“And my strike force?”
“I want you to use those ships to do missile strikes on the Machines, from VII to VI. But don’t get too close to the planet killers.”
“I’ve seen the reports, Admiral,” said Montgomery, nodding. “I have no desire to see my ship fall out in catastrophic translations.”
“I don’t think you’ll be able to do much about those planet killers, but maybe if you whittle down the other ships of their force, it might make them pause to think. Or make that calculate.”
“Yes, ma’am. I’ll get right on it. I‘m planning a meeting of my subordinate flag officers as soon as everyone is through. We can do that on the way out to the hyper barrier.”
Bednarczyk looked over to a side holo, where flights of shuttles were leaving the Bolthole asteroid on their way out to the arriving ships, bringing the Klassekian com techs and some of the Exploration Command liaison officers she was sending to all of the flagships, so those commanders would have someone familiar with the local area.
It took almost an hour for the one hundred and thirty-eight ships of Montgomery’s command to transit. They were followed by a couple of repair ships, the vessels that would install her subspace coms, and some logistics ships. And then the first vessel of her battle fleet, a twenty million ton superbattleship. Once the most powerful class in the Fleet, having just given up that status to the twenty-seven million ton super heavy battleships, they were still formidable ships. Now she was looking at her new flagship, the Dictator Chang Lee, named after the first ruler of the humans in the Perseus Arm, the Captain of the Exodus III.
I’ll make you proud of your namesake, Chang, she thought as she closed her eyes for a quick prayer, then opened them to watch the next ships of her command transit the gate.
Next through was the King Louis II, the flagship of Admiral Joshua Vonstag, the commander of the battle force. Battle Force would be split into three combat command task groups, each with a vice admiral in charge, one of which, Rosemary Gonzalez, was already in system. There would, of course, be the usual complement of rear admirals to command task forces and commodores to head up major squadrons.
“Another com coming through for you, ma’am,” said the Com Officer. “Coming through the wormhole.” The officer’s eyes went wide as she looked back at her Admiral. “Ma’am. It’s the Emperor.”
Beata stared for a moment in shock, wishing that she had on a fresh dress uniform, instead of the shipboard overalls most crew wore on deployment. She thought for one second about connecting with a voice only com, but this was the Emperor. She nodded her head to the Com Officer and the holo came alive near her chair.
“Your Majesty. Thank you for expediting these reinforcements. And what can I do for you this fine day?”
“Admiral,” said Sean, sitting behind the desk in the fancy dress uniform with the eight stars on the shoulder boards that denoted his position as commander in chief of the Imperial military.
“Your Majesty,” she replied, her eyes narrowing for a moment. “Giving me last minute orders?”
She still wasn’t sure what she thought of this Emperor, who only a few years before had been a lieutenant in the Fleet. She had to admit that he had given her this post, over the objections of some above her. And he had come through on the reinforcements that were arriving at this moment. But still, he seemed much too young and inexperienced for the position he held during wartime.
“Really more last minute suggestions,” said the young man with a smile. “You already know the importance of your mission.”
“I am to defend Bolthole at all costs, and defeat these Machines before they depopulate this region of space.”
“Partially correct, Admiral. Bolthole is important, as are the technicians and workers we have stationed there. But ‘at all costs’ may be pushing it a little far. I want you to defend that system, but not at the cost of your fleet. It does us no good to have your force destroyed only to have the system destroyed moments later.”
Sean looked into her eyes for a moment, and she could feel the power of his personality through that gaze. He is the son of Emperors, she thought, nodding.
“There will be nobody looking over your shoulder, Admiral. I expect you to make the decisions pertaining to your fleet. This is in the best traditions of the Fleet. But I also expect you to operate within the strategic guidelines you are given. Our fleet must survive. You must fight a smart battle, and hurt the Machines as much as possible, so that you can interfere in their plans as much as possible.”
“Some of my people have advised that we evacuate this system, your Majesty,” said Bednarczyk.
“And I have heard the same, Admiral. Now that you have a wormhole gate, you can always evacuate if need be. If you find that necessary, do it, but only if necessary. I have more wormholes coming, in a convoy of hyper VII ships. But it will take at least two months for those ships to get to you, coming as they are from the Donut.”
And we can’t send wormholes through wormholes, so having one here doesn’t help us get those new ones, thought Bednarczyk. The one tech that gave them the most advantages over any opponent, and they were at the ass end of nowhere as far as the supply of them was concerned.
“Once you have them, you will have a significant force multiplier at your disposal, but only if you have the vessels to make use of them.”
“I understand, your Majesty.”
“I think you do, Admiral.”
“We still have one big problem, your Majesty,” said Bednarczyk, watching the Emperor raise an eyebrow. “I’ve read the report from Hasselhoff, but I don’t have any convenient black holes to drop the planet killers into.”
“Our people are looking into it, Admiral. One possibility is the graviton beam they’ve used against us, though I don’t hold out much hope for that development for another couple of centuries, if not longer. After all, we don’t have billions of tons to work with. From what we can gather, the planet killer that Hasselhoff fought had over a hundred distinct graviton projectors that could be sent out on a broad beam, or concentrated together for farther targets. But each projector was massive, a brute force approach.”
“I don’t have a couple of centuries, your Majesty.”
“I suggest you try the VII to VI attacks Hasselhoff used. Otherwise, we’ll keep working on something to get you some ideas on how to take them out.” Sean smiled again, a slight smile that showed his youth, even while blue eyes as hard as ice looked back at her. “I have faith in you, Admiral. I could have taken some of my other commanders out of their fleets and sent them out there, but I thought you were a good choice for command. So fight the damned Machines, and get rid of our old mistake. Sean out.”
The holo faded away, leaving Bednarczyk to her own thoughts. She looked at the main holo once again, to see the first battleship of a squadron come through the gate. I still think he’s a little young for his position, she thought, but it wasn’t as if he wanted the job at this age. She thought of his slight boyish smile and decided this was a man who would care about his people. She thought of the hard eyes and realized that Sean would not give an inch in this war, that he would go all out to win, and never give up. And she realized that she could follow him to the capital of the Ca’cadasan Empire.
But first she had a war to win on this frontier. She watched the rest of the battleships come through, followed by the battle cruisers. And then the first of the seven fleet carriers that had been assigned to her command came through. Two were hyper VII ships, not assigned to the scout command so that she could use them as part of her fast reserve. The most important thing about them was not the ships themselves, but the inertialess fighter wings they carried aboard. Wings that would need to be equipped with Klassekians, who would have to be trained for the positions. The same would be done for the five wings of standard fighter and attack craft, though, from what she had been told, it was not as vital for those to have instantaneous communication as the inertialess craft.
“I
will have a meeting with all flag officers in two hours,” she told her Com Officer. “Until then, I’ll be in my quarters.” There were some ideas she wanted to simulate before the meeting, so she could get the input of those officers.
* * *
KLASSEK SYSTEM, MAY 7TH, 1002
.
“The missile attack was partially successful, General,” reported the System Defense Commander.
Wittmore had watched that attack on the tactical plot, zoomed in to look at the Machine ships as they approached the asteroid belt. Partially successful meant that out of the eighteen ships that were closing on a cluster of rocks they could divert for bombardment, they had killed five of them, and damaged three more. Not enough damage to stop them, of course. Once the ships mated to rocks, those that would become the tractors, vessels without full thrust could still keep up as escorts.
“Do we have any other missiles?” he asked the naval officer, already knowing the answer and grasping at straws.
“Not a one, General. Our fabbers can make some more by the end of the week, about thirty of them. But we won’t have enough antimatter to make warheads.”
“You can make fusion warheads, right?”
“We can, General. It will take a little longer than it would have to make antimatter warheads.”
Wittmore thought about that for a moment. “We will know what their course will be once they have attached themselves to their rocks, yes?”
“Of course, sir. Once they start pushing the rocks toward the planet, there will only be one efficient path they can take.”
“And we can mine that approach, correct?”
“Of course,” said the Captain in an excited voice. “We can lay mines across their path, which we can calculate within a couple of thousand kilometers. But we don’t have the missiles to use as mines.”
“But we do have fighters and fast attack craft, right?”
“I hadn’t thought of them, General. We could set them on a ballistic course to intersect the Machines on their way here, in full stealth mode. They could come on when we are at closest approach and boost to a suicide attack.”
“And we would control them, how? I don’t like the idea of using our ships as automated weapons against automated weapons.”
“We could send one manned fighter along with them,” said the Captain. “They could trigger the response when the time comes. And I would recommend overloading the fusion reactors on all the attack ships, so we can get the biggest blast possible.”
“Get started on that plan, Captain. You’re the naval expert, so I’ll leave it up to you to figure out how to set it up so it surprises those damned robotic craft.”
“Yes, sir.” The holo blanked, leaving the General with his own thoughts for a moment as he continued to watch the Machine ships moving toward the cluster of rocks they had selected, decelerating into an orbit matching course. Some of those rocks were probably too large to use for bombardment, a hundred kilometers or more. A Machine ship could move one, but it would take weeks to get it into a position to strike the planet. There were a score or so of smaller planetoids, in the five to twenty kilometer range, which would make perfect projectiles, something they could get within range to strike the planet in three or four days with constant thrust.
The last of the Imperial exploration ships would band together in four hours and begin boosting for the Machines, chasing them back into the system. The Imperial ships would have the acceleration advantage, or so it seemed, but so much depended on how the Machines responded to their movements. The Machines most likely still had missiles, while the Imperial ships did not.
And Hasselhoff and her force will not be able to jump from the black hole gravity well for another thirty-one hours, thought the General, shaking his head. It was not Hasselhoff’s fault, and in fact, she had performed above and beyond the call of duty getting rid of the planet killer, a ship they would have had no defense against. But he could still wish the hyper barrier of a ten solar mass black hole wasn’t so far out, or that the system was so dense in gas that no ship could come up to the kind of velocity needed to get them out of that well quickly.
* * *
Marshuk was a moderately sized town on a heavily populated planet. Two hundred thousand Klassekians called the place home, though its proximity to the mountains and their wilderness areas attracted more hundreds of thousands of visitors each year. The town had a local militia of ten thousand, about half of them at ready condition with the alert going on. And a three thousand Klassekian police force that was better trained than the militia, though not as well armed. It was a quiet place that would really attract little attention from an invader, or anyone trying to bombard surface installations.
The robots came up through the underground of the city, the sewers and utility conduits. They were able to congregate while their micro drones scouted out the surface, while factory bots took the raw materials of the underground and built more of their kind. The first the Klassekians knew that something was wrong was when sections of the city went into brown out, then black out, and water stopped running in many areas. Utility workers went in, and were never heard of again. Police were sent in to look for them.
Moments after first contact of police with the robots calls of panic came screaming over the city com. Minutes after that the first of the battle bots came rushing out of the underground and into the streets and buildings of the city, killing everything in their path. Unarmored militia was mobilized and sent into the infected areas of the city. Their screams and cries echoed over the com until there was nothing on the airwaves. The robots consolidated their gains and swept over the city, killing every organic in their way. Within an hour there wasn’t a living creature in the city. Not a sentient, not a pest, not even vermin.
Klassekian military units moved in next. Unfortunately, the brigade commander on the ground decided it was a good idea to push his troops into the city. None that entered came back, and the Machines found themselves with more raw materials to make more of their kind. Every hour they were given they increased their numbers by fifty percent, a geometric progression that would build an army. The same tactic they had used on the worlds of the Empire they had taken over three centuries before, that had necessitated the sterilization of those planets.
Forty-five minutes after the destruction of the Klassekian Army brigade a similar unit of the Imperial Army was surrounding the city, digging in, setting up their lines of fire, quarantining the built up area. The Colonel in charge of that brigade was not about to send his tanks and heavy infantry into that built up area, a death trap of close in fighting for forces that were made to take on an enemy at range.
* * *
“What do you want us to do, sir?” asked Brigadier Kellings over the com. She was the direct commander of the two Imperial Marine and five Imperial Army brigades that were stationed on the planet, and had indirect command of all Klassekian military forces, but took her commands from Wittmore.
“You’re sure there are no survivors?”
“Absolutely, sir. All our probes have seen are robots and bodies. The same on the orbital view.”
“OK. Brigadier Kellings, these are your orders. Make sure that nothing gets out of that city. Electromag the air, I don’t even want one nanite escaping. Then we’re going to hit that city with kinetics until the bedrock is glowing.”
“I don’t think the natives are going to like that too much, sir.”
“They’ll like being overrun by mechanical death even less, Brigadier. I’ll get on the com to President Contena and let him know what we are doing, and why. Get on hitting that city. And make damned sure you get them all.”
The Brigadier saluted and the holo she was on faded away. With a thought Wittmore sent a contact request to President Rizzit Contena. The leader must have been in his own war room, not surprising since his planet was under siege, and he appeared seconds later on a holo.
“You have news, General? Have you contained the outbreak at Marshuk?
”
“We have the city surrounded, Mr. President,” said Wittmore, who had grown in his ability to read the alien faces since being assigned here. He could tell that the President was under great stress by the way his tentacles twitched and his outer motion detection eyes kept moving this way and that.
“Have you been able to save the people of the city?” asked the President in accented Terranglo.
“I am afraid there is no one left alive in the city, Mr. President. I have the city surrounded by my Marines, and we are about to hit it with kinetic strikes to take out the robots. Afterwards, we will move into what’s left and make sure none of the robots survived.”
“What if there is someone left alive in there? What about the property damage? Can’t you just send in your soldiers and destroy the robots without destroying the city?”
“Mr. President, my heavy infantry, both Army and Marines, are the only hard punch I have against these things. I know your own forces have improved, but they are still not at our level, yet. I cannot afford to waste them at this time.”
“But you can afford to destroy one of our cities?”
“Mr. President. I don’t want to destroy your cities any more than you do. But we must make sure this breakout is contained so we can move our Marines on to other crisis areas.”
“And how many more of these, crisis areas, are you expecting, General? And what about the enemy ships that are threatening us from space?” The two large fine vision eyes of the alien looked about to pop out of his head, while the tips of his tentacles were now waving in the air, the sign of near panic.
“We’re taking care of the threat from space,” said Wittmore in a calming voice. I hope. But if he didn’t take care of this threat on the ground, the planet was still lost. “As far as how many crisis areas we are expecting, I can’t say. There’s no telling how many of the Machines will come out of the ground.”
Exodus: Machine War: Book 2: Bolthole Page 32
