The Vega responded in kind with its own smaller ship-to-ship torpedoes. Alothian navy torpedoes were modern and had some capacity to avoid anti-torpedo ordinance. The exchange of torpedoes between the two fleets was disastrous for the pirates. The three closest Red Maw corvettes collapsed into their own explosions, while the Galaxy remained unscathed.
The Jaguars flew towards the incoming fleet, flying in and around the torpedoes. Jorg shouted out the order to charge weapons. He heard the second wave leaders reporting in. He saw the numbers on the screen showing the distance between the two fleets closing and he could see from the data that all of the Jaguars were picking out targets and locking on. With the data linking, there was no confusion in target selection. Again, he looked down and saw that the hodgepodge collection of pirate ships was within range and his command console began showing the invisible tracking slugs being fired from the Jaguars. Within a few seconds they began hitting the closest pirate ships, and then a few split seconds after that, the wave behind that. In an instant, the darkness of space was filled with the flash of lightning.
“It’s an Alioth storm in space, you damned pirates!” Jorg heard someone yelling over the coms.
Jorg smiled. He was bringing the power of God to the heathens. He found his target, fired the first shot and then blinked when lightning struck.
***
It took only seventeen minutes for the pirate blockade of Aefricano to be completely decimated. Scanners had read nearly one-hundred seventeen ships in different orbital patterns around the planet blocking all transport on or off. The Galaxy and its fleet had jumped into just a small portion of that entire blockade and had engaged sixty-four pirate ships ranging in size, speed and armament. Despite the overwhelming odds, surprise, tactics and military drill were entirely on the side of the Galaxy. Of the sixty-four enemy ships, thirty-seven were utterly destroyed, seven were captured and the rest fled. The Galaxy had suffered zero losses and only one of the Jaguars had been hit, but it was still fully operational. Marcus had been glad when the reports came in. They were the results he expected, especially against a horribly inferior enemy.
Graham had initially complained that they had allowed too many to escape, but that had been their intent all along. The Vega had sat mostly action-less after it fired off its initial salvo of torpedoes. Instead, it had been deploying tracking drones onto all the pirate ships available. The hopes were the usually cowardly pirates would flee once things got out of hand. Captain Sawyer had nearly panicked when they started wiping the pirates out faster than she could tag them. She had to request the Jaguar waves to slow down a bit.
The pirates that fled, along with the rest of those in the blockade, had unsurprisingly slung off in apparently random directions. They had expected this as well. It was only a matter of time before the drones began sending back telemetry data to show the general path they were headed to. This system held a very large asteroid belt and many of the ships that had formed the blockade were not jump capable, so they would have to flee to somewhere in this system. Once the data came in, Marcus conferenced in his captains from his chair.
“We have the data back. Nearly all the tracked ships slung out to a rather large asteroid, here, in this sector of the belt,” Marcus tapped on his screen. On board the two other ships, the captains referenced their maps and saw where he was pointing at.
“Isn’t this an issue for local security?” Captain Sawyer asked.
“We dealt the Red Maw a good hit today, but I see no reason why we shouldn’t finish this off now,” the Admiral replied.
“That’s what I wanted to hear,” Graham said. “Besides, it would really be a show of good faith if we did this for the alliance.”
Sawyer could be seen nodding in agreement.
“But what’s to keep them from dispersing when they see us coming? I guarantee they have optics on us and will notice us slinging out to them,” she pointed out.
“They won’t see us,” the Admiral stated without any reservation.
“This a new trick of yours, Admiral?” Graham asked.
“Remember on Cranon 5, when we used the gravity bend of that huge tug to essentially blind the Dominion to where we were?” Marcus asked.
Both the captains nodded. It was just one of the Admiral’s great innovations in battle and further proof that he was the foremost mind in modern space warfare.
“The Galaxy now has the means and power to recreate that effect, for the entire fleet,” the Admiral said, a certain level of pride evident in his voice.
“So we can fly under stealth?” Jayne asked, impressed.
One of the biggest advantages of the Galaxy was its power supply. The reserves of power allowed the capital ship to use new tactics that simply were too restrictive in the past. With these new and modern power supplies, a tactic such as bending light with a gravity field for more than mere moments was now possible.
“That is the idea,” Marcus replied.
The Vega and the Indigo reattached themselves to the Galaxy and once the Jaguars were on board, the work of cleaning up the remains of the battle was left to local security forces. The Galaxy then turned towards their final destination, deep within the Aefricano asteroid belt. The capital ship’s new stealth mode was still very limited. It only functioned if the fleet was traveling in a straight line to its target, and then would only be hidden from that target. The system worked by creating a field of gravity strong enough in front of the ship to bend the light to the sides. In the blackness of space, this was the equivalent of disappearing. The fleet could easily be spotted from the sides and rear because of the heavy light distortion, but from the front, the ships would effectively disappear. It wouldn’t be until the fleet was much closer to its target that a perceptive viewer might notice the bending of the light.
The Galaxy and its two companions drew up the new stealth shield and the fleet made a sling maneuver out towards the system’s heavy asteroid field. They would have to come out of the sling well before the suspected pirate base in order to move around the rock field, but close enough to deploy the two corvettes and the Jaguars. And if the stealth shield worked, the pirates wouldn’t have a clue until it was too late.
The sling lasted eight hours, just an hour longer than it had taken the fleet to hook jump into the system. The Admiral had long wanted to develop the capability to hook jump within a system. The accuracy that was required for such a jump was currently unheard of, but they had within the Galaxy the first prototypes for such a system, and the perfect navigator to coordinate the jump. Its name was TOM.
Both Captain Crawford and Captain Sawyer were aware of the AI. By galactic rules and standards, this version of an AI was highly illegal and controversial. It was a fully conscious intelligence, aware of its need for survival and completely integrated into each of the ship’s systems. It only had two hard-coded rules: it could not take human life or rewrite its basic programming. Both of those rules though, could be overruled by the Admiral. After the Man vs Machine wars so many centuries in the past, the two biggest restrictions that were put into artificial intelligence were that of allowing rewriting at any level or permission and allowing such a system to be fully integrated into any kind of hardware. In this case, The Omniscient Machine, or TOM, had broken these rules.
The Alioth navy had taken a great risk in developing the AI. If they were discovered by any of the other militaries or governments, there would very likely be economic sanctions, if not all-out war. The last true fully-conscious AI had been destroyed nearly eight-hundred years in the past, after the last war against the machines, but the fear of a renewed war somehow managed to remain fresh in every human being’s mind.
It wasn’t as if AIs weren’t an integral part of human life. They could be found on all modern space-ships and stations, and were routinely used in industry, biology and even to clean houses. It was the free-thinking machines that had nearly caused a biological genocide that were completely banned from even experimental development.
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Marcus had never held that fear. He understood the full capacity of a battlefield software program. As quick as he could think and react, he knew it would be nothing compared to what an AI with full bio-silicone cores could do if it had the freedom to. What the Admiral had come up with, in order to curtail the fears of a new war was something never thought of before. He proposed raising the AI as children. Instead of developing fully operational AIs, create them as simple programs and allow instructors, teachers and mentors to develop, teach and train them, allowing them to grow only when it appeared they were ready. Marcus had overseen TOM’s entire development and had been its sole mentor for the last two years. If TOM was anything, he was Marcus’ child; a virtual part of himself.
And for that reason, Marcus was not afraid.
The sling dropped them right at the edge of the asteroid field. Most rock belts in nearly all the other systems were barely fields at all. The Kuiper Belt in Sol was so sparsely populated that it was virtually impossible to see one asteroid visually if you were landed on another. On Aefricano, it was different. Nearly three AU from the sun was a long, thick ring of rock that spun in orbit. It was the remnants of some super planet, along the scales of something never seen or recorded before. It was incredibly rich in minerals and yet another reason why the system was equally rich and at the same time a target for pirates.
As they dropped out of the jump and the stealth shield came down, full battle sensors came up. A clear power source was detected just twenty-five miles in on a hunk of rock nearly ten miles long. It had the power readings of a space station. It was the Red Maw’s hiding grounds. And they had come in unnoticed. Not a single ship was there waiting for them.
It didn’t take them long to notice, though.
Alarms went off on the bridge as the crew began counting off the torpedoes being shot off by the station itself. This would prove to be much more of a challenge.
“Graham, I need that wall up now. Jayne, counter-measures.”
He typed the command to allow the Jaguars to deploy. The Galaxy could withstand a lot, but even a few hits from a space-station-borne torpedo would disable them. Thankfully, such ship-buster missiles were slow, and without any other form of greeting party, the Jaguars were able to destroy them before they could reach the Galaxy.
Marcus watched from his multiple screens, many of them direct video links to the Jaguars themselves, as the sleek modern fighter ships easily dispatched the slow moving torpedoes with lightning. Already, the pirates were deploying their own ships. The Jaguars were entrusted to keep them busy, or alternatively, to destroy them all, as the Galaxy and its two corvettes moved in closer to the station.
Moving through the asteroid field was a simple task. The large capital ship simply used its own gravity field to brush off the large rocks as it moved into the range of the station.
“Sir, incoming message from the station. They are surrendering,” came one of the audio messages from one of his women down in the battle bridge below him.
The Captain typed his reply.
-Send no reply. This group has far too many crimes to pay for.-
The Vega and Indigo maintained a close position to their large ship. The Indigo had its shield out, but had very little reason to use it. The Jaguar waves were annihilating the limited resistance the pirates were putting up and some smaller ships were already fleeing.
“Sir, large shuttles leaving the base.”
Marcus relayed a command to the Vega. The corvette turned slightly and a large bank of torpedoes, seventeen in all, erupted from its side and sped towards the station. These torpedoes could navigate, with TOM’s assistance, through all the debris. As the shuttles exited and were making their way clear of the asteroid field, the torpedoes found their mark, piercing the hulls and erupting explosions within each ship. A collection of floating debris piled up in front of the ship's hangar, blocking more ships from leaving.
Marcus could see the incoming message blinking on his screen. The pirates were defeated. Even if they surrendered, most would be executed for their crimes. The Admiral had done his research. The Red Maws, in existence for nearly seventy years, had been responsible for nearly twenty-three thousand deaths, mostly due to ship attacks. And that was on top of the billions in monetary damage. The Admiral had already agreed with his captains that their punishment would be served here.
As the Galaxy closed in to the asteroid, they began to visually make out the actual station portion of the rock. It was a collection of domes and would naturally only be the cover to great underground tunnels.
“Indigo, clear a path.”
The Corvette swung its shield into position directly ahead of it and shot out in front of the Galaxy, towards the populated portion of the rock. The large shield grew in size. It was needed only to push all the remaining debris and rocks aside. A pair of Jaguars flew next to it in escort formation, but nearly all threats against them had been eliminated. The Indigo flew unimpeded towards the station, with only the rocks in its way. Once it reached the station, it turned around, positioned the shield behind it to protect it, and flew back towards the Galaxy. It reached the capital ship and ducked back behind it.
The order was given to the Jaguars to clear out at least ten miles away.
Marcus could see the waves start flying back towards the Galaxy. As soon as they passed the ten mile mark, he typed in the command.
-Destroy it.-
He saw the data reading for four station-killer drones. He saw them power up and then become armed. Two minutes later, they flew out of the Galaxy and sped off towards the station. The pirates must have recognized something was up because the station erupted in gunfire and anti-spacecraft missiles, aimed at the four drones. Each drone was shaped like a spiral, and was about twenty feet long and five feet across. The drones flew independently towards the station, but were guided by TOM, and deftly avoided direct hits from the stations cannons. The drones crashed into the rock next to the station and four legs appeared on each on, attaching themselves into the asteroid. The spirals began to spin and the drones began drilling themselves into the rock. As bits of brown and black dust flew off into space, the drones disappeared into the ground.
Marcus waited, glancing down occasionally at the data being fed back by the drones. It would only take thirty seconds. He counted it down in his head, and precisely on thirty, all data from the drones stopped. He glanced up and saw the image on the screen. Flashes of light eked out of a few towers and domes and then the whole section of the asteroid began to crumble inwards. Fire came pouring out of the holes the drones had drilled and the whole side of the asteroid exploded.
Each of the drones had been carrying a ten-megaton nuclear device. They had all four exploded at the same time, sending a shock through the station before the force of the explosions tore it apart. The Indigo had its shield raised in front of the Galaxy to protect it from the debris that sped off from the explosion, but most of it was pulverized.
Some of the pirates had clearly escaped, but if the Red Maws were ever to regroup, this would deal them a difficult blow. It would be long before they were ever seen again, if ever.
The Admiral began sending orders to regroup and prepare for post battle sensor readings and recordings when he heard a chirp in his ear. He reached out and tapped his screen. It was TOM.
“Go ahead?”
“Sir, I have something you might be interested in.”
Data began to display on the Admirals main screen. He sat down and tried to understand what he was being shown. He shook his head.
“What am I looking at, TOM?”
“About thirty miles behind us, at the edge of the field, I started picking up this transmission. It started about ten minutes ago, right as we began clearing our final path to the station.”
Marcus turned his map around to point towards where this signal was coming from.
“What is it? Pirates?”
“No.”
“Then what is it?”
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nbsp; “I am not positive. But whomever it is, they attempted to hack us.”
“What?” The Admiral was shocked.
“It is a very aggressive attack. It is attempting to take full control of the ship, sir,” TOM explained.
“Who is this?” Marcus said, tapping on the map. He dragged over commands for his Jaguar wing leader to investigate.
“It’s not human.”
The words hit Marcus like a splash of cold water.
“Say that again?”
“It is nothing like any human code I am aware of. And I know most of it. This attack is being run by an AI. Very complex, very intelligent, but very foreign.”
“You said attempted?”
“Sir, this attack came with its backdoor wide open. It was not expecting to find me, or anyone like me, here. I do believe it tried talking to me, but I eliminated it before it could do anything.”
“Eliminated?” the Admiral asked.
“I killed the AI.”
Marcus watched as the lead Jaguar approached the vessel on his screen. It was still just a speck on the screen.
“I have fully disabled the ship. It won’t be going anywhere.”
The small speck grew in size. As the Jaguar approached it, the image troubled the Admiral. It was a small black sphere. Pointed away from the Jaguar were four small wings, or legs. Across the top of the sphere was a clear line, and indentation in the sphere. It couldn’t be more than three feet in diameter. No human being could possibly fit in there.
The Lost Tribe (Sentinel Series Book 2) Page 10
