The Battle for the Solar System (Complete Trilogy)

by Sweeney, Stephen

  “That’s a nanite?” Enrique said. “I thought they’d have legs, or maybe just be round, spiky balls.”

  “Quite possibly that was the original design,” Tunstall said, “but from what I’ve learned through studying them, it appears that the engineers allowed the nanites to evolve their own ideal form, via various genetic algorithms.”

  “And the Enemy all have several billion of those things inside of them?” one of the security team asked.

  “Yes,” Tunstall replied.

  “And they all look like that?”

  “Mostly,” Tunstall said, his tone suggesting he was about to provide a more comprehensive answer. “Now, take a look at this one, from one of our two friends …” He tapped at the console and a new image appeared on the second screen.

  “Ugh!” Dodds said, along with many of the room’s other occupants. He wasn’t entirely sure why he reacted that way – it was only a machine. Yet there was something quite unnatural and wrong about its appearance. Compared to the image on the left screen, this nanobot was a mess of engineering. The limb units were misaligned, half of them sprouting from the wrong part of the body. Some also appeared shorter than others. One was even split halfway along, sprouting two additional limbs in place of the single root one. The body looked to be half-formed, the nodes that uniformly covered the working nanite were scattered and misshapen on this one. Dodds’ eyes studied the rest of it for as long as he could, before he felt as though he was gazing on a genetic experiment gone horribly wrong. It was almost disgusting to look at. In fact, he didn’t want to any more. He focused on Tunstall and Parks.

  “What’s happened to it?” Parks wanted to know.

  “It’s badly mutated,” Tunstall answered. “The evolution process has gone wrong.”

  “Is that what’s caused it to stop working?” Dodds said.

  “No. The nanites automatically stop functioning when they are no longer able to detect activity within the brain. However, it seems to me that they may have inadvertently been causing it themselves. From what I understand about the way the machines aid their host, the nanites would have spent all their time keeping the soldier in tip-top condition, making enhancements and fixing even the smallest of imperfections. This nanobot would have been attempting to do the same thing, or at least believed it was. It likely spent all its time inadvertently causing tremendous damage to the host, as well as other nanites around it. Eventually, the damage would have spread to vital organs and the brain, and caused the host to die.”

  “But surely with so many other working ones, that guy couldn’t cause that much damage by himself?” Enrique asked.

  “Oh no,” Tunstall almost chuckled, tapping away at the console some more, “there are lots of these little fellas.” More images of mutated and abnormal nanobots appeared on the screens, as the doctor presented his somewhat reluctant audience a slideshow of images. “It only took one to begin to malfunction and get away with it, to begin affecting all the others. It would’ve started fixing what it saw as damage to other bots around it, anything from minor to major tweaks. If that bot or any others were then used as templates for repair or replication themselves …”

  “… then it would’ve triggered the whole replication process to go wrong and the entire nanite family would start to misbehave,” Parks concluded.

  “Precisely.”

  “Knew it,” Parks said, in what was clearly a mixture of anger and relief. Even so, the news seemed to cause Parks to glow. He looked hopeful, almost happy. “Could that be the same for all the other soldiers?” he asked.

  “Hard to say,” Tunstall said. “If they all contained the same technology, with the same inherent flaws in each, then I would have to say so.”

  “Do you think it was intentional?” Dodds said, looking at the body of the woman that lay within the glass container. He could almost see her continuing to rot before his eyes.

  “I doubt it. I can’t see any reason why anyone would build in such a mechanism. It’s more likely that the design wasn’t that good to begin with. Nothing’s perfect,” Tunstall finished.

  “We need more evidence of this,” Parks said. “What can we do to prove whether or not this is a flaw in the entire population or just an isolated case, caused by some other unknown factors?”

  “Bring me more bodies,” the doctor said, with a slight shrug. “I’d like to examine a few more and see if the same holds true of them. I wouldn’t want to think that we lucked out with these two here,” he added, casting a hand over the two bodies on the table.

  Parks nodded. “I’ll locate a nano-specialist to come up here and give you a hand with your diagnosis, as well as give some of those things a more thorough going-over,” he said. He then turned to the rest of the room. “Right, let’s get back out there, people. I want six more bodies brought in, from six different ships at one hundred kilometre increments, to ensure a wide sweep. Koonan, Todd, Dodds, you’re to escort the boarding teams, but you are not to disembark or enter any vessels yourselves, understood?”

  Dodds saw Parks’ eyes on him as he spoke, but said nothing other than to acknowledge the admiral’s orders.

  “Let’s hurry, people,” Parks finished, “this might be the one thing we’ve been searching for all these years.”

  *

  It took only a couple more hours to find and retrieve the bodies that the doctor had requested, and a few more hours after that to get the results. They were consistent with the two already brought in. Each soldier had died as a result of cellular degeneration, brought about by rogue nanobots. Tunstall’s explanation was simple – the nanites may have been extraordinary in their design and goals, but nothing was perfect. And after ten years, the flaws in the original design had made themselves quite apparent.

  Parks found this explanation good enough to gather together a number of his senior staff and plot their next move. There was only one that he wanted to make and he ordered the fleet forward, towards Kethlan.

  V

  — Alpha Centauri —

  An excerpt from A GIFT FROM THE GODS by Kelly Taylor

  24th December 2624

  The revelation of the Pandorans’ fate was the first sign of hope that came to us in those final forty-eight hours of the war, although neither I nor Estelle became privy to such information until our retreat to Sol. I’m not sure how much of a difference it would’ve made, had we been told earlier. Though we might have known that the Pandoran army was dying, their numbers still exceeded twenty billion at their peak, and even mere human beings can display remarkable resistance to degenerative diseases.

  The condition affected all those who had been implanted with the Senate’s nanomachines. It has never been conclusively proven whether or not the errors in the replication were a result of an inbuilt fail-safe, or whether it was because of a flaw in the nanomachines themselves, but it is possible that the Senate assumed the war would only last five years at most, after which the nanites would’ve been told to shut themselves down.

  With errors present in the newly constructed or repaired nanomachines, the bots themselves would begin to damage the host’s very DNA, tamper with their cells, and even attack organs directly. Some Pandorans ended up blind or deaf as the nanites had disrupted or clogged up their optic nerves and caused their eardrums to burst. Under normal operation, the nanites themselves might have intercepted, translated and relayed the images and sound to the host’s brain. Not so with the flawed bots. Much like the Pandorans themselves, the bots now sought only to destroy. Ironic indeed.

  The tipping point of such internal attacks would come when the machines began to attack each other, the damaged machines dismantling or destroying the working ones, seeing them as foreign bodies that needed to be eradicated. This behaviour actually extended to the Pandorans themselves, with instances of infighting occurring.

  Sadly, however, this didn’t help the defence line at Alpha Centauri that the Pandoran army was rapidly approaching. Having sacked Temper, Gabriel, Rex, Ind
igo, and even the shipyards and fuel and mining facilities at Barnard’s Star, there remained only two systems in the Confederation that were deemed to be still worth protecting – Alpha Centauri and Sol.

  Estelle and I had been serving aboard Leviathan for the best part of three years by then, acting under the command of Aiden Meyers. He had finally been granted the long awaited promotion to commodore, like so many others, after the fallout of Black Widow.

  The defence of Alpha Centauri didn’t last long. Official records say that the Pandoran army concluded the battle in a little under five hours. I can tell you in all honesty that it felt a great deal faster than that.

  *

  “How many more are we waiting on?” Kelly asked, from her vantage point high above Sky. From this height, it was quite impossible to make out what was occurring on the ground, the only indication of what was happening being the steady – and seemingly unending – stream of shuttles and transport craft that continued to journey up from the surface. She imagined that there might still be many, many more down there, swashes of people waiting to get into the shuttles and other transport craft that were queued up in the airport, awaiting access to one of the three runways.

  “A lot,” Estelle came back, confirming her thoughts, “and there are still plenty of people waiting to actually get into the port itself.”

  Kelly acknowledged her and returned to watching the streams of cruisers and interplanetary shuttles making their way up from Sky. She would follow them soon enough, and begin escorting the next batch towards the jumpgate and jump points. Many she knew would be heading to Sol, but others were – against all advice – taking their chances in jumping to other parts of the galaxy, hoping that they could escape the approaching Pandoran fleet and find somewhere to settle in peace. Kelly didn’t hold out much hope for them.

  “Commander Taylor,” her comms then came alive. It was Julie Simpson, one of the evacuation coordinators.

  “Taylor here,” Kelly answered.

  “We need to get the current group moving,” Simpson said. “Please could you join the escort team and take them as far as the gate. It’s all gate-dependent craft in this batch, none are able to exit the system via their own means.”

  “Do we have a backlog?”

  “You could say that,” Simpson responded. “I’m still trying to convince the ground teams to permit us to shift the jump-capable craft out on their own, but they seem to think that that could cause frustration among all the waiting passengers. They reckon it might cause gate-dependent vessels to attempt to piggyback off those forming their own points and endanger both craft.”

  “Are there no ships left that can sustain more than themselves?”

  “No, they already left.”

  “Understood,” Kelly said. “Is there any towing work that needs doing?” she added, working her way through her ATAF’s systems, to locate the tethering device. It had been fitted more than a year ago in a somewhat haphazard fashion, various hardware and software hacks being put in to allow it to work with the fighter. They had come in useful for towing craft, the ATAF’s speeds making the work a lot quicker than with most other vessels.

  “No towing today,” Simpson said. “Just escort duty.”

  “Acknowledged. Did you get all that, Estelle?”

  “I did,” Estelle responded. “Go to it. I’ll herd the next batch into position and await your return.”

  “Okay,” Kelly said and turned to face the ships above her, an array of all shapes and sizes, rectangular and sphere-like craft being the most prominent. The last time she had looked there had only been a handful of spacecraft. There were quite a few vessels up there now, all holding position in low orbit, waiting to get going. She brought her ATAF’s engines up the full power and started towards the group.

  While Kelly had been working in open space, Estelle had been working planet-side, closer to the ground, often circling just above the airport itself, using the ATAF’s presence to instil some kind of control over the hoards of desperate people. It seemed to have done the trick, with no acts of aggression having occurred since the two Knights had been charged with overseeing the evacuation procedure. The escapees would be well aware of what the ATAFs were capable of and how any threats brought against them might end. Offering some sense of safety to the fleeing residents of Sky was also a part of that duty, as Kelly was doing now.

  It wasn’t long before she was within range of the clutter of starships, preparing to signal her readiness to the coordination team. The main escort team was made up of little more than a few starfighters, and light-class fighters at that, TAFs and Fireflies mostly. Nothing more could be spared, all other military craft had been allocated to the frontline defence, preparing for the inevitable arrival of the Pandoran army. She could see the bulk of that defence line some way off, grouped together near the expected arrival point of the enemy fleet. There were a lot of ships there, frigates, cruisers, dreadnoughts and carriers, as well as scores upon scores of starfighters. She would catch bursts of cyan from their engines as they shifted into new positions and made fine adjustments to their formation. Likewise, more capital ships could be seen moving up to join others.

  Yes, there were a lot – she couldn’t count them if she tried, not the warships and certainly not the starfighters which were far too numerous. Yet at the same time she felt that there weren’t all that many. What she saw here represented about two-thirds of what remained of the allied forces’ naval presence, sent here to hold the line. A handful had gone with Griffin to the remains of the Mitikas Empire and the rest were making ready to fortify Earth.

  Kelly moved into position behind the convoy, notifying the coordinator that she was ready to proceed. It wasn’t a long journey to make, but the time it would take them to travel to the gate was largely governed by the speed of the slowest vessel. Here, today, it would likely be that luxury liner that was swollen with passengers. She looked over it for a moment, seeing how graceful and stunning it looked. Then, as the sight began to evoke memories that she would rather forget, she turned away. With Kelly ready, the fleet started off, moving at a steady pace.

  She couldn’t believe it had come to this. Seven years ago the Pandoran army had spread out from Mitikas and commenced their attack on the rest of the galaxy, seeking to crush and stamp out everything that they saw as standing against the rule of the Senate and the Glory of the Empire.

  And nothing had stopped them.

  Words had failed. Fighting had failed. Surrender had failed. And now, running might well be about to fail. The allies’ backs were against a wall. They couldn’t go any further.

  She adjusted her flight path, accelerating and swooping around some of the vessels at the rear, both to check for anomalies and also to once more emphasis the presence of the ATAF there alongside them. She ignored the liner as she passed it, but still caught its name fleetingly. Empress of the Stars. Ah, a typical name for what was likely once a holiday vessel. She wondered how many unusually named starships she would see today. She wasn’t sure what had prompted it, whether it was something that some Independent nations did a lot or if it had been a fad of some kind, but she had found herself suddenly on the lookout for unique identifiers. The first she had ever noticed had been a mining vessel called I’ve Told You Once Already. Though amusing, she had thought nothing of it, until another occasion when she had sighted Would You Like Fries With That? The third instance had come just a day later, when she had been charged with escorting It Was Like That When I Got Here.

  So ridiculous was the name that it had made her laugh. And though most others had failed to share in her appreciation of these amusing designations, she had started to note them down. She had told her father about them too, and he had reciprocated with some of the more absurd names that Gloucester Enterprises had christened their vessels. Elpis’ Gift had been one of the last he had mentioned. That’s a special one, he had said, the CSN had assigned an important task to that ship. Keep an eye out for it. Kelly had done so,
noting its movements as precisely as she could, and had continued to post the various monikers she found over to Enrique, along with her messages, to brighten his day.

  She carried on up the line, moving to the craft at the front, noting their ancient forms. These were ships that should probably have been retired years ago, far past their prime and ready to be scrapped. Nightcap, The Viceroy, something totally illegible, Indispensable. She came to the front. Tell Me If I’m Doing This Wrong, the lead vessel was named. She grinned at that one. Enrique’s somewhat childish sense of humour was sure to appreciate it. She’d make a note to forward that one to him.

  She wondered how he was. Oh, how she missed him. The last night they had spent together had been only a few days after the fallout of Black Widow, when the allied forces had limped back from the Adetton system, in Imperial space, to lick their wounds and wonder just how they could ever contend with an enemy force of that size. She knew he was still alive, though. She had received a strange communication from him some hours ago. It had been a text message, rather than a video recording, and had been written in a hurry. It was a little hard to understand, almost cryptic. She had smiled at that, thinking of how her very own journals had once read that way, too. From what she had been able to figure out from the message, Enrique was telling her that all the Pandoran soldiers were dying, and their ships were lying abandoned in the Kethlan system. They had brought some bodies aboard Griffin to examine and discovered that they had died of some sort of cellular disease or degeneration. He believed that this was true of all the other soldiers in the area, which would explain why they hadn’t faced very much resistance, aside from at Krasst. Please keep this to yourself, he had asked, as they couldn’t be one hundred percent sure just yet. He had concluded by saying that they were preparing to head to Kethlan itself, and put down on the planet’s surface.