The Code

by Doug Dandridge

  I can’t think like that, thought the admiral, grimacing. That’s the way to despair. I come from a fierce warrior people, and one thing the Maori wouldn’t do was give up.

  Henare laughed for a quick moment at that thought. He fancied himself one of the Pacific Islanders who had terrorized the islands at one time, hence the tattoos he had placed on his face, a source of pride in his heritage. Realistically he was thousands of years removed from those people, no fiercer than any other human raised in their soft technic society.

  What would my ancestors have done, what did they do, when a superior force came at them? he thought. Fight, was the answer, whispering through his mind across history. Fight, die if he must, but spend his last moment alive swinging at the enemy.

  “Captain Carson,” he said into the air, calling up his chief of staff. The woman’s face appeared in the holo.

  “Cassidy. I have an idea. It may sound crazy, but it may be our only way to preserve our gate.”

  “Tell me what you want and I’ll see that it’s done,” said the woman, a slight smile creeping across what had been a totally morose expression.

  “First we ….”

  Chapter Thirteen

  The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. Sun Tzu

  GORGANSHA SPACE.

  “CIC is reporting a change in enemy status,” called out Captain Lyndsey Quan, the fleet tactical officer.

  What now? thought Beata, looking over at the officer as if she were a snake about to strike.

  It had bothered her that the Machines had been able to make up their losses so quickly. It seemed like all of their estimates were off. They had been thinking in human terms, adding in the of course faster production times of automation, then doubling that projection. And it seemed that they had come nowhere close to what the Machines had been capable of. Of course, they really didn’t need shipyards to produce ships. All they had to do was dump a bunch of materials, a horde of nanites, and some electromagnetic field projectors, and they could build a ship. What they couldn't build with nanites was supermetals and antimatter, but they could build the production facilities at the same rate as they built their ships. As long as they had the orbit space around the star and the cold planets for supermetals.

  And then they had moved into hundreds of new systems, if not thousands, and started what would have been called a cottage industry setup if not for the size of every platform. She wasn’t sure what the change of status the captain was about to drop on her, but she was sure it wasn’t going to be good.

  “CIC is estimating the larger Machines ships are double the mass we thought. Twenty million tons or more.”

  Beata looked at the plot, then back at the captain in disbelief. The Machine capital ships they had dealt with in the past had massed between eight and ten million tons. While the new estimates made the ships still nowhere in the class of the few superheavy battleships she had in her order of battle, they were still larger than the vast majority of her battleships, sixteen million ton hyper VII vessels.

  “Numbers?”

  “Still estimating two thousand five hundred vessels, ma’am.”

  And she still had about five hundred vessels, about a hundred of them battleships. The Gorgansha were about to enter the battle with about eight hundred more ships.

  “What’s our count on the total Gorgansha fleet?” she asked, looking at the numbers of ships entering each of the five systems they were set to defend.

  “Intelligence estimates, based on our assessments of shipyard production and known forces, that they have eight thousand vessels, almost two thousand of them capital ships.”

  It was looking like four thousand ships were in their four moving forces, an estimated half of their force. It made sense that they would hold something back to defend systems against Machine probes. But half their fleet when so many of their systems, at least a quarter of what they had left after the Machines had destroyed so many before the Empire inserted itself into the mix, were at risk? What the hell was their game? Some of her intelligence analysts thought that the dictator was going to try and take out the Imperial presence after the Machines were taken care of, and if most of her fleet was destroyed in combat that would make it much the easier. But did the maniac not realize that the Empire would get revenge if he started destroying the ships of his allies?

  The one thing she had that Bolthole didn’t, and the situation there was still up in the air, was wormholes. Each of her forces had at least twenty, seventeen or eighteen of them attached to launch complexes back in the Supersystem. They could each put out thirty missiles in less than a second, then wait thirty seconds for the wormhole on the other end to be moved to a new launch tube. Her wormholes were all attached to twenty of the accelerator tube launchers, letting even her least well-equipped force put out five hundred and ten missiles per launch, over ten thousand before the launch tubes were exhausted over a ten-minute period. After that it would be twenty minutes before the next batch was up to speed. Those missiles were still her best long-range weapon, and while not impossible to track when they got close, still having the next best thing to total stealth all the way in.

  “Do you want us to fire, ma’am?,” asked Quan, looking up from her tactical board. “I might be able to predict their entry coordinates.”

  “Let’s wait until we have a firm fix on them on this side of the barrier,” said Beata after a moment’s though. “I know we have a shitload of missiles in the queue, but I don’t see the need to waste them. However, make sure our fighters are waiting as close to that predicted point as possible. But not within the range of their graviton beams.”

  She wanted her three wings of fighters to hit them as soon as possible. However, she still had to concern herself with the graviton beams they had that could drop them out of warp. Not with the catastrophic translation as a ship dropped out of hyper. Still, it could damage the fighter, and while the crew was most likely to survive, they would be out of the fight. Maybe tracked down in normal space and destroyed.

  “Try Plan Beta Five, ma’am?”

  “Sounds good to me,” said the admiral with a smile. That was a tactic they had yet to try, but in simulations it had worked perfectly. Unfortunately, a lot of things that worked perfectly in sims didn’t work worth a damn in real life. Still, it seemed like the best bet to get in a strike, since graviton beams could also drop the warp missiles back into normal space well before they reached the target.

  “Enemy ships dropping into normal space, now,” called out the sensor officer. Two thousand five hundred contacts moved from the hyper plot to the normal space plot over a period of seven seconds, each just a few seconds outside the barrier.

  “I wonder if there is any way we can spoof their sensors so they don’t have an accurate take on the barrier,” said Beata in a moment of insight. That would be great, since then at least half the Machine fleet could conceivably crash in the barrier, falling into a catastrophic translation, before they could react. She couldn’t think of a way, but that didn’t mean someone else wouldn’t. But since they hadn’t come up with a way to do that to the Cacas, she didn’t think it would be appearing anytime soon.

  Suddenly there were many more Machine ships on the plot.

  “What the hell is going on?” cried the admiral, shocked at the sight of so many ships appearing where they were sure a lesser number would appear.

  “CIC is estimating that there are now five thousand enemy ships. All of lower than predicted mass.” Quan looked at her with narrowed eyes. “It looks like those very large ships were actually more than one linked together.”

  And why didn’t we think of that? she thought, scowling. It was something the Cacas did, but nothing that her fleet had showed the Machines. The big aliens had a habit of linking a battleship to a supercruiser and two scouts, dropping into normal space and separating. All of the ships were hyper capable, but it fooled their enemies as to how many ships they had coming in. And where in the hell had the Ma
chines come up with that idea? It wasn’t like they had any connection to the Cacas.

  The probable answer came to her a moment later as her agile mind made the connection. The disaster at Chan’s research base, where the Machine AI had taken over the brains of some of the scientists and made a play to take the asteroid. That was the key. The Machines could link into organic minds. Not something they did to get servants, since they considered organic beings inferior and not worth the effort, though in the case of the base they had made an exception. And had proven that they could read information from an organic brain. She wondered which of her people it had ripped the information from before terminating their lives. Obviously it had done so, and had gotten the information on how the Cacas used that tactic to fool their enemies. Then it had come up with something to mask their emissions at distance so the humans wouldn’t realize how much mass they were moving with each contact.

  “Fighters are moving in to the attack.”

  Beata said a quick prayer as she watched the tracks of the warp fighters come into existence and start to move. Straight into the teeth of the Machine fleet, which was in the process of moving ships to give them the best graviton beam coverage. They didn’t have any delay while orders were formulated and transmitted, but it still took time for ships to move. Still, they had the time, and the attack was about to run into their best possible configuration.

  Until the fighters turned ninety degrees up and sped at twenty times light, curving over the top of the enemy fleet in less than a second. At the top they pivoted and released their missiles, which sped in at a faster speed than the fighters, twenty-five lights, closing the distance within less than two seconds, well before the enemy ships could even shift to bring their weapons to bear.

  Almost six hundred and fifty missiles streaked in to the targets. It would have been wonderful if all had been hits, but that was too much to ask. Over two hundred still ran into graviton beams. The larger Machine counter missiles didn’t have the speed to actually make an intercept. They could get in the way, though, and another hundred or so missiles fell off the plot. Not every missile hit a single target, and some, unable to communicate with their fellows forging in, ganged up, two hits to a ship, in a couple of cases three.

  The warp missiles had an advantage of being able to rip through armor with their forward compression beams. Their disadvantage was that they had no inertia, no momentum, so they added nothing of the devastating force into the contact that normal space ship killers did. And with two hundred megaton warheads at most, they actually did less than total damage unless they lucked into a critical hit. There were a couple of those, and two Machines ships went up in explosions that left little more than plasma, while a dozen others drifted in space after the strike, moving forward with what velocity they had, plus the added component of the missiles’ explosion. Apparently out of action.

  * * *

  The Machine AI couldn’t feel shock nor surprise. It had set itself up in the best configuration it could calculate, using diagrams of the attack and where they would be when they launched. By all calculations it should have been able to hit some of the enemy fighters, while at the same time knocking all of their warp missiles back into normal space. The humans had pulled the unexpected, only next time the AI would know to expect it. It calculated another coverage, one that wouldn’t stop everything coming in from one vector like the last, one which rated as excellent. Instead it would give good coverage all around, and the AI predicted that it might just get some of the enemy fighters on the next approach. The order went out, and the thousands of ships shifted, bringing their graviton beams into an alignment that would allow them to sweep the space from all angles.

  * * *

  “Tracking the Machine vessels from their grabber emissions, ma’am,” said Quan, staring at the holo plot over her own station. “They appear to be aligning in another configuration. They…”

  The admiral stared at the holo, her body stiffening. “Warn those fighters off. They…”

  It was too late. The fighters moved in on another vector, getting almost to the range of the Machine graviton beams and veering up and over, repeating their last maneuver. Only this time, as more than a dozen of the ships entered the range basket of the Machine beams, over half were hit and dropped from warp. A moment later another ten fell of the plot. The fighters launched and banked away in the way of ships with their type of drive, doing what ships in normal space couldn’t. A few more fell off the plot, raising the total to twenty-four.

  Beata couldn’t see what was happening from this distance, but she had a sick feeling that the Machines would track the ships that had fallen into normal space and take them out with lasers. If they could track the human ships or escape pods they would kill them.

  “How many did we get?”

  “Three enemy ships fell off the plot,” said Quan, closing her eyes and shaking her head. “Seven have slowed, a couple considerably.”

  The sick feeling intensified. Sure, they had taken out well over twenty million tons of enemy ships, and damaged three times that amount, all for the cost of just over three hundred and sixty thousand tons of fighters. A win. She couldn’t let herself feel that way when the enemy had only lost AIs, and she had lost over two hundred living beings. The Machines had no hopes, no dreams, no plans for a life, unlike the humans and Klassekians on those ships.

  “Fighters are on their way back to their carriers,” called out the com officer.

  The admiral nodded. Of course they were going back to rearm. The only means they had to attack without those medium range weapons was their warp lance beam on the approach, the augmented version of their compression beam, and the expansion beam of the retreat. Both very short ranged, at most a light second or three, and they would be open to not just graviton beams, but missile fire as well, while their beams would do little damage.

  “Lyndsey. I want time on target. Launch internal missiles from the tubes, then space out the next launch for thirty seconds later. And on, for ten cycles.”

  “You want to time them with wormhole launches.”

  “Exactly. I want our waves to be as thick as possible,” replied Beata, nodding. “And the wormhole launched weapons can take advantage of the cover and ECM of the ship launched missiles. If we’re lucky, they’ll waste most of their fire on the weapons coming from our magazines. If we’re really lucky we’ll still get some hits with those missiles, then the wormhole weapons will ream them a new asshole.”

  She glanced at the plot and brought up the section that contained the Gorgansha fleet. They were now translating into normal space, and she expected them to head toward her hell for leather. The Machines had to be picking them up from the translation emissions. She waited for their allies to start accelerating her way. With the new tech they had given them they could hit at least four hundred and seventy gravities with their capital ships. Still not as good as her own ships, but much more capable than what they had before the Empire improved their tech base.

  “How fast are the Gorgansha ships accelerating?” she asked, staring at the plot and the numbers underneath the force in general.

  “Two hundred and fifty gravities, ma’am.”

  “Why in the hell are they pulling such low acceleration?” Bednarczyk didn’t like what she was seeing. If it had been her coming to the aid of an ally that was about to be overwhelmed she would be pushing her ships for all she had.

  “Get on the com and ask their commander what the hell he’s doing?” she yelled at the com officer. “Then send a grav pulse to them with a truncated question.”

  For not the first time Beata wished she had direct faster than light contact with the Gorgansha flagships. They couldn't give the Gorgansha wormholes. The Empire didn't trust them enough to lend them that tech, even if they weren't capable of making their own. Not for the first time she wished she had Klassekians aboard those ships. If she had had her way there would be, but the Empire had been very careful with their treatment of their new
est alien members. Only one sibling group of Klassekians had volunteered to work with the other aliens. When the rest had found out about their slave holding culture most had simply refused. The Emperor had defended them. They were very important to the Empire, and he wasn't about to alienate them by forcing them to serve such a harsh master.

  So all the large force Gorgansha flagships only had a single Klassekian com tech, connected to the one serving their dictator. The dictator could connect to Bednarczyk and her leaders through the wormhole that Khrushchev's ship, within less than a second's transmission range. It has seemed like a good enough solution. The Klassekians could connect with their sibling back at the Gorgansha home-world, who could in turn connect to Beata through her wormholes. It had seemed like a workable system, but it depended on the dictator giving his go ahead for the communication to proceed.

  “Four hours twelve minutes till reception of the lascom,” said the officer.

  And why in the hell did they come out there? she thought, shaking her head, feelings of anger, shock and confusion threatening to overwhelm her. Any commander worth her salt would have brought that fleet in at a point further around the circumference of the system, dropping out of hyper no more than two light hours from her and the inhabited planet, and not double that range. A mistake? Or a planned maneuver by the dictator? From their acceleration rate she would guess the second. It was looking like a setup, and she couldn’t figure out why the Gorgansha would want to do this. Her force would have to deal with the brunt of the enemy fleet attack by itself.

  “Send a com to Khrushchev,” ordered the admiral, hoping this would go through. “Ask her to get in touch with the dictator and ask why his fleets have come out so far from us in every system. And see if they can talk him into giving his commanders new orders.”