Exodus: Machine War: Book 3: Death From Above

by Doug Dandridge

  Beata crossed her fingers, realized what she was doing, and cursed herself for a superstitious fool as she uncrossed them. A moment later she crossed them again. Superstitious or not, it couldn’t hurt. The tracks on the plot were changing, not fast enough for her, but they were going in the right direction. Come on, she thought.

  “We’re breaking free now, Admiral,” came a call from the ship’s Captain. The plot showed the other battleships also stopping their boost, then backing up slightly and turning in space.

  We need more time, thought Beata, holding down her inclination to order them to hold position and keep thrusting. That would not only lead to her death, something she wasn’t all that anxious to experience, but the deaths of over fifteen thousand spacers. She clamped her mouth shut, knowing that things needed to go the way they had planned. Now was not the time to throw improvisation into the timetable.

  “They’re going to miss, ma’am,” yelled out the excited Tactical Officer.

  Beata nodded, unwilling to say a word. The plot showed the warships all moving to safety, all the firing vessels passing the thousand kilometer line, the three battleships on the pusher detail moving behind the derelict. Her ship’s grabbers were cooling down, still not at optimal temperature, but functional enough to move them if the derelict was pushed their way. The moment of decision was moving toward them, and there was nothing any of the human participants could do about it.

  * * *

  The humans reacted too quickly. It was unexpected, since organics couldn’t parse data at near the speed of a computer. Then again, organics possessed the ability to make decisions before they looked at all of the data. Sometimes that led to bad decisions that made the situation worse for the humans. More often than not those snap decisions worked out, sometimes brilliantly. This appeared to be one of those cases. The AI had thought that the Orion drive would have caught the humans off-guard, maybe caused a panic. Instead they had reacted swiftly. The planet killer was closer to its target than it would have been otherwise, but still not close enough.

  Reality was what it was, and it was something it couldn’t change. The closest approach was nearing, and the AI sent the commands to every containment vessel in its hull, every warhead, making them ready for the final command. The clock ticked down, the closest approach was here, and the AI sent the final command of its existence.

  There was over three thousand tons of antimatter aboard the vessel, the explosive power equivalent to one hundred and seventeen terratons of yield. More power than one hundred and seventeen thousand ship killer warheads. Not even the structure of the hundred kilometer diameter vessel, the five kilometers of armor, could hold up to a blast like that. For a microsecond the hull fractured in a million places, letting out streams of superhot plasma. Then the entire thing ruptured. Most of the ship was turned to superheated gas propelled at a good fraction of the speed of light. There were some larger sections that flew away whole, a hundred tons here, a couple of tons there, millions of barely kilogram pieces.

  In space most explosions had very little in the way of blast effect. Blast effect was carried by matter, and most warheads only had a hundred tons or so to work with, which spread to almost vacuum thin gas a hundred kilometers away. Blast only occurred on hits or near misses with these weapons. This blast carried trillions of tons of matter, the mass of a moderate sized asteroid. At one hundred kilometers it was the equivalent of a direct missile hit. At five hundred it was still a powerful push at near light speed. The radiation and heat transmitted almost instantaneously out, heating hulls and boiling away alloys at a thousand kilometers.

  Several of the smaller vessels, destroyers and light cruisers, lost considerable hull armor as they were battered by a radiation storm that sleeted through the bodies of their crews. Heavy cruisers and battleships fared better, but still sustained some exterior damage as the blast wave washed over them.

  The derelict planet killer was almost exactly fifty-seven kilometers from its detonating twin. The heat boiled away billions of tons of armor, turning the outer skin of the derelict into a jet, pushing it forward at several gravities. The blast wave hit soon after, adding another couple of gravities to the mix. The armor ablated away, more swiftly than anyone could have imagined.

  An hour and a half later the brilliant flare of the exploding planet killer reached the Bolthole asteroid. It was remarked at the time that it resembled nothing less than a supernova in the close stellar neighborhood.

  * * *

  “Prepare for detonation,” came the command over the suit com.

  Lieutenant Suarez looked quickly to each side, making sure her people were ready. Every suit hugged the wall that would become the floor when the blast pushed the ship they were on, their backs adhered to the alloy through nanotech built into their armor.

  The force built quickly, going from zero g to more than two in a couple of seconds. Two gravities was not too bad. Seconds later the g load built to four in an instant, and Suarez was suddenly depending on her suit to help her lungs bring in air. Four still wasn’t a disaster, though it felt like four people kneeling on her chest. She could barely move her arms and legs. The actuators in her suit would have still moved her limbs if she could move at all, and her implant could order them to move even if she couldn’t. She didn’t need to move. All she needed to do was lay there and pray that the ship didn’t come apart around her. If that happened her suit would have provided about as much protection as vacuum, and she and everybody aboard would be dead.

  With that thought came the shaking, as if the vessel were about to definitely come apart. She prayed some more. Suarez wasn’t sure it would do any good, but it was about the only thing she could do. The shaking built, until her teeth were chattering in her mouth. She closed her eyes and repeated the same prayer over and over, not sure if God would do anything for her, hoping at least that she wouldn’t end up in a bad place after she died.

  * * *

  “There it goes,” called out the Tactical Officer as the main viewer showed the flash and dissolution of what had been a several trillion ton object. The view died almost instantly as the probe vaporized under the attack, switching to a farther image as another unit took up the feed.

  Bednarczyk looked at the view of the bridge of the ship, where the Helm was piloting the huge ship on manual, boosting ahead of the derelict planet killer, striking a balance between being hit by the massive construct and staying in its shadow to protect them from the blast of the other Machine.

  And if this one blows, we won’t have any shadow to cover in, she thought, staring at the view of the expanding cloud that had been the other Machine. One close up telescopic view showed the hull of the derelict, ablating away under the blast.

  “Will it hold?” she shouted out, looking over at her Tactical Officer.

  “I don’t know, ma’am. I just don’t know.”

  The officer had a wide eyed look to his face, and Beata was sure her visage was much the same. They were all on the edge of panic. It was all well and good to talk about facing death with courage, but this was a situation that pushed the limits of courage. Death could come at any second, and they had absolutely no control over it. If the derelict blew, everyone close to it was gone. The over one thousand Marines and spacers aboard, the more than fifteen thousand crew on the battleships. And it was a death they couldn’t even spit in the eye of. The derelict wouldn’t care if they fired at it while it was exploding.

  On the viewer the image was clearing as the cloud of plasma dissipated with its spread. The bright center of the explosion was gone, the only glow the radiating heat of the derelict’s hull. Beata willed the image to switch to infrared, then to radar. The hull was holding, barely. Four kilometers were gone, the last kilometer at the edge of molten, even the structural component underneath damaged. But it looked like it was going to hold.

  “It’s over,” whispered the Tactical Officer. “We’ve survived.”

  “It looks like it,” said Beata, feeling
a smile stretch her face. This isn’t going to be good for my image, she thought as the flag deck crew turned to look at her with that smile on her face. She had a reputation for being a cold ass old lady. Now they had seen her emotions, her fear and her relief. The hell with that, she thought, shrugging her shoulders. She felt good to be alive.

  “Orders, ma’am?” asked the Chief of Staff.

  “I want all the flag officers in conference in one hour,” she said, turning to walk from the bridge. People would want to celebrate this victory, or just the fact that they were still alive. Thirty-seven days, five hours, she thought as she checked the data on her implant. That was when the next Machine force would be here. And in eighteen days their other fleet would appear at the hyper barrier of Klassek. She thought she could handle that one, probably. The one coming for Bolthole would be the problem. So they needed to get to work on a plan.

  “The Emperor is on the com, ma’am,” came the call as she was walking through the hatch to her quarters.

  Of course he is, thought the Admiral with a frown. She wanted nothing more than to get a stiff drink and maybe a quick nap before the meeting she had called for. But her lord and master called, and she must needs obey.

  * * *

  The shaking stopped, and an instant later the g forces went away. We made it, thought Suarez as she opened her eyes. That meant that all of the Machines in this system had been defeated. They had won. Not everyone had made it through the battle, but now was the time for the survivors to feel the relief of survival, to celebrate. The mourning would come soon enough.

  “Okay, everyone,” came the voice of the battalion commander on the com. “We still have a job to do, so everyone get to it.”

  Of course, thought Suarez with a smile. The mission always came first with the military. The concerns of the people who made it up were always a distant second.

  She really wasn’t sure if this was the life for her, which was unfortunate at this time. She had proven to herself and others that she was good at this job. Only she wasn’t sure she could take the fights where half the people under her command didn’t make it back. Unfortunately, this was wartime, and there were no resignations. She was in for the duration, just like everyone else.

  Chapter Seventeen

  One has to look out for engineers - they begin with sewing machines and end up with the atomic bomb. Marcel Pagnol

  “Here’s to victory,” called out a Militia officer from the bar, hoisting a full glass into the air, then taking a deep drink.

  “I wish we could have been a part of the victory,” said one of the Klassekian militiamen at the table. “Instead, the damned things never got to us.”

  Nazzrirat gave a head shake such as he had seen the humans make. He too had wanted to take part in the battle, though he had to admit that he wasn’t at all sorry that the Fleet had stopped them before they got to the asteroid. There were rumors that another Machine force was on the way to the system, more than a month away, but on course. He hoped they were ready for this one as well, and that they would stop it in space before it reached his new home.

  “Are you still making rifles?” asked one of the other Klassekians.

  “Hells no,” answered Lonzzarit Andonna, one of his birth siblings and a member of his platoon. “They have us building those damned replicator things. I think they call them fabbers.”

  Should you be telling anyone what we’re making? he thought at his brother over their quantum link.

  You think the enemy has robots in our drinks listening in? thought his sibling with a mental laugh.

  The humans are very security conscious.

  And when it makes sense to, I will be just as security conscious. But not now.

  Nazzrirat gave another negative head shake. They had been counseled on need to know, but nothing had been said about talking about their jobs. It was not a great secret that the base was ramping up on fabbers, the nanotech driven production machines that could be programed to make almost any part on command. What those fabbers were being programmed to produce he had no idea, though he did have his guesses. There were launches planned for the next day. A lot of them. The humans needed more fleet units, and it just made sense that they would be making the parts for those things. Not just ships, but the manufacturing plant that would lead to more vessels.

  “Well, we’ll all be working double shifts starting tomorrow,” said the first Klassekian to speak. “They have us supervising the growth of those damned power cells of theirs. It’s really amazing how fast the things grow. Which is why they need people supervising them to make sure that they don’t form abnormal shapes.”

  Nazzrirat had heard of the crystal matrix batteries, the substance that the Imperials used in place of the chemical batteries and fuel cells of his people. Capable of holding more than a thousand times the energy per weight of the most powerful fuel cell, they were one of the products that made Imperial civilization go. They held energy in the crystal bonds of the batteries, which changed configuration according to the amount of power that was put into them. The main problem was the scale of batteries that were needed by every ship in the fleet. Even destroyers had a couple of thousand tons of the things aboard, battleships in the hundreds of thousands.

  “Another round,” shouted someone from the bar, to accompanying cheers. More drinks arrived at their table, carried by one of the human females who worked the bar as a second job. The tips she received made sure that she would remember their table. The Klassekians were also well paid, with little to spend it on.

  “To the Empire,” said one of the Klassekians, raising the whisky that they preferred to drink. Human alcohol did have an effect on them, but their tolerance was so much higher that beer and wine was like drinking a soda. The hundred proof whisky was the equivalent of beer to their systems. They had a hard time getting drunk, but when they reached it they were as out of control as any smashed human. And unfortunately there weren’t any sober pills that worked on their metabolisms. They were said to be coming, but no estimated time had been given.

  “To the Empire,” echoed Nazzrirat, raising his own glass, then gulping down the smooth liquid. He and his brothers were from one of the smaller nations on a smaller continent in the Southern Hemisphere of his world. They had been a democracy for centuries, a true democracy, with everyone a citizen, and every citizen a vote. Empire would have been one of the last things his people would have aspired to. But now they were part of one, and so far, the bargain had been a good one for them.

  Hours later they were among the last people still in the bar. Most had drunk their fill and staggered off. They would fall into bed to be awoken too early. The humans and most of the other aliens would be able to take the sober pills and recover within moments without even a hangover. He and his people might not have such a rough awakening, but they also wouldn’t have that instant recovery. Thinking of the morning he hoped the human scientist came up with the medication for his people quickly.

  “Closing time,” called out the bartender. “You all have shifts to report to tomorrow, and the Admiral will have my head if he finds out I let you bottomless pits sit here drinking after the official closing time. So get up and get out.”

  There was some grumbling, but everyone knew the bartender had no choice. Nor did they. Refusing to leave would bring the Shore Patrol, and no one wanted to sleep it off in the facility jail. Nazzrirat said goodbye to the others, then joined arms with the two brothers he had been with out in the hallway. A few steps into their journey Lonzzarit started into a song that had been old in their nation when it was still a kingdom of brigands. Nazzrirat joined in, wondering if there might be complaints from people trying to sleep. No one showed up on their journey to quiet them, and Nazzrirat thought again of the wonderful materials science of the human, that made their chambers truly soundproof. Finally, they reached their chambers, where the other siblings were already in bed. The Klassekian let his head hit the pillow and fell into a deep sleep in moments, his dreams
and the dreams of his brothers soothing him through the night.

  * * *

  “The Emperor wants this thing ramped up to full production in two weeks,” said Admiral Anaru Henare, the commander of the Bolthole system. He turned a fierce glance on everyone sitting in the room, the Maori tattoos on his face lending an extra dimension of fierceness to his display.

  “And what Sean wants, he gets,” said Fleet Admiral Beata Bednarczyk, her holographic figure taking up the space at the other end of the table.

  There might have been some sarcasm in those words. Then again, there might not have been. They had all come to know the will of their young Emperor since the war with the Cacas had begun. They knew that he had a strong will, and when he wanted things done, they got done, no matter how impossible they seemed at first.

  “Surely he doesn’t want everything going,” exclaimed Ms. Zhao Lei, the Chief of Worker Relations, and the woman responsible for seeing to their health and welfare. “The supermetal production plants are too exposed.”

  Henare had to agree with her. The two ice planets that had already been partially converted to supermetal production were right at the edge of the hyper barrier. Anything that came into the system could hit them almost immediately, depending on their angle of approach. He thought it a bad idea to have built the facilities there in the first place. But that was how it was done in the core worlds that were the center of Imperial heavy production, so that was how it had been done here. Plans called for three more supermetal facilities to be constructed, but they would be an hour in from the barrier, on moons in orbit around one of the gas giants. That would allow for the placement of a series of forts that would defend all of them at the same time.

  “We need those production plants going,” said Bednarczyk in a tone that told everyone there she wasn’t open to argument. “The Empire doesn’t have the supermetals to spare, and we found in the last engagement that fusion drive missiles just don’t cut it. If we’re fabbing thousands of missiles a day, we need the supermetals to build their drives.”