Exodus: Machine War: Book 1: Supernova.

by Doug Dandridge

  More suicide bombs had been detonated in both Tsarzor and Honish. For every bomber who had hit a high priority target, twenty had been stopped, normally with fatal results for the terrorist. They were stopped well before they got within range of Imperial personnel, which, with their combat armor, meant closer than twenty meters for even a powerful explosive device, and that would only do minimal damage to suit and user, easily repairable. Unfortunately, that was still hard on any civilians who happened to be with seventy meters or so of the blast.

  And, unfortunately, those terrorists who hit low priority targets, shopping centers, schools, buses, apartment buildings, were much harder to stop. They really didn’t harm the efforts to save as many people as possible from the supernova. There were a thousand times more people than they could save, anyway. But it still burned up the Imperials that an enemy was killing so many innocents.

  * * *

  As soon as the ships entered orbit the troop transports started disgorging their shuttles, transferring their infantry down to the planet. Major General Wittmore transferred his command team to HIMS Boudeuse, where ground control had previously set up shop. Vice Admiral Rosemary Gonzales came over on the next shuttle, and Rear Admiral Nguyen van Hung prepared himself for being relieved of his command.

  “Admiral on deck,” called up the boat bay Officer of the Deck, as the doors to the shuttle opened and the smallish red-haired woman walked onto the floor of the hangar. All sprang to attention and rendered salutes, which the woman returned immediately.

  “At ease,” she said in a soft voice that, surprisingly, penetrated the entire length and breadth of the hangar. Admiral Nguyen,” she said on noticing the lower ranking flag officer. “I’ve read your reports on the way in. And I must say that this situation has really gone to shit, quickly.”

  Nguyen cringed internally at her words, wondering if his actions were going to be written up in a condemning manner.

  “I doubt if anyone could have done any better, Admiral,” said Gonzales, walking with Nguyen to the hatch leading to the lifts.

  “And what are your orders, ma’am?” he asked as they got on the lift, the two admirals and their Chiefs of Staff.

  “I’m not here to give orders, Admiral Nguyen,” said the woman with a smile. “I’m just passing through on my way to Bolthole, where I’m set to take charge of the defense of the system.”

  “So I will remain in charge?”

  “I really doubt if anyone else could have done better, dealing with these damned neobarbarian fanatics. And Fleet Command wants this thing to remain an Exploration Command mission, and not turned over to one of us breakers and killers in Battle Fleet.”

  Nguyen digested her words as they walked to the conference room, then moved to the head of the table when the Vice Admiral waved him to it. Lee sat to his right, while Gonzales and her Chief of Staff sat across from each other about midway down the table.

  “We came directly from the Empire,” said Gonzales, leaning her elbows on the table. “I was already preparing to head out to Bolthole with two freighters and a trio of liners full of contract workers, when the orders came down from sector HQ. The orders originated from the Emperor himself, and directed us to give you all aid possible. I gathered what ships were available in the Trevor system, where we’re staging convoys to Bolthole, and headed out a little ahead of schedule.”

  “What ships are you leaving behind, ma’am?” asked Lee.

  “Well, you can’t have my flagship. Old as she is, she’s still the most powerful unit I’m going to have, out there in the middle of nowhere. At least until they cut loose some more units for me to defend this most important system, out in the middle of nowhere.”

  The Admiral looked at the flat comp she had laid on the desk for a moment, thinking. “You can have one of the battle cruisers, which will bring you up to four here, I believe. At least until Challenger comes back from wherever she went. The assault carrier is yours also, since you have a greater need of the aircraft and shuttles it carries. I’ll leave one of the heavy cruisers as well, one light cruiser, and three destroyers, which leaves me with my flagship, two battle cruisers, a heavy, two light cruisers and three cans, which will give me a decent core force for Bolthole, along with what’s already there.”

  Nguyen almost asked her what was there, but he didn’t have the need to know about the defenses of the top secret system. “And the other ships?”

  “Three of the large freighters and the three large liners are already loaded with people and equipment for Bolthole. The rest of the freighters have equipment command thought you might need, and you need to go ahead and load the liners with Klassekians, as many as they can fit in cryo. We’ll take them with us to Bolthole. The same with the troop transports. We’ll convoy them back here as soon as they’re unloaded in the system, so you can use them again.”

  Captain Lee looked at her own flat comp, working on some figures. “So, we can send over forty thousand on this trip,” she said after a moment of calculating. “Maybe five thousand more if we load up the warships.”

  “So, forty-five thousand it is,” said Gonzales with a smile.

  “Any idea how many more ships are coming our way, Admiral?” asked Nguyen. Forty-five thousand sounds like a lot, until we consider that there are billions on this world.

  “I really couldn’t tell you, Admiral. The Emperor ordered all available resources committed this effort. But what that means, all available?” The woman shook her head. “With the war going on with the Cacas, and, frankly, a war we are not winning, I can’t say what that means.”

  “Of course the Emperor and command realize how important these people can be to our war effort? The possibilities for instantaneous communications are endless. They are a resource we can’t afford to lose.”

  “And we are not going to lose them, Admiral,” said Gonzales. “We are saving the species. Maybe not as many as we would like. But remember, if we are defeated by the Cacas, we are most likely exterminated, and then every other species in the Perseus Arm is enslaved.”

  Nguyen stared at the woman for a moment, knowing she was right, in a manner of speaking. Normally the human species was one of the more benevolent ones around, but now they were being pushed to the limit, and only had so much aid to give.

  “How many of the Klassekians are ready for transport, Admiral?” asked Gonzales, clearly ready to change the subject.

  “Fifty thousand are currently in cryo,” said Lee, answering for her Admiral. “And we can process and cryo freeze eight thousand a day.”

  “So we can move the ones we can take up to orbit in how long?”

  “With the shuttles you’ve brought, Admiral Gonzales, a little under three days,” said Lee, looking up from her comp. “That’s, of course, considering all the other tasks we have detailed for them, and pulling any off of tasks that aren’t priority.”

  “Any chance of getting a wormhole?” asked Nguyen, thinking of many ways such a thing could solve their problems. Like running ships from the orbit of Klassek to the orbit of either Bolthole or main base, without all the inconvenient travel through hundreds of light years of space.

  “I’m afraid they’re in short supply, Hung,” replied Gonzales, frowning. “Those are a little dear at this time. I’m supposed to be getting one for Bolthole, but I can’t tell you how long it will take to even get one there.”

  “All we can do is all we can do, sir,” said Lee, putting her hand on his forearm.

  “Do we need to cover anything else?” asked Gonzales, looking at the faces around the table. “No.” She folded her flat comp and returned it to the belt pouch it rode in.

  “Then let’s start loading,” said Gonzales. “I want the convoy boosted out of orbit in eighty hours.”

  * * *

  Melissa Sung had her last duty with the Fleet scheduled for that very moment aboard the ship she had been assigned to while alive, the HMIS William Clark. By Imperial Fleet regulations, if possible, an autopsy was to be perfo
rmed on any personnel who died in the line of duty. Even though the cause of her death was obvious, since very few people survive a large caliber bullet to the forehead, regulations were regulations, and one of the ship’s surgeons, supported by two medical aides/corpsmen, stood over the naked body of the woman, multiple sensors pointed at her from all angles. Two more crew stood within the room, an intelligence specialist curious to find out how much physical pain she had gone through, and another pilot, one who had been among Sung’s best friends.

  The surgeon moved his hands through the air, activating the radar, deep radar, x-rays and magnetic resonance sensors than scanned her body to the cellular level, feeding their pentabytes of information into the medical system computers. What should have happened then was the formation of a three dimensional virtual image of the body that the surgeon could probe with his thoughts and the motions of his hands. Unfortunately, the binary explosive in her veins and arteries was made to react to several of the energy types probing her, including radar and x-rays.

  The two kilograms of fluid inside her body was equivalent to one metric ton of TNT. The entire mass blew within a nanosecond, completely annihilating the body that contained it and blasting out in all directions from the table. If anyone in the room had been wearing the medium battle armor of the Fleet they still would have died, from the concussive effects if nothing else. In heavy armor they just might have survived. All were in soft uniforms, and were disintegrated by the blast, reduced to micro droplets of fluids and small chips of bone. The walls of the room, within medical, which was in the middle central capsule of the cruiser, were over thirty centimeters thick and made of hard alloys infused with carbon nanofiber support. They held up to the explosion, channeling it through the one open doorway into the room. A jet of flame rushed out of that chamber, into the office area where two more medical staff worked. Both were incinerated, and the blast channeled through the next door, into a small ward containing a medic and two patients.

  The only thing that could be said for the last trio was that their bodies survived, though they didn’t. The ship shook from the explosion, from a tremor that knocked nearby crew from their feet, to a minor vibration further out that was still alarming in that such should not have been possible of a light cruiser in orbit that hadn’t been hit by enemy fire. Klaxons sounded, and within seconds damage control robots were rolling into the damaged section, while fire suppression systems came online and human search and rescue personnel suited up. By that time everyone who was going to die was dead, and there was really no one to rescue.

  * * *

  “So, as far as we can determine, Chief Warrant Sung had a powerful fluid explosive within her body, one that was sealed away so our chemical sensors could not detect it. And, while she was being probed by our standard scans, x-rays, magnetic resonance and various forms of radar, the explosive detonated.”

  Susan Lee stopped talking for a moment while everyone looked at the scene of devastation

  “Sneaky bastards,” growled Vice Admiral Gonzales, eyes narrowing. “So they guessed that we would scan the body, and end up detonating a bomb in our midst.”

  “That’s about it, Admiral,” said Lee, nodding. “The biggest problem now is scanning all of those bodies in cryo before we load them on ships.”

  “Why not just not scan them?” asked Captain Joshua Zhukov, Gonzales’ chief of staff. “Unless you think they may have another way of triggering them.”

  “We do,” agreed Lee, pulling up a three dimensional representation of the explosive molecule. “This one was tailor made to detonate when energy was put into the system. We’re not sure that what kind of energy triggered it, though our labs are working on duplicating the molecule and testing it. But right now it could have been any particular energy, or any type, such as heat. And we will be warming all of these Klassekians up when reviving them, while the nanites go in and repair the cellular damage.”

  She rotated the molecule, and several small regions blinked and changed configuration. “Our chemists believe that the molecules can also be triggered by other explosions, much as most of our common engineering charges will. Or that the molecule can be modified to be that trigger. And after a certain amount of time, the molecule will unwind, like the protein it is, and cause the detonation. Which would not only kill the native carrying the explosive, but dozens, possibly scores of those around him.”

  “But not enough to really damage a ship?” asked Gonzales.

  “We think not. Not even if several of them detonate sympathetically. The Klassekians are kept in chambers that are not housing any vital equipment, and the bulkheads of the ships are too strong for even this explosive to penetrate, as seen in this explosion. In fact, if the hatch had been closed, the blast would have been restricted to the surgery.”

  “And in a liner? Or if there are a bunch of these bodies stacked up in one place, next to the outer hull, let’s say?”

  “Hard to say,” said Lee, shaking her head, then pulling up the schematic of one of the smaller liners in orbit around the planet. “It’s still hull metal, and tough. But not armored. Not even as strong as the bulkheads of a light cruiser like Clark’s. I guess it would depend on too many factors for us to really know.”

  “The best thing we can do is make sure none of these seeded bodies get on-board,” said Gonzales, looking at her own Chief of Staff. “How long would it take to scan every Klassekian in cryo with nanites before we take them aboard the ships?”

  That was probably something we should have done before this, thought Nguyen. But we really didn’t expect to be loading time bombs.

  “It will add four days to our schedule,” said Zhukov, a deep frown on a face that was made for such. “All because of the lack of forethought.” He said the last while glaring at Susan Lee.

  “No recriminations,” said the Vice Admiral. “I’m not sure anyone could have seen this coming.”

  But I should have, thought Nguyen, nodding in agreement with the higher ranking flag officer anyway. We were dealing with fanatics, and they have been acting true to form. Nguyen thought that over for a moment while the conversation went on around him. The Empire was not used to such, or were they? There were the Lasharans, with their what humans considered a death cult. Their behavior was much like the Honish. But we’re here to save them. Which didn’t matter at all when they thought the wishes of their God were being opposed.

  “I hope they didn’t get any aboard Lusitania,” said Lee, her face tight with the tension of worry. “Or any of the escorts.”

  “Something we also can’t worry about right now,” said Gonzales, picking up the cup of coffee that had sat untouched in front of her for the entire meeting. “Let’s concentrate on what we have control of, which is quite enough for right now.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Expect the unexpected is a great slogan. But there are times when the permutations of the unexpected reach the total number of atoms in the Universe. What then?

  Imperial Fleet Tactical Manual.

  Captain Trevor Whitlow of the Lusitania sat in the comfortable chair of his day cabin, thinking about what it would mean to arrive at Bolthole, only five days from their current position. Lusitania was at point nine-two c in hyper VII, the maximum velocity her electromagnetic screens could handle, giving her a pseudovelocity of almost thirty-seven thousand times the speed of light. The three warships in her escort, the light cruiser Chan Chun and the destroyers Harold Tillman and Auguste Piccard, could pull point nine-five c with their military class electromag fields. But they can only go as fast as the slowest ship in the convoy, thought the liner captain, an employee of the Connover Lines and not in the Fleet, though he could be recalled under his reserve commission at any time. Us.

  He looked up from the reader he was using to peruse one of his favorite tomes, to look at the holo display that showed their progress through this section of the Arm. It was literally unknown space. Maybe a dozen ships had been through this section, which was not on the u
sual path out to the region Bolthole was in, since they had doglegged out to Klassek, and then more or less headed back toward the Empire at an angle. One day soon this space would also be crawling with Exploration Command ships, seeking out more living planets, more civilizations, increasing the knowledge of the Empire. But not now.

  “Message from Captain Durrance,” interrupted the Com Officer.

  “Put it through,” he told that officer, and waiting for the holo to change to the face of Beatrice Durrance, the commanding officer of HIMS Chan Chun. They were within a light second of the cruiser, well within range of a com laser.

  “Captain Whitlow,” said the naval officer, the bustle of her bridge on the holo behind her.

  “Captain Durrance,” he replied, sitting up straight and putting the reader on the end table as he noted the look on her face. “What’s going on?”

  “Tillman picked up hyper resonances to Galactic west,” said the Captain. “Right on the edge of her sensors.”

  “In which dimension?” Of course, his ship wouldn’t pick up anything on the edge of a destroyer’s sensor envelop.

  “Hyper VI, as far as she can tell. And, from what her Sensor Chief is saying, the object is traveling much too fast to translate to another dimension, if they even can come up to ours, which is unknown.”

  “So we discovered another space faring civilization,” said Whitlow with a smile, wondering why that was bothering the convoy commander to such an extent. “So your people can come out here and make contact when this mission is over.”

  The cruiser captain’s eyes narrowed as she stared out of the holo. “The Chief thinks its changing its vector at twelve hundred gravities.”

  “But, that’s amazing,” blurted Whitlow. Or impossible, for any organic life. Unless they’re much more advanced than we are.