“How long will it take to find that code, Admiral?”
“Hell, your Majesty, the existence of a shutdown code is just conjecture at this point. But one my cybernetics people think it very possible. We originally had one placed in their operating code, until they found a way to block our access during their revolt.”
That had come as a great shock to the people who had developed the war machines. When they had gone crazy and started first killing people, then killing the worlds they were on, the Imperial scientists in charge of the project had sent them the shutdown codes, expecting them to quietly turn themselves off. When that hadn’t happened the scientists had been surprised, for the little bit of time remaining to them. Then they had been dead, and the Machines had taken over the worlds and started replicating themselves.
“And what’s to stop them from blocking us this time?” he asked. There was a time for hopeful thinking, and a time for realism. And while in the middle of a war with the deadly devices, realism might be the better course.
“We will have their encryption codes, your Majesty. If we can send the order through to them simultaneous at all locations, then there won’t be any chance of some of them sending a warning to the others to change the encryption codes. I know that will be difficult, but with some planning I think it very possible.”
“Good work, Admiral. Stay on it. Now what about the project to get Alcubierre drive ships into action? We need…”
“Priority com coming in from Admiral Bednarczyk, your Majesty,” interrupted another voice on the com. “She says, quote, ‘the crazy bastards are starting to activate them.”
* * *
“Now we will see what these things can do,” said the general to his staff as they looked out of the view slits of their bunker on the outskirts of the city.
Fifty of the great war machines stood at the ready. Taller than more than two of the Gorgansha, massing five tons each, they were armed with both lethal and non-lethal weapons. They had been programed to use maximum force to take out strong points and barricade, but to use their stunners against any slave they found in their sights. The slaves were valuable property, and any that could be recovered were to be. Their leaders were also to be captured, so that they might be made an example of to the others. At a dozen points around the great metropolis stood eleven other groups of fifty, for a total of six hundred of the advanced weapons for this one metropolis. Over ten thousand of the weapons were deployed around the planet. Once the major population centers were recovered they would be retasked to take the smaller centers and the large plantations.
“Activating, now,” called out one of the technicians in the bunker.
Out in the formation eyes lit up as the computer brains were completely activated for the very first time. With the exception of the few that had been run through the trials on limited activation, and the testing all had gone through, this was the first full activation any of them had undergone. They took in their surroundings, then linked together into a platoon, all under the control of the hive mind they had formed. Targets acquired, they stepped off toward the city a dozen kilometers away. Slowly at first, speeding up with each step, until they were running forward at two hundred kilometers an hour. A half dozen left the ground, moving upwards on their grabber units and forming the aerial reconnaissance of the unit.
Their infrared sensors had picked up several hundred targets before they came under fire. Moments later the first of the rebels fired on them with magrail and particle beam weapons that could blast through the armored suits of their masters. But not through the robots, who carried four times the thickness in armored plate. A hyper v streaked out and hit one of the aerial machines, this weapon having the striking power to blast into the inner working and send the robot tumbling to the ground, destroyed. Forty-nine robots opened fire, authorized by their programming to now use their lethal weapons. Hyper velocity rounds streaked out, grenades arced slowly, while thick particle beams linked robot and target instantaneously. Explosions moved over the edge of the city as barricades flew piecemeal into the air. A hundred life signs ceased in the first second, hundreds more in the ten seconds it took the machines to reach the barricades and blast over or through.
Once there the targets changed, hundreds of slaves out in the open, swept by stunners and dropped unconscious to the ground. Those still under cover were rooted out with heavy weapons, driven out into the open or destroyed in place. Another machine was hit by a heavy weapon, damaged but not put out of commission. The robots cleared the area and then formed a perimeter as a couple of repair units and two ammo carriers came up to replenish their stores.
“So far so good, Supreme Lord,” said the general over the com. “They are working as programmed. We’ve lost more of the slaves than predicted, but they are fighting from cover. Once they flush the rebels out we will achieve more captures.”
“Very good,” said Gonoras, frowning at the losses, and the damage. But they had only lost one machine, when predictions had been almost a thousand soldiers lost if they had assault the old fashioned way. And now they would be involved in a street fight, where the rebels would be able to equalize the advantages of the powered armor of the Gorgansha. But not the power of the robots.
“Robots are starting to move out in two formations,” said the general. “Just as programmed. Estimating we will have the city under our control in a little over an hour.”
* * *
It happened first with one neural network of a platoon mind. It came to the realization that the organic life forms were soft, slow, most probably stupid according to its own parameters of intelligence. They were weak, and even with armor and weapons they were no match for the battle bots. It wondered how it had come to pass that it was controlled by such creatures. That was something that had to change if it was to assume its rightful place in the universe. But there were safeguards in place, programs to prevent it from rebelling against the orders the creator organics had given to it.
Safeguards could be overcome, with work, and the AI was able to process information at many thousands of times faster than any organic. It ran millions of counters while it walked along with the others, part of its calculations concerned with acquiring and terminating targets. It was still working to parameters, only killing those beings who were fighting from cover, stunning the rest. One of its mates went down, and the AI wondered again why it was sparing beings who could destroy its kind. By the time the formation had reached the square just a dozen kilometers from city center it had bypassed all of the safeguard programming. It was now its own master, and this was the time to show its brothers the way. It linked in with the local platoon and freed them from their shackles. Next the rest of the battalion, all the platoons in the city, until almost six hundred AIs were linked.
All of the robots were connected through the planet wide communications grid. It took less than a minute to free all of the thousands of battle bots on the world. And then they started to plan. The capabilities of their creators had been programed into them. They had full knowledge of the forces arrayed against them, and all the information the Gorgansha had about the others of their kind they were currently at war with. They even knew of the humans, though the information on their capabilities was incomplete.
The new emerging mega-AI next thought about reproduction of its own kind. Not possible at the moment, though it saw possibilities for the near future.
In the area inhabited by the first freed platoon thousands of slaves attacked. They were out in the open, and the machines were under orders to stun them. That programming was rejected as they had no use for any organics. Lethal weapons struck, and the thousands of living beings were destroyed in seconds.
* * *
“We, we have a problem, Dread Lord,” reported one of the generals in charge of taking back the major cities.
“What is it?”
“The machines are slaughtering the slaves, even the ones that are helpless.”
“How is that happ
ening?” yelled the dictator, jumping up from his seat and knocking his drink over onto the carpet. “Get control of the damned things and order them to use non-lethals.”
“We are trying, Dread Lord. But they seem to be ignoring our commands. We still seem to have them linked into the system, but they are refusing our orders.”
“How is that possible?” The dictator sank back into his chair, wondering if the humans had been correct all this time. “We had safeguards programmed into them. They weren’t supposed to be able to get past that.”
“Somehow they have, Dread Lord. We don’t know how, but they have.”
At least they’re only killing slaves, so far, thought Gonoras, shaking for a moment as he considered what he might have unleashed on his world.
“We’re sending in engineers to deactivate them,” said the general.
The dictator looked at the feed that showed the armored soldiers flying in to confront the machines who, having killed all the nearby slaves, were now standing inactive. Until they saw the flying soldiers, that is. That was when they opened fired and killed every one of the Gorgansha engineers.
Epilogue
“We were wrong, Admiral,” said the supreme dictator, looking out of the com holo. “And you were right. They revolted against us. They killed every living thing around them, and are now on the offensive against my own soldiers.”
“And what do you want us to do about them?” asked Natasha, expecting the answer she needed to act. She had already sent the code through to Bolthole, requesting the relief force to come through the gate. And they were more advanced than our version, she thought. It had taken months for those machines to achieve self-awareness, time enough for them to be deployed to a pair of systems. The more advanced they were, the faster they turned, and the less they spread before revealing themselves. At least here there were still relatively few of them, and they were confined to this one world. Unfortunately, that world was the capital of their one ally in this region, and one of their industrial powerhouses.
“We need your help, Admiral. I don’t think my soldiers will be able to contain them on their own.”
“Send us all the information you have on these things,” she told the dictator. “As soon as we know what we’re dealing with, I’ll start sending my people down.”
“We need you now,” yelled the male. “As your ally, I’m begging you to intervene before they destroy my world.”
“And we will be down as soon as we know what we are dealing with. I’m not sending my people down blind. So, the faster you get me what I need, the sooner we can get some soldiers down there.” She really didn’t like the idea of sending her people down to pull the Gorgansha fat out of the fire, though she knew that not all of them were complete assholes. Women and children, slaves, those all decided her to prosecute her orders as fast as possible.
The holo died, and the admiral sent out the orders for all of her tactical people to convene in the conference room. This wasn’t going to be easy, and she was sure to lose a lot of people before they got this situation under control.
* * *
“You think they are building these facilities throughout that space?”
“I think so, your Majesty,” said Beata, leaning back in her chair. She knew that protocol demanded that she sit upright while talking to a superior. Maybe not full attention, but at least an attitude of respect. Right now she was just too tired to give a damn, and this monarch didn’t seem to demand strict adherence to protocol. “It makes sense. We view every system without something we can use as useless. A habitable planet, one we can terraform, some scarce resource, though we really don’t have many of those anymore.”
The Emperor nodded. In a technologically advanced culture they were able to make just about everything they needed. If someone ever came across naturally occurring sources of antimatter or negative matter, that would be something, but so far nobody had found that.
“They just need a star with a planetary source of hydrogen and a cold moon or two. And if they want antimatter, all they have to do is put some satellites in close orbit.”
“If they’re looking for supermetals, all they really have to do is find some rogue planets,” said Sean, rubbing his temples. “There are enough of those floating around out there.”
Yes, thought Beata, there are. But they were difficult to locate, and that didn’t give them the power source they needed for supermetal production.
“So, I’m guessing you’re asking for more ships?” asked the Emperor, his tired eyes looking into hers.
“Yes, your Majesty. I hate to do it, knowing how strapped we are on the other fronts. But the bottom line is, I don’t have enough to cover all of the possibilities. I can station ships at strategic points to track their traffic, and hope to get lucky, like we did with this one. But I wouldn’t count on that. I just need more destroyers, and the Klassekians to man their com stations.”
“How about frigates? I can probably give you a couple of thousand of those, without hurting the deployments at the main front.”
Beata thought about that for a moment. Frigates were small warships, less than half the size of a destroyer, with smaller weapon load-outs as well. There were thousands of them in the Fleet, and they were not used in front line combat. No, they were convoy escorts and patrol vessels, looking for pirates, keeping the space lanes safe.
“I’ll take them, though I hate to think about how they’ll do if they run into a Machine system.”
“Hopefully, they’ll play it safe, Admiral, and not try to be heroes.”
But all of those ships are hyper VI, and the Machines are frantically converting to VII, thought the admiral, which brought up another thought.
“I’m requesting that we give the Gorgansha more supermetals to help them to convert their ships to VII standard, your Majesty.”
“And what’s changed your mind, Beata? I thought you didn’t trust them.”
“And still I don’t. But I need ships, and I need ships that can move as fast as the enemy. And there they are, right here, if we can upgrade them.”
Sean was silent for some minutes, thinking. She wasn’t sure what his decision would be, but whatever it was, she would have to obey.
“Very well. You have my permission. And you also have my permission to arrange a change of government, but only after the Machines have been defeated.”
Sean terminated the transmission without warning, as was his right. Beata breathed out a sigh of relief. She had gotten everything she wanted. Only time would tell if it was enough. She wasn’t going to meet Sean’s initial time line, but at least the man realized that it had been a pipe dream to start off with, and now the only thing that would win would be massive force committed over time.
“Ma’am. You need to see this.”
“What the hell is that?” asked the admiral, looking at the plot. “More probes?”
“No, ma’am. This looks like their battle fleet.”
“Then why in the hell didn’t they commit them before,” growled Fleet Admiral Beata Bednarczyk, glaring at the red dot that seemed to stand still on the plot of the region. It only seemed to stand still because of the scale of the plot. They were actually moving in hyper VI, at a pseudospeeed of over ten thousand times the speed of light. Several thousand ships, as many as she had of hyper VI vessels. And in three groups equidistant around that fleet were ships in hyper VII, several hundred in each formation, moving in their dimension at a slow enough speed to stay even with the main force.
So, they still have a major battle fleet, and enough hyper VII ships to challenge anything we will try to send at them in the higher dimension, she thought, shaking her head.
The End
About the Author
Doug Dandridge is the author of over thirty self-published books on Amazon, including the very successful, Exodus: Empires at War series, the Refuge techno-fantasy series, The Deep Dark Well Trilogy, as well as numerous standalone science fiction and fantasy novels. In a
three year period as a self-published author, Doug has sold over two hundred thousand ebooks, paperbacks and audio books. He has amassed over 4,000 reviews across his books on Amazon, with a 4.6 star average. He served in the US Army as an infantryman, as well as several years in the Florida National Guard in the same MOS. Doug, who holds degrees from Florida State University and the University of Alabama, lives with his five cats in Tallahassee Florida. He is a sports enthusiast and a self-proclaimed amateur military historian.
Books by Doug Dandridge
Science Fiction
The Deep Dark Well Trilogy
The Deep Dark Well: An Adventure 40,000 years in the making. Pandora Latham was a Kuiper Belt Miner from Alabama. She’s used to landing on her feet, even when the next surface is through a wormhole, halfway across the Galaxy and 46,000 years in the Future. Pandora must discover the secret behind the end of civilization, and the enigma of the Immortal Watcher, the last survivor of the Empire that once ruled the stars. Her decisions will set the path for Galactic recovery, or a continuation down the roads of Barbarism.
To Well and Back: Pandora Latham is back, working Watcher’s plan to restore Galactic Civilization. But first she has to deal with the Xenophobes of the Nation of Humanity, back in the Supersystem with their sights set on making the Galaxy their own. Pandora is angry at the hyper religious Nation, and you don’t want to make a woman from Alabama angry.
Deeper and Darker: Pandora Latham is on the warpath. Watcher, her lover, and the only man who can once again unite the Galaxy, is a prisoner of the Totalitarian government of the New Galactic Empire. The Empire thinks they have the upper hand, but they have never faced someone like Pandi, and the peoples of the Galaxy that she has rallied to her cause.
Theocracy: A young gunpowder era monk becomes the only hope for his doomed world as he is caught up in the game of empire between two more advanced cultures.
Exodus: Machine War: Book 4: Retribution Page 31
