Exodus: Machine War: Book 1: Supernova.

by Doug Dandridge

  “Tactical,” called out the Captain, alarmed by the words of the Honishan. “Do we have any missile tracks from the planet.” She looked again at the Honishan, who had closed all of his eyes and was mumblings words that the translation program could not interpret.

  “Nothing, ma’am,” said the man.

  “Check their missile fields,” called out Lamsat, his own expression anything but serene. “They still use liquid fueled rockets, unlike us. They have to fuel them before launch, and we can pick up the plumes of the fueling.”

  “Scan the surface of the large continent, Tactical,” she ordered, looking at the holo of the planet and zooming in on that land mass.

  “We have missile launches, ma’am.”

  “From the large continent?” she asked, not seeing any tracks appearing on the tactical scan.

  “No, ma’am. They're coming up from the smaller continent. Hundreds of them. More every second. And we’re picking up some sea based launches as well. Preliminary trajectories indicate they are all aimed at the large continent.”

  “Why did you launch first?” she asked Lamsat, staring into his eyes. There had been remains of civilizations discovered that had killed themselves with nuclear warfare, but this was the first eyewitness account of it happening. And I’m one of those eyewitnesses, she thought in horror.

  “A first strike is our only chance of surviving this,” said the Astronaut, all of his eyes wide. “We’ll still get hurt, but there will be survivors.”

  “Our God will protect us,” said H’rrana in that maddeningly serene voice. “He will not allow our lands to be touched, while our missiles will smite the infidel.”

  “More missile launches,” called out tactical. “These are coming up from the large continent. Hundreds of them.”

  “What kind of warheads are these weapons carrying?” asked Albright, turning to look at Lamsat, having given up on getting a rational answer from the Honishan alien.

  “From a hundred kilotons to thirty megatons,” said the Astronaut, his tone betraying his disbelief at what was happening. “Most of our missiles have smaller warheads, but multiples per launch platform, while theirs are mostly unitary weapons of greater yield.”

  “I have over three thousand objects in the air, ma’am. And more launching every second. What do you want me to do?”

  “Target those weapons and take them out,” she shouted, watching the missiles tracks all over the holo globe. “Launch assault shuttles and fighters. I want them on courses that allow us to hit all of the weapons, including those that Clark can’t reach.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” replied the officer, and the com went blank as that man got busy with the task of saving a planet from nuclear destruction.

  “What are you doing?” asked H’rrana, opening his eyes and staring at the human.

  “Saving you from yourselves,” said Albright as the first of the missiles disappeared from the plot.

  “You can’t do that,” shouted the emissary from Honish, rising from his seat, looking like he was about to climb over the table to attack the Captain. A large hand came down on his shoulder, and the heavily muscled form of the Phlistaran Marine pushed him back into his seat.

  “We’ll have none of that,” rumbled the big officer. “You be a good boy, and just sit there until the Captain gives you leave to get up.”

  * * *

  Clark’s main energy battery was built around her four laser rings, two each on bow and stern sections. Each was a marvel of technology, their design allowing the accumulation of multiple hundreds of gigawatts of photonic energy that bounced around within its confines. Each ring was fed by eight accumulators that push photons into the structure. The material of the ring was made of nanomaterials that could become transparent in any part of the outer surface. They could also grav lens as well as any purposefully built structure, focusing a beam that stayed tight for well over several light minutes. And they could change the frequency of the beam, from infrared up to gamma rays, depending on the nature of the target.

  The targeting system of the ship could track and target over two hundred objects at the same time, and each ring could fire up to fifty beams simultaneously. Against the hard targets of modern warfare a one fiftieth strength beam was not much of a threat. Even a missile took a several second exposure to that kind of a beam to kill, and no modern weapon would allow contact for that period of time. So the ship rarely used its full targeting and multiple beam capabilities.

  But these targets were not of the same tech level as the firing ship. They were fragile, and it didn’t take more than a momentary contact to vaporize the warhead. Within a second of opening fire, Clark had hit over a hundred missiles, blasting them apart in the upper atmosphere. In the great majority of cases the warhead was vaporized so quickly that the conventional explosives needed to set off the nuke were already expanding vapor before they exploded. In very few cases did the actual nuclear explosion occur, and those were either very high in or above the atmosphere.

  The missiles from Tsarzor began separating as they arced above the atmosphere, turning into three or more tumbling objects, each falling toward their targets. They were more difficult targets to track, and the increasing interference in the upper atmosphere added to the difficulty. The sensors of the cruiser could still find them, but it added time to the location and acquisition of each target.

  “I’m not sure I can get them all, ma’am,” said the Tactical Officer over the com.

  “Keep at it, Tactical. If one of them hits the planet, I’ll consider it a defeat.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said the Tac Officer, dropping off the com so he could take care of the business in hand. The ship’s computer was finding the targets and prioritizing them, but human oversight was still needed in the firing procedure.

  The cruiser also carried four, six hundred ton attack fighters, and six assault shuttles. The fighters were heavily armed with beam weapons and antiship missiles. Capable of a thousand gravities acceleration, they headed off on courses that kept them above the atmosphere and to positions where they could cover areas hidden from the view of their launching vessel. The shuttles had nowhere near the armament, nor the acceleration of the fighters. Still, they were equipped to land Marines against armed resistance, and had the weaponry to suppress ground fire and battle atmospheric craft. They were not the most effective craft to shoot down ballistic missiles with, but they were better than nothing, and added somewhat to the effort to render the strikes harmless.

  The time clicked by, and more and more missiles and warheads were knocked out of action, while others launched from the weapons fields of both combatants. And then another complication entered the equation.

  “We’re picking up ground following weapons, ma’am,” called out one of the weapons techs who was assigned to targeting.

  “Show me,” she called out, and the holo of the planet zoomed in to a view of the surface of an ocean, and a long object with stubby wings streaking over the waves.

  “Velocity is point two six kilometers per second, ma’am. About nine hundred and sixty kilometers an hour. We think it’s intended to fly under the enemy sensor grid, and take out targets by surprise.”

  “Time to nearest potential target?”

  “About seventeen minutes, ma’am. We’re picking up many others with the same velocity and similar attack times. Do you want us to fire on them.”

  Albright thought for a moment, zooming the holo back out to look at the battle between her ship and the ballistic missiles. Other missiles were rising from locations around the larger cities, from their trajectories most likely defensive weaponry made to shoot down the incoming weapons. And Clark’s sensors were keeping track of them as well in case they turned out to be something completely different.

  “Hold off on firing on the, cruise missiles, I think they were called. We’ll take care of them once the ballistic missiles are gone.”

  “Can you get them all?” asked Lamsat, leaning forward and watching the
tracks that were ending with rapidity, though each wave of intercepts was further along their arc.

  “We’re trying,” said Albright, looking up at the alien, then over at the other one, who still had an angry look on his face. “They’re easy to kill, but there are a lot of them.”

  “Then take out the Honish missiles,” said Lamsat, looking over at H’rrana with glaring eyes. “They started this thing, after all.”

  “You launched first,” said H’rrana, slamming his right tentacles on the table. “We only responded.” He looked over at the human. “You need to destroy their weapons first.”

  “We only launched because you were fueling your missiles,” screamed Lamsat, sitting up as if he wanted to jump out of his own seat.

  “We are targeting all of your weapons, without regard for who they came from,” said Albright, shaking her head. And if you weren’t so potentially important to us I would just turn my back on both of you and fly away. She shook her head again, knowing that last thought to be false. She was mandated to contact intelligent species, and part of that mandate was to help them survive.

  How’s it coming, Tactical? the Captain sent over her internal com link.

  It’s going to be close, ma’am, sent that officer.

  Albright sent a mental nod as she watched the holo. There seemed to be fewer missiles on it than a minute ago, despite fresh launches. The laser emitters were providing plenty of power from the crystal matrix batteries that fed them, while those batteries were being continually topped off by the reactors. In a fight with another ship of her class, she would be going through laser power faster than she could replenish it. Against primitive missiles, not so much. It didn’t take much power to blast them from existence. Only their numbers were causing much of a problem.

  “How many damned weapons do you both have?” she asked in frustration, looking at the two aliens. She looked back at the holo and saw that there were even fewer weapons, but the ones that were still up were closer to the territory of their enemy. And the low flying weapons were still up in mass, with growing numbers.

  Come on, thought Albright, watching as scores more warheads disappeared off the plot. And no more were rising from the continents, though there were still some submarine launches.

  “Tactical, detail someone to take out every submarine you can locate with kinetics.”

  “Yes, ma’am. We’re on it.”

  “You can’t do that,” said Lamsat in a stricken tone. “My people are on some of those submarines.”

  “And they’re launching weapons of mass destruction at other people on your world,” said Albright, staring at the alien astronaut. “Tactical,” she said again, knowing that the aliens would hear her and relay this message to their world through whatever telepathic sense they had. “Target those missile fields as well. I don’t want them to be holding any surprises.”

  All of the aliens sat there in shock, staring at the human who had just ordered strikes on their world. Moments later the first of the kinetic weapons landed in the water near the icon of a submarine that had launched weapons. The vessel was probably not at that point anymore, which didn’t really matter as the weapon struck the water with the force of a multi-megaton warhead. Any sub within ten kilometers of that strike was gone. There were more hits on the water, then a bright flash as a kinetic came down on a missile field on the larger continent.

  We don’t have that many kinetics aboard, thought the Captain. Every ship carried some, but they really didn’t expect to use them, especially Exploration Command ships. KE weapons were really nothing more than masses of iron, a ton each, with a built in single grabber that could accelerate them up enough velocity to generate megatons of force, along with their own acceleration due to gravity. They could always make more, but they didn’t have the time for that now.

  There were more flashes on the holo as the lasers kept taking out warheads, and kinetics continued to strike subs and missile fields. Then the well ran dry, and there were no more kinetics to drop. Albright was tempted to order missile strikes, which could double as kinetics if launched without their warheads. She resisted the temptation, since, as an exploration vessel, she didn’t have that many in her magazines to start with, and they were really the only weapons she had for use against ships of her tech level or greater, if any came along.

  “I think we’re going to get them all,” called out the tactical officer over the com. There were only a couple of score weapons left, and, though the atmosphere was roiling with explosive energy and electromagnetic radiation. And then the unthinkable happened, and the tactical system lost lock on one weapon, which hurtled down on a coastal city on the larger continent.

  The weapon flared, brighter than the kinetics, and a mushroom cloud rose into the air and into the stratosphere. The city below the blast started to dissolve as the blast wave moved out, following the thermal wave that set everything burnable on fire.

  “There were over five million citizens in that city,” said H’rrana in a hollow tone. He glared at Lamsat, and tried to rise from his seat before the Phlistaran Marine pushed him back. “Your people murdered five million of our citizens.”

  “In self-defense,” yelled back Lamsat, returning the glare.

  “And you,” continued H’rrana, turning his gaze to the Captain. “You killed thousands of our people, with your strikes on our submarines and missile fields. You too are a murderer, and the blood of those people is on your hands.”

  Albright suppressed a flash of guilt and looked up to meet the eyes of the Honish representative. “I do not accept your guilt, H’rrana. I saved billions of your peoples with the actions of this ship. If you didn’t want your people put at risk, you shouldn’t have launched thousands of damned nukes at the Tsazorians while my ship was in orbit about your planet. And you,” she said, turning toward Lamsat, “are just as guilty.”

  She looked back at the holo, to see the large mushroom cloud still rising from the nuke strike, and the several smaller from the kinetics. “My God. We came here to tell you people what danger you are in from that damned blue star, and all you can think about is killing each other.”

  She looked over at her Marine Lieutenant, making sure she had his attention. “Lieutenant J’rrantar. Would you please escort the gentlemen, and lady,” she nodded to Nastra, “to suitable quarters. They are our guests while we sort this situation out.”

  As soon as the aliens were all out of the conference room Albright contacted Nagakami. “Get me the leaders of the two nations on the com. I want to make sure we understand the situation here.” Moments later the heads of the two leaders of Tsarzor and Honish appeared in separate holos floating above the table. She wasn’t sure if they could see each other, though both casts were also being recast to the other side. Albright took a deep breath and began the work of diplomacy, making sure both leaders knew what was going on.

  Chapter Four

  It is hard to reason with a species gone mad.

  Old Brakakak saying.

  “We’ve confirmed it, Captain,” said Commander Sophia Romanov, the ship’s surgeon and exobiologist. “The last subject received the information from his brother as instantaneously as to make no difference.”

  And that subject was over a light hour from his brother, who was on the planet, thought Albright with smile. This is something that can really help the Empire, if these people don’t let themselves get taken out by that damned supernova.

  That was the problem here. While there were some who were willing to leave the planet and go with the Terrans, there were many more who had one excuse or another for not cooperating, and those were willing to interfere with those who wanted to go. Point in fact was the newcast she was watching at that moment, where one of the talking heads was telling the people of the planet that the humans were here to kidnap them, to take them into space to labor as slaves at some diabolical mining colony. A second holo had a spokesman from the nation of Honish telling his people that their God was near, and extorting th
em to resist any attempts of the humans to get them to leave this world before the deity arrived.

  And so much potential here. They had proven that the natives could communicate mind to mind, thoughts, images, sounds, across great distances with no degradation in the signal, and without the passage of time. Romanov had scanned them with both external imagers and nanotech while they were transmitting and receiving, and had found the area of their multi-lobed brain where the ability seemed to reside. The kicker was that only siblings from the same birthing seemed to have connections with each other. Some form of quantum entanglement, where the cells of that section of the brain shared a quantum state with the similar cells in those of the brother or sister.

  The good news was that Klassekian females, though only capable of one or at most two pregnancies in their lifetimes, had large litters of from six to twelve babies, all of them connected. And surely we can find a way to use this ability to augment our fleet communications. Wormholes are great, and expensive, and we definitely will never have enough for all of our ships. But with these people in our com sections.

  “What’s the next step, Doctor?”

  “I’d like to take a couple of them into hyper and see if the effect works no matter the dimension.”

  “And for that, you need to send one out to the Lewis, and let them translate into hyper?”

  “Exactly right,” agreed Romanov. “And I would like to test them across every dimension of hyper. We need to know the limitations of this thing as well as its benefits.”

  “Go ahead and set that up,” ordered the Captain. “If you need Lewis to come in from the hyper limit, I’ll order them in. It’s obvious these people aren’t going to be a threat to any of our space based assets.” It might be a different story on the ground.

  She had people on the planet now, over a hundred, mostly researchers and their Marine security. About half of them were looking at the huge constructs that rose up above the atmosphere. They still had no idea what they were, or why they were put where they were. What was known was that they were impenetrable to any kind of energy probe, and invulnerable to any kind of laser of material drill. They couldn’t even get an estimate of their ages. All they knew for sure was that they had been here since the beginning of written history on this world, and there were legends of them that predated that history.