Exodus: Machine War: Book 3: Death From Above

by Doug Dandridge

  Now they were here, after several more jumps back to normal space. They had broken the signal code along the way, a two day ordeal, and knew what the sentients looked like. Basically bipedal with four limbs, manipulative organs that were close to human hands, and a head superficially humanoid, with some differences in their sensory organs. The skin color was unusual. Their skin was transparent, to the point where the internal musculature and vascular system could be easily seen.

  Then, on the last jump, they had lost the signal. What that meant they didn’t know. Had the aliens switched to another more advanced means of communication? Or had they destroyed their own civilization? The other possibility was even more frightening, that something had come along and destroyed them. Something like the Machines? Matthews hoped not. Humankind already had enough of a stain on its collective soul.

  “Jumping, now.”

  The nausea came as they moved from hyper VII to normal space, the most violent of standard jumps. Matthews shook her head, trying to clear it, her eyes focusing finally on the plot. It had changed from a projection to a full on vid, showing first the total system, bright G class star in the center, then switching views to each of the planetary bodies.

  “Stop,” shouted Matthews as a watery world appeared, cloud masses swirling in the atmosphere. “Zoom in on that.”

  The world came into clearer view. It would have been a beautiful world if it had any vegetation on the surface. Instead it was a dead rock. Waves rolled in the oceans, clouds dropped rain onto the surface, but there was no life to take advantage of that ocean, that rain. Water quickly eroded away the bare soil in the wetlands, while great dust storms raged across the deserts.

  “Something killed them off,” said the Exec, watching the same view from CIC.

  “And I don’t think we have to go too far off track to figure out what that something was,” replied Matthews, as another zoom of the planet showed smashed objects in orbit. “Anything living would have wanted the fertile world for their own. But the Machines don’t want anything living and growing, since that gives aid to their enemies.”

  “We’re picking up a number of hot spots throughout the system, ma’am,” called out the Tactical Officer. “Heavy radiation.”

  The view on the central tank turned back to a tactical plot, showing the rad hotspots. Only fission energy systems and fission primed bombs left those kind of hotspots. “So they weren’t all that advanced,” she said, thinking of what kind of spacefaring civilization they must have had. Surely nothing beyond interplanetary. Though it was obvious that they fought with primitive nuclear weapons, and probably fought hard. But in the end it made no difference, as an interstellar force was too much for their primitive tech to handle.

  They sat in normal space for a half an hour, drinking in everything their sensors could gather. Satisfied that the system was dead, or at least that there had been nothing of interest moving in it thirty hours before, Matthews ordered the next jump. They moved into VI, to the barrier and down into V, then to IV, at which time they jumped down to normal space again, and spent another half hour looking over the system.

  “Okay. Bring us in to a light hour outside of the hyper I barrier. We’ll get another good look at the system, and then move on.”

  “You don’t want to go in for a thorough examination, ma’am?” asked the Exec.

  “We don’t have permission to do so, XO. We were lucky that the Admiral let us get this much of a look. They really want the data we have aboard, and I don’t want to keep that lady waiting.”

  They went through the stair step again, this time coming to rest one light hour outside the hyper I barrier. They were skirting along the outer boundary of the system, so they could jump back into hyper I and continue outward on the same profile, moving through greater expanses of each ring than if they had come straight in.

  “Okay. Let’s get out of here and start back to Bolthole.”

  “Ma’am,” called out the Sensor Chief from her shielded station within the ship. “I’m picking up a grav pulse. Coming from just beyond the hyper I barrier at seven degrees to spinward.”

  “What the hell,” exclaimed Matthews, looking at the object that had just appeared on the plot. It was far enough away that they were at absolutely no risk from beam weapons, and it would take over an hour for a missile to reach them, by which time they could be well on their way in hyper. “What do you make of it, Chief?”

  “I don’t think it’s of Machine origin, ma’am. I can’t be absolutely certain, since they are capable of forging an unknown signal, but it doesn’t fit anything they’ve done before.”

  Matthews stared at the plot that showed an unknown object at the center of the grav pulse. What was it, and why did they pulse at this moment? Did they think she might leave before they contacted her, and sent out a signal in desperation?

  “Ma’am?” asked the Helm, looking back at the captain’s chair.

  “Don’t translate into hyper just yet,” she ordered the Chief. “Start us on maximum decel.” She looked over at the Klassekian Com Tech. “Let base know that we have found something of interest. Give them all the data we have found, along with my recommendation that we investigate.”

  * * *

  “They are about to jump, my Lord.”

  “No, they cannot,” said Goran, staring at the Sensor Master. “Are you sure they are not of the artificial life forms?”

  The Sensor Master pointed to the visual their gravity lenses had brought to them across the twenty-one light minutes distance. It did not look like ships of the artificial life forms. It was not a large vessel, and many of the features were unknowns. But if it could traverse the dimension higher than their highest possible, it was more advanced than they were in at least one feature.

  “What should I do, my Lord?” asked the Sensor Master, his eye turrets moving back and forth from his station to the face of the Fleet Leader.

  “Send them a gravity pulse,” ordered Goran. “Let them know that we are here.”

  “Do you think they will receive it?” asked the Ship Controller. “They may not have those kind of sensors.”

  “They will have them,” said Goran, sending a glare toward the Controller that made that male look away in terror. Why am I burdened with such idiots, thought Goran. If he had a better Controller aboard, he would have spaced that one in an instant. Of course they had grav sensors. Did they not move through hyper, something that took gravitic technology to accomplish. And they had picked up the grav wave of their normal space drive. If the aliens didn’t have graviton sensors, then they were the idiots.

  “Sending out the pulse now, my Lord,” reported the Sensor Master. “But I’m not sure they will get the message.”

  “They will know we are here, and that we want them to know we are here,” said Goran. “That’s the message I want them to have.”

  * * *

  “We have a visual on them, ma’am,” said Matthews to the Admiral, whose face now looked out at her from the holo the Klassekian was generating. Like all of such holos there was some blurring, a bit of static here and there. Still, it was remarkably clear considering it was coming through alien eyes and an alien brain to be transmitted here. “They definitely don’t look like Machine ships.”

  “And you want to initiate contact with them?” asked Bednarczyk, a look of doubt on her face. “There seems to be an awful lot of the bastards.”

  “I think it’s a battle force, ma’am. As to who they are fighting? My guess would be the Machines, same as we are.”

  “You know the risk of a first contact situation?”

  Matthews knew the risk. If the aliens tried to seize her ship she was to try to escape no matter the risk. If the capture of her ship was imminent, protocol was to wipe all computer systems and the memories of the crew, if the ship could not be destroyed. If able they were to self-destruct, so that the aliens could gain no intelligence from her vessel. It was enough to scare the hell out of any exploration ship commander.
But first contacts were also the dream, and she would not shy away from this one. She wasn’t sure all of her crew would agree, but they were volunteers for the Command. And every one of the crew would go down in the annals of Exploration Command as having been the first to contact a new species.

  “We know the risk, ma’am. And I willing to do it if you give your permission.”

  That the Admiral would give that permission was not a given. Her ship had detailed information on the Machine industrial system. Her Klassekian Com Tech had been working herself to exhaustion sending all of it she could over her link.

  “Okay, Commander. You have my permission. But for the love of God, be careful. Keep your engines ready to run, and your defenses ready to come online.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Of course she would have her laser rings charged when approaching these people. But first contacts were a diplomatic situation, and there was no need enter them with an aggressive act, like locking on weapons with targeting radar. Of course they would have every one of those alien ships plotted on the navigation sensors, which could be downloaded to weapons in an instant. But appearances were what were important at a time like this.

  “Send a grav pulse back to them,” ordered Matthews. “Then broadcast on all frequencies with standard greetings.”

  The Klassekian gave a head shake and went to work. Matthews wondered if all of this might be too much for the new crewperson, who until a couple of months ago wasn’t familiar with any of their procedures. The Com Tech looked up at her with a question on her face.

  “You’ll find the first contact dictionary under the protocols. Send them the whole thing.” The dictionary was a lexicon of standard Terranglo, ten thousand words and several thousand of the most common phrases of the language, along with pictures and vid clips to give context. It had been used in dozens of first contact situations, and had always worked, though sometimes it took some time to work out the translations between the parties.

  “Sending,” said the Tech some minutes later.

  “Start us on the way toward them,” Matthews ordered the Helm. “Slow and easy. Let’s not show them all we have.”

  Twenty minutes later they received the return transmission from the aliens, including visual of the crew. Matthews studied the views of the aliens, taken from many angles so the people they were trying to communicate with could get used to them. The lexicon they had sent the aliens also had many views of humans, including images of males and females, and multiple figures of the other species that populated the Empire. They wanted these people to know they were dealing with a multispecies Empire, so they would realize there was no xenophobia on this side of the encounter. Whether that was true of their new friends or not was currently an unknown.

  “That’s an unusual design,” said the Exec, who was also the chief biologist on the crew. “Hexapodal, but with a tripodal arrangement.”

  Matthews studied the picture of the alien and had to agree with the Exec. While no biologist herself, her training having been in planetology, she still knew enough evolutionary theory to see how unusual it was. There were many body forms across the galaxy, each planet having its own distinctive evolutionary path, though there were also some constants. Most large animals were quadrupeds, though like humans they could have two locomotion limbs or four. That was the plan on about seventy percent of the planets they had encountered. Hexapods were the next most common, twenty-five percent, though the number of locomotive limbs could vary. There were about three percent with eight limbs, the remaining two percent comprised of more unusual combinations, many downright weird.

  Most six limbed creatures had three pairs of appendages. These had two triads, one large limb on the right side of the upper body, two smaller on the left, and three locomotive limbs in the rear of equal size. With a long tail extended above that central limb. Three eyes, set in turrets like some lizards, with scaly skin that was also very lizard like. Three ears, or what looked like them, one on each side of the head and one on the back of the skull. They were strange looking, but not horrific. Humans would get used to them quickly, just as they had gotten used to the Phlistarans, the Gryphons, and more recently the Klassekians.

  “Send their transmission to the translation computers,” she ordered the Com Tech.

  “Already have, ma’am.”

  “Then good job.” The Tech was learning her job. Every other crew member aboard had at least a year’s training before they were assigned to a Command vessel, and many had a deployment or two with the Fleet beforehand. The Tech had two months training, total, before reporting aboard. Barely enough to move around the dangerous environment of a spaceship without getting herself killed, much less become a serious com operator.

  And I can’t wait to see what you people are like, she thought, watching the views of the alien ships as hers decelerated back down to a stop before heading their way.

  * * *

  “They’ve slowed to a stop, my Lord,” announced the Sensor Master. “Maximum rate of three hundred and fifty gravities.”

  Gonar grunted as he thought about that. The alien was using a standard space tug drive, grabbing and pulling at the quantum fabric of space. No real surprise there. What was a surprise was the acceleration. His ships could do over four hundred gravities, his scout around four fifty. He would think that a more advanced ship would accelerate at a much greater rate.

  “I think they are holding back on their capabilities,” he told his bridge crew. “Smart. They don’t want to give away what they can do, in case they need to run.”

  “Why would they need to run?” asked the Ship Master. “We have sent them an invitation to speak with us. We would not besmirch our honor by voiding that agreement.” The Ship Master looked like he was going to get angry for a moment. “We are not the artificial life forms.”

  “No, but they don’t know us. And I suspect that they have met a lot more aliens than we have.” Goran looked over at the holographic images the aliens had sent. The dominant species, for that must have been what they were with from all the images they had sent, were a bipedal quad form, very common from his people’s explorations. The also had a hexapod centauriod, an avian form, and a half dozen other alien forms in their expanse.

  He looked back at the ship as it approached. The hyperdrive arrays were apparent by their size and location, even if they were of a completely different structure. Space tug units were also easily recognizable, and smaller than those on his own ships. Maybe they didn’t have the acceleration of his ships, but he wouldn’t have bet on it. Those rings on the front were different, though he thought they were beam weapon projectors of some type. How they would work he hadn’t the slightest idea, but the arcs of the fire they would give that ship were something his warrior people would dream of.

  “They’re still sending us a steady data stream, my Lord. But nothing I would recognize as star charts.”

  “Then we know they are not complete fools,” mumbled Goran. The aliens had to know from his number of ships that they were contacting a military power of some strength, and they were sure to think that this wasn’t all of it. He didn’t know their strength. Perhaps they only had a few ships, and a couple of star systems. With their hyperdrive and the number of alien species they appeared to work with, he doubted it. Most small star nations, confined to a couple of systems, were somewhat xenophobic. His people were not xenophobes, though they were suspicious of other species that might not have his own races best interests at heart.

  “Look at this, my Lord,” called out the Com Master, projecting an image onto a holo in the center of the bridge.

  Goran stared at the object. It was a ship, and one he had seen too many times in the recent past. The Artificial Life Forms. The aliens had met them too, and if the robots had acted as they had toward his people, they were sure to be the enemies of these folks as well. Which was already a good start on an understanding, one that might lead to an alliance.

  “Make sure we don’t scare them off,” he to
ld the Com Master, making a gesture with his two left hands that told the male the order was to go out to all ships. His people needed an ally in this war if they were going to survive, and he would be damned to the deepest hells if he let a misunderstanding ruin this chance.

  * * *

  “We’ll be at a stop in relation to the alien fleet in three minutes,” reported the Helm Chief.

  “And the aliens?”

  “One of them is slowly moving to the front of their formation,” said the Tactical Officer. “The others are still sitting there in space, just drifting along.”

  “Then come to a stop in front of that ship,” ordered Matthews, pointing at the icon of what appeared to be the contact ship. “Then we’ll just wait and see.”

  “They…” The Tactical Officer looked up from his station, eyes widening as he looked at his Captain. “We’re being painted with targeting lidar, ma’am.”

  “Send a message to that contact ship,” said Matthews, standing up and walking to the tactical station while looking over at the Com Tech. “Ask them what the hell is going on?” She hoped they would be able to translate that message. They should, but there was no telling where the translation might fall through, and being lit up by a targeting lidar was enough to hit every alarm bell in her system. That was a large warship, in the class of a battleship, and she was pretty sure a beam hit from that ship would ruin her week.

  They were within a light second of the alien ship, and there should be limited delay to any communication. Within seconds the face of an alien, she assumed it was the commander, appeared on the holo viewer. He spoke, or at least the orifice under his three nostril nose, opened and closed, and high pitched sounds came over the com. A moment later the translation came through in the voice of the ship’s computer.