Exodus: Machine War: Book 4: Retribution

by Doug Dandridge

  “Shit.” While that was ingenious of the trapped alien personnel, it was also something that the people in the sector might be able to figure out. And if they could infiltrate the computers of the rest of the base.

  “I want every system in the base cut off from external communication.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “You heard me. I want every computer that has an outside connection to be cut off, right now.” We can reconnect them one at a time and see which are safe, she thought. It was a drastic measure, and not one she was sure was necessary, but she wasn’t about to take that chance. It wasn’t worth the risk. She started talking to her system, sending it the codes to shut it down from outside contact.

  “Now, here are my further orders. I want every Phlistaran Marine in the complex in full heavy battle armor and deployed to the entrances to the lost sector. As soon as they are gathered, they are to attack into the sector. Any resistance is to be met with total destruction.”

  That was an order she hated to give, since those people were obviously not in control of themselves. Unfortunately they were now pawns of the Machines, and must be stopped at all costs. “And get me Thapa on the com, then start shutting down everything in that sector as well.”

  “Admiral,” said Birsha Thapa as soon as the holo came up. “Is the situation with the Machine brain under control?”

  “The Machine brain is no more, but I can’t say the situation is under control. I am ordering all systems shut down in your sector. And you are to evacuate immediately.”

  “But, we’re making progress. I’m sure we’re about to crack the last couple of layers of encryption.”

  “And that is why I want you to stop, right now,” said Chan, enunciating every word so she wouldn’t be misunderstood. “Bellefante thought he was making progress, until he released something he couldn’t control. I don’t want the same thing happening to you.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said the wide-eyed scientist as she reached off holo and pushed something. “All power to the memory core had been shut off. We are preparing to evacuate.”

  “Thank you, Doctor. And we’ll get you back in business as soon as possible.”

  That place of business might be on a different location, though. She was thinking about an isolated lab on another asteroid, no signal contact with the outside world, limited personnel. And a battleship watching it at all times, weapons ready.

  “The Emperor is wanting to speak with you, Admiral,” came the next voice over the com.

  Just what I need, thought the admiral, who couldn’t think of a thing the Emperor could tell her that would help the situation. But she couldn’t tell him no.

  “Your Majesty.”

  “Admiral. I hear your having a problem.”

  “I am, your Majesty. But I think I have it figured out.”

  “No doubt,” said Sean, looking into her eyes through the holo. “I have no doubt that you can handle it if anyone can. I just wanted to know if there was anything you needed to clean it up. I can make sure you don’t get caught up in red tape.”

  “That, would be nice, your Majesty. But I think I have the resources I need to take care of this mess. And I really don’t think it a good idea to be sending a signal through the wormhole at this time.”

  “Intelligence is monitoring everything at this end, Admiral,” said Sean, a slight smile on his face. “No subsets or packages of data are going to make it through. But I’ll let you be about it, Admiral. Don’t let arrogance get in the way of calling for help.”

  The holo blanked, and Chan thought with anger about what the Emperor’s last words had been. She didn’t think she was arrogant. Just because she thought she was smarter than anyone else she knew. That wasn’t arrogance. It was fact. She didn’t consider that the Emperor was an intellect in her class as well.

  * * *

  “We can’t break out, Dr. Bellefante,” reported the colonel, his faceplate raised, his sweat streaked face looking at the scientist. “They have too many heavy suits waiting outside, and we don’t have the firepower to break through them.”

  “And the holo projections aren’t working?”

  “No, sir. They have their faceplates down, and I suspect they are filtering the signal.”

  Bellefante thought about that for a moment. His normal self would have applauded the quick thinking of the admiral. His current reprogrammed self could only despise her for standing in the way of his imperative, and his service to the Machines. He thought about it for some moments, and then he had it.

  “How are the images fed into the suits, Colonel?”

  * * *

  “We have movement,” said the captain, following the motion detector trail that was indicating something moving toward them just before the exit from Gamma forty-one. “Be prepared.”

  They were prepared for people in suits to come issuing from the isolated sector, and not for what did. Scores of small drones, jury rigged from spare light armor suits, came flying out from the darkened entrance, flying straight at the soldiers. Many were taken out of the air by particle beams, exploding with a heavy vapor that floated through the air. Those that made it further exploded on their own, the particulate matter hitting the facing sides of the suits.

  “I’m blind,” called out one of the soldiers.

  “Me too,” yelled out another one as panic started to spread.

  The captain saw all of his visual and radar inputs go down at the same moment, and the last thing he had seen on radar had been upright suits heading out of the entrance to the sector, weapons in hand.

  “Raise your faceplates,” he ordered over the com, despite orders not sure what else to do. “Now.”

  Most of his soldiers obeyed, and were instantly caught in the mesmerizing sight of the colorful holographic image. They would have been trapped and reprogrammed, if not for the intervention of the half dozen Phlistaran soldiers and score or so Gryphon spacers, who were able to look at the hypnotizing display without any affect. The Phlistarans pulled the humans away by force of suit and muscle, while the Gryphons laid down fire with particle beam rifles, along with a couple of heavy laser beamers.

  The human troops would be of no use for some time, staring blankly out into space as their minds tried to throw off the effects of the holo. Two of the Phlistarans stayed with them, making sure they didn’t head back to where they could reengage with the holo, while the other four went back to add their fire to that of the Gryphons, who were in danger of being overrun by scores of people in light armor.

  It was a close thing, but the arrival of another forty odd heavy suited Phlistarans turned the tide. And as soon as the tide was turned they charged, their heavy suits moving like huge centaurs across the open plaza between the sectors, taking fire from weapons that had not been made to take on their armor. The heavy beams of the Phlistarans had no problem punching through the armor of the defenders, only having trouble with the few heavy suits that were arrayed against them. A few Phlistarans fell, holes burned through suits from sustained contact. One lay unmoving, a hole through his chest armor spouting the steam of vaporized biomatter. The other lay screaming, the hole through his hind quarters indicating a good portion of his exterior anatomy had been carbonized. That one might survive, while the other was most probably gone, its brain superheated along with its thorax.

  Particle beams in the hands of the huge aliens played over the defenders, burning through light armor in an instant, medium armor in a couple of seconds, glancing off of the heavy suits, whose wearers ducked away before they could finish cutting into them. Another Phlistaran fell, but the rest pressed on. They were a brave people, and their orders were to take back the sector. Some military historians likened them to the Scottish Highlanders in the British Empire, the most savage of soldiers, always going forward as long as there was a chance at victory. And they swept through the defenders who stood not a chance of stopping them.

  As they passed through the entrance they hit the only heavy weapons the brain
washed defenders had, heavy beams that could cut through a heavy suit in less than a second. These were barricaded in, protected from the heavy particle beams for some seconds, able to engage the Phlistarans long enough to leave a dozen of the great creatures dead or wounded on the floor. The particle beams wielded by the huge aliens finally got through, leaving melted weapons and partially vaporized bodies behind the charred metal boxes that had made up their cover. A score more Phlistarans came through at that moment, reinforcing the attack group, which moved in and started to sweep through the sector. Along the other three entrances poured more Phlistarans, along with groups of Gryphons and even some hastily armed Malticons.

  The sector was ten levels, not counting the deep core labs like the one that had housed the Machine brain. Each level had dozens of hallways and over a hundred chambers, with everything from large meeting rooms and recreation centers to small one room quarters. And all had to be cleared, people taken in hand or neutralized as the case might have been. Computers needed to be disconnected from any inputs and outputs, any holographic units still working had to be turned off.

  More and more troops went into the sector as the lead elements continued the sweep. They continued to have to kill armed humans, though those who were unarmed were knocked out with sonic stunners. Mistakes were made, people killed who didn’t need to be, but the orders from on high told them to not take any chances with their own lives. The admiral wanted all of the scientists taken alive, if possible, but if they had a weapon they were to be put down, hopefully stunned, but killed if not possible to capture.

  As soon as one level was cleared of all holo projectors human troops joined the sweep. It wasn’t long before the entire sector had been taken care of, all the people captured and taken to confinement in the medical facility. No one would trust them until they could be proven to be deprogrammed, and at the moment no one knew how to do that.

  * * *

  “We’ve cleared the sector, ma’am,” called in the security force commander, Brigadier Max Speed, his faceplate raised as he looked out of the holo. “We’re moving the technicians in to make sure there’s no Machine influence left.”

  Chan nodded. That last part could take a week or more, even with every technician she could spare working on it. And even then, how could she be sure it was clean?

  Dammit, this isn’t some ancient plague, she thought. We’re centuries more advanced than those bastards. A spray of nanites in every chamber and the problem is solved. So why didn’t she think of it as solved if they used robots to destroy robots? There was a lot of superstition surrounding the Machines, deserved or not.

  But was it undeserved? After all, they had done everything they could do to isolate the damned things they had brought here for study, and one of them had still found a way to get out. Missing any means of communicating with any other devices, with no mechanical means of manipulating the environment, locked under kilometers of nickel/iron, it had still found a way to work it purpose.

  “I want everyone taken out of that area isolated until we can get a complete brain scan on them,” she ordered, thinking that those people might still be agents of the Machines. Hell, it was almost a certainty that they still were, since nothing had been done to deprogram them yet. And that would be an entirely new line of research, one that might keep the neurologists and neuroscientists busy for years.

  They had dodged a particle beam this time. Now that they knew the Machines had an ability unguessed at, they would be ready in the future. It might be better just to make sure all of their AIs are slag as soon as we have them in our sights, thought the admiral, though part of her wanted to capture all they could for study. The next thought was what would have happened if she had been trapped by their programming. She had no illusions that her brain, under her own control or not, couldn’t do a better job at attempting a takeover than Bellefante’s. Fortunately, she hadn’t fallen under the spell, and now it was up to her to make sure no one else did, either.

  * * *

  Doctor Harold Bellefante looked out of the cell they had placed him in, a solid ten centimeters of glasssteel between himself and the rest of the base. The chamber was isolated, not allowing him implant contact with anything outside. Even the lights were behind shielded transparencies, only the plumbing actually reaching the outside world. And there was no way he was going to get signals through those.

  What the admiral and her people didn’t know was that he had programmed a mass of nanites while he still had his freedom in the sector. They were controlled by a brain module he had also programmed with many of his own memories. And that he had released them into the water conduits. With luck they would have made it into the central water processing plant, where they would go to work. The invasion of the base had been thwarted for now. But another one was in the works, and this time the infiltration would go much further before it was discovered. It might take several weeks to build up the resources to stage a complete take over, but they had the time.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Computers were never designed in the first place to become musical instruments. Within a computer, everything is sterile - there's no sound, there's no air. It's totally code. Like with computer-generated effects in movies, you can create wonders. But it's really hard to create emotion. Thomas Bangalter

  MACHINE SPACE: NOVEMBER 4TH, 1002.

  “We’ve found another one, ma’am,” said the officer on the holo.

  Mara didn’t have to ask the man what one he had found. The expression on the senior captain’s face told the story. It was an expression of sorrow and rage warring for dominance on his visage.

  “Were there any intelligences in that system?”

  “I can’t tell, ma’am. All I know is that the second planet has an oxygen nitrogen atmosphere, and there is no sign of photosynthesis on that world. It’s a desert, ma’am. My science officer suggests that due to the percentage of oxygen in the current atmosphere, the world was probably living less than five years ago.”

  Mara shook her head, closing her eyes for a moment, feeling like she was about to cry at the injustice of it all. If only we had gotten into this region sooner, she thought.

  If what they knew about the Galaxy in general this sector, about half the volume of one of the twelve outer sectors of the Empire, there would have originally been a couple of thousand habitable worlds. Maybe more, when other rarer life forms were factored in, methane or ammonium breathers and such. There should have been three or four intelligent species in that same space. Imperial ships had seen two species wiped out in the area just outside this space, and Mara doubted that anything within their space had survived. They would have killed more if they hadn’t have run into the Gorgansha. Much as she didn’t like the males of that species, they had fought hard to repulse the Machines and had helped all life in the region. Not that they had much of a choice, since they had a strong survival imperative, like most species. And Klassek would have joined the list of dead worlds if not for the Empire.

  And it’s all our fault, thought the scout force commander, now running one of the many wings of the battle fleet. By the Goddess, I wouldn’t be surprised if every single one of us has hell ahead of us in the afterlife.

  She knew that was unfair, since no one in the last few generation had anything to do with creating the murder devices. No one was around who had been alive at that time, not even the infants. And only a small percent had been complicit in the development and manufacture of the Machines. But if there was such a thing as racial guilt, humans were guilty as hell.

  “Make a quick sweep of the system, Captain. Let’s make sure that nothing of intelligent design survived.” She didn’t need to tell him what to do if he found something. If it was of alien origin it was to be studied, so that they might at least catalog another intelligent species, so they wouldn’t be completely forgotten. And if it was of the Machines, it was to be destroyed down to the molecular level. There was no mercy for things that possessed none themselves.

/>   Her force was now spread out over hundreds of thousands of cubic light years. Not something she had wanted to do, since many of those ships were beyond quick reinforcement if needed. If they ran into trouble they might be killed, especially the hyper VI ships. But she had a lot of space to cover, and had decided some risks must be taken. Admiral Bednarczyk had agreed. The captains of those ships didn’t like it, but they didn’t have to. The Fleet never demanded that its people like the orders they were given, only that they obey them. They had signed up for it, after all.

  “Ma’am. Sanford is picking up Machine ships moving in hyper VII, two light years from her position.”

  Sanford was a hyper VI destroyer out on single patrol. Her orders were to move ten or twelve light years, then drop into normal space for a couple of days and just observe. That way she wouldn’t be picked up, if she were lucky, and could act as a remote sensor platform. The Fleet had platforms to do that, but none had instantaneous com assets like a manned ship. If a probe transmitted by grav pulse, the enemy knew they were there, and could attack or avoid as they wanted.

  “Any indication that the Machines know where she is?” asked the anxious admiral. The destroyer was a hyper VI vessel, which meant she couldn’t get higher than the Machines. If they tracked on her and went into pursuit, with their greater starting velocity and acceleration, they would probably catch and kill her.

  “They don’t think so, ma’am,” reported the Klassekian, who only a couple of years ago had never imagined he would himself be in space, much less so far from his home star. “The enemy ships are on a reciprocal course and will pass near, but not very. They’re on a heading for this star.”

  The central holo tank changed views, showing the stars near the destroyer, a single bright point blinking.

  “Chief of staff. Do we have any idea what’s around that star?”

  “None, ma’am,” said Commander Jason Wooddruft, who was also her group tactical officer, reporting from CIC. “That’s one we haven’t visited, since there seemed to be nothing of interest there.”