Found this really awesome short story and thought I would share it with you all.
[ic=Coming for you]
!MESSAGE BEGINS!
We made a mistake. That is the simple, undeniable truth of the matter, however painful it might be. The flaw was not in our Observatories, for those machines were as perfect as we could make, and they showed us only the unfiltered light of truth. The flaw was not in the Predictor, for it is a device of pure, infallible logic, turning raw data into meaningful information without the taint of emotion or bias. No, the flaw was within us, the Orchestrators of this disaster, the sentients who thought themselves beyond such failings. We are responsible.
It began a short while ago, as these things are measured, less than 6^6 Deeli ago, though I suspect our systems of measure will mean very little by the time anyone receives this transmission. We detected faint radio signals from a blossoming intelligence 2^14 Deelis outward from the Galactic Core, as photons travel. At first crude and unstructured, these leaking broadcasts quickly grew in complexity and strength, as did the messages they carried. Through our Observatories we watched a world of strife and violence, populated by a barbaric race of short-lived, fast breeding vermin. They were brutal and uncultured things which stabbed and shot and burned each other with no regard for life or purpose. Even their concepts of Art spoke of conflict and pain. They divided themselves according to some bizarre cultural patterns and set their every industry to cause of death.
They terrified us, but we were older and wiser and so very far away, so we did not fret. Then we watched them split the atom and breach the heavens within the breadth of one of their single, short generations, and we began to worry. When they began actively transmitting messages and greetings into space, we felt fear and horror. Their transmissions promised peace and camaraderie to any who were listening, but we had watched them for too long to buy into such transparent deceptions. They knew we were out here, and they were coming for us.
The Orchestrators consulted the Predictor, and the output was dire. They would multiply and grow and flood out of their home system like some uncountable tide of Devourer worms, consuming all that lay in their path. It might take 6^8 Deelis, but they would destroy us if left unchecked. With aching carapaces we decided to act, and sealed our fate.
The Gift of Mercy was 8^4 strides long with a mouth 2/4 that in diameter, filled with many 4^4 weights of machinery, fuel, and ballast. It would push itself up to 2/8th of light speed with its onboard fuel, and then begin to consume interstellar Primary Element 2/2 to feed its unlimited acceleration. It would be traveling at nearly light speed when it hit. They would never see it coming. Its launch was a day of mourning, celebration, and reflection. The horror of the act we had committed weighted heavily upon us all; the necessity of our crime did little to comfort us.
The Gift had barely cleared the outer cometary halo when the mistake was realized, but it was too late. The Gift could not be caught, could not be recalled or diverted from its path. The architects and work crews, horrified at the awful power of the thing upon which they labored, had quietly self-terminated in droves, walking unshielded into radiation zones, neglecting proper null pressure safety or simple ceasing their nutrient consumption until their metabolic functions stopped. The appalling cost in lives had forced the Ochestrators to streamline the Gift's design and construction. There had been no time for the design or implementation of anything beyond the simple, massive engines and the stabilizing systems. We could only watch in shame and horror as the light of genocide faded into infrared against the distant void.
They grew, and they changed, in a handful of lifetimes they abolished war, abandoned their violent tendencies and turned themselves to the grand purposes of life and Art. We watched them remake first themselves, and then their world. Their frail, soft bodies gave way to gleaming metals and plastics, they unified their people through an omnipresent communications grid and produced Art of such power and emotion, the likes of which the Galaxy has never seen before. Or again, because of us.
They converted their home world into a paradise (by their standards) and many 10^6s of them poured out into the surrounding system with a rapidity and vigor that we could only envy. With bodies built to survive every environment from the day lit surface of their innermost world, to the atmosphere of their largest gas giant and the cold void in-between, they set out to sculpt their system into something beautiful. At first we thought them simple miners, stripping the rocky planets and moons for vital resources, but then we began to see the purpose to their constructions, the artworks carved into every surface, and traced across the system in glittering lights and dancing fusion trails. And still, our terrible Gift approached.
They had less than 2^2 Deeli to see it, following so closely on the tail of its own light. In that time, oh so brief even by their fleeting lives, more than 10^10 sentients prepared for death. Lovers exchanged last words, separated by worlds and the tyranny of light speed. Their planet side engineers worked frantically to build sufficient transmission infrastructure to upload the countless masses with the necessary neural modifications, while those above dumped lifetimes of music and literature from their databanks to make room for passengers. Those lacking the required hardware or the time to acquire it consigned themselves to death, lashed out in fear and pain, or simply went about their lives as best they could under the circumstances.
The Gift arrived suddenly, the light of its impact visible in our skies, shining bright and cruel even to the unaugmented ocular receptor. We watched and we wept for our victims, dead so many Deelis before the light of their doom had even reached us. Many 6^4s of those who had been directly or even tangentially involved in the creation of the Gift sealed their spiracles with paste as a final penance for the small roles they had played in this atrocity. The light dimmed, the dust cleared, and our Observatories refocused upon the place where their shining blue world had once hung in the void, and found only dust and the pale gleam of an orphaned moon, wrapped in a thin, burning wisp of atmosphere that had once belonged to its parent.
Radiation and relativistic shrapnel had wiped out much of the inner system, and continent sized chunks of molten rock carried screaming ghosts outward at interstellar escape velocities, damned to wander the great void for an eternity. The damage was apocalyptic, but not complete, from the shadows of the outer worlds, tiny points of light emerged, thousands of fusion trails of single ships and world ships and everything in between, many 10^6s of survivors in flesh and steel and memory banks, ready to rebuild. For a few moments we felt relief, even joy, and we were filled with the hope that their culture and Art would survive the terrible blow we had dealt them. Then came the message, tightly focused at our star, transmitted simultaneously by hundreds of their ships.
"We know you are out there, and we are coming for you."
!MESSAGE ENDS!
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Oh hai.
There's a second part to the story, actually...
[ic]
!RECORDING BEGINS
In darkness and silence I fell, and for a while I was at peace. Within the armored hull of the pod, suspended in shock gel and a hundred layers of ablative film, I could pretend the universe didn't exist, had never existed, and that the last 50 years relative had never happened. But in the dark, in the absence of action or stimulus, my machine-self idled and my soul-self let its imagination wander. In my mind's eye I could see the other pods falling around me, decoys and comrades alike, indistinguishable to the keenest sensors until the rising flak broke them open to spill their contents into the burning sky. I waited for one of the questing beams of light to single out my refuge and end me, and to my surprise some part of me felt afraid. My machine-self counted the seconds and calculated my altitude. It would be a simple thing to end it all, to just empty my mind and wait for the ea- the ground to strike me and erase the memories. The temptation was strong, but I'm not capable of dying quietly, none of us are, or we wouldn't be here.
A thousand meters above the city, my survival instincts asserted themselves and my machine-self triggered the deceleration protocols. Micro-explosives shredded the remains of the heat shielding, filling the air around me with a cloud of glittering, laser-scattering chaff. The drogue chutes deployed, pulling the retrorockets to the end of their tethers a microsecond before they ignited and gravity returned. Spy drones launched themselves from the pod's exposed skeleton and flew out over the city, relaying telemetry and images to my machine-self. A map grew in my mind, heat sources and weapons emplacement highlighted across my vision. Through the eyes of my drones I watched my pod finish its deceleration with the aid of a relatively soft building, and ordered my machine-self to suspend the detonation of the pod's release system. Under the building's rubble, the explosive bolts would only damage my body and bring more wreckage down on my head. I would have to dig my way out.
I probed the debris with ultrasound and my machine-self analyzed the composition and distribution of rubble encasing me, finding a small opening above me. I punched one of my limbs through the top of the pod and placed a small demo charge in the gap, dialing it down to minimum strength before pulling my limb back into the safety of the pod's confines. The blast cleared the rubble, and the remaining shock gel crystallized around me as it absorbed my half of the energy. I pushed upwards through the brittle foam, clambering up through the hole I had made, and took a moment to scan the burning corpse of the building I had landed in. My eyes flickered across my surroundings; my soul-self sought meaning in the pictograms and murals that decorated the walls, while machine-self analyzed their material and estimated their resistance to my onboard weaponry. Both my selves snapped to attention as a strange, patterned chattering became audible over the roar of the flames, and one of The Enemy entered the hall.
My machine-self studied it dispassionately, carefully measuring and noting every feature of its alien form. It stood two meters tall and roughly three across, looking very much like a crab wrapped in Mylar film. It was made of fours. It had four arms and four legs, four eye stalks, four 'fingers' at the end of each arm and four claws on each 'foot.' It was lugging some kind of breathing apparatus on the flat shelf of its back, and clutched a hose and nozzle contraption in two of its hands, spraying fire-retardant foam onto the smoldering walls around it. My soul-self didn't care about its function or purpose; I felt only hate and rage. My soul-self formed intent, my machine-self calculated a course of action, and my body leapt from behind the rubble that concealed me from The Enemy's sight.
My eight powerful limbs propelled me upwards, faster than the monster's twitching eyes could follow. I pushed off the high ceiling, my metal frame making a mockery of this world's feeble gravity, and landed behind the creature with a loud crash. It let out a high speed chattering and spun to face me, dropping its hose in panic. This specimen of The Enemy was clearly not a soldier, it wasn't prepared to face anything like me, but I didn't care. I darted forward and clamped two of my forelimbs onto the upper segment of its body and two on the bottom half, and pulled it apart like a lobster. I felt its chitinous exoskeleton crunch under the Mylar clothing as it helplessly beat its arms against my armored carapace, and something inside of me felt joy for the first time in a very long while. Something behind me let out a noise I would quickly come to recognize as a scream, and I swiveled to meet the new targets.
There were three more of the things in the next room, looking at me with what could only be terror. My machine-self noted their size and numbers, the digging tools clutched in their claws, the potentially explosive tanks of breathing gas that each once carried, and the unstable structure of the building around me and determined they might actually pose a threat to my combat chassis. Dispensing with theatrics, I simply fired a high velocity electomag slug at a point on each of their shells equidistant from all four eye stalks, assuming (rightly so) that it would be a major nerve cluster. As the three fell dead, I turned my attention back to my original target, which remained alive despite its gruesome bisection. I hesitated in thought, it had been nearly seven minutes since my landing and military personnel couldn't be far behind the damage control teams. But there were billions of these monsters on this world, and we would need a good understanding of their anatomy to kill them all. I unfolded a combat blade from my right forelimb and went to work.
The skies of this world had been cloudless and clear before we came, the ground bright and hot with reflected sunlight from their endless days, but that had quickly changed. Towering mountains of reflective chaff filled the atmosphere, reaching up to the edge of space and casting dark shadows across the cities that had known the continuous light of two suns for thousands of years. Sinking chaff met rising smoke, hot and cold air mixed for the first recorded history and micro-storms formed between the glass and stone towers that had housed this world's murderous denizens for untold generations. Soldiers had gathered around the base of the building I had landed in, unwilling to send in more troops after the first squads had stopped screaming, and seemingly incapable of simply leveling the structure with explosives. It mattered little, I had slipped out when a brief whirlwind had blown down the main avenue, spitting out harmless ball lightning that crawled across their emplacements and left them cowering in the dirt. I clung to a shadowed wall a block away, letting my machine-self analyze their weapons and technology while the weather quickly eroded their fighting spirit. A few lucky shots from their handheld weapons could cripple even my redundant systems, and the vehicles mounted some seriously threatening equipment. Fortunately I was not alone in this place.
Somewhere down the road a heavy gun barked and one of The Enemy's tracked vehicles erupted into flame. The remaining three vehicles turned their armored prows toward the threat and began firing into the distance, trying to pick out the source of the attack in the storm lit gloom. The armored infantry rose from cover and began firing, their backs to me. I launched a volley of smoke bombs and sonic strobes into their emplacements and dropped off the wall, bounding across the road in a heart beat and tearing into them with my combat blades and HV Electromag Cannon. Diamond edged claws peeled back bulky ballistic armor, allowing my low power projectiles access to their relatively soft organic shells. The screaming sonic strobes and swirling smoke left them disoriented and useless, while my machine-self had no difficulty mapping the ultrasonic echoes left by the carefully timed pulses of my weapons. By the time I had finished the eight troopers, their vehicles were guttering wrecks, rent and torn by the superior firepower of my approaching allies.
Dressed in matching black, 8 meter tall bipedal tanks, they identified themselves as Jonathan Kymorez 482 and 739. My machine-self noted the superficial damage they wore on their scarred hulls and requested a Datanet relay from their machine-selves, while my soul-self thanked them for their firepower and made meaningless small talk. They thanked me for the targets and informed me of a semi-organized push on the well defended northern quarters of the city. They had lost their infantry support and two of their clones shortly after landing, and requested that I scout their path northward. My machine-self used JK739's high-gain antenna to pull compiled maps and tactical reports off of the fleet's Datanet, uploaded my logs, and we set off to join up with the rest of the horde.
!RECORDING ENDS
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