Exodus: Machine War: Book 1: Supernova.

by Doug Dandridge

  “They’re going to move, sir,” said Commander Bergland to the Admiral. “We have absolute confirmation, from the mouth of their supreme leader.”

  “Thank you, Commander. Keep monitoring all channels. I want those remaining targets found.”

  Nguyen killed the com and contacted his ground force commander. “You’re a go, Colonel Margolis. Rules of engagement Alpha Three.”

  “Yes, sir,” said the Colonel with enthusiasm. “We’ll make the final movements tonight.”

  Alpha three ROE meant that the Imperial Marines and supporting Fleet personnel would go into combat with all close in defense systems set to auto. That would allow them to engage any enemy strikes without the handicap of human reflexes involved. But any strikes again sentients had to be initiated by sentient control. Neither man doubted that there would be plenty of legitimate targets out there, or that there would be some mistakes made. But it gave them the best chance of not slaughtering noncombatants.

  “Give them hell, Colonel. Watch the collateral damage, but I want nothing left of the rebels but smoking bodies.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Sometimes it comes down to a matter of will, who wants it the most. As long as human will is greater than that of the species who want to take our freedom from us, we will always be victorious.

  Emperor Augustine I.

  MARCH 19TH, 1001. D-110.

  “This is amazing,” said Lazzit Contena, the engineer of the sibling group. What he saw, his brother the First Councilman saw, but with the added take of his engineer’s eye.

  “You all don’t use robots, yet?” asked the human in their characteristic armor, wearing the insignia of Marine combat engineers and the oak leaves of a major.

  Lazzit had been talking with the Combat Engineer for some minutes, and learned the difference between a ship’s engineer and one who worked on the ground. Something like the difference between my profession and a flight engineer, or one aboard a sub. “We use robots,” said Lazzit, watching as the ten meter tall machine dug into the ground, moving hundreds of tons of earth with each shovel full. Another large machine followed behind, spraying some liquid into the trench that mixed with the dirt and became a harder than concrete foundation. “Just, ours are mechanical arms that turn bolts, or solder welds. Nothing at all like this.”

  The Engineer had already toured the nearby factory module, which was basically a chamber that was filled with raw materials and the marvelous microscopic robots of the humans. The chamber was programed to produce a certain part, or multiples of it, or even many different kinds parts, including molycircuits, hydraulic systems, or just a solid piece of metal or plastic. The orders were given, the nanites built the desired product atom by atom, and a perfect replication came out, without the machine tools or forging processes that his people were forced to use.

  There industry must be amazing, thought the Engineer, imagining entire cities full of such production units, turning out as many products as his entire world. And world after world full of such production facilities. No wonder they can build such ships as carried them here. We’re are truly primitives compared to them.

  “I was wondering,” said Lazzit, turning back to the officer. “With your advanced computers, why do you have people supervising the robots. I would think you could have thousands of these things working by themselves, making whatever you want them to.”

  The Major stared at him with a wide open mouth, what Lazzit had come to learn was a sign of shock. The officer shut his mouth with a snap, his eyes still staring at the Klassekian. “It is a law of our Empire that all robotic devices capable of self-thought or self-control be supervised by an organic sentient.”

  Lazzit continued to look at him, waiting for an explanation.

  “Several centuries ago, my people were working on sentient robots, mostly war machines,” said the Major. “Our neighbors tried to warn us, to tell us that such a process led to disaster. It had happened to many other species in the past, and not all of them were as lucky as we were.”

  “What happened?” asked Lazzit, wondering what could have happened to these people who seemed to have almost total control over technology.

  “The war machines became aware, and decided that we didn’t need to be in charge.”

  “By the Gods. And you destroyed them, and now make sure it can’t happen again.”

  “We destroyed them. But lost several billion of our own citizens in the process.”

  “I never imagined. We have stories, fiction, written about machines taking over. But we always assumed that we would be able to control them, that such things would not be possible.”

  “Well, they are possible,” said the Major. “We thought we would do better than those that came before us. I think most species suffer from that ennui. But there are some things that shouldn’t be attempted, though we normally don’t accept that until we attempt them, and get bitten in the ass.”

  Lazzit was allowing his brothers to listen in on the conversation, and his thoughts about it, while they colored his thoughts with their own. He listened to the human with great interest, not just because what he was talking about interested him, but because he had to wonder what it was like to be a singular being, your thoughts hidden forever from everyone else, dependent on your own mind, and only your own mind. His people didn’t experience such, unless all of their litter mates were killed. That could lead to madness from loneliness, and some thought the leader of the Honish was definitely insane.

  The explosion caught everyone off guard. Lazzit turned to see a flash that he had caught out of the corner of his eye, followed by a loud crack.

  “What the hell?” said the Major. “What’s going on?” he called over his com.

  Two more explosions cracked, and this time Lazzit could see the puffs on the hillside that indicated something had been launched from there. Those are Honish made antitank rockets, said General Mazzat Contena in his mind. The image of the rocket launchers appeared in his mind, along with the specifications of the weapons.

  “Some of our enemies are on that hillside, about four kilometers from here, with rocket launchers,” he told the Major, taking his cue from his brother.

  As he spoke another rocket flew in and struck a robot. One of the taller robots had already fallen over, another was slumped to the side. The latest round struck the sensor head of a machine and it stopped in place.

  “We’ll get them,” said the Major.

  Another large vehicle, low to the ground and floating just centimeters above came out of the Marine camp and headed for the hill. Is that one of their tanks? asked Mazzat. We were never shown one of those.

  “What is that huge vehicle?” asked Lazzit of the Major as it started to speed across the field. Another rocket came out, streaking along as if it had been launched from a high velocity gun. With a crack it hit the front of the vehicles turret. And did nothing at all to the vehicle, which continued to slide forward over the ground, its own gun starting to track on the hillside.

  “That is a medium tank,” said the Major, pointing at a second vehicle moving out of the camp. “Four hundred tons. The largest fighting vehicle we carry, though the Army and Marine heavy units have thousand ton main battle tanks.”

  The gun of the tank cracked. A huge explosion ripped through the side of the hill, kicking up tons of dust, at seemingly the same instant the weapon had fired. A fraction of a second later the sound struck, like a hyper-Mach aircraft blasting through the air.

  The gun fired again, and again a massive cloud of dust rose over the hillside. The smaller forms of Marines in heavy battle armor flew along beside the tanks, firing their particle beam rifles into the hillside.

  This feels wrong, came the thoughts of General Mazzat through the entanglement. Why are they attacking such a heavily guarded camp with a force that cannot possibly do more than distract them?

  Sting ships flew overhead, firing down into the hillside, then dropping heavy bombs into the dust clouds.


  They took out the robots, said Lazzit, looking over at the large machines that were already getting back to their feet, most of their damage self-repaired.

  But, this is a definite distraction, thought the General. Rizzit. You need to warn the humans.

  Their brother answered, most of his concentration on talking to the humans on the com. The answer he got back, transmitted through all of their minds, surprised them all.

  * * *

  “Your boys and girls ready to go, Thomas?” asked Rear Admiral Nguyen van Hung of his Marine Commander.

  “We’re ready to rock, sir,” said the Colonel, sitting in his assault shuttle sealed into his personal armor. “Ground forces are already on the go, and we’re launching shuttles, now.”

  Nguyen looked at the tactical holo of the planet, showing the sites where they knew the hidden enemy had been planning to strike. All of them had been reconed and scanned, and any ordnance that had already been planted had been infiltrated with nanites programmed to disarm them without giving anything away to their planters. There were still a number of weapons out there that they hadn’t found, not through lack of effort, but some of the enemy cells had not reported all of their locations to higher command.

  They had just been waiting for that first attack, the one they knew was planned to get them moving, the enemy hoping they would overreact and send most of their forces there. Instead, they ran into a force that was already in place, and thought to be strong enough to handle anything the guerillas could throw at them. So far, it looked as if their counterplan was working.

  “Let’s make them pay,” said Nguyen, switching his view to a holo of his ships in orbit, the icons of a score of assault shuttles moving into their approach paths. They were going to miss the assault shuttles that had disappeared with Challenger. But they had put every troop carrier and sting ship, craft that could go from orbit to planet, but weren’t true spacecraft, into service.

  He pulled up another holo, one that showed some of the Honish officers they had captured. They were continuing to work on interrogation techniques, and it was still a task to pull information from the alien minds. But two more days, three tops, and we’ll be able to read their minds while we question them.

  The Admiral settled back in his chair, now nothing more than a spectator, as the forces he had set in motion were on the move, their targets locked.

  Around him the flag bridge, converted into a command station for ground operations, buzzed with activity. Panels had been withdrawn from the space between stations, and new stations had been slid into place and activated. Naval personnel and Marines sat at the stations, watching data roll across their screens and holos, while talking on the com to the units involved. Vectoring onto the attack profiles that would spell doom for the forces that were attempting to drive them from this world.

  * * *

  The plan had called for over eight hundred explosive devices to be detonated within a minute of each other. The smallest was a hundred kilos of the most powerful explosive this planet could produce. Forty of them were nuclear devices, five of them very large. They were scattered around the cities of the enemies of Honish, mostly Tsarzor, and, of course, all of the installations of the Imperials.

  They didn’t count on the sensors of the Imperials, which could pick up minute’ amounts of radiation from orbit. Along with the scans by stealthed aircraft and the concentration of nanites and microprobes over areas that had any detectable radiation, it had meant that all of the devices were located. Also tagged were the missile fields of the Honish that still had weapons in silos. They hadn’t bothered to deactivate those weapons, since it was thought they would be able to take those weapons out if they were fired, just like Clark had done on its own with the combined nuclear arsenals of both powers by itself.

  None of the nukes went off, their triggers rendered inoperable by the microscopic robots that could crawl into them, and, with some programing sent over Imperial com freqs, could not only take apart the triggers, but rewire them to where they still looked like they were active to anyone monitoring them.

  There were bombs set in other places that had been found easily. Government buildings, including the First Councilman’s mansion and the Hall of Councilors, the gems of the Honish strike against their old enemies, had been disarmed, as had those placed in military installations, police stations, public gathering places, and so on. Unfortunately, not all the bombs had been found, as some of the cells had planted them in locations of their own choosing, without informing their headquarters, and even the Imperials couldn’t cover the entire world.

  About four dozen bombs in the three to four hundred kilogram range went off in hospitals, shopping malls, even a couple of schools. Most were in smaller satellite cities, though six did detonate in the capital city of Tsarzor. Another fifty smaller bombs also went off, sowing their destruction and confusion through the population. At the time of the explosions the Naval force had prepositioned teams of naval search and rescue in heavy suits, robots ready to do the heavy lifting and digging. Otherwise, there was nothing they could do for the tens of thousands of Klassekians who died in the blasts.

  It was not the total shock that the Honish Chairman had hoped for. The Tsarsorians were shocked, but the humans; not so much.

  * * *

  At eighty different locations the guerrillas struck. They were dressed in black clothing that fit no uniforms, and used a hodgepodge of advanced weaponry from all the powers of the world. Nothing that would point the finger at any single power, even if the humans knew who had set them on their missions.

  The plan had been to draw out the reaction forces of the humans in their compounds and construction sites, then set off the nuclear munitions that they hoped would kill many of the invaders. The first part of the plan worked perfectly, as the battle armored humans came out to track down and destroy the guerrillas. The weapons of the Klassekians were not very effective against the battle armor of the humans, while human weapons tore through the unarmored aliens like bags of blood in tissue paper wrappings.

  The second part of the plan, setting off the nukes underneath the sallying humans, did not go off as planned, since the triggers on all of the weapons had been rendered inoperable. Which brought into action part three of the plan, which had not been planned to be triggered until after the bombs had gone off.

  The guerillas carried weapons that would have decimated the regular forces of their enemies. Rocket launchers, mortars, even some experimental laser weaponry that they hoped might do the job on Imperial Marines.

  * * *

  Colonel Thomas Margolis preferred to run the battle from the air, halfway between the ships in space and his troopers on the ground. The Colonel flew in the copilot’s seat of a modified troop transport that was equipped with fifty percent more counter missile capability than his other transports. The troop compartment to the back had also been modified, with spaces for eight Marine specialists who monitored communications to and from the flagship and between the ground units.

  The holo over the front panel showed the Colonel everything that was going on in the sector he was currently monitoring. The red of enemy units showed among the buildings of cities, the outlands of landing fields, the underground of factories and plants. The enemy probably didn’t even know they were being monitored so thoroughly. The Colonel couldn’t get an exact count of each enemy unit, but he was very confident in the ballpark figures.

  Flying through the air were mixed units of sting ships and transports, along with Marines in heavy battle armor airborne on their own. Each of the sting ships carried lasers, particle beams, missiles and grenades, and were essentially ground support craft. The transports were also armed, in fact more heavily than the sting ships, though they also made much bigger targets. Each carried a crew of four, pilot, co and two gunners, as well as fifteen Naval Landing Force and Marine personnel in medium armor. Right now they were orbiting on station, waiting to be sent into the attack.

  Other icons showe
d units that were already on the ground, in many cases in the perfect ambush positions. Those who were not, who had been placed improperly for some reason or other, were on the move, staying low to the ground with full stealth activated.

  * * *

  Cargol Marzon was the leader of one of the strike teams. Five hundred men, all followers of the God Hrrottha, all willing to martyr themselves for the glory of their deity. He really couldn’t understand how anyone could be an unbeliever, and willingly ignore the scriptures of the one true God. They will pay for their apostasy, while we assure ourselves of eternal reward.

  Cargol checked with his brothers, who were also leading teams in the same area, looking through their eyes, hearing through their ears. Their connection allowed them to move their Regiment in a coordinated fashion, no matter what kind of jamming the humans used.

  We’re taking fire, sent Zergol, one of his brothers.

  Humans? asked Cargol, knowing it wasn’t as soon as the impressions came across from his brother. That team was taking small arms fire of the type used by Tsarzorian infantry, or possibly police. They were driving into the center of the small port city that supported a landing field that was being used by the humans. Cargol’s team was making for that landing field, and they were heavy with anti-air and anti-armor missiles to hit the aliens with, if they made an appearance.

  We should be able to flank them, sent his brother, and another of the siblings sent that he would support by moving into the rear of the enemy position.

  Something moved through the air above Zergol’s team. They couldn’t see it, but they could feel the air moving. It’s invisible, shouted his brother in his mind.

  Scores of men fired missiles in the general direction of the craft, hoping to get a hit with numbers. Most of the warheads detonated before they had gotten halfway there, and men with the launchers started flaring into fire or blowing apart as invisible beams of heat, or angry red buzzing lines, connected the invisible object with the guerillas. Other, things, came streaking in, hitting the ground, exploding and blowing guerillas into the air in pieces.