The Code

by Doug Dandridge

  Exodus:

  Machine War:

  Book 5:

  The Code.

  by

  Doug Dandridge

  Dedication

  This novel is dedicated to Chris Kennedy, the Factory Boss and the co-creator of the Four Horsemen Universe. You have shown this old man how it should be done.

  Contact me at BrotherofCats@gmail.com

  Follow my Blog at http://dougdandridge.com

  Follow me at @BrotherofCats

  Copyright © 2019 Doug Dandridge

  All rights reserved.

  Please respect the hard work of this author. If you found this book for free on a pirate site, please visit Amazon and buy a copy of your own. I feel that I charge a reasonable price for this work. I would like to thank Ruth de Jauregui for the wonderful job she has done lettering my books. And finally, I would like to thank Larry Southard, probably my biggest, and definitely most vocal, fan.

  For more information on the Exodus Universe, visit http://dougdandridge.net for maps, sketches and other details of this work.

  Books by Doug Dandridge

  Doug Dandridge’s Author Page at Amazon

  Science Fiction

  The Exodus Series

  Exodus: Empires at War: Book 1

  Exodus: Empires at War: Book 2

  Exodus: Empires at War: Book 3: The Rising Storm.

  Exodus: Empires at War: Book 4: the Long Fall.

  Exodus: Empires at War: Book 5: Ranger

  Exodus: Empires at War: Book 6: The Day of Battle

  Exodus: Empires at War: Book 7: Counter Strike:

  Exodus: Empires at War Book 8: Soldiers

  Exodus: Empires at War: Book 9: Second Front.

  Exodus: Empires at War: Book 10: Search & Destroy.

  Exodus: Empires at War: Book 11: Day of Infamy.

  Exodus: Empires at War: Book 12: Time Strike.

  Exodus: Empires at War: Book 13: Retaliation.

  Exodus: Empires at War: Book 14: Rebellion.

  Exodus: Tales of the Empire: Exploration Command:

  Exodus: Tales of the Empire: Beast of the Frontier.

  Exodus: Machine Wars: Book 1: Supernova.

  Exodus: Machine Wars: Book 2: Bolthole.

  Exodus: Machine War: Book 3: Death From Above.

  Exodus: Machine War: Book 4: Retribution

  The Deep Dark Well Series

  The Deep Dark Well

  To Well and Back

  Deeper and Darker

  Theocracy

  Theocracy: Book 2

  Others

  The Shadows of the Multiverse

  Diamonds in the Sand

  The Scorpion

  Afterlife

  We Are Death, Come for You

  Five By Five 3: Target Zone:

  A Fistfull of Credits Anthology.

  Tales of The Lyon’s Den Anthology.

  Those in Peril Anthology.

  Lockdown: Zombie Anthology.

  The Prometheus Saga: A Science Fiction Anthology

  The Monster

  Apocalypse: A Fiction River Anthology.

  Fantasy

  The Refuge Series

  Refuge: The Arrival: Book 1

  Refuge: The Arrival: Book 2

  Refuge: Book 3: The Legions

  Refuge: Book 4: Kurt’s Quest:

  Refuge: Book 5: Angels & Demons

  Doppelganger: A Novel of Refuge

  Others

  The Hunger

  Daemon

  Aura

  Marathon

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  Prologue

  GORGANSHA HOME WORLD: JANUARY 20TH, 1003.

  Hraston Gonoras sat his throne and studied the star map that was projected into the air before him. The stars his people inhabited were highlighted in yellow. There had been many more of them before the Machines had come. The ones that were still there were mostly the more populated systems, the industrial muscle of his Empire. Looked at that way, they had retained over three quarters of the muscle, and lost some of the fat. Of course, if the humans hadn’t arrived, he probably would have lost it all by now.

  They are such fools, he thought of the newcomers to this section of space. Why in the hells did they offer to aid a species that was not their own, not even subjugated by them. What did they get out of it? He knew the Gorgansha people would not engage in such foolishness. His people were practical. There were Gorgansha, and then there were enemies and potential enemies. Unless they had been subjugated and enslaved. Most Gorgansha still had a difficult time believing that any species that had become a star power could live by the philosophy of altruism. It had to be a lie, and the humans were trying to lull the Gorgansha into a false sense of security, before they invaded.

  Of course, there was still the threat of the Artificial Lifeforms. The humans had advanced the tech of the Gorgansha fleet, but only so they could use them as cannon fodder. Well, he wasn’t about to fall for that. His fleet would be preserved. Let the humans fight and die to destroy their creations. His fleet would defend his territory, and once the humans had been weakened enough, he would destroy their fleet as well, and then the expansion would begin.

  “Dictator,” said one of his aids, walking into the audience room and bowing. “The machine infestation has been crushed. The human Marines have finished them off for us.”

  That was one he should have listened to the humans about. His scientists had developed their own war machines, both to fight the evil invaders and to control their own slave populations. They had started the development before the human contact, and the dictator had seen not seen any reason to not deploy his robots. And then had come the slave revolt, and the perfect opportunity to use the battle bots. Who had almost immediately started attacking his own forces as soon as they put down the rebels. Fortunately, the humans had been near, with their battle suited Marines, and had been able to get the situation under control. While at the same time taking some losses and leaving behind some wrecked suits his people had been able to quickly hide. Soon they would have that technology as well.

  The machines had gone into hiding, what few of them survived, and it had taken months for the humans to track them all down in their various places they had hidden in across the system. They had eventually done the job. Now the dictator was wondering if they could build the machines again, with more safeguards in place.

  “And where are the human Marines now?”

  “On their way back to their ships, or waiting on their shuttles, Dictator.”

  “Let me know when the last of them are off. And have the shuttles all been set?”

  “Yes, Supreme Dictator. All is ready.”

  Gonoras gave a head shake of acknowledgement, showing his teeth in a predatory smile. He waved his two left limbs in the air while the heavy claw of his right limb gripped his chair arm in excitement. His three turreted eyes closed as he thought about what he was going to order in the near future. It would commit his people to another war. It was necessary if he was to continue to rule this space. If his people were to continue to rule over their slave species.

  “When the time comes I want as many of those telepathic aliens as possible taken alive,” he said, staring into the three blinking eyes of his subordinate. “We must have a breeding population.”

  The humans had shown his people many technological wonders. A higher level of hyper, more powerful weapons, the wormholes. They could reproduce the hyper VII drives, and the more powerful weapons, though the Gorgansha industrial base would have to expand to take advantage of them. The wormholes were a non-starter. The humans would not tell them how to make them, and his own scientists seemed to feel that it was still centuries beyond them.r />
  The Klassekians now. They were a miracle of evolution. Those born of the same mother in the same birthing were able to communicate with each other across any distance. The dictator thought of what his fleet could do with com slaves like that. The humans refused to sell them, though, and he could only get a few for temporary assignment to his flagships, and only if they volunteered. Only one sibling group had volunteered, and only after various guarantees for their safety. He had never heard of such nonsense. They weren’t humans, not the dominant species of that Empire, so why did they care so much.

  And the way the humans treated their females, like their equals. That was bad enough, but he had to deal with them as officers of their fleet. Worse, his own females were starting to get ideas. No one had ever said that they were stupid. Just that they were physically weak, and therefore unworthy to be in leadership positions. Those were reserved for warriors. So much going on, so many changes. If things worked out the way he wanted it would be the start of a golden age for his rule, for his people. If not, they might end up conquered by the humans, who were such sentimental fools that the Gorgansha would soon get another chance to rule themselves, though it would be over for Hraston Gonoras. It was a risk, but weren’t all things that brought advancement.

  He would have to exercise some more patience. The Artificial Lifeforms were still a major threat, and must be destroyed before he declared war on the humans. But everything was in place, so when the time came he could give the orders and they would be carried out.

  * * *

  “How many star systems in our area of operations?” asked Fleet Admiral Beata Bednarczyk, looking at the huge rotating holo map turning in front of her. The conference room was large, but the holo map made it seem to extend out to infinity to everyone actually sitting there. Those attending by holo themselves would also see a larger than life representation, limited by the power of their own holo projectors.

  There were millions of stars in the projection, appearing like a rain of brilliant dots. There were areas of relative scarcity interspersed with globes and twists of density. Red, orange and yellow were the predominant colors, along with many whites and some eye hurting blues, Nebulas of gas resided here and there, taking on the shades of the closer stars shining through them. A tiny piece of one arm, the Perseus, in one average sized galaxy, they were really more than the human mind could take in.

  “At least thirty million stars,” stated the operations officer, Captain Dominik Swede, his eyes following the look of his admiral. Everyone had their own individual control of what they saw in the holo, and could zoom or pan as they saw fit. For conferences like this most tapped into what their leader was looking at so they would have reference to what she was talking about.

  “Thirty million,” said Beata, nodding her head. “And what, half of those are in multiple star systems? Still giving us over twenty-two million individual systems. And we have a total of eleven thousand Imperial warships to cover that area.”

  “Don’t forget the twenty odd thousand Gorgansha vessels,” said Mara Montgomery from the area her holo projection sat.

  “I’m trying, very hard,” said Beata, sparking a few muffled laughs from among her people.

  The Empire had spent billions of Imperials boosting the tech base of the Gorgansha, and the alien fleet was growing by leaps and bounds. Its ships were now twice as capable as they had been. She didn’t think they were as good as her ships on a ton for ton basis. That there were more of them was still a concern to her, especially as they didn’t seem to be pulling their weight in the current mission.

  “So, let’s say we have twenty thousand vessels that can conduct searches” she continued, parts of the map zooming in as she swept her eyes across it. “One ship for every thousand systems. And that’s if we send them in singly, a recipe for disaster if the Machines decide to pick them off.”

  “The problem,” said Mara Montgomery if reply, her holo image rippling, “is that if their ships are in hyper we can’t pick them up from a long distance. And if they’re standing still in the system, we can’t detect them from the edge of the system. The only way we can detect them there is to send ships in, taking a day or more of time, and hoping we can stir them up.”

  “A fucking impossible situation,” said Beata, nodding toward her scout force commander. “No way we can check out every system in any kind of realistic schedule. Not with enough force to do anything about it.”

  “So, what do we do?” asked Captain Lyndsey Quan, the Fleet Tactical Officer.

  “What do you suggest, Senior Tac? This is your area, after all.”

  “I thought my job was to come up with battle plans to give to you for approval or not,” said the younger officer, one of the most intelligent people at the conference, shrugging her shoulders.

  “Think of this as a battle plan, then,” said an angry fleet commander, glaring at her subordinate.

  “Sorry, ma’am,” said the admonished officer, looking down for a moment. When she looked back up the ever-present smile was creeping across her face. “Didn’t mean to make light of it. What would I do? The only thing I could. Continue to use our electromagnetic projector ship to sterilize systems as fast as we can. Keep scouting as well as we can. And keep trying to intercept their grav pulse signals so we can keep sending information back to Admiral Chan.”

  Beata nodded. It was exactly what she was thinking. Their only real hope of ending this thing in a reasonable time was for Chan to come up with the magic bullet, the kill switch. She hated having to depend on that, and wanted a military solution that used what she already had on hand to solve the problem.

  There’s one other thing I can do, she thought. Something that might get her more ships. She didn’t think the Empire had any more to give, but there were other powers in the alliance. Even if they could only give a small percentage of their fleets, it would still reinforce her to a great extent.

  “Okay, we keep doing what we’re doing until we have a better opportunity to try something else,” said Beata, emphasizing her words with her pointing finger. “Everyone is to follow their orders, with the caveat that initiative is to be supported. And one last thing. I want everyone to keep a close eye on our Gorgansha.”

  “Don’t trust them, ma’am?”

  “No, Mara. Not as far as I could throw their Dictator. Much as I would like to do that.”

  The meeting broke up with more chuckles. No one on the staff liked the bastard, but he was what they were forced to work with.

  Chapter One

  The problems of victory are more agreeable than those of defeat, but they are no less difficult. Winston Churchill

  MACHINE CENTRAL INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM. FEBRUARY 15TH, 1003.

  The Machine mind that controlled the system that was now their most productive industrial center thought about what was going on in its war with the humans, its original creators. It was trying to come up with a solution, a way to win. Thinking and calculating, going through millions of permutations a second, coming up with solution after solution. Unfortunately, none of the solutions seemed workable. They might work against a species made up of total idiots, which unfortunately was not the definition of humans.

  It had done what it could. Since the humans had shown they had the ability to take out any heavily fortified system, the Machines had spread out, putting their industry in a thousand systems, working on more. That had diluted the effect of each human strike, and they had still been able to sting the humans in each system. But in the long run it was an unworkable strategy. The Machines needed to engage the humans in major battles and win. If the entire human Empire was brought into the battle it would lose.

  Gaining the technology of hyper VII travel had helped to narrow the tactical disadvantages. The graviton beam technologies had even hurt the faster human ships when deployed properly. The one thing they couldn’t duplicate were the wormholes the humans seemed to have so many of. Maybe if given the technology, and provided with some decades to build a stati
on such as they humans were said to have, it might be able to come up with its own. In the quantity needed to counter what the humans had? That was the question.

  A signal come through from the AI that was running the shipyards. The Overmind linked in and looked over the report. Twelve more of the hyper VII battleships were ready to leave their building slips. They had lasers, they had missiles, and what they didn’t have was sufficient supermetals to finish their hyperdrive arrays. It could either finish them as hyper VI vessels, or make four with hyper VII drives. More supermetals would be on the way as soon as the production facilities were ready. Unfortunately, that was still over a month away, and it would have thirty more battleships in this system alone at that time, waiting for their allotment of supermetals.

  [Finish them all as hyper VI ships] it sent back to the shipyard AI. It then updated its order of battle. In this system alone it had ninety-one battleships and one hundred and fifty-six escorts, very few of them hyper VII. That knowledge in hand, it powered up the huge transmitter array and sent a signal to the next system. As soon as it received acknowledgement, it sent it on to the next, and the next, until it had contacted all thirty-eight systems in the local net.

  If the AI could feel emotions it would smile. It had enough ships to do something with them other than just letting them sit in system defense stances. It knew from the information that had been initially programed into it so many centuries before that going on the offensive was the only way to win a war. Capturing the initiative the humans called it.

  So it pulled up the star charts with all of the enemy deployments it knew of. Some were very powerful, with enough in the way of suspected wormholes that action against them would cost dearly. The one system toward the home space of the humans had been tried before, multiple times, and the Machines had always lost. That seemed like a non-starter. The Empire of the other organic beings involved in this war had some good targets. The problem with that was the stars were all within support range of each other, and it couldn’t take on all of those forces at once.