The Fall of the Rubberbirds
Lord Yygonaugh, the Overbird of the Rubberbird Empire, has a Prophesy finally catch up with him...
I've had this idea running through my head ever since i first saw the artwork depicting the Alien Rubberbirds by mrminos
so I wrote this as soon as i had the most effective fighting force to over throw that Overbird...
The Fall of the Rubberbirds
Lord Yygonaugh, the Overbird, sat in his command throne surrounded by elite Rubberbird guard slaves. He should have felt perfectly safe and in control of the situation, as he always was, but this was far from the case. Mere hours ago, his pleasure ship and fleet of Rubberbird invasion ships had approached a small, seemingly defenceless world. The populous were all Dragon anthros who lived as hunters, gathers or at most as simple farmers with no advanced technology in sight...perfect candidates for conversion into his Rubberbird Empire. It should have been easy, his forces had gone through this routine on countless other worlds, and it always worked...until now.
Seemingly from nowhere, highly advanced robotic beings had begun a counter attack, the ground action quickly turning into a route as unfeeling nanorubber encountered uncaring metal...metal armed with extremely advanced weaponry: lasers, missiles, conventional projectile guns, and even more powerful weapons that Yygonaugh had never seen before. He had withdrawn his forces to consider a different plan of attack to punish those who dared defy him...when the robots changed tactics again, taking to stars with aerial units in pursuit of his ships, and the resulting space battle had crippled his fleet. His starfighter force had suffered 98% casualties and the few capital ships he brought with him had suffered sever damage to their defences, engines and weapons.
Virtually every ship under his command was dead in space, and he could spare no slaves to work on repairs, not when the robots' boarding parties made their appearance. Lord Yygonaugh had been forced to activate every Rubberbird slave under his command to try and repel the robots' advance, but it did nothing. Every time an attacking robot was damaged enough to disable it even slightly, it simply repaired itself, often within seconds, before getting back into the fight. To make matters worse, the robots' tactics kept exponentially improving every time one of their number was 'injured'. The same trick never seemed to work twice, and not just against the injured party, ALL of the robots improved at the same time, indicating that they were all linked. Not only that, the improved tactics the robots employed occurred far too fast for them to be the result of a remote operator reprogramming them on the fly. That meant that he robots had an AI that was learning; evolving on its own...even his elite guard and Deathbeasts had been useless after just a few minutes of combat.
And now they were practically outside his door, and nothing he could do was stopping them. They destroyed his ship and Rubberbirds with such ease, such speed, the Overbird was not too proud to admit that this unstoppable tide terrified him. The sealed doors of the bridge shuddered from the blast of a weapon of some kind before simply being blasted open. The figure that emerged from the smoke and noise steps slowly, deliberately, its metal claws clicking against the deckplates. It stood aproximatly two meters tall, its form reminiscent of a theropod dinosaur wearing a small backpack that connected to its weapons. Red warpaint decorated its head face and body as it looked around, its cold, merciless gaze falling on Lord Yygonaugh. At its back, four smaller, cat-like robots moved to take flanking positions around the bridge, the weapons mounted on their backs targeting the few Elite Guard that Lord Yygonaugh had left.
A faint hiss of air pressure was heard as a pair of foot and a half long blades extended from the dinosaur's right wrist while its left hand transformed into some kind of weapon barrel. The machine's face moved like flesh instead of metal as it sneered at the seated Overbird.
"This vessel has been deemed hazardous to the biological life forms of Dracos. Termination, authorized." Lord Yygonaugh had little time to reflect on how the voice of the robot was actually quite pleasant before it attacked with blade and flamethrower, buring his guards to ash before driving its blade through his chest. The Overbird felt a strange calm come over himself as the blade entered his heart, the voice of an old Zebra Shamaness resounding in his mind even as he remembered scoffing at her words before she was killed...
"The evil of the Rubberbirds shall one day be undone, by the deadly steel-clad blades of the firey Crimson One..."
Alpha Leader, the Command Unit of the Raptor division of the Darkstar Force, pulled his blades from the now silent Bird, running three or four scans for lifesigns. Finding nothing, he nodded in satisfaction while receiving reports from other Darkstar units through the Network. While the Raptors were the rank and file of Darkstar Force, the other divisions were no less important, and his opposite numbers in those divisions; Alpha Prime of the cat-like Darstar Panthor Spec Ops, Alpha Fighter of the Pterosaur-like Darkstar Talon Air Force and Alpha Skipper of the more turtle-like Tor Naval Force; were the closest thing to family a technorganic being like himself was ever likely to get.
Speaking of, Skipper was having a blast with his naval action against the partially constructed aquatic base the Invaders had been attempting to build. Apparently they were using some mildly interesting prefab tech, nothing like what the Darkstars used, but the Dragon scientists might find such primitive tech amusing. Darkstar Control seemed to agree, though like Alpha Leader, Darkstar Control seemed mildly irritated by the imitation pirate accent that Skipper favoured. No one, not even other Tors, knew why Skipper was so...individual...but it certainly did not affect his work.
With a small mental shrug, the Raptor leader began his mop up operations. What was left was for the Dragon techs to poke through and study, he was just a soldier, let others worry about what made the universe work. Alpha Leader did find it somewhat ironic though, for all the Dragons of Dracos knew of science, technology, and many other subjects, they mostly chose to live without, as their ancestors had for generations. They were an odd species, but he couldn't fault them, after all, the Dragons had created the first generation of Darkstars almost a hundred million years ago, and then been kind enough to allow their creations to grow and evolve on their own, bound only by sensible restrictions that they themselves also adhered to. Alpha Leader was content with that...