Fiction:Andromeda War/The Darkest Hour/Mecholife V/S Mecholife!

The Grox are the ultimate form of mechanical life in the known universe. Or at least, they were, until the Mechanization caused the natives of the Wental Galaxy to become machine life as well. Now, both forms of machine life are in the Andromeda Galaxy. And both are on opposite sides of a conflict. They have yet to meet in battle, and both have powerful weapons built to destroy. The Wentals have angered the Grox by taking into themselves an enemy of the Grox, the Starmaster Alliance, and becoming the Union of Mecholife. Therefor the Grox have determined that the only option is to exterminate all non-Grox Mecholife in the universe...

First Contact
Like all wars, this one did not start with massive fleets battling it out for supremacy. This war started out with a few small scouting vessels of the Grox encountering the outer reaches of the Mecholife Expanse...

Seven Grox Warships, in seven different groups, each accompanied by five Grox Fighters, each came across the Mecholife Expanse at a different location and time.

The first encountered mecholife on a planet startling near the core of Andromeda, a large world with three smaller moons. The planet was at first thought to be lifeless, but as the ship and it's escort entered the atmosphere, they were attacked by what at first appeared to be an enemy ship. Then the Grox, shooting at it, realized it had no visible engines, and appeared to be flying with a set of large, feathered wings. The vessel saw a large swarm of these creates below, and started to get worried. It's weapons could easily take down a few of them, but there seemed to be hundreds, if not thousands, below. Unbeknowst to the ship or it's escort, it had arrived at the planet right when the Screai, the dominant species, was beginning it's mating rituals, which involved the males trying to get the larger females to mate with them. During this time, they are far more aggressive, and these poor Grox ships had just arrived upon a very large hoard of them. The ships decided, foolishly, to see what these creatures were doing, and killed the one that had attacked them. That caused the rest, interconnected by the Network, to see the ships as a threat not a foodsource. The swarm attacked. By the time the Grox ships could react, only two were left, the Warship and one Fighter. The Warship pulled out, commanding the Fighter to distract the creatures while it did so. The ship then did a full scan of the planet from a safe distance, and came to a conclusion: it had just arrived at a Mecholife world. Looking in closer at the creatures, it could even see, barely, the narrow golden threads filled with light that was a well known marking of Mecholife. The ship headed back to the rendezvous with the rest of the fleet.

The second of the seven Grox fleets encountered a mysterious fleet of large ships moving slowly through space. They couldn't detect weapons or engines, and assumed these ships were simply deactivated or dormant as they traveled at sublight speeds to a destination. The fleet decided to investigate. As they got closer, they found that these larger, silent ships were surrounded by a vast swarm of much tinier ships, too small to be a threat. All the ships had the same basic design, a large body with tiny hairs coming off of them. Not one of them was moving even so much as a single hair. One of the smaller ships bumped into a Grox ship and instantly latched onto it, the hairs extending and growing into the mechanisms of the ship. As if that was que for the rest of the ships, they suddenly came to life, swarming at the Grox ships with absolute concentration and force. The Grox ships didn't even get to fire a single shot before being swarmed over by these strange ships, they tangled into the mechanisms of their fleet and jammed up everything. They did send a FTL message torpedo back to rendezvous with the data they had collected on this strange fleet. The "fleet" moved the large ships towards the assortment of bigger "ships". There the grox fleet was ripped apart and consumed by the Yercks, a species of space Mecholife that is dormant until prey collides with the sensors scattered around them.

The Third of these seven Grox Fleets encountered a large protoplanetary disk. They went in search of resources that could be used by the Grox, as such a disk would be filled with such resources. What they found instead was what seemed to be a massive series of reef structures, all swarming with small creatures that seemed to be eating each other and were moving by jetting out small amounts of gasses and flames from various parts of their bodies. Scattered among this were larger creatures, using the same mode of transportation, but obviously more dangerous as they were taking out schools of the smaller creatures. And even larger then these were goliaths, immense creatures that seemed to be taking apart entire regions of the reefs at a time. The reefs themselves, the Grox Fleet found, were taking in sunlight and energy directly from the clouds of gasses the entire system was engulfed in. The Grox Fleet here studied the reefs for a time, researching every creature there to ensure that there were no threats in the system before moving on. After a time, they returned to the rendezvous without taking any casualties.