Exodus: Machine War: Book 2: Bolthole

by Doug Dandridge

  The base itself was a number of structures in orbit, including a twenty million ton station that had been built in place, the actual headquarters. It shared the space with thirty purpose built habitats, a trio spacedocks, and a dozen orbiting warehouses. Over four hundred and fifty thousand Klassekians were quartered on seven of the habitats which had room for double their population.

  And now that space may go to waste, thought Admiral Adanna Douhou, looking at the system holo as she sat at her desk. The striking ebony skinned woman was the highest ranking Command officer in this sector, only the Fleet Admiral in charge of Exploration Command had more status. She flipped off the holo and looked back on the screen that was scrolling the report from General Wittmore, the governor of the Klassek system.

  It was a good thing that those aliens, whatever they were called? She stopped for a moment to look up the information, and found that they hadn’t been given a name other than Ancient Aliens. That they saved that world was a good thing, but now some of the Klassakians we rescued want to go back to their world. I hope that General Wittmore can convince enough of them to volunteer for our crusade against the Cacas.

  She continued reading the report, going over the part about how the humans and Klassekians were both the kind of species that would eventually rise to the same status as the Ancients, both sets of them. She recalled reading the testing reports on the strange quantum entangled aliens, who scored on average higher on the intelligence scale than pre-improved humans.

  “The first group of Klassekians are ready to head to the Empire, ma’am,” announced the duty officer over the com.

  “Thank you,” said the Admiral, switching the holo to a view of the newly installed gateroom. It had just arrived three days prior, and they now had a direct link to the Sector I Fleet base, and, through them, the heart of the Empire. Some wormholes were also on their way to Bolthole, and should be arriving in a week or so. Now she wished she had assigned an escort to the battleships that carried it. But with what? was her next thought.

  The holo showed eight hundred Klassekians lined up in the gateroom and the long corridor outside. All were members of sibling groups that could communicate among themselves. All had tested for above average intelligence for their species. All were young and fit, and hopefully would prove a boon to the inertialess fighter program. And if they could convince enough of the Klassekians to sign up, they would be the first of tens of thousands of com wizards that would revolutionize the way the Fleet fought and communicated. Wormholes were great, but there were limitations to them, such as the inability of a wormhole equipped ship to go through another portal, and the expense of each hole. They couldn’t equip every ship with a hole, but there were billions of these aliens with their singular ability.

  * * *

  “I’m so nervous,” said one of Mzzarat’s sisters as they waited their turn to jump through the mirror. Newly arrived by shuttle from their habitat, all of the Klassekians had been gawking at everything aboard the main base station, the largest object any of them had ever seen in space. Really the largest object any of them could imagine.

  The Klassekian female gave the head motion of agreement used by her people. She really hadn’t needed her sister to say anything, as she could feel the anxiety through their entanglement link, just as she knew her seven sisters could feel hers. Maybe we shouldn’t have volunteered for this, she thought, holding that to herself and not allowing it to go out through the link. That mirrored surface looked too much like sorcery, something a technological people like hers were not supposed to believe in. But having grown up reading the fantasy of her people, it was difficult not to allow her imagination to get carried away.

  At first this had seemed like quite the adventure, going into space aboard ships that could go between the stars in no time. Something her people had dreamed of, but even the experts said was something that would take centuries to accomplish, if ever. And then the humans had come, in ships that could travel into higher dimensions, where they could move at the equivalent of tens of thousands of times the speed of light. Another wonder, mixed with the terror of their world on the brink of destruction.

  She had learned that her world had survived, due to some more high tech even more advanced than that of the humans. Some of the people had demanded to return to their home, but the majority still wanted this adventure among the stars, including Mzzarat and her sisters. They had been entranced by all of the wonders of technology that the humans took for granted. They spent their time watching documentaries of the human worlds, filled with not only humans, but many other strange looking aliens, all living together in a stellar society. Her favorite had been the entertainment vids, impossible characters in improbable situations that looked like reality. The siblings, like over a hundred other sets of entangled groups, had decided that they wanted to be part of that, so they had volunteered to become com techs with the human fleet.

  “Move along,” said the human who stood at the entrance to the portal, making sure that the queue made orderly progress through the gate. Another sibling group had hesitated, and the human continued to try and coax them through, but it must have been too much for them, as they walked out of line with their heads held low. The people behind them hooted and yelled insults at them, trying to bolster their own courage. Mzzarat and her sisters refused to join in the shaming, since they were next, but they also determined not to be seen as cowards before their peers.

  The human waved them forward, and Mzzarat’s elder sister by three minutes gathered herself, then walked into the portal and through. A moment later the thoughts came through the entangled link, from thousands of light years away. It’s OK, came the thought, and Mzzarat walked quickly through the mirrored surface, her sisters following.

  She stepped into a nightmare, where she seemed to be everywhere at once, time stretching over hours. She lost all contact with her sisters, and wondered in a panic if this had been a trap to get rid of them. Her elder sister might have been trapped in this place as well, and her transmission could have been a trick of this location of insanity. And then, without warning, she was stepping onto the floor of another chamber, this one with a different appearance than the one she had just left.

  Her sister waited for her, and a human in uniform motioned for her to move away from the portal. She moved in a daze, and another of her sisters came stepping out to take her place.

  “Keep moving,” shouted the human. “If you stand in place, the next one through is going to run into you, hard.”

  “Is this the center of your Empire?” Mzzarat asked the human was she moved further into the room, watching as a line of Klassekians moved down another hall.

  “You have one more gate to go through to reach the Donut,” said the human. “So move along.”

  The sisters got into the next line, again feeling the anxiety of the unknown as they communicated through their link, comparing notes over what happened. All had had the same experience, and there was disagreement over whether it had been real or illusion.

  Another jump, and they were in a large chamber that had many gates along the walls. People were coming and going from the long room, some through doors, others through wormholes. There were humans in battle armor standing guard in the room, and almost everyone was in one of several kinds of uniforms, most unfamiliar to the Klassekians.

  “Follow the people in front of you,” said a human in battle armor, lights blinking on his suit to attract attention. “There is a transport rail three hundred meters from here that will take you to the next gate room.”

  How many of these things are we supposed to go through? thought one of the sisters, echoing the thoughts of all of them. They had been told it would be a quick trip, covering a lot of distance in little time.

  The train was another wonder, not much different on the outside as many of the subway cars on her world. Once they were seated, the car took off, accelerating at an unbelievable rate that soon had them passing through stations in a blur, with no fe
eling of acceleration. At one point they passed through an enormous chamber that had to be tens of kilometers wide, if not hundreds, filled with row after row of machines that were beyond their comprehension.

  “What is this?” asked Mzzarat of the human guide who was in their car.

  “Magnetic field generators,” said the human, a female. “They’re used to turn the spinning black hole into a power generator so they can make wormholes.”

  “How big is this thing?” asked another of the Klassekians, a male.

  “Millions of kilometers in circumference,” answer the human. “You all have implants now, so go ahead and practice linking into the databanks to get your answers.”

  Mzzarat had forgotten about those links that had been placed into their brains by nanotech. She activated hers now, and found herself looking at a menu in her mind. She concentrated on one of the categories, and it expanded into others, which led to still others in an expanding tree. She found what she was looking for, a general article on the Donut, and the generation of wormholes through it. She didn’t even notice when moments later the train came to a halt and the doors opened.

  “One more jump and you’re to your destination,” said the human, standing up and moving to the door.

  “And then what?”

  “And then we turn you into Spacers, to help defend your people, and mine.”

  * * *

  KLASSEK SYSTEM, FEBRUARY 22ND, 1002.

  “We have graviton emissions coming from hyper, General,” said the young woman who was the duty officer aboard the Challenger, one of the two battle cruisers in the system defense force, and its flagship.

  “What are they?” asked Major General Travis Wittmore, the Imperial Army officer in charge of the system as military governor. While not Fleet himself, no one could obtain flag rank in the Imperial Army without a working knowledge of the senior service that was responsible for their transport, among other things. They had sent a courier back to Command Base six days before, and it would be there in another eight days. Then they would know about the Machines as well, and hopefully would cut loose some more ships to protect this world, the vital home of the only known species that could communicate across interstellar space instantaneously. Bolthole was also vital, and they were scheduled to get a wormhole gate within the week. Which meant they would also be screaming for reinforcements, days before his request arrived.

  “Resonances are unknown, so their size and speed is guesswork,” called back the duty officer, who the com was now identifying as Lt. Commander Noratov. “We are tracking twenty-six objects so far, estimated size between one and four million tons.”

  “Has the Commodore been informed?”

  “I’m here, Travis,” came the voice of Captain Gertrude Hasslehoff, breveted Commodore in order to command the system naval element. “I’m looking over the data, and it seems similar to what has been reported about the Machines.”

  A chill ran down the General’s spine as he heard those words. He had suspected as much, but hearing it from an experienced Fleet officer was something else. Those bastards could come in here and wipe out this whole system, every living thing, and there’s nothing we could do about it. He didn’t doubt that the Fleet would put up a fight, but they were outmassed three to one. He had some shore defense batteries on the planet, which could give an account of themselves if this enemy didn’t simply sit off and hit them with relativistic missiles.

  “Can you give me a tactical?” he asked, then waited a few moments before the holo appeared in the center of his office. That’s a relief, he thought, seeing that the intruders were coming in from the other side of the system. The star would be between them and the inhabited planet. If they had come in from another angle, or from above or below the ecliptic, they might have been doomed before they had a chance.

  “We’re sending out low boost grav waves to all ships in the system, ordering them to shut down and coast with nothing but stealth systems activated,” said Hasslehoff. “Fortunately, most of my force is in close to the planet, and anything else in hidden from that angle.”

  Wittmore nodded to the woman who now appeared on the holo, looking as if she had just been awakened. ”And we don’t have much out of the Klassekians yet,” said the General, running what he had on their industry through his implant.

  The Fleet had dropped off scores of nanofactories on the planet, and a dozen more in orbit, when it seemed that the planet was doomed and the only hope for a few percent of the people was to construct covered shelters. Those factories had been left behind, and had been busy building some weapons systems and commercial ships, as well as modernizing the industrial infrastructure of the planet. But they had not built enough space warfare weapons to be of any use. Most of what they had built had been ground combat vehicles and equipment to help Klassekian World President Rizzit Contena to consolidate his rule over the world. And we picked the right man for the job, thought the General. Rizzit has proven to be a wise leader, though part of that might have been because he knew how hard the Imperials would come down on him if he started acting like a despot.

  “I’ll get on the com to the President,” said Wittmore as he sent out the request through his implant. “If we can shut down the planet, we might just get out of this intact.”

  The holo of the Commodore vanished, replaced by that of the President, in his office, a worried expression on his face. Humans still had trouble distinguishing individual Klassekians, or reading their emotions. The General had been around Contena enough where he could do both as far as the President was concerned.

  “We have unknowns coming into the system,” said the General, looking over at a second holo that was showing the track of those ships. “Entry time approximately forty-nine minutes, unless they jump out further up the hyper dimensions.”

  “Do you know who they are?”

  “We’re suspecting the Machines we created,” said Wittmore, watching as the being’s eyes widened. “The good news is that their vector puts them on entry on the other side of your star, so they won’t get an immediate take on your radio transmissions. But you need to shut the planet down. No broadcasts, not external lighting. I’m suggesting that you want to make this planet look dark.”

  “Will that work?” asked the President in a choking voice. “Won’t they just go ahead and kill this world anyway?”

  “If they’re looking for us, they might not. And every hour we delay them is the chance that the cavalry might come riding in.”

  The Klassekian looked confused for a moment at the colloquialism, then nodded his head in a human mannerism. “Should I alert my military?”

  Wittmore thought about that for a moment. He doubted the Klassekians would really be able to do much of anything. But it wouldn’t hurt, and would help them feel like they were doing something. “Go ahead. Just make sure they are com silent.”

  The President nodded, and the holo went blank. Wittmore looked back at the tactical holo and zoomed in on the section that showed the intruders, all coming in straight at point three light, approaching the hyper V barrier, beyond which no object could remain in that dimension due to the gravity well of the star. He sat there watching closely, hoping that they might miscalculate and get thrown from hyper in a catastrophic translation. No such luck, and all of the ships translated smoothly into IV just seconds from the barrier.

  They went through the progression, down the levels just before each barrier, and jumped back into normal space. The General knew that there were visual systems looking at them now, not that those ships could transmit the information back, and it would be hours before they could actually observe that portion of space. That’s why we need some wormholes out here, he thought, thinking about all the tactical advantages that even one wormhole equipped ship would give them.

  The intruders coasted for about an hour, obviously looking and listening. Those they were hunting held their breaths, waiting for the intruders to make one of two decisions. Continue in and around the star t
o look at the world, or to turn around and head out. The intruders had to know there were a couple of planets out of sight. After all, they could observe the rest of the system and the star, and the perturbations of the those bodies would tell the tale of the worlds that were hidden.

  Wittmore studied the holo, which was tracking the intruders by their graviton emissions. They were in visual from a ship that was in the belt, hidden by a large asteroid that was the target of mining operations. It was not a warship, but a locally built ore hauler that had been upgraded with minimal grabber units that allowed it a couple of gravities acceleration. The only problem was, even though it had visual, it couldn’t send its results back to the ships in orbit without risking discovery.

  Two hours into the system the intruders started to decelerate at nine hundred gravities, shedding velocity. Two hours later they were on the way out, boosting at that same crushing gravity load. In four hours, a least time accel/decel profile, they were at the barrier and jumping back into hyper.

  “They’re gone, General,” reported Commodore Hasslehoff, her com coming down in a tight laser beam.

  “But we’re not safe yet?” he asked, sure of the answer.

  “No. There’s always the risk that they’ll drop out in normal space a couple of light months out and pick up all of the FM coming out of the system.”

  “This doesn’t make sense, Gertrude. Why didn’t they spend some more time in the system, or send some ships around to the other side of the system to get a look at us? At least they could have left a couple of ships behind while the rest moved on.”

  “I’m not really sure, Sir,” answered the Fleet officer. “Remember, they’re machines, AIs, without the organic gestalt that guides so much of our own thinking. It’s difficult for us to understand them, as I’m sure it’s almost as difficult for them to get us.”

  Wittmore could understand that. Humans, and really all organic sentients, had what was for all intents and purposes a quantum brain. Some had more connections to the spookiness of the quantum universe than others, while a few, such as the Klassekians, had other connections into that strange realm than others. Making a quantum computer had long been a goal of the human species, and many others, and while some had been created with great promise, they had all turned out to be failures in one respect or another. True, they could crunch numbers very fast, but they were always missing that vital gestalt, the ability to look past the numbers and raw data to come to conclusions that seemed miraculous.