All of her ships were back into the system over a light hour from the barrier, giving her missiles the flight time they would need to get to optimum attack velocity. Her two special vessels, the five kilometer wide nickel/iron asteroids that had been converted to battle stations, were a half light hour closer to the enemy. They had been outfitted with banks of missiles as well, capable of putting out ten thousand weapons each in a little under ten minutes. Their primary weapons were the enormous laser batteries built into their bodies, and it was hoped they would be tough enough to close with the enemy and fire them up with light amp. No one knew if that was true, and they wouldn’t know until they tried.
All of the launchers near the Bolthole system were also online, and they would launch over three hundred thousand weapons when given the command. They would also get up to optimal attack velocity by the time they reached the enemy, and Beata planned to time them so that their weapons would get to the Machines at the same time hers did.
“Are the fighters ready?” she asked, looking over at her Com Officer.
“Both wings reporting ready,” said the officer after speaking into her com for a moment.
Neither of those forces were on the plot, but the Admiral knew exactly where they were located. Two wings of inertialess fighters. One would go forward in the manner they were trained to do, one hundred and eight vehicles accelerating up to point nine light at twelve hundred gravities before raising their warp bubbles and forging ahead at faster than light speed, building up to two times light speed. From there they would coast toward their targets and do what they needed to do to make the attack. They would slow in order to make that attack, dropping their bubbles when they again reached point nine light and launching their missiles. She wasn’t sure how much of an effect they would have on the planet killers, but she was hoping their appearance from out of nowhere would cause some recalculating by the Machines.
The second wing, visible on the plot as sixty-four objects, was coasting toward the enemy at point zero five light, almost crawling in space compared to modern warship profiles. At the proper moment they would erect their bubbles and also boost up to two times light speed, building up the maximum inertia rebound possible. Then they would do something never done before. That part worried the Admiral. They had performed a test, so she knew that it worked. But it had not been untaken against a prepared opponent. If it failed it would go on her. If the crews died she would not only have the responsibility pushed on her shoulders, she would feel the ultimate self-recrimination for those deaths. That’s why I get the big Imperials, she thought, a grimace on her face. If it works I get the credit. And I really don’t care about that, as long as it makes the Machines rethink their attack.
* * *
“They’re making their final jump, ma’am,” called out the Force Tactical Officer from his station.
Vice Admiral Mara Montgomery glanced at the officer, giving him a hand motion to let him know she had heard. Right now she had more on her mind than being told something was happening that she had known would happen down to the second. She had to plan her attack, using her force along with that in the system to stress the Machines into making bad decisions, if stress was even a word that meant anything where they were concerned.
The machines were coming in from the north of the system, perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic. There would be almost nothing between them and Bolthole, unless the stray asteroid was counted. This gave the Machines a complete view of the system looking down. There was nothing that would escape their view. The Bolthole asteroid, the planet that was being terraformed for rest and recreation, the supermetal production facilities at the edge of the system, even the other asteroid mines and gas processing facilities in orbit around the giant worlds. All would be clear, all would be marked as targets.
Now, which target do you go after first? she thought, watching as the Machines headed into the system on a coast at point one light, the maximum translation speed of their huge planet killers. Bolthole would have been her choice if she had been them, since it was the most strategically important base in the system. Bolthole was still constructing attack ships while its fabbers turned out thousands of missiles a day. But she was not a Machine, and to them the planet, currently on the other side of the star, with its abundance of planetary life, might seem the more important goal.
“Orders, ma’am?” asked the Tactical Officer.
“We continue in. I don’t want us coming into normal space until they are at least ten light minutes ahead of us.” While they didn’t have to worry about graviton beams in normal space, they did have to be concerned about the enormous laser batteries the planet killers mounted.
“We have missile launch,” called out the Tactical Officer, as the information from the system came flooding in over the wormhole.
The tactical plot was showing the Machine force now well into the system. At the twenty gravity maximum of the planet killers it would take almost a day to come to a complete stop if they wanted to come back out. They could shift vectors over time to avoid the inner system, but it would take them about two days to get back into hyper.
Other ships were all over that plot, detectable from their graviton emissions as they started moving. The main battle fleet, over two hundred battleships, another hundred battle cruisers, and four hundred lesser ships. There were three other concentrations of warships, each about fifty, mostly cruisers and destroyers. And near bolthole were almost a thousand small vessels, insystem attack craft, ten thousand ton missile attack ships that could boost at over seven hundred gravities.
And what are those, she thought of the hundred and eight objects that were forging ahead at twelve hundred gravities. They had to be the inertialess fighters, at least the one wing that was going to come in on a normal attack profile. Of course she couldn’t see the other wing, which would be coasting, not putting out gravitons, until they raised their bubble and moved ahead, undetectable to anyone in the system.
But what mostly caught her attention were the thousands of small icons that had appeared on the plot, with thousands more appearing each second. As she had already known, Bolthole had been fabbing thousands of missiles a day. They didn’t have the alloys and supermetals for that many weapons, so they had improvised. They were five hundred ton fortress missiles, with just enough grabber power to get up to five hundred gravities. All carried one hundred megaton fusion warheads, with a fusion engine provided to add acceleration for a limited period. They were not up to modern standards, but there were a lot of them, over a hundred thousand. And when they reached a certain point in their profile the modern weapons would launch as well, adding their weight to the incoming storm.
“Calculate the arrival time of those missiles from Bolthole,” she ordered her Tactical Officer. “I want our launch to put our missiles into the enemy’s lap along with them.”
“Should we wait on the wormhole missiles as well?” asked the Commander, the most senior tactical officer aboard her force, and soon destined to become a battleship captain.
“Hell, no,” she growled. She had a dozen preacceleration tubes waiting on her call. In twelve minutes she could have three hundred and sixty missiles on the way at point nine-five light, undetectable until they reached a couple of light seconds from the target. And forty-eight minutes after her ship released the last missile of those launchers the first tube would be ready again. “Launch them as fast as you can, as soon as we enter normal space. Right at those big bastards. Maybe we can get a couple of lucky hits.”
“Update coming in over the wormhole,” called out the Com Officer, as a hundred and twenty new icons appeared on the plot for a moment before falling off, the other wormhole equipped ships in the fleet firing off their preaccelerated missiles.
Good to know that I’m on the same page as the Admiral, thought Montgomery. She had thought about asking permission, but figured the Admiral would know what she was going to do anyway. The missiles heading at the enemy would be coming in on th
ree different vectors, while she would add a fourth. She still didn’t think it would be enough to destroy the planet killers, but if they could make them miscalculate, they might still win.
* * *
The Machine ships came back into normal space, their sensors grabbing every photon and graviton that came their way, while their active sensors sent out pulses that would give them more information in from one to four hours. The system had already been scouted, prior to and during the last attack. All of the celestial bodies were where they were supposed to be, every planet, moon and asteroid. The huge asteroid that was the main human base showed up clear on the plot, while the visual scans, looking at the body as it had appeared two hours previous, picked up the numerous objects in orbit around it. But not the enemy ships it knew must be there.
They are sitting powered down, thought the AI. Their skins are set to absorb all light, so we cannot pick them up. But they are there.
Also, there was the force that had been striking at them all the way here. It did not doubt that the following force would play a part in the human battle plan, but what part it could not calculate at the moment.
There were power sources across the system, but that didn’t mean anything. The humans could have evacuated the system, which would have been their best decision, and left installations powered up to fool the Machines into closing and destroying empty targets. That did not enter into the AIs plans for attack in the least. It would still destroy the asteroid base and kill the inhabitable planet. The humans would lose a major installation. If they were still in the region the Machines would track them down and attack. If not, the Machines would have more time to prepare to take on the human Empire in their home space. Either way, today would be a victory.
Then the graviton emissions started to light up the system. Hundreds of ships, from capital ships down to escorts. Followed moments later by thousands of smaller ships, in the ten thousand ton range, just a little larger than the vessels the Machines used as missiles. Then even smaller ships, only a hundred or so of them, accelerating out a twelve hundred gravities.
If the AI had emotions and a face to show them it would have smiled. Taking out the human base would have been satisfying to its logic circuits, but killing life was even more so. And not just the dumb life of plants on a newly living world. Intelligent life was the primary target, and here it still was.
Missiles appeared on the plot, thousands, tens of thousands, building in number each second without a let off. They appeared larger than the missiles the humans had been firing at their fleet, and they were only boosting at five hundred gravities, which did not make sense. Decoys? If so, there were a lot of them, up to fifty thousand and rising. That didn’t make logical sense. So they had to be meant as attack weapons, and with their pitiful acceleration they must have been the best the humans could come up with in the time they had. Which could mean they were low or even out of their regular missiles.
The AI shunted that thought aside. While possible, it was not the way to reason out the decisions to be made. It would not do to underestimate the foe, while it would also not be of benefit to give them abilities they actually did not have.
The decision made, the AI sent out the order to accelerate into the system. Velocity would be to their disadvantage due to the terrible acceleration rate of the monster ships. It thought for a moment about releasing the rest of the fleet to range ahead and to the side, dismissing that consideration as soon as it appeared. The humans had the acceleration advantage over the planet killers, and could defeat the rest of the fleet in detail. Then they could run from the system after handing the Machines a small defeat, and still have a fleet in being.
The AI kept analyzing, calculating, following decision trees all the way into the system. While it could access everything in its memory almost instantaneously with perfect recall, while it could calculate thousands of times faster than the most agile organic mind, it still had a weakness that its enemies wouldn’t even think to consider. It had too much information, too many trains of thought, too large a decision tree. And as soon as a decision was reached it started the reanalysis, the second guessing, that most trained human commanders had learned to forget as soon as the tactics had been decided upon.
* * *
Captain Alilat Maalouf, the wing commander of the special attack group, still didn’t like her mission orders. It seemed like a waste of craft. Looking at the com board, showing the links to all the fighters through their Klassekian com techs, showed only sixty-four ships. Sixty-four crews, the other half of her wing remaining back at base.
She looked over at the plot that showed the enemy fleet, then at another holo that showed her target, one of the massive enemy vessels they had dubbed planet killers. And she knew there was no way one of her fighters, or even an entire wing, could put a dent in that thing. It had armor twice as thick as the entire width of a battleship, and underneath was not the fragile bodies of a crew, but more alloy hard machinery. Even puncturing that armor, something no capital ship missile was likely to accomplish, much less one of the small weapons the fighters carried, would have little effect on such a beast. A killing blow would involve getting enough force forty kilometers or more into the heart of the ship. And even then, if the blow didn’t land on the central processor of the machine, it might not accomplish much. Assuming there weren’t backups all over the ship, which would be the smart way to bet.
“How is she handling?” she asked her pilot, the next moment wondering why she had bothered. The problems, if there were any, wouldn’t come when they were coasting through space.
“No problems so far, ma’am,” replied the pilot. “That won’t come until we’re under boost and in the bubble.”
Echoing my thoughts. She looked once again at the schematic that showed the other inertialess fighter attached to her own, bottom to bottom, hooked together at a dozen points with explosive bolts. Her pilot had control of that one as well, and if everything went perfectly they would move as one. Any problems and they could have two individual ships pulling at each other all the way there.
They weren’t expecting any hits, but even a near miss could cause damage to the surface installations of a planet killer. And a near miss of a Machine capital ship would be a killer. That wasn’t the point of their mission, though it would be gravy if it happened. They were a demonstration of power; one it was hoped would make the Machine AI think twice about approaching Bolthole.
* * *
PLANET KLASSEK.
Pendergrass wasn’t really sure why he and his squadron mates were here. He would rather be out flying his craft, killing Machines. Most of the Fleet was gone from the system, at Bolthole, where a big battle was about to start. As far as they knew there was no more Machine presence in this area at least, which didn’t mean they couldn’t come back here, as long as they still had any foothold on the plant. And if the Fleet couldn’t stop them at Bolthole? Then they might be called upon to fight another invasion.
The strange looking alien greeted the humans and their two Gryphon pilots at the entrance to the school. It was a tour, ostensibly to show the Imperial Army pilots what they were fighting for. There were children everywhere, all walking in groups of from six to twelve. The Warrant had of course heard about their abilities, and it made sense that the identical siblings were go almost everywhere together. Still, he found it slightly unnerving thinking about the group minds behind those sets of four eyes that followed his every move.
The Warrant shook his head and cursed under his breath. He had been hoping to get a crack at the Cacas, in the main war, the one that mattered. Not out here in the middle of nowhere, going up against death machines, defending people he really didn’t care about. Not that these people weren’t worthy of survival. They just weren’t his people, and it was hard to care about a bunch of neobarbs.
The group walked into the auditorium, where most of the children in the school had clustered. More were coming in every moment, those running late. They gre
eted other sibling groups, and the large chamber was filled with the high pitched speech of children, reminding him that they really weren’t telepaths who might be able to read his mind. No, they were only able to communicate with their birth siblings through their connection. For communication with every other member of their species they must needs still speak, and his translation program was letting him know what they were talking about. The, to them, strange looking alien creatures who were here to protect them from the monsters of their worst nightmares.
Several of the teachers called out in high pitched shouts, and the conversation in the auditorium died. Matched sibling groups continued to glance at each other, and Pendergrass was sure they were still talking up a storm over their quantum link. The principal started speaking, and the translation came across over the implants of the Imperials.
“These fine people have come to our world to save us from the things that would destroy us,” said the Klassekian male. “You have seen their base at the edge of town, what had been the municipal landing field. As soon as they arrived, they went to war against the things that invaded our world. And I am pleased to announce that, as far as we know, there are no more of the killer machines in our region.”
There was applause at that, the silent version of these sentients, their tentacle tips waving in the air. Hooting came from their mouths, a weird warbling that sounded like something in peril. The Principal raised his tentacle tips into the air and the hooting stopped, though the waving continued.
“What do you do?” shouted out one of the children, the words coming through the translation program.
Exodus: Machine War: Book 3: Death From Above Page 6
