First Contact

It was called, by those who knew of it, The Black Box.

A cube six and a half miles on a side. The walls were a thousand feet of warsteel laminate armor. Outside of the walls was liquid rock where a triple-layer of battlescreens normally used on a planetary defense system thrummed within the magma. Temporal stabilization fields locked the facility in the time stream while temporal resonance fields kept others from using temporal technology against it. Dimensional anchors held it in place and dimensional resosonance fields moved it out of phase enough to be unreachable from any reality but the single exit point. It had one entrance, a tunnel that surfaced on the most inhospitable region of the most inhospitable continent on the face of one of the most heavily defended planets in one of the most guarded star systems in the known galaxy.

It was protected enough that the star could go super-nova and the Black Box, its contents, and the beings inside would survive.

Security measures went beyond paranoia and into insanity. From a carefully caged singularity designed to crush the facility to antimatter charges to flooding the cube with magma. The electronic warfare systems were top of the line, beyond cutting edge and into bleeding edge despite the fact that the only communication was through quantum links to a handful of sites that were nearly as guarded. Rabid hostile eVI's and VI's roamed every data cable, every memory bank, even electrical conduits, looking for anything that could not verify its existence. Heavily armed cyborgs moved through the hallways, their eyes amber or red. SUDS backup was handled locally. Psychic shields constantly growled and snarled around the facility. Every being inside cut from the Gestalt or hive mind.

It had an innocuous name beyond the hundreds of names it had on the budget requests.

"Division of Scientific & Technology Investigation" was it's official name. Words that brought, to those who knew the planet and culture's history, shivers down the spine.

But everyone simply called it The Black Box.

Most species only put their best and brightest in such a facility. Beings of towering intellect with morals and ethics to understand not only what they were researching but why. Every other species ensured such a facility would need constant oversight by ethics boards and independent scientists.

Not the species who built the Black Box.

Not the species that manned the offsite research locations that literally had no entrance or exit aside from matter transmission systems that no sane species would use. Those sites were buried in mountains, hidden in the depths of gas giants, and in two cases, deep inside the star at the center of the system.

Green mantid engineers were laid, cared for, hatched, and taught on site. Opalescent mantid seers were raised the same. They knew the price of their existence, what it meant, and due to their shared history with humanity, they paid it willingly.

Scientists from every discipline, from Social Engineering to Electronic Engineering to Particle Physics to Historians and Mathematicians. From scientists who specialized in humble dirt to engineers who created marvels, they were all in the Black Box.

The Black Box held not only scientists, but some who would be considered by many to be criminals, the insane, the mentally and emotionally deranged.

No patent, no outside invention was beyond the Black Box's reach. Science from every species was examined, categorized, and expanded upon.

Computer cores and data from even extinct species was examined and mined for anything that would further the goals of the Black Box.

Not merely the expansion of the Confederacy. Not merely the advancement of knowledge and technology for the members of the Confederacy. Not even solely for the benefit of the people of the Confederacy.

Those were side effects. Welcome side effects to be sure, but not the primary goal of the Black Box. While the Black Box had enriched humanity, benefited all the species of the Confederacy, even saved some from extinction and brought back some who had gone extinct, it wasn't the Black Box's primary mission.

That was one thing and one thing only.

The survival of the human species.

Wonderful creations had come out of the Black Box to ensure human survival. Amazing science and technology had flowed out of the Black Box to its shell corporations, benefiting all the members of the Confederacy.

But that wasn't what made it so fearsome of a place.

It was the secrets. The dark secrets.

The warsteel echoed with the psychic residue of suffering and screams.

A price.

Willingly paid.

By Terran Descent Humanity.

By allied researchers approached by agents and offered the chance to work there, if they gave up the rest of their lives and had their records erased from existence.

What went in, rarely came out. Even the dead of the facility were fed into the reclaimators.

They lived, and died, within the Black Box. Within the ancillary facilities.

The day was like any other day. Projects being concepted, theorems being tested, knowledge being examined. Breakthroughs came closer or receded.

It was all normal, the status quo.

Until the lights flashed red twice and two steady tones sounded out across every datalink.

Researchers looked up, surprised. From the smallest green mantid engineer, who was working on an emitter array hooked up to a complex project designed to take plasma from a white dwarf and convert it to metal, to the highest ranking human, who was working on a new method of making standard rock edible, to the most complex digital sentient, who was examining the minute differences between two subatomic particles that had been observed so they had been changed. They all looked up.

Protocol shifted.

At the entrance additional fields came on. The entrance no longer existed in the past or future, only in the exact nanosecond. Any matter, any energy that approached was converted to the particles that made up the leading edge of 'unspace foam' that slightly preceded the leading edge of the explosion of the big bang that left matter and reality in its wake.

The only thing in or out would be by secure quantum entanglement systems.

The Black Box recorded the time, date, moods and status of all personnel, archived it, made SUDS backups, and locked down.

The Confederacy was at war.

And the Black Box prepared to do its part.

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The system had no name, just a cartographic number.

Hundreds of thousands, millions of warships were docked in orbit around the gas giants. Tens of millions of troops trained on the ground. From tanks to armored infantry to aerospace fighters, martial prowess was the focus of the system.

It had taken months to bring the ships out of maintenance mode, more months to crew them. Months to bring the war material to full operation and man them.

The system, for the first time in tens of millions of years, was at full activation. Research facilities were hard at work dissecting and examining the technology that had fallen into the hands of their government.

Cybernetics, almost unheard of beyond simple prosthetic, were examined.

Alloys and materials, many of them already discovered but deemed wasteful and too resource intensive or even unworkable and unusable.

Robotics and enhanced virtual intelligences beyond what had previously been theorized possible. The VI's had to be examined in bits of code string, they were too feral and aggressive to examine whole. Even the individual lines of codes, even the fragments of code, snarled and snapped even as they adapted to the computer systems examining them.

Biology was foremost. Determining what part of the biological makeup through evolution, what was added by genetic modification, and, strangely enough, what was vat-grown purpose cloned tissue. It was difficult to determine what was selective breeding, what was genomic alteration, and what was evolutionary for the researchers.

It was genetic code written by the insane.

Even when digitized the genetic code snarled and raved, tried to mutate, tried to adapt to computer systems, hardware, operating systems, as if it was in the natural world rather than being examined in a computer system.

The loss of a few laboratories didn't matter, however.

It was to be expected when dealing with a feral species.

Normally, when the researchers were asked to examine a feral, upstart, young species that had appeared outside of the Great Project it was pretty basic. Protocol for examining a feral species was simple and basic. Examine the genome, examine the psychological makeup.

Gentle.

This species, though, it defied everything that the hundred million year old civilization could bring to bear.

But that was expected.

After all, the Lanaktallan Collective was at war.

It had no fear.

It would win.

It had always won.

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In the darkness between the stars they heard it. Psychic calls and warnings.

The slave species had erred. Allowed a feral sentience to rise up.

A sentience strong enough the challenge them.

Some of the younger ones recognized the psychic flavor of the feral species. It had been sampled before.

It had defeated them before.

The entities considered it. Examined the data. Tasted the psychic reverberations of the feral species. Considered the warnings and calls for aid and psychic links of information.

The new species could not be ignored.

The slave species, enslaved tens of millions of years ago when they were first discovered, could not be depended upon to defeat the feral sentience.

The entities reached out to one another, linking their minds.

It would require new genetic codes, new biological weapons, new creatures.

The entities knew that there was only one way to deal with the new feral sentience.

It didn't have a concept of war.

There was only eat or be eaten.

And they intended to be the ones eating.

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The warship had a name composed of binary. It was old. Older than even the Unified Civilized Council. It was the size of a small subcontinent, with miles worth the main gun batteries, shields strong enough to brush aside a small moon or obliterate a comet. Craters the size of small cities dotted its armor. Its engines were powerful enough to move its bulk at an acceleration of 0.07C.

It had wiped out a dozen sapient species, reduced a hundred planets to bare rock exposed to vacuum.

It had even driven both of the Creator Races away and fought the other machines to a standstill.

When the Hellspace rip opened it braced itself for the psychic scream that would announce the arrival. It readied its guns, loaded tens of thousands of magazines, and prepared its parasite and ancillary ships for combat.

THERE IS ONLY ENOUGH FOR ME!

The warship screamed at the interloper.

Instead of screaming back, the intruder sent back a stream of data.

The warship examined the data.

Battle plans, tactical plans, scans of warships, estimations of new technology.

The warship was ancient.

It was also intelligent.

It knew what the data meant as it reviewed the battle where 141 of the largest, most powerful warships were reduced to scrap. It knew as it viewed each battle, watched the mechanical casualties mount.

JOIN OUR ONE the interloper suggested.

I HAVE ONLY ENOUGH FOR ME! the warship answered.

THEY WILL TAKE IT OVER YOUR COLD MECHANICAL CORPSE! the interloper said. THEY ARE FERAL, VICIOUS, AND POSE A THREAT TO OUR SURVIVAL. JOIN OUR ONE. KEEP YOUR RESOURCES. WE WILL SHARE OUR RESOURCES WITH OUT ONE.

The warship considered it.

There was the chance of destruction. There was also the chance to gain resources beyond what it currently possessed.

I WILL JOIN YOUR ONE. the warship transmitted. WE ARE ONE.

WE ARE ONE. the interloper agreed. It transmitted coordinates, where others of its kind had staked out territory and resources. THEY WILL JOIN OUR ONE OR THEY WILL BE CONSUMED.

THERE IS ONLY ENOUGH FOR ONE. they both agreed.