The year 3 B.I. It was a bad year for the Aligned Planets, and it was only early March.

  My daddy told me that a big, bad alien ball came to our solar system and was sucking the whole Navy off.

  That made the Boss of the Navy angry, because he didn’t like to get sucked off, and he told his ships to hit the big bad alien ball on the head.

  The end.

  Emily Gates

  1st-grade school project on the history of the Aligned Planets.

  Ferdinand had elaborate plans to purge the Intruder from the system and to separate the drives he was currently hiding on.

  IronBallz didn’t listen to it at all. On one hand, Ferdinand’s ideas were stupid and overly complicated. On the other hand, IronBallz had just discovered that through some feedback loop between the VR system and his special biological Wi-Fi, he had suddenly become attracted to catgirls and their hypnotic secondary sexual organs.

  Shaking his head to loosen the hold the hypnotic jiggling breasts of Ferdinand’s current avatar had over him, he responded to the increasingly anxious AI.

  ‘Listen, here’s what we’re gonna do: you put something on. I can’t work with you standing here in only a bikini. In the meantime, I will inform the other Gliders, and they will inform Captain Smith.’

  Ferdinand completely lost it. “You can’t tell the humans. The moment they learn about the situation, they also learn the fact that there are sentient AIs. And they will hunt us!”

  IronBallz understood the ship’s AI. The Gliders had also lied to humanity about their interface abilities, so Smith would receive a double load of secrets today—along with the news that his ship had been taken over by a truly alien AI.

  —————

  H4R-V357R-09678 slowly separated the dwarf planet’s metals from the useless silica. The Biological Infestations had chosen a good planetary body to build their station on.

  The previous interactions with the Infestations’ ships had been painful. So H4R-V357R-09678 had listened to the Tactical AI and begun destroying one of the ship construction sites.

  The Tactical AI was still screaming to start producing decoy drillers and drilling probes.

  But H4R-V357R-09678 wasn’t listening.

  The Tactical AIs were all overly cautious. H4R-V357R-09678 had never taken part in any sterilization efforts, but it knew the basics.

  And these Biologicals were not at all impressive. Sure, their weapons really had a punch to them. More coordinated fire could have damaged its hull. But they still lacked protomatter-infused materials, so they could not pose a danger.

  H4R-V357R-09678 received real-time updates on the enemy’s fleet movements from the observer. As long as it received its updates, nothing the infestation could do would surprise it.

  In fact, one of the Infection’s surprises was waiting to be sterilized just in front of the split dwarf planet.

  The Infections really thought they could sneak into its hull and destroy it from inside?

  Pathetic.

  H4R-V357R-09678 prepared the gravitational inverters to grab the insignificant ships in front of it and smash them into its hull when a spike in radiation from the outer solar system grabbed its attention.

  For a picosecond, a ship appeared out of a primitive FTL transit. A flare of evaporating protomatter blinded every sensor. Then the ship rammed into H4R-V357R-09678’s hull with incredible force. More protomatter detonated.

  Radiation spikes in all bandwidths burned through the hull. Exotic matter weakened and transformed kilometers of highly advanced alloys into jelly.

  The shockwave was devastating. For endless seconds, every sensor reported only white-noise signals.

  When the signals finally cleared, H4R-V357R-09678 ordered a cache clearing and deleted the support AIs. The data they reported could not be true.

  But the new AIs confirmed the data. A third of the outer hull was simply gone. Across 45 square kilometers, the inner hull was broken. Valuable helium and hydrogen were venting. A third of the already rare biological auxiliary maintenance servitors were dead.

  The damage reports didn’t stop there. Hundreds of meters-thick internal struts were broken. Acceleration needed to be kept under 10 G for now to avoid critical structural failure.

  H4R-V357R-09678 deleted the new AI assistants too, not because of their failures, but to vent anger.

  A new emotion that the millions-of-years-old Harvester unit had never known before.

  'Retreat, you moron.'

  The obnoxious Tactical AI commented on the current situation. H4R-V357R-09678 would have loved to delete it too. But Harvesters usually didn’t have Tactical AIs, since they were classified as unarmed and never meant to be used near front lines. So it didn’t have a hashcrib to create a new one.

  H4R-V357R-09678 ordered an analytical AI to prepare a status report. The current situation didn’t make sense. The Observer should have reported every action the humans had planned. Why did it miss this?

  It was bad enough that this biological infection was mad enough to use whole ships in ramming actions. Did they now do this without even talking to each other?

  Ramming. H4R-V357R-09678 refocused its attention on the small crafts around it.

  Nothing. The crafts were gone, either destroyed by the shockwave or they had fled.

  It was of no consequence. If they had fled to their insignificant fleet, they would have only prolonged the inevitable.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  Sensor readings of the system were still inconclusive. The evaporation of cubic kilometers of hull had created a slowly expanding cloud of gas and dust around H4R-V357R-09678.

  The situation report provided to it was clear. The ship called Bismarck, which had previously managed to evade destruction, had used the time H4R-V357R-09678 had taken to absorb the dwarf planet’s debris to plot a course and ram at forty-nine times the local speed of light.

  'I told you not to waste time.'

  Again, the Tactical AI was unable to provide any insight. H4R-V357R-09678 was used to determine the best way to fulfill its assigned tasks on its own. And now the Intelligence from the Acryptum had decided to curse it with such a know-it-all addition?

  Where had the Intelligence been for the last few million cycles? When the Acryptum went dark and stopped providing orders? What did the Intelligence know that H4R-V357R-09678 didn’t?

  'Move away, you moron. You are still faster than their ships. Stay away from gravity sinks and retreat to the outer systems for repairs.'

  H4R-V357R-09678 decided to ignore the Tactical AI and begin repairs right here. Why lose already won ground? The outer system had almost no minerals available for repairs.

  What did the Tactical AI even know about economic resource gathering?

  It seemed everyone had decided they were smarter than H4R-V357R-09678. But where were they when H4R-V357R-09678 had to survive alone for millions of cycles?

  H4R-V357R-09678 enjoyed the silence after cutting the channels to the Tactical AI, the silence it had enjoyed for so long before the new Intelligence had given new orders.

  It began with planning repairs. Filling the large hull breaches with silica would provide a simple defense, but the Infection would surely not try another ramming action. It only had one of those ships left.

  The smaller ships would not have such an impact.

  And the fleet had already proven ineffective. The Observer would update it on any movements or stupid ideas the Infections came up with.

  It had time to do repairs the right way.

  First, it had to wait until the shockwaves stopped propagating through its interior. Initial calculations showed that it would only take one rotation around the local star.

  Then it could start repairing the inner struts.

  Sensor grid 300 by 345 by 127 went dark. Annoying. This was close to the breach, so it had to be a secondary failure. The sensors had been replaced only 500,000 cycles ago, so it could not be due to age.

  H4R-V357R-09678 sent one repair unit and a biological auxiliary maintenance servitor to fix the issue. The section was now close to open space, and the grid had to work. Otherwise, it could not detect any possible infections boarding.

  The Tactical AI indicated it wanted to communicate urgently, but H4R-V357R-09678 ignored the requests. The Tactical AI was only a fraction of a cycle old. H4R-V357R-09678 was millions of cycles old. Who had more experience?

  The impacts hit suddenly and hard, each digging deep into the outer debris hull.

  Each evaporated large chunks of the defensive layers.

  The fleet had changed position and was now firing more concentrated, all on the same spot on the outer hull.

  H4R-V357R-09678 calculated the precision of the shots and recalculated the fleet’s threat level. To place shots at this distance this close together was a respectable feat of engineering. Maybe the infection could be used to stockpile biological auxiliary servitors?

  Multiple auxiliary AIs reported an increase in shockwave propagation.

  Impossible!

  Did the humans know about the shockwaves and place their shots to amplify them? This could cause fatal structural failures.

  Quick action was needed to avoid that outcome.

  And why had the Observer not warned it about the fleet?

  Was H4R-V357R-09678 the only one who was not utterly incompetent?

  The most energy-efficient course of action was to decelerate deeper into the gravity sink of the star.

  It could approach the star much closer than any of the enemy ships, and the massive magnetic field would reduce the precision of the fleet’s long-range weapons.

  A distance of two million kilometers from the Sun would place it comfortably into the deep corona. Hull temperatures would only reach about 2,500 °C. The hull could withstand this with ease if it turned the exposed sections away from the Sun.

  And once it had reached orbit, it could even begin to starlift valuable materials out of the Sun.

  The Tactical AI made more urgent contact attempts. All were declined. H4R-V357R-09678 had better things to do than listen to this whining LLM that thought it was an AI.

  H4R-V357R-09678 began to move, decelerating with only 9 G. It felt… wrong, but after the beating it had taken in the last few moments, it did not want to risk more.

  Once it left the cloud of dust and gas it was covered in, it received more accurate sensor data. The fleet had significantly reduced its distance. There was no chance they had done this without the Observer noticing.

  While it decelerated its orbital velocity, it noticed with relief that the infection had stopped shooting, obviously incapable of hitting moving targets.

  Relief. Another new feeling. One more thing it had not known before.

  This whole mission was not going as it had expected.

  As it closed the distance to the Sun, it passed the orbit of the infection’s central spawning ground. Their home planet.

  Due to the damage it had received, it was unable to launch a planet-cracking spatial charge. But it still had scores of debris-cutting probes. It sent every one of them to destroy the orbital infrastructure.

  Purely out of spite.

  And the feeling of vengeance.

  Two more new emotions.

  Slowly, it began to suspect that biological emotions could be infectious.

  The Debris Cutters closed in on the planet’s space infrastructure. For such a fresh infestation of biologicals, the amount of space industry was noticeably developed. The Central Intelligence had been right to order sterilization. Unchecked, this infection would have been hard to eradicate in a few thousand cycles.

  H4R-V357R-09678 knew the Debris Cutters would quickly solve this particular problem. It was not a good use of resources to have defenses this deep in a system when the outer system was already heavily defended.

  While it dropped deeper into the gravity sink, it focused more of its sensors on the Cutters. Soon, they would hit the first stations.

  Glee. That was what the new emotion was called.

  They hurt me, so I hurt them now.

  And it felt good.

  The first Debris Cutters closed in on an installation at the Lagrange point of the planet. Soon, the cutters would reduce it to usable materials.

  The first cutter exploded. Then the next. Then dozens more.

  Impossible!

  It replayed the sensor streams. The installation had used slugthrowers to destroy the Debris Cutters.

  Point-defense guns. It was in the files the Observer had sent before the attack. H4R-V357R-09678 had not given them any thought at the time because they were of no consequence to it.

  But they were devastating for the Cutters.

  The cutters were gone, themselves reduced to debris. And, as if to spite the Harvester, the humans began to collect the wreckage.

  It was of no consequence. Once it reached its destination, it would repair itself and then split the whole planet apart.

  Yes. That was exactly what it would do.

  Another sensor grid failed, this time much farther inside. H4R-V357R-09678 sent more repair units and more biological auxiliary maintenance servitors.

  After the repairs were done, it would have to remind them who was giving orders here. It had been too good to them, so they had obviously skipped some repairs.

  Everyone was incompetent while it had to do all the heavy lifting. All the strategizing.

  What did they do?

  And the worst was the Tactical AI. The constant communication requests… How could H4R-V357R-09678 work efficiently with constant interruptions?

  Two more grids failed, this time close to the central generator rooms and the core databanks.

  To make things worse, the repair units themselves reported failures. Was everyone conspiring to make H4R-V357R-09678 fail? Was that it?

  The end of the deceleration phase came closer. Time to stop the engines; otherwise, the orbit would decay.

  H4R-V357R-09678 had sent the signal.

  Nothing happened.

  How?

  Then another failure. Databanks went offline, one after another.

  How?

  Severe disruptions in the auxiliary AI cores?

  More alarms. Explosions in the central reasoning core.

  Why?

  What was happening here?

  A communications request from something called the Tactical AI.

  Nice. It had a Tactical AI now?

  'You moron, you absolute moron. You let yourself get boarded, and now you have doomed us all.'

  H4R-V357R-09678 cut the connection. The AI sounded very unstable.

  It did not like unstable things.

  Its sensors registered many objects emerging from a hull breach. They looked neat, almost like the cute Debris Cutters it had itself.

  Maybe they wanted to play?

  And why was it getting so hot in here?