The Code

by Doug Dandridge

  “They can make their way without me,” she said, giving her own very human head shake. “They can get work in the Empire, and if they are needed for a com team, there are seven of them. Still enough.”

  “You better make sure you have a secure place to shelter,” he said, looking into her eyes.

  “Do you?”

  “I have a quarter ton battlesuit to shelter in,” he said, nodding. He thought of the tough alloy battlesuit, fully equipped with sensors, grabbers, and electromag shields. Everything he had been lacking during the last battle. A larger weapon also came along with it. He had no doubt he would be able to hold his own against a Machine battlebot. Just as he was sure he and his kin would go down if the Machines had the numbers they expected.

  “I can get a weapon,” said Mraazzarit, glancing away. “Any way I can get one of those suits.”

  The male shook his head. It had taken months of training for him to make the suit part of himself. Weekends at militia drill, nights of volunteer training. It still hadn’t fallen into place until a couple of weeks ago. Now everything in the once confusing suit seemed natural.

  “We can’t get you a suit. But there will be strong points established where you can take a firing position behind armor. Let me talk with the captain, and I’ll see if I can get you on one of the squads.”

  “Why does this keep happening to us?” complained the woman.

  The male didn’t have to ask what she meant. Their planet almost destroyed by religious fanatics, then by the supernova that went off only six light months away, then the attack by the Machines, both in the home system and here. It seemed like a never-ending sequence of disasters for their people.

  “Our people still exist,” said Nazzrirat. “And no matter what, they still will. There are millions of us across the human Empire now. And no way now that any single disaster can take out our race.”

  From what they had heard, Imperial biologists had taken enough life forms from their world, along with tons of genetic samples, so they could duplicate it in the Empire if need be. In fact, that might be a given in time. They had terraformed worlds of their own in their space, and duplicated worlds they had colonized before having to run away from their primary enemy. And then they had terraformed worlds to match all of their own alien races, giving them multiple home worlds. It was something they were very good at. Something they seemed to enjoy.

  “All militia are to report to your armories,” came a voice over the intercom into the cafeteria. “Repeat, all militia are to report to your armories.”

  “Come along with me and I’ll see what I can do about getting you a weapon and position,” he told the female. They had only been a couple for the last two months, but he was already seeing the possibility of choosing this one as a mate. He didn’t want to lose her before that happened. I don’t want to lose me either, he thought with an internal chuckle.

  “All ship engineers and constructors are to report to the hangar bays,” came another call over the intercom. “Repeat, all ship engineers and constructors are to report to the hangar bays.”

  Nazzrirat wasn't sure what that was about. Since it didn't concern him he dismissed it from his thoughts and took off down the corridor, heading for his company assembly point.

  * * *

  Commander Russ Wellington wasn't sure he was up to the command he had been given. It was the dream of every naval officer to command a capital ship. Unfortunately, he was damned sure that he wasn't ready for this. The biggest ship he had ever commanded, before being seconded to Bolthole as an engineering officer, was a destroyer. Now they were asking him, no, commanding him, to take charge of a battleship.

  As if that wasn't bad enough, the ship wasn't completely battle ready, It was missing electromag projectors and about half of its close in weapons. It had all of its missile launchers, but no missiles. Cargo shuttles were frantically moving missiles and counters aboard the ship, but it would be a near thing if it was fully armed in time. Even worse, the crew was not really a unit. Construction engineers, retired Fleet personnel, even civilians who had been tasked with installing trivialities aboard, they had all been pressed into service.

  Battleship Alpha ninety-nine didn't even have a name. Just the numerical designation it would carry back to Central Docks, where it would be given a name by the Bureau of Ships, as well as the assignment of a permanent crew, all of whom would have undergone advanced training in their specialties. Officers would be assigned with experience on other vessels. It would then go through shakedown of a month or more before being deployed.

  Instead, he would have people who had never served aboard a warship, what officers he could find slotted into whatever positions they might have the least bit of experience with. And whereas a normal battleship would have a crew of well over three thousand, he had seven hundred and forty-two. It seemed hopeless. But these people would die anyway, no matter what they did. There wasn't room to evacuate all of them, and any chance to fight back was taken by all who were offered the opportunity.

  * * *

  “Take her in nice and slow, Clarence,” ordered Petty Officer First Anaya Kashani, carefully watching the front viewer which was displaying their track into the hanger.

  “Yes, ma'am,” said Clarence Brubaker, the civilian tech she had selected as her pilot.

  Normally the PO would have taken the piloting duties, qualified as she was with small craft operation. Unfortunately, she was in command, and had to do more than fly the ship. She almost made a remark about working for a living in response to the ma'am, but decided they didn't need any reprimands at this time. The eight civilians who were her crew aboard the ten-thousand-ton fast attack craft were not military, though Brubaker did have some past experience, in the Army. They had all worked with her assembling these ships, and knew the workings of them inside and out. That didn't mean they knew how to fight the ship. That was up to the former engineering PO who had served aboard these ships in a combat unit.

  “Steady as she goes,” ordered Kashani, wishing that she were back on her home world of New Lahore. Or even with the main Fleet. Anywhere but here. “Set her down over there, in that clear space.”

  There was a human in a spacesuit standing on the other side of that space, using light sticks to motion them in. More spacesuited figures stood near a couple of large rolling carts, each with a capital missile sitting on the built-in racks.

  Brubaker brought the ship in, his hands shaking slightly from the stress. Kashani could deal with that. She need to see the man working under stress. She knew he was a qualified technician, and had flown these craft before, but only from one open area of space to another. If he couldn't handle this maneuver she would have find another pilot, though she wasn't sure who that would be.

  The civilian set the ship down on the deck of the hangar without more than a slight bump, and the PO grunted in satisfaction.

  “Open up the tubes,” she ordered, and one of the other bridge crew pushed down a series of switches, swinging the hatches open on all four of the large missile containers on the sides of the craft.

  The handlers immediately went to work, pulling their carts forward on antigravs, then locking them into place. The missiles also had antigravs attached, allowing the handlers to swing them up and out of their cradles, then into the craft's containers. It went without a hitch, the back tubes filled, and another pair of missiles came up to the deck from the storage facility below, already mated to their own carts. The empties rolled to those lifts as soon as they were vacant, lowered back so they could be mated to new weapons.

  The fourth missile was the disaster that Kashani had been dreading. Even with the weight taken off them from the antigravs, they still carried a hundred tons of mass. One team swung their weapon in too fast, and the handler helping to make sure it went into the tube couldn't get out of the way in time. One hundred tons of missile crushed the human into the compartment, killing them instantly.

  “Get that tube cleared,” Kashani shouted over
the com.

  “I just lost a man,” shouted back the loading crew foreman.

  “And you have my sincerest condolences,” said the PO in a soft voice. “But we need to get loaded and on our way, so you can get other fast attack craft prepped.”

  She really wasn't sure how much good the craft would do. Maybe one wouldn't. But the hundreds they were deploying would surely have some effect on the battle.

  “Understood,” said the foreman in a tone that bespoke gritted teeth. “We'll get you on your way.”

  “The last one is locked in,” said the wide-eyed tech who was manning the sensor station, the schematic of the ship on a holo over her station showing all four missiles tubes in the green.

  “Make sure your people are clear,” said the PO over the com. “Get us up off the deck as soon as they're out of the way, and back into space,” he ordered the pilot.

  There was an assembly point sixty thousand kilometers from the platform they were currently on. They needed to get there and get out of the way of everything else going on. Until it was their time to maneuver into the heat of battle.

  * * *

  “We're receiving reports of accidents all over the facilities, sir,” called out one of the com techs on the system control bridge.

  Henare nodded, stopping his pacing for a moment. “How many?”

  “Dozens,” said the tech in a hushed voice. “More. Multiple fatalities, a lot more serious injuries.”

  The admiral had expected as much. Normally, Bolthole worked under severe safety protocols. Even then there were accidents. A lot of very massive pieces of equipment, not to mention energy dense objects, were moved around during many of the construction processes. Everyone involve wore protective suits, akin to battle armor. And still people were struck by objects even the armor couldn't protect them from. Every week there were crushed arms and legs, sometimes bodies. Arms and legs could be regrown, and if treated in time even those with massive internal organ injury be healed.

  But not always. And with the safety protocols relaxed, necessary if they were going to get everything done in time, of course the accidents were going to increase, and with them the fatalities.

  “We have supervisors asking for instructions on what to do,” continued the tech.

  “Some division heads are asking if they can order their people to slow down?” said another one.

  “No, dammit,” growled Henare, checking the time in his head. The Machines would be translating into normal space in one hour and fifty-seven minutes, best estimate. “We need to get everything into space, or into fixed weapons that we can before they can get missiles into us.”

  He was about to say he didn't care about the casualties, but that wouldn't be true, and he felt for his supervisors. They were responsible for those under them, and would of course blame him, and themselves, for their loss. He had to look at the bigger picture. If some were injured, or died, other might live because of their sacrifice.

  “Everyone is to continue working as hard and as fast as they possibly can. If they need a break, for food or a short rest, of course they can take them. But I want it emphasized that every ship they make ready, every weapon they prep, increases their odds of making it out of this shit-storm alive.”

  “Understood, sir,” said one of the wide-eyed techs, while the other simply nodded, unable to respond.

  If everything went according to the timetable his staff had worked out, he would have a fifty percent larger fleet by the time the Machines actually got into the vicinity of the Bolthole asteroid. Of course, the quality of those reinforcements was still an unknown, and he would be happy if they improved his offensive firepower by ten percent. What he was really counting on was the weight they would add to his defense. What laser rings, counters and close in weapons they had. Even their own hulls, if it came to that.

  Chapter Eleven

  The secret of getting ahead is getting started. Mark Twain

  GORGANSHA SPACE.

  “Okay, Beata. You have all the warships we’re going to be able to give you,” said McCullom from out of the holo. “Do you think you can win this fight?”

  “I’m sure I can,” she told the CNO, feeling no doubt whatsoever while looking at the area plot. Until she thought of the numbers again. Then there was definite doubt.

  There were four major fleets of Machines moving into the Gorgansha Consolidation. About equal sized, all about twenty-five hundred ships each. There were other, smaller forces, scouting, screening, not currently engaged in the assault, though they could be vectored in at any moment, And of course she didn’t know how many of their new warp fighters they had, since those were carried by hyper capable ships and would not show up on the plot.

  How in the hell did they rebuild so fast? she thought, tallying the numbers from this invasion. Twelve thousand ships? Along with at least two thousand vessels now outside of Bolthole. She thought she could beat back this attack, though there were some systems that might get hammered before she could get to all of the enemy forces. What she was worried about was the wave that would surely follow this one. And the next. The Machines had a strategy that she couldn’t deal with if they kept it up.

  Machines could build ships much faster than the Empire. Even more importantly, they didn’t have to train crews to man the ships. The AIs came ready to go to war, cloned from the other AIs and installed. She would lose hard to replace crew in these battles, while they would lose none.

  Her other problem was with the Gorgansha fleet. She still wasn’t sure about them. She felt that the ships were good enough. The crews were trained good enough and should acquit themselves well. What she didn’t trust was the leader, who she was sure would make moves on his own without consulting her. Could she depend on his units being where she needed them to be to support her ships, or would they leave her in a lurch and abandon her formations? Leaving her ships in danger of being overwhelmed.

  “We’re sending the projector ships to you in the next couple of hours,” said McCullom over he com. “First one to Bolthole.”

  “They’re ready?” said Beata, shocked. “I thought Chan said they wouldn’t be prepared for another month.”

  “The Emperor, in his infinite wisdom, has decided that this is the time.”

  Thank God for that, thought Beata. She didn’t always agree with the young man, but she had to admit that he had made some good decisions, and put his foot down to make sure those dictates were carried out. If left to the CNO and her research maven, the plan would never be enacted, lest it fail and relieve them of that hope.

  She wondered about sending the first ship to Bolthole. Of course it was important, but so were the people they were trying to save in the Consolidation.

  “What's the range of those ships?”

  “Chan thinks the signal they send will be picked up in hyper VIII for almost two thousand light years in every direction. If the Machines are monitoring that dimension of hyper, they will get caught.”

  Beata wasn’t sure about that, since the Empire's ships used grav pulse com and had never achieved those kind of distances. They did use that dimension frequently for com, or had before the advent of wormholes and Klassekians, so she thought the signals would get through, if the signal reached them.

  “Well, if they work, I can use them,” said Beata, smiling slightly. “I’m tired of losing living breathing people to a bunch of silicon microcircuits.”

  “I understand, Admiral,” said McCullom, sending a disapproving look toward her subordinate. “But if we transmit and it’s the wrong message, the Machine AIs will be alerted to our plan.”

  And if we never use it they will never know, but it won’t do us any good if we don’t use it, thought Beata.

  “Still, you are not to use the transmitters until we give you the go ahead,” said Sondra, using her best command voice. “I know the theory says thousands of light years, but that's just theory, and we won't know until we use them. We would rather we knew we had multiple ships in clear ra
nge before transmitting. It definitely does us no good if we take them down on one front but some message gets out and alerts the others. If they change their programs to reject the header then we’re locked out. Forever.”

  “Understood,” said Bednarczyk, nodding. “We’re not in as dire of straights as Henare. So we’ll be happy to let him go first and follow his lead.”

  “Good,” said McCullom, fire in her eyes. “And make damned sure that those damned Misogynists don’t get their hands on the transmitters.”

  That wasn’t a term that Beata had heard very often, especially in the Empire. Humans were an egalitarian species. People did what they were capable of, which mostly meant skill and intelligence. There was, of course, still a difference in strength, but that didn't amount to anything aboard ship were everyone wore powered armor. She wasn’t sure how the being on the street in the Gorgansha Consolidation thought and felt, but she did know that their asshole of a leader was what the CNO called him.

  “Keep us informed,” said McCullom, her tone softening.

  “I think I will be just a little bit busy, Admiral.”

  “Of course you will,” said Sondra, her tone growing harsh again before she again toned it down. “But I want regular reports, even if it’s just an ensign calling me.”

  “Understood.” The holo died, and left Beata alone for a couple of moments to think. All she had time for. She immediately called up the strategic plot and took a good look at it. She had four forces out there, some still in the process of joining up, all moving in the way of a Machine force that was driving toward the Gorgansha Consolidation.

  The nation had already taken a beating from the Machines before the Empire had come along. In fact, they were on the brink of falling to the Machines. They still covered a significant area, with a population of nearly sixty billion, about half of them Gorganshas. The rest, slaves all, made up about thirty billion, in eleven species. They were not allowed weapons, or military training, which meant that only the Gorgansha were fighters. That was also not quite true, since the slaves on the capital world had revolted, the cause of the disaster that was the Gorgansha attempt to use war machines of their own manufacture.