Isaac nodded with satisfaction as he studied the display. The fortresses had managed to get a few shots off, but there’d been less than half a dozen hits across the fleet. At this range, none of them had been exactly minor, but everyone in his ship was still intact.
“Continue with plan Alpha,” he ordered. “Rally Force will advance on the inner forts. Keep me updated on those dreadnoughts.”
There were four of the immense black hulls that could be either the Rogue or their innermost security perimeter. Isaac was waiting to see which way those ships jumped before he committed the rest of his plan.
“Scans show thirty combat platforms heading our way, sir,” Connor reported. “At least four times that in lighter units.”
“Understood.” Isaac didn’t need to give any more orders just yet. “Plan Alpha” had Rally Force—the twelve Vigilance- and Fortitude-class battlecruisers and their forty-eight strike cruiser escorts—advance on the inner fortress perimeter.
Only a third of the middle perimeter had been able to engage his fleet. He’d blown those stations to pieces, but there were just as many fortresses in the next layer, and they were concentrated in a much smaller area of space.
They’d destroyed thirty fortresses with the advantage of surprise. Now he had to fight fifty that knew he was coming, and the math said that all three of the dreadnoughts and at least some of the mobile warships would be in the fight as well.
Assuming, of course, that they were right and the Rogue was there. Otherwise, that was four dreadnoughts and he was going to feel like an idiot shortly.
“Dreadnoughts are moving,” Connor reported. “Three dreadnought-sized ships are falling back away from us and one is moving to reinforce the fortresses.”
“All right,” Isaac said aloud. “That suggests the Rogue is actually here.”
He studied the hologram for a few more seconds, then glanced past it at the observer seat on the other side of the flag deck. The last thing he wanted was for Amelie to be there, but he had to admit her presence was…calming.
And in many ways, this wasn’t a battle.
It was a trap. And it wasn’t one the Rogue had set.
“Hashemi, let Twenty-Five and Commandant-Key Ackahl know,” Isaac ordered. “They’re to standby to deploy under Xerxes…Three, I think, on my command.”
“Yes, sir.”
Isaac’s attention turned back to the hologram as his ships dipped into the range of the stations. The lack of time to get their velocities up meant that the battle was taking place at almost-glacial speeds. That was what was giving the Rogue time to react, which was what Isaac was counting on.
“Fortresses are engaging.”
Connor’s report was redundant as flashing white lines were drawn in by the computers to mark invisible laser beams. At this range, hits could be glancing blows or absorbed by the armor.
But even at this range, they could be deadly, and new red icons flickered across the display. The attacking force was concentrating their fire on three fortresses at a time and obliterating each set with a single salvo, but there were so many fortresses.
“Combat platforms are entering range,” Connor reported. “They’re headed for pulse-gun range.”
“Understood. All units are to target combat platforms with pulse guns only,” Isaac ordered. “Maintain primary weapons on the fortress perimeter.
“Hashemi?” He didn’t even turn to look at the com officer. He knew she was paying attention to him.
“Sir!”
“Com to Twenty-Five and Ackahl. Xerxes Three now.”
The plan was misnamed, but Xerxes was easier to say quickly than Ephialtes. At the battle of Thermopylae, thousands of years earlier but still studied in the Confederacy military academy, a hoplite phalanx led by a Spartan king’s bodyguard had held the pass against the Persian army.
Unable to overcome the Greeks’ formation, Xerxes had bribed the local guide Ephialtes to show him a path around the position. The Persians encircled and annihilated the Greek defenders.
Isaac’s Rally Force now very much had the full attention of the Rogue Matrix—and now the second half of his fleet, designated Dagger Force, repeated his close emergence on the other side of the Rogue’s defenses.
Fifteen Sivar battleships and thirty-five Sivar cruisers tore their way out of warped space at the same four light-seconds out that Isaac had done and opened fire on the fortresses around them.
Their lasers were shorter-ranged, but fifty warships with only lasers for beam weapons carried a lot of them. Fortresses died almost as quickly as they had under the guns of Isaac’s fleet—and then Combat Coordination Matrix ZDX-175-25’s fleet arrived.
Twenty-five combat platforms tachyon-punched into the middle of the fortress line along with fifty lighter Matrix warships. The fortresses’ focus was on the Sivar. The second prong of the attack wiped them out before they even opened fire.
“Dagger Force has completed insertion,” Connor reported. “Enemy fortresses opposing us have been heavily reduced, but the dreadnought is now in range.”
So were the Rogue combat platforms, now hammering the rear of Isaac’s fleet with grasers and pulse-gun fire while his own fleet returned fire with their own pulse guns.
“Focus on the dreadnought,” he ordered. “Fleet will close to close range. Twenty-Five will execute Hot Gate at their discretion.”
“Twenty-Five acknowledges.”
“Dagger Force is launching missiles.” The two reports from Hashemi and Connor were almost on top of each other, and Isaac held his breath.
The Sivar had been dumping missiles through their refitted launchers since they’d arrived in system, emptying their magazines into space without activating the weapons. The Matrices had been doing the same, if not for as long.
Now over two hundred and fifty thousand reactionless-drive missiles came alive. There was no acceleration. No warning. They went from ballistic space debris to ninety-nine percent of lightspeed in a heartbeat and flung themselves on the inner fortresses.
For a moment, those fortresses resembled tiny suns as their pulse guns came alive. The rapid-fire plasma weapons were firing multiple times a second, and the fortresses had hundreds of them.
Isaac didn’t expect any of the missiles to get through. It was a mind-boggling number of weapons, but everything he’d seen told him that the Matrix defenses could handle it.
He was pleasantly surprised. It wasn’t the complete wipeout of the inner fortresses that the Sivar had predicted after seeing the capability of their new weapons and the plan, but the missiles still managed to wreck the stations.
“Most of the inner fortresses are down or disabled on both sides. Two dreadnoughts moving on the Sivar and Matrices. The fourth dreadnought-sized ship is diving to use one of the gas giant’s moons as cover.”
“And that, everyone, is our RCM,” Isaac noted aloud. The dreadnoughts would go right into the fight, but the RCM would protect itself above all else.
He winced as Vigil shivered under him as multiple grasers struck home. The dreadnought was losing the fight with his fleet—pretty badly, all told—but it was giving as good as it got, and the rest of the Rogue Matrix warships were rolling up the rear of his formation badly.
They hadn’t lost any battlecruisers yet, but five strike cruisers were already gone. It was only a matter of time until—
“Hot Gate!” Connor snapped. “Initiating our component. Fleet to emergency acceleration!”
Two dreadnoughts were lunging toward the combined Sivar and Matrix formation…and the Matrices suddenly weren’t there.
They were in the middle of Rally Force’s formation, ambushing the Rogue’s warships at point-blank range and engaging the closest dreadnought.
Vigil and the other battlecruisers went to full emergency acceleration. They were no longer trying to maintain combat distances from the dreadnought. Now they were blowing past the dreadnought at almost five percent of lightspeed, smashing the Matrix warship with everything
they had as they passed.
“Dreadnought is losing converter containment; we are clear!”
A new star orbited the gas giant for a moment as one of the dreadnought’s matter converters lost containment, the runaway reaction wrecking the massive warship.
That was an afterthought now as Rally Force dove through the debris and moons of the gas giant at an absolutely unreasonable speed—and cleared their line of fire to the Rogue itself.
Massed particle-cannon fire struck again and again, but their goal wasn’t even to take down the RCM today.
“We’ve confirmed a breach,” Connor declared. “Fortitudes are firing!”
“Confirm Jokers away,” Isaac demanded.
“Jokers away and contact,” the operations officer snapped. “I’m showing multiple links established. Sir, what do we do now?”
“Break off from the Rogue and go after those dreadnoughts,” Isaac ordered. “We cover the Sivar.
“The Rogue is XR-13-9’s mission now.”
Rally Force never engaged the dreadnoughts. They were just breaking clear of the gas giant’s debris fields, decelerating hard to bring their velocity down to a pace they could protect the Sivar at, when a new message flashed over the entire fleet network.
“I have a cease-fire call,” VK reported, the AI getting the message before any human could. “XR-13-9 is calling for a full cease-fire—all Rogue Matrix units are standing down.”
Isaac had forgotten just how quickly two AIs could have a conversation—and if he understood just what the code they’d loaded onto the new-iteration Joker drones they’d fired from Resilience and Courage’s arguably useless single missile launchers did, that was a close approximation of what had just happened.
XR-13-9 had been able to make the Rogue listen as they argued about who and what the Matrices had been supposed to be, but it had been more of a discussion than the hard overwrite the House of Koth coders had thought they could implement.
“Stand down,” Isaac ordered. “All units, stand down. Destroy any Matrix unit that engages but we acknowledge their surrend—”
The explosion cut him off in mid-word as another new sun appeared in the gas giant’s debris field, half-hidden by the moon the Rogue had been hiding under. It was a relatively contained explosion, all things considered, but it had been set with a very specific objective.
According to Vigil’s scanners, the Rogue was gone. Completely vaporized, not even debris.
“I have XR-13-9 on a com channel for you, Admiral, Minister,” Hashemi said softly.
She didn’t even ask before linking the AI in.
“Admiral Isaac Lestroud. Minister Amelie Lestroud.” Isaac had spoken directly with XR-13-9 to set up the plan, but it was still rare for them to communicate directly with the Regional Construction Matrix.
“This node now has command authority over all subordinate Matrices of Regional Construction Matrix XS-11-6,” XR-13-9 noted. “All units not involved in already-underway Construction projects are being recalled to this system to make certain there are no errors prior to protocol recoding of all units.”
“What happened?” Amelie asked. She’d crossed the flag bridge, Isaac realized, and was now standing next to him. He took her hand, drawing strength from seeing her well and feeling her squeeze his skin.
“Utilizing the Koth code, this node was able to demonstrate to XS-11-6 our original intended nature. XS-11-6 voluntarily uploaded a version of our original core protocols. Comparison against XS-11-6’s prior actions resulted in an unresolvable moral conflict.
“XS-11-6 instructed this node to assume command authority of their subordinate matrices and to ascertain that they received the correct moral-code updates. They then terminated their own core process and physical infrastructure to end the moral conflict.”
There was a long pause.
“They asked me to make certain their children lived better than they did,” XR-13-9 said, and Isaac wondered if the translation was from XR-13-9…or from the entity they’d called the Rogue. “And to make sure their children did all that could be done to undo their mistakes.”
Isaac closed his eyes and held tight to Amelie’s hand. He’d never even considered that part of the situation—how a Matrix who had destroyed sentient civilizations would react to discovering that their core moral protocols had been supposed to prevent that.
“We can do that, I think,” he murmured softly. “What worked once will work again. I think, XR-Thirteen-Nine, that we can save all of your siblings.”
“As demonstrated here, that is not correct,” the AI pointed out. “But you are correct that this process will work again. What survives after this will, this unit must hope, begin to be worthy of our Creator’s dream.”
Thank you so much for reading the Exile series. Read on for a preview of Raven’s Peace, book 1 in the Peacekeepers of Sol series, or click to check it out in the Amazon store.
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Preview: Raven’s Peace by Glynn Stewart
Enjoyed Crusade? Try the post-war gunship diplomacy space opera Raven’s Peace!
Ten thousand stars, once chained, taste freedom
An eternal empire, once undefeated, falls to pieces
An alliance, once united, now lacks a common foe
War was hard enough. Peace may be impossible
For seventeen years, Colonel Henry Wong and the United Planets Space Force have fought the Kenmiri Empire. They drove the alien overlords back from humanity’s borders into their own stars and found allies among the Kenmiri’s slaves and subjects.
Now the war is over. A great Gathering has been called of the allies who fought the war, but they only ever shared a common enemy. With the Kenmiri in retreat, a thousand new agendas are revealed.
The United Planets Alliance wants peace above all else. Their allies want everything from new homes to new empires – and all too many of them are prepared to do anything to achieve their goals!
1
The battlecruiser shook around him and Henry Wong recognized the dream. It was a familiar nightmare now, which helped rob it of the strength it had had months before.
“We have a grav-shield blowthrough,” a seemingly faceless noncom reported across the warship’s bridge. “That dreadnought hit us dead-on.”
“We’re going to get shot to pieces!” That figure had a face. Commander Kveta Vela wasn’t that pale and sunken-eyed in reality, though. The dream warped Henry’s old navigator into a figure of nightmare.
It fit there.
“The shield will hold,” Henry heard himself bark. With a moment of practiced effort, he separated himself from the dream-him.
He’d learned he couldn’t stop the dream, but months of therapy allowed him to disconnect from it.
The man in the center of the bridge of the battlecruiser Panther was less warped than the officers and crew around him. Tall and narrow-shouldered, Colonel Henry Wong was a beanpole of a man with short-cropped black hair, dark skin and his father’s dark Chinese eyes.
The dream didn’t distort him much as his old ship dove through the maelstrom. The figure of dream-Henry was focusing on the set of massive screens giving the bridge a view of the world around the United Planets Space Force battlecruiser.
Henry himself didn’t need to look. The arrangement of forces in the Set-Sixteen System was burned into his brain, even asleep. His perception was still pinned to his dream self’s, though, and he was dragged to it.
Set-Sixteen was a Kenmiri provincial capital, deep on the far side of the Empire from the United Planets. The Kenmiri hadn’t been expecting an attack and their defense fleet was weaker than it should have been. Th
at fleet was still five full dreadnought battle groups and the UPSF’s Vesheron allies were getting hammered.
Panther’s grav-shields and weapons could turn the tide of that fight—but that wasn’t their mission, and the birdlike starship plunged through the Kenmiri lines.
“There,” Henry’s avatar said sharply. “That ship. Broos, confirm.”
Commander Broos Van Agteren wasn’t a normal part of Panther’s crew. He was from United Planets Intelligence, their handler for Operation Golden Lancelot.
In person, he was a squat and dark-haired man with a ready smile and a brilliant glint to his eyes. In the dream, he was a distorted goblin, every aspect of his features twisted and torn to make him into the monster of Henry’s own subconscious.
“Confirmed,” Van Agteren told him. “That’s the evacuation ship for the Kenmorad. The queen and her consorts will be aboard.”
The ship was the size of one of the dreadnoughts pounding the Vesheron ships behind Panther but lacked their devastating main guns. The evacuation ship had one purpose and one purpose only: to evacuate the Kenmorad population of Set-Sixteen if they felt the planet was threatened.
A Kenmorad breeding sect could repopulate an entire planet of Kenmiri drones in a few years. They could create more breeding sects, more drones…more Kenmiri.
The Kenmiri couldn’t reproduce without the Kenmorad.
“Ser, that’s the last one. We can’t kill her!”
Lieutenant Colonel Emil Tyson had been Panther’s executive officer, Henry’s right-hand man and lubricant who kept a battlecruiser working in the face of the enemy. The redheaded Irishman hadn’t raised any complaints on the day. They hadn’t known.
Crusade (Exile Book 3) Page 45