Free Into the Darkness: Crimson Worlds Refugees I by Jay Allan

after so long the time had come. The Regent had made that contact. It was an alarm, a call to action. The imperium was threatened. After ages of nothingness the Unit was ordered to prepare for war, to rally the forces of its sector. To confront the enemy.
    There had been strife for several years now…and fleets from other sectors had been dispatched to gain the victory. But the enemy had been underestimated. The forces the Regent had thought adequate to destroy them had been defeated, driven back. Now the Regent was sounding the full alarm, calling to every sector in the vastness of the imperium, directing all intelligences to rally what forces remained under their control after so many years of decay. For the first time in uncounted ages, total war was upon the imperium.
    The Unit reacted immediately. Slowly, it fed its precious power reserve into circuits long dormant. Memory bank after memory bank slowly came to life, and with each one the Unit recovered a portion of itself, data and computational abilities long dormant. It hadn’t been immune to the ravages of time—whole sections of its vast quantum brain were unresponsive—petabytes of data lost. But it felt the surge of power, of quasi-consciousness. It remembered. A time long ago, when its sector was active, when billions of the Old Ones, the biologics, still inhabited the worlds it administered.
    The communique that had initiated its renewal was of the utmost importance. The enemy had somehow blocked access to the only known warp gate leading to their space. But a large fleet had remained behind, and it escaped the trap the Regent had set for it. The enemy ships had fled, deeper into the imperium, and they had eluded the forces in pursuit, disappearing into the vastness of imperial space. Into the Unit’s sector.
    The Regent’s orders were clear. Find the enemy. Hunt them down, destroy their vessels. Whatever the cost. And there was something else too. The Unit was to take prisoners, live enemies it could interrogate. It was unclear if the humans knew a path back to their home worlds, but the Regent wanted that data. It had declared that the forces of the Imperium would not rest until they had discovered a way to reach the home space of the humans—and eradicate them once and for all.
    The Unit took steps to obey. Gradually, methodically, it continued to reactivate old power sources, expanding its operations as more energy became available. It opened communications lines, sent messages to its subordinate units on the various worlds of the sector. Only a few answered. The others, the Unit postulated, must have succumbed to the ravages of time. Or fallen to the enemy, its defensive algorithms suggested hawkishly. Still, it didn’t matter. The few that responded would be enough. Even now, the planetary command units were activating their armaments, determining how many ships, how many robot soldiers, were still functional. Soon, the Unit would have the data it needed to plan the destruction of the enemy.
    Then it would dispatch its fleets to search. The enemy was far from home. The Unit rationalized that their moves would be dictated by logistics. They were biologics. They would need foodstuffs to maintain themselves. They would need ammunition stores to replace those expended in battle. But most of all, they would need fuel for their ships. The enemy vessels used primitive nuclear fusion as their primary power source. It had been uncounted ages since the forces of the First Imperium had utilized such primitive power sources, but they were well understood. The enemy would need a good source of tritium and helium-3. They would be searching, even now, for a system with a gas giant rich in the two rare isotopes. And that was a data point the Unit could use to narrow its search…
    AS Midway
    System X16
    The Fleet:  225 ships, 47,916 crew
    “They had to leave Volga behind. The crack in her containment chamber opened up again.” Anastasia Zhukov was staring down at