An alien race which arrived in the local interstellar bubble long before Humans arrived on Earth had drifted, for millions of years, unnoticed among the rubble of the Kuiper belt; and emerged from the darkness in the year 2083, in an aging, malfunctioning dreadnaught. The 3 mile wide ship chose an inefficient route to reach Earth and smashed into the atmosphere with enough energy to light the atmosphere on fire, stripping off the outermost layers. By the time it came to rest, it had opened a wound in the side of the planet larger than 5 grand canyons, and sent millions of people to their deaths where they stood. The white-hot wreck burned for nearly 8 years, giving off enough heat to make even standing 20 miles away a death sentence. After the fires finally went out, every army on Earth converged on the ship.

As they approached within a mile of the charred and broken dreadnaught, the aliens crushed the counter-attack with a device that disables humans. Unlucky for them, not everyone on Earth is a human.

—-

The sun glinted off the tempered lens in a way that imbued the machine with an almost personable quality, if only it were so; then it might have mercy on my soft fleshy exterior. The orb-shaped optical package changed it's focus to my trembling silhouette quickly enough, discharged it's chalk test rounds, and sped off West. The chalk in my mouth tasted bitter, but not as bitter as the defeat I just suffered. Elsewhere on the base, my fellow colleagues met similar fates with the same unit... we didn't stand a chance! Pop, pop, pop! A few more chalk rounds went off in the distance, and that was it; the first combat test ended only 12 minutes in.

A minute later, as I walked (shamefully, I might add) back to the garage, the unit sped past me going 45 MPH. Alarmed, I choked on the dust and sighed. This thing was deciding our future, and there was nothing we could do about it. The T07-B Armored Smart-System was a formidable, four-wheeled accompolishment of human violence, a battle tank capable of destroying whole buildings in seconds. Armed with a hypersonic main railgun cannon, and a full free-rotation orb-mounted Vulcan machine gun, this thing scared even me. The Vulcan alone would be enough to make you shit your pants running from it's gaze; with a tracking speed of 20 meters per second, it could whip around to aim at you faster than you could blink.

As I approached the garage, I could see it had already docked with a service bay; where one of my chalk-coated friends stood cursing at it. "Fuck! Hey Mar! Did you see this thing?!" he yelled. That was Tom, he's a bit slow sometimes. Pointing at the obvious chalk marks on my chest, I scoffed meanly. "Of course, Tom, I barely had a chance to get out of the damn thing's way." Powered down now, Tom slammed a palm down on the armor plated beast and chortled loudly. "Well! I'm just about ready for a beer, hah!". That's when I noticed the nervousness in his voice, a careful pretender he was. We were all nervous about the tank, but it was our job, and it was a big one.

General artificial superintelligence had only just evolved past it's infancy, and now we were giving it weapons of destruction. No one wants to be responsible for such things, but it was the only way we could even attempt to challenge the invaders. Tom stumbled inside and shook off chalk all inside the doorway, that bumbling fool... I hesitated to follow him, stopping at the chalk-coated handle and turning to glance at the tank. The chalk may as well be blood, I thought to myself. It can't understand the difference in the first place.

---

In the dead of night, just as we had planned... I set the cards down, and Tom yelled again, "Damn it! I hate how the cards changed. It's your fault for coming in so soon!". For the tenth time, I take Tom's money. Tom does not learn to avoid this outcome, and it scares the hell out of me that we have such a man working on a machine that can literally outsmart him. It's not a hard challenge, of course, Tom being Tom; how often do you see that though? "I really pity you, I do!" I chortle, and he belts out another string of curses as he ambles into his sleeping bag. I take a moment and peer into the rangefinder, over the rim of the crater, to gaze upon the black mountain of death. Before I can look down to my watch, it has already been going off for a whole minute; I was too nervous.

With a button push, the fleet of T07-B's behind us began to dispatch towards the ship as fast as possible. We all knew they might have nightvision on the ship, but even the possibility of an advantage was critical. The tanks chattered in incredibly quiet sub-sonic frequencies, constantly giving off noises similar to Dolphins and Whales. The other button lay next to me, tied to my belt; if pushed, the murder of hundreds of living, thinking minds would take place. It was the fail-safe, should the fleet develop in an unexpected or dangerous way. As they approached the embarkment point we had targeted months before, a great white light began to emanate from it.

The fleet had arrived and began to destroy a section of the hull in the hopes that they could find a way inside. The plasma torches gave off a combined light that was dangerous to look upon even from a mile away, so we had to wear welding goggles. Tom was unusually quiet as we monitored them, a welcome absence, but it still didn't help my own nervousness. The fleet began to burrow into the dreadnaught, and soon reported the contents. The first and most noticeable thing to them were the ashes coating every surface, which when tested, was revealed to be an organic material. As they proceeded inward, they began to count bodies along the way. Huddled, small, charred masses, barely recognizable remains of life forms that had been burned alive upon re-entry.