Exodus: Machine War: Book 3: Death From Above

by Doug Dandridge

  “Unknown, ma’am,” replied Montgomery. “What I want to know is how we can test that?”

  “I have an idea, but I can’t think of a way to carry it out from our current dispositions.”

  She looked at the close-up view of the huge enemy vessels. The laser domes on them, the apparatus that took all the power from the very large emitters underneath and focused them into narrow beams or wide swaths. They could kill missiles out to a light minute with a wide fan, and the schematic was showing the coverage of all of those domes. It looked like they could cover about ninety percent of the incoming paths at any one time. Trying to get anything through that? It looked impossible.

  But if we could take out those defenses, even temporarily, she thought. “Get Captain Maalouf on the com,” she ordered, looking over at her human Com Officer. That officer nodded, then went to work, routing the Admiral through a Klassekian com tech on board the battleship. The message would go through several sets of siblings to get to the Captain’s fighter, but it would get there, and the agile minds of the aliens would make sure that nothing was lost in the mind to mind translation.

  “Maalouf here, ma’am. Orders?” came the voice of the Wing Commander. There was no visual, that would be asking a bit much in this kind of link, but the audio reproduction was perfect.

  “Captain, I know this is asking a lot, but here is what I want you to do.” And if you can pull it off, we may be able to get these monsters off our back for just a little while, thought the Admiral, though weighing in the back of her mind was the knowledge that more were on the way.

  Chapter Seven

  The thing that we possess, that machines don't, is the ability to exhibit wisdom. Herbie Hancock

  MACHINE SPACE.

  “We’re seeing a hell of a lot of traffic here, ma’am,” said Lt. Commander Stepanowski, the exec of the Edmund Hillary.

  More than expected? thought Commander Roberta Matthews, looking at the plot that was filled with vector arrows. There were scores of them, even this far out from the system they were targeting. Vector arrows mostly pointing toward that system, every object in hyper VI. Fortunately, there were none of the massive traces of the planet killers. Which didn’t mean they weren’t out there. Just that they weren’t moving.

  That was making Matthews sweat as her small squadron worked its way into Machine space. Of course the enemy knew they were here, but so far couldn’t do anything about it. Unless they moved into the range of a planet killer with its graviton beam. Then one or more of their ships would suffer a catastrophic translation. It would be bad enough if they translated as pieces, killing everyone aboard. It would be worse for the Empire if chance worked out and the ship, against the odds, came through more or less intact. Right in the middle of Machine space, near a ship that could capture them and their hyper VII technology. Matthews did not want to be responsible for that.

  “ETA to system?”

  “Three days, four hours,” stated the Navigator.

  A little over two days’ ship time, thought the Captain. They would start decelerating in a day ship’s time so they would be at a near stop at the hyper VII barrier. They wouldn’t pass the barrier, since that would take away their one advantage. If it was safe, they would drop into normal space so they could do a long period long range assessment of the system. Then, if anything approached them, they could jump back to VII and be immune to any kind of attack other than graviton beams.

  “I wonder what the hell all these ships are doing going to System Alpha?” asked the Exec.

  That was what they were calling it for lack of a better name, System Alpha, the primary base of the Machines. They didn’t know if the Machines had a name for it, though what they probably had was a binary designation. They weren’t even sure if this was really their primary system. It was hoped that it was, and feared that it wasn’t. If they had a more heavily developed system out here the humans were in trouble.

  It was always said that it was better to know. Matthews wasn’t sure if that was true, but she had to admit that command had a point. They could only prepare for what they knew the enemy had. Even if that preparation was only to make their final peace with whatever they worshipped before getting rolled over.

  * * *

  PLANET KLASSEK.

  Lt. General Travis Wittmore had never liked enclosed spaces. Which was kind of funny, since he had been living in heavy suits and riding in shuttles all his adult life. That was different than the feelings he got when kilometers of earth were overhead. He still had those feelings while monitoring the soldiers who were moving through the tunnels under the earth, even though he personally wasn’t there. That was no longer his job. But he still felt the fear, the anxiety, and the guilt that he was not there with them.

  His job for the last decade had been to send people into danger, trying to use the information at hand to get the mission accomplished with the fewest casualties possible to his people. That had started when he became a battalion commander, no longer responsible for leading a company, sometimes from the front. Over seven hundred people, his responsibility, not to make sure that all of them survived, but to make damn sure that they didn’t give their lives in a wasted action. Most times he was successful, sometimes not, but often enough that they had put him in charge of over three thousand people. Then seventeen thousand. And now over eighty thousand humans and Imperial aliens, as well as hundreds of thousands of the natives of this world, all in defense of billions of their people.

  “What’s that, Tucker?” asked the voice over the com, the company commander far back in the column of heavy infantry that were penetrating the Machine lair.

  The trooper swung his view to something looming out of the shadows, his light enhancement systems bringing it into focus. It was some kind of machinery, a long cylindrical object sitting on its side on the floor. The view switch to infrared, and the object glowed with heat.

  “I think it’s a fabber of some sort, ma’am,” answered the squad leader, Sgt. Nathanial Tucker under his life signs on the viewer.

  Wittmore forced himself to stay silent. This part of the operation was that Captain’s, and his battalion commander above him. He was just an observer at this point, unless something happened that he felt needed his input. But he had seen those objects before, on other recent operations. It was a fabber, something the Machines had Constructed in mass under the surface. They were mass manufacturing more of their own kind to fight the organic creatures they saw as their mortal enemies.

  “You might want to tell them to be careful, Colonel,” he told the battalion commander when he didn’t hear that directive from the officer. Heat meant something was going on with the fabber, and he could only think of one thing that might be going on in a device like that.

  “Watch it, Sergeant,” came the voice of the Lt. Colonel over the com. “Something is liable to come out of that thing. Take it out, now.”

  The Sergeant sent his acknowledgement over the com as he directed his squad to take their places, several points where they could fire into the machinery while minimizing splash effects to themselves. Before they all got into place the machinery popped open, the hatch almost flying off and a robot jumping out.

  The Machine was about the size of a heavy infantry suit, though not the same configuration. It had too many limbs, several of them ending in what looked to be beam weapons. A pretty standard configuration for their ground combat machines, its camera eyes, giving it all around vision, tracking everything in the room as it started to move into a position that would use its birthing chamber as cover.

  The Machine opened fire, the invisible beams of its lasers showing in the dust laden air. At the same time the squad fired, the angry red of their particle beams very visible. Most hit the fabber, splashing metal as they converted their kinetic energy to terrific heat. One hit the shoulder of the robot before it could get completely under cover, destroying the shoulder and dropping the still moving arm to the floor.

  The robot was outclasse
d. It was using technology three centuries behind that of the humans, which was not the least of its shortcomings. Its body was made out of a steel alloy reinforced with carbon fibers, all that the Machines could get from the region where they had burrowed. The alloy of the human suits was twelve times stronger than the armor of the robot. It was reduced to using lasers due to the fact that particle beams constructed without the strong magnets of accelerators without supermetals were feeble devices. They could still kill an unarmored human, but against a suit they were non-starters. The lasers were powerful enough to burn through suit armor with a sufficient duration of contact. They had to penetrate the electromagnetic fields that bent the beams and turned a tight focus into a minispot, then start vaporing the tough alloy a little at a time.

  The human particle beams, their accelerators built from supermetal magnets, materials not found in nature, were powerful enough to turn the armor of the robot into vapor. They continued to burn the fabber and any parts of the robot that showed for even an instant. Another arm and the laser unit it carried were burn off, then a grenadier put a half dozen twenty millimeter explosive devices over the fabber to drop down on the Machine. After that it was a matter of moments to totally destroy it.

  Another Machine destroyed, along with the chamber that would have birthed yet another one a couple of hours into the future. One on one the Machines were not much of a problem. The problem was that they normally came in thousands, outnumbering the heavy infantry a hundred to one in some cases. They still lost most of those fights, but they caused human casualties, and unlike them, Wittmore didn’t have convenient fabbers that could turn out more trained human soldiers and their equipment.

  “We have movement ahead,” called out one of the scouts ranging thirty meters ahead of the squad. “Heat signatures. Scores of them, hundreds.”

  And here it comes, thought the General, feeling the chill of close combat in tight quarters running down his spine.

  The tunnel ahead came apart as robots pushed through the last layers of earth separating them from the humans. Those humans were now yelling as they took what cover they could and fired. The yelling decreased as discipline took over, and the only thing heard over the com were orders, situation reports, and heavy breathing. The angry bee sounds of particle beams almost overpowered the other noises of battle. The popping of grenades sounded for moments at a time.

  Particle beams were deadly weapons, able to vaporize solid matter at an incredible rate. Unfortunately, they needed energy and proton stores, and cooling after long use. If not for that problem, this squad could probably have taken out all of the attacking machines with no problem. As it was, only so many of the squad could fire at any moment, and only in disciplined shots, so that the unit could keep up continuous fire. And fall back as the rest of the platoon moved up and into position.

  Soldiers began to die, their life signs going flat over the transmission. Many more of the robots were falling off the scanners, their single hot mass turning into splatters of molten metal. But the dead troopers concerned the General more. Some might be salvageable, if the fight was won. If lost, so were all of those soldiers.

  The rest of the platoon joined the battle. A minute later another platoon joined in, following behind a burrowing machine that had been mass produced for this campaign. It chewed its way through soil and rock, crunching them to the point where they were easily transported through the attached tubes back to the surface. The troopers followed behind, breaking into the largest of the tunnels that was the gathering place of the war machines.

  The battle ended with the same suddenness as it had begun. One of the heavy suits, a trooper in battle armor that was fifty percent more massive than the standard assault units, launched a missile from his backpack that shot like a streak of light down the tunnel, moving toward the ceiling and avoiding the cluster of robots until it had moved four hundred meters away. The warhead went off in a brilliant flash as it released twenty kilotons of energy, destroying all of the robots within two hundred meters down both sides of the tunnel and any side passages. The soldiers hunkered down, their suits protecting them from the effects of the blast. Over half the machines in the complex were destroyed, the rest disrupted for some moments.

  The Imperial soldiers moved forward, systematically destroying every machine, or anything that had the look of being machine made. Particle beams shot out from hundreds of weapons, metal vapor rose into the air, making even the lasers in use more visible as they shone through the gaseous alloy. In five minutes everything was destroyed, while engineers moved in and sprayed nanites throughout the complex. The microscopic robots would make sure anything machine made, down to the molecular level, was disassembled. After they were through they would take apart their fellows, until nothing remained.

  One more down, thought Wittmore, taking a final look at the casualty figures. Fifty-six killed, though thirty-four of those had been put in cryo and would be recovered. What it came down to was that his strength had been decreased by fifty-six, and it would be weeks before the thirty-four were capable of any kind of duty.

  He sighed as he ran a hand through his close cropped hair. The only way the Empire had stopped the Machines in the first place was by sterilizing the planets they had entrenched upon. There might have been another way, but they couldn’t think of one at the time. And he wasn’t allowed to do the same with this world. So here he was, burdened by rules of engagement that the first commanders to face the Machines hadn’t had to deal with. Deep down he wanted to save this world and the people on it. But he also didn’t want to see the Machines win here, and the people die anyway.

  All I can do is keep stomping on the roaches, he thought, chuckling a bit at that thought. There were roaches in the Empire, but not on most worlds, and most people would not even know what he was referring to. He knew from history that the insect pests had been almost impossible to eradicate. Even the best science of the time made nary a dent in their population. Today, nanites would ensure that they didn’t overrun a planet, or at least the habitations of intelligent beings. If he could use the microscopic robots in massive quantities here, that might work as well. But that was outside of the rules of engagement passed down from above.

  There was always a chance with nanites that something might go wrong, and disassemblers start taking apart things they weren’t supposed to. Modern science had the answer to that one as well, specialized nanites to attack the rogue bots, which could also lead to other problems. The base problem was that nanites were really stupid little things. They lacked the processing power to do anything but identify their target according to programmed parameters and start to work pulling atoms and molecules away from that structure. To function efficiently, which was to say with any kind of intelligence, they needed a control system, usually a computer module in visible range. The bodies of all Imperial citizens had such a system, actually many of them, built into the basic implant they all carried in their cerebral cortex. The Klassekians for the most part didn’t have those implants. Some did, a small fraction of the population, and more every day. But ninety-nine percent didn’t, so an internal nanite defense system was counter indicated for them. Any renegade disassemblers that got into their systems would ravage their bodies, maybe killing them, or maybe just turning them into monstrosities that wished they could die.

  The humans leaving the Machine complex set off strong electromagnetic pulses that would destroy any of the microscopic robots, human or Machine made, since they didn’t have the protection against that strong burst that implants or battle armor did. It was a guarantee that no disassemblers would survive here, or Machine assemblers that they might have missed with the previously deployed measures.

  “Sir,” came a call on the com. “We have another breakthrough.”

  Of course we have, thought Wittmore, wishing for the hundredth time that he had not ordered the news of every new occurrence sent to him as soon as it happened, or his deputy if he was asleep. “Show me.” he ordered, and
a pair of holos came to life over his desk. One showed a satellite view of the area in question, giving him a second to orient to it, then zooming in. The other was the view from a tank commander’s com, showing a ground eye’s view of the area.

  Wittmore stared at the map, recognizing the suburb of the planetary capital. That capital was something he did not want to lose, and he immediately sent out commands to the orbital reaction force to send down a battalion to form a blocking unit.

  “Acknowledged, sir,” came the voice of that battalion commander over the com. “Boarding shuttles in three minutes.”

  Wittmore was already concentrating on the shots from onsite, forgetting about the reaction force now that he knew they were on the way.

  There was a hole in the ground, from the satellite view at least fifty meters in diameter. Something was moving around in the hole, and the smoking remains of some large objects were apparent on the ground nearby. One of the objects came into view within the hole, scrambling up the side and into the open air. It immediately reminded the General of a great spider, though the leg count, ten, was wrong. The bulbous body hanging between those legs was pure Machine, its armored covering shining like chrome. It immediately turned its head and a laser beam, showing in the dusty air, linked it with one of the human tanks.

  Something impacted with the Machine tank, moving so fast it couldn’t be seen, though the effect it had on the robot was as instantaneous as it was devastating. Pieces of molten metal were ejected into the air, flying into smaller droplets as they moved. A great gaping hole opened in the head of the robot, while its body bulged with the outward spreading kinetic energy of the passing penetrator round. The robot sagged to the ground, its legs motionless.