The Code

by Doug Dandridge

  Her ships had again struck at the Machine fleet, rippling off all the warp missiles they had carried. And once again she had generated less than ten hits. Eight, in fact, and only one Machine vessel had been destroyed.

  “We're getting requests for orders,” said her Klassekian com tech, looking over at her as the wing moved away at twenty lights, ahead of the Machine fighters that had been scrambled to chase them.

  “Get me command on the carrier,” she ordered the tech, setting his priority to obtain the information she needed before she formulated her own orders.

  “Captain,” said Rear Admiral Ho, his face appearing on the holo, transmitted through the minds of the com techs. “You need to return to the Akagi and rearm for another strike.”

  “But our strikes are doing almost nothing to the bastards,” growled Powers. “We need something more potent.”

  “What do you suggest, Captain,” said the admiral in charge of the carrier force. “Those are the only weapons I have for you and your craft. If you don't have missiles, then all you can do is drive in and try your attacks with forward compression beams. I don't think you'll make it past those warp lances of the Machines.”

  “There has to be something we can do,” said Powers, closing her eyes and thinking about all the crews she had lost so far. “We're accomplishing next to nothing. And the enemy is still coming on without a care.”

  The captain realized that the last didn't really make sense. They were unfeeling death machines. Of course they didn't have a care. There was nothing she could do to rattle them.

  “They aren't accomplishing enough to warrant risking them in attacks,” broke another voice into their conversation. The holo split, showing the tattooed face of Admiral Henare. “Load them up with counters. As many as will fit on them, then send them out on missile interception.”

  “You sure, Admiral?” asked Ho, his brows narrowing. “Seems a waste of their potential.”

  “I'm sure,” said Henare, shaking his head. “They can whittle down some of the missile streams while conserving our warp missiles for a time when we can figure out how to get them home.”

  “You heard the man, Captain,” said Ho, the troubled look never leaving his eyes. “Get your wing back to the ship and load up.”

  Powers watched the viewer as her pilot maneuvered the craft through the front hangar doors of the huge carrier. The deck was half full of other fighters, the ships from another wing, set about on the surface while crews moved missiles on rolling carts to reload the fighters. Counters were smaller than warp missiles by a third, and she could see that they were packing eight missiles around the hull of each fighter, below the warp ring, in the place of the four offensive weapons they would normally carry.

  “Setting her down,” called out the pilot, a moment before the fifteen-hundred-ton craft thumped down on the deck on her three landing pads.

  “The deck crew is giving us instructions to sit tight,” said the com tech, this time monitoring the standard set used for short range com out of warp.

  “I don't have anything else to do,” said the captain, eliciting a laugh from her bridge crew.

  The viewer showed the other wing, or what was left of it, lifting from the deck two at a time and moving out through the other end of the hangar. They moved away on thrusters, gaining speed until they were well away from the carrier and above it. Then they simply disappeared, their warp bubbles raised and moving faster than the light needed to actually see them.

  “We're next,” said the com tech.

  Powers flinched slightly as she heard the bumping of objects being affixed to the hull. The warp missile clamps weren’t really made for these weapons, so she was sure they were out there with some welding equipment, attaching two counters together, then working them into the launch clamps. It took more time than she would have liked, though she was sure they were working as fast as possible.

  “We're ready ma'am,” said the tech. “The rest of our squadron will be prepared within another minute.”

  “Let me know when they are, and we'll lift and get out of here.” She didn't know if more fighters were on their way here to rearm, but wouldn't have been surprised.

  “Do you have a good command link?” she asked the pilot, pulling up a schematic that showed the missiles attached to the hull.

  “I, think so,” said the pilot, looking over his targeting computer readouts.

  We'll see, thought Powers.

  “We're good to go, ma'am,” said her com tech.

  “Tell the wing to follow me,” she told the tech. “Let's get moving, lieutenant.”

  The ship only thumped slightly this time when the landing pads retracted into the hull. The viewer showed the approach of the hangar doors and the space beyond.

  “We're cautioned to avoid the counter firing arcs,” said the com tech, looking back at the captain. “They're assured us that they have it, no problem.”

  The fighter left the carrier and moved on an upward slant. The carrier was sitting out from a large asteroid, several others visible in the distance. This was a cluster of about a dozen, not unheard of but unusual. The carrier had the largest between themselves and the Machines, along with a pair of destroyers that were her only escorts. Flashes of light appeared on the edges of all three ships, there and gone in the next instant, the launched counters heading out against a Machine launch that had targeted them.

  “We're being ordered to vector onto this missile stream, ma'am,” said the tech, as a blinking point came up on the plot. A hundred thousand missiles spread over ten light seconds, on a direct heading for the Bolthole asteroid. Already up to point seven light and accelerating.

  Powers looked over the plot, zooming in on the stream. It wasn't a perfect representation, only visible by the graviton emissions of the missiles, which blurred together with distance and motion. She picked an emergence point and looked over at her com tech.

  “We'll come out here, one light minute ahead of the swarm, and unleash everything we have.”

  That would, hopefully, keep them from being targeted by the missiles, while still getting enough hits to make the evolution worthwhile. Anything the Machines fired at them would take exactly one minute to reach them, and they wouldn't be able to target them until they dropped out of warp. Even then they would have a poor solution, until they actually got a visual. It looked good. She then imputed where she wanted all the ships to come in, how far to spread, their angles on the way out. In close proximity the fighters could be as much a danger to each other as anything the enemy shot their way.

  It was an eleven-minute trip at full warp to the point of emergence. Jessica worried the entire time about whether she was making a good tactical decision. She couldn't think of a better way to do this, so despite her doubts she decided they would forge ahead.

  “We have Machine fighters on intercept,” called out the sensor tech.

  “How long?”

  “Four minutes, twenty seconds approximate.”

  Powers looked at the attack timer through her implant. They would emerge in front of the Machine missiles in three minutes and fifty-three seconds. Giving them enough time to accomplish their mission and get away. Hopefully. She had wanted to play the lasers of her command over the enemy ships for as long as possible before jumping back into warp, then possibly hitting them with compression fields from the side. Now she would just have to see how it went.

  “Emerging, now,” called out the pilot minutes later as he took them out of warp, right ahead of the enemy swarm.

  It was a very good translation, smooth, the nose of the craft pointing at the missiles that were not yet on their normal space sensors. A net of lascoms linked the wing, letting their commander know where they were in relation to all the others. Powers glanced at it quickly, all the time she had, and with a few exceptions it looked as good as she could hope.

  “All ships. Launch.”

  Some thumps came through the hull as the missiles were released and ejected out int
o space by their small thrusters, then took off as their grabbers engaged, thrusting them forward at twenty thousand gravities.

  Three hundred and ninety-two counters appeared on the plot, forging ahead into the face of the enemy swarm. They had already gone into evasives, making it more difficult for the Machine missiles to target them.

  “All ships, fire,” she called out, her voice going out over the lascom.

  Every ship fire its hundred megawatt nose laser, sending a powerful beam toward the swarm, sweeping them along arcs of fire that were set to avoid the approach vectors of the counters. Shooting their own missiles out of space was not something conducive to a successful weapon interception. The lasers might not do much, and maybe they hit a couple of dozen missiles, maybe destroying a third of those.

  “Enemy fighters in fourteen seconds.”

  “All ships jump to warp and go on heading alpha. Let's give them one last hit before we go after those fighters.”

  All forty-nine fighters made it into warp, moving well out of the way before the weapons of the first rank of missiles reached their positions. They moved up the side of the swarm and raked them with their compression fields, turning for moments to bring the beams into contact with the stream. Due to their pseudospeed they could only do this for a few seconds, then they were off, running up behind the Machine missiles and curving around heading for the enemy fighters.

  The wing blew through the enemy fighters, knocking several dozen of them out of warp. Forty-seven fighters made it through, two knocked from warp themselves. Powers raged in her mind as she looked at the two blinking dots on the plot that indicated where her pair of lost fighters had gone dark. They might have survived, but without their warp they were still dead. Machine fighters dropped out of warp near those dots, and the wing commander knew they would be searching for those ships and crews, if they were still around. It was life, and their prime directive was to end that.

  “Command is estimating that we took out over two hundred of the enemy missiles,” said the com tech.

  Added to the fighters she had splashed, that was a respectable result. Still, losing two crews hurt. And over two hundred missiles out of a stream of almost a hundred thousand was pitiful. It might save something in the target area, but that was uncertain.

  “They want us to rearm with warp missiles and go back after Machine launch platforms,” said the tech.

  “Back at the carrier?”

  The tech closed her eyes and communed with her sibling for a moment. “Akagi has been hit. They're fighting fires all over the vessel. We're to proceed to the base at asteroid Gamma seven three six. They have missile reloads stored there.”

  Powers pulled up the asteroid on the plot, finding that it was thirty-nine minutes away at maximum warp. There were no other warp traces around it, so her wing might be the first to be directed there. No enemy around as far as she could tell, but once her wing dropped out of warp near the body that could change. Fast.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure... than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat. Theodore Roosevelt

  GORGANSHA SPACE.

  “That was the last of them, Admiral.”

  “Good job, Tiberius. What are your plans now?”

  And only if we could say the same¸ thought Beata. Two of her forces had caught the Machines perfectly as they came into the systems they were defending. They still hadn’t been easy fights, and she had lost more ships and people than she would have preferred. She huffed out a half laugh at that thought. She would have preferred to lose none, and destroy all the Machines.

  “If you can open a gate, we could send you most of our capital ships,” replied Vice Admiral Hahn, his face frowning on the holo. No commander liked to give up ships from a command, but the man was intelligent enough to realize that if the other forces lost their battles, the overall campaign was lost. “Of course we can’t give you our wormholes.”

  No, and you won’t be able to get them to us through hyper for more than sixty-three hours, thought the fleet commander. She did the math in her head, quickly, weighing the options. She would have to take one of her wormhole launchers offline, then convert it into a gate. That would take fifteen to twenty minutes, time during which the wormhole would be of no use to her. Hanh would have to do the same, and the ships would have to transit from one pipeline to another back in Donut space. The gates would be close, so they would be able to do that in less than twenty minutes or so. With one ship every thirty seconds once that thirty-five or more minutes were gone, it would take over forty minutes to get twenty some capital ships through. Ships without wormhole launchers of their own, and probably very short of missiles in their internal magazines as well.

  “No. And thanks for the offer, but it won’t help enough. What you can do is send your ships this way through normal space, minus a defense force for that system.”

  “What good will that do, Admiral?” asked Hahn, raising an eyebrow.

  “It won’t do us any good,” said Beata, grimacing. “But you can be in position to take out the Machine force if they get by the Gorgansha as well. You realize they’re going to move on to another system once they’re done here.”

  “Understood. But don’t you give up on yourself just yet, Admiral.”

  “We’re not giving up, Tiberius,” said Beata, feeling determined to make it so. “On paper we’re screwed. But battles aren’t fought on paper. If we don’t make it through this one, you’re not going to find much left to take out. Now, let me get back to my battle.”

  Hahn disappeared from the holo, and Bednarczyk looked over at her com officer. “Get me Admiral Montgomery.”

  It took a few seconds to get the scout force commander. No longer than expected, since every force commander would be on their bridge at this time, of course.

  “Admiral.”

  Mara stood in the center of her bridge, letting the pickup show her entire body standing up by her com station. Beata had always admired the presence of the lower ranking admiral. Tall and petite, she had a strength of presence that few officers carried. Her flag bridge was a hive of activity, people talking over coms, looking over holo screens that were giving them the rundown on the entire force.

  “Any sign of activity from the bastards?”

  “All kinds, Admiral,” said Mara with a frown. “The systems we have hit are still dead, and I think anything that survived is laying low. But ships are coming and going in a lot of other systems. And heavy activity from three systems in particular. I think they’re amassing another strike force.”

  How in the hell are they building them up that fast? It took the Empire almost a year to construct a battleship, not counting the time it took to build the many components. They used robots, but they had to be supervised by people, which limited their construction speed. It also included shakedown time and crew training, several months by themselves. A ship that went to the front without a well-trained crew was only half as combat effective as a veteran vessel.

  The machines didn’t have supervisors for their robot constructors, which could work full speed twenty-four hours a day for however many days it took to complete the ship. There was no shakedown, since everything was checked out throughout the process. And there was no crew training time. The AI uploaded a copy of itself, as good as any other that had gone into any ship in their fleet. All of their commanders were of equal ability, maybe not as good as humans, but as good as many the Empire had faced on the other front. Not imaginative, but tactically sound. The result? They could lose masses of ships and make up their losses in a couple of months. Any war of attrition was a forgone conclusion.

  We can’t beat this enemy, thought Beata, shaking her head. Oh, probably if the Empire committed its entire fleet, and those of their allies, and went on a couple of year search and destroy, they could obvi
ously roll up the Machines and end them for good. The only problem was a little war of extermination going on against the Ca’cadasans. She was sure that the big aliens wouldn’t accept a truce to let the humans hunt down the Machines, since that enemy was actually helping them by draining off forces from the main front.

  “Keep an eye on them.”

  “Are you going to be okay, Admiral?” asked Mara, concerned about her friend. “We’ve been monitoring the battle here. Is there anything we can do?”

  “Not a thing. Just keep them under surveillance. Don’t let any of them slip away. If you have to engage to keep them together, do so.”

  “Will do. Keep us apprised.”

  “Of course.” Beata terminated the contact before she got too emotional and damaged her image as the stone-cold bitch. Of course Mara had known her for her entire career, serving as a ship commander in one of Bednarczyk’s task forces. Montgomery knew the real Beata, but appearances must needs be maintained before the onlookers.

  “Ma’am. We have several ships reporting that they are out of counters.”

  Beata turned toward the young com tech who was reporting that information. The expression on his face showed that he was feeling at least as alarmed as she was.

  “How many? What class?”

  “Three ships so far, ma’am. Two destroyers and a light cruiser. But most of the fleet is reporting ten percent or less in their magazines.”

  The tech had his station set up to monitor all incoming coms going to the other stations, looking for keywords. In his case missiles and counters. So he was seeing the text readout of all the transmissions dealing with that subject.

  “Order them to switch to offensive missiles set for interception.”

  The tech grunted, then started pushing keys on his panel. He looked back at her with wide eyes. “Most ships are down to less than ten percent of those weapons as well, ma’am. With at least a dozen showing empty magazines.”