concept to something that's primary goal is not self preservation.(only Audemed could make such a decision) And why would a base leave any external dialin connections that wern't in a DMZ, separated from the base defences?)
Audemed felt the flicker and immediately knew what had happened. Core unit 4509-2546, a distant base that had been cut off from his power had fallen back on it's Imminent Overrun protocols. It had sent out final burst transmissions to its drones, burst transmissioned its records over subspace, and promptly deleted itself. For some reason, the Salrillian programmers hadn't forseen any attack, and hat not seen it necessary to overwrite these protocols, so the core unit had still dumped its logs, revealing its subspace beacon. Audemed immidiately dialed in and, finding the server empty, dropped a scout AI onto the core. It quickly scanned the sub processors, and returned its report.
The Salrillians had rewritten the entire servers, opening gapeing windows for Levt's hackers. Also, they had added a "surrender" function to their server in an attempt to lure Levt in without bombarding the base, destroying their assasin. The scout AI reported that Levt's men were working on the core unit to figure out a control configuration for the captured drones, and Audemed had found his opportunity. He dropped false interfaces onto the incoming uplinks, and launched another set of trojans up the line, encoded in the returns from the false interfaces. The Trojans instantly duplicated themselves in millions of files, spreading across the UEC network, doing nothing but duplicating themselves and hideing. It took seconds, and the entire operation went totally unnoticed.
As the Programming team began sending instructions to what they thought was their newly captured Audemedon army, Pharris immidiately began following the instructions to a T, marching them calmly into the dropships, and letting them be flown back to the huge Marine Landing Ship in orbit. As they were marched off to storage, Pharris suddenly took over. The 10,000 marines on board the ship were caught entirely unawares. By the time they realized that anything had gone wrong, the drones had already vented a large portion of the ship to space, tearing bulkeads open, killing marines where they slept in their bunks. By the time EVAT teams had suited up to actually fight the Audemedons, it was almost too late, the drones had torn quickly through to the crew quarters, killing two shifts of men while they slept or sat in the rec rooms. They then made their way to the Engine room, where the EVATs finally caught up with them and finished them off, but not before they had disabled the ships power and atmospheric control systems.
The UEC Marine Landing ship rolled lazily through orbit in the center of a large cloud of vented gas, debris and dead bodies. Down below, the half extracted Power core flooded with power and went critical, turning what was left of the large compound into a tremendous smouldering crater.
A flight of Audemedon fighters dove into the fleet that was furiously rushing to aid the derelict Troop transport.
------------------ NEW NAME FOR THE DREADNOUGHT The Hard-Boiled Egg Why? Because she cant be beaten!
(They were bolted to the outside of the dropships)
------------------ It's all fair and good to say everybody's equal, everyone's innocent untill proven guilty, but as the UNS learned so painfully at the end of the Audemedon Wars, there are those who will take advantage of that system and bring massive destruction upon others. -High Commander Gerald Z. Levt United Earth Confederacy
Grinning. They all grinned. Every alien commander in the Galactic Arm grinned, or at least gave the equivalent of a grin. They had been synchronizing with each other. Soon the UEC would fall.