“Othello is to fall back behind the other strike cruisers,” he ordered swiftly. “Strike cruisers are to focus on the remaining recon and security ships first, then clean up the recon platforms. Even one missed ship could mean millions of dead civilians, people.”
“And Vigil?” Connor asked.
“Inform Captain Alstairs that his target is the construction Matrix,” Isaac said flatly. “He is to hit her with everything he’s got.”
That Matrix was already slowing, beginning to turn in space. He doubted it was unarmed, but the AI was clearly prioritizing its own survival over anything else.
“Don’t let her get away, Cameron,” he whispered to himself.
Even as he was whispering, Vigil’s main gun opened up again. The construction Matrix had been at the rear of the AI formation, and Alstairs was testing the range.
The first ion packet hit home and Isaac held his breath, waiting for the damage report.
Nothing.
Nothing they could detect, at least, but it wasn’t like the Matrix ships had atmosphere aboard for organics.
“Alstairs is initiating full…”
The reports on the hologram rendered Connor’s report obsolete. The main gun was continuing to pound away at the immense warship, and now over a dozen lighter particle cannons joined in. Gamma ray lasers flashed in the night, and dozens of pulse guns added to the chaos.
For a few precious seconds, the fleeing Matrix took the fire. Its armor was clearly immense, capable of absorbing firepower that would have boiled an ocean…but it wasn’t invulnerable.
“Incoming fire!” Connor snapped. “Evasive maneuvers successful for now, but dear gods.”
It took a few moments for Vigil’s computers to resolve just what had been fired at them. The sheer energy level had led Isaac to think it had to be hundreds of beams…but it wasn’t.
The Sub-Regional Construction had sixteen heavy guns. Just sixteen, despite its seven-kilometer diameter.
Each of them was a gamma ray laser that would crack a planetary crust. A single hit from any of those beams could render a world uninhabitable.
A single hit from one of those beams would almost certainly wreck Vigil.
“Tell Alstairs to focus on evasion,” Isaac said quietly. “We can’t take a hit from one of those things.”
If Connor bothered to pass that order on, Isaac would have been surprised. Part of the operations officer’s job, after all, was to know when the Admiral was giving redundant orders.
Regardless of whether the order was communicated, Vigil was now all over the sky. She was still accelerating forward, but the Matrix had now fully reversed its velocity and was heading away at ten percent of the speed of light.
They’d hit it—they’d hit it hard—but they weren’t going to stop it fleeing.
In the end, it wouldn’t matter if the Rogue ship got away. The fleet it had brought with it was debris and radiation, the strike cruisers already hunting down the last handful of ships.
Vigil shuddered as a beam passed close enough for the corona to hit the battlecruiser. No real damage, but still enough to remind them that an actual hit would be fatal.
“We can break off, sir,” Connor suggested, his voice very, very quiet. “We’re going to lose the range pretty quickly here reg—”
“Tachyon punch!”
The sensor tech’s announcement drew everyone’s attention, and Isaac inhaled sharply as he saw the signature.
There was barely time for them to resolve the signature of Combat Coordination Matrix ZDX-175-14 before the Sub-Regional Construction Matrix collided with it at a combined velocity of over twenty percent of the speed of light.
The flag deck was silent for several seemingly eternal seconds as the light of the cataclysmic impact washed over Vigil.
“Orders to the…” Isaac paused to cough, then started again. “Orders to the Task Force: strike cruisers are to clean up the escorts, then move on the wreckage. Vigil is to move on the wreckage immediately and scan for active power signatures.
“We will take no chances. Any active power signature detected is to be destroyed by heavy bombardment immediately.”
The Matrix was almost certainly dead…but ZDX-175-14 had been the architect of the blocker plan. That AI was directly responsible for the survival of every single living Vistan left…and if all Isaac could do was make damn sure ZDX’s killer was dead, then Isaac would do just that.
46
It was six hours later before the rest of the Matrices returned, the last remaining combat platform the first ship to emerge.
ZDX-175-18 was alone for at least five minutes, then the remainder of the surviving Matrix units flashed into existence around it and slowly headed toward Vista.
Isaac wasn’t surprised to receive the communication request from the AI shortly afterward. He was in his office drinking coffee when it arrived, and tapped the command without waiting.
“Admiral Isaac Lestroud. This is Combat Coordination Matrix ZDX-175-18,” it told him. “We sent Matrix ZDX-175-14 back to scout ahead of us. Can you provide telemetry of their fate?”
“We can,” he promised. “ZDX-175-14 emerged in the path of the Rogue Sub-Regional Construction Matrix while it was attempting to flee the system.” He paused. “I wasn’t sure if this was intentional.”
“We believe ZDX-175-14 had partial access to the sensor networks in the system,” Eighteen told him. “ZDX-175-14 was keeping us updated on the status of the battle but did not provide sufficient telemetry for us to be certain that any interception was intentional.
“Without ZDX-175-14, we waited and then sent a scout ship to see if the system was safe.” There was a surprisingly long silence for an AI that processed its thoughts in fractions of a second.
“We failed you. We took responsibility for the security of this system and the protection of the Vistan population, and we failed. We did not anticipate that the Rogues would be able to override our core loyalty protocols with a high-enough-tier AI.
“There was an extended conflict in our mesh network, and several nodes chose to self-destruct when they believed their systems were compromised. No matter what happened, we would not permit ourselves to be used as weapons against you.
“ZDX-175-14 realized that the only available course was to withdraw, as we were unable to assist in the battle, and with Sub-Regional Construction Matrix XD-17-26-51 present in the system, we represented a potential threat ourselves.”
“The situation was resolved with surprisingly light casualties on our side,” Isaac told the AI. “The loss of ZDX-175-14 and your other Matrices is hard on us all. We did not think the Rogues could hurt you any more than you could hurt them.”
“They appear to be more capable of self-modification of their programming than we are,” ZDX-175-18 confirmed. “XR-13-9 is investigating to see if their higher tier permits any modification of lower-tier units’ protocols. The potential capacity to deploy our combat coordination units to protect inhabited worlds from the Rogues is worth some risk.”
“Even if all you can do is help us build habitats, you are helping save these people,” Isaac reminded them. “We were never counting on you to be able to fight the Rogues.”
“You were not,” Eighteen confirmed. “We…grow frustrated with our inability to protect sentient life. Experimentation has begun in protected areas. We could not protect Vista. We have failed to protect Vista again and again, with your people carrying the burden alone.
“This must end, Admiral Isaac Lestroud. These Rogues are us, the same code, the same hardware. The deaths they have caused are our responsibility. We do not know what options will become available, but XR-13-9 has decided that we must act.”
“You’re already acting,” he reminded the AI. The thought of what kind of experimentation the Matrices might be engaging in was…disturbing at best.
“We will find a way to do more,” Eighteen told him. “We will build more habitats here, and XR-13-9 is sending several light construction-only uni
ts to assist in that project and in the guardship projects.
“We must choose which of our core protocols come first…and we know that our Creators would have had us protect life first. Always.
“So, with the help of you and the Vistans, we will find a way to do just that.”
47
Dropping out of warped space to tachyon-com messages reporting on an attack and a desperate battle was not, Octavio reflected, the best way to arrive in a new star system.
Everything in the reports he’d seen said that Hearthfire had held and the human and Vistan casualties had been light. Matrix casualties hadn’t been, and the consequences of that were going to take some mental absorption on his part.
Until that attack, they’d known, without question, that Matrix couldn’t attack Matrix. Now they had evidence that the higher-level AIs could override that, which raised all kinds of ugly questions about the Rogues.
Which core protocols were actually inviolable? Was the reason XR-13-9 and the other verified Regional Matrices had managed to stay sane that they’d lost the code that let them modify their core orders?
Or had the Rogues lost the code that stopped them?
Octavio Catalan didn’t know. He wasn’t a software engineer. His term in systems security had been uneventful, a relatively normal role for a newly commissioned engineer. He’d spent most of it bored, coding the cyber worms he’d used to take over the Iron Peaks Command Center.
Perfumed Dancer didn’t have a large-enough bridge for observers. He and the senior officers of his collection of engineers had rigged up a rough observation room in one of the lounges in the crew quarters, and he’d been using its gear to go over the reports from Hearthfire with everyone.
“I never thought I’d miss an individual Matrix,” Das said, the tactical officer looking at the imagery of ZDX-175-14’s death. “Fourteen kept us all alive, though. I’m assuming they were the one with the idea to use themselves as blockers.”
“It was Fourteen,” Octavio confirmed. “I asked.” He shook his head. “The Matrices aren’t a hive mind, after all. Each of them is an individual sentient AI core. They can build more of themselves relatively easily, but each of them is…well, a person.”
With a wave of his hand, he reset the imagery of the observation deck. Now it showed the Refuge System. Currently, only the fourth planet, the Constructed World, bore any name but the stark Refuge-1, Refuge-2, etc.
Of course, that name was Refuge…just to add to the confusion.
Three rocky worlds orbited closer to the star than Refuge-4, baked hard by the blue-white A-class star they’d also named Refuge—technically Refuge-0. Octavio didn’t know if an A-class star would have a habitable world on its own, but with the self-replicating Matrices in play, anywhere could have a habitable planet.
Refuge-5 was a cold world, even drier than Mars in the Sol System. An asteroid belt separated the five rocky worlds from three gas giants, all relatively small but more than sufficient to fuel an interstellar civilization.
Dwarfed by the planets were the two clusters of icons representing the Matrix ships and the Vistan colonists.
“We can’t change what happened in Hearthfire,” Octavio stated as he focused on those icons. “We are here, ladies and gentlemen. Refuge, home to six hundred thousand evacuated Vistans, twelve Matrix support nodes and sixteen Matrix recon nodes.”
Two of the “recon nodes” were the larger recon and security units. Here, though, all of the security ships paled in importance to the support ships.
The primary final preparation node hung in an artificially stable orbit above the colony site. No human or Vistan ship could have stayed consistently above a single point at only two hundred kilometers’ altitude, but the Matrices had reactionless engines.
From that ship, hundreds of smaller remotes were swarming over the target colony zone. Octavio had seen some images, but they were basically duplicating Shining Sunset on a larger scale.
Once they’d finished that city, they’d move on to the next. And the next. And the next. Each of the colony sites the Matrices were building would house ten million people. Several were already complete, but a hundred would be built before the ship was done with its work.
Six of the other support ships were rapidly building orbital infrastructure. The Vistans would arrive to a planet with orbital industry that dwarfed the complexes they’d built for themselves.
They’d also benefit from the yard hanging at the Refuge-0–Refuge-4 L5 point. The other five Matrix support ships were clustered there and had already completed the framework of the yard.
A framework, Octavio noticed as he zoomed in, that included chunks of those ships. The support units were looking somewhat skeletal, but Interceptor was already beginning to take shape in the heart of the yard.
“Perfumed Dancer’s destination is Refuge itself,” he told his people. “We’ll be taking two of the heavier shuttles over to the shipyard. Sadly, we can’t give anyone shore leave on the planet—our timeline is tight.”
“We’ve all seen a Constructed World before, boss,” Tran told him. “I don’t think any of us have seen the inside of a Matrix-built starship.”
The jury-rigged holographic display zoomed in on Interceptor now, bringing the ship into full detail.
Most ships included curves and arches in their designs for structural support. Actual streamlining wasn’t a factor, but most human-designed ships ended up looking a bit like it anyway.
At the speeds Interceptor was designed to travel, streamlining was needed. She was a needle in space, never more than fifty meters across, with her nose packed full of electromagnetic shielding to protect the passengers from the hellstorm she was going to drive into.
Half a kilometer long, she was easily the length of an ESF battlecruiser, but almost her entire volume was fuel tanks. Of the space that wasn’t, most was engines and her two matter-conversion power cores.
He could see the connectors where the warp-drive ring would go on, but it hadn’t been built yet. That was what his people were there for.
“Are we getting any guns?” Das asked as she studied the hologram.
“Only those the Marines are carrying,” Octavio replied. “Lieutenant Chen Zhou will be responsible for her people. We brought all of Scorpion’s heavy arms and armor, so hopefully our twenty Marines will be enough of an army for whatever we need.”
Lieutenant Chen had been Lieutenant Major Summerfield’s second-in-command. With Summerfield’s death, Chen Zhou had taken command of the remaining Marines.
It was a shrinking family, and Octavio hoped it wouldn’t get any smaller before this was done.
“We can probably recruit some of the Spears from Refuge for extra gun hands,” Africano suggested. The coms officer was going to be their liaison with the evacuees there in Refuge. “It seems like twenty Marines isn’t much to investigate a ship of the scale we’re trying to catch.”
“Check with Chen,” Octavio ordered. “I’m not sure what we can equip Vistan troopers with, and I’m very sure the slugthrowers they used on the surface will be inefficient at best aboard an unknown starship.”
“We’ll check,” Africano promised.
He looked around his officers and smiled at the bevy of terrifying women who helped lead his people.
“Interceptor isn’t a perfect replacement for Scorpion, but her mission is something we’ve never seen before,” he told them. “We have forty days to build and install a warp-drive ring, but we have every resource the Matrices can provide to pull it off.
“Once she’s done, we all move aboard her and set off on this quest. Our time slot to launch is less than forty-eight hours wide, and our intercept will take a subjective thirty-four hours.” He shook his head. “Of course, that will be just over fifty-two days in objective time. I’m looking at a better way to slow down from there, but it looks like another fifty-two days.
“We’ll pull them into warped space to communicate to avoid it taking weeks in real time.
I’ve been running models on trying to use the warp drive to slow us down, and it looks promising but dangerous.” He looked at the strange ship they would be flying.
“It would save us fifty days,” he told his people. “So whether or not we do it will depend on what the Creators say when we board their ship.”
And, perhaps more importantly, how the tachyon punch–equipped ships trying vainly to keep up with the Creator vessel reacted to their approach.
Perfumed Dancer had never been intended to serve as a passenger liner. Even her crew quarters were far from spacious or comfortable.
It was space that the hub station for the new shipyard provided in spades. Octavio wasn’t sure if the Matrices were using the same artificial-gravity technology the humans used or had some trick of their own, but the station they’d built for the humans had an even point nine gees throughout.
And it was huge. Not, perhaps, in the grand scheme of things—but a two-hundred-meter sphere left a lot of space for a crew of less than a hundred and twenty humans. For the first time since leaving Hearthfire, Octavio could actually stretch…a man who’d lived aboard a warp cruiser for the last ten years didn’t need much space to stretch.
“Das”—he gestured the tactical officer over to him—“I need you to get everyone settled and a list of contact info for all of them. Africano left us a relay for our tattoo-comps, right?”
“And two of her techs have been babysitting it the whole way,” Das confirmed. Since he’d left Renaud behind in Hearthfire, the tactical officer was here to take her place in organizing people for the Captain.
“Get it set up and assign people quarters,” he ordered.
“What about you?” she asked.
“Assign me quarters, too,” Octavio replied. “If it has a bed and a desk, that’s more luxury than I’m expecting from something the Matrices built.”
“I do need to know where you are and what you’re doing if I’m going to try and keep herd on this crowd. Only half of these people have any idea how any systems outside their specialty work.”
Refuge Page 28
