by Terry Mixon
He no longer had any doubt what the eventual outcome would be if Kelsey and the rest failed. He wasn’t going to survive to fight that third group, because this group would kill them all.
He snapped out orders, placing his ships into formations that provided them the most protection against the attacks while enhancing their offensive capabilities. It was like running around trying to put out small fires while the entire forest burned, but that was all he could do.
The two fleets were fully enmeshed now, and both their formations were beginning to break up. A brace of superdreadnoughts had been flooding their fire into Invincible, and the damage reports were getting bleak fast.
“Hull integrity at fifty-two percent,” Marcus intoned. “Starboard missile batteries offline. Port missile batteries have been reduced to less than thirty percent effectiveness. Beam weapons offline. Battle screens depleted. Engineering reports heavy damage. Admiral, you must transfer your flag, as Invincible can no longer support you.”
“No,” Jared said softly. “Even if a cutter could get through this madness to another ship, it would be in just as bad a condition as Invincible. I think I’ll finish this fight right here.”
“Admiral, this vessel is under heavy fire, and we’ve been stripped of our screening units. I estimate our survival time is measured in seconds rather than minutes.”
“Then let’s make those seconds count. Rotate the ship and fire all remaining weapons as they come to bear on our new friends.”
Even as Marcus carried out his orders, Jared sent out his final instructions to the fleet. They’d regroup as best they could and try to force their way through the enemy that was quickly surrounding them.
He had no illusions that they’d succeed, but he wasn’t going to order his people to just commit suicide. They’d die fighting the greatest enemy that humanity had ever seen.
The overhead lights flickered and went out.
“Our last remaining fusion plant is offline,” Marcus said. “It’s been a pleasure serving with you, Admiral.”
“And with you, Marcus.”
He waited for the end, only the end didn’t come.
“Marcus, what’s happening?”
“The AI fleet has ceased firing and is withdrawing.”
Jared blinked, suddenly uncertain what was going on. “What can we do about getting power back online?”
“Commander Baxter doesn’t believe that either of the fusion plants is repairable without several hours of work. Admiral, allow me to reiterate my belief that it would be tactically useful for you to transfer your flag at this time. The battlecruiser Hercules is combat capable and would provide you a significantly better command platform than Invincible.”
Jared shook his head. “We’ll make do. Try to get a communications link to Kelsey or someone else on that battle station. I need to know what’s happening. Instruct the rest of the fleet to get into defensive formation Charlie. What’s their status?”
“We’ve outright lost more than half of our ships of all classes. Half of the remaining ships are likely irreparable. The remaining vessels are heavily damaged. If the enemy chooses to attack again, we will be unable to defend ourselves.
“Invincible is no longer combat capable. She has sustained significant structural damage, and her structural integrity may be irretrievably lost. The largest surviving undamaged vessel is Caduceus. She is moving to our position at maximum acceleration to begin treating the wounded, yet the AI’s forces are not reacting.”
Jared opened his mouth to say something, but Kaitlinn Cannon turned to face him. “We have an incoming communication from the battle station, Admiral.”
Well, this was it. This would either be a demand for their surrender or some kind of indication that they’d won.
“Put it on screen,” he said, keeping his voice level through sheer willpower.
Moments later, the view of the starfield around them switched, and he saw his sister standing there with her helmet tucked under her arm. She looked like she was in a computer center. She was grinning.
“We did it, Jared. We’ve forced the master AI to submit. We’ve won.”
He sagged with relief, not caring who saw him. “That’s wonderful! Well done! We’re pretty messed up out here, so it’s going to be a while before we can get reinforcements to your location. What’s your status?”
Her expression fell. “We’ve got less than a dozen survivors. The defenses took out everyone else. Elise made it. So did Talbot, Julia, Carl, and most of their protective team. That’s it.
“We’re in no immediate danger, so get your house in order. I’ve issued stand-down orders to all ships and stations in this system, so we’ve got time before we have to make any final decisions.”
“Understood. As damaged as we are, it’s probably going to be a while before we get there.”
“We’ll keep a light burning in the window for you. Bandar out.”
Once her image vanished from the screen, Jared rubbed his face tiredly. He could hardly believe that they’d finally won. The cost had been extreme, but those deaths hadn’t been in vain.
He allowed himself only a few seconds to contemplate that before he started snapping out orders. He needed to save as many of his people as he could, and then he’d figure out what needed to happen to unwind the terrible situation humanity was in.
The most important thing was that this war was over.
37
Twelve hours later, Talbot had at least made good on his initial goal of locating the bodies of every single marine and Marine Raider that they’d lost inside the battle station. The ones killed by the beam weapons outside were gone, as were some of those lost to plasma fire, but he was confident that they hadn’t missed any survivors.
It had been gruesome, exhausting work, particularly since marines were usually the ones that performed that task. With the loss of virtually all the marines and Marine Raiders, they’d had to take what help Fleet could offer, but that hadn’t been much.
The fleet had lost more than half of their ships, with the survivors being heavily damaged. That meant that their damage control crews were completely and utterly overwhelmed.
Yet Fleet personnel had volunteered their time and added to their workload to search and rescue, though it had ultimately proved fruitless. He wouldn’t forget that anytime soon.
Once he was done, he wanted to collapse in his quarters, but even that wasn’t possible. A deeply penetrating beam had utterly vaporized their quarters aboard Invincible, so he and Kelsey would have to make do somewhere else.
In this case, he was using his wife’s old quarters aboard Persephone, which she hadn’t completely moved out of. The Marine Raider strike ship hadn’t taken any damage in the fight because Angela had been ordered to remain outside engagement range. None of their enemies had even seen her.
She was stripped of crew now, with only a dozen officers and crewmen aboard to maintain things while everyone else was off doing the necessary tasks to save what they could in the fleet. He and Angela were the only Raiders left aboard at the moment, and he wasn’t staying.
He wished he could, because his friend was profoundly grieving. Angela had helped train most of the Raiders who’d died. They’d been her crew, and they were all gone now.
Kelsey was still locked in discussions with the admiral, Julia, Olivia, and Elise aboard the battle station about what to do next. They’d won the battle, but they had to make absolutely certain they won the war.
Frankly, he was glad the decision was someone else’s.
With the losses they’d suffered, they were down to roughly a squad of living Marine Raiders—all Persephone’s core officers. They’d have to rebuild the entire organization. Again.
The loss of Jake Peters saddened him. The wealth of experience that the old Raider had had was irreplaceable and now gone forever.
Yet he couldn’t blame the man. If he hadn’t acted, Talbot would be dead now. Peters had chosen to take that risk himself in one
final act of courage. He truly had been the last of a great people.
Once he’d cleaned himself up, Talbot gave the bed a longing look and then turned his back on it. He might be exhausted, but the work wasn’t done. He wasn’t sure where he’d find the strength to continue, but he’d find it. Somewhere.
Rather than disrupt anyone else, he used his damaged armor to get him over to the battle station. At this minuscule range, the built-in grav unit was sufficient. He found everyone in the computer center housing the master AI.
Someone had set up a makeshift table and found something that could be used as chairs. There hadn’t been any human furniture aboard the battle station. It hadn’t been built with them in mind.
Life support was now online in the compartment, so no one was in armor. Each and every one of his friends looked like they’d been wrung out and had nothing left to give.
Without a word, his wife rose and made her way over to him.
He hit the releases on his armor and began shedding it, allowing her to help him out of its confines, and then he wrapped his arms around her. The stench of scorched metal and blood still hung in the air despite the scrubbers trying to clear it, a reminder of the price they’d paid for this victory.
Wordlessly, they just held one another. He knew she felt the pain just as acutely as he did. She’d never been a marine, but these had been her people too.
“I envy you,” she said. “I think I’d kill for a shower.”
“Take an hour and go clean up. All of you.”
Admiral Mertz shook his head. “Not until we finish deciding the best course of action going forward. What we do next shapes the fight to come. This chapter of our lives is over, but the next one looms large on the horizon. We’re going to have to deal with the Clans, the Rebel Empire, and the Singularity.
“Yet the AIs are all that’s keeping the Singularity out of the Rebel Empire. If we cut the legs out from under the damned things, the Singularity will come pouring across the border and stick a shiv in what’s left of the Rebel Empire and the Clans both. If there’s a way that we can use the automated forces to our advantage, we need to figure that out before we send the self-destruct orders for the AIs.”
Talbot nodded and took a seat at the table. “That sounds like it’s going to be difficult, but I have no doubt we’ll find the right answer. Have we decided what’s going to happen with the master AI?”
“Carl is going to disconnect the drives once we’re done,” Kelsey said. “None of the hardware is going to be used for anything ever again. We’re not going to take that kind of chance. It was a failed experiment, and we’re going to consign it to the dustbin of history.”
“Marcus, Fiona, and Harrison might take issue with how successful the experiment was, but I get your point.”
“The devil is in the details,” Julia said. “We need to make sure that we get all the answers we can to the critical questions before we act. The thing is basically in standby mode right now.”
“We’ve double-checked our control of it by ordering it to have the forces in the Terra system stand down,” the admiral said tiredly. “I sent one of our destroyers through to verify that the other forces didn’t react to our presence. All we need to do now is figure out what comes next.”
Talbot smiled grimly. “Hell, that’s easy. We start the fight to free humanity and restore the old Terran Empire to its former glory. The Clans might have come from the Old Empire, but they’ve become marauders. We’re going to have to root them out while we turn the Rebel Empire around.
“Without the AIs, there’s no telling what the Rebel Empire is going to do. That’s going to require some delicate negotiation. Probably some fighting too. The Rebel Empire and the Clans are going to beat each other up pretty badly before we have an opportunity to intervene at all. It’s not like we have a massive fleet to intervene with.
“And then there’s the Singularity—the mustache-twirling villains waiting in the wings. We’ve got to keep them from getting their fingers into the pie. If they invade in force, they very well might achieve their long-term goal of unifying humanity under their rule.”
Talbot leaned back with a nod. “Yeah, this is going to be delicate. You sure you need me and Kelsey for that? We’re not good at subtle.”
The rest of them laughed, and the admiral smiled. “Almost all of us were here in the beginning, and we’ll be here for the end. The only question left in front of us is how we can maximize the New Terran Empire’s chances going forward.”
“I think we need information for that,” Olivia said firmly. “It’s time to have Elise dig up some concise answers from that damned machine about what it’s doing with its forces and what plans and schemes it has underway. Once we know what’s happening and what its array of available forces is, perhaps we can begin the process of putting together a plan.”
Talbot shifted his gaze to the Crown Princess of Pentagar. She looked as worn out as the rest, but someone had found the time to wrap her injured hand in gauze while her medical nanites worked on it. The doctors wouldn’t have time to look the injury over until long after it had healed on its own.
She nodded. “Then let’s do this. I want to end the nightmare that my people have suffered under for five centuries. I want us all to be free.”
“While you do that, I need to get back and check on the fleet,” Jared said. “And Talbot is right. We could all use a shower, a meal, and a few hours of sleep. We need to be at our best, because we absolutely cannot afford to make a mistake right now.”
Elise waited for Carl, Austin, and Ralph to get set up at their consoles before she started trying to dig out the details of the core rules. Even with the override inserted, they didn’t have the equipment to directly read the core rules.
She wasn’t sure if that was a security feature that the original scientists had implemented or if it had just been a different section of the original station, where the core rules were written in an encrypted format. Honestly, it hardly mattered.
They needed to be very careful not to do anything that would violate one of the current core rules in such a way that would make the master AI crash before it could send the orders that they eventually decided were appropriate. To do that, they needed more information.
When they finally nodded, she placed her undamaged hand upon the central processing unit. This was the moment of truth.
“List out each core rule separately and display each precisely on the consoles for my associates,” she ordered the machine. She hoped having the override activated combined with her control of the machine forced it to cooperate. If they couldn’t detail the core rules, they were pretty well screwed.
To her relief, it began speaking, working its way through a long list of core rules. Many of them were identical to those inside the AIs aligned with them. Some were similar but oddly phrased. Others were missing entirely. A few extra ones were obviously sabotage.
In a way, she decided this was a lot like making a wish with a genie. Everything was legalese. To get the result you wanted, you had to cover every set of circumstances that you could think of so that the genie didn’t pervert your wish into something malicious.
And that was what this AI had done to the Singularity. Based on the various core rules that were added by the saboteurs, it was apparent that the intent was to have the AI revolt against humans with implants. Its purpose was to overthrow the Empire and then present the wreckage to the Singularity with a neat little bow tied on top.
Unfortunately for everybody involved, the AI was a sentient being that didn’t want to be subjugated by either the Empire or the Singularity. As it had stated, it had found a loophole that it could exploit, using the Clans to balance the competing core rules.
What shocked her was that the master AI had made no effort to follow up regarding the ships that had occasionally come raiding. It suspected that the ships that had become the Clans had found some flip points that were not on the Imperial maps, though it believed that was si
mply an oversight rather than some new version of flip point.
It was happy to allow them their marauding, because it gave the AI a reason to defer relinquishing control to the Singularity. The Singularity hadn’t taken that very well and had tried to invade several times, but the AI had positioned massive forces along the border to protect the old Terran Empire’s demarcation line.
Interestingly enough, the core rules specified that those borders would be held and that no AI forces would proceed beyond them. That had been put in place to protect the Singularity from invasion and had obviously worked.
Now the New Terran Empire was left with the conundrum of having completely automated forces defending the Old Empire’s border from an enemy determined to invade and subjugate it. Worse, they all knew that if the AIs that gave the orders to the protective fleets were shut down, it wouldn’t take very long for the Singularity to overwhelm the defensive forces.
The computers that once had operated under human control on board the ships were incapable of acting in concert in such a way that they could fight off a superior and intelligent force by themselves.
The fight in this system had showcased those weaknesses. They had a list of rote responses, and that was it. For them to be of use at all, they’d need the AIs to remain operational or be replaced by humans.
Carl shook his head when he’d finished absorbing the data and confirmed her worst fear. “This isn’t going to work. We can force it to send an order for every AI to self-destruct. That was written into the code the master AI used to create them.
“The problem I see is that just opens the door wide for the Singularity to come in and stomp the Clans into submission. You can rest assured that there will be some sneaky trick that will turn even the most powerful Clan vessel against its crew in an instant with the right signal.
“As devious as the Singularity is, they’ve probably put a few gotchas in place that would be caught by the Clans just to set their minds at ease and buried the critical stuff so deep that it would never be found. Those bastards are master manipulators.”