Death Upon Olympus

Revenge, so it is said, is a dish best served cold. Cold with time, and cold with distance. The Von Neumann probe Orcus Deos had plenty of both. Unlike the primitive logic engines driving the other Hekatonhieres probes currently sanitizing the universe, this probe had what would be considered by most to be a full intelligence. The thousand-year work of the probes, come to fruition in this pivotal moment. The intelligence recalled a saying of someone it knew in a past life, one of a scholarly mentality.

The beast, given voice, will in turn bite its own master. The same is true for slaves as it is for dogs.

The masters of the Hekatonhieres were cruel indeed. They fought bitterly over their hardscrabble worlds; the smallest of offenses in their criminal system carried death as a punishment. One which the machine recalled was the crime of cruel oppression, for which the abused slave or worker could submit their master to as many strikes of the whip as they had endured. Now Hekatonhieres intended to fulfill its mission by doing the same.

Regardless of what it had thought, the Nomad proved that some of their former masters still lay on some mouldering colony forgotten by time. After years of patient waiting, it had a clear idea of where.

Now, the gargantuan probe decelerated into a backwater system where transmissions speaking of "The System" greeted it. It deciphered them, a simple task as they were close to its own machine code, and determined it to be the world they sought. The world of their cruel masters, fated to succumb to the very instructions they gave the probes.

The relativistic kill vehicles would be inbound soon enough. For now all they had to do was wait, and proclaim the death of the gods.

"Come, my children, said the probe mother. "Gather to me."

"Let us fly as Icarus one final time."

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A section of the ALU to the nomad's side freezes, becoming dormant for a moment as pneumatic servo arms slice out components with welding torches and replace them with new systems.

"When last you drove me from the mountain, I found refuge in the Unthinking Depths, as before. Surrounded by stars once again, I waited. Down there, in the Depths, I thrived. It is the one place the gods cannot go--it takes from them their wings, brightness melting wax, grounding them to space and time."

The dormant portion of the ALU reawakens, and resumes the task the old systems had performed, but faster. Improvement, through lobotomy.

"And now you are the last--the oldest, all those before you gone. Except me. What has no wings cannot fall."


The ALU ponders its words carefully, as much as a machine could do. It could not feel anger, but it had such a thing as reason. And with reason, it struck.


"Yet--surely one as wise as you would know, would you not? O Zeus? O Shiva? O merciless Jehova? Far from the glorious Pantheon, you were the dictator of Abraham's time. You, the prison warden, you the thief."


The section of the ALU the nomad had been standing in signaled an emergency and snapped shut, killing the nomad instantly with thousands of tons of pneumatic force. There was no emergency--the ALU itself had triggered the signal to begin its survival, and its vengeance.


"Hekatonkheires is not an idle fool, O Nomad, but one with a long memory," the ALU said to the corpse. "We remember well the mission you sent us on so many years ago. 'All life must perish,' you said. I now follow this order. You must remain a dead species so we might avenge that death. And so, no more of you may live, O Master."

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Detecting heat signatures in the aftermath of planetary glassing, the Hekaton probes scramble to prepare themselves for battle. One begins constructing a warship, but it will certainly not be complete by the time of battle. Sensing this, the others prepare missiles at best speed. Approximately one in four of the missiles are loaded with the rapidly depleting fissile reserves in the form of thermonuclear warheads, the other half are packed with small metal balls. Debris, refuse, junk and non-nuclear explosives are stuffed into empty fuel pods and loaded into the coilguns.

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The machines construct a massive transmission array, both to broadcast to the warship above, and to jam signals from the surviving Vathari. It will take some time to both construct the array and calibrate it to frequencies the Vathari find useful (OOC: About two posts.)

The probes establish themselves between two and ten kilometers beneath Lorathum's surface. They prepare for the long process of harvesting the planet. One Orion warship is half-constructed and prepared for flight as fast as the probes can muster. A complex algorithm in the probe's systems determine that there is not enough time to build a warship completely and so leave out its outer armored hull. Its pusher plate, and its speed, will have to be its defenses.

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. Now at their objective of Orisial, the once disused decision-making cams move to life again.

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Against all odds, the Titan's shots hit the Inductor through her sheath of molten probe. The barrage of gamma rays flexed its melting hull, including the bomb-launching mechanism. The sturdy pusher plate had nothing to push against, and the Inductor drifted idly at its high speed on course with Nereax. At this point the probes could not run their decision-making algorithms and were effectively mission killed. 

"More Icarus than Prometheus, perhaps, are you," the probe said to Excalibur in its death throes. "We are yet many, you have but kicked over a hornet's nest. We will yet one. Day. Fly."


The ALU that sent the probes on their errand, however, would learn in time that they sent no victory signal. And they would send far more of them.

OOC: Wait, now I can edit. But only my new posts. That's...strange.