as written by Lobos
The birth of a new age should always be announced in the flames of the last. From destruction comes life. Such is the circle.
Such was the message carried in the central intelligences of the swarm hurtling through the tunnel through space and time, under the propulsion of their Hades drives. A message repeated thousands of times a second, within the brains of the drones, their simple logic paths and intentionally minimal designs leaving them pawns. Extremely smart within their own field, but pawns. Expendable. Indeed, desired to be thus.
The thousand ships that sailed at superluminal speeds barely qualified the title of ship. A few dozen thousand tons of nearly solid carbon nitride nanotubes, the Hades Drive, reactionless thrusters, a few superluminal sensors, a broadcasting comm, and the guiding cortex inside of them. They had but one mission, a single one way trip, to deliver a message, a package. A cry of war, and they were that cry.
And the time had come to speak.
As one, one thousand drones curbed their velocities, dropping to precisely 90% the speed of light. Reaching that velocity, they exited the non-space tunnel they traveled, the first hundred of the swarm coming into real-space on terminal vectors, within 15cm of 539626424 meters to their goal. Immediately broadcasting the message on the wide-bands they carried, a fervent scream of electronic noise that was a message crunched within static. The first wave of the ten within the swarm would strike their target, the Aschen Watchtower within the Cryo system, within a scant two seconds.
That was all the warning that they had been instructed to give.
Each and every one of them carried the potential to end a world's life, at their mass and velocity.
Each and every one of them had but one target to kill.
Each and every one of them would die to destroy it.
Timed to hit fractions of a second one after the next, after the next and the next and the next, they were a chain of destructive potential that was horrific, and they came on, to slay themselves and all they touched in the release of power their simple impact would bring. All the more terrifying was the vector they came from.
The direction of Langara and the inner core worlds.
Contained within the message for those who witnessed to hear, was the harsh, grating voice of the sender of this message.
"You Aschen have grown stagnant. And we have come to burn you for it. Prepare yourselves if you wish, but you'll fall to the slaughter nonetheless."
The birth of a new age should always be announced in the flames of the last. From destruction comes life. Such is the circle.
Such was the message carried in the central intelligences of the swarm hurtling through the tunnel through space and time, under the propulsion of their Hades drives. A message repeated thousands of times a second, within the brains of the drones, their simple logic paths and intentionally minimal designs leaving them pawns. Extremely smart within their own field, but pawns. Expendable. Indeed, desired to be thus.
The thousand ships that sailed at superluminal speeds barely qualified the title of ship. A few dozen thousand tons of nearly solid carbon nitride nanotubes, the Hades Drive, reactionless thrusters, a few superluminal sensors, a broadcasting comm, and the guiding cortex inside of them. They had but one mission, a single one way trip, to deliver a message, a package. A cry of war, and they were that cry.
And the time had come to speak.
As one, one thousand drones curbed their velocities, dropping to precisely 90% the speed of light. Reaching that velocity, they exited the non-space tunnel they traveled, the first hundred of the swarm coming into real-space on terminal vectors, within 15cm of 539626424 meters to their goal. Immediately broadcasting the message on the wide-bands they carried, a fervent scream of electronic noise that was a message crunched within static. The first wave of the ten within the swarm would strike their target, the Aschen Watchtower within the Cryo system, within a scant two seconds.
That was all the warning that they had been instructed to give.
Each and every one of them carried the potential to end a world's life, at their mass and velocity.
Each and every one of them had but one target to kill.
Each and every one of them would die to destroy it.
Timed to hit fractions of a second one after the next, after the next and the next and the next, they were a chain of destructive potential that was horrific, and they came on, to slay themselves and all they touched in the release of power their simple impact would bring. All the more terrifying was the vector they came from.
The direction of Langara and the inner core worlds.
Contained within the message for those who witnessed to hear, was the harsh, grating voice of the sender of this message.
"You Aschen have grown stagnant. And we have come to burn you for it. Prepare yourselves if you wish, but you'll fall to the slaughter nonetheless."
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