You don't believe me do you, well have a sit with that drink and let me tell you a story and if it doesn't change your mind I'll buy you another.
You ever hear of the Concordat of Man?
No?
Doesn't surprise me very few have these days. It was founded about the same time as the Hegemony. The Concordat fought wars with both the Hegemony and Shogunate but it amounted to little more than trading systems back and forth. A couple hundred years ago though the Concordat collapsed. Survivors that showed up in the Hegemony were usually collected and kept from communicating with anyone; the Shogunate seems to have done the same thing. I searched long and hard, found lots of old conspiracy theories about what happened but not any actual records of interviews with Concordat citizens. The Hegemony and the Shogunate took over a lot of the Concordats fringe worlds after that but all the core systems were uninhabitable seems a lot of biological and nuclear weapons were used. Pop your seals on some of these worlds and you'll be dead in less than a minute.
How do I know? Well for a long time I worked on a salvage crew that contracted with a university in the Clarke Federation to gather whatever useful stuff we could find on those dead worlds.
It seems that very very few people in the Concordat had the gifts necessary to be mecha pilots. The Concordat didn't use mecha, they had infantry that wore 1 to 5 ton suites of powered armor instead and tanks, very, very big tanks. Some just barely fit inside a gateway field others were even bigger. For the longest time I'd only ever seen burned out hulks of these tanks so thought they must not have been very impressive in battle, until my crew came across one that still worked.
We had been on Laumer for more than a week without incident. Due to radiation levels communications was line of site only, we had just recently launched a couple of com-sats into orbit to solve this but one had died on its way to orbit as it passed over an area we hadn't been to yet. We sent up a modular drop ship to investigate orbital debris and I was sent with a company of mecha to investigate the ground.
We had crossed the fence line into the Retief Military Reserve without issue which wasn't surprising at all. The actual base had been nuked to glass but it was a large facility that covered what we thought was empty country side. We crested a ridge line into a long valley when we got scanned by an unseen source and our comm. Channels lit up on every frequency. Someone, it might have been me, keyed their mike and started saying "What the..." as soon as they spoke all the excess noise went away and we heard it speak.
You know how some computerized voices you can't tell are computerized this one was almost human but seemed to have been designed to let you know it wasn't. "Human piloted mecha due to current treaties I must inform you that you as allies of the Concordat that this is a restricted area. Turn around and exit this valley." It said.
The valley was long and wide in the middle of it there was a large flat hill. I was looking at it with maximum magnification when it shifted and the weapon barrels tore through the vegetation that had grown over them. I transmitted, "Captain it's one of their tanks, center of the valley." and watched one of the barrels point straight at me, not just my mecha but I could tell it was targeting me in the cockpit.
Captain Smit tried chatting the thing up, "Who are we speaking with? How many survivors are there?"
The response from the AI tank chilled me more than the threat of weapons fire, "I am planetary defense unit HNS-1956, of the Dinochrome Brigade. There are no survivors on Laumer."
I and several others had begun backing over the ridge but others held their ground. The Captain continued, "The Concordat collapsed a long time ago. Survivors fled other systems to the Hegemony and the Shogunate. We're a salvage team looking for relics and descendants of survivors. Why don't you stand down?"
"My orders still stand Captain." HNS responded, "None of the parameters have been met for me to relinquish my post. I must repeat, turn around and exit this valley or I will use lethal force."
Jensen spoke up, "Cap'n must be someting really impotant in thar, I ain't loosing my percentage cause some ol' computer toll us to go away." And then he fired a volley of missiles at the tank.
HNS-1956 engaged our 12 mecha simultaneously; accelerating suddenly the vegetation and dirt that had covered it fell away as it began its counter attack. I had read about the weapons on these things from some records we had found but no one alive had ever seen these things in action. It shot the missiles down with its Infinite Repeaters, fired a bolt of fusion plasma straight up from one turret and with another killed the Captain, Jensen and two others in what looked like a nuclear explosion that knocked down several other mecha. The Hellbore had left nothing of the 4 destroyed heavy mecha but burning radioactive wreckage. The rest of us were dodging shells from secondary weapons fire. At the same time as all this was happening my computer told me it was barely holding off a hacking attempt targeting my neural interface. I watched those that fought the machine die barely scratching it. I saw a couple of pilots eject from frozen mecha, one was shot from the sky as it headed into the valley the one that headed out of the valley was ignored. I turned my mecha and ran. It's weird the detail you notice and remember from a fight spray painted on the side of one of its Hellbore turrets were the dust covered words in old Earth English "Stormin Norman" never did figure out what that meant.
Those that stayed in that valley were slaughtered without remorse or another verbal transmission, that shot it had fired almost straight up had destroyed our modular dropship. The few of us that made it back over the ridge survived. As far as I know planetary defense unit HNS-1956 still sits in the middle of that valley waiting for orders that will never come and with every intent to guard it till the end of the universe if necessary. I don't know what is in that valley and I don't care.
The point of this story is the Concordat had thousands of those artificially intelligent metallic monsters and they lost a war anyway, against a non-human enemy that targeted the civilian population of those dead worlds. Humans wouldn't have used biological weapons that kill any human without protection and that can survive high levels of radiation for hundreds of years. Humans would have bragged about defeating the Concordat and it died without warning or fan fare. We never saw any aliens or the wreckage of their war machines. That massive battles occurred was obvious but it's like one side cleaned up all their mess and left. Whoever or whatever they are they are still out their beyond a gateway and we aren't ready to fight them.
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Submitted by Sean Wadey#356597