Chapter Text
The machine retreated from the window and pushed its grinding blades into the City’s hull, obeying the instructions written by its original designers millennia before to burrow and quarry whatever lay under its heavy feet. Then it sent the same order to the other mining units trudging the surface of the Shabma ship on tedious cleaning duties.
Tireless, resilient and virtually indestructible, the machines went to work, digging, refining, and processing the metals they hauled out. Then they used the materials they’d stockpiled to build more of themselves. They mined, replicated and multiplied—slowly at first when there were only few of them, then faster and faster as their numbers increased at an ever-swifter rate—all the while ignored by the flesh and bone beings who dwelled deep inside the mother ship and had little interest in affairs outside their own.
Until a couple of years after Voyager had fought its way out of Shabma space, what remained of the stryker fleet, a trickle at first, then a flood, panicked and harried, poured out the ruins of the City and crossed the Rim for the first time since the Shabma had exited the Desolation, eons prior.
A vast galaxy, whose existence they had long rejected out of fear and hatred, awaited the striker pilots on the other side of the asteroid field, and madness descended upon them at the sight of stars shining their bright and unrelenting glare upon them. A galaxy bursting with suns, planets, ships, and most of all people remembering old tales about a murderous species cowering close to the void and slaughtering all who navigated its territory.
None of the Shabma made it far into the light despite their cries and warnings of an even bigger threat brewing near the Desolation.
When the fighting ended, their pursuers ventured into the space between the void and the asteroid field in search of the fabled giant ship said to reside there. They found nothing but hundreds of mining machines slowly drifting across the empty space once occupied by the Shabma and now void of any sentient life, and they left them be. The City was no more, its metals and alloys stripped away.
Having exhausted all available feedstock, their toil coming to a grinding halt, the patient and enduring machines floated idly and waited. Years, as measured on a far away planet, passed. Decades. Then, one machine, followed by another, then three and soon dozens turned their dogged attention to the seemingly inexhaustible supply of rocks tumbling overhead.
A thousand years later, long after Voyager’s deeds and that of its captains had turned into ancient legends, rumours of an incoming colossal wave of ever-ravenous machines spread through the systems which were now missing an entire asteroid belt.
Nobody listened.
T H E E N D