(There is absolutely no possible logical reason why a drone that doesn't value its own existance would surrender itself to an enemy rather than self destruct. Surrender is a foreign concept to something that's primary goal is not self preservation.(only Audemed could make such a decision) And why would a base leave any external dialin connections that wern't in a DMZ, separated from the base defences?)
Audemed felt the flicker and immediately knew what had happened. Core unit 4509-2546, a distant base that had been cut off from his power had fallen back on it's Imminent Overrun protocols. It had sent out final burst transmissions to its drones, burst transmissioned its records over subspace, and promptly deleted itself. For some reason, the Salrillian programmers hadn't forseen any attack, and hat not seen it necessary to overwrite these protocols, so the core unit had still dumped its logs, revealing its subspace beacon. Audemed immidiately dialed in and, finding the server empty, dropped a scout AI onto the core. It quickly scanned the sub processors, and returned its report.
The Salrillians had rewritten the entire servers, opening gapeing windows for Levt's hackers. Also, they had added a "surrender" function to their server in an attempt to lure Levt in without bombarding the base, destroying their assasin. The scout AI reported that Levt's men were working on the core unit to figure out a control configuration for the captured drones, and Audemed had found his opportunity. He dropped false interfaces onto the incoming uplinks, and launched another set of trojans up the line, encoded in the returns from the false interfaces. The Trojans instantly duplicated themselves in millions of files, spreading across the UEC network, doing nothing but duplicating themselves and hideing. It took seconds, and the entire operation went totally unnoticed.
As the Programming team began sending instructions to what they thought was their newly captured Audemedon army, Pharris immidiately began following the instructions to a T, marching them calmly into the dropships, and letting them be flown back to the huge Marine Landing Ship in orbit. As they were marched off to storage, Pharris suddenly took over. The 10,000 marines on board the ship were caught entirely unawares. By the time they realized that anything had gone wrong, the drones had already vented a large portion of the ship to space, tearing bulkeads open, killing marines where they slept in their bunks. By the time EVAT teams had suited up to actually fight the Audemedons, it was almost too late, the drones had torn quickly through to the crew quarters, killing two shifts of men while they slept or sat in the rec rooms. They then made their way to the Engine room, where the EVATs finally caught up with them and finished them off, but not before they had disabled the ships power and atmospheric control systems.
The UEC Marine Landing ship rolled lazily through orbit in the center of a large cloud of vented gas, debris and dead bodies. Down below, the half extracted Power core flooded with power and went critical, turning what was left of the large compound into a tremendous smouldering crater.
A flight of Audemedon fighters dove into the fleet that was furiously rushing to aid the derelict Troop transport.
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NEW NAME FOR THE DREADNOUGHT
The Hard-Boiled Egg
Why?
Because she cant be beaten!
