Exodus: Machine War: Book 2: Bolthole

by Doug Dandridge

  It won’t be long now, she thought, reaching down to the floor to grab the small pistol she had stored in the nursery for emergencies, though nothing like this. It was a low powered mag pistol, good enough to take down organic forms without armor. Against these robots she was sure it would be next to useless. But she would not surrender her life, or the lives of her charges, without giving it all the fight she had. She looked over at one of the Nursery Fathers, who held a larger mag rifle in his hands, aiming it at the door.

  More of the molten alloy of the door was running across the floor, its heat burning it into otherwise fireproof tiles. The slow dribble turned into a flood, followed by the center of the door falling in soft pieces, a hole opening up to the outside. Two laser beams burst through to strike the walls of the outer chamber of the nursery, burning into the faux wood walls, one sliding across to set a desktop aflame.

  Here they come, thought the Nursery Mother, aiming her pistol at the door as robot arms pushed and the whole mess started to fall inward. The first robot pushed through, and she sent a flurry of rounds into the torso of the machine, for no apparent effect. The robot turned as it continued pushing through the doorway, raising one of its arms and swinging it toward Nella. She kept pulling the trigger on her pistol as she closed her eyes and waited for death.

  * * *

  “How many more of these things do we have to burn through,” asked a member of one of the other sibling groups, a female.

  The Klassekians had been fighting their way down a corridor for the past several minutes, turning robots into semi-molten pieces, then jumping over those parts to engage more. Several of the Klassekians were wielding two particle beams, one for each tentacle cluster. They had lost a third of their number during the assault, the reason that so many of them were now able to use two weapons.

  We’ve got to break through, came the thoughts of one of Nazzrirat’s siblings. His group had been more fortunate than most, having lost only one member. The other three groups had been racked by the shock of sibling death, causing momentary loss of motivation, followed by a killer rage, something that had been programed into their genes from their ages of savagery.

  A Klassekian went down to a particle beam, then another, as the other members of the attacking platoon went for cover. The robots particle beams filled the air, punctuated by the occasional laser. An explosive shell went off overhead, and two more Klassekians fell to the floor with serious injuries.

  “This might help,” called out a Klassekian female who had not been with the group until this moment, pushing to the front with a pair of different weapons in her tentacles. Each was a stubby barrel with a large drum protruding from the firing mechanism. “Give me some cover fire, but leave the middle of the corridor open for me,” she called out.

  Nazzrirat’s sibling group took one side of the corridor, the largest other extant group the opposite side. At a signal from the female, who was not with any siblings of her own, they opened fire, sweeping their beams down the corridor. Most of the machines ducked behind the barricade they had erected against such an attack, while others faded into the cross corridors.

  And we’re running low on proton packs, thought Nazzrirat as the warning light flashed on his weapon, indicating that the pack was almost spent. But the robots can’t have many more, can they? Protons were stripped off of atoms by an industrial process that required moderately sized equipment and a lot of energy. While it was in the realm of possibility that the robots could manufacture their own reloads, the Klassekian would have guessed otherwise.

  “On my command, cease fire,” yelled the female, her legs tensing. She jumped into the middle of the corridor, the weapons in her hand bucking as they sent streams of tiny pellets down the corridor. Some of the pellets hit the barrier, exploding in bright flashes that shredded the materials of the furniture and storage containers the Machines had stacked. More flew over, to explode in the air as soon as they reached the other side.

  “Cease fire,” yelled the female, continuing to direct fire down the center of the corridor for a moment, then sweeping the streams to the side. The rounds went out straight, then curved into the side corridors, exploding with loud cracks, sending pieces of robots flying into the cross corridor.

  “What the hell are those,” yelled Nazzrirat over the cacophony of sound.

  “Grenade launchers,” yelled the female, stopping to slam new drums into place on both weapons. “I was working on these, and thought they might come in handy.”

  “Good thinking,” said the male, changing the proton pack out with the last one in his bag. “We need to move,” he called to the rest of the Klassekians.

  The band moved quickly down the corridor, coming to another cross, where they ran into more robots, and more fire. More of the Klassekians went down, but they fought their way through, just in time to see several of the robots pushing their way through a door. The sign overhead said Nursery, and Nazzrirat had the sinking feeling that they were too late.

  * * *

  The angry buzz of particle beams fought with the quick, clear crumps of explosives. Nella mumbled a prayer and waited for the instant of pain that would occur before she felt nothing ever again. But the buzzing went on and on, and she opened her eyes to see the robots that she had last seen coming toward her falling to the floor, each in several pieces.

  We’re going to live, she thought, as she took in the strange looking new aliens coming through the doorway, weapons in hand.

  “Is everyone alright?” asked the first of the aliens in heavily accented Terranglo.

  Nella was almost instantly on her feet, running toward the strange looking alien, wrapping him in a hug with her free arm. The child in her other arm started crying once again, wide eyes staring at the alien. “There, there,” she told the little boy. “These are good people. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  The Klassekian wrapped his left side tentacle around the humans, looking a bit uncomfortable, but going with the moment.

  “Thank you,” said Nella to the Klassekian, glancing around to see the rest of the adults clustering around the aliens, smiling, laughing, relief in the air.

  “It isn’t over yet,” said the alien Nella was embracing, untangling himself, looking down at his rifle, then at the woman. “We need to get back into the fight.” The alien gestured to some of his fellows, those who were carrying two or more rifles, who brought over those weapons and handed them to the humans. “If they come back, you will have the means to resist them. Now we much go.”

  The Klassekian turned away, moving through the door, the rest of his fellow aliens following. The buzzing sound of particle beams sounded from the corridor, the Klassekians making sure that any robot that might come back to life would not.

  “God bless them,” said one of the parents who had come to rescue her child.

  God bless them, thought Nella as well. And welcome to the Empire.

  * * *

  “Fire,” ordered Captain Thomas Douglass, watching as the combat engineers remotely triggered the weapon they had set up in the chamber.

  Looking much like a shoulder fired missile launcher on a stand, though larger, the weapon it deployed was a very different animal. The round popped from the barrel and hung in the air for a couple of seconds going from glowing red to radiating white, then sped ahead at a thousand gravities, slamming into and through the nickel iron wall. Like a hot cannon ball through weak wood, it pushed through the fifty meters of material separating one chamber from another, bursting out and slowing to almost a halt, ejecting sensor globes into the air. The sensor globes only survived a few seconds, three for the longest lived, as weapons in the chamber destroyed them. The probe lasted much longer, able to withstand weapons fire for more than twenty seconds before it fell to the ground as a molten mass.

  “OK,” said the Captain, pulling up the take from the drone on his HUD. “What do we have.?”

  He cursed under his breath as the vid of the self-excavated chamber the Mach
ines occupied became clear. Along one side of it was a series of two meter long oblong containers. He counted thirty on the stop motion view. Panning the view to the other wall and he saw that there were twenty more along that side.

  “We think those are nano-fabbers,” said the Engineering Officer over the com.

  Piled up on the floor in the center of the chamber were some other objects, none of them quite as regular as the fabbers. Douglass zoomed in, his breath catching in his throat as he identified bodies in that pile, mixed in with several tons of rubbish that appeared to have been gathered from the habitat and manufacturing areas.

  “Raw materials,” opined the Engineering Officer. “Possibly to use in making better alloys than they could with nickel and iron alone.”

  “Fantastic,” groaned the Captain. He could already think of some uses for raw materials. He zoomed in on some objects on the edge of the pile and cursed again. The remains of militia power armor, and the stock mechanisms of a half dozen particle beams. The materials they needed to upgrade the robots to more modern specifications.

  “Are you getting this, Sir?” asked the Captain over the com.

  “I am, Captain Douglass,” came back the voice of the General. “Your orders are to take out that chamber, that factory, as soon as possible. By any means possible.”

  “Acknowledged, sir. We’re on it.”

  Douglass looked over at the Engineering Officer, who stood by his men, hovering over the three tubes. “First platoon,” he said over the com. “On my command, move out. I want those robots rolled up, and let nothing stop you.”

  He raised his hand and looked back at the Engineering Officer. “Fire.”

  The three tubes popped out their weapons, the same as before. The rounds heated up, then plunged into the nickel/iron that was like a soft gelatin to their superheated advanced alloy. As before they entered the chamber, as before they ejected a number of globes. But these were different globes, orienting as they did to the chamber and speeding to cover the entire area. And then they detonated, antimatter warheads breaching contain and releasing almost a kiloton of explosive power each.

  Blast came back through the holes, and through the entrance into the factory, but otherwise couldn’t penetrate the fifty meters of metallic wall. The explosive power was contained in the chamber, and it shredded every robot of any size in the chamber. The larger bots came apart, pieces slamming into the walls, while every insect bot and nanite was either vaporized by the heat or pounded to fragments by the concussion wave. The blast channeled down the tunnel that connected the new chamber to the habitat, again destroying every robot in its path. The tunnel was over two hundred meters long, zig zagging at twenty-five meter intervals. By the time the wave reached the defensive positions of the robots at the end it had died down to the point where, while it would still be deadly to unprotected organic life, the mechanicals were able to weather it.

  What they weren’t able to weather were the thirty-one Marines in heavy battle armor that struck while the blast wave was still passing through. The Marines were half blind, pushing into the wave with the strength of their suits, firing almost at random. Thirty-one heavy particle beams sweeping the tunnel at random was still enough to take out every robot within that segment.

  The Marines continued on down the tunnel, taking out the few remaining Machines that showed any semblance of working. The factory chamber itself was dead, everything that smacked of the Machines slaged, totally destroyed. They wouldn’t be making any more of their kind here, but just in case, the Marines scattered a couple of kilos of nanites to make sure.

  “It’s taken out, General,” reported Captain Douglass over the com, hoping he could let his men and women stand down for a few moments.

  “Good job, Captain. Now I need your people to sweep these tunnels at segment Delta Five Beta.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Douglass, not knowing what else to say. “Gather round, people,” he said over the company com. “We have another mission.”

  Of course there were the round of complaints over the com after those words went out, but the people still came as quickly as they could. Suits were checked, batteries changed, proton packs distributed. And then they went about their business, as Marines.

  * * *

  “Make sure you check those corners, Zumwalt,” growled First Lieutenant Sophia Ngursky into her suit com at the private in question. She shook her head as the Private almost jumped out of her light infantry suit. We take almost fifty percent casualties, and that reject isn’t one of them. I’ll never understand how the Gods order this Universe.

  The company had been fighting on and off for the last four hours. Fortunately, most of the militiamen had been near to the armory when the alert went up, gathering for their weekly training session. Most of the other militia companies had not been so lucky, many of their members having to brave machine attack to get to their weapons and armor storage. Because we were not supposed to be attacked before an alert went up that allowed us to get to our equipment, thought the Marine NCO who was the acting company commander of this militia unit.

  So most of the militia companies had started off at three quarters strength or less, and fighting the robots had gone a long way to making them even more understrength. If we’re going to be fighting tough bastards like those, we’re going to need better armor, she thought, amending that as she remembered that these Machines were weaker than the real deal.

  “What’s the sweep say?” she asked the Fleet Tech that had deployed with them.

  The Tech looked over at her, the faceplate of his medium armor showing his wide eyed face. Don’t like deploying with the infantry, puke, thought the LT. Well tough. You’ve got better armor than the rest of my people. Of course Ngursky had made sure that she had deployed with the medium combat armor worn by Marines on shipboard duty. That had already saved her life in more than one firefight.

  “We have foreign nanites in the air,” replied the Tech.

  “Which means we have them all through the materials of this section,” said Ngursky, shaking her head. She really wasn’t worried about her people and their equipment. All had been inoculated with protective nanites, while their suits were infused with similar microscopic machines. Anything attacking them would be overwhelmed by the superior Imperial tech. That might not be true for the entire facility.

  “Tanner,” she called into the com, catching the attention of one of her heavy weapons people.

  “Ma’am,” said the Corporal, jogging up with his own heavy particle beam in hand. Of course it was not as powerful as the heavy beamer the Marines carried. Really more like the standard beam rifle those troops used.

  “Spray the whole area down,” she ordered, pointing to the magnetic containment tank hanging from the Corporal’s belt.

  “You heard the lady,” called out the Corporal. The other members of his section, equipped with the same containment tanks, came forward, unlatching wands from the tanks and spraying the walls around them. The mist hit the wall and disappeared, while the Corporal sprayed the fog from his own tank into the air.

  The nanites infiltrated the wall and swarmed through the air, hunter killer versions of the nano-scale robots, built to find intruders like the Machines had brought onto the station and neutralize them.

  “I’m picking up something else, ma’am,” said the Fleet Tech, his eyes growing even wider. “It seems to be coming from straight ahead.”

  “More nanites”

  “I don’t think so,” said the Tech, dropping his sensor wand to snap back into place on his suit and moving his rifle forward on its strapping.

  “Action front,” called out Ngursky on the com as she took a knee and brought her own particle beam rifle to her shoulder.

  A few of the militia stood in place looking confused, but most of them had been through the crucible of combat over the last four hours. They immediately got low and took aim. Even Zumwalt took some steps back to get into a firing line with the other members of her squa
d, ducking low. Each squad now presented a front of overlapping electromag fields that covered their shortened forms.

  The robots came around the bend in the corridor, aiming and firing as soon as they spotted the suited humans.

  SUPERSYSTEM.

  “What the hell is that?” asked the Emperor as he looked at the large globe on the holo. Well, not that large when considering celestial bodies, thought the Monarch. It wouldn’t even make a good sized moon. But for a ship?

  “From what we know so far, we’re calling it a planet killer,” said McCullom, sitting in the room beside the Emperor. “Not that it would destroy a planet, but it would easily have the power to scour one clean of life.”

  “And we can defend against it, how”

  Sean couldn’t take his eyes off the blurry image, which was actually quite good when one thought of what it had to go through to get here. From the mind of one Klassekian to another, then through three different wormhole gates to get to this chamber in the Hexagon.

  “We are still looking into that, your Majesty,” replied the CNO, her expression grim. “If it was manned, we could probably hit it with enough firepower to overload its compensators and kill the crew. But in this case?”

  Yeah. There’s nothing alive on-board for us to kill. How many gravities of shock equivalent to destroy its brain? Hell, missiles handle over ten thousand, and their computers still function perfectly. We can crank them up to twenty thousand gees when we have to.

  “We have Weapons Development looking at possibilities, based on what we assume to be their tech level. But, your Majesty, this is all guess work.”

  “And you say there are two of them?” asked Jennifer, who had come along for this meeting because Sean wanted her to learn something about the military aspects of ruling.