Exodus: Machine War: Book 3: Death From Above

by Doug Dandridge

  “The people won’t like it,” said Zhao, who seemed to have missed the Admiral’s tone. “In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if many refuse to go to those stations.”

  “Then they had better be made aware of their options, Ms. Lei,” said Bednarczyk. “Those people are under contract to work at whatever jobs they are assigned in this system. If they refuse, the Emperor has authorized me to draft them into the military. They will then be moved, by force if necessary, to those planets to start the production of supermetals. Believe me, they will do their jobs, but with much fewer benefits and at much lower pay.”

  “That’s outrageous,” shouted Zhao. “I have friends in Parliament who will hear about this.”

  “Eventually, yes,” said Henare, shaking his head. “As of right now we are in a communications blackout. All messages will go through my headquarters, and my people will have first look at them before they are sent out.”

  “This is outrageous,” repeated Zhao, standing.

  “This is war,” shouted Bednarczyk, her hand moving toward the table and going through it without a sound. “Sacrifices are made in war. Or do you think that we in the Fleet are the only ones who put our lives on the line.”

  Henare nodded as the civilian took her seat, a look of panic on her face.

  “The bottom line is that we are fighting a war out here,” he said as soon as she was seated. “The Empire is also fighting a much larger war closer to home. They can send us aid, but only so much. This system was envisioned as being able to produce complete task groups to send back into the Empire at need. Well, those task groups are needed here, and we need to build them.”

  There was a lot of head nodding around the table. Gunther Hartmann raised his hand, and Henare nodded his way.

  “Am I to understand that we will be laying down ships?”

  That was a good question. They had enough building slips on the asteroid to start construction on a couple of task forces, and with a little work they could have just as many slips in the space around the asteroid. But any ships they started to work on would not be ready by the time the next Machine force arrived.

  “Right now we’re going to concentrate on weapons and equipment,” said Bednarczyk. “We have some ideas for uparmoring and uparming some of our ships, including the two battle stations that didn’t get into the last fight.”

  Henare had been wondering about that. The two asteroids, both containing a battle cruiser that formed the propulsion and control section, had launched missiles, but had not been able to close on the enemy to use their beam weapons. He pulled the Fleet Admiral’s plan on his implant, sucking in his breath as he saw what they proposed.

  “We might also consider building some monitors, system defense ships with heavy armor and weapons. My engineers think we can have some built within the month, which would be just soon enough to shake them down and get them ready for combat.”

  All of this was going to be a huge effort, and if they failed to defend the system, everything would be lost. And it wasn’t just the effort for defending the system. If they won, they would still have a greater war to prosecute against the Machines, and they would need this base in order to strike at the enemy’s industrial base.

  The point was that modern fleets were more than just ships and crews. There were logistics vessels, missile colliers and antimatter tankers. They were production facilities, repair centers and ships, and a thousand and one items that vessels needed. For every ton of vessel that was launched into hyper, there were over two tons of infrastructure in systems to support that ton. Supermetal production facilities, antimatter satellites, asteroid mines, carbon fiber spinners. And almost another ton of logistics vessels, plus tugs, shuttles, navigation beacons. It was an enormous undertaking, and species that had tried to build the ultimate fleet without the support soon found themselves losing the war they had unleashed. The Empire had learned through the centuries not to cut those corners, and so they had been successful.

  “I think we can get a couple of hundred more fast attack craft built, and maybe a thousand or more fighters,” said Commodore Harta Sukarno, Henare’s chief of staff. “We can put those together in no time, if we have the crews.”

  “Crews will be coming from the Empire,” said Bednarczyk with a tight smile. “They actually have a surplus of spacers and pilots at the moment, until the next wave of warships come out of the slips. So we get some of that largess. And, of course, more of the inertialess craft. I’ve been promised four more wings to add to the two we already have.”

  “And wormholes?” asked Admiral Rosemary Gonzales, one of the task group commanders. “That is our greatest force multiplier, and we could sure do with some more wormhole equipped ships.”

  “We have some more coming in the next couple of days, along with the hyper VII ships to carry them,” reported Henare. “Not really enough in my opinion. I think ten was the total count.”

  “There is another convoy on the way,” said Bednarczyk, her mouth turning down into a frown as she raised her hands to calm the other officers down. “Forty more wormholes for us. Twenty each for Klassek and Exploration Command Base. Arrival time, a month and a half. So it will get here right after the Machines have arrived. Another will be sent out two weeks after that one, so two weeks later we will get another forty.”

  There was much cursing and head shaking around the table. That was still the logistical bottleneck, and until someone figured out how to push one wormhole through another, it always would be. Wormholes still had to come to them the old fashioned way, through hyperspace, one light year at a time. Once they had them, they would have access to even more of the wormhole launch systems and particle beam accelerators on and near the Donut. But meanwhile all they had to do was hold out until they got here.

  Yeah, thought Henare with an inner chuckle. Easy that. Easiest thing in the Universe.

  * * *

  “I really don’t like getting this close to a star,” said the young woman who was the newly assigned copilot.

  “You’ll get used to it,” replied Terry Roberts, the tug pilot, checking the readouts to make sure the ship, his cargo, and most important of all his valuable hide were in the proper positions. If you don’t get used to it, you won’t last long.

  The star on the view screen was not the largest anyone had ever heard of. In fact, it was a basic yellow dwarf. Still, from close up, with prominences larger than entire planets rising and falling from the sea of plasma that made up the body. No one could look at it from this close and not feel awe, and a little fear.

  Their task was to move assets into a close solar orbit, which meant getting really near to the G class star. That was the job for the tug Maxie’s Pride for the foreseeable future. The eight hundred thousand ton vessel was mostly reactors and grabber units. It couldn’t go very fast, since its inertial compensators only protected it from fifty gravities. But it could pull like the beast it appeared to be, moving fifty million ton or larger objects at a couple of gravities.

  The object they were pushing was right at the eight million ton range. It was almost in position, just one more nudge and it would be in the close orbit that was needed for its optimum functioning.

  “There,” said Camila Torgersen, the flight engineer. “Cut drive and back off.”

  “Roger,” agreed Roberts, punching in the commands. The ship’s computer handled the actual maneuver at his command, it being much more precise at a time that called for precision. Roberts felt he could still do the job on manual, but he didn’t see the need to take chances when he didn’t have to.

  The eight million ton object, six kilometers long by one wide, fell along into its orbit. Moments later the solar panels started to unfold. It would take an hour for the unfolding to complete, by which time a hundred square kilometers of cells would be drinking in the power of the star, sixty four times the energy per centimeter of an array in the middle of the life zone.

  “Everything checks out, Maxie’s Pride,” came the voice o
f the caretaking crew supervisor over the com. “We should be producing fuel in the next hour.”

  “And another satisfied customer,” said Roberts into the com with a laugh. “Returning to base to pick up the next unit.”

  There were a score of tugs operating at placing the antimatter production satellites into orbit. Bolthole had produced over two hundred of them in the last four months, and were producing ten more each day. Plans called for over a thousand of the units to be in orbit by the end of the year, eventually ten thousand in total. Each would produce a ton of antimatter each week, eventually ten thousand tons each seven days, which the fleet of harvesters would shuttle back to the multiple storage farms in orbit just on the other side the life zone.

  Antimatter was still the most efficient means of energy storage known. And one of the most dangerous, since antimatter could explode simply by contact with matter. There was some hope that zero point energy might be used in the future, if the puzzle could be solved, and it turned out to not be as risky as theorized. Antimatter could cause an enormous blast. Failure of zero point energy could theoretically destroy the Universe, though current thought was that the quantum foam wasn’t quite so fragile. Still, antimatter was here now, and sure to be used for centuries to come, and one of the most important uses of a military base was as a refueling and rearming point.

  The antimatter satellite was very efficient. Using processes that had been in use for centuries, they converted matter to antimatter by a flipping process that reversed the charges on protons and electrons, turning them into antiprotons and positrons. By the conservation of energy they couldn’t produce more power through antimatter than they used in its production, and the process did use more energy input than what they got out. Still, its ratio of one point two input to one output made it the most efficient energy production process known to the Empire.

  * * *

  “I really don’t like this.”

  The Shift Supervisor nodded his agreement. He really didn’t like it either, despite the assurances of the powers that be that they would be protected by the Fleet. Despite the deep shelters they could seek refuge in during an attack. The Fleet wanted supermetals, so twenty thousand workers had been moved here against their will to make those. A battalion of Marines had been stationed on the ice moon as well, ostensibly for security, though many of the workmen felt it was to make sure they toed the line.

  “Nothing we can do about it now,” the Supervisor told the woman. “We’re here, and there really is no way off this ice ball unless the Fleet gives us passage.” He looked at the timer on his implant. Twenty seconds to go. “Get ready to fire her up.”

  The operator nodded, then turned her attention to the control board. Several thousand other workers were waiting at their stations, monitoring, ready to intervene if something went wrong. But the whole shooting match was controlled from here, the central control center, and she was well paid to make sure that everything started off without a hitch.

  “Group A fusion plants are all hot,” she said, looking at the holo that showed bar graphs from fifty fusion plants, all ramping up. At operating level they would each produce one hundred gigawatts of energy, for a total output of five terrawatts. All of the bar graphs appeared in the normal range, right where they were supposed to be.

  “All cooling grids operating at nominal level.” The second holo showed the temperatures of each cooling grid, feeding a thousand square kilometers of radiators each. “Ready to shunt power to accelerator tubes.”

  “Shunt power, now,” said the Supervisor after he did a quick check of all the activated systems.

  “Shunting power.”

  Another set of bar graphs appeared in a holo next to the others. They rose, indicating the power being fed over huge superconducting cables to the particle accelerator. This was the real heart of the operation, a two thousand kilometer long linear accelerator that stretched around the curvature of the planet. It would move heavy particles at just under the speed of light to collide at the end, building up more massive elements as they fused. Most of those elements would be very short lived, in the nano and picosecond range. About a half percent would be one of the stable supermetals. Most of those would be superiron, the lowest atomic number of the cluster, and the least useful. Least useful meaning it was still very useful, though it had only half the conduction and radiative abilities of the next one up. There would be useful amounts of supersilver, and even less of the most valuable, superplatinum.

  The supermetals were shunted aside into the small storage containers, while the rest of the mass was moved back to the beginning of the accelerator to begin the journey again, to smash into other heavy elements at one hundred thousandth slower than the speed of light. More supermetals were produced, and at the end of the day several tons of useful substances would have been gathered. The process also generated a lot of heat, and yet another radiative field was used to pull that heat away and radiate it out into the cold of space. Some of the heat bled into the planet, which was at an ambient temperature of ten degrees above absolute zero. In a century or less that temperature would have risen to the melting point of the ice, and the planet would have to be abandoned, all of its machinery transferred to another body.

  “Okay, let’s start up the second production line,” said the Shift Supervisor. The procedure went much as had the first, bringing up the fusion plants, making sure everything was working within normal limits. The cooling system was tested and proven to be working, then the accelerator. In fifteen minutes that line was working as well. Two more were under construction on the planet, one scheduled to be opened in two weeks, the other in four months, and then the planet would be at full capacity.

  “Signal the powers that be that everything is working. That should make them happy.”

  And it would make the rest of them happy if they were able to get off this place before the Machines returned. Sabotage was not the answer, throwing a monkey wrench into the system. That would be considered treason, a capital offense during wartime, and no one doubted that the military commander of this system would execute anyone found guilty of that crime. Plus, it wouldn’t get them moved. It would just add more work.

  The Supervisor wondered if someone might be stupid enough to try anyway. He hoped not. And not just because of the inconvenience it might cause him. He was, after all, a loyal subject of the Empire, and he realized that the Machines needed to be stopped. Even if it cost him his life, and the lives of everyone working this station so near the hyper barrier.

  * * *

  “The facility is online, Admiral,” sent Mining Supervisor Terra Shongololo over the com. It would take almost an hour for the message to reach Bolthole and the officer in question. Still, the supervisor knew that everything was working, and the pride of getting the job done lived in her heart at this moment. The hum of pumps sounded through the massive station, mostly in testing mode at the moment, though soon they would be moving the lifeblood of the operation.

  A dozen large mining ships were moving through the upper atmosphere of Cthulhu, the largest gas giant in the Bolthole system at one point five Jupiter masses. Each five hundred thousand ton vessel moved on its grabber units as it sucked up the hydrogen rich atmosphere and compressed it into its storage tanks. When they had gathered a million tons of gas they would come up and rendezvous with the thirty million ton station, offloading their gas for processing. The station would separate out the other gases and retain the hydrogen, which would be picked up by tankers and taken to the various fusion plants powering the industrial concerns of the system. At the moment their station was the only one operating in the system, though another would be online in a couple of months. If we’re still here to operate it, thought the Supervisor with a frown. The Emperor had ordered that now the system was to be held at all costs. It would be nice if the will of the Emperor was enough, but it would take more than that to defeat the enemy coming this way.

  Terra looked at the view of the cold gas giant i
n the viewer. It actually produced heat, with the mass of gas pressing down on the core. At three times its mass it would be a brown dwarf, but it would actually be losing mass, if only a little bit, during their operations in this system. The orange bands of clouds moved swiftly across the surface. There was life in those clouds, mostly micro-organisms, through some larger forms fed on them, and some truly massive beasts fed on those larger forms.

  Funny how we still use measures of things none of us have ever seen, thought the woman, who had a degree in astrophysics on top of her credentials in engineering. Jupiter was just a name in the history of science books, with some footnotes in the tales of humankind. The same with Sol. Earth was more of a known quantity, since every school child was required to take a couple of semesters of the history of the homeworld. But all of the measures still came from that system that no human of the Empire had ever seen.

  She switched the view to one of the ice moons of the gas giant. There were four of them, the smallest about a fourth of an Earth mass, the largest a half Terra. That thought made the woman smile, since her parents had given her that name for some obscure reason. Early construction was going on at two of those moons, where within a year of so new supermetal plants would be starting up.

  “The first mining ship will be docking in twelve minutes, Supervisor,” came a call over the com.

  And here we go, she thought. Soon they would have gas flowing through the system, and within a couple of hours the first batch of refined hydrogen would be ready for shipping.

  * * *

  The Moses Curry dropped out of hyperspace into normal space three light years out from the Bolthole system. They were beyond even the Ort cloud, about equidistant to the nearest star to Bolthole’s primary, Cthugha. It was a mere red dwarf, with a few iceball planets in orbit around it, nothing of interest. What was of interest was the space surrounding the Bolthole system, and the reason the destroyer was out here.