* * *
“So, this is the biggest combatant ship you have?” asked the human officer, walking through the hatch to the hangar deck.
“Why, yes,” said the Gorgansha captain, his triple eyes bugging out at the alien who he thought was insulting his ship. “This is the Claw of the People, the pride of our fleet.”
“What, six million tons. Less than one of our battle cruisers. And how much power do you get out of your reactors? Probably not enough, if I don’t miss my guess.”
“Uh.” The captain was not an engineer, and though he knew a ball park figure for their power generation, he wasn’t sure of what terms to use that would accurately portray them.
“That’s okay,” said the human, who must have been an engineering officer. “I’m going to guess, based on your tech base, that your ship generates about the same amount of energy as one of our heavy cruisers. Which gives you an energy density of about a quarter of ours. Let me guess. When you’re pushing into hyper VI, almost every other system on the ship is shut down.”
“Why, of course. What other choice would we have?”
“You could build better reactor systems,” said the human, touching the first finger on one hand with the first on the other. “Or more efficient power transmission superconductors.” He touched his second finger. “Or you could just put in more reactors, though with a ship like this, I’m not sure where you would put it.” The officer touched the third finger on his hand. “Well, you have what you have, and we’ll have to work with it. Maybe when you build some new ships we can help you get it right, starting with making them bigger.
“Now, we just have to figure out how to make your power feeds more efficient, so we can get more power to your systems, if that’s possible.” The engineer looked around some more, finally focusing on a power conduit and walking over. “It’s a pathetic system that can’t even keep the ship powered while jumping to hyper. I’m surprised you found the courage to go into the higher dimensions in this wreck.”
The captain was starting to lose his temper. All this being had done since coming aboard was insult his ship. It was too small, too weak, not well designed. He held his temper in check, since the dictator had ordered that he do everything he could to make the humans welcome and to help them make needed changes to his fleet. If he caused problems with the humans he could face execution, and the captain did not want to meet such an ignominious and useless death. Later he might be able to get back at these beings. That was always a possibility.
“Since we don’t have time to pull out and rebuild your reactors, I think the first step will be to improve their power conversion hardware and software, followed by replacement of your transmission superconductors.”
“That, would be wonderful,” said the captain, switching gears and thinking of his ship with more power.
“Then we will work on pulling those pitiful laser systems out of your hull and replacing them with some of our ring structures. Though I’m not really sure if that’s the right move, since it will take a lot of time, and sideline your fleet units for weeks to months. So, we may have to just make do with minor improvements, and work on getting your missile batteries up to snuff.”
Again the captain found his temper rising, and he thought of shredding the soft skinned creature with his claws. But the human had an escort, and those powered armor suits looked very capable. He was sure his own armored troopers wouldn’t be their match. Then his mind latched on to all the human had just said.
“I thought you would be giving us your missiles,” said the captain, again glaring at the human.
“Well, if we did that, you would have to strap them to your outer hull. That, or put them in your hangar decks and push them out. You could fire our counter missiles through your offensive missile tubes, but they are too large for that purpose. So I think the best bet is to design more modern missiles that can use your existing tubes and let your own factories build them. And that way you wouldn’t have to change all of your manufacturing base. If you happen to use fabbers, and not something more primitive.”
“Do we have enough supermetals to turn out these improved missiles in the quantities we will need?”
“In a word, no. Which is why we will loan you a bunch of our supermetals to make up some of the shortfall. But you will have to increase your own production.”
“Loan? I thought we were being gifted with these materials.”
The human gave him what the captain could only assume was a humorous look. “Old boy, we will be giving you quite a bit of strategic material, but we expect you, as an ally, to pull your own weight. And we have another war going on thousands of light years further up the Perseus arm. So, though we are willing to help, the onus of defending yourselves against the Machines lies with you. Expecting miracles, are we?”
That was not what the captain had heard from the dictator, who had said that these humans were here to save the people from the artificial life forms. Some of the other officers had thought that too good to be true, and the captain was now finding out that it was.
“And when will we be expected to pay back this largess you have delivered?”
“When the war is over, I would think,” said the human, waving away the concern of the Gorgansha officer. “We realize that a people fighting for their lives are not in a position to repay loaned materials during the fight. Now, if you would show me your bridge, we can get to work on planning how to upgrade your sensor and communications suites.”
* * *
“I have reports of captains stating they were insulted by the humans who came aboard their ships,” said the chief of staff. “They say the humans make comments about the small size of our capital ships, or our lack of technology. Their pride is hurt.”
Dictator Hraston Gonoras laughed deep in his chest, a high-pitched sound much like steam escaping through a hole in a line. “A more technologically advanced species noted that our technology is not as advanced as theirs, and that hurt their tender feelings.” The dictator laughed again, then grew serious. “It’s about time our people got over their pride and listened to those who know more. Yes, we progressed quickly through our own brains and resources. But these humans have been doing it longer. That is all. If we had the same amount of time, we would be just as advanced.”
The chief of staff didn’t look like he quite believed that, and the dictator had to admit he didn’t as well. The human population also outnumbered his by an order of magnitude, which meant so many more scientists and engineers had worked on their problems. If given equal time his people might not have advanced as far. And the one area he had a blind spot to was the societal factors. He couldn’t imagine a society better run than his own, and would have argued vehemently against the assumption that the freedoms of human society led to greater progress than his own. From his viewpoint, a free society was an unorganized society, so how could they be better?
“Anything else?”
“Their engineers have been meeting with our ship design and building people, my Lord. And those luminaries are also complaining that the humans are speaking down to them, since they have spent their entire lives learning their craft.”
“Here is what I want you to do,” said the dictator, motioning the chief of staff closer so he could speak in a quiet voice.
The chief of staff nodded, a grim smile on his face.
Chapter Five
The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living. Marcus Tullius Cicero
MACHINE SPACE: AUGUST 20TH, 1002.
Beata watched the holo as the first of the wormhole launched missiles slammed into the planet. There was nothing alive on that world, but there were intelligences there that threatened all life. And it was the job of her fleet to eradicate them. Completely.
The first missile hit, too fast for the eye to follow. It appeared as if a large portion of one of the continents simply exploded upwards with an eye hurting flash. Ejecta was hurled upwards, completely out of the atmosphere, to fa
ll back thousands of kilometers away, flaming as it reentered. A moment after impact great spouts of red molten rock arched up into the sky.
Moments later another missile hit, then another, until twenty had impacted that hemisphere of the world. Now the seas were boiling away, huge steam vents sending superheated water into the atmosphere. The land surface turned into a sea of magma, spilling off the continents and into the boiling seas. As the planet turned more missiles slammed into it, destroying the entire surface.
“Nothing could survive that?” asked one of the tactical staff.
“I want to make damned sure,” said the admiral, glaring at the holo. “Keep hitting it. And throw some antimatter warheads in for high atmospheric blasts. I want that planet flooded with EMP.”
Electromagnetic pulse wouldn’t harm any of the larger, shielded machines. But there wouldn’t be any of those on that world, where any large machines would now be puddles of melted metal. Or maybe not puddles, since there were no surfaces for puddles to gather. But small machines, nanites and microdrones, might be floating in the atmosphere, and those would be vulnerable to EMP. They were still dangerous, just by existing, and so needed to be taken care of.
Beata looked at the image of the system again. Four rocky planets, five gas giants, over a hundred moons, millions of asteroids. And any one of them could hide Machines, lying powered down and silent, waiting for the organics to leave. It was an impossible mission. The only way they could ensure this system was empty of Machines was to cause the star to supernova, and that was well beyond the ability of Imperial technology. It probably always would be, hopefully, since no being should control that kind of power. Which still left the problem of how to sterilize this system. This was one single system, when they had a region with millions of systems to contend with.
She could see why the people in the past were so adamant about making sure the Machines didn’t spread. Unfortunately, some had gotten away, and now they had this current mess on their hands. And it was looking to her like they would continue to have a mess after the Fleet did everything they could possibly do.
“We have Machine ships breaking out from the outer gas giant,” came a call over the com.
“Show me.”
The plot zoomed in to show a pair of battleship sized machines boosting away from the ring system of a superjupiter gas giant. Acceleration figures appeared beneath the ships, over fifteen hundred gravities. Because there were no organics aboard to be damaged by gee forces, and they could go well above the capacity of their inertial compensators, if they even had any.
“Firing missiles,” came a voice over the com.
Nothing appeared on the plot, so Beata figured those must be wormhole launches. In that case, the Machines were doomed.. That was until a dozen smaller blips appeared on the plot coming out of both of the larger Machines.
“Goddammit.” Beata felt like picking up the closest object and throwing it into the holo. All that would accomplish would be the possible destruction of whatever object she chose when it passed through the illusion and hit something. It would be just as useless as all the other actions her fleet was taking.
“Releasing fighters,” came another voice over the com. Thirty-two new icons appeared, boosting at over a thousand gravities, too slow to actually catch the machines. Until the raised their negative matter fields and disappeared from the plot. They would now be boosting at twenty-five thousand gravities, though only a couple of hundred would actually be felt on the craft, easily handled by their inertial compensators. They would boost past the Machine craft, then decelerate and appear in front of them, ready to blast them into plasma. Or such was the plan.
The Machine craft, each a couple of hundred tons of fast boosting robot, started shifting vectors in a pseudo-random manner. Some of them might still fall to the fighters, but some would also get away, unless something else stopped them.
“Dammit. Get some ships out there to get in their path.” A cruiser or destroyer could do it, if they were within a couple of light seconds and were able to bracket the craft with lasers. The only problem? There were no large ships that would be within reach before those things got out of the system and jumped into hyper.
“Keep after them,” she told the bridge crew. “I’ll be in my cabin.” She was tired of watching her fleet play whack-a-mole with this enemy. There had to be a better way, and she needed time to look into the possibilities.
Her cabin was much larger than any others aboard the ship, and much more spartan than most. Even the lowest enlisted crew, with shared common space and small sleeping tubes, had more personal items in their areas. All she had was one holo cube, projecting pictures over the small table next to her bed. It flashed pictures of people she knew, or had once known.
It flipped to one of her parents, one of the last she had uploaded into it. It had been taken five years before, while they were still alive, before they had been killed by pirates while on a cruise to the frontier to continue their work. They had been old, but they still had at least two score years of life left. And bastards with no conception of family or love had ended them.
Beata froze the picture in place with a thought through her com link. She studied the faces. Her father had been an archaeologist, her mother a linguist, and they had been going out to look at some new ruins that had been discovered just beyond the boundaries of the Empire. Neither had approved of her choice of a military career. As far as they were concerned, the military was a necessary evil, and one which their beloved daughter shouldn’t have wasted her efforts on. Even when she achieved flag rank they had looked down on her. She was still welcome in their home, but the insults never ceased when she was there. So she had stopped visiting. Until they were gone. The rest of her family had never forgiven her turning her back on her parents. At that point she was truly alone.
What I was doing was important, she shouted in her thoughts. Couldn’t you see that? Obviously her parents hadn’t. They had thought the military a dinosaur, useful only when the more intelligent strategy of diplomacy failed. And if the proper people were involved, it should never have failed. Military personnel were Neanderthals, barely able to read and write, and certainly not able to think. Beata had found that wasn’t near the truth. Most of the flag officers she had served under had proven to be on the far end of the intelligence scale. None of them were bloodthirsty monsters who couldn’t wait to kill as many combatants as possible. They wanted to keep their own people alive, as much as that was possible. And for the most part they didn’t like killing enemy combatants, though they had enough common sense to realize that they must kill the opponent if they wanted to keep their own people alive.
We are not monsters, nor idiots, and we accomplish more to ensure peace and advancement in the Galaxy than all of the archaeologists and linguists alive. And the diplomats. As far as she was concerned, while the knowledge developed by people digging in old ruins was interesting, it wasn’t of the caliber of information as that which was developed by Fleet engineers and theorists, which had furthered the expansion of the human species. The Fleet and the Army protected helpless systems, while the ships of the navy ensured that commerce could exist and efficiently move needed materials from system to system. And because their ship had sailed without Fleet protection, their own fault, they had fallen to pirates, who would run roughshod over space if not for the military. So you were wrong, she shouted in her mind, becoming angry for a moment, then feeling shamed that she felt that way about her parents, who were dead, while the Fleet hadn’t been able to save them.
I don’t have time for this. With another thought the holo cube went off and the projector on the desk sent up a representation of this sector, everything they knew about it filled in. Stars with known Machine infestations were a blinking red, formerly inhabited worlds they had wiped out were in yellow, while still living worlds were green. Included in that, to spinward, was the Consolidation of the Gorgansha.
So many worlds, she thought, staring in turn at e
ach and every yellow dot, then the proximity of the red dots to them. So many intelligent species. And this is why we are here, mother, father. To preserve the lives that exist in the Galaxy. Not those who have gone to extinction, like the musty old civilizations you spent your lives studying. Those were the dead, and these are the living. And we cannot allow these unliving things to kill more of the living.
“Engineering here, ma’am,” answered a voice on the com when she sent out the query. “What can I do for you, ma’am?”
“I need you to get your best brains together,” she told the chief engineer of the force. “And contact the best of the inertialess fighter engineers. I have a little project for you.”
* * *
“But we have always done it this way,” complained the oldest of the ship designers.
“And if it was good enough for your father, it’s good enough for you?” asked one of the human engineers, a smirk on his face.
The ship designers stared at the man. The words came across over the translator, but without the nuances of tone and facial expression that the Gorgansha used among themselves, so they weren’t sure what the man was saying. Or most of them weren’t.
“Are you saying that we do not progress?” protested one of the younger designers. “That is not true. We learn from our mistakes, just like other species, even yours. When we find that something doesn’t work, we make changes. When necessary.”
“And probably at the cost of many lives,” said the human, looking from face to face. “We have gone through that as well, and what I’m trying to give you are the lessons we have learned, so you won’t have to make the same mistakes.”
The Gorgansha continued to stare at the human, who cleared his throat and looked down, then back at the two Marines who had accompanied him to this meeting, as if he wanted to make sure he had some protection if these beings decided to attack.
Exodus: Machine War: Book 4: Retribution Page 6