Exodus: Machine War: Book 3: Death From Above

by Doug Dandridge

  Every one of the destroyers had a target assigned to them by their senior squadron tactical officers, and all opened fire with all lasers and particle beams, adding some bursts with close in weapons as the missiles closed to under a light second. Some of the missiles were able to avoid for a moment, while the range was still in the tens of light seconds. When they reached under that the beam weapons hit and stayed locked on. First one, then several more, then even more of them exploded under the attention of warship batteries, until seventy of the hundred were gone. Moments later the destroyers targeted the remaining missiles, and they soon joined their fellows as expanding clouds of plasma.

  The planet killer released another hundred weapons, then ten seconds later another hundred, followed by another hundred as soon as they could load their tubes. It was obvious what they strategy was, to overwhelm the missile defenses of the destroyers that were not even their targets, blasting through and heading toward whatever their target happened to be at the end of their flight. The destroyers still took seventy under fire, adding counter missiles to target the other weapons. The heavier units, still heaving missiles at the enemy ship, shifted fire on the weapons the destroyers had not targeted. Almost two hundred of the big weapons were destroyed on the way through the destroyer formation, leaving the remaining hundred or so to forge on. Several more were destroyed by lucky hits by beam weapons, while chasing missiles took out a couple of score more, until a little more than sixty missiles continued on.

  “Get ready for another wave,” Vonstag ordered his destroyer screen. “Everyone else concentrate on the big bastard.”

  Acknowledgements came back, and his force fired everything they had at the planet killer, falling ahead of the ship at two light minutes. Ships were constantly in motion to avoid concentrated beams, while electromag fields and armor were depended on to blunt the wide angle fans that had been able to destroy missiles. Beam weapons struck where they could, advanced targeting systems trying to hit what where identified as beam projectors. Plasma torpedoes and the shells of close in weapons sped toward the oncoming vessel, rupturing or exploding as they absorbed gigajoules of heat. Several capital ships and heavy cruisers were still arrayed to the side, putting their leading fire into the enemy ship.

  “We have ships reporting heat overload,” reported the Com Officer. “They’re requesting permission to pull away so they can cool down.”

  “Agreed,” ordered the frustrated Admiral, looking at the blinking ships on the plot. They were evading enough to keep from bearing the brunt of a full power narrowed beam, but the wide angle beams really couldn’t miss, and were pumping gigajoules of heat into his entire fleet. He wanted to keep heavy fire on the enemy, but ships could absorb enough heat to become uninhabitable, and then they were useless.

  “Kroger just went up,” reported the Force Tactical Officer.

  “What happened?” asked Vonstag, ordering a replay of the visual through his implant, then recoiling as he watched a two hundred and twenty thousand ton destroyer partially convert to vapor, then completely to plasma as antimatter breached.

  “She took a laser beam,” replied the shaken officer. “Not full on, just the edge of one, but it was a big one.”

  Vonstag stared at the officer, then back at the plot. It was hard to imagine that kind of power in one laser beam. If his twenty million ton superbattleship caught a destroyer in a close range blast of all four laser rings and two particle beams it would take almost a minute to reduce the ship to spreading plasma. That beam, or a mere small part of it, had reduced the destroyer to plasma in an instant. They would be firing more of those beams, sending spears of destruction through space, hoping to hit a target.

  “Nagoya has been hit,” called out the Tactical Officer, sweat streaming down his face. The bridge was starting to get stuffy as the ship absorbed photons. They were also close to the enemy, in the action, and in as much danger as any other vessel. Vonstag was sweating inside his armor, but he was sure some of that was due to anxiety.

  The heavy cruiser came up on video, twelve light seconds away, so twelve seconds in the past on the vid. The laser had struck across the stern, and almost a hundred meters of that ship back there, including parts of the rear grabber units, was gone. As he watched, another beam sliced through the upper hyperdrive array, vaporizing tons of supermetals. The cruiser was still trying to maneuver, but six seconds later another beam shot through the middle of the hull three hundred meters from the bow. A hundred meter wide hole appeared. Almost cutting the ship in half. It was fortunate that there was no antimatter in that section, just back from the forward magazines and forward from the reactors.

  In moments the lifepods started leaving the cruiser. Vonstag thought that a bad idea, that the crew should have ridden what was left of the ship out of the battle zone. Pods started flaring as soon as they were launched, their small mass quickly overheated by the wide spread of laser light they were trying to traverse. In three minutes it was a moot point, as another beam struck the ship which was now on a predictable course. More of the ship converted to vapor, and this time antimatter was breached, turning what was left into the ubiquitous expanding ball of plasma.

  “Orders, sir?” asked the Tactical Officer, obviously hoping for the order to withdraw.

  “We keep fighting until we have reached the point where we can’t take any more heat,” replied the Admiral. “Then, after we cool down, we come back in and keep up the attack.”

  The Tactical Officer nodded, the expression on his face showing that he did not like the answer. Orders were orders though, and he, like the rest of the force, didn’t have much choice but to obey.

  * * *

  The AI was monitoring the hits on its thick hull as it moved ahead, the enemy ships darting around it like the small flying life forms that were found on living worlds. They were very hard to hit, though there was always the possibility. So the ship alternated between wide angle fans and powerful beams. It estimated that most of the enemy ships would overheat after about fifteen minutes’ exposure to the fans, and a direct hit would kill almost any of them. Then they started moving ships in and of range, allowing some to cool while others continued to attack.

  Missiles were taken out before they could strike, maybe one in a thousand actually hitting the hull and causing minor damage to the armor. The small explosive rounds sometimes got through, but they were not even a bother. The ship flew into expanding balls of plasma that must have been short range weapons. They were tenuous by the time they reached the planet killer, and the molecules had gone from hundreds of thousands of degrees to a mere ten thousand. They were not really a threat either.

  The AI calculated that there was nothing the humans could do to stop it with their current weapons, though it did consider that they might have more of the super powerful warheads that had started the first disaster. If those were thrown at it the probabilities could change rapidly, and it might not complete its mission. It started picking up the impossible ships at a half an hour into the system. They were moving all around it, seemingly immune to the fan beams it was projecting on all vectors. None came out of the warp the Machine AI now recognized as their means of propulsion. It was another technology it would have found use for, but unless it captured one of those vessels to analyze that would never happen. Now all it could do was track them in its limited way, and prepare for the moment one of the super powerful blasts occurred around it.

  Disaster did come, but not in a manner it had given any possibility of happening. A particularly dense piece of superhot plasma flew into the hull, the outer edge hitting one of the laser projectors and burning into the lens, distorting it. Moments later a full power laser from one of the human battleships hit the lens of the nearest projector to that one, and suddenly there was an opening in its defenses. The AI sent robots to those lenses, scampering along the outside of the hull, trying as frantically as a machine could to get to the damage and repair it. By the time they got there the humans must have found the op
ening, because a stream of missiles came flying in at relativistic speed and struck the unprotected area of the hull.

  The hull was too thick for those missiles to penetrate, but they didn’t need to. They destroyed the damaged laser lenses, while their spreading blasts took out a half dozen more, and suddenly twenty percent of the hull was uncovered. The calculations changed. Now there was a forty percent chance that the ship would not make it through this mission. Destruction was acceptable if it kept the enemy from getting one of the Machine AIs, and even better if it took out most of the enemy fleet. Still, it was starting to vacillate, jumping back and forth between continuing and retreating, though every second was moving the probability of fleeing more to the negative.

  Another grav pulse com came through. The humans were just outside the fortress that held the primary AI of the other Machine planet killer. They had fought their way through the defense that had automatically sprung into action when humans had set foot on the vessel. The calculations changed as another constant was added to the variables, that of the need to keep the organics from gaining a working AI to experiment on. Now the decision swung toward forging onward and indecision was what was left behind.

  * * *

  “The next groups of missiles are ready when you want them, Admiral.”

  I hope this works, thought Mara, nodding to the young Tactical Officer. It was his idea, but she would take the blame for wasting the missiles if it didn’t work. Of course, she would also get some of the credit if it worked, though she would make sure he got the lion’s share of it, while shielding him from the flak if it didn’t.

  The idea was a simple one. Missiles at high relativistic speeds packed a heavy kinetic punch, so much that gigaton warheads were not the most destructive part of the package. And missiles entering the laser fans of the planet killer were exploding when those antimatter warheads breached from their magnetic bottles failing. So the Tactical Officer had suggested that they fire the wormhole launched missiles without warheads. Even if the laser fans pumped enough heat into a missile without antimatter the most it would do would be to turn a solid mass moving at relativistic speed into a molten object traveling at the same speed and packing the same energy.

  “Fire,” ordered Mara, looking back at the plot. “And keep them coming until they’re out.”

  The first thirty missiles appeared on the plot in a microsecond, traveling at point nine five light, closing on the planet killer at point eight three c. The target was just over a light minute away, and the missiles covered the distance in a little under eighty seconds. Sixty seconds later they could observe the flash of the hits on the huge hull. They couldn’t tell if the missiles were solid or molten, and it didn’t matter. The idea worked. Thirty seconds after the first the next volley went out, before the first had even reached its target, then another half a minute later. The fifth ran into a full strength laser beam that vaporized most of the stream, turning them into attenuated blobs of gas that were too spread out to do much when they hit.

  “Shift our position before the next shot,” ordered the Admiral. The Machine had calculated that last shot, and she wanted to give them something it would have trouble targeting again, or at least the first stream. “And begin analysis on our hits. Let’s see if we we’ve put any holes in their defenses.”

  * * *

  To say the AI was shocked would be overstatement. Surprise might have come closer to it, but that was also an emotionally driven state. It did calculate that what had happened had not fallen within its probability matrix. The weapons had come in without grabbers pulling them along, the sign of a wormhole launched weapon. It was getting the track back on them from laser reflection less than a fifteen seconds from impact. The expectation was that their antimatter warheads would breach when the containment vessels failed. It hadn’t happened with these missiles, which impacted the hull with considerable kinetic energy, more than the warhead would have imparted. They all struck within a microsecond, all landing on a point, eating their way through the armor. The thirty missiles blasted through almost two kilometers of armor, stopping just above the kilometer of liquid metal shock absorber.

  Thirty seconds later the second stream struck, a different point on the hull with the same result. There seemed to be no risk that the missiles would break through the armor, but they were wreaking havoc on nearby surface installations as their kinetic induced blasts spread out. Weapons and grabber units went off line, and the AI calculated that ten hours of such attacks would leave it coasting helpless in space. And it was still more than fifteen hours from the other ship, and only if it still retained most of its grabber power.

  After the fourth wave came in the AI had spotted the launching ship, and the probable pipeline the incoming weapons were going to traverse. It fired a full strength narrow beam, a mere two hundred meters in diameter. It missed the maneuvering ship, but soon twenty-seven of the missiles were caught up in the beam and converted to clouds of gas. They were still traveling in at point seven three light, and when they hit they caused some deep erosion of the hull, but nothing like the compact masses would have.

  There were only three ships that it could pinpoint as firing the relativistic missiles, one to the rear, two ahead. The ones to the front were still firing missiles that were exploding under laser power, obviously still containing warheads, so it decided to target the one that was firing the weapons that most threatened it. That ship was still evading, but a quick calculation was all that was needed to bracket it with every laser that could bear.

  * * *

  The flag bridge of the Prince of Conway shook furiously in an instant, more than the inertial compensators could handle. Everyone not strapped into a chair was thrown hard into the ceiling of the chamber, including the Admiral.

  Mara was stunned by the impact. If not for her armored suit and its built-in compensators, she could have been killed. “What the hell happened,” she stammered after she felt a broken tooth on her tongue and spit it out.

  The Tactical Officer shook his head for a moment, then looked at his board. The officer had been wise enough to have his suit locked into the chair, but the sudden shift of the ship had still shifted his brain within his skull, causing a concussion. His internal nanites would quickly correct the neural situation, but there would still be confusion for some minutes.

  “I think we were hit by a laser,” said the officer in a slurred voice.

  “Damage?”

  The Tactical Officer looked at her as she moved down and back to her seat, and she switched on her own side holo to get a view of the damage. By the Goddess, no, she thought as the damage became apparent. The beam had sliced through the center of the ship, taking out everything from the top of the hull to about the halfway point. The bridge was gone, not a trace of it left, and the Admiral was sure there were no survivors. The second laser ring had been severed, and the casualty readout showed almost a thousand crew unaccounted for.

  “Take control of the ship,” she ordered one of the crew who still seemed to be cognizant of what was going on. “Maximum evasive maneuvers.”

  The ship shook again, this time the bite taken out of the bow, a hundred and fifty meters of ship gone, including the wormhole. Half of each forward grabber was gone, enough to half their pull, but not enough to render them completely inactive.

  The crewmember she had ordered to take control, a com tech who had manned one of the many communications boards that were set around the flag bridge, reconfigured her station, turning it from a transceiver control board to a helm station. The Admiral’s implant command gave actual control to the station, and as soon as the holo screens came to life around the petty officer she starting sending the ship into maneuvers. Five hundred gravities pull to the upper port, followed two seconds later by four seconds to the immediate starboard, immediately followed by a drop for seven seconds. A vessel from another age would have come apart under the stresses, only half a hull holding in place. With modern materials, superalloys and carbon fi
bers dozens of times stronger than diamond, the stresses never reached the point where it was a threat to the integrity of the hull.

  Another laser struck, a result of many beams bracketing the area and random chance. A good portion of the upper hyperdrive array flashed into vapor. At the moment that was not a disastrous result, since they were in normal space and probably wouldn’t need to enter hyper in the near future. The impromptu helm did two more vector changes, then pushed the ship on maximum acceleration away from the planet killer.

  “We can take over now,” came the voice of the Executive Officer over the com.

  “We’ll keep it,” replied the Admiral, smiling at the Petty Officer, who as far as Mara was concerned had earned a promotion to chief and a transfer to helm duties. “But keep a watch on our defenses.”

  “Do you intend to return to the attack?”

  “By the Goddess’ hells, no. This ship is done for the day.” Probably more like six months, she thought, looking at the damage schematic. They were now moving away from the enemy at point zero one light, adding four point nine kilometers per second per second onto their velocity. The Petty Officer was still randomly evading, and it looked like they were going to make it.

  Mara looked at her one Klassekian Com Tech, getting the being’s attention. “You’re my only contact with the force,” she told the frightened looking being. “I’m depending on you.”

  The Klassekian gave a very human head shake, then closed her eyes and started communicating the Admiral’s words to her siblings.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear. Mark Twain

  KLASSEK.

  The Capital Building was in the middle of a busy day. The Machines were still popping up here and there at random. Mostly the Imperials were on top of it, and hit their surface penetrations quickly, driving back underground and pursuing until that infestation was destroyed. Unfortunately, they weren’t able to predict those penetrations, and hundreds of thousands of the Klassekian species had died. And now the damned Honish were revolting again, attacking Imperial and Klassekian troops in hopeless attacks that were still taking the attention off where it needed to be, the invaders.