“Is there anything that Hillary can do for us?” asked the Tactical Officer, who had to already know the answer, but was grasping at anything that might assuage his fear.
Hillary was moving away at point nine five light in hyper VII. Even if she tried to decel down to translation velocity it would be more than a day before she could, and then she would be light years away. There was no way she could launch missiles to translate down and hit the Machines, or more realistically the La Salle. It would take them hours to decel and come back, having to decel again when they reached attack range. No hyper capable missile had that kind of energy storage. It would fall out of hyper well before getting within light years of its target.
“I’m afraid not,” said Francois, still trying to think of some way to take his own ship out. The translation had not destroyed his ship, but it had rendered it all but inoperable. Most of the crystal matrix batteries had shattered during the event, almost all of the power runs had overloaded. She still had antimatter warheads in the magazines, sealed behind thick blast doors that now refused to open. The emergency hatches had also come down in engineering, sealing the reactors away from all but the few crew that were near the units. And those people were out of com, their own suits damaged. They had no idea what was going on, or what they should do. The Captain could still hope that they would do something to initiate a breach, but without knowledge of what was going on beyond their sealed compartments that was too much to hope for.
If given a day they could get the ship back to partial operating status. Three days and they would be able to get back into hyper and on their way. They would be lucky if they had an hour. And here they sat, over half the crew injured to the point where they couldn’t function, just about every ship’s system offline, surrounded by enemies who had no reason to help, and every one to destroy them.
“We have enemy ships on approach,” called out one of the Petty Officers who was manning an outside observation ports. All the cameras and sensors were down, so they had to resort to visual observation and reports over suit coms, those that had survived the translation.
“What are they?”
“It looks like two of their battleships. They’re moving into position. Shit, they just launched shuttles.”
And we know what that means, thought Francois as he signaled the Chief Engineer over his suit com. “We really need to get something going, Rebecca,” he told the officer. “We have visitors coming, and we need to ready their reception.”
“We’re trying, sir. All we have are hand cutters and particle beam rifles, and the bulkheads and hatches we’re trying to cut through are very tough.”
“Unless you want to be captured by these bastards, I suggest you get through those barriers.”
The ship shook, and the Captain didn’t even need to ask what was going on. The battleships were hitting the destroyer with lasers, set to cut through the hull without destroying the vessel. Normally warning klaxons would be going off, but even that system was down.
“How long?” he asked his Chief Engineer.
“Five minutes? Ten? We’re moving as fast as we can sir.”
And my yelling at you to go faster is not going to accomplish anything, is it?
“Keep on it.”
“We have Machines in the ship,” came a panicked voice over the com. “Sweet Jesus, we have Machines in the ship.” The com went dead at that moment, and Francois was sure that the crewperson was dead.
“Close the emergency hatches,” he ordered over the com. “Everyone, repel boarders. Repeat, repel boarders.” Nice sentiment, he thought of that order. But the enemy was sure to flood his ship with robots. They would come in and do the job without fear or hesitation. If the ship blew while they were inside it was no great loss to their fleet. If it didn’t they would have everything they wanted from this vessel, including the secret of hyper VII. And they couldn’t even wipe the memory banks of the dead computers. The emergency hatch, one that could be opened and closed by hand, was slammed shut, the wheel locks spinning into place.
“All crew within reach of hyperdrive tech. Smash it. Destroy it. Melt it to slag.”
That wouldn’t stop the Machines from discovering the secret of VII. To accomplish that he needed to destroy the ship’s main computers and much of the hyperdrive arrays. With hand weapons there was not much they could do to take out the arrays, and the computers were sealed behind blast doors at the moment. There were devices in the computer meant to take it out, but in trying to make those devices foolproof, only detonating when someone in authority really wanted them to, there were numerous protocols in place to set them off. And none of those protocols were accessible at the moment.
Something hit the emergency access hatch, hard. It soon turned into pounding, which stopped after a moment to be replaced with the sound of sparking metal as whatever was on the other side tried to burn through. It would take some time to burn the hatch open, but the Machines had other ideas, and a twenty centimeter area of white heat appeared in seconds on the bridge side of the hatch. Moments later the powerful laser punched through, and everyone on the bridge moved to a position where they could take whatever came through under fire. What came through were the blurs of small objects that flew into the room on diverging courses, then exploded in small blasts of fury.
Francois cursed under his breath as his HUD went blank under the multiple assault of explosions, gamma rays, and EMP. His suit was hardened against the last two, and his vision returned in seconds, just in time to see the second three meter long snake come through, the first already cutting down his bridge crew before they could react. He fired on the second and torched its sensor/weapon head, which didn’t stop the rest of it from heading his way in a blur. A third robot was already through the hole, with a fourth following, and the Captain was sure they had lost the bridge. The blinded snake hit him and knocked him back, but not before he had raised his faceplate. As he hit the deck he brought his pistol up to point at his face and pulled the trigger. At least he wouldn’t be a captive, subject to whatever experimentation they intended for such.
* * *
“We’ve lost contact with the La Salle, ma’am,” reported the Com Tech, a worried expression on her alien face.
“Did they blow the ship?” asked Admiral Bednarczyk, looking into the shocked face of the alien. This one was a sibling of the Klassekian who had been on the bridge of the La Salle, and had experienced the death of her sister. What does it feel to be in the head of someone you have been entwined with from birth as they die? She was amazed the being was still coherent, and gained new respect for their newest allies.
“I, I don’t think so, ma’am,” said the shaken alien, her heavily accented Terranglo almost beyond recognition. “The last thing my sister saw was a snake, no, a robot, turning its head toward her. Then, nothing.”
Crap. So they most probably captured that ship, and with it the secret of hyper VII. Of course, it will take them time to figure everything out, and even more to implement the tech. That brought a little bit of satisfaction to an otherwise unsatisfying incident. She hated losing people, and two destroyers worth was almost six hundred trained spacers. Worse than that was the advantage they would lose.
And they will run into the same problem we needed to get hyper VII. The reason we still have so many hyper VI ships even now. The bottom line was supermetals. Supermetals were essential to grabbers and hyperdrive units. An island of stability in a sea of ever shorter living elements, they didn’t occur in nature, or at least none had been found so far. It took considerable industrial capacity to make all three of the elements, S-iron, S-silver and S-platinum, and there never seemed to be enough of them. And a hyper VII array took more than four times the mass of the precious elements than a VI.
So, to convert their entire force to VII, they only need to make four times the mass of supermetals they already possess. Yeah, easy. Difficult or not, they would be producing hyper VII ships. Maybe not a lot of them at first, but they wo
uld be there, which would make the tactical decisions of her commanders more difficult, and riskier.
“Get me the commander of the Hillary,” she ordered another Klassekian, this one a sibling of the tech on that destroyer. “And I want visual on this one.”
The Tech nodded and started to concentrate, pulling a visual signal, as seen through the eyes of her sister.
“Admiral,” said Roberta Matthews, coming out of her chair to the position of attention.
“At ease, Commander.”
“I’m, sorry, Admiral,” said the younger woman on the other end of the com, falling back in her chair.
“Not your fault. I knew this was an extremely dangerous mission when I sent you on it. And I went over the log from your tech. If not for your quick thinking, we would have lost all three ships. Just get your ship and its intelligence back to us.”
“Yes, ma’am. We are changing course to come in on a different vector. I will be shifting a bit every hour.”
“Good thinking.” And Beata had to admit to herself that it was a very smart decision. The Machines would not be able to lay in ambush for them if she did that, and it was just about impossible that she would just overfly another trap in open space. If only we had thought of that before you hit the ambush. But entirely not your fault. Bednarczyk in fact was thinking that this Commander was going to be trading her oak leaves in for eagles when she got back to Bolthole. That, and command of an entire destroyer squadron. “Now get back to us.”
The com died, leaving Beata to her own thoughts for a moment, all the time she had with an active battle still going on in this system. She had already known from a previous report that not only the planet killers carried the graviton beam, that they were also carried in a less powerful version by some of their capital ships. But by how many? If she had to bet, she would put her money on only some specially outfitted ships carrying the graviton beams, and even then it took about a score of them to drop a ship out of hyper. And so far all they had seen were probes and a pair of destroyers dropped. They didn’t know if they were powerful enough to take out a battleship, with its much more powerful hyperfield. But she wasn’t willing to gamble on that.
“Admiral,” came a call on the com. “The other planet killer is now two hours from contact with the one we’ve boarded. Their missiles will be coming into contact in five minutes.”
“Show me,” ordered Beata, turning toward the central plot of the flag bridge. First the plot showed the icons that became familiar to every serving Fleet officer. The large icon of the planet killer coming at them was on one edge of the plot, surrounding by several groups of Imperial vessels. The huge vessel was moving at a mere point two light, accelerating at much less than a gravity, probably all she could do. The destroyer force falling in front of the enemy ship was much reduced by the enemy’s last gambit. Over seventy missiles were on the way toward the smallish force she had around the planet killer they were trying to rob of information. She had already arrayed all her destroyers and cruisers ten light seconds out to act as the first defense screen. Her ship and her three smaller battleships were closer to the planet killer, all defensive weapons powered up and ready. It was fortunate that she had ordered those ships back at the last moment. She didn’t think the enemy missiles would get through, and any that did would only cause minimal damage to the enormous construct it was trying to destroy.
Not a very smart decision, you mass of circuits, she thought. She was sure it was trying to prevent the humans from gaining intelligence on their kind, but it had been a stupid decision. The incoming vessel was still being pounded, its weapons going offline at an alarming rate. Alarming to the Machine, if it could be alarmed. She was sure to lose some ships to that small missile storm, but not too many. Unless?
“They’re going to ram the damn thing,” she said out loud, looking around for her Chief of Staff and finding him standing by the tactical station. “How much damage could they do ramming that thing?” she asked, walking over to the station.
“At better than point two light?” asked the Tactical Officer, looking up from his station. “With that much mass? I would say it would destroy both of them, ma’am. And even worse would be the explosion that will erupt when all of their antimatter stores breached containment.”
“How bad?” asked a now concerned Fleet Admiral, leaning over the back of the chair.
The Tactical Officer pulled up another holo as he imputed some figures. The two planet killers appeared, an instant before collision, then impact, and the shock wave reached out in all directions.
“You know, Admiral, that in most cases there is not much of a blast effect in space, but here we have trillions of tons of mass being projected out. I would think that anything out to several hundred kilometers would simply be destroyed. Out to a thousand kilometers we would still have significant damage to most vessels.”
“What can we do to stop it?” said Beata in a loud tone, biting back the comment she had wanted to make about the officer lecturing her on things she already knew.
“We’re hitting it with everything we have, and it’s not doing much good,” said the Chief of Staff.
“Maybe if we gave the one we have a good push,” said the Tactical Officer.
Beata glared at the man, not sure whether he was being serious or not.
“Just give me a listen, ma’am,” said the Tactical Officer, getting his courage up. “We’ve already reduced the incoming big bastard to a half gravity acceleration. It seems likely that we will reduce it to nothing before it reaches the other planet killer. Right now the attacker is on a course to strike the other ship, when they intersect, here.” The officer pulled up a plot to hang in the air over his station, showing the two huge vessels and their predicted courses.
“In two hours they will intersect, the one coming in to strike the other. If we can alter the path of the target, the incoming planet killer will not be able to hit her.”
“We have three large ships we can use to make a try,” said the Chief of Staff, pointing to the plot and highlighting the superbattleship and two standard battleships now moving to close with the captured planet killer.
“But will they be enough?” asked Beata, wrinkling her brow as she tried to do the math in her head. It could work. We would only get at most a tenth of a gravity push, but that could be enough. In open space the ships could at most push about five hundred and twenty-five gravities. Any more and they had to use the tanks. This wasn’t a function of the maximum pull of the grabber units, but was because of the limits of the inertial compensators in those devices. They could actually pull the ship along at almost a thousand gravities, but the wear and tear on the crew would be catastrophic. The battleships had a combined mass of fifty million tons, and they would be pushing an object in the trillions of tons. Actually, an estimated two point five trillion tons. So the three ships pushing together would be able to move themselves and the planet killer at one fiftieth of a gravity, or nineteen centimeters per second per second. Not a lot, but maybe enough in the time they had.
“What happens when the other planet killer self-destructs, trying to take out the one we’re moving away from it. From what I can figure, we will only be ten kilometers or less from the other ship when it goes. That’s well within the hundred kilometer limit you specified as the zone of total destruction.”
“For our ships, yes ma’am. But these things have five kilometers of armor. There will be significant damage to the planet killer we’re trying to save, but I think it will survive. Our ships will have to duck behind our planet killer, but I think they’ll survive.”
“So it’s still a risk?”
“It definitely is a risk, ma’am. What it comes down to is whether you want to have this thing around to mine for information, or not.”
Beata thought for a moment. The risk was that she would lose three battleships, an important part of her command, but not vitally so. That her own hide would be at risk as well didn’t even enter her thoughts.
>
“Let’s do it,” she told the people around her. “I want all of our attacking ships to step up the assault on that bastard heading toward us. We need to cut her down to no acceleration, or at least so little that we can still get the other one out of the way. And our three battleships will move into the position specified for this operation and start pushing.”
Chapter Fifteen
We are still fearful, superstitious and all-too-human creatures. At times, we forget the magnitude of the havoc we can wreak by off-loading our minds onto super-intelligent machines, that is, until they run away from us, like mad sorcerers' apprentices, and drag us up to the precipice for a look down into the abyss. Richard Dooling
“We’re going to be bringing out the brain in the next ten minutes,” said the Battalion Commander over the com.
About time, thought Madison Suarez. According to the information coming in over her HUD, the enemy planet killer, the sister to this one they had boarded, was one hour and fifty-one minutes away. Unfortunately, the computer core of the AI, the thing they had come for, was five meters across, which meant they needed a more than five meter wide hole through its armored containment vessel. And then there were the choke points along the way that had to be widened. The dozen smaller globes they were thinking were memory modules had already been disconnected and packed up in cases that had been fabricated on the shuttles. They were only a meter in diameter, and were easily transported out. There had been some thought of cutting up the processor, but since they really didn’t know how it worked, they were afraid that might totally destroy the unit.
Exodus: Machine War: Book 3: Death From Above Page 19
