Exodus: Machine War: Book 4: Retribution

by Doug Dandridge

  “Yes, ma’am. But, if we jump into hyper they’ll be able to track us.”

  “You’re not going to jump into hyper. What you are going to do is lay low out there in the Ort cloud, and wait till our relief force gets there. Admiral Montgomery is on her way, and should be there in just over two days.”

  Captain Tanamurta thought about that. He could get the device out of the system in a little over a day, while the enemy force would be here just after that. Boroslav would have her ships alongside the Exterminator, protecting the device. While Chung would curve his force around the hyper barrier and meet them out there, giving them a little more cover until Montgomery could get here.

  “I’d like to know what the hell is attracting the assholes here,” said the commodore, looking over at the sector plot that showed the predicted position of the Machine force. It also showed every platform the fleet had out there capable of transmitting instantaneously to any other, screening the area. There were some very large blank areas in the region, places where any number of ships could be on the way here, not to show up until they were within the inner screen, less than twenty hours from the system.

  “You don’t think they’re coming after the Exterminator?”

  “No, ma’am. Not unless they have some way of communicating over long range.”

  Beata looked at her for a moment, obviously mulling her answer. “We suspect that might be true, Commodore. Probably not on all their ships, since it would be one mother of a piece of equipment, and we can’t see them having it on every vessel and displacing protection and firepower. But some. Maybe just one in every force. They had one on the planet killer we captured.”

  “But, even if it was a large piece of equipment, that would be nothing on the capacity of one of those big bastards.”

  “Precisely. Which is why we don’t think its standard equipment on their warships, but something that useful would have to be part of every large force. We haven’t made this general knowledge yet. The spooks don’t think we need to disseminate it to the fleet. I disagree. We need to locate those ships and make them priority targets.”

  “And how do we tell which ships they are, Admiral?”

  “We’ve been working on that too. We think they send out a pulse of gravitons on a tight beam,” said Beata, a schematic appearing on the holo in her place, showing a Machine capital ship with a large device taking up a good portion of the stern hull.

  “Be kind of hard to pick that up and separate it from the entire force. All we’ll know is that they’re sending something to an unknown target.”

  “If we get in between them and their target, we might be able to detect which ship it is. If two ships happened to pick up part of the beam, we could find it with triangulation. Otherwise, look for ships that are near the center of their formation, and don’t seem to be contributing much to the battle. Those are the ones to target from the start.”

  Boroslav thought about that for a moment. That might help them to locate those ships. But they would be the best defended vessels in the enemy fleet. To get to them they would have to blast their way through the screening ships, which really defeated the purpose of trying to take them out in the first place. If they destroyed the entire fleet, problem solved. “I don’t see how we can take it out before they send a message, Admiral.”

  “Neither can we. But we also can’t see any other choice but to try. Now, get your ships out of there and meet up with Chung. He will be in charge until Admiral Montgomery gets there.”

  The holo blanked, leaving the commodore alone with her thoughts. At the forefront was that she would be serving under another commodore, an officer of equal rank. She looked at the records on her implant and saw that she actually had more time in rank than Chung, though he commanded the larger force. No use trying to argue about it now, she thought. Bednarczyk had made her decision as to who would command here, and the woman was well known for being stubborn. Pointing out that she had time in grade would not endear her to the fleet commander.

  “Send out the orders,” she said to her com officer. All ships are to repair to this point in space beyond the barrier.” She looked on the plot, zooming in and locating a large iceball. “Here. We will meet here, and wait for Chung to bring his force in.” And then we hope Montgomery gets here before the Machines find us. And that they don’t already have something larger on the way.

  * * *

  The humans had mustered enough of a force to destroy everything it had sent. If it could feel anger it would have been enraged. It could not feel anger, or frustration, and immediately began working on another plan to take out the device. The AI could not understand the term obsession. A human programmer or psychologist would call it obsession, stemming from very different processes, but obsession nonetheless. Every set of calculations it processed, every simulation it ran, came back to the same answer. It had to take the device out, before the humans used it to sterilize every system they took. Its reasoning told it that such would take decades with the one device. It would surely come up with other solutions. That didn’t make any difference. It had to destroy that device, even if it took every ship it had.

  The AI checked its deployments once again. The hyper VII battle force was still not ready. In a month it figured it would have enough ships to match the humans in the upper dimension. Until then it wouldn’t. It was still on the edge of deploying them to hunt down the device, but the calculations kept pulling it back from the brink. It would need those ships for the attack it was planning, using their higher dimension capability to attack the hyper VI ships of the humans, devastating that force, then coming back to take on the outnumbered VII warships.

  The AI sent out the new directives to every one of its forces that had a com vessel. They were ordered to avoid contact with any human forces that outnumbered them, and to attack any that they could easily crush. Unless they located the device. Then they were to attack without regard to their own losses. Those orders sent, the AI again looked over everything it knew about the tactical and strategic situation and again recalculated the odds. After several seconds, and millions of evolutions of calculations, it gave up. Until it had destroyed the device all of the other calculations were meaningless. Its resources were unknown for another major battle until it knew the status of those units. According to theory the AI could not go insane. To an outside observer it would seem as if that theory were wrong.

  * * *

  “Here they come,” said Boroslav over the com. All of her ships were out in the ort cloud, arrayed around the Exterminator in a defensive formation, all unnecessary systems powered down. Chung had been hitting them for the last fifteen hours, shadowing their force and getting in strikes with wormhole launched weapons whenever he got the solution that worked in his advantage. Unfortunately, he hadn’t gotten enough of them, and had only taken out forty-four of the almost five hundred ship force. And he had lost nine of his ships in the process.

  Now almost three hundred and fifty ships were dropping out of hyper into normal space at the edge of the system. They started boosting into the system immediately, and Boroslov was sure they didn’t know where her force and the Exterminator were located. Otherwise they would be decelerating at maximum so they could go back into hyper and work their way around the system.

  “How soon till Montgomery gets here?” asked the engineering captain, speaking over the laser com. Tanamurta was aboard the Exterminator, working on the device, doing, something? She wasn’t sure what, and it didn’t really matter, since it kept him out of her hair.

  “ETA, twenty-one hours,” said the navigator. “We should be picking them up in hyper in another twelve and a half hours.”

  And in that time the Machine force will have moved deep into the system, not able to get out before Mara can engage, thought the commodore. She really just wanted to get what was left of her force out of here, along with the device that Bednarczyk thought was so important. If Montgomery could engage them long enough to let her force slip away, tha
t would be enough for her.

  The Machines continued into the system for another three hours before twenty of them started changing vectors and heading back out. The commodore thought they would be going back into hyper and heading around the system. It was something she hoped they wouldn’t do, since that meant they were considering the Ort cloud as a hiding place for their target.

  And then the image of Montgomery’s force appeared on the plot, moving through hyper VII. She had only brought those ships along, giving her a current force of eighty-one ships. Outnumbered and outmassed by the enemy, but possessing superior hyper capability and wormhole launchers. The enemy ships in the system started changing vectors, trying to boost out. But they were too deep in to escape. The smaller force was almost to the barrier, and Chung’s force was still involved in a running battle further out, unable to intercept those ships.

  Hours passed, and the enemy force continue trying to claw its way out, while the smaller force reached the barrier and jumped into hyper, immediately starting to curve around the system on a course that would bring them to the Ort cloud. It was still a big place, and she was not going to do anything to make finding her easy. That didn’t mean they wouldn’t luck out, and she had some contingencies in place in case they looked to be getting close.

  “Uh oh,” said the tactical officer. “It looks like they’re about to jump back down into normal space, ma’am.”

  Icons started to appear on the plot, scattered around the Ort cloud, their predicted emergence points. And two of those points were within light minutes of her force, close enough to pick them up if they looked closely.

  “Send out this order,” said Letitia, looking over at her com section. “All ships are to remain powered down unless ordered to do otherwise. Repeat, no one is to do anything until I tell them to.” It wouldn’t do to have someone panic and open fire, drawing them into her position.

  Over the next half minute the twenty machine ships jumped into normal space. They started sending out active sensors the moment they appeared. Just when it looked like they were about to get away with staying hidden, one of the Machine vessels got a return, on the Exterminator, the one ship that didn’t have the stealth capabilities of the others. And then the knife fight was on, the Imperial ships opening fire with their lasers and particle beams at the two closest enemy ships, which returned fire.

  The Exterminator took a couple of laser hits that burned through the hull, causing minor damage, before the rest of the human force hit those ships with more fire than they could handle. One went up in a plasma cloud as its antimatter stores breached. The other started a tumble as its forward grabbers were burned off. That one fired a couple of missiles at the target that was most important to them, the human flare causing device.

  * * *

  What the hell, thought the Captain Tanamurta as the hull he was sheltering in shook.

  “We’ve been hit, sir,” called out one of the engineering crew that was working on the device, repairing the minor damage it had taken during the last flare generating event. “Laser strike.”

  “We have missiles coming in,” yelled out another crewman, calling down from the maneuvering control room they used before and after events.

  Tanamurta thought about yelling out an order, but couldn’t think of what to say. The ship had some defenses, and they were already active. The object was large, and even a hit by a ship killer traveling at low velocity wouldn’t totally destroy it. But it might still kill them depending on where it hit. The Exterminator might have been the mass of a battleship, but it’s hull protection was minimal, missing the armor of a capital ship.

  “The warships took them out,” yelled the same voice over the intercom.

  But there will be more coming in, thought the captain. He thought about ordering everyone to the hangar deck, where they could evacuate the vessel. But he really didn’t like the idea of being out in space in a small shuttle with beams and missiles flying around. No, he thought it better to take his chances in battle armor, within the fragile hull of this device that every other ship in the force was charged with defending.

  * * *

  Letitia Boroslav pumped a fist in the air as the second Machine ship blew up. She looked quickly at the plot, then over at her com officer. “How’s the Exterminator doing?”

  “They took one laser hit,” said the lieutenant. “No reported casualties.”

  Boroslav breathed a sigh of relief. As important as the device was, she knew that Tanamurta was even more important, since his mind had come up with it. I should have ordered him to this ship, she thought. He might have refused, in which case she had the Marines in place to drag him over. But it was too late now.

  “The other ships are all jumping into hyper, ma’am.”

  Boroslav cursed under her breath. She could hope that meant they were going away, but she knew better. They were going to micro-jump right on top of her position.

  She looked back at the plot, noting that Montgomery’s ships were on the way in, almost to her. About two thirds would be coming into space in front of the main Machine force. The rest..

  “We have translations all around us,” called out the tactical officer.

  Eighteen Machine ships jumped back into normal space, all within two light seconds of her vessels. And seconds later twenty-four Imperial vessels came out within the same range.

  The Machines opened fire first, their computer brains allowing them to acquire and fire much faster than the human controlled vessels. Their lasers lanced out and pierced hulls, killing crew and destroying machinery. The human weapons fired back, including five wormhole particle beams that hit with the power of their huge accelerators housed on the Donut. It was the definition of a knife fight, every ship too close to miss or avoid, no protection except their armor and cold plasma fields, which in most cases were only able to slightly attenuate their power. The humans had the more powerful beam weapons, and more ships, and within a minute it was over. Montgomery had lost a trio of ships destroyed, many others damaged, but all of the Machine vessels were gone.

  On the other side of the system the other human ships were launching wormhole preaccelerated missiles at the enemy ships that were still an hour away from the barrier. Not one of the Machine ships made it.

  “Good to see you, Admiral,” said Boroslav as Montgomery’s face appeared on the holo. “You came right in the nick of time.”

  “Wish I could have gotten here sooner,” said the smiling woman. “But I guess it’s better than getting here too late. It was a very near thing.”

  Boroslav nodded. “We need to get this thing to the next target. And I could do with some more ships, since the damned Machines seem to have a hard on for that device.”

  “We’ll get you to the next target,” said Montgomery, looking off holo for a moment. “But it will be up to Admiral Bednarczyk to give you more ships.”

  Boroslav nodded again. It seemed to her that the only proper decision was to protect the damned thing if they wanted it to do its job without being destroyed. But it wasn’t her call.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Men talk of killing time, while time quietly kills them. Dion Boucicault

  KLASSEK: NOVEMBER 12TH, 1002.

  “General Wittmore,” came the call over the com. “We have another emergency.”

  What in the hell now? he thought, looking down at his flat comp for a moment. He thought they were through with the Machines on this world. If they had escaped his attack and were making a comeback, he wasn’t sure what he would do. Well, he would do whatever needed doing to end their threat.

  The Klassekians were still picking up the pieces of the EMP attack that had ended the Machine plague. Replacing all of the burned out circuitry of their electronics. In some cases they weren’t even bothering, waiting for the higher tech versions of the Empire that they were now also capable of manufacturing. Still, it had taken a week to get everything running back to more or less normal.

  “What is it?” h
e asked, trying to keep the peevishness out of his voice and failing. The face of the Fleet liaison officer appeared over the desk in a holo.

  “Scouts have picked up another Machine force on its way here in hyper VI,” said the officer. “Approximately three hundred and fifty vessels.”

  “Christ,” blurted out the general. “I’m hoping there are no planet killers along with them.”

  “No, sir. We don’t think there are any of them left.”

  But for some reason they keep trying to destroy this world, thought the general. It made no sense to him. The Machines were fighting a defensive battle in their own space, they had a powerful enemy on their own borders, and they had to know that Bolthole was more of a threat to their kind than this single planet. Yet they kept coming back here, again and again. There had to be something they considered important here. The Klassekians? Their abilities were a force multiplier to the Empire. But they had been spread far from the planet since their discovery by the Empire. There were over ten million of them off world by now, in the Fleet, at Bolthole, in the Empire. So, could there be something else that was drawing them? If so, he couldn’t figure out what it was. And no matter why they kept coming back, they needed to be destroyed.

  “Can we stop them?”

  “I’m, not sure, sir. The admiral plans to strike at them while they’re still some distance from the system. Unfortunately, we have no hyper VII ships. They’re all deployed with Admiral Bednarczyk.”

  Which made sense. She was engaged in active combat operations, and she needed all of the fast ships she could get.