One down. How many more to go?

With the exception of a few Reaver attacks and a small raid the other night, things have been quiet on Hale's Moon. Not perfectly quiet, of course. They never are. But quiet enough. Just wish Sabrina and Imrhien were back from their respective personal missions. This time, at least, Immi was trying to stay in touch so we didn't have another rude surprise in store.

Of course, I suppose Reaver and Raider attacks don't really count as quiet. Especially when a couple of the Raiders tried to mug me - before half a dozen armed people showed up and the whole thing degenerated into a firefight. But compared to some of the things we've faced recently? No. This was quiet.

The thing that really caught my eye was the report from Blackburne that they'd managed to track down one of the Mother bots out in the Wastes and destroy it. Had to hand it to them. I wasn't expecting a frontal assault to succeed like that.

Their description of the Mother wasn't quite what I was expecting, but wasn't outside the parameters of even the original mining machines. Within a given range, they'd configure themselves to best suit the terrain they were deployed in and the available resources. This one was pretty big and deployed on the surface, which was a bit of a surprise, but again not outside what would be expected.

While I was immensely pleased they'd managed to destroy the factory bot, I didn't share their unlimited enthusiasm and relief. The original mining machines were built from an initial Seeder unit that would release a few mining drones to gather resources, then set about constructing the refinery/factory unit. The Mother. Once built, Mother would start turning out more drones to gather materials and from there, build another seeder to go off and find another place to start mining. After that, maybe two percent of Mother's production would go towards building new Seeders to spread the von Neumann Love across whatever rock the machine was on.

Since there was nothing in the report about them recovering the thing's main core, there was no telling whether it had created one or more seeders before they took it out. There wasn't even knowing whether it was coded to make seeders, or whether it was just building war machines. It was good they'd destroyed it. Even better that, unlike the one we knew of on Hale's, it wasn't buried under a couple kilometers of rock. But was it the only one?

I didn't want to burst their happy bubble, but there was the very real possibility that there was another one, or possibly more than one, of those things somewhere on the ground on Blackburne. If there was, the other one almost certainly knew it's sister had been taken out and how which meant defeating the next one would be all that much more difficult.

Sadly, even if they had managed to bag the single Mother bot on Blackburne, our fight against the machines was far from over. There'd been reports of drone attacks from at least half a dozen frontier worlds, with some unusual reports from the trade lanes indicating the Machines may have been build with interplanetary capability. If that really was the case, we'd not only have to find them on the worlds we knew about, but hunt down every possible nest in the entire region. If we missed just one, the Machines would be able to continue replicating, seeding, and growing their forces until they executed whatever long term plan they'd been programmed with. Assuming, of course, they hadn't broken out of their programming and gotten an agenda of their own.

That was something I didn't want to contemplate.