“How long until we can rebuild the missing pulse guns and Turret B?”
There was a long pause.
“We’ll start rebuilding pulse guns within a couple of days,” she told him. “I can rebuild Turret B if you want, but I can’t build LPCs, Captain. The light particle cannon require fabrication facilities we just can’t fit on a warp cruiser.”
“I know,” he conceded. “I was hoping for a miracle.” He considered the situation. “Once you have the spare cycles, start rebuilding A regardless. We may end up just sticking oversized pulse guns in it, but we’re going to need to teach the locals to build those anyway.”
“Sir?”
“There’s a Rogue Regional Matrix somewhere nearby, Commander Tran,” Octavio said flatly. “We can’t stop the forces it’s going to send after us with one turret. So, we need more guns. We help the locals build new ships around their bomb-lasers, and we teach them how to build pulse guns.
“Then we use those pulse guns in our own repairs. In the long term, we have to abandon this system,” he admitted. “But right now, we need to make sure these people are safe until we can abandon this system. A lot of that is going to fall on you.”
“That’s one hell of a lot of tech transfer, sir. Are we authorized for that?” Tran asked.
Octavio met his dark-skinned engineer’s gaze and smiled grimly.
“I am authorized to do whatever I feel is necessary,” he told her. “I have full plenipotentiary authority.”
Tran exhaled and nodded.
“I’ll get my people on the turrets, and I’ll dig into those files the Vistans sent us,” she promised. “Give me a couple of days and I’ll have an idea of what we can get them up to building.”
“I’ll take the same look as I have time,” Octavio replied. “We’ll make it happen, Lieutenant Commander. We’ve already bled for this system. I’ll be damned if I give it up now.”
An alert flashed up on his desk and he swallowed hard.
“And on that note, I need to be on the bridge,” he told Tran. “If we’re only moderately lucky, the tachyon pulse we just picked up is friendly.”
There was no sign on Scorpion’s bridge of the fact that the cruiser was almost crippled. Octavio’s default displays on his command screens gave the lie to that—he’d been the warp-drive engineer and then the chief engineer on this ship, so he kept the automated damage control report as one of his displays.
The black lines that should have been Turret A were sobering enough. Turret B was currently lit in amber, which meant they could fire the guns. In theory. Depending on whether or not Octavio was willing to risk permanently losing the turret and the techs currently laboring inside it.
He wasn’t. If the new icons on his screen were hostile, Vista was doomed. Octavio would hate himself forever, but given his command’s current state, he would have no choice but to withdraw.
“How long until we have sensor data?” he asked Das.
The only thing the icons currently told him was that something had tachyon-punched into the system two light-minutes away just over a minute earlier.
“Forty seconds and counting,” his tactical officer replied, her attention focused on her own screens as she passed commands to her team. “I’ve confirmed eleven punch signatures, which lines up with our update from Exilium.”
Fifteen ships had left Exilium. Ten recon nodes had been hauling the warp freighters with one recon and security node flying escort. The other four ships had been sent to Refuge, and information had been filtering in from them over the last few hours.
Refuge was everything they’d expected from working with the Matrices. Fifty-five percent of its surface area was water; the gravity was slightly lower than Earth’s—or Vista’s—and it had the same atmosphere and ecosphere as Exilium.
A Constructed World was a paradise for humans and, presumably, the forgotten Creators of the Matrices. It would be on the dry side for Vistans, but habitable.
“Hold on,” Das suddenly interrupted his thoughts. “I have a new tachyon pulse. Four new icons, tachyon-punched in within twenty light-seconds of the original flotilla. I didn’t think the other ships had left Refuge?”
“They haven’t,” Octavio said grimly. “Battle stations, people. Let the Vistans know we believe we have friendlies, but we have unexpected visitors.”
“On it,” Africano responded.
“Lightspeed sensor data coming in now,” Das reported. “Original flotilla appears to be as expected. Ten recon nodes, ten of our freighters, one recon and security node. They…aren’t maneuvering, though.”
“Waiting for somebody,” the Captain concluded. The concept of grabbing a Matrix by the neck and shaking until they finally told him what they were planning in advance was appealing…except for the fact that even a recon node’s AI core was fifteen hundred cubic meters, massing some six thousand tons.
His understanding was that the larger ships had larger cores, but not by as much as he’d expect. An S&R node’s AI core was only about seventeen hundred cubic meters. The bigger Matrices were more intelligent than the smaller ones, but not by much.
A recon node was an impulsive teenager and a Regional Matrix was a wise and experienced elder, but they were well within a human-scale bell curve of each other’s intelligence. The sheer processing power and speed of an AI core meant they weren’t on the human bell curve.
And yet…they weren’t always particularly bright.
“Update,” Das snapped. “Newcomers are combat platforms. I repeat: newcomers are combat platforms.”
New icons appeared on his screen, the massive six-clawed forms of the Matrices’ battlecruiser equivalents. Each of those claws held a gamma ray laser capable of obliterating even the asteroid-hulled guard ships.
He’d beaten two before, but that had been by hitting them with vast salvos of X-ray lasers before they fired their grasers. He didn’t expect to get that lucky again.
“Send code interrogations,” he ordered, his voice surprisingly calm. “Are they engaging the flotilla?”
He knew their allied Matrices couldn’t attack another Matrix ship, but who knew if the Rogues still had that core protocol?
“Negative,” Das replied. The woman paused. “They are all maneuvering now. They…are forming up?”
“The hell?” Octavio demanded.
“Sir! Incoming communication from one of the combat platforms,” Africano reported. “Relaying to your console.”
It started playing without Octavio even hitting a button.
“Captain Octavio Catalan, this is Combat Coordination Matrix ZDX-175-14,” the mechanical voice stated. “Matrices ZDX-175-14, ZDX-175-04, ZDX-175-15 and ZDX-175-18 have been assigned to provide additional security for the Hearthfire System by XR-13-9.
“Combat Matrices will escort the freighter transport flotilla to thirty-two light-seconds from Vista, then establish distant protection orbits. We understand that the Combat Coordination Matrices may represent a risk of emotional reaction among the local sapient populace, and will attempt to minimize this.”
There was a pause.
“Once we have established distant protection orbit, we are at your disposal, Captain Octavio Catalan.”
The message ended and Octavio stared at the warships. He wasn’t even sure he was going to be able to use them, and he wasn’t sure he could keep them from panicking the Vistans.
“They’re friendly,” he said slowly. “And I still can’t help but wish the Matrices hadn’t sent them.”
18
None of the news coming up from the surface was anything Octavio could regard as good. Part of him had hoped that the collapse of anything resembling a government in good chunks of the surviving nations would have kept the news of the Matrices’ arrival quiet.
In the grand scheme of things, that the media corporations were not only managing to get the news out to people but continuing to get updated news to send out was probably a good thing.
Right now, however, he
was watching video feeds from his own drones showing him panicked rioting in one of the cities that, while outside of the region of control they’d secured with Shining Rivers, had been stable.
He wasn’t sure what the crowd was hoping to achieve—it wasn’t like breaking store windows and emptying water mains into the streets would have helped the Guardian-Star-Choir fend off the Matrices if they had been hostile—but he didn’t think humans would have fared much better.
The good news he had was that the Matrices had managed to rig up the interfaces for their remotes to fly the ships. They couldn’t do anything complicated with them, but they could bring up the warp drives and take them to Refuge. That was probably enough, but…
“Renaud,” he gestured his XO over to him. “I know the Matrices say their remotes can fly the ships, but how many people could we break free to put aboard them as well? Let’s say I wanted a crew of five to back up the remote on each ship.
“Can we do that?”
That was a fifth of Scorpion’s complement, but…missing a turret and half their pulse guns, he figured they could do it.
“I think so,” she said carefully. “Biggest problem I see is that we’ll have to grab some pretty independent and capable sorts—the kind entire departments are using as linchpins. Plus, well, can we spare the officers?”
Octavio snorted. The people he needed to send were experienced engineering NCOs, not Ensigns running one shift in engine block two.
Of course, given the nature of the Exilium Space Fleet, he didn’t have any Ensigns, and even the Lieutenants who’d left the Confederacy as Ensigns were at least five-year veterans.
“Flag the noncoms we’re thinking about commissioning,” he told Renaud. “I know we’ve got at least ten POs and Chiefs on that list, so we’ll give them temporary warrants and put them in command of the freighters. Trial by fire—with the Matrix remotes as their XOs.”
“Makes sense. I’ll have a list for you by end of day,” his XO told him. “That will leave us shorthanded, though.”
“We’ll make do. Getting those ships moving with their passengers is task number one.” He shook his head. “Which means I need to talk to Sings and the Shining Mother.”
“The Empress,” Renaud said quietly. “That’s what we’re making her, you know that.”
“So long as she holds her people together well enough for us to get them to safety, I will make her a crown of gold and diamonds with my own two hands,” Octavio replied. “She’s our only hope.
“Speaking of which…Africano!” He gestured for the coms officer to join them as he shouted her name. “Now would be a really good time for us to be able to put the Shining Mother on everyone’s speakers. I need two hundred thousand volunteers to go on strange alien ships and travel to a system they know nothing about, after all.”
“We’re…close,” the com officer admitted, wrapping a curl of hair around her finger in thought. “We’ve got the coding translations working, and we’re testing if our worms work on their hardware.”
Octavio nodded…then paused.
“And just where are you testing those worms?” he asked.
“On all of the carriers left that aren’t Shining Rivers’,” Africano admitted. “Best-case scenario, we force open communications channels. Worst-case scenario, well…we cripple a potentially hostile asset.”
Scorpion’s Captain managed to restrain himself from facepalming. Africano wasn’t wrong, just…
“Please check with me before we try and hack armed assets in the future, please?” he asked carefully. “I know they’re only wet-navy ships, but still.”
Octavio couldn’t conceal a sigh of relief when the combat platforms finally turned back, letting the less-threatening recon nodes deliver the warp freighters to orbit.
“All right, people,” he addressed his senior officers. “Getting people onto those freighters is going to fall to the locals. Africano assures me that we now have everything we need to put the Shining Mother on every screen-equivalent on the planet.”
Africano didn’t look quite as certain as Octavio was making her out to be, but that was life. They’d successfully broken into the communications channels of the ships on the surface, and it was starting to sound like the naval militaries, at least, were choosing hope over loyalty to broken nations.
There were eight carriers left on the planet that hadn’t belonged to the Shining Spears. Three had belonged to the two nations around the passage, countries whose capitals had been swept away in the Impact.
Those ships had leapt at someone—anyone—able to help them save their people. The other carrier groups had taken some convincing, but Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters was extraordinarily convincing.
Hopefully, Sleeps-In-Sunlight would be just as persuasive.
“The Shining Mother will speak to the Vistans in about an hour, if we’re translating time correctly,” he told everyone. “We’ll stand ready to support her in any way needed, but I’ve made clear to her that we will not provide weapons or fire support for engagement against other Vistans.”
Octavio knew that line was not as inflexible as he was implying it was to his officers—and that both his officers and the Shining Mother knew that too.
“How are we getting people up to the freighters?” Renaud asked. “We only have so many shuttles.”
“The freighters came with their full complement,” Octavio told her. “Unfortunately, we don’t have the pilots for them, either.”
He looked around at the Amazon brigade that served as the officers of his ship and smiled calmly.
“Our first step is to make sure the freighters are operating properly and that the Matrix remotes integrated without problems our AI friends might have missed,” he said. “There’s also a stack of cargo aboard the ships—I don’t even know what the Admiral has sent us.”
From the communiques he’d exchanged with Lestroud, nobody was entirely sure what they’d managed to shove aboard the freighters. A lot of people had been stuffing whatever spare resources they had that might be useful aboard, and the time crunch had been so tight, no one had been keeping track.
“Once we’ve confirmed the ships are functional and off-loaded everything, we’ll cycle our pilots to get all of the shuttles down to the surface. Once they’re on the surface, our pilots get to play flight instructor.”
“Will the Vistans even be able to fly our shuttlecraft?” Das asked. “It’s not like we have their sound-projector display systems.”
“We’re installing a copy of their controls, and, since I’m not done making Lieutenant Commander Africano’s life hell, she and her team will have to rig up a translator system so that the shuttles can duplicate their sound systems,” Octavio told them, gesturing to the coms officer.
And if Africano pulled that rabbit out of her hat, she was going to find herself a full Commander before the week was out. He knew just how immense the workload he’d dropped on her was.
From her expression, so did she.
“We’ll make it happen,” she said, her voice admirably level. “Might take longer than we’d like, though.”
“It takes the time it takes, but remember the price of time,” Scorpion’s Captain pointed out. “Emptying the freighters will take time. Training the pilots will take time. Finding the first two hundred thousand volunteers will take time.”
He shook his head.
“My understanding is that the Matrices are building coastal settlements on Refuge to receive the evacuees. They apparently have a unit whose entire purpose is building the colonies. We’ve never seen one, but they were supposed to have years of warning of an approaching colony ship. Why would they build early?”
“So, at least we don’t need to worry about putting roofs over their heads on Refuge,” Renaud concluded. “Though I imagine whatever the Matrices build is still going to require massive retrofitting to work for the Vistans.”
“Almost certainly,” Octavio agreed. “But they’ll have somewhere to start.” He
shook his head. “We certainly couldn’t provide enough of anything for a billion people, and all of our shipping capacity is going to be tied up just moving these people.”
“For once, it’s useful having von Neumann machines as allies,” Tran noted. “It’s still terrifying, let’s be clear, but they’re being useful.”
“I’m going to have to talk to the combat Matrices,” Octavio said. “We know they can’t fight the Rogues, so I want to know what they can do for us. I wouldn’t turn down them building us a few hundred thousand graser mines or something similar.”
“I wouldn’t count on it,” Das told him. “They’ve always been pretty strict on what they’ll transfer for tech. Hell, did they ever officially give us the matter-conversion plants?”
“No,” Tran said instantly. “Dr. Reinhardt reverse-engineered the conversion power cores.” She chuckled. “I got the impression that the Matrices are more impressed than bothered when we do that, but they’ve only actually sold us about half of the tech we’ve learned from them.”
“We’ll get what we get,” Octavio said with a sigh. “Our first priority is getting these people to Refuge, but that’s going to be a process of years without some kind of miracle. That means we need to get them off of Vista before Vista becomes uninhabitable, and we need to make sure the Rogues don’t finish them off.”
“We’ll make it happen, sir,” Renaud promised. “These people already got dealt a shitty hand. We’ll keep them in the game.”
19
Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters had been as terrified as any of her people when the black ships had returned. Even warned that there were friends coming who looked like the vessels that had shattered her world and her Star-Choir, the datasong telling her of the new ships had sent a chill down her spine.
Especially the four big warships. Two of those had sent Scorpion, a vessel capable of wiping her entire Guardian-Star-Choir from existence, running. Only by combining the human ship’s defenses with a stunning expenditure of nuclear weapons had turned the tide there.
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