And now, for some escalation.
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Chapter 47
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Rachel
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Okay, enough trolling the Aschen. Now, time to extort negotiate with them.
I'd taken over more than the Stargate facility on this planet, and I'd been trolling an increasing number of sites, though my manipulations were getting less sophisticated as I was working on multiple places. By this point the entire city-planet was getting worried over all the glitches that were happening.
Fortunately at this point I had every screen and intercom under my control, which meant I could stop worrying about trolling people and start talking to them.
"Hello, people of Aschen." I had every screen display my face, and every speaker boomed with my voice. "You have displeased me." And then I deactivated the visual stealth on some of my units.
Above the planet, enough Skylords decloaked to completely black out the sky. In atmosphere, I had leviathan frames hovering over every building, their sensor arrays glowing an ominous red in the suddenly dark sky.
I waited for panic to start. I didn't have to wait long. Once one person in a area started screaming, it usually spread pretty fast.
"Now, let's talk about the continued survival of your race." I said. "Here's how it's going to work. If you dial a new address, I will kill all of you. If you don't cure the plague you released on Delphi, I will kill all of you. If Delphi becomes sterile, I will kill all of you. If you dial Delphi after you cure the plague you released there, I will kill all of you. If you contact any new worlds, I will kill all of you. At some point I may give you someone else's bioweapon so you can make a cure for it. If you do not make the cure, I will kill all of you. If you try to slip your contraceptives into the cure, I will kill all of you. If you try something, I will kill all of you. Have your Stargate back, and stop being a planet-wide collection of assholes."
Their Stargate finished the drop I had put it into a few minutes ago, and crashed into the Capital. The Aschen First Citizen was killed, along with a few of her staff, as the Stargate came to a stop in the atrium of the capitol building, shattering a five-hundred-year-old floor mural depicting three different races swearing to become servitors of the Aschen. No amount of money would convince me that was historically accurate.
Right now, they needed some light, so running lights flickered on across the ships covering the sky, lighting up everything with a nice, unpleasant green hue. They'd be able to live off of that energy. They weren't in for a fun time, but when you claim racial superiority gives you the right to commit effective genocide, you don't deserve that.
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Chrono
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2 September 2000
"Sink!" She shouted, as her ships opened fire on the incoming vessels. A dozen ships poured from the rift in hyperspace, three blocky Bilskirner-'Is and nine of the newer, sleeker Bilskirner-II's.
Neutronium lashed out across space, slamming into the shields of the commandeered Asgard ships. The shields held, just barely. Meanwhile, several schools of Vengeances circled the targets, blasting any clusters of Replicators that were being launched. Meanwhile, her Skylords shut off their spinals and switched to their secondaries, giving more precision to the assault. The shields failed, and the shots bounced off the hulls of the ships.
Using a replicated Asgard transporter beam, Chrono beamed all the Replicators in the ships out into space, in a ball. That was bracketed by a dozen high-yield warheads. With the ships clean of bugs, Chrono went to work consuming the Asgard vessels. This time, finally, they were intact. Or intact as anything the Replicators chewed on was. But power systems, shields, and hyperdrives were all intact across all the ships. And that was the important part.
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3 September 2000
"FULL POWER, MAXIMUM DESTRUCTION!" Chrono hollered over an open channel. The Replicators never responded. Chrono was pretty sure they were actually incapable of communication, or advanced thought. They only sent out ships from a system once they had fully colonized it or they noticed something interesting. Like Chrono's assimilation of the system. Looks like the Asgard had FTL gravity sensors or something like that to notice the effects. But now that she had an intact read of both the Bilskirnir-I and -II, she didn't need to worry about acquiring more intact ships.
Which was why she had hundreds of millions of ships here for her first attack on an assimilated Replicator system. The sheer amount of power she had at her disposal was insane. Every single Skylord that could fire at a ship was doing so at max power, and she still had power to spare. A Bilskirnir's shields could easily hold off one Skylord's attacks. Even a dozen it could easily handle. But a thousand?
The NIGs of the ships turned into giant metal popcorn, the casings melted and warped open by the energy plants' explosions. Vengeances launched their tactical warheads into the massive gaps opened, completely shredding the gutted ships.
The Asgard ships were not designed to engage large numbers of ships. They only had a few powerful cannons, as opposed to the Exile strategy of having many smaller weapons. A few ships were destroyed, but more could take their place. The Replicators had no such luxury. Every ship they lost was permanent, one fewer hyperdrive that they had. Destroy them all the ships, and the bugs would be stuck to be destroyed at their leisure.
While her cruisers were busy destroying the space capabilities of the Replicators, the few Settlers she had were assembling massive teleporters, relying on the new picogate technology to cut the power cost down to a reasonable amount.
The picogates, were awesome. By reducing the size of the wormhole, it cut power costs in every way. Power increase because of range was decreased, and the power spike that occurred at 38 minutes took longer to happen, at well over a day. And one basic energy plant could keep it going for a month even with that. In addition, with ASM relays to handle data transfer even before the hyperspace wormhole connected, it bypassed the lockout that Lantean gates required in order to avoid the wormhole jumping between gates.
The gates disgorged more Settlers, which immediately began to activate their upgraded fabricator arrays. They beamed the nanites directly to the work area, eliminating the need to waste nanite energy on the route the nanites took. In addition, the upgraded fabricator used a second type of nanite that opened a link to the resource network, doubling the speed at which the work proceeded. Some Settlers began constructing more teleporters, while the rest began forming a massive sphere around one of the planets, reclaiming the entire thing whole.
Elsewhere in the system, another sphere of Settlers began the process of constructing a standard Exile Planet. 15 megameters across, 20 trillion Research cores, 1.5 quadrillion metal per second, and capable of orbital maneuvers via the 500 kilometer Halley core. It was the basic long-term economic structure. The citadel systems in Avalon boasted hundreds of them each. And now, this system would become a citadel system itself.
That was how the war against the Replicators was going to be won: one system at a time.
