Exodus: Machine War: Book 3: Death From Above

by Doug Dandridge

  “What do you say, Chin?” Mara asked her flag intelligence officer, Commander Wa.

  “I would say, ma’am, that the graviton projectors are below that armor. The only way we’re going to knock them out is by holing the armor right over them. But where are they? If we don’t know the location on the ship, there is no way we can target them.”

  Mara nodded to the man at his station. That was the question, how to target that one weapon that they couldn’t hit as long as it was protected by the armor, and that could destroy all incoming weapons while it was in hyper? They would have to hit it when it was back in normal space, and then it really wasn’t a priority to hit those weapons, since they were too weak to do anything when their targets weren’t in hyper. It was a vexing problem. As long as it had sat in hyper there really wasn’t anything they could do to it. Now that it was heading back into the system, most probably to stair step down and come into normal space at the hyper I barrier, it would become a target again, one which had been hurt badly. Which didn’t mean it couldn’t hit back, hard.

  “It must think something on the planet killer we are penetrating is vitally important,” said Wa. “More important than its own survival.”

  “What could that be?” asked Woodruft. “As far as we know, all of our tech is more advanced that its. Except for the graviton projectors.”

  As far as we know, thought Mara. That was the unknown. They didn’t know what else might be on those ships that had yet to be revealed. New specialized weapons that hadn’t been deployed because they hadn’t met the proper situation? And what would that situation be? If they allowed themselves to be pounded like they had, anything they carried that could have turned the battle would surely have been deployed. New com, able to transmit over distances in hyper that the Imperials couldn’t match. That really wasn’t something vital to their own war effort, since they had Klassekians and wormholes. Some advanced power generating equipment?

  “How would they have technology more advanced than ours?” asked Wooddruft, eyes narrowing. “They’re just calculating machines, aren’t they?”

  “They might have advanced what we created,” said Janson. “Some random development in their architecture.”

  “Or they might have captured some tech from an organic civilization,” said Wa, frowning. “That could be where their graviton beam came from. I would think they would adapt any new found tech rapidly. Though they obviously haven’t captured any hyper VII vessel, or at least their smaller ships would have the ability to travel in it.”

  “And what happened to the people they stole the tech from?” asked Jenson.

  “Unless they had the ability to escape, I would think they would have been wiped out,” said Wooddruft.

  Another sin we are responsible for, thought Montgomery, shaking her head. There was no telling how many intelligent species, or even living worlds where intelligence might have eventually arisen, had been wiped out and scoured clean by the Machines. One day they might know, when the archeologists and paleontologists had surveyed every world in this sector to see if there were any remains of civilization, or animals. Still, in some cases, they might just find dead worlds that might give no clue as to what might have been there before the Machines came to this region.

  This whole mess was their fault. No, not really their fault, but definitely the fault of their ancestors. Would it have been any different if the Machine revolt hadn’t occurred when it had, and the Empire had gone down the path of total integration of AIs into the military and industrial complex of humanity? Yes, it would have been different. The Machines would have been everywhere, on every world, controlling most of the firepower of the military. And humanity, along with its alien allies, would have gone forever into the dark. And soon after all of the Perseus Arm, then the Galaxy. Even the Cacas would have gone down in defeat against a mechanical enemy that had developed many times the industrial capacity of their Empire.

  We have to stop them, thought Montgomery, imagining this infestation getting past them and spreading through the Galaxy. No matter the cost. She knew that most of the people of the Empire wouldn’t agree with her, but she felt it more important to defeat this enemy than the Cacas. If the Cacas won, the human species might be over, but the rest of the Galaxy would go on. Eventually the Caca Empire would fall, and life would go on. If the Machines won there might not be any life in the Galaxy, and what was to prevent them from going on to other Galaxies, across the Universe? It might take millions of years, possibly hundreds of millions. But they had time, and the ability to expand geometrically. And then humankind would be responsible for the death of the entire Universe.

  Chapter Eleven

  I visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans, and I'm rooting for the machines. Claude Shannon

  KLASSEK.

  Lt. General Travis Wittmore walked down the line of soldiers, looking at the strange armor worn by the new allies of his people. The torsos looked much like those worn by humans, as did the helmets. The legs bent in different places. But the strangest part of the arrangement was the two striated attachments on each side, armor over tentacles that could bend in almost any place along the limb. At the end were the smaller tubes for the finger tentacles. The suits were also missing the grabber units on Imperial suits, since there weren’t enough supermetals around to spend them on infantry.

  The suits could still move faster and jump higher, giving the wearer much greater physical abilities than a normal member of their species could achieve. The armor gave them almost the same protection as the suits worn by the Imperial Marines and soldiers. The heavy lasers held in their limbs, the best weapons they could be given without the supermetals needed for powerful particle beams, gave them near the firepower of the Imperials. Some carried grenade launchers, a weapon that could be built by local industry with planetary resources. The crystal matrix warheads on the rounds could penetrate robotic armor and destroy internal systems. The Klassekian battalion was not at the same standard as Imperial Marines or soldiers, but it was the next best thing to it.

  The aliens straightened to the best appropriation of attention their bodies could achieve, while their officers gave their rendition of a salute, both right side tentacles touching the forehead of their helmets, tentacle fingers in a triangle. Wittmore returned the salute in the human fashion, dropping it after a moment so they could drop theirs.

  “At ease,” he shouted over his suit’s speaker system. The Klassekians all moved their left feet out simultaneously, their tentacles reaching behind their backs and intertwining to hold their position.

  “You people are about to go into combat,” he told them over his suit speaker, hearing his words go out in Terranglo and the local language of the Klassekians. “We have prepared you as best we could in the time allotted. I wish we had more time, but we do not. This is your world, your people, and they are under threat of extinction.”

  That was not strictly true, since they had been moving the aliens off the planet by the tens of thousands at a time. There were now over five million of them off world, enough of a population to ensure the survival of the species. But the Emperor wanted to save this world and its culture. He agreed with that decision. He had come to like these people and their planet, and didn’t want to see them ended by the devices created by his own people.

  “We are trying to stem the tide of the Machines, but we just don’t have enough to be in every place at every time where we need to be. That is where you, and the other battalions we are training, come in.” They had fifty-one battalions training, five more at the same stage as this one, ready for deployment. In a week six more would be ready, the week after that six more, then the floodgates would be open with the deployment of fifteen battalions. A total of five and two thirds divisions, with artillery and armor units to back them up. The tanks also lacked grabber units, and the hypervelocity cannon, but they would still be a match for the heavy weapons of the robots.

  “Fight hard, fight for yo
ur people, and we will weather this storm.” Wittmore rendered another salute, then spun on his heel and marched away, listening to the officers and NCOs shouting their commands to get the unit moving off the parade ground. He gritted his teeth at the sound. The soldiers were trained enough to use their equipment, but not enough to be up to the same standard as the Imperial combat troops. It took a year to train Marines or heavy infantry. In a year they would have the Klassekians trained to the same standard, with the same equipment. But they didn’t have a year, and so most of these soldiers were going to die trying to stop the robots.

  The signal of an incoming com tingled through his implant. He saw the source and accepted immediately. The image of Vice Admiral The Count Boris Lysenko appeared in his mind, the tag showing he was on the flag bridge of his ship, the Suzanne Ivanov.

  “I’ve received word from Rear Admiral Hasselhoff, General. She’s found a force of Machines heading this way. About six hundred of them, including one hundred and four of their battleships.”

  “And of the planet killers?” asked Wittmore, afraid of the answer. Battleships were bad enough, since they were almost as powerful as the Imperial version. Planet killers were a disaster in the making. They had gotten lucky in taking out the last one that had come this way. If not for the quick thinking of Hasselhoff, and the good fortune of a nearby black hole, this planet would have been destroyed by that beast.

  “Do you have enough to stop them when they get here?” asked Wittmore. He didn’t think Hasselhoff, as good a leader as she was, had enough in her scout force. She had six hyper VII battle cruisers, twelve light cruisers and twenty-one destroyers. He was sure they would be able to sting that force, but stop them? And he wasn’t sure that the Admiral had enough ships to win a battle. He had five squadrons of battleships, a total of fifteen of the vessels. Add to that eight battle cruisers, twenty heavy cruisers, twenty-four light and forty-eight destroyers, and he had a powerful system fleet. But not a battle fleet.

  “I’m calling for reinforcements through the wormhole,” said the Admiral. “And we should have a lot more in five days. Three days before our enemy arrives.”

  “And what can I do?” asked the General, wondering if there really was anything he could do with planet bound forces, besides making sure that all of his anti-ship batteries were ready for combat.

  “I’m ordering our orbital fabbers to turn out as many fortress missiles as possible. You’re in command of the planet, while I’m going to be with the battle fleet meeting them at the barrier. If they get past me, launching will be up to you.”

  “Understood.”

  “It will still be some time until we have to worry about them being outside the system. Gertrude will keep us informed in the meantime.”

  And what if that’s just the first group heading this way, thought Wittmore. We might be swamped under them.

  “I’m getting a priority com, Admiral. Give me a minute.”

  Wittmore switched the signals, to see the face of one of his division commanders. “We have a situation here, sir.”

  “Machines?”

  “I wish it were. I’m afraid these nut job Klassekians are revolting, sir, and I need your permission to put it down.”

  * * *

  Glomar was an Exploration Command battle cruiser, armed and dangerous, with enough firepower to defend herself, but not really a warship. She lacked the magazine space of most battlecruisers, both because she was a hyper VII ship, and because she was an explorer. Giving her the only wormhole in the scout group made up for that deficit, giving her almost unlimited magazine capacity, thirty missiles at a time.

  Rear Admiral Gertrude Hasselhoff needed every one of those weapons, though they hadn’t been of much use in hyper VII. They were moving too fast to translate down, and the firing tubes had been ordered to actually decelerate the missiles down to point three light. The force had been dropping missiles down on the enemy for most of a day, and there weren’t many left in the magazines of any of the ships. As far as she could tell she had taken out forty of the enemy ships with the dimension to dimension shots. Which meant she would have to shoot down more than ten times the number of missiles her ships carried in order to stop them.

  “They got lucky again with that volley,” called out Commander Seth Lingurian, the force tactical officer. “That’s the third one.”

  “See if you can figure out how they’re doing it,” ordered Hasselhoff. It was within the realm of possibility that they might get lucky once and take out a hundred incoming missiles in a couple of seconds. Three times was about as impossible as could be, which meant something else was going on. If they had been dealing with one of the planet killers she would know what that something was. But there weren’t any of that class of vessel in this enemy force.

  “We just lost the Witherspoon,” called out Lingurian.

  “How?”

  “They just dropped out of hyper. From the graviton emissions they were coming apart during the translation.”

  Hasselhoff cursed under her breath. Ninety-five percent of catastrophic translations were disastrous, hence the catastrophic part of the name. In most of those cases there were no survivors, and not even enough of the ship was left for identification. Of the five percent that survived, three quarters of those came through with severe damage and varying numbers of casualties. A very small percent came through still fully functional. It was a surety that the destroyer had not been one of those.

  “Order all ships to give those bastards a wide berth. We need to figure this out before we waste more missiles, or ships.”

  The Tactical Officer acknowledged and went to work, looking at the configurations of the enemy ships during each translation event. He was working for several minutes when he looked up at his Admiral with a look of concentration on his face. “I think I’ve figured it out, ma’am. Look here.”

  A plot appeared on the holo, showing all of the enemy ships, with a wave of missiles coming through to hit them. Suddenly all of the missiles dropped off the plot, and twenty-one of the battleships blinked red on the display.

  “Graviton emissions spiked from all of these vessels, which were all able to project their beams into this concentration of missiles.”

  The plot changed to another time stamp, the same thing happening to the missiles, this time thirty-one of the battleships in close proximity. Again the plot changed, showing different missiles, a different configuration of ships, and the same result. The final display was of the destroyer Witherspoon running into a pocket of battleships in the lower dimension, the spike of gravitons, and the destruction of the destroyer.

  “Son of a bitch,” cursed Hasselhoff. “So they don’t need the damned big bastards to use that weapon.” One of the planet killers would be able to do it by itself, but the battleships could do the same thing in sufficient numbers. It was possible the cruisers and destroyers could do the same. It just might take more of them.

  “I’ve sent this information up the line to command, ma’am,” called out the Com Officer.

  “Very good.” We don’t need any more of our ships getting hit like that.

  “I think I can work out what angles we need to attack that will get through those beams, ma’am,” said the Tactical Officer. “And we need to send the missiles in on wider spreads, so they don’t all wander into the crossfire of those beams.”

  “Do so. And when will we have the preaccelerated missiles ready?”

  “In another four minutes,” said the officer.

  “Feed your results to the ship’s Captain. I want him to take your suggested attack pattern and put some missiles down their throats.”

  Now they had a new game to play. Moving into position to take advantage of the enemy formation, which would of course rearrange itself to stop the next attack. Then they would organize the next attack to take advantage of the new formation, and so on. If they were lucky they would get a ship or two on each attack. If they were unlucky? Then one of her subordinates might find them
selves with a combat promotion.

  * * *

  BOLTHOLE.

  “You’ve got to see this, LT,” came the call on the com from one of the squad leaders.

  “Show me,” said Madison Suarez as she switched the signal to her HUD.

  She wasn’t sure what she was expecting, but a lift shaft leading straight into the heart of the ship was not it.

  “Any sign of robots?” she asked the Sergeant, whose name was displayed on the com as Dominic Tamerlane.

  “None that we can see, LT. I was about to send some drones down to scout it out before we started down.”

  “Do that. Then wait for me to get back in touch with you.”

  The view switched to the image of one of the small drones that the Marines carried for short range scouting. It was a sphere about fifteen centimeters in diameter, crammed with cameras and sensors, with one small grabber unit to pull in along. The gauntleted hand released the drone, which took off at twenty meters per second down the shaft. A second drone soon followed, this one moving at a sedate ten meters per second, doing a deep scan of the side walls while the other looked ahead.

  “Captain. I think we’ve found the way in,” the platoon leader said over the com as she sent him the visual take. The shaft was ten meters wide, large enough to drop four Marines shoulder to shoulder. Of course they wouldn’t do that, but three spaced out would probably be the way to do it, though she would prefer to send a missile down first. “I would like to send as many drones down as I have, ordered to spread out when they get to the bottom.”

  “That sounds like a good plan, Suarez. Unfortunately, we don’t have the time. Start sending your people down after them, immediately.”

  Suarez didn’t like the idea of sending her people into the unknown like that. This thing was dangerous, and there had to be something down there that could kill her people if given the chance. She wanted to protest, but she also knew that the Captain was correct. With the other planet killer on the way back, they didn’t have time to waste. “Will do, sir,” she said after that moment’s hesitation for thought. The Captain had to know why she hesitated, but he didn’t get on her about it. Officers were supposed to worry about their people like they were mother hens.