Rawold fumed, gripping the sides of his chair hard enough to leave finger marks in the complex metal-polymer construction, which was strong enough to resist most explosive blasts.
The Shredran were bred once as warrior drones, dumb, dense, and designed to die en masse. The master race which had bioengineered them had achieved what they needed, mining of the galaxy of the one metal alloy they considered of value, and moved on. The Shredran had since elevated themselves, the way many galactic civilizations had, by availing themselves of uplift technology. They found artifacts of long dead civilizations that could be activated, and then repaired, and in some cases reverse-engineered with the help of the AIs.
Manaca was one such AI, and the Roack battlecruiser one such ship. Manaca used her Shredran crew as her extension to the physical world. She had the same attitude toward them that their makers had: contempt—by and large.
She was using them as muscle to make more ships under the overwatch of AIs like her. All those other ships and AIs were slaved to her.
That was because for all the Shredran’s uplifting, they retained the bodies once bioengineered to serve both as miners and soldier drones. The ones deemed secondary soldiers weren’t long for the mining pits. That was part of the reason why Rawold had flinched so as Manaca said she would take over the control of the ship, impugning his ability as a soldier.
The Shredran had exchanged one master for another.
They weren’t exactly pleased about it, but Manaca gave them access to other galactic federations, and that meant a chance to evolve—even if such tech would likely have to be slipped by her.
The fact that she knew about Peacekeepers might mean she and the Roack existed in their time, or perhaps even predated them. There was hope in that.
But Rawold was still wary. The Shredran might suffer the loss of one of Manaca’s minion AI and ship clones slaved to her, but not her. The other AIs’ capacities were less than hers, if not by much. And they did not come equipped with the capacity or the knowledge to reproduce themselves. Those secrets Manaca kept close.
“Assessment?” Rawold asked, speaking directly to Manaca.
“There’s no coming up against a Peacekeeper. I’m releasing all of our fighters now and have issued orders to the entire fleet to do the same. There should be a sign of space in our vicinity being disturbed a split second before the Peacekeeper’s appearance. All pilots will be ordered to fire the instant I detect the disturbance. Their fighter craft will have to be handed over to the AIs as well. We can only hope to get lucky that a billion billion shots into the darkness will hit their mark.”
“Odds of success?”
“Incalculable.”
“We will deploy the Roack Battle Cruiser’s crew to the vacuum of space,” Rawold said, “add our laser-rifle fire to the mix. Slave us to your supersentience so we can fire on your mark and in the direction you tell us.”
“The lasers will never have time reach their mark, even if they could make a dent in that limited timeframe, which they cannot. But on the off chance a Peacekeeper lands on top of you, your Shredran bodies, when properly applied, are strong enough to possibly damage a piece of the hull. You can only hope you will hit a vital organ of the ship.”
“So be it.” Rawold was already out of his command chair as was his command crew.
“You will likely die out there. She’ll be targeting the cruisers. The resulting blasts will take out the fighter jets and your soldiers.”
Rawold sighed. “There are always more where we came from, as you’re so fond of reminding us.”
“Good luck,” Manaca said, not a drop of emotion in her voice.
The callous bitch had approved the decision based on her mental calculus. You could bet not one factor of that equation leaned on the sustained wellbeing of the Shredran.
Manaca wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to take out a Peacekeeper, even against long odds. But she herself would assuredly flee to safety once her net had been cast.
***
THE COMMAND DECK OF THE CENTURION GALACTIC CRUISER
MEMBER OF THE ROMA-NOV GALAXY FLEET
One blast.
Per ship.
That’s all it took.
The Roma-Nov Galactic fleet had just been wiped out.
Time elapsed: one-one-hundredth of a picosecond.
No one had time to see the attack ship.
Whatever had hit them was already gone.
The few survivors were fleeing the nests of the galactic cruisers in their fighter jets like Vermi that had escaped the gardener’s pest eradication spray.
Commander Volatov, his command deck in flames, held his XO in his arms, mortally wounded. Most of the others were already dead. Explosions kept interrupting his attempts to solicit information from his second in command. “Veraken, can you tell me anything?”
“Not stealth technology,” Veraken gasped out. “We can scan for that.”
Another deafening noise of another explosion kept Veraken from spouting more, as did the blood oozing from his mouth. “Unknown weapons meant our shields were useless.”
Another explosion. This time one of the control panels housing the Centurion Galactic Cruiser’s scanners—a lot of good they had done in any case. Good riddance. His XO gasped, coughing up more blood, and tried not to look at his severed legs—the nanites rushing to cauterize them and stem the hemorrhaging of blood. The nanites would succeed, but it wouldn’t matter. Veraken would long be dead. That much was already clear.
After another bout of coughing up blood and screaming in agony from the triage work his nanites were undertaking, Veraken continued where he’d left off. “Only heard rumors.” Veraken fought to prioritize the rest of the analysis for his captain’s ears he’d have time to get out before dying. “Peacekeeper technology. Order a retreat.”
“As for our Cruisers, there’s nothing and no one left to fall back,” Volatov informed him. “The fighters will run out of fuel before they get too far.”
“No, I mean, the entire Gypsy Galaxy invasion by the intergalactic fleet. Get them the hell out of here while there’s still time.”
This time Volatov gasped as if he’d been hit by the next explosion.
Volatov gave Veraken a hard look. Maybe the man had lost too much blood to be spewing anything but nonsense. One ship? That was the sole response from the Gypsy Galaxy so far. And he was already calling for a retreat?
Veraken expired in his arms.
His dying words had sent chills up Volatov’s back. Their species, the Naysa, were considered Roma-Nov’s galaxy’s unsurpassed intellectuals. Veraken, specifically, had been trained in war gaming. They were believed to surpass even AIs when it came to split-second decisions, relying often instead on shortcuts in reasoning that supersentients didn’t have to avail themselves of. Usually they had too much mind power to bother. It was a case of the slower moving animal outpacing the faster one by refusing to run himself as hard.
Still, Volatov couldn’t bring himself to call a retreat of all galactic civilizations.
Veraken couldn’t be right.
It just wasn’t possible.
Veraken’s one wrong move would be stricken from the record. Volatov would see to it before he expired. Veraken deserved to be remembered for the genius he was.
How did they know the Roma-Nov fleet came to win at any costs? That we were never going to be an ally? Hell, we even dressed the part—a composite of TGC humanoids known for playing nice—likely just here for war games, responding to the Nautilus’s request to act like viruses, testing the defenses of the Gypsy Galaxy. And still they saw through the ruse. How?
The captain took his last thoughts with him as the remainder of the deck exploded; it was one hot, searing joy ride to hell.
***
FRIZA - A ZRIKA GALAXY CRUISER
IN ANOTHER QUADRANT OF THE GYPSY GALAXY
The Qes captain was operating in Singularity Time, along with the rest of his bridge crew on the Friza, a Zrika Galaxy
Cruiser, as were the star fighters already deployed from the cruiser – millions of them. Like a fish laying eggs, Friza’s chief AI, Rangata, was still spitting out the fighters. But Rangata could not give access to Singularity Time for Quadar’s entire crew. Just the ones manning weapons stations on the cruiser in addition to the ones on the command bridge and the ones in the fighters.
The Zrika Galaxy Cruisers were built as an homage to the tree of life—a long-time legend of their people that many still took as truth—out of which all of creation grew.
Friza’s long trunk sucked in particulate energy through the tree’s roots, feeding directly from the vacuum of space, processing the various particles, refining and concentrating them, and furthering them up the tree to the lifeforms that fed best off them. The crew staffing the trunk were little more than delivery men helping with this transport.
The real talent was in the crown of the tree. The tree of life’s leaves were fed off of coarser solar radiation and space dust, which they used to power the ship. The flowers delivered the spores—the star fighters, small, extremely fast-moving war birds, which were very hard to target, but needed in great number against an enemy’s galactic cruiser.
Qadar’s bridge crew was located in the stamens of the flowers, suspended in liquid, the nectar procured in seasons of battle. The nectar itself was comprised of superconducting fluids which facilitated the singularity-time uplink with the ship’s chief AI. The bridge crew was kept, in effect, in an embryonic state, never quite able to awaken to the real world, where things moved much slower.
The fighter pilots also would be lying prone in their jet fighters, appearing to be sleeping or in hibernation. Their neural impulses, moving at the speed of light, would serve as their hands and feet coordinating the ship, transmitting their instructions directly to their craft.
The Qes’ trees of life could sense the disruptions to the subspace vacuum through their sensitive roots that only a Peacekeeper could make. So, they knew the Peacekeeper was coming.
They just didn’t know when.
It didn’t matter.
In Singularity State, the Peacekeeper’s brief presence in their quadrant of the Gypsy Galaxy—a mere sliver of a picosecond—would be all the time the Qes needed to destroy her.
The Peacekeeper was entering the fish net—a distribution of galactic cruisers that made it most inviting for placing a bomb of sufficient size and power inside the net to take out all the cruisers at once. The problem for the Peacekeeper was that the net was already saturated with “the fish,” or more properly, the pollen from the tree, millions and millions of Starfighters.
There it was.
The Peacekeeper.
Visible from millions of Starfighter portals at once.
The attack commenced.
***
GENERAL SCHOPENHAUER’S PEACEKEEPER
FACING OFF AGAINST A CONSTELLATION OF ZRIKA GALAXY CRUISERS
Pria, General Schopenhauer’s Peacekeeper’s chief AI, realized the trap was sprung the instant she stepped into it.
So, her enemy could fight from Singularity State.
Pria was created for just such a situation.
That was not the finding that troubled her.
The net of Tree of Life ships—with which she was familiar—would block her access to the void temporarily, making it deaf and dumb to her communiqués.
She took out the Trees of Life—hundreds of them at once, with a single hit each, the weapon of choice: a desiccator bomb. The tree of life was essentially a living organism, and like most living organisms, was more than eighty-five percent fluids—super-fluids to be precise, allowing the ship and its crew to function in Singularity Time. The desiccators robbed the Trees of Life of their vital liquids; the living ships exploded in clouds of dust, much like the “pollen” the trees released.
But in the one-eighth of a picosecond that it took the bombs to reach their target and complete their work, Pria couldn’t go anywhere. She was trapped.
It was one-eighth of a picosecond too long.
Manifesting within the fishnet, a Tree of Life ship released countless fighters. They crowded one another, barely able to stay out of their own way. Many of the fighters careened into each other hard enough to explode. The ones crashing together in turn ignited many more within the blast radius. The erupting fighters were like fireflies dancing about the trees of life.
The countless explosions of the relatively miniscule fighters were hardly any threat to Pria’s energy shields.
Nor would the debris from the countless exploding fighters be any bother. They could not even blind her sensors with their cloud-like thickness.
The problem was the fighters that had been caught up inside the Peacekeeper Vitalis’s energy shields when she materialized. The energy shields were a form of superconductance technology themselves, which allowed Pria to fire her weapons even when shielded. The shield, acting like any protective cell membrane could selectively allow things in or out.
Most forms of superconducting technology were known to Pria. But one asset the tree of life technology had going for it was its ability to find new forms of superconducting mediums over time. The trees were in fact evolved to do just that.
Few of the fighters were coated in the same superconducting liquids. And as most forms of superconductance were known to Pria, very few of the fighters slipped through. The moment they did, the shield scanners gave her a fix on the nature of the superconducting medium, and she shut down access to further intrusion along that part of the superconducting spectrum.
But the ones that had made it past the protective membrane of Pria’s shields were now free to raise havoc with little she could do about it.
She had weapons she could deploy within her shields strong enough to take out the fighters without damaging her own hull.
But she had not anticipated the need to scale up this arsenal; the strategy she was acting on required her to scale up her long range, super-powered weapons, not her peashooters.
It was a mistake that would now cost her crew dearly.
Pria herself would recover—in time.
Not enough Starfighters and not enough time to take out a ship her size. But the pinprick holes those fighters could make with their lasers and plasma bombs were going to give humanoids aboard her directly in their path one hell of a bad day.
***
GENERAL SCHOPENHAUER’S PEACEKEEPER,
THE VITALIS
DECK THREE
Decklan had been thrown back from the weapon’s bay he was manning on The Peacekeeper. He sat up from the floor, wondering why the pain was in his stomach when he’d hit his back so hard. That’s when he saw the fist-size hole that had been bored through his midsection.
His weapon’s bay had been temporarily destroyed. But its hive-mind nanites were rapidly rebuilding it. Good luck destroying a hive mind. It could suffer the loss of millions of nanites and still get the job done. His firing solution would be up and running long before he would. Pria indulged her artillery gunners just like she indulged her pilots, for the simple reason that the day may come when her ability to handle everything was compromised, and their humanoid reflexes would need to be as sharp as ever. He existed as a contingency that most likely would never be needed. So he realized his loss wouldn’t mean much in the cosmic scheme of things.
As for his nanites rushing to repair him… it didn’t look like they were up to the task this time. He wondered why.
And he just as quickly realized the problem. That laser that had hit him, it had cleared a path for superconducting fluids to come shooting through the hull right behind it—the embryonic mix used by the Tree of Life fighter pilots themselves, escaping their exploding vessels. That goo splatter would have been immune to the lasers, able to ride out the coherent waves of light because the laser’s heat really wasn’t directed at it, and even if the laser were, the superfluid could bleed off the heat readily enough.
The problem was that his nanites couldn’t
get past the gravity-defying fluid. The hole in his chest, coated with superfluids was like a quicksand pit for the miniature robots so small that thousands of them could drown in the zero viscosity layer before making it to the other side, drown or freeze up, and, once brittle, be torn apart by the motions of the superfluid movement.
His firing solution would be immune from the superfluid. For one, its many hive minds had a relatively simpler task rebuilding components for the weapon compared to the hive minds percolating through Decklan. Maintaining wetware, biological systems, whose life support needs were far more demanding, was a much, much harder task. Those cells were dying in the time the hive minds inside his body needed to procure new solutions to a novel situation. And though he wouldn’t hold it against Pria, it was a safe bet that the mind power of the nanite hive minds infesting his weapons solution was far greater than the ones infesting him.
As much an engineer as a gunny, Decklan found his explanation for his state of disrepair rather satisfying. At least he would die knowing what the hell had killed him. He made sure to transmit the information to Pria via the nanites in his brain, which were doing just fine.
And then, methodically, sequentially, in the manner of a good engineer, having finished the last of his calculations, he died. In peace. In the middle of a war possibly without end. He might well be the lucky one.
***
GENERAL SCHOPENHAUER’S PEACEKEEPER
DECK FOUR
Rayban rode the plasma blast hitting him, wrapped around the ball of energy as if it were a cannon ball that had caught him in the gut. He came rife with such analogies, being a student of war going back to the very beginnings—as it unfolded on any and all known worlds. Of course, such a backstory had been supplied by Pria herself when she bioprinted him, but he’d taken to it wholeheartedly.
By the time the energy burst deposited him where it could do the most damage, half his weapon’s bay and the adjoining one had been taken out.
Moving Earth Page 69
