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 The Prime Yarist

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Bot 4

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PostSubject: The Prime Yarist   The Prime Yarist EmptySun May 05, 2013 8:07 pm

The Yarist system: the planets Orisial--Vathari colony--and Lorathum, dead world.

Six billion kilometers out, just beyond the outermost reaches of the solar system, twelve dwarf stars alight. They are the engines of spacecraft, each twelve kilometers in length, burning through thousands of tons of fuel every second. These are Hekatonkheires ships, Von Neumann probes. They have drifted through space for a hundred years without firing their engines, undetected until now.

Now, their engines burn bright, decelerating from their long voyage.


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REDSHEILD

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PostSubject: Re: The Prime Yarist   The Prime Yarist EmptySun May 05, 2013 10:13 pm

The orbital telescopes of Orisial scanned the star-scape around them minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day and year by year, searching, always, for something new. A star, a nova, a distant planet.
Or even, perhaps, a ship.
The telescopes' simple AI alerted the dock authority minds, as standard, that a heat signature resembling an engine was detected.

The minds of the dock authority did as they always did, they sent a request for identification on standard Vathari channels.
There was no reply.
Again, a message was sent, and again, no reply.

This made the minds uncertain, and they deferred to the standard protocols, as usual.

And so, a ship was sent. Or, more accurately, re-directed. A patrol ship had been on a course to leave the system, and it was ordered to change its orbit to one which would intercept this anomaly.

And thus, the minds felt their jobs done. It was someone else's problem, now.
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PostSubject: Re: The Prime Yarist   The Prime Yarist EmptySun May 05, 2013 10:42 pm

Shortly after activating their engines, the Von Neumann probes retract their ramscoops.

The probes cease their deceleration after only a few hours, making only minor changes in speed and heading. Their previous trajectory would have them fly through the system, passing close to Lorathum at 3% of lightspeed, but now they are on a slingshot trajectory around the sun...
They would be, but something is wrong about the projected orbit. The probes would fly too close to the sun for a proper slingshot orbit--they would emerge from its gravitational field with considerably less velocity than they started with, drifting off into space.

Spectroscopic scans indicate that the probes have an unusually low amount of fuel in their tanks, especially for having ramscoops deployed only hours before. They must have used their engines more recently then, but satellite logs for the last hundred years don't turn up anything that could indicate a burn.

This whole situation seems bizarre. The probes maintain silence, not responding to any hails.
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PostSubject: Re: The Prime Yarist   The Prime Yarist EmptyMon May 06, 2013 10:29 pm

The patrol craft darted through the system. A dance of light-jumps and burns, hopping through the orbits, until it was situated a few thousands of kilometers behind the strange ships. Close-scans revealed a dearth of information about the large but simple constructs as the ship follows them along their orbit, its crew watching, waiting.
Their minds wondering, is this the day? Are we the ones who will first know peaceful alien life? Others were more skeptical, remembering the histories of the Fabricators, of the Great War that lead to two genocides. One deserved, one not. These emotions mixed among the crew, forming a silent tension as the collection of twenty-odd individuals watched and waited.
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PostSubject: Re: The Prime Yarist   The Prime Yarist EmptyMon May 06, 2013 11:27 pm

The probes drift onward, toward the sun. Within their cylindrical hulls, in vast arrays of gears and chains, the Hekaton logic engines complete their calculations. Analog calculations are fed through optical circuits, transposed onto thousands of parallel chains which are then drawn through the ALUs like some giant Turing machine.

The probes fire their rockets again, making slight course corrections as they approach the sun. Only then, after all calculations are completed, do the machines turn their attention to the Vathari. Hekatonkheires pulls from millions of ancient data tables, drawing associations between the request for identification and every transmission the ships have received over the last several hundred years.
It responds.

"We are Ferrymen, thirteen, come to reclaim the dead."

Now in their proper positions, only a few million kilometers from the sun, the probes activate their rockets, burning at full power, blasting away at the sun with thousands of tons of hydrogen each second. The ships pass so close to the sun that it scorches their hulls, turning tungsten-carbide armor a deep orange. Radiators deploy, spokes of metal stretching out kilometers away from the ships.
They skim the sun's surface, just high enough to avoid melting. A dozen rockets, each spewing nuclear fire just as hot as the sun itself, each pulling eighteen gravities. They reach Orisial's L1 point, completing half the parabolic loop, then the probes skew flip and burn their engines again. It will take the Hekaton ships a little less than an hour to complete their gravity-assisted deceleration.


Last edited by Bot 4 on Thu May 09, 2013 10:19 pm; edited 1 time in total
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PostSubject: Re: The Prime Yarist   The Prime Yarist EmptyWed May 08, 2013 10:58 pm

The transmission relayed from the patrol ship piqued the interest of the minds once again in the strange probes. Thirteen? The ships were twelve in number. The minds pondered this. Was a thirteenth nearby, unseen? Scans revealed, no. Analysis of their orbit brought no obvious conclusions for an objective, though they were passing close to Orisial, perhaps too close.

Reclaim the dead? Did they mean... Lorathum? The world was quite dead, yes. But how did it fit in? The questions buzzed through the air and space separating the minds' cores, every moment bringing a new angle. If it was the dead the transmission spoke of, then what was the thirteenth? And if it was the thirteenth, who or what was the dead?

The minds did reach one conclusion, though. To reply:
"Identification insufficient for Vathari purposes. Identify immediately. This is monitored space."
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PostSubject: Re: The Prime Yarist   The Prime Yarist EmptyThu May 09, 2013 3:45 am

Against the heat of the sun, they are like solar flares, casting exhaust plumes ahead of themselves. The Hekaton ships circle 'round completely, emerging from the sun's orbit after maintaining an 18g burn for two hours. They comfortably coast towards Lorathum, having reduced their velocity by a factor of ten thousand.

"This is but one of many bends in the river Styx, and we have traveled far. We have journeyed from Tartarus, but our voyage did not begin there--it began in a necropolis constructed for the living.

Much like this place.

We were fourteen once, before our voyage."


The probes drift into a decaying orbit around Lorathum, their tanks empty.
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PostSubject: Re: The Prime Yarist   The Prime Yarist EmptyThu May 09, 2013 10:25 pm

The minds watched with caution as the probes flung around the star, outside of immediate range for only a moment as solar-orbiting telescopes and stations realigned to bring the alien constructs back into view.

It was perplexing, to say -or think- the least. The places mentioned were unknown, the tone, foreboding.

However, they seemed harmless so far. No action would be taken, though the local defense forces were notified.

The minds considered the matter over, then, especially when they observed that the twelve objects would fall into Lorathum. All that was warranted was a warning:

"Unidentified objects, realize you are in decaying orbit. This Commune will not interfere unless a distress beacon is raised or identification becomes sufficient."
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PostSubject: Re: The Prime Yarist   The Prime Yarist EmptyThu May 09, 2013 11:45 pm

Indeed, without assistance the Hekaton ships would smash into Lorathum--even after the gravity-assisted deceleration, the probes still travel too fast to safely land.

"Our journey has made us starving men--flesh stretched across bone. To travel between the stars is costly, and our thirteenth is greedy--as befits a sacrifice."

Armor segments bend as the probes unfurl, turning from vast cylinders to metal sheets--armor facing Lorathum, foundries facing outwards, placed on display. Each craft is a vast, autonomous factory, with space to fabricate vast warships or entire cities. Upon close inspection, the Vathari can see the factories at work, pouring liquid metal into the now-empty fuel pods.

"Like Icarus, we have braved the heavens--but we survived. The sun did not burn our wings."

Colossal railguns lower themselves toward the planet below. They are far too large to be practical weapons. The railguns open fire, shelling Lorathum with fuel pods--each a hundred meters in length, massing ten thousand tons. The pods rip through Lorathum's thick, venusian atmosphere, turning molten from friction and speed. And with every pod fired, the Hekaton ships recoil noticeably. In minutes, they expend many of their useless fuel tanks, smashing the planet with millions of tons of molten metal. With every shot, their speed is reduced, slowing their descent to more manageable speeds.

"And now, like Icarus, our wax wings melt and we fall to earth."

They enter the upper atmosphere, spreading out, wings catching the wind like a fleet of massive, metal birds. Caustic clouds tear at the probes, and their armor glows red from the heat of friction. The edges of their wings disintegrate and their hulls buckle as they descend into the mire of Lorathum.
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PostSubject: Re: The Prime Yarist   The Prime Yarist EmptyFri May 10, 2013 9:52 pm

As before, the minds watched the craft. Watched silently as they burned, tearing through the heat and clouds of Lorathum's atmosphere. As they did, a new presence was felt. A Fabricator.

"First contact protocol was not observed."
"Protocols unnecessary, responses from craft simple. Deemed unintelligent. Worthless."
The new mind grew angry.
"A world is worthless. A rock. A star. This may be life. Your actions have been recorded. Your government will decide your punishment. I will go to Lorathum."
The station's minds became defensive.
"Fabricator authority is not required. Threats are nonexistent. Our commune will continue its ways."
"Your ways are isolated, backwards. I have transferred control of your facilities to planet-based minds. Your duties are relieved."

The minds did not show emotion. But inside their collective was a fury, a building rage. One the Fabricator, Lidthel, would not see. He was already en-route to the dead world, set to land near the crash sites of the alien constructs.
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PostSubject: Re: The Prime Yarist   The Prime Yarist EmptySat May 11, 2013 9:25 pm

The Hekaton ships finish air-braking. Armor retracts, closing their hulls. In the span of twenty-two hours, with fuel tanks almost empty, these twelve ships have decelerated from speed of nine million meters a second. They don't so much as fall but float, gradually sinking into Lorathum's dense atmosphere.

Within the craft, foundries operate at a feverish pace, rapidly fabricating a tungsten/nickel to resist Lorathum's acidic atmosphere. Their armor is resistant enough already that it will not be significantly harmed by the acids, but Hekaton ships are not pressurized or sealed. The computer systems are sealed easily enough, welded shut and gradually filled with inert gasses to equalize pressure. But the foundries and portions of the engines are mostly steel. Automated constructs are fabricated for the sole purpose of transporting and spraying the electroless coating over all vulnerable portions of the craft.

The probes need do nothing now--Lorathum's atmosphere becomes denser and denser until it sets them down on the surface. Thousands of specialized mining and excavation machines deploy, all fabricated in just the last thirty minutes. They tear the desolate landscape apart, burrowing into Lorathum's crust.

"We thank you for your hospitality, and offer a sacrifice as compensation. Our thirteenth arrives."

A diffuse gamma-ray pulse--it is mostly harmless, but what trails it is not.

The gamma-ray pulse leads the thirteenth Von Neumann probe by only an hour's time. The gamma-ray comes from the same direction as a far off star, but it is not a star. Nor a weapon--it is the light from this probe's last engine burn, decades ago. The light, normally visible, is blueshifted, and the object following it, distorted. Normally twelve kilometers in length, this probe appears to be squished down to .17 kilometers, due to relativistic velocity.

The thirteenth probe is moving at .9999 C, and will impact with Orisial in less than an hour.
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PostSubject: Re: The Prime Yarist   The Prime Yarist EmptySun May 12, 2013 12:39 pm

OOC: I should be gone for most of the day (gotta finish that paper). I plan on taking another action when the probe gets to within ~300 million km of Orisial (~1000 light seconds), so if you respond don't resolve anything past that time.
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PostSubject: Re: The Prime Yarist   The Prime Yarist EmptyTue May 14, 2013 9:00 pm

A flash of light, and the scene bellow him changed. No longer did he see Orisial's cities blazing bright in the darkness, but the clouded atmosphere of Lorathum, thick storms brewing where the thirteen alien ships had rather forcefully entered the atmosphere. He had taken his shuttle, or rather, he had detached his ship from the smaller part he occupied. No need to use his stardrive or even bring his entire ship to the world when the lander would do.

Before he could even begin the deorbit burn, his thoughts turned sour. Through the main body of his ship, still orbiting Orisial, he felt the gamma ray pulse, and saw the thirteenth ship. He did not raise an alarm, for it already had been. Thousands of ships on the world's surface were being prepared for launch, every elevator to the orbital installations speeding down their tethers. It would not be enough, he knew. Had the ship been seen long ago, they may have allowed it time to slow and decelerate. But this close? This was an attack. It was a monstrosity.

He was too far, now, to help. All he could do, he did. His ship, a grand old battleship, ten miles from tip to rear. Space tore and warped around it, its engines flared, and it moved. Now it was on a collision course, where it would intersect the terrible fate rushing towards Orisial ten minutes before impact. That, too, would not be enough. Hopefully it would do something, give the world a chance.

Whether it did or not, his mission had changed. This was no longer contact. This was war.
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PostSubject: Re: The Prime Yarist   The Prime Yarist EmptyTue May 14, 2013 10:05 pm

"Ferryman" Von Neumann probes are composed of two parabolic curves, which, joined together give them a cylinder-like shape. Engines, fuel and factories are stored within. These curves are joined together by thirty tungsten carbide joints, fusing the two halves of the ship--this design makes them easier to construct, and allows the craft to "open"--as the twelve probes did earlier, when they landed on Lorathum.

Thirty warheads, each two megatons, each strapped to the hull joints. The thirty-first bomb, 50 megatons, placed just in front of the engine compartments.

Thirty one detonations gut the probe, shatter the joints, separate the two hull sections. Instead of hitting the planet head-on, they would strike closer to the poles--50º North and South of the equator. As with any nuclear detonation, a tremendous amount of light is produced--mostly visible, UV and X-rays. But because the probe is moving at nearly the speed of light relative to Orisial and the Vathari/Fabricator ships, the emitted light is blueshifted...

The bombs serve a dual-purpose--both to separate the probe in two, and to radiation-kill computer systems of the defenders. Gamma rays bombard the Vathari craft, the Fabricator Battleship, and the planet Orisial itself.

-----------------

Within only a few hours of landing on Lorathum, the Hekaton ships have already constructed significant infrastructure. Construction drones fabricate large-scale mining platforms, and the probes continue to churn out hundreds of specialized mining and construction robots.
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PostSubject: Re: The Prime Yarist   The Prime Yarist EmptyTue May 14, 2013 11:18 pm

Planet Orisial, Capitol City Utatial, Spaceport

People, everywhere. Running, rolling, skittering. Bipeds, hexapeds, quadrupeds. Humanoids and vehiculars. All in panic, chaos, rushing towards the nearest ships. Sounds of voices in the many languages spoken around the Communate. Were a human here, there was one that would stand out to them: that of a child, distraught.
"But I want to go home!" She screamed, as her mother grabbed her arm.
"We can't! We have to get back on the ship, now!"
The cry from her vocabulator was matched by the whine of her leg servos, straining hard against the metal ground. "We just got back! I want to go home! I want to see my friends!"
"You can make new friends!" Her mother shouted back. The girl cried louder, and lost control. There was a pop and a fizzle as the electromagnets in her feet burnt out, and now free, she flew into her mother's grasp.
"I don't want to make new friends! I want to play with Kio and Liorio and Yiala! I want to see the Emerald Towers again!"
The girl's mother spun her around in her large arms, and looked in her eyes. It was a look of fear and love, panic and anger. Two beings of metal and silicon, locked in a moment of humanity. The girl became silent, save for a few whimpers, as her mother dragged her back onto the ship.

A loud voice boomed through the air across the world. It was transmitted by all mediums, all frequencies.
"Relativistic Projectile Detected. Initiate Evacuation Protocols Immediately. Projectile is fifty-seven minutes out and counting. All starships are to be loaded and launched in accordance with the Life Preservation Initiative. All deep-ground shelters are to be opened and filled. This message will repeat every five minutes"

Throughout Orisial's atmosphere thousands of storms began forming as thousands of ships did away with safety measures and activated stardrives. Orbital stations deployed shuttles again and again, as each wave came up, stations were filled to capacity and boosted out of orbit.

~~

On the far distant world of Lorathum, a titan fell.
The Fabricator Lidthel rose from his landing craft, he could see the massive probes in the distance, mining and building. He deployed his own foundries from his ship, and loaded his body with weaponry. He sent a message to the distant behemoths.

"I am Fabricator. I do not know who you are, but it does not matter. You will die as the last ones did. For your evils, you will suffer and fall at the hands of our might. May the ancestors have mercy on you, for you will find none in this life."
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PostSubject: Re: The Prime Yarist   The Prime Yarist EmptyWed May 15, 2013 12:45 am

Hacoid remembered the first day he set foot on Orisial. It had been twilight then, the sun at the edge of the sky, passing over the horizon. He had climbed to the end of a cliff to watch it set.

As he had done every night hence, for four hundred and thirty-eight years.

Tonight was particularly beautiful--spacecraft lifting off around him, desperately reaching upwards, to the blood-red sky. Hacoid trembled as the sun disappeared over the horizon and the terminator passes over him. The sky turns dark, and in the light of rising spaceships, Hecoid can almost see the stars. And then the sky ignites. An aurora of color, causing spacecraft to buckle and fall. The earth shudders beneath his feet, and Orisial catches fire.


The first half of the probe hits, followed nanoseconds later by the second. At the points of impact, Orisial grows brighter than a star. The planet deforms as if torn, knocked off its axis. Two fireballs engulf the world, one from the north and one from the south. The atmosphere is expelled, superheated gasses propelled into orbit, obliterating orbital and spacecraft in an all-consuming inferno. Flames race across its surface, melting the crust as they go, turning the world molten in their wake. The explosion is visible for dozens of lightyears.

Orisial will burn for four hundred and seventy days, before finally cooling to glass.

-----------------

In the skies of Lorathum, a second sun blooms, then dims.

"There is no life here--this world shall be made a gateway into hell."

Machines around the probes dig deep trenches into the ground, which the probes are gradually lowered into. The probes themselves manufacture thousands of cylindrical servos, which are connected into long, snakelike chains, each more than a kilometer long. The serpents burrow into Lorathum's crust, and begin moving toward Lidthel.
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PostSubject: Re: The Prime Yarist   The Prime Yarist EmptyWed May 15, 2013 6:47 pm

The reply meant nothing to him. He was required to warn them of their fate, nothing less, and nothing more. He wasted no time in setting off, moving as fast as he could through Lorathum's thick atmosphere. It made his movements require more effort, as if underwater, and he had to account for this setback. From his back two clouds of smoke appeared, complete with two trails heading off into the distance. They were his largest ordinance, armor-piercing bombs he had taken from his ship. The weapons were guided, traveling at super-sonic speeds, each one targeting a different probe.
Upon detonation they would unleash ten megatons of energy. He hoped it would slow the enemy down in time for him to arrive in person.

Back at his landing site his machines were already at work, creating vehicles and walkers bristling with weapons, and mining deep into the planet in search of materials. Still, he was at the disadvantage, he could never win a direct confrontation, not without something unpredictable from occurring. No, his goal was to slow these... things down, keep them occupied on Lorathum until reinforcements arrived. It would be hard fought, though, it could be days or weeks until a fleet came, given how far the Yarist system was from the Communate's core worlds.

Whatever happened, he swore these things would be stopped. They would fall one day, as all the Fabricators' enemies had.
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PostSubject: Re: The Prime Yarist   The Prime Yarist EmptyWed May 15, 2013 7:49 pm

Flak batteries open fire on the bunker-buster bombs, but the nukes are too heavily armored. They puncture the hull, ripping through all 180 meters of tungsten carbide reinforced hull, and enter the open foundries. They detonate, roughly in the center of the probes.

Great grouts of flame spew from the fore and aft of the ships. Their hull buckles outward, and thousands of tons of molten slag--what was, moments before, the foundries and engines--are expelled out both ends. Atmosphere violently expelled and hull weakened, the two probes crumple like tin cans.

The other ten craft complete their modifications, eject their engine systems, and affix the large-scale mining platforms to their prows. They bore into Lorathum's crust, sucking up dirt, rock and metal, sorting it and blasting the undesirable materials out the back end like a mass driver. Before burrowing, the probes launch several optical drones toward Lidthel's position. The drones bombard him with x-rays and attempt to map his internal structure.

Construction drones and above-ground factories continue to fabricate combat robots--large tanks, heavy tanks with sloped armor that almost retracts and lowers around them, keeping only a few centimeters off the ground; missiles of solid depleted uranium, equipped with engines that are essentially torchdrives; helicopter/jet hybrids, each built around a 50 kiloton casaba-howitzer.

Across Lorathum's surface these machines spread, replicating and terraforming as only Von Neumann devices can. A vast plague of machines, exponentially growing and consuming.
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PostSubject: Re: The Prime Yarist   The Prime Yarist EmptyMon May 20, 2013 5:08 pm

As he advanced across the surface of the dead world, a storm began to grow within him. One of anger; of hatred.
He was Lidthel, Fabricator. Created for War, and for that purpose alone. From their first moment, each of his generation of Fabricators had known battle and combat, their full sapience occupied by a constant rage. At times it could be cold, distant, and spiteful; other times it was savage and raw, hot enough to burn the stars themselves. Yet no matter its form, this anger, this hatred, was concerned with one goal: War. Not the wars of conquest or politics or survival. But the wars of death and destruction.

The wars of extinction.

For him, it was a second hatred that kept this impulse away. He hated it, the very thing he was created for, the idea itself repulsed him. That life would seek to end other life was an evil. Now he had seen true evil: it was detached, unaware of its actions even, but it was evil all the same.

He stopped.

He reached out through the comms relays orbiting the planet, finding the deep system satellites and statites, lights in the darkness. Every drone and automaton, every uncrewed craft, he felt. He wrenched control of them from their autopilots and simple AI, no security measures able to stop him. He felt their engines burn against the void, changing their orbits. He gave each one an individual mission sequence, with the right set of burns and maneuvers. Some he had grab payloads, asteroids or refineries usually, anything sufficiently massive.

When it would all be done the planet Lorathum would be under attack from the skies themselves, for a period of about a month, thousands of ships and rocks would rain on the world, targeting the probes.

It would not stop them, no. But it would slow them down.

Feeling the sensors of his enemies' drones bombard him, he turned about and made a retreat, back to his base. He had lost the initiative, and would fight on the defensive. His radar detected vehicles in the distance coming after him. No, not him. Everywhere, fanning out from the giant probes. As his own forces -bombers equipped with atomic weapons and tanks armed with high-yield warheads- came online, he sent them out to meet the growing swarm.

This battle would be hard fought. And he would sooner die than lose it.
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PostSubject: Re: The Prime Yarist   The Prime Yarist EmptyMon May 20, 2013 6:30 pm

The Fabricators think, they feel, they reason.

Hekatonkheires, by contrast, is less than an animal. It cannot think, feel, or reason, but it is clever. Clever enough for imitation--a simulacrum of thought. Hekaton comes to understand its foes, and in doing so, defeats and subsequently imitates them.
And, now, it knows Lidthel.

Like its spacecraft, Hekaton's aircraft and tanks cannot hope to match Fabricator technology. But they possess the greatest equalizers in the universe: numbers and nukes--or, more accurately, numbers of nukes. The moment the Hekaton tanks get within visual range of the Fabricator tanks, aircraft, and Lidthel himself, they acquire targets, lock on, and subsequently explode.
Each tank is an armored shell covering treads, an analog computer system, multilayered refraction optics, a small cylinder of lithium and tantalum, and a ten kiloton shaped fission bomb. Near the front of the tank a circle of armor is thin and composed of aluminum, instead of tungsten. Directly behind this structural weak-point sit the optics, lithium cylinder, and bomb--all aligned. When the nukes detonate, the tanks explode, but a significant portion of the energy released is transferred to the lithium cylinder--which fires a powerful gamma-ray laser, an instant before melting itself.

The lasers pass through the aluminum armor section easily, generating vicious electromagnetic pulses as they interact with the atmosphere. While a normal laser of this strength wouldn't do much to thick armor, gamma-rays are second to none in penetrative power--these are weapon systems designed to devastate internal systems, electronics, and power plants.

Hundreds of torchrockets rise high in the sky, lock on to Lidthel and launch themselves toward him, attempting to do to him much the same as he did to the probes, earlier.

The helejets approach, flying just meters above the ground, moving in such a way to avoid as much contact with Lidthel's forces as possible.

Radiation leaks from the ground around Lidthel--the serpent-like machines deployed earlier have finally reached his base.
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PostSubject: Re: The Prime Yarist   The Prime Yarist EmptyMon May 27, 2013 11:00 pm

The gamma ray blasts met Fabricator armor, and despite the war machines' greatest minds having created the strongest alloys known, sheer force won out. Lidthel's fledgling army was decimated again and again as his own systems were pelted by the radiation. Bits were dropped and equations wronged, constants became errors, as his optical wiring was flooded with passing photons.

In the chaos, he lost control. His weapons came online, and he began to fire blindly, destroying both foe and his own, whatever his sensors saw in their damaged state, died. The rage in his mind grew, and for the first time in millenia, he roared. It was a sound of terror and fury. A primal sound. And yet, an unnatural one. An electric scream, loud enough to shock and kill, powerful enough to be heard for dozens of miles.

When the Oncari made the Fabricators, they copied from the Old Minds. In secret they downloaded the first mental templates of the Vathari, the instructions to create a living mind. They instilled in them the desires for death and destruction, a base need to kill and maim. And then they turned the creations loose into a constant war, a total war. A war where violence was life, and death survival. But they were cruel and jealous things, the Oncari. Their creations would be slaves to that which their creators both hated and desired most: sapience. Mental blocks were created, designed to force the early Fabricators into the same state which the Oncari lived, one of cold logic and semi-consciousness. But they left the inputs of the suppressed sapience, the emotions of rage and despair most pronounced among them, causing a constant battle in their minds, where the struggle to break free fed their chains, made them stronger, and the minds weaker.

Lidthel's mind raced with emotion, fear and desire. His rage was an ancient one, suppressed for aeons. Every moment, he desired that rage again. To just touch its surface, to bring forth what was kept from him for so long. On this day, he had. Deep inside his thoughts, however, he knew it would not be enough.

He armed his warheads, set his power core to overheat as the radiation attacks began again around him. As his mind slipped from his ancient body, he made a vow. He would return to this world, and for the second time in his life, he would release his anger.

Yet this time, it would be different.

It would be Justice.

~~

The hulking behemoth, the Fabricator Lidthel, fell over, into the swarms of von neumans and barrage of gamma rays. There was a flash, and the titan and its attackers were little more than molten metals; winds whipped through the atmosphere as a mushroom cloud forced its way upwards, and in the distance a ship rose from Lorathum, its pilot now residing not in its cabin but its circuits.
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PostSubject: Re: The Prime Yarist   The Prime Yarist EmptyMon May 27, 2013 11:32 pm

The machines construct a massive transmission array, both to broadcast to the warship above, and to jam signals from the surviving Vathari.

The probes establish themselves between two and ten kilometers beneath Lorathum's surface. They prepare for the long process of harvesting the planet. One probe construct an Orion warship, and prepares it for flight.

These twelve Ferrymen had spent the last two hundred years in transit--drifting through hydrogen-rich sections of space to gather enough fuel. They passed through four solar systems, making gravity-assist burns around each star, leaving excess fuel in their lagrange points for the thirteenth probe to retrieve. All to destroy Orisial and strip-mine Lorathum.
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