“I’m not sure how your succession works, or how your dictators are chosen, so I really can’t say. Emperor is a hereditary position, passed down through a family line. In peacetime he is more of a figurehead and head of state.”
“And in wartime?”
“Then he becomes a supreme ruler, though he still has to work with the members of Parliament.”
“Why does he have to work with them. Can’t he just tell them what to do, on pain of death?’
“It, doesn’t work that way with us,” said Matthews, fighting to keep a look of horror off her face. Though they probably wouldn’t recognize it as such without more contact time.
The Fleet Leader looked over at something off the holo, then the audio was muted for a moment while he communicated with someone else. Matthews waited for the Fleet Leader to finish his conversation, which seemed to go on and on. It must have been something important, or shocking to them, because the Fleet Leader kept looking back at her in the holo, then turning back to the crewman he was talking to. Finally, he turned back to the holo and the audio came back on.
“Is this true? You really have such a vast Empire?”
“It is true. The Empire is four thousand light years from end to end. And we have over one trillion beings in the Empire.”
“This is, unbelievable.” The Fleet Leader turned again as someone talked to him off holo. He turned back to the holo. “And your Empire is really so far from here? Why are you out here?”
“We thought it a good idea to have a place we could retreat to if we got overrun.”
“Why would you need to do that, as mighty as you are?”
“It was just a precaution. My people think ahead to all the eventualities. I mean, possibilities.”
“Are you willing to give us the secret of the higher dimensions, so that we can move faster than the artificial life forms.”
Matthews thought about the diplomatic answer. They knew the aliens only had the ability to get to VI. They had followed the alien mission on their sensors that was heading back to their homeworld as they jumped up into hyper. They had continued on in VI even after they had passed the VII barrier.
The experts back at Bolthole had predicted that the aliens were new even to VI. From what information they had on their tech, taken from Hillary’s sensors and com, they were actually at a slightly lower level than the Empire had been when they first discovered travel into VI. In hyperdrive tech they were a mere fifty years behind the Empire, in much of their other technology a century.
“That is up to our Emperor. They are in the process of discussing it. I also have to tell you that other ships are on the way here to bring a higher ranking officer so our talks to go to a deeper level.”
“How do you know this?” asked the Fleet Leader, his eyes turning in their turrets, what the humans thought was an indication of surprise. “Do you have faster than light communications?”
“Sort of. It’s more complicated than some tech. We have some crewmembers who can communicate mind to mind over interstellar distances.”
The Fleet Leader continued to stare at her. “Would you sell some of those people to us. They will be well treated.”
“We, er, don’t do that with sentient beings.”
“We would trade you some of those beings we have enslaved. You might find them useful in your mining operations.”
Matthews muted the com immediately and turned to look back at the bridge crew, noting the shocked expressions on their faces. It wasn’t like the Empire hadn’t run into other species that enslaved sentient beings. The Fenri were well known as a slaver Empire, as were the Ca’cadasans. But the Empire had never treated with those species as friends. She wondered how the people of the Empire would feel about it? It probably wouldn’t meet with their approval. Would it make any difference to what the Emperor decided? Probably not. In fact, with a front so far removed from the body of the Empire, it was unlikely they would hear anything about it in the short term. Only when military personnel rotated back to the Empire would it become known. Those Marines, spacers and soldiers would of course be under orders to not talk about it, but word was sure to get out.
“Are they serious?” asked the XO. “Fucking neobarbs.”
“I don’t like it either, XO. But we are under orders to work for close relations with these people, not to school them on our ethics.”
“The people of the Empire won’t like it,” said the XO, echoing her earlier thoughts.
Not my problem, she thought, ordering the audio back on. “We appreciate the offer, but I am sure that our own miners are better trained with the equipment we have. I must say again, our com specialists are volunteers in our military. They are not a commodity that we can trade.”
“That is too bad. They sounded like something that would help us to fight these artificial life forms which are enemies to us both.”
Slick, thought Matthews. But we’re not going there. “We will wait until our senior officer gets here to discuss this point.”
“But you can contact them at a distance. Why can they not acquiesce from your base?”
“Again, I have been ordered to wait until the senior officer arrives, and to let her negotiate this matter.”
“Strange that you would have a female in such a position,” said the Fleet Leader.
Matthews felt the blood rushing to her face. She had noticed that all the references to gender in the information they had sent to the humans had made no mention of females in their military or government. There was no reason to believe that the females of their species were not intelligent, such as those of the Ca’cadasans. So why were they excluded from responsible positions. The Fleet Leader’s question gave her an answer. They discriminated against their females, something else that seemed barbaric to the Imperials.
“I cannot just sit my force here and do nothing,” said the Fleet Leader. “We either need to attack the artificial life forms where they are, or go back and defend our home stars. And if the fleet goes, I go with them.”
“Can you leave a deputy here to act for you?”
“There is no one in the fleet authorized to treat with you. I am the ranking member of our fleet, and a cousin of the Dictator. So it must be me.”
Well shit. I guess we have to go with them. “Let me get in touch with command and see if they will authorize us to accompany you.”
“That would be good. We will be boosting in six hours. I expect to have your decision by then.”
The holo went off before Matthews could respond. She really didn’t want to go along with these people. She still didn’t trust them, and wasn’t sure that her people would ever be able to. Though they haven’t tried to pull anything yet, and they would still be able to vector the Commodore and her small squadron to them. Still, she had an uneasy feeling about it.
* * *
“They are weaklings,” said the Assistant Fleet Leader. “They are not worth an alliance. We should just take their ship and its hyper VII technology.”
“And have another enemy at our throats,” said the Tactics Master. “As mighty as they are.”
“All we have to tell us of their might is what they have told us,” replied the Assistant Fleet Leader. “And a story that their Empire is really a thousand light years from here, so that we won’t wonder why we have not met them before. I say it is all lies. Take their ship, Fleet Leader, and return to our homeworld with the technologies to make us a more powerful nation.”
“And they will blow their ship up in our faces, Fleet Leader,” said the Tactics Master. “It is in the histories they sent us, over and over again, how their vessels had self-destructed to avoid capture.”
“And I think they put that in there just to make us hesitate trying to take their ship away from them while we have them within range,” said the Assistant Fleet Leader.
“And when you are a fleet leader, you can decide what your ships are going to do,” said Goran, glaring at the image of his second in command over the hol
o. “Until then, we will do my will, and I will do the will of the Dictator. Understand?”
The second gave a head motion of acknowledgement, his eyes turrets quivering in near panic. As high a position as he had risen to, at a word Goran could still order him executed, just as the Dictator could do to the Fleet Leader.
“We will not again discuss taking their ship. I do not want these people as an enemy.” He felt in his soul that these humans and their alien subjects would be good friends, and terrible enemies. At least for the moment. Their ability to move to space at four times the best speed of his people’s ships would mean a lot in a war, just as having that advantage against the artificial life forms could spell the difference between victory and extinction.
* * *
“What in the hell are these things?” asked the Klassekian who sat beside Nazzrirat, looking at the holo of one of the fabbers he was monitoring. The fabber, using its mass of nanites under computer control, was capable of building just about anything on its own. The Imperials insisted that the process be monitored, and after seeing the Machines they had created in the past coming back to haunt them he understood.
“I think these are components for their normal space drives,” said Nazzrirat, looking at the holo connected to one of his fabbers, then switching to another. “They use some of the same superheavy elements that the particle beams used.” That had been what they had been producing before the last Machine attack, making weapons for Marines and militia. The armories were full, and that was no longer a priority. Instead, they needed drives for the small warships they were producing in large numbers.
One of the bank of fabbers opened, and a manipulator arm moved down to pick up the partial fin that was revealed. Out of curiosity he had looked over the schematics of the entire unit. He still wasn’t sure how it worked, but he did know how the parts fit together. This factory chamber was only producing this unit. His brothers were working in other chambers building other parts of the entire unit, and all were sending them to larger factory areas to be assembled into the complete grabber units for use in ships and missiles. Each fabber in this chamber, a total of one hundred, was producing a unit every fifteen minutes, twenty-four hours a day. Ninety six hundred a day.
There were over twenty thousand of these factory chambers in the asteroid, and about a thousand of the final assembly rooms, churning out the parts for the ships, stations and missiles that were being built to handle the next attack. Some other units were making more fabbers, while engineers were excavating new chambers. It employed many hundreds of thousands of people, and from what the Klassekian had heard, they were moving more workers from the Empire on a daily basis.
“When do you think they’re going to move you to their Empire?” asked the other worker.
Nazzrirat gave a very human head shake, something he had learned to imitate since coming to the asteroid. He was a senior NCO in the militia, which was considered an important component of the defense of the asteroid. As such he was considered essential personnel. Most of the Klassekians were scheduled for movement to the Empire, where they would continue to establish a population of their people and train as com techs for the Fleet.
“They’re telling me I’ll go right before Machines get here again,” said the other Klassekian in a smug tone, as if he were more important than Nazzrirat and his brothers.
And I will be proud to stay here and fight for this station, thought Nazzrirat, glaring over at the other male, then turning his attention back to his production queue, making sure that everything was running according to plan. He didn’t think that turning his attention away for a moment would allow a killer robot to arise, but he was going to take this job seriously. He was, of course, just a small cog in the machine, both in his factory job and in the militia. None of the decisions being made were his, and he preferred it that way.
He really wasn’t all that worried about Bolthole surviving the attack. They were under twenty kilometers of nickel/iron, and the shelters were even deeper, two hundred kilometers down. What he really worried about was his homeworld, which would also come under attack, and weeks sooner that Bolthole. From what he had learned, planets with people living on the surface were much more fragile than asteroids with the inhabitants living under layers of armor. And he had studied as much of Imperial history as he could, especially the military sort. So his greatest fear was that the next Machine attack would take out Klassek, where the last attack had failed. He really didn’t care if he was moved to safety, but if he had his wish, he would be back on his homeworld defending it.
* * *
Lt. General Travis Wittmore looked over the planetary defenses that would be under his control when the Machines came back to this system. He had hopes that the Fleet could stop them from reaching the system, though from the reports coming in from the scout force there would be five hundred Machine ships showing up outside the hyper barrier of the system in a little under two weeks. And from what the Fleet analysts were projecting, they would definitely try to take out the planet in this attack. They had almost succeeded in the last attack, with much fewer ships. This group could probably launch thousands of their missiles at the planet, and it would only take one of the eight thousand ton weapons to strike at relativistic speed to kill almost all of the life on the world.
The Fleet would be the first line of defense against that missile storm. They were to place themselves between the Machines and the planet and try to hit everything that came their way. Some of those weapons would be targeted on the ships, of course, and if the Machines were lucky they would kill most of the opposing vessels. Unlikely, but possible. It would then be up to the defenses on and around the planet to stop whatever made it through.
The planetary holo showed the weapons he had at his command on the world. Nine brigades of planetary batteries, four hundred and thirty-two particle beam cannon and about half that many dedicated interceptor missile platforms. There were three forts in orbit, and six hundred defense platforms controlled by those forts. At first glance it was a formidable defensive array. Considering that the forts and defense platforms would probably be overwhelmed by much less than a thousand missiles, and the shore batteries would have a lot trouble engaging missiles at high velocity at close approach, it wasn’t formidable enough.
The Emperor wants this planet protected, thought the General, wondering if he might be able to jump over the Fleet’s head and contact the Monarch directly. If he was a Fleet officer that would probably mean the end of his career. Fortunately, he was not a Fleet officer, and he had sent an encrypted message to Grand Marshal Mishori Yamakuri asking for his help.
“You have an incoming com, General,” said the Com Officer at his headquarters.
“Put it on,” he ordered, wondering who might be trying to contact him at this late hour, just before midnight in the capital time zone.
Wittmore sat up straighter in his chair as the face of a middle aged Japanese man appeared in the holo. “Grand Marshal. I take it that you got my message.”
“Yes, I did,” said Mishori with a smile. “And first let me congratulate you on destroying the Machine infestation on that planet. The Emperor is very pleased that you were able to take care of the problem with so few casualties.”
We only lost a hundred million of the indigenous population, thought Wittmore with a frown. To him, who had gotten to know the local people, those were not light casualties. He had to admit that there were still over five billion Klassekians living on the planet. And even though the Machines were gone, as far as they knew, there was still a revolt going on among the Honish. The fanatics were getting the worst of that revolt, and the newly trained and equipped Klassekian military was having their way with them. Still, he didn’t like the idea of people, which included innocents caught in the crossfire, dying on his watch.
“Now, what is this about not having as much planetary defense as you would like?”
“Grand Marshal,” said Wittmore after letting out a breath. “I be
lieve that the next Machine attack in going to concentrate on the planet. And it will only take one hit by one of those massive missiles to just about wipe out the planet. I think the Fleet is predisposed to think about attacks targeting military assets, since that is what we would do. I want, no, I need, more assets to knock out their missiles before they can strike.”
“And what do you have in mind. The Army is limited on what resources it can give you. All of the orbital forts and platforms belong to the Fleet. We can suggest they give you control of them, but they do not have to listen to us. The only assets we control are shore batteries, and you know how ineffective they are against anything not launched from orbit.”
“That’s the problem, sir. We might be able to acquire a relativistic missile coming in, but I can’t see a hope in hell in actually hitting it. And even a strike by a particle beam isn’t going to stop eight thousand tons of hyper-fast object from hitting the surface.”
“Will your command be able to weather that hit?”
“I believe so, though any unit close enough to the point of impact is gone. But the civilians don’t have heavy armor suits. And the survivors would need food brought in from outside, since any crops or herds they have would also be destroyed.”
“So, what you are asking is that I talk with the Emperor? That is unlikely to go over well with Sondra.”
“I know it’s a lot to ask,” said Wittmore, wondering if the commander of his service was going to back down from a political fight. “But I must ask, if I’m to be able to protect these people.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” said Mishori, nodding his head. “Again, I’m, not sure how Sondra will feel about my going over her head where her service is concerned.”
“And the Emperor?”
“The Emperor has a predilection for supporting the Fleet, since that was where he was trained. But I do have to say that he has made sure the Army wasn’t passed over for resources when asked. Will he give you what you want? I don’t know, but I’m willing to give it a try. Are you ready if the Machines try their old tactic?”
Exodus: Machine War: Book 3: Death From Above Page 28
