“They have already been alerted that you might attack them.”
“The fleets will not attack. I made an agreement with my other force commanders to not accept those orders, though they might also have some trouble with people aboard their ships. There are some officers aboard every command ship who would throw themselves off a cliff if ordered to by the dictator. So hopefully no one will cooperate.”
Goran blew out a breath and looked up into the eyes of the human admiral. “I need a favor from you, though.”
“What?” Beata's eyes again narrowed, something the fleet commander had learned meant many things, among them distrust.
“Can you get me in touch with the command ships of those other forces? I need to make sure the people I put in charge are still in those positions. And talk about what we are to do. We are still subject to the discipline of our ruler, and might have to go into exile.”
“We can do that. How about if I send warp fighters to each of your forces and tie them into our com net. But as to exile? What if we gave you an alternative for the ruler you have?”
“A coup? I’m not sure I can do that. I gave my oaths to the dictator. And I know that I don’t want the job.”
“And if we gave you someone who would be acceptable to you. Could you swing most of your officers to support that person.”
“I, don’t know. I would have to know who this person is first. Maybe speak with them.”
“Fair enough. I’ll see what I can do.”
The admiral disappeared from the holo, leaving the Gorgansha alone with his own thoughts. If he went through with this things would never be the same for his people. He made a head motion of negation, then gave his species version of a smile. Maybe things needed to change, and they needed to move their form of government to one closer to that of the humans. The humans had a ruler, but he didn’t have total power, and his people had freedom. They didn’t have to continually fear for their lives.
Minutes later the com officer sent a signal through to his cabin. “I have the commanders of the other forces on the com, my Lord. Coming through the human fighter.”
Goran steadied his nerves. He knew these people, and had an agreement with them. But now he was about to try to lead them into a whole new territory.
* * *
PLANET MARGOLD.
“Thank God,” said Johnny Nakajima as he exited the lift entrance, Karen by his side.
His wife carried the same cage she had brought down into the shelter, their test subject. All the surface instruments had shown that it was safe for terrestrial life up here. Some smoke, a slight rise in temperature. There might be more smoke in the future, drifting over from the hit to the far continent. But this one that they had spent so much time working on looked like it was going to be fine.
The breeze rustled the leaves of the deciduous trees that stretched out in all directions. Oaks, maples, elms, quick grown to make what looked like an old growth forest. The mountains to the west were covered with pines. They couldn't see the grasslands on the other side of those mountains, but they knew they were there.
Something chittered at them from one of the nearer trees, and Johnny watched with delight as a squirrel ran around the trunk of an elm. The small rodents had been released days before the attack, and it was a delight to see them adapting.
“Get out there and pump out babies, momma,” said Karen, opening the cage and letting the rabbit out. The animal hopped a few feet, then looked back at the woman who had raised it.
“Go on,” said Johnny, smiling. “You've got a job to do.”
The rabbit looked at him like she understood, then turned and hopped into the forest. There would be no predators for the next couple of months, allowing the herbivore population to grow. That wouldn’t last. Soon there would be fox, weasels and hawks hunting.
“Let's check out the cages,” said Johnny, taking his wife's hand and moving toward the batches of enclosures holding more of the small animals. There were also some baby deer and pigs in other pens, who would be released once they were further into their growth.
“Johnny,” yelled out Ivan, running up from the pens. “We made it.”
Nakajima wasn't sure if the man was talking about the planet, or themselves. He was willing to accept both meanings.
Yep, he thought. We made it. He had heard the news before coming up. The Machines, who had killed so many living planets, had been defeated, once and for all time. Now his company could get on with the business of bringing planets to life, replacing those that the creations of humankind had destroyed.
We can't replace those evolutionary lines, thought the terraforming supervisor with a feeling of sadness. Those are gone forever, including some intelligences that might have enriched all of our lives. There was nothing he could do about that. All he could do was build worlds that the intelligences he knew about could use.
Chapter Nineteen
Thus it is that in war the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory. Sun Tzu
MACHINE SPACE.
“They aren’t moving, ma’am,” reported the force sensor officer, her eyes roaming the multiple screens and holos at her station.
“Very well,” replied Mara Montgomery. “Force A. Jump.” And may the Goddess be with you.
The fifteen ships all opened their portals into the hyper dimension and moved forward, heading for the Machine system that was their target, one of their primary industrial nodes.
It was a short trip to the hyper one barrier, the six battle cruisers, four light cruisers and five destroyers jumping back into normal space three light seconds from the point where they would have catastrophically translated out of the higher dimension.
“We’re picking up power plants all through the system, ma’am,” called out the sensor officer from the command bridge. “I’m not sure they’re as harmless as we’ve supposed.”
“Are you picking up any grabber emissions?” asked Mara, hoping she hadn't made a major mistake.
“No, ma’am.”
“Not any?” Mara stared at the plot. The power emissions were all light minutes away, some a couple of hours. They might not even be emitting any more. Graviton emissions were the gold standard. If they started boosting they would give off those emissions, and Mara’s force would pick them up immediately.
“Not a one.”
“So, it might still be a trap,” Mara said in a hushed voice. “But very unlikely,” she said in a tone that carried across the bridge. “We can make sure it isn’t a trap.”
She looked over at her force tactical officer, Commander Johansson. The red-haired man nodded back, knowing what she wanted.
“Targeting,” said Johansson, his fingers flying over his keyboard as a number of holo screens expanded and collapsed around him. It wasn’t something that could be done in seconds, but he accomplished the task in less than three minutes. The targets all blinked on the central holo tank plot, lines linking launching ships. There were only three wormholes in the force, and those ships were aiming at far targets, the rest going for those much closer.
Mara walked up to the tank, her eyes roaming over the target selection. There were two planets, a half dozen moons, hundreds of orbiting platforms, and thousands of antimatter sats. Along with them was a Machine fleet, one that consisted of several hundred ships, more than half of them capital vessels. A formidable industrial presence, and a massive mobile force that presence had built.
I wonder where the central AI was located, she thought. That was something she would like to melt down at close range, slowly, with the hope that the AI would know what was happening. She couldn’t guarantee that, so she would just have to satisfy herself with converting everything to plasma.
A squadron of warp fighters ran into the system at twenty times light speed, getting within video range of some important targets and linking back to the flagship through their Klassekian c
om techs. That would give Mara near real time views of the targets, something no commander at the beginning of the war with the Cacas couldn't have imagined.
“Approved,” said Montgomery with a smile. “Fire.”
The flagship bucked slightly, its wormhole launcher releasing a stream of thirty full sized capital missiles, all on a course for the largest of the industrial planets. The flight time at point nine five light was fifty-seven minutes. Other targets were closer, and those would be engaged earlier in the queue.
Montgomery sat back in her command chair and brought up a dozen holo screens, arranged around her so she could view any of them with a minimum of motion. The returns of the hits would come back to her at light speed. If she had the wormholes to waste she could have mounted one on a missile and watched the strike in real time. She didn’t have wormholes to waste, so she had to wait to see most of the strikes. Not the ones that would have warp fighters near them, of course. Those she could watch mere seconds after the hits.
One holo, looking over at a close cold moon that had been turned into a supermetal production site, showed the hits from the stream. A dozen painfully bright explosions erupted along the surface, superheated water that in its ice form had acted as rock, blew into the sky, while more of the water rose as its version of lava. More missiles hit, until all thirty had struck the target, and the melted remains of the supermetal production facility joined the steam in the air above the surface. The plasma ignited, and a firestorm ran around the world, to meet up on the other side.
“I guess that one is toast,” said Mara, smiling as she watched the destruction.
Another moon was hit, then another. One missile missed the target and slammed into the atmosphere of the gas giant the moons were orbiting. It was like a comet slamming into the giant, only a thousand times more powerful. The force erupted through the atmosphere, fire rising, a circular ripple passing through an extensive part of the world.
“Anything alive on that giant just took a major hit,” said Johansson, watching the same scene on a holo over his station.
“With the exception of these ships, there is nothing alive in this system,” said Mara with certainty. The Machines didn’t let life exist where they set up base. That was their prime directive, and they never deviated from it. If they had detected life in the gas giant, they would have bombarded it with enough energy to have made it extinct.
The view of one of the major planets was the main event. It was within the life zone, and might very well have had living creatures on it at one point. Maybe not advanced life, but definitely simple. But with the atmosphere it had, the typical oxygen/nitrogen mixture, it had probably had advanced life at some time in the near past. Oceans filled with sea creatures, the land covered with at least vegetation and insectoids. Now it was barren, the surface a desert from pole to pole.
The missiles came in so fast that there was no fiery trail through the atmosphere. One second there was a dead surface. The next dozens bright flashes showed, and those locations sprouted massive fireballs rising above the atmosphere. Fiery shock waves traveled out at many times the speed of sound, joining up until the entire hemisphere was a sea of fire. Spouts of lava arced into the sky at the points of impacts. Over the next hour those spouts sprouted a sea, covering the surface. All of the structures the Machines had built to exploit the resources of the planets were melted, sunk into the lava sea.
The planet’s moon was hit minutes later, a secondary target that still needed servicing. It wasn’t as tectonically active as the planet it orbited, and there was nothing to burn. Shock waves traveled around the smaller world, destroying everything the Machines had planted on the surface. The main planet continued to turn, until part of the untouched hemisphere was exposed. Volcanoes had exploded, fault lines were still in the process of letting go. The sea of fire was slowly spreading to that side. That other hemisphere would also be serviced in time, when it was presented fully to the aim of the missiles.
Someday, thought Mara, feeling tears in her eyes as she looked at what had been the promise of life and was now dead. She took no blame for it. But someday someone would come along and bring this world to life. Once it had cooled down, maybe in a couple of thousand years.
“Cut the cruisers and tin cans loose,” said Mara, clenching a fist. “I want them to scour the system. Anything Machine is to be destroyed.”
She looked at the plot that showed everything still in the system. The further inner planet would be serviced in twenty minutes. The antimatter sats were not worth wasting missiles on, the warp fighters the battle cruisers had carried were rushing ahead to handle those.
“I estimate three days to take out the entire system,” said Johansson.
“It takes what it takes,” said Montgomery, looking over at her force tactical officer and frowning. “And then we’ll move on to the next one. And the next after that.”
It might take years to totally scour this space. Mara wasn’t sure she wanted to be involved in this campaign that long. The main fight still awaited. But as long as she was assigned to it, she would do the best job she could of getting rid of the Machines. Humanity needed to make sure the mess they had made was cleaned up for good.
“Get the reports from our other groups,” she ordered, standing from her chair and turning toward the hatch. “I’ll be in my cabin.” Her stomach had been rumbling and needed taking care of. As much as she would have liked to watch the entire show, she needed to take care of herself. And there were thirty-seven other forces out there taking out machine systems, as well as pairs of destroyers searching for more. She would have to check in on those eventually, after she had filled her stomach.
* * *
BOLTHOLE.
Nazzrirat looked over the large chamber that the Machines had excavated. He wasn’t sure how they had done all this without people detecting it, but somehow they did. The chamber stretched for several kilometers, and the ceiling rose fifty meters. The entire space was crammed with partially constructed walkers, while another chamber contained a tank park. Construction bots were frozen into place around the machines they had been in the process of completing.
The far end of the chamber was filled with fabbers, much like the one the factories above sported. Maybe a little less advanced. Half were open, the parts of Machines frozen in the process of being pulled out. The others were still shut, closed on the parts they had been in the process of constructing.
Materials were stacked along one wall, and other chambers were packed with supermetals used to make powerful particle beams and electromag fields. The battle bots had raided factories and their storage facilities above. This new line of robots was intended to have more than twice the combat power of what the humans had already faced, those lesser Machines that had been much more capable than what they had had to deal with during the first invasion.
Nazzrirat felt himself gripped with rage. This was the heart of the Machine war making capability within the asteroid. This had been responsible for the deaths of his siblings, leaving he and Phazzarit the last surviving members of their group.
“We’ve got it, LT,” called out one of his men. Not from his original platoon, but part of the platoon sized unit his company had become.
Nazzrirat turned to see a couple of troops pulling a hover cart filled with equipment. Boxes of proton packs for their rifles, shells for the launchers, even a couple of cases of throwing grenades.
“Everyone load up. In one minute we burn it down.”
The men moved with speed, loading up their rifles, packing their ammo pouches. Nods were given as soon as troopers were ready. The LT looked over the chamber. This wasn’t the only one, but this one was his responsibility.
“Okay, everyone. In position.”
The men moved to form a fan that looked out over the chamber, weapons to shoulder. Trigger discipline was maintained, but the officer could tell that his people were ready to rock and roll, as the humans said.
“Burn it down.”
Men started dropping out of the firing line as they cooled overheated rifles. Nazzrirat continued to fire, ignoring the warning it was screeching at him.
[Slow it down, Nazzrirat,] sent his brother. [It’s doing no one any good for you to burn off your own tentacles.]
The LT sent back acknowledgment and pulled his tentacle tip off the trigger. Other men had started firing again, and Nazzrirat forced himself to wait for the heat bar to drop back to normal. As soon as it did his tentacle was back pressing the firing stud.
His rifle stopped producing its beam, and he pulled the empty proton pack out and dropped it on the ground. It only took a couple of seconds to seat the next one in and slam it forward. He checked the heat meter, grunted in satisfaction, and started firing again.
The chamber rippled with heat, metal flowed across the floor, and the Machines went the way of the life on planets they had wiped clean. The materials would eventually be salvaged, put into deconstructor fabbers and separated out.
“Lieutenant,” called out one of his NCOs. “Lieutenant. Stop. They’re done.”
A couple of men wrapped tentacles around him and pulled him back. Nazzrirat shook his head, blinking his eyes and looking out over the chamber. There was nothing left but the molten metal on the floor. Some was flowing out through vents in the floor, while the rest pooled and started to harden.
The Code Page 27