The Code

by Doug Dandridge

  Johnny looked at the cage, containing a pregnant female rabbit that would have been released soon, along with thousands of others. They had planned their first bird colonies, which would join the worms and insects that had been established early on to build the soil and fertilize the plants.

  Only the word had come down that the Machines were back, and that missiles were on the way that could devastate the surface of the world.

  “Why the hell can’t they just leave us alone,” cried Karen, staring up at the sky.

  “That’s not what they’re about, dear,” said Johnny, putting an arm around her shoulder. “They only care about killing, and by making this a living world, we are creating a target for them.”

  The entrance to the shelter was across the holding area, past the small habitats they had established for the first animal transplants to this region. There were hundreds of small mammals, lizards and birds in the habitats. This world was going to be terraformed as a New Earth. They were starting off with the smallest animals in the ecosystem. Rodents, weasels, foxes, prey and predators. Next would come some of the larger animals.

  “What about our animals?”

  “We can’t evacuate all of them to the shelter,” said Johnny, hoping that the favorite rabbit she had gotten attached to would keep her calm. He also didn’t like abandoning all the new animal life they were about to establish here. They would to be followed by millions more in thousands of species. He didn’t like the idea that the hundreds of millions of trees that they had planted were about to be incinerated.

  “We’ll restart if we have to,” he said, hitting the button to summon the elevator. “But we have to survive to restart it.”

  The door opened, revealing an elevator, empty. Most of the other staff had already gone down. More would be coming, but it was up to them to get here. The same at the other score or so sites. The couple moved into the car and the doors closed behind them, the lift starting on its way down. It only had small compensators, and it took some time to move down the five thousand meters to the shelter capsule.

  Johnny kept waiting for the ground to start shaking from kinetic hits. Finally the door opened, revealing the shelter with all the other workers standing around and talking. At least the majority of them. Some were still missing, and Johnny was hoping that they might be elsewhere in the shelter.

  “Hiero and Ivan are still missing,” said Pietro, Johnny’s assistant. “Last I heard they were out at the northern lakes checking out the forest.”

  “Shit,” exclaimed Nakajima, visualizing that area. The northern lakes were a chain that had formed naturally in the foothills of a mountain range. A northern Taiga forest planted there was not reacting as hoped, and the pair were plant biologists who were looking into what needed to be done to correct the problem.

  Nakajima Terraforming had ten thousand people working on the project, in fields like biology, ecology, geology and others. More would have been coming from the Empire, ten thousand specialists to supervise expanding the ecology. It took a lot of trial and error to get it to work, and sometimes things worked in a way that was unexpected.

  “What can we do?” asked one of the other people.

  “Nothing. All we can do is shelter and hope they make it to safety.”

  There was some grumbling, but no one was willing to leave the shelter to stage a rescue.

  Karen started crying softly, still holding the carrier.

  We didn’t sign up for this, thought the project supervisor, looking around at the shocked faces of his people. They had come here to bring a world back to life. Not to get caught up in a war zone. But here they were, wanted or not.

  * * *

  Captain Jessica Powers stared at the plot her Klassekian com tech was projecting through his implant into the holo projector. It wasn’t perfect. There was some blurring in some regions as the two brains involved processed the data and sent it over the link. Not perfect, but better than anything they would have had without the singular aliens as com techs.

  The missile swarm they were coming after was just ahead and to port. Beyond it was the planet they were charged with protecting, a light hour away. And of course the cloud of enemy fighters was coming in behind and to starboard. It seemed the Machines had a hard on for life, so they had prioritized the almost uninhabited planet. It didn’t make sense to the military trained mind of the wing commander, but then they were a much different order of intelligence. Really nothing more but very advanced calculating machines, like all computers. Not something humans and their allies could relate to.

  Fortunately, they had only had to warp a little over a light hour from Bolthole. The planet was inward from the asteroid and in the same arc of orbit. One light hour and fifteen light minutes. The Machines were out at the hyper barrier, two light hours distant. The enemy had actually seemed to let them boost toward the target before heading out. The captain wasn’t sure why, but she didn’t think it was a mistake, it was a feature of their tactics. Because of that they were able get to the target a little faster than the enemy. But was it fast enough?

  “Okay. We’ve got maybe five minutes before we’re going to be involved in a dogfight. So everyone pick a missile, make sure your neighbor isn’t going after the same, and go get it.”

  “Get us on the closest missile and knock it out of space,” she ordered her pilot, Lieutenant Isuku.

  She felt a shiver go up her spine as she again looked at the enemy swarm. They would be her problem in less than ten minutes. Each of her ships carried four warp missiles, which they would need when the six hundred enemy fighters arrived. Which meant they would have to attack the missiles in normal space with their lasers.

  The pilot was well trained in this kind of maneuver. He dropped out of warp four light seconds to the front of the missile, a little off to port so the laser ring could target it. He lined up and fired, just a fraction of a second before the missile fired its own light amp weapon on the fighter.

  Shit, thought the captain as the fighter shook momentarily from a laser hit. They aren’t just missiles.

  They should have guessed that the ultimate AIs would have configured their missiles to have defenses, essentially making them robotic attack craft. The pilot was an expert shot, he and the automated aiming system. The powerful laser blasted through the nose of the missile, breaching its antimatter, blasting it into plasma.

  “Damage report?” asked Powers.

  “Right bow thrusters are out. One of our laser emitters is gone. Small hull breach,” called out the engineering tech in the rear compartment of the fighter.

  “We lost seven fighters, ma’am,” called out the sensor tech, her wide eyes looking back at her captain.

  “Shit.” Now it made sense for the enemy fighters to let them close with the missiles before attacking. The missiles were capable of destroying her fighters from close range, and every one of hers they knocked out was one less she had to use in the fight against the enemy warp ships.

  “How many did we get?”

  “Estimating eight-seven, ma’am.”

  Powers ran those numbers through her brain for a moment. That meant that thirty-one had missed of her fighters had hit. Did all seven of the destroyed fighters miss, or did some, like her own, get in the killing shot while getting hit themselves. Still, it was a good hit ratio, but they would have to conduct just over nine more attacks to take out the swarm, and that was if she lost no more ships. If they used the same tactic as they had just performed, she would not have a wing left before she got to the end of the swarm. And the enemy fighters were now about four and a half minutes away.

  “All fighters are to perform evolution Charlie,” she ordered, setting in motion an alternate attack profile. “Everyone get with your buddy and get moving.”

  She had just set the Charlie plan in motion, and from here on they would not be able to target as many missiles on each attack. What they would do was attack from the stern, where hopefully the heavy armament would not be as much in e
vidence. And with two ships she was hoping to get in sure kills before the enemy weapons could react.

  That evolution went much better. The forty-nine pairs and one trio killed all fifty of their targets. And still lost two ships as missiles spun around in place to bring their nose beams into the line of fire. It was a better loss to kill ratio than before, but still not what the captain would consider optimal. The next was more damaging to her force. She lost four fighters, while knocking out forty-two missiles. She was beginning to think that at the current rate she would run out of fighters before taking out all the missiles. And the enemy fighters were now two and a half minutes away.

  At one minute to enemy contact she had eighty-two fighters left. Not all of the fighters had been totally destroyed, and there were some crew floating in space in their ejectable cockpits.

  “Make sure you keep sending out progress reports back to command,” she told her com tech. If she could help the other attack wave to make more efficient attacks with fewer losses she had accomplished part of her mission. She would rather have had the information herself to work with, but she was the first wing to attack, so the mission had been handed to her.

  “All fighters. Turn eighty degrees to starboard, ten degrees up inclination. Boost at full speed for two minutes, then turn into attack vector on enemy fighters. Prepare double missile launch in optimal range and veer off.”

  She thought it would be better to initiate the attack with her wing, instead of reacting to the enemy.

  “Turning,” called out the pilot. The fighters moved through warp without inertia, without any kind of normal space velocity. Turning the compression field moved the vector of the craft. Unlike normal space ships, the warp fighters could actually bank and turn in space, and the wing swung onto their attack vectors and came in, carefully avoiding crossing their compression fields on their fellows.

  At maximum range the fighters loosed their first pair of missiles, the weapons taking off at warp and zeroing in on targets. The enemy fighters only had one defense against them, moving their own compression/expansion beams and attempting to catch them in the disruptions. Nine missiles dropped off the plot as they were speared by compression beams. The rest hit, their own compression beams blasting through the sides of the warp bubbles and into the enemy fighters. Less than a second later the missiles themselves hit, their warheads exploding and blowing one hundred and fifty-five Machines fighters out of space.

  The human fighters sped off, using their speed advantage to separate, opening up the range. At a minute’s distance they turned and headed back. This time the Machines took out eleven missiles and one fighter, while the missiles took out a hundred and fifty-three of the enemy.

  Now it becomes hard, thought the captain, looking back on the plot. There were still almost three hundred enemy fighters, and now she would have to close with them, dogfighting with compression beams. Her ships had compression beams that extended a quarter again further than that of the Machines, a function of their higher speed. Unfortunately, on the attack there was still the possibility of coming into the range of the enemy beams. Powers was hoping that her pilots could get in, get a hit, and get out, without that happening, but there were no guarantees.

  * * *

  The coded grav pulse signal ran through the system like so many other pulses. It was obviously a com, but no one could tell to what. The targets of the transmission didn’t have that problem.

  The Machines had been hiding on the asteroid since the last attack on the system. The humans had assumed they had gotten all of them, and then conducted detailed searches to find out if there was anything they might have missed. The pair of Machines pods had been powered down completely, waiting for the command. Now they went active, powering up and releasing swarms of nanites into the nickel/iron of the asteroid. The pods themselves had stores of silicon and other elements, enough to allow the construction of several thousand small construction and combat bots with minimal crystal matrix batteries. Not enough to take the asteroid, but definitely enough to work on another army, and take what it needed from the rest of the facility.

  If only the human sensors didn’t pick them up for just a bit more time.

  * * *

  “Captain Powers’ reports that they are dogfighting the Machine fighters,” said the com officer in an excited voice. “She has lost some ships, but each attack pass is taking out thirty to forty enemy,”

  Henare nodded, looking on the plot. He could see the swarming of the fighter groups, his and the Machines, but couldn’t parse out the details. He hoped the Machines would be defeated before Powers’ wing was gone, so she could go back after the missiles and save the planet. Even if that wasn't possible, and the Machines fired more swarms of missiles, those were weapons that wouldn't be targeting his vital platforms.

  Reports were coming in from the other wings. They were losing some ships to the missiles, which were essentially combat drones that also carried large warheads, kind of like the Kamikazes of the past. He was still hoping one of the wings would take out their targets and move to Powers’ aid, but so far they were all still whittling away at the enemy. And losing some of their ships in the process.

  “We have more Machine warp fighters powering up, sir.”

  “Shit,” hissed the admiral in alarm. “How many?”

  The admiral could see the signals of the mass of warp fighters on the plot, but there wasn’t a count yet. But there seemed to be a lot of them. It was looking like he might have to call a wing or two off missile attack before they were finished. They would need to rearm with missiles before taking on the missiles, which meant either returning to the asteroid base, or…

  “Vector these wings over to this carrier,” he said, pointing to the ship on the plot, loitering out in another part of the asteroid belt. It had just been completed by the ship yards and was preparing for its hyper shakedown cruise. It had small caches of warp missiles, enough to supply a wing with two loads, what it would have needed for training during the shakedown. It had been thought that it was best to not move the carrier, to hope that the enemy didn’t spot it, since it wasn’t fully crewed yet, and was not a ship of the line. Vectoring fighters over there might give it away, but the fighters needed to rearm as fast as possible, and there it was, ready to be used.

  “First Crakista ships are coming through the portal, sir.”

  Henare turned to look at the holo that showed the portal. It was about time, though they would still only add another thirty-four capital ships to his order of battle. It was looking like he was going to be overwhelmed in this battle unless command came up with more reinforcements.

  “Get me McCullom.”

  Henare only had to wait a few moments for the CNO to appear on the com holo. He supposed she was monitoring both battles in this space, since nothing was going on at the Caca front at the moment. Henare realized that that fact could change at any moment. It was fortunate that the Cacas, as far as the humans knew, didn’t have intelligence on what was going on out on this front. If they did, they might try to take advantage of it.

  “Admiral. I know what you want, and I have to tell you that we’ve given you everything we could possibly get to you. Everything else would take half a day or longer to get to the gate.”

  “Even more warp fighters?”

  “We’ve noted that the Machines have their own warp fighters, so it’s looking like they aren’t quite the advantage we were hoping they would be,” said McCullom, shaking her head. “However, I will see what we might have training in the black hole system that I might be able to cut loose.”

  Henare nodded, another thought in the back of his mind. He would not abandon the system, no matter what, orders of not. However, he felt like he was in over his head. Henare had never been considered a tactical genius. More of an administrator than anything else, he had been picked for this slot because it was felt he would do a good job on getting an industrial system up and running. But he wasn’t the man to try and pull out a tact
ical miracle.

  “You can do it, Anaru,” said McCullom, nodding. “Remember, they’re fucking calculating machines with delusions of grandeur.”

  “And you think that little speech is going to make me feel like I can pull off a miracle?” said Henare, giving the CNO a sideways glance.

  “Hell, no,” said McCullom, shaking her head. She looked into the eyes of her admiral. “I stopped expecting miracles halfway into this war against the big bastards. I will tell you though, I have seen people I never thought would pull something off do it, over and over, starting with our Emperor. You have the best training we could give you. The Academy, the Commander’s College, the Naval War College. You can outthink them. I wish we could tell you what to do, but you’re the man on the spot, so it’s up to you to figure it out. Just remember. They take things at face value, and they can be fooled. So find a way to fool them until we can get the projector ship to you.”

  “And where is our miracle weapon?”

  “Still on approach to the gate in its system. A couple of hours. Maybe a little longer.”

  Henare thought about that path, doing the calculations. After it passed through that gate it would have an hour’s flight to the next, then nine hours at least time accel/decel into the gate that led here. So best case would be a little less than twelve hours. They would be hit by at least one missile storm by then, possibly three of four. If he was the AI he would target the gate, cutting the system off from reinforcements. He might know there were no more coming, but they wouldn’t, so the gate would be a priority target.

  “I’ve got an idea, Admiral,” he said after going over his plan in his mind for a moment. “It might be the craziest damn thing anyone has ever thought of in this war, but if it works, we might still have a way to get Chan’s miracle weapon here in time to make a difference.”

  Of course, they would be pinning all of their hopes on unproven tech. True, it had worked on AIs Chan had created in the lab using downloads of the most intact one they had captured. But what if the others were more intact, and had built in safeguards that the one she had didn’t. Then the projector would come through, sing its siren song, and nothing would happen.