The Code

by Doug Dandridge

  “And the planet?”

  “Nothing we can do for them,” she said, shaking her head. Even if her entire fleet went to that star to embark people for an evacuation, they would only get less than one percent to safety. “I know you don’t like it Admiral. I don't either. But we have to stay the course set for us by the Emperor and Admiral Chan.”

  There. I’ve done it, thought Beata, feeling a bit guilty. Now everyone on her command staff would believe that the admiral was only following this order that she might not agree with. Somewhat dishonest, but she was willing to let them think that about her for the time being.

  “Will do, Admiral,” said Admiral Hahn, letting out a sigh and closing his eyes. “I’ll do my best to make the Machines pay for it. Such payment as it is.”

  Bednarczyk had to agree with that last sentiment. There was a satisfaction to killing a living opponent that was standing in the way. That was a horrible thought, but in a battle terror was a normal emotion. And visiting terror on your opponent made one feel better. Brave, an avenger, gaining vengeance for your fellows who the enemy had killed. The Machines had no feelings. No fear, no anger. Destroying them caused no distress to their AIs. Destroying them might still have been necessary, but it wasn’t very satisfying.

  Hahn disappeared from the holo, dismissed by his fleet admiral. She leaned back in her chair, then called up the star map holo of the sector, expanding the area of interest. Right now the Machines were located in a space, on a course, that could bring them to four different populated systems within the next day. Her deployments didn’t allow her to move her entire force to any one system. Knowing where they were heading ahead of time, she could have moved at least half her fleet to any one system to contest them. She didn’t dare to do that, and it was tearing her up inside. What she could do was send smaller forces to each of the four systems, accomplishing two goals. Not letting the Machines know that she was reading their mail, and making sure the Machine forces were eroded by combat before they moved on. If those were even the systems they were heading for. So far their vector arrows showed them missing all but one of those systems by a margin of light years. Intelligence could be wrong, and they were actually heading for one of the other worlds closer in. They would know for sure in a day.

  Chapter Nine

  It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light. Aristotle

  GORGANSHA SPACE. JULY 16TH, 1003.

  Vice Admiral Tiberius Hahn commanded the largest force that had ever been put in his hands. Fifty battleships, all of them hyper VII. Twenty-four of the same class of battle cruisers. And three hundred smaller vessels, cruisers and escorts. The Machine fleet heading his way had over quintuple his ship strength, some VIIs who were its advanced scout force. In a general battle he would have used his hyperdrive advantage to hit and run. Machine weapons made that a risky proposition.

  The graviton projectors of the enemy made that tactic a non-starter. Anything of his that got too close would be dropped out of hyper in a catastrophic translation, meaning almost sure destruction. The same would go for missiles he fired, even the wormhole launched variety. That would not be as tragic a consequence as losing ships full of people. It would still be a waste of missiles. When the only thing they had to worry about were the huge planet killers deploying such beams, they could maneuver around them and get in enough hits to make the maneuvers worthwhile. Now it was just a maneuver of futility that put his ships at risk for nothing.

  He also didn’t want to be trapped within the system. The Machines could push their ships well above the limits of their compensators. With no living beings aboard, it didn’t matter if their machinery and internal spaces were subjected to hundreds of gravities. If he got trapped in a normal space battle, he would still probably win. The wormhole launchers gave him a tremendous advantage. He didn’t know what new twists the Machines might unveil this time, but he was sure there would be some. And he wanted an escape route out of there if things didn’t go his way. Which was why his fleet was sitting in normal space just outside the hyper III barrier.

  The Bonada system itself was not anything special. K class star, a dozen planets, one of them able to support carbon-based life. Three more rocky worlds, two hot, one cold. The rest were smallish gas giants, in the range of Neptune or Uranus. A moderate sized asteroid belt between two of the gas giants. The planet was also nothing special, if any world with living things evolving on the surface could be called ordinary. The only land organisms that had come about so far were some scrubby plants, insectoids and some eight limbed amphibians. And the lifeforms that the Gorgansha had planted there to support themselves and the slaves they had brought along with them.

  One hundred million intelligent beings, half of them the dominant species. Hahn wouldn’t have cared so much if it had just been the Gorgansha. But the fifty million plus slaves were another matter.

  They aren’t any better than the Cacas or the Fenri, thought the admiral with a flash of anger. He wasn’t sure why they were supporting these people. Looking at the plot that showed the enemy fleet on approach he realized that it didn’t matter that the people they were supporting were slavers. The only thing important was that the Machines wanted to kill them. The fact that they were slavers could be settled after the Machines were gone. If that happened. If the Machines killed all of the people of the Gorgansha Consolidation it really didn’t matter that they held other intelligent species as chattel, since all of them would be dead as well.

  “Machine fleet is hitting the V barrier,” said the fleet tactical officer, Captain Klassa Rodriguez. “It looks like they’re going to do a standard stairstep approach.”

  So they're going for a least time approach, thought the admiral. Stairstep meant they were dropping down to the maximum translation velocity, then accelerating to the point where they needed to decelerate again to the next translation point, and so on, until they were hitting normal space. Since it was impossible to sneak up through hyper, it reduced the reaction time of the system defenders. Only this time the defenders were ready, and they would react as soon as the enemy entered normal space.

  “Predicted entry point?” asked Hahn, looking over at his tactical officer.

  “If they do indeed come out at the I barrier, they will translate here within ten seconds of this time,” said the captain, her eyes returning his look.

  Of course she was confident, given the parameters they were working from. If the enemy instead came out at the II barrier, or the III, they would not be in the predicted engagement basket. Anything fired before then would be wasted, but since they were wormhole missiles, there were almost infinite reloads back at the Donut. Hahn was willing to risk those missiles.

  “Commodore Douglass is to fire all of her launchers to hit that point twenty seconds after the predicted emergence. Keep pumping out missiles until they empty all the accelerators in their queue. And I want Captain Lauren’s fighters on the spot to attack right after the missiles strike.”

  Hahn had been ordered to hurt the enemy and not get his force destroyed, and not worry so much about the sentient beings in the system. But he would be damned if he didn’t fight a successful battle against them and kick their asses. The people on that living world depended on him to defend them, and he was going to do his best, no matter what his commanders wanted.

  * * *

  The Prime AI of the Machine force followed the movement of its fleet as it forged inward, stair-stepping with precision. Each ship coming into normal space less than a second from disaster, something no living being would attempt unless under server duress. They would be too afraid of possible disaster to take that chance. There were sometimes fluctuations in the barrier, caused by the difference in gravity fields associated with planets in orbits around the star. Very small fluctuations, not anything that would result in any problems with the built-in fudge factor of human calculations. The Machine was willing to take the tiny chance.

  The first five translations went without
flaw. The sixth was the problem. One Machine battleship was just about to open the hole in space that led from dimension III to II. The hole opened the proper distance away for the translation. The ship fell toward in. Everything was going well. Except the barrier shifted out just a couple of thousand kilometers and suddenly the opening was on the other side of the barrier, and it started to ripple.

  The battleship hit the barrier before it got to the hole that it now couldn’t possibly reach. In the space beyond the barrier only the hyper I and II dimensions existed, and the ship was still in III. Plunging into that space it was forcibly thrown back into normal space. Alloys tore apart, some ran like liquid, and the antimatter core of the ship breached, causing a massive explosion. Some of the blast extended back into the hyper dimensions, hitting another ship and knocking it off course, to ram through the barrier. Again, precipitating a catastrophic translation.

  This time the ship survived, if such a term could be used for something that had lost its computers. Essentially its crew had been killed, and the ship forged into the system at point three light with nothing in control. Unless repaired it would eventually hit the star, an outcome that the humans would have no problem with.

  The Machine had no time for regret, if it could even feel such an emotion. A statistically improbably event had happened. That was all. Everything else was going according to plan. It ran the permutations, seeing if it needed to change the plans. Coming up with a negative, it did what its program told it to do. Continue on without change, while continuing to run the data over and over. If it had been a living being such mental behavior would have been called an obsessive/compulsive disorder. In a computer it was called business as usual.

  * * *

  “We have a translation at the hyper II barrier, sir,” cried out Rodriguez, her voice almost in a panic. If the Machines came out there, all wormhole missiles they had already launched would miss, and they would have no idea where the Machines would be for the next launch. They might still generate hits, but not as many.

  Hahn grasped his chairs arms tight, leaning forward, willing the Machines to not come through at that point. Not that he expected the Machines to conform to his wishes.

  The tactical officer let out a breath. “It was two ships, not the entire fleet. I suspect it was a couple of catastrophic translations. Always a danger when they’re trying to cut the parameters so close.”

  “No need to panic, Klassa,” said Hahn, keeping his own voice under control, even though he had been on the verge of panicking himself.

  “So we continue to track and fire as if they are still going to translate at the I barrier?” asked the tactical officer.

  “That’s the smart call, Klassa,” said Hahn. He knew this officer was good, but the pressure on all of them in this campaign had been fierce. Fighting an unfeeling opponent that only existed to kill all life was enough to rattle anyone. “I would say the odds are they are still going to do what you first thought. So we go with the odds.”

  Rodriguez nodded, then looked back at her board.

  “Douglass is firing her first volleys, now.”

  A light minute to the port of the flagship, thirty light minutes from the translation point, the capital ships of Commodore Elisa Douglass opened fire with their wormhole launchers.

  Fifteen battleships and four battle cruisers, all of his wormhole launchers, each released their thirty wormhole launched missiles over a one second span. Five hundred and seventy missiles pushing through space at point nine-five light, on course to hit the Machines, thirty-one and a half minutes flight time, within seconds after they entered normal space. Thirty seconds later, the time it took to move the other end of the wormholes to new accelerator tubes, another five hundred and seventy missiles were on the way. This went on for fifteen minutes, thirty cycles, the capital ships shifting their fire inward. Each launch had a lower chance of interception. There would still be hits, just not as many as the enemy fleet started to shift its vector to get away. But any hit was a good hit, and Hahn would take all he could get.

  “When will Captain Lauren’s fighters go?”

  “They’re only ten light minutes from the translation point,” said Rodriguez. “Thirty seconds from start up to attack.”

  So the fighters would be sitting there for the next thirty odd minutes, crews on edge, sweating in their perfectly environmentally controlled cockpits. It would be easier on them if they could be committed sooner. Unfortunately, the laws of physics cared nothing for their feelings, and at the moment they were nothing more or less than ammunition waiting to be fired at the target.

  Hahn shook his head, again wondering why he had ever decided to take this career path. Maybe because I’m good at it, he thought. He was realistic enough to know that he wasn’t God’s gift to the Fleet. He was also realistic enough to know that he was much better than average, and because he was here either less of his people would die or more of the Machines would be destroyed. Preferably, both. It wasn’t an easy career, but then, if it was, anyone could do it.

  * * *

  The Machine force finished its translation within ten seconds, just before the arrival of the first wave of missiles. Every ship started scanning the system in all modalities as soon as they were in normal space. They all sent their data back to the command ship, which performed its own analysis. Which didn’t mean that the other ships didn’t do their own analyses as well, and sent their own results back. In some ways it was a good system, making sure that nothing was overlooked. It also sometimes resulted in information overload.

  The system was as expected. Some Gorgansha ships, both military and commercial, were on the move. The twenty-seven on the way out of the system, on a heading toward the Machines, were obviously military. In motion to try and stop the invaders from forging into the system and attacking their planet. It was really a hopeless gesture, and if the Gorgansha were operating from logic, like the Machines, they would be trying to get those ships and as many people as they could hold away from here. It wouldn’t help, but it would be a more logical response.

  The other ships, just over a hundred, were heading away. Obvious commercial vessels, freighters and passenger liners. They were following a logical course of action, but they wouldn’t get away either.

  The Machines calculated the course of their shots and started getting their weapons ready for fire. That was when the alarms started going out from the first ships to pick up the incoming missiles, sensors starting to pulse their beams off the stealthy weapons. Giving the Machine fleet less than ten seconds to respond.

  All weapons were already online, ready to fire. They might not be aligned with the firing solution, but it only took seconds to move them onto the target. Lasers opened fire, counter missiles started moving through launch tubes, and fast firing projectile weapons began to rotate into position.

  As soon as they were hit with sensor beams with the strength needed to detect them the computer minds of the missiles started sending energy into their grabbers and went into hard maneuvers to dodge, while at the same time calculating the best firing solutions to their targets.

  Missiles started exploding in space, hit by powerful beams and projectiles that blasted through the lightly armored body of the incoming weapons. Over half the missiles fell off the plots of the Machine ships. Which meant that just under half went into their final attack profiles, running into the projectile weapons. Most of the fleet was shielded by other ships, unable to bring their weapons to bear.

  The human missiles struck, a dozen hitting directly, their kinetic energy transforming Machine ships into spreading clouds of plasma. There were over fifty proximity hits, warheads going off within ten thousand kilometers and sending heat and radiation into nearby ships. Nine enemy ships sustained severe damage, still capable of fighting and boosting, but not able to keep up with the fleet if the rest of the ships went into maximal maneuvering.

  Thirty seconds later the second wave came in, this time more falling to the defenses. There
was still a couple of hits, two more ships turned into plasma. Some more were damaged, but the Machine fleet weathered the second wave much better.

  The next wave came in, and the next, each doing less, blasted out of space. Counters took out some, lasers others, close in weapons most of what was left. The missile waves kept coming in for fifteen minutes. At the end of that time the Machine ships were down to less than twenty-five percent of their counter missiles, less than fifty percent of the projectiles. Each ship could make more projectiles, given time. They wouldn’t have more counters for many hours, and only then if replenishment ships met with them. As far as the humans knew, that was.

  In the middle of all of this the Machines picked up several hundred sources, from very large to fairly small, start putting out gravitons. They were well beyond the barrier, and the Machines were now moving inward. It would take them hours to change their vectors to move out, and if they did the planet might survive longer.

  Orders went out, and the Machines fired a volley of missiles at Bonada, their newer weapons, capable of acceleration rates similar to those of the humans, and only fifty percent larger. Their second volley went toward the human fleet, accelerated away with almost enough velocity to kill their inward motion. Their grabbers pulled at them, moving onto a course that would reach the human force in a couple of hours. Of course the humans would be gone by then, most likely into hyper to move around to another firing position. But it had to do something.

  The Machine ships were still dealing with the waves of incoming missiles when they picked up the space-time disturbance of the human warp fighters starting up. It took a few moments, and some triangulation, to determine where they were heading, though the Machine AI was sure it already knew. Right toward them. It prepared the graviton beam weapons it knew would knock them out of space if they came within range.

  * * *

  “Do you want us to go after those missiles, sir?” asked Captain Michael Lauren, sitting in the cockpit of his warp fighter, communicating through his Klassekian com tech.