A.I. Void Ship (The A.I. Series Book 6)

by Vaughn Heppner

  Later, Boron 10 had witnessed the human message with its anti-AI virus. After a short computer struggle, the Beta Hydri battle station brain-core had succumbed to the enemy’s assault.

  The virus assault was more than clever, it was downright insidious. The living creatures had used the AI method against the Dominion. Who would have believed that living creatures could devise such a wicked counterblow?

  As Jon Hawkins had feared, Boron 10 had destroyed every probe attempting to discover his whereabouts under the planet’s ammonia clouds. The siege-ship had watched the enemy fleet decelerate and finally arrive at the captured battle station.

  The enemy fleet was not much in Dominion terms, but it was much bigger than what an errant species should have in Region 7-D21 at this point in the extermination campaign.

  It was true that the groupthink Kames at Delta Pavonis, Sigma Draconis and 70 Ophiuchi were proving stubborn in their continued resistance, but there were reasons for that. The AI Dominion had faced such species before and always won in the end. The rest of the Region 7-D21 aliens should all be dead by now.

  As Boron 10 waited for the exact moment to begin his attack, he had begun to understand the brilliance of Main 63. The great controller of Regions 7-D19, 7-D20 and 7-D21 must have understood that something of the kind had been going on out here.

  There were fourteen enemy cyberships and thirty-one assault-sized vessels. According to his scanners, yet another alien species crewed those small, triangular-shaped ships. Their combined mass was nothing compared to his awesome warship.

  Yes, it was time to destroy the enemy fleet and gather yet more data for Main 63. He had learned the key event, however, consisted in the humans having an anti-AI virus.

  Boron 10 now catapulted nineteen squadrons of fighters into orbital space, and those fighters zoomed in attack mode at the living enemy. At the same time, Boron 10 generated immense power and began to climb out of the planetary cloud cover. Soon, he would unlimber a host of gravitational dishes and obliterate the pesky fleet from existence.

  -14-

  Jon sat transfixed in his command chair as the true size of the enemy vessel became evident.

  “This is…” Gloria said, slowly shaking her head. “I can’t fathom the size, the amount of material used to construct such a thing.”

  Jon slid forward on his chair as he stared at the main screen.

  “It’s as big as the Moon,” Gloria said.

  “What are the ship’s actual dimensions?” Jon asked

  “Three thousand kilometers in diameter,” Bast reported.

  “Three thousand?”

  “Indeed,” the Sacerdote said.

  “I see gravitational cannons,” Gloria said, as she stared at her board. “There must be tens of thousands of them.” She swiveled around. “Jon. We can’t face that. It has us outgunned a thousand to one, maybe ten thousand to one. We’re fleas compared to it.”

  Jon stared in shock at the screen as the titanic spheroid broke through the massed ammonia clouds and headed for orbital space.

  “Almost six hundred robot space-fighters are heading for the battle station,” Bast said.

  As his heart raced, Jon shoved up to his feet and staggered toward the main screen. Gloria was right. They were fleas compared to that thing out there. It was like comparing a normal terrestrial planet to a star. The enemy vessel was monstrous. A one-hundred-kilometer cybership—the normally massive warship had been rendered to the size and potency of a shuttle compared to that thing. If he had one hundred cyberships, it wouldn’t matter. They could not win this battle.

  Jon scowled as he watched the colossal vessel rise upward from the enormous gas giant. He no longer had time to devise a careful plan. Hydri II was right up against them in stellar terms. Could they outrun the monster ship?

  Jon shook his head. No. They would not outrun it. The enemy ship and his fleet were each at almost zero velocity. The colossal AI vessel had maintained itself in Hydri II’s upper atmosphere. That meant the ship had titanic engines and could likely accelerate faster than any ship in his fleet. In space, size usually denoted the faster ship.

  That thing out there meant the Confederation’s largest fleet was doomed to destruction. Maybe if he sent every ship in a different direction, a few of them might survive to report about the monster vessel. Yet, if that thing destroyed most of the fleet…what hope would humanity have to face it later?

  Humanity certainly did not yet possess one hundred cyberships. And he might need one thousand cyberships to defeat that monster vessel in a regular space battle. That thing represented doom to man.

  “What are we going to do?” Gloria asked, her mentalist training likely keeping the hopelessness out of her voice.

  The normally philosophical Bast Banbeck didn’t have the same sternness. “Can we surrender?” the Sacerdote asked in a quiet tone.

  “No!” Jon said, as revulsion surged through him like an electric current. The idea was worse than repugnant. “We will never surrender,” he said, his voice hardening.

  “Then we will die,” Bast said.

  The words yanked a lever in Jon’s brain, flooding him with the abhorrence of defeat. The flood slowed his racing heart as he hardened his resolve. In the end, it was always going to come to this: a handful of human-crewed ships facing a massed death-machine onslaught.

  “It’s better to die fighting than to live on your knees,” Jon said.

  “As Bast suggests,” Gloria said, “we do not possess that option. AI vessels exterminate. They do not take prisoners—well, not often and not too many.”

  “This is just like Neptune,” the helmsman said, a lanky man with pitted features and black-staring eyes.

  Jon spun toward the officer, a man named Travis Nelson. “What did you say?”

  “This reminds me of Neptune when we first saw a cybership,” Nelson said. “Remember how the AI ship looked too big to exist? That’s the same thing with that…ship out there.”

  “Neptune,” Jon whispered, his eyes narrowing. “How did we defeat the cybership in the Neptune System?”

  For a moment, no one spoke.

  At last, Gloria cleared her throat. “We did the impossible, boarded what later became the Nathan Graham. But you can’t be thinking about boarding that ship, Jon. Imagine boarding Luna with the number of people we have. Even if we could get inside the thing, a million robots would exterminate us. The ship could have ten million robots to swamp us. We’ll never capture that.”

  “Maybe not,” Jon said, as he focused on the metal monster rising out of Hydri II. “The point is we’re going to fight with the intent to win. A win here means destroying it. That means we have to attack it with everything we have and hope our ramming cyberships will be enough to cause it to lose power so it sinks back into Hydri II. The gas giant’s gravity can crush it for us.”

  “Do you mean to use the assault crafts so the raiders can get inside?” asked Gloria.

  “We use everything we have,” Jon said. “The fleet is going to pull a Miles Ghent today.”

  Miles Ghent had been the captain of Cybership Da Vinci and had purposely turned his vessel and flown into unbelievably fast alien missiles. The missiles had killed Miles and everyone aboard the Da Vinci, but he’d saved half the strike force by his sacrificial action.

  “You mean for all of us to ram the enemy ship?” asked Gloria in a half-choked voice.

  “If we can’t survive,” Jon said, “—and I don’t see how we can against that—we can at least try to take the bastard down with us.”

  “What sort of generalship is that?” Gloria asked.

  Jon turned to her, and for a moment, he was just an ordinary man as fear and worry shined in his eyes. That changed as the hardened warrior psyching himself up for battle took over. This was it: his last hurrah. He’d always wanted to die fighting. Well, it looked like he was going to get his wish. He just wanted to make sure he destroyed his enemy while it happened.

  -15-

 
; The Confederation fleet began to maneuver, and under the circumstances, it was a reasonable plan.

  Hydri II was four times the size of Jupiter, approaching the mass that would have turned it into a star. The gas giant swirled with incredible storms. It pulled everything around it with an immense gravitational tug and it expelled harsh radio waves and heavy radiation. It was a hellish world. And out of the swirling ammonia-clouds a colossal metal warship arose, bristling with weaponry. No doubt, the brain-core controlling the ship planned to eradicate all of them, and it didn’t look as if there was anything they could do about it.

  Jon was giving it his best shot, though.

  The captured battle station targeted the clouds of approaching AI fighters. The brain-core in the station warned the fighters to stay away. They did not respond.

  The battle station’s gravitational cannons warmed up as golden balls of power sizzled into existence in the grav dishes. Then, golden beams speared out at the six hundred fighters.

  The AI fighters scattered even as the grav beams exploded one individual fighter after another.

  Meanwhile, Jon had made his decision. The potential firepower of the enemy ship beggared description. He couldn’t just drive straight at the AI vessel and hope to get close enough to ram it. He was going to have to get creative.

  Thus, as the battle station beamed the approaching AI fighters, the Confederation fleet maneuvered behind the battle station in relation to Hydri II. Each cybership-class vessel accelerated with huge exhaust tails growing rapidly in length and heat. The ships used the battle station as cover as they sped for the nearby factory moon. The Roke bombards followed to the back and on both sides of the fourteen cyberships. The bombards could not accelerate as fast as the human-crewed ships. The bombards remained on the sides because their vessels would not survive for long against the heated exhaust produced by fourteen matter/antimatter engines.

  While the Confederation fleet accelerated, the battle station slaughtered the approaching AI fighters.

  “Launch missiles,” Jon ordered the battle station. “Launch all your missiles and attack-craft on the assumption that you can annihilate the fighters. I want you to attack the enemy ship.”

  “I am launching as ordered,” the battle station brain-core replied.

  At that point, forty-six huge golden beams lashed outward from the colossal AI vessel even as it reached low orbital space around Hydri II. The new gravitational beams smashed through its surviving fighters and struck the armored hull of the battle station.

  The forty-six hot beams—larger than normal grav beams—drilled against the armored hull at an astonishing rate. The battle station had never been designed to take such punishment. The hull began to glow due to the deadly heat transfer from the beams to the metal. The immense heat transfer weakened the entire hull. Then, one grav beam punched through the hull armor. Another did likewise. Then a third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth—

  The battle station erupted in a mighty explosion. Metal, coils, computer parts, storage bulkheads, extra warheads—some vaporized and some sped outward at fantastic speeds.

  The remaining AI fighters vanished in the storm of heat, radiation and mass that swept them from existence.

  The terrible eruption of mass, heat and radiation might have crippled the Confederation fleet. But the majority of the Confederation ships had already slid behind the factory moon in relation to the battle station. The moon absorbed the shock of the battle station’s death, saving those ships.

  On the bridge of the Nathan Graham, various probe-fed screen-shots fizzled as one probe after another ceased to exist.

  “We’re doomed,” a weapon’s officer cried.

  “Quiet,” Jon said. “We’ve just started fighting—”

  “Started?” the officer shouted, interrupting, his eyes wild. “Are you insane? Did you see what that ship just did? We have to flee.”

  “You’re dismissed,” Jon said. “Report to your quarters.”

  The officer laughed crazily.

  Jon motioned to a space marine. The thick-necked marine marched to the man and grabbed him by the scruff of the neck.

  “Leave me alone,” the officer shrieked.

  The marine slugged him across the jaw and caught the officer as he slumped unconscious. Then the burly marine carted the officer off the bridge.

  Meanwhile, Jon snapped more orders.

  The fleet gained velocity as it sped past the factory moon and headed as fast as it could for the nearby gas giant.

  Jon was using the moon as a shield and using angles to keep the rising monster from being able to see them in direct line-of-sight. If the AI ship couldn’t see them, it couldn’t fire grav beams at them.

  As the fourteen Confederation cyberships strained to reached the gas giant, one XVT missile after another left the ships’ launch tubes. As the ships left the protection of the moon, those missiles roared for the AI vessel.

  Now, however, enemy golden gravitational beams once more reached out for them. Eight or nine beams hit Cybership Gilgamesh. Twelve enemy grav beams struck Cybership Albion. The two cyberships kept accelerating in order to get over Hydri II’s horizon in relation to the enemy vessel.

  The Gilgamesh made it with twelve other Confederation cyberships. The Albion blew up as enemy grav beams smashed through its hull armor and devoured crew and components inside.

  Fortunately for the fleet, just before the end, the captain of the Albion blew his matter/antimatter core. He did it deliberately as a shape-charged blast. The majority of the heat, remaining parts and radiation spewed toward the enemy ship arising from Hydri II. The enemy ship was too far away for that to matter for it, but the heroic and quick-thinking action saved many nearby friendly vessels.

  Despite that, seven Roke bombards shredded into pieces as the blast, radiation and near-speed-of-light particles from the destroyed Albion struck them.

  “Ignite the last third of the XVT missiles,” Jon said in a strangely altered voice.

  “Sir?” the Missile Chief asked.

  “Ignite them now,” Jon said. “Create a whiteout. Now, now! Do it now!”

  The Missile Chief stabbed buttons on his panel.

  In space, the last third of the XVT missiles heading toward the rising AI monster exploded.

  At the same time, fifty-two large grav beams lashed most of the remaining Roke bombards that were in the AI vessel’s line-of-sight. What might have happened if the beams had remained on target was obvious.

  The detonating warheads caused more than a sensor whiteout, however. They also created a blast zone. That zone momentarily created a kind of shield that blocked the enemy’s grav beams.

  During that brief time, the thirteen human-crewed cyberships reached the outer orbital edge of Hydri II. They turned hard, changing their heading. Instead of traveling directly at the gas giant, they began to skim along the outer orbital edge, heading at accelerating velocity toward the still-rising AI monster. The enemy ship no longer had line-of-sight on them, as Hydri II’s horizon blocked them from each other. Thus, the enemy vessel could not fire the gravitational beams at them.

  The Roke bombards weren’t as lucky because they were slower.

  Some of the bombards had ceased to exist because of enemy grav beams. Some died because of the Albion exploding, and a few more were destroyed due to the detonating warheads creating the whiteout. In total, half of the Roke bombards were gone, leaving sixteen to fulfill the honor of the furry Star Lords.

  “The AI is slaughtering us,” Gloria said.

  “So far,” Jon said grimly.

  “What can you hope to achieve by this?” she asked.

  “Meaning,” he said.

  “Suicide is meaning?”

  “If it takes down my enemy—yes.”

  “We’re going to lose the war.”

  Once more, Jon stared at his wife. He wanted to tell her that he was only human. What did she expect from hi
m? The colossal AI ship was far too much for the greatest Confederation fleet yet.

  “Try the anti-AI virus against it,” Jon said.

  “It’s obvious that’s why it’s here,” Gloria said. “It must have seen what we did to the battle station, recording the event.”

  “Of course,” Bast said as he snapped his fingers. “It watched our battle station takeover, and it did nothing to counteract it. The AI ship lured us to the star system to observe our methods.”

  “Don’t you think I know that?” Jon said in as even a voice as he could manage. “We’re going to charge and fire at it from the closest range I can get us. Those of us that can will accelerate into the ship and try to ram and detonate it. If that fails, maybe some of us can reach inside and march to its brain-core.”

  “A suicide run,” Gloria said quietly.

  “It was the only thing I could think of that gives us even a quantum’s damn of a hope of winning this fight,” Jon said.

  Gloria nodded as her small shoulders slumped. “We will do what we can. That is logical.” With that, she turned back to her board. The fleet gained velocity as it raced around Hydri II.

  -16-

  “They are bold,” the first alien said.

  “Reckless and foolish,” said the second. “They cannot win.”

  “I do not believe they are attempting to win.”

  “Then…their behavior is even less worthy of our time.”

  The two aliens watched the progress of the Confederation fleet as it circled the gas giant, obviously trying to get into immediate firing range of the AI siege-ship.

  The aliens watched from a vessel the humans had once decided to call a void ship. In human terms, it was a great spheroid over three-hundred kilometers in diameter. It had an outer rocky exterior like an asteroid, and giant nozzles in back to propel it. The two aliens were in a huge, mountain-like building on the asteroid’s rocky hull. The ship was presently in the blackness of the void, a nebulous realm outside of normal time and space, as biological and machine entities conceived of such things. The observing aliens were neither biological nor machine, as they were composed of raw energy, but ordered energy of a unique sort.