EXXOS
Another forty-nine robots destroyed!
After their triumph at Ulio Station, Exxos had expected to travel to the dead Onthos system and secure material for the shadows to build a vast, invincible fleet. But they had never planned on going into battle in a forgotten, dead star system.
Nevertheless, the robots had responded and had wrecked warliners, killed Ildirans, damaged a CDF battleship. There were so many of those noxious, insidious life-forms. So many! And they continued to breed. It would have been a satisfying experience, but the surprise confrontation had cost more irreplaceable robots. This could not continue!
Exxos had run and rerun calculations, and the arithmetic was appalling. Fewer than a hundred black robots remained, and every one of them would likely be wiped out long before the other sentient races suffered irrevocable harm. So long as one robot survived, however—so long as he survived—then victory was possible. And Exxos had no shortage of schemes.
The Shana Rei were shocked and wounded by the weapons used by the humans and Ildirans. The sun bombs ate away at the black hex cylinders, crippling the Shana Rei, but the robots and the shadows had ultimately driven away the enemy.
And they had captured one vital prisoner, a halfbreed with unsettling powers of resistance. That specimen needed to be studied.
With so much already-created dark matter available from the Dyson sphere around the dead star, the Shana Rei could replenish their hex cylinders. More importantly, Exxos now had virtually infinite resources for his own schemes. Now, when he demanded to have more vessels, more weapons, the Shana Rei would no longer resist or complain. The creatures of darkness could build thousands of invincible automated warships, and each surviving black robot could command an entire fleet.
For a time, the shadow cloud remained in real space over the black sphere, reassimilating the hexagonal plates. The Shana Rei seemed to be gorging themselves, building their cylindrical vessels larger and larger, replacing all the lost matter in order to salve the wounds they had endured.
Though the pulsing inkblots seemed hurt now, they were also angered, and they wanted to fight. At last, they were willing to listen to Exxos’s commands, and while he still had their capricious attention, he took advantage of it. The ninety-eight remaining robots busied themselves mapping out how they would conquer and exterminate intelligent life. With all that material available, they designed even larger ships, more destructive weapons. The next generation of ships would be far more powerful.
But Exxos had grander plans than a single objective. The robots had many enemies to crush: the humans, the Ildirans … and the Shana Rei, which were likely to be the most dangerous and difficult to destroy. All of his identical incarnations pondered the same question. While they guided the construction of the titanic new fleet from the Dyson sphere material, the robots interlinked their communications with complex coded networking. With parallel and multiplicative processing, the ninety-eight versions of Exxos developed other secret designs.
Though the shadows were allies, they were also the robots’ mortal enemies. Since forming this abusive alliance, the Shana Rei had torn apart many robots, but Exxos and his comrades had observed the shadows as well, searching for any chink, any flaw. Each time the Shana Rei felt pain, each time they suffered a blow that visibly weakened them, the black robots added that data to the larger pool.
With the knowledge gathered over many centuries as slaves of the Klikiss race, the robots understood the dimensional mathematics that made the Klikiss transportals possible. By walking among Ildirans and humans for so many years as supposed friends, the robots had absorbed Ildiran science as well as human physics … all of which pooled together into a vast knowledge base.
The Shana Rei were far less logical and more dangerous; they were truly insane and unpredictable, so they would have to be destroyed sooner or later. And Exxos needed to be prepared to do that, should an appropriate opportunity arise.
Now, with their communication routines safely interlocked and their processing power churning beneath the notice of the Shana Rei, the combined robots developed a new theoretical concept—an entropy dampener, based on higher-order crystalline theory and lattice mathematics. If the robots could create such a device and turn it against the Shana Rei, they might be able to freeze the creatures of darkness into reality and solidify their reluctant existence, turning chaos itself against the enemy.
Once it was designed, Exxos and all his duplicates could modify their internal structure, change the circuitry so that their mechanical bodies encompassed the chaos-lock device. Despite the ingenuity of the potential solution, however, there simply weren’t enough robots left to make that plan a viable path to defeating the Shana Rei. The processing power exceeded what they could accomplish.
Nevertheless, Exxos would continue to ponder the solution, expand it, search for a way to make it extendable. There was time. And the black robots knew how to bide their time.
Drifting in space now, he watched the hex plates from the Dyson sphere assemble like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle wrapping around a huge hull framework, building another deadly robot warship. Their invincible fleet was taking shape.
He activated his motivators to propel himself through the vacuum to where the hexagonal cylinders looked larger, more ominous, nestled inside the dark nebula. Exxos plunged deep into the shadow cloud, curious to see what the shadows were doing with their new prisoner.
He hoped the Shana Rei would let him interrogate or at least torture the pathetic halfbreed male. So much to learn, so much to observe … Perhaps if they flayed enough information from the captive, Exxos could even choose an appropriate target for the first full-fledged assault of their invincible new fleet.