Exodus: Machine War: Book 4: Retribution

by Doug Dandridge

  Klassekians were born in groups of from eight to twelve, all genetically identical to their siblings. They only separated from their siblings about a month into the growth process, and their minds were connected up to that point at the quantum level, which gave them those abilities. They could see through the eyes of their siblings, hear through their ears, read their very thoughts. And with training they could project the images they saw through the implants Imperial science had provided to their people. The Empire tended to only recruit the larger sibling groups, though attrition could make them smaller, quickly. At least two of the siblings were housed in protected command and control facilities, so their contact with their brothers or sisters couldn’t be taken out. The fleet probably had, including those assigned to inertialess fighters, five thousand of the aliens in the net. It was a confusing hodgepodge, but it seemed to work, and work well.

  “How many?” asked Mara when she didn’t see that data on the plot.

  “At least thirty of them, ten of them capital vessels.” The Klassekian looked back with a shocked expression on his face. “They’re hyper VII vessels all, and coming in on a course to cut Commodore Grigsley off.”

  “By the Goddess, no.”

  Grigsley was supposed to be able to jump into hyper and get away if the Machines in the system got to close. If he had something coming in that could get higher in the dimensions than he could, escape might be impossible.

  “How far are they from the system? And when will Grigsley be able to detect them?” Which would have to be further out than they could detect the commodore if he jumped into hyper.

  “The commander of the Sanford is predicting they are fourteen hours from the system in hyper VII, ma’am,” stated the com tech, who had been a computer programmer on Klassek before the arrival of the Empire. “Probably a little more if they want to actually enter the system.”

  Mara nodded. If she had to bet, they were going to enter the system. If she was lucky they not only would enter, but would go deep into it, unable to escape when the rest of her force showed up at their doorstep. And what the hell is so interesting about that system? She thought. Grigsley had not reported any industrial infrastructure in that system, which didn’t mean there was none. But if it was extensive there would be no way to hide it.

  “Send these orders to Commodore Grigsley,” she said, looking over at the com officer, who would be using the wormhole network for this transmission. “And make sure he has all the data we have.”

  * * *

  “Dammit. Why in the hell did they have to come along now?”

  The commodore had the force in the system more or less trapped, even though they outnumbered and outmassed him. With his wormhole launcher he essentially had unlimited misiles. Not unlimited in the short haul, since the launchers would run out of ready weapons and have to accelerate more up to speed, which took time. But he could fire high relativistic missiles until the universe died heat death without having to go back to a base and resupply. Maybe not that long, thought the commodore with a quick smile. He doubted any of the species around now would still be around then. Having studied xenosociology at the academy, he didn’t think any intelligent species could last more than a million years, if that long. Most didn’t last more than a couple of thousand years as a technological species.

  “Send an all ships command. Prepare to fire all missiles at the enemy. And they are to follow us back into the outer reaches.”

  “We’ll be dry of long range assets, sir,” said his exec from CIC. “Is that a good idea?”

  “Good idea or not, that’s what Admiral Montgomery ordered. So that’s what we’ll do. Unless you have further objections, XO.”

  “No, sir.”

  “I thought you might say that. We’ll jump into hyper after we fire everything we have, then drop back down as soon as we get out of translation detection range for the system. We will reconfigure our wormhole to take on missiles from the Donut, and resupply while we await the admiral. Understood?”

  All of the ships started to fire, the cruisers, heavy and light, putting out hundreds of cruiser class missiles apiece, the destroyers each putting out just over a hundred destroyer class missiles. It wasn’t really all that much of a missile swarm, not compare to what fleets put out, but it would cause some damage and disruption to the Machines. And New London put out all the preaccelerated missiles she could, until those launchers back at the Donut had no more to send until they could accelerate more. By that time they were at the proper velocity for a jump, dumping some sensor buoys behind to monitor the system. The buoys could only communicate by grav pulse, and so could be found and destroyed. But only a couple of them would transmit at a time, which would tell a couple of others it was their turn next, and so on, until all fifty of the buoys they had left behind on diverging orbits had been destroyed. By that time the admiral’s force should be here.

  “Jumping, now,” called out the helm. The lights dimmed, not due to lack of power as much as the general disruption caused by transiting the dimensions. Nausea came and passed for all crew members, and then they were in hyper II, heading out. With luck they would be back out into normal space before the new enemy force got within detection range of them.

  * * *

  “Any idea what they’re up to, Mara?”

  “Not a clue, ma’am. But this system must mean something to them if they’re committing almost a hundred ships to it. It can’t be because they’re interested in killing the life zone world in it. That’s already long dead.”

  “Damned peculiar,” said Beata Bednarczyk. “I’d like to find out before we kill them all.”

  “I could order Grigsley to continue to observe from far outside the system, while we drop into normal out of detection range and wait. Of course, that’ll mean we won’t be able to do anything else for a few days.”

  “I don’t think we’re going to be through in this region any time soon, admiral. And if they’re up to something, I want to know.” Beata looked at the plot she had been studying over and over again for twelve hours each day, trying to find a pattern to the Machines that she might be able to use against them. So far, no luck, and it was still a war of attrition over millions of cubic light years. They were winning, taking out a hundred times the mass of Machines for what they lost. She still really didn’t care for this kind of war, since the enemy they were fighting had no thought for itself, no fear. All they could do to them was destroy them, and they would have to destroy every single one.

  “Just keep a watch on them, and monitor your other forces, the ones that aren’t with you. You might consider getting them to converge on your location as well, in case there’s something dangerous in that system we don’t know about.”

  * * *

  “So far, nothing, ma’am,” said Commodore Grigsley into the com. “The new force came in and started into the system, and as far as we can tell, they’re just congregating around the innermost gas giant. They haven’t even sent scouts out to look over the outer system, even though they must suspect we have something out here watching them.”

  “Okay. We’ll wait one more day, then I’m bringing in the rest of the battle group and we’ll finish them. I’ve got eighty percent of my command waiting out here, and I’m not willing to let them wait much longer. There’s too much work to do in this region.”

  “I agree, ma’am. I’m not really scout force or exploration command myself. Nothing against them, or you, but I prefer to be shooting something.”

  Mara laughed. That was the attitude of most of the fleet, those who were not members of scout force. Most of them didn’t realize that scout force commanders also had that attitude, but they would rather destroy lightly guarded convoys and command facilities than go toe to toe with heavy task groups. She just thought it was a smarter way to fight, and in the long run did as much to erode enemy capabilities as the other way.

  “Something is going on around the gas giant, sir,” called a voice in the background.

&nb
sp; “We’re picking up images of something happening in orbit around the gas giant, ma’am. Or at least something starting to happen over twelve hours ago.”

  “Can you tell what it is?”

  “Not really. But here’s our take.”

  Mara looked at the video as it appeared on a local flat screen. The view was really too far away to get a good three-dimensional image, so the holo really wasn’t needed, and the two dimensions gave better resolution. At first she wasn’t sure what she was looking at. Then it started to make sense.

  The moon close into the gas giant had already been undergoing construction for quite some time, but it hadn’t been powered up yet, and therefore hadn’t been detected by the commodore’s squadron. But the Machines were still building the infrastructure on the moon, while ships brought ores out from the asteroid belt and other vessels gathered hydrogen from the giant. None of the vessels were the specialty ships that humans used for industrial functions, similar to those that had been spotted in other Machine systems. But obviously their warships could be configured on the fly for numerous other uses.

  “That looks like a supermetal production facility going up, and it’s almost ready to go,” said Mara, pointing at the detailed image of the body.

  “I wonder why they aren’t using it yet?” asked Grigsley. “They should have started production on three quarters of the facility by now.”

  “They don’t want us to discover it until its ready to roll,” said the admiral, sure that she was correct. “And they built it in an otherwise unremarkable, unindustrialized system, where we weren’t likely to look.”

  “But, why, ma’am?”

  “Because they need supermetals to convert their entire fleet to hyper VII. And they know we’re hitting every one we can find in their industrialized systems. So they build them elsewhere.”

  The admiral looked at the plot, at all the millions of stars in this region. Maybe a couple thousand had habitable planets, but most of them had planets. And the great majority of those had asteroid belts and gas giants, and cold moons. Millions of possibilities, and now any of them could hide a Machine supermetal facility, just about to go into production. Or already in production.

  “Damn, I’ve got to tell the fleet admiral about this. And we will be there in fourteen hours. As soon as you detect us coming in I want you to jump and get to the barrier. Then you’re to send every wormhole missile you have at that thing.”

  The commodore acknowledged and the holo died, leaving Mara alone with her thoughts for a moment. Thinking about how this war might have gone from impossible to unwinable.

  “Get me the admiral on the horn,” she ordered. She didn’t have to tell the com people which admiral. When she used that tone, she meant the only one in command at this front.

  * * *

  “All ships have dropped into normal space,” called out the navigation officer.

  “Very good,” replied Commodore Grigsley, looking at the plot of the system. They were now too far out to pick up the graviton emissions of the ships operating in the system, which meant the Machines wouldn’t be able to pick up theirs out here, though they had to have picked up the movement in hyper and their jumps.

  “Any sign of the other Machine force?”

  “No, sir. Not yet.”

  Which was also good news, since that force, traveling in VII, would be detected about the same time as their translation down to normal space from V. Which meant the Machine force coming in wouldn’t have picked up his translation. The other Machines in the system, able to pick up that translation, might tell them when they came into normal space. But by that time they would have slowly cruised to another location, several light minutes from where they were now. And then they could lie silent in space, pumping all of their waste heat outward through microwaves.

  Eighteen minutes after they had dropped into normal space the resonances of vessels moving in hyper VII were picked up. The Machines hit the barrier, then started to stair step down through the dimensions, using their maximum decel and accel to move through as quickly as possible and finally fall out of hyper and into normal space.

  As soon as they entered normal space they started boosting for the inner system. Minutes later a dozen ships started to change vector, heading out to the general region where Griglsey’s force was located. It would still take them over an hour to kill their velocity into the system before they could start back out, and the commodore felt secure where he was. And if they did find him? He thought he had enough to destroy that force at range with his wormhole launched missiles, and if not, the admiral would get here by then.

  “Send to the admiral. Enemy force has arrived. Append all data we have to the transmission.”

  Now it was a matter of sitting and watching, and making sure the admiral had the benefit of their observations on the way in. Of course, the visual observations were over twelve hours old, though the graviton tracks were immediate.

  There was a lot of activity around the gas giant, and all they could do was speculate what was going on. Were they continuing construction, or had they decided to pack it up and pull out, knowing that the humans had to be on the way? He would only know when Montgomery’s force arrived and his group could again jump for the system.

  * * *

  “Commodore Grigsley reporting no change to the Machine stance, ma’am.” Reported the com officer.

  “That’s strange,” she murmured, looking at the plot. The Machines had to know she was out here, heading in, stair stepping through the dimensions. And they had to know this was a force that could destroy them and their supermetal production facility. What the hell are they up to?

  “Has Grigsley seen anything that might threaten us on emergence from hyper?”

  “He’s not reporting anything, ma’am.”

  “Damn.” Mara thought about what they might be able to do to her force. They had the entire perimeter of their system to cover, and they couldn’t have known what vector she was coming in on until just over an hour before. Not enough time to get anything to the perimeter. Or was it? The Machines weren’t as intelligent as humans, though they were cunning and able to process information at an incredible rate.

  “Order all ships to jump back into normal space at the hyper II barrier.”

  “Hyper II, ma’am,” said the com officer, a confused look on his face.

  “I’m suspicious, Lieutenant. And when I’m suspicious, I like to play it safe.”

  The timer ticked down, and the information coming in continued to show no change in the machine stance. They had to know she was coming in, they had to realize a battle was about to happen. So why weren’t they getting ready?

  “Jumping, now,” called out the navigator.

  The lights dimmed and the portals opened in space, letting the more than two hundred warships drop down into the black medium lit by the millions of tiny pinpoints of stars. The passive sensors picked up nothing, at first, and Mara thought that she might have been jumping at shadows. And then the drives of thousands of large Machine weapons lit up, right at the hyper I barrier.

  “How did you know, ma’am?” asked the tactical officer, turning and looking at her with a questioning expression.

  “I didn’t. But they have to have noticed our tendencies as well, and it was only a matter of time.”

  Mara looked at the plot, waiting to see what else might be out there, then deciding that what she was seeing had to be it.

  “Jump back into hyper. I want us to work up to a point five light minutes ahead of where they’ll be, and prepare to blow those missiles out of space.”

  It wasn’t a long trip in, and the vessels were sure what they were going to find when they jumped back in. The enemy weapons were on the way out, changing their vectors slightly to reacquire their targets. Unfortunately for them, the targets were still over fifteen minutes away. The Imperial ships opened fired with long range assets as soon as they were in normal space, letting off streams of wormhole launched missiles. Ov
er half were blown out of space before they got into counter missile range, where most of the rest were taken down. The few that made it past the counters fell to beam weapons, and the Machine ambush had met with total failure.

  “Now target everything in the system,” she ordered. “I don’t want there to be a circuit board left when we leave.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The passion for destruction is also a creative passion. Mikhail Bakunin

  MACHINE SPACE: NOVEMBER 6TH, 1002.

  Captain Hishry Tamamurta watched as the Exterminator moved into position a couple of light seconds outside the photosphere of the target star. It was a G class, one of the best stars to locate a habitable planet around, since it gave out plentiful energy, had a wide enough Goldilocks zone, and had a long enough life span for complicated life forms to evolve. K class also had a significant life span, much longer than a G, but with a much narrower life zone. F was also a candidate, but they were much shorter lived, the more energetic of them lasting little more than two and a half billion years. Not impossible for advanced life, but not as probable.

  He looked at the holo of what had been the inhabitable planet of this system, before the Machines got here. They had left it a lifeless world, still possessing an atmosphere, and oceans, but nothing to fly through the sky or swim those seas. The atmosphere had still been a mix of oxygen and nitrogen, though the oxygen would eventually be leached out of the air by geologic and mineralogical process, and with no plants it would not be replaced. That would have taken thousands of years, maybe longer, but it would have happened.

  Now it had been worked over by the Fleet in order to destroy the Machines. The seas had boiled away from exposure to magma rising from the missile strikes, clouding the atmosphere and obscuring the surface. Bright lights could be seen through the cloud cover, hot spots on continents and ocean beds where the missiles, coming in at high relativistic speeds, had punched through. There were still spouts of magma rising above the clouds, some of it going out of the atmosphere and into suborbital trajectories, to eventually fall back to the ground. The world was dead, thousands of degrees above its original temperature, and would remain that way for thousands of years. Possibly forever, if it went into a greenhouse meltdown. It was a shame, a once living world that could have someday been terraformed. A total waste, and all due to the Machines.