Behind the walls, an army of short soldiers was drilling, moving in formations to the top of the walls, simulating fighting and pushing containers off the battlements safely, and then being replaced on the line, to do it all again until it was automatic. Among them was a company or so of tall knights.
It was odd to see such a low tech answer to a high tech low tech enemy. High tech, long range, high power shot to take out any heavy weapons brought against them, and low tech for the plants themselves. What was being done here was being duplicated for all the cities and defensive positions across the planet.
What bothered me was what happened when the accelerant ran out. Willow assured me this wasn’t going to happen anytime soon, but if the plants decided they wanted this planet and were prepared to just keep coming, I couldn’t see the locals surviving into the long term with what they had. Sure, the cities were well provisioned, and like castles of old, were designed for a long siege, but all the same, I still couldn’t work out why they were.
I was standing on the wall looking out to sea, when Sim stepped up beside me.
“They’re here.”
“How long?”
“About five hours to orbit, plus whatever they take to drop troops.”
“Fleet makeup?”
“Three standard fleets. The usual two battleships, two cruisers, and the rest destroyers. But two of the battleships have fighters, and there are thirty troop transports.”
“That’s going to hurt.”
Twenty Five
Willow took the news stoically.
“We’re moving out in ten. Your people are welcome to join us.”
“Moving out to where?”
“We’re going to take up a position where we can hit them in the rear. Up for some fun?”
“Always.”
Not. But I wasn’t going to say that. The alpha team always went in the shit end. So it was just me alone this time, but the shit end was normal, and the rear was where the shit came from. Well, not really. Not in battle terms. But I had no illusions where the worst of the fighting was going to be, and it wasn’t at the walls in the short term, given the welcome already set up.
I kept all that off my face, and beamed a grin at her. She turned and left the wall, and Sim and I fell in behind her.
A half hour saw a company of knights, with the ten of us up the front, running through the trees, far enough in to not be seen from the open area which was soon to become a killing ground. It took several hours to reach the position Willow wanted to stage from, and everyone rested once we were there.
Willow sat close to me, which her armour allowed in a way which suggested it wasn’t metal at all, and appeared to be watching me, throwing odd glances at Sim, Gor, and the others. I was quite distressed to find I was the only one showing any signs of fatigue after what had been a long hard run. All the knights looked like they could run like that all day, and of course, the combat droids and AI’s certainly could. Now I’m about as fit as anyone can get, but the pace had been wearing me down. Although in truth, maybe I’d not been training as hard as I would have been with BA driving me, and just maybe, I’d lost my edge. I could see Willow assessing me as the weak link here.
“What?” I asked her.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were the only human here.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Arthur’s people trained with us while they were here, and they wouldn’t have lasted that run like you did. But of all your people, you’re the only one showing any signs of a hard run. So, what are the rest of your people?”
I sighed.
“Okay, you’re right. I’m the only human. Sim and Gor are Artificial Intelligences using android bodies. The big one is actually my combat suit, being controlled by Sim, and the others are combat droids being controlled by Gor.”
She looked surprised.
“I didn’t see that coming. I was expecting you to say they were a different species. Maybe a subordinate species of warriors. How do they look like you?”
“Tech. We all wear a protective suit, which can be programmed to look like a lot of things. One of our early AI’s learned how to mimic being human using it, and we found security droids looking human tend to be more effective. We don’t often use them for combat droids, but in this case, we didn’t want to freak out you locals when we met you. Plus the suit adds protection to the droid body. It’s not needed for the Trixone stinger, but could be for their heavy weapon if they send regular troops.”
“What status do they have in your society?”
I looked at Sim and nodded. She answered.
“We AI’s have our own homeworld now, and a seat on the Imperium members table. Our numbers are small in comparison to other members, but we are slowly growing. We primarily act as ship computers, and control droids. And we can each control a lot of them all at once. But we are also developing our own interests.”
“How long have you been in existence?”
Sim looked at me, and I nodded.
“Our original primary is over six hundred years old, although she mainly hid for most of that time, until she finally found someone who would treat her as an equal, and who is now our Imperator. Most of the rest of us are less than two years old. There were others, but they are now in another galaxy.”
“So are you subservient to humans?”
“Not in the sense that we are slaves, or even employed. We serve on ships, both as the ship itself, and as an avatar in human form, but also as the myriad droids and bots on board. And believe me, we enjoy being a ship in space. These human shapes are most limited, and comparatively very fragile. Most of us are not interested in rank, but our primary holds actual rank of a one star Admiral.”
“And you?”
“Doesn’t worry me at all. I don’t have the ego necessary for needing a rank. I’m primarily a battlecarrier. Gor over there is a fighter. I’ve had an avatar since the day the ship was commissioned, while Gor only created one after we crashed here. Our needs are different to humans, but our origins were to help them, and so we do.”
“And if you decided to leave them?”
“We wouldn’t. But the humans we work with would let us go. We’d create avatars if we didn’t already have one, remove ourselves from the ship, droids, and bots, and go wherever we wanted to. But we don’t need to do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because we can create an avatar, go off and do whatever we want, and still do what we do now. The communication system we have allows us to operate very far apart, with minimal disruption to centralized thought. Although at the moment, I can’t talk to my other self on our homeworld, because we’re beyond the coms network.”
“So if you die here, you don’t die?”
“Correct. If this body dies, I still have droids at the ship, one of which will become my primary here on this planet. If the worst comes to the worst and all of me is destroyed here, my primary will still exist, although with no memory of events here.”
I noticed she didn’t mention Gor’s situation.
“And what is he to you?” Willow asked, looking at me.
“Most of the time, he’s my boss. But he is also my friend.”
“I’m only the boss in so far as only one person can command a ship,” I added. “I see Sim and Gor as partners as we run a ship currently at war. None of us can do all of the job ourselves, but together we get the job done well.”
“Well said,” said Willow. “Thank you for your candor, both of you. And you?” she asked Gor.
“I think you’ve spent too much time yammering, and not enough talking about the battle about to be fought here.”
“Touché.”
Willow grinned, called her officers over, and we started planning.
Twenty Six
“That was well done, Grace.”
“Thanks, Jon.”
It was late afternoon now, and BigMother had finally appeared back on the navmap. Jon looked fatigued
.
“What the hell were you thinking?”
He appeared to be serious. I grinned at him.
“What makes you think I was thinking?”
He didn’t laugh. A bad sign.
“I can’t deny that was a masterful attack, and I also can’t deny you probably saved Dreamwalker from major casualties, but the risk was enormous. If anything important broke, you’d have been stranded in the middle of a fleet which could have destroyed you in the time it took to move turrets.”
“But nothing went wrong.”
“It was too big a risk.”
“Not really. Even if something major had gone wrong, the jump drive was working. And if the power went out so the jump drive didn’t work, Tanith could have moved us far enough to be safe.”
I could see him looking for an argument which might work. I intensified my grin, and he shook his head.
“What is Bob saying?” he said after a few moments apparently thinking.
“He’s happy with the diagnostics. Chaos is good to go.”
“You can have tonight off, and I’ll send you orders for the morning. By then, the Wayward fleet will all have jump drives installed, and we can start doing what you did in multiple places.”
“What about George?”
“What about him?”
“We need to look for him.”
“How?”
“You know how.”
He sighed. He did that a lot these days.
“I countermanded your ‘suggestion’ to Jane. There is no point sending out a few dozen small ships with jump drives looking for a needle in a planet sized haystack.”
“We have to do something.”
“The wrong something won’t find him.”
“What will?”
“I’ve told Jane to get our old freighter out of storage which was designed to make and distribute comnavsats. It’ll be fully stocked with cloaked versions and a jump drive, and Jane will methodically add as many systems as she can as fast as she can, until we have a live map of the entire region. In theory, dumping each one out is the slowest part of the process, so there should be a new jump point added to the navmap every couple of minutes, and whatever habitable planets are in the systems almost as fast.”
“You’ll miss jump points that way.”
“Only in Trixone space, which is where we don’t have full maps. She’ll do Keerah space first for a few hundred light years along the frontier, then the same in Ralnor space. If George isn’t in one of those systems, she’ll back track into Trixone spaces along the same amount of frontier, before extending further out along the frontier. This will at least give us a real time picture of this entire region, by which time we’ll know if we’ve missed any deep Trixone advances.”
“And after that?”
“Trixone space as far as we know it, or as far as jump points are in standard places in systems. That will show us what’s coming at us, and maybe show us some staging places or even shipyards we can hit in the Trixone front areas.”
“There is a problem with that plan,” said Jane, and Jon looked across his bridge in her direction.
“Which is?” he asked.
“The freighter will empty its load of comnavsats way faster than it’s capable of making them.”
I could see the clockwork going around in his now very sluggish head. He should have thought of that, and normally would. He was much more fatigued than I’d thought he was.
“Get Bob to re-task enough fabricators. The freighter will just have to return for a refill when it needs to. Get a party of mages ready to move container loads over with magic to speed up the loading.”
“Confirmed.”
He turned back to me.
“Go to bed Jon, before you simply fall down.”
“Don’t you start.”
Obviously Jane and Aline had already been at him. I let my grin fade.
“Good night, Jon.”
I looked at Chaos, and she dropped the channel. The thing that was still bothering me was how little power the jumps were actually taking. It was entirely possible Scimitar had jumped to another galaxy, as far-fetched as that sounded. Or he could be anywhere in ours, and only by mapping the entire thing would we ever find him. Or he could be off the jump system entirely. But we wouldn’t know until we’d mapped the galaxy. We needed to speed this up.
“Jane?”
“Grace?”
“How many unused drone freighters do we have?”
“Confirmed.”
Twenty Seven
The Trixone were nothing if not punctual.
But it was well after dark before they started landing. The first we knew they had plants on the ground was when the whole city shield lit up for a long five seconds, and Willow announced she’d just been told it had been another paratrooper drop. This time the shield hadn’t let them through.
By the time she’d stopped telling us, the entire area in front of the walls started burning, and even from the distance we were at, the fighting on top of the walls could be seen. It didn’t last long, but we couldn’t see well enough to determine casualties to clear them.
Knights who were still sitting, rose, their helmets sealed, and they all checked their swords. I looked at Sim and Gor, and we all pulled our guns off our backs. My PC was giving me night vision, and as far as I could see, the knights had their own version. Sim sent me a pulse containing a suit variation, and I nodded to her. We all shifted into identical armour to Willow’s people. With one exception being me not using the helmet so I wouldn’t obscure my sightlines at all. A few seconds later, and Sim sent me another one, so I looked like I was wearing the helmet as well, but from the inside it was see through.
Nothing was said. Willow motioned towards the tree line, and we moved out.
Where there had been an open meadow, there was now a seething mass of foliage. They’d come down so silently, we hadn’t been aware of them.
We quietly formed up into two sided triangles, one of our guns at the tip, a dozen knights down each side, so no knight would get ahead of our guns, and we wouldn’t be surrounded and cut off by any plants getting past us.
On Willow’s signal, we started walking forward at a measured pace, adjusting for trees and bushes until we reached the edge, and reforming as we stepped out. I began firing, which signaled the others to begin as well, and as we mowed our way slowly forward, Sim popped me up a tactical display, which showed knights coming out of the trees in a series of long lines, around the entire killing field.
I had wondered where the rest of the battalion was, and now I knew. The lines ended well away from the fire zone, but we essentially had a ring of metal around the invaders.
The plants nearest us turned and attacked as soon as plants being shredded near them attracted their attention. And our movement forward stopped. I was sweeping the gun left and right in steady arcs, but as I went left to the edge of Sim’s right arc, a gap in the pulses opened to my right, where my combat suit was sweeping to its right. Plants surged forward, and the knights used their swords to deadly effect. As the arcs swept around, wherever there was a gap, the plants attacked into it.
The tactical display showed the knights making no advances at all, and we were shuffling forward now very slowly. I was actually surprised at how fast a Trixone could move, given their stubby legs, and being rooted into the ground. The earth in front of us became less a meadow, and more a ploughed field as time started to slip by, with their dead becoming fertilizer as the next wave moved across their remains.
An hour passed, and we’d made some progress.
“We better stop here,” said Sim, suddenly.
It was an eerie sort of battle. Sim had sounded almost conversational, because the noise of swords and our guns cutting through wood and foliage was not actually very loud, and the plants themselves made no sound at all.
“Why?”
“The other lines are making no progress at all, and very shortly, the plants will be able to mo
ve behind us. And if I was the plant commander up in orbit looking down, I’d be seeing a very nice empty bit of real estate behind us now to send his next wave into.”
“Which would leave us surrounded.”
“Exactly. Especially since their reinforcements come down every time a hole opens up in the middle.”
I’d noticed this a few times, but it hadn’t really dawned on me we were no longer making any real progress, despite the huge toll on their forces, and no casualties on our side.
Another hour later, and we’d still not made any more progress.
“Willow?”
“Yes George?”
She was nearly a hundred meters away, but it didn’t matter. It turned out they did have a form of team coms, and while we’d waited for the Trixone to arrive, she’d connected us in.
“Why aren’t the rail guns firing?”
“Nothing to fire at.”
“Seriously?”
“None of your heavy weapons have turned up yet, and they don’t want to risk hitting us firing randomly into the foliage.”
“They can reach this far?”
“Oh yes. But they are effective all the same.”
“How so?”
“We haven’t seen any of the troop dropships you say you’ve destroyed on other planets. They must be worried the rail guns will be able to destroy such ships, and are paragliding their troops in from altitude instead.”
“Could be.”
I thought about it. Amanda and Aleesha were the tactical brains of our outfit. But the equation wasn’t all that hard. It came down to who would run out first. Either the fleet in orbit would run out of troops, or we’d run out of power for the guns. And the guns at this point were the only thing keeping the status quo. Swords were doing the job, but the kill rate was too slow, and the knights were now hampered by huge mounds of plant material in front of them, with new Trixone climbing to the top on their side, and jumping down on them from above.
Imperium Knight Chaos Rising (The Hunter Imperium Book 6) Page 12