Exodus: Machine War: Book 2: Bolthole

by Doug Dandridge

  The Pilot nodded and turned back to his board, setting the new course that went out to the other ships by whisker laser. In the surrounding space sixteen fast attack craft and seventy-eight fighters nudged onto the slightly different course. They were heading toward an intercept at point zero zero two light, about six hundred kilometers a second.

  The Captain fed the information into the computer and waited a moment for the return, then squawked in satisfaction as the new course lined up perfectly on the advancing Machines.

  “Starting boost in five, four, three, two, one,” counted the pilot.

  As he hit the commit panel on his board the ship leapt forward at one thousand gravities, adding nine point eight kilometers per second onto their velocity each second. Impact would be in one minute for the unmanned ships chosen for the suicide attack.

  The Machines noticed them immediately, and laser and particle beam fire speared out and started destroying the small vessels. The two manned craft were a light second back from the rest of the formation, not priority targets at the moment. Attack fighters and fast attack craft were exploding into plasma throughout space, until only half were left to actually intersect the formation. At that point they all started to explode, but not from the strike of beam weapons. Instead they detonated with smaller blasts that shredded each craft into dozens of pieces, while tens of thousands of ball bearings came out of each exploding vessel.

  Over three thousand pieces of craft flew through the Machine formation, all massing from ten to fifty tons, while millions of the small ball bearings followed. All of the Machine ships were hit, as were the asteroids, which shrugged off such minor blows without any problem. Several of the pieces housed crystal matrix batteries or fusion reactors, while other parts had the small antimatter warheads used by the ground forces for antiship fire from planetary surfaces. The ships took damage, none enough to be destroyed, though two lost most of their boost and started to fall behind, while one went into a tumble that it couldn’t recover from.

  Moments later the two manned fighters came through and launched the six missiles each carried. Twelve missiles, targeted on four ships and four rocks. All of the ships were hit, and two went up in clouds of sun bright plasma as their own antimatter stores breached. Three of the asteroids were hit by warheads powerful enough to push them off their course toward the planet. When all the flares of fire had died down, there were still two Machine ships, the one tumbling out of control, the other closing on the one asteroid that was still on course for the planet.

  “We got all but that one,” crowed the Pilot in excitement.

  The crest of Slaviska’s head rose and he clapped both three digit hands together, showing anger in the manner of his people. All the Machines needed was that one ship, that one asteroid to go ahead and kill the planet. If there were no ships he might have been able to use his two fighters to push it far enough off course to miss the planet. If he tried it without any missiles the last ship would burn his two fighters out of the sky. It could commit to whatever action it needed to, since the rock was up to the proper velocity to achieve a perfect hit to one side of the world about three thousand kilometers from dead center. It was just an escort, and it looked like it was the only one the rock would need.

  “Put us on a following course,” he ordered the Pilot. He might not be able to do anything at the moment, but if he stayed close, the opportunity could present itself. He didn’t see how any opportunity could present, but he had to keep the hope that something would happen.

  * * *

  “And there’s nothing you can do, Admiral?” asked Wittmore, using a Klassekian Com Tech to get the message to Hasselhoff’s flagship.

  He was looking at a track of the asteroid, moving along at a velocity high enough to generate the force to kill all life on the planet. It would hit in less than twenty minutes, and there wasn’t anything he could do about it.

  “Not a thing, General. Our missiles won’t strike for another forty minutes, which really won’t do anyone any good. And from our position out here, there is nothing my ships can do.”

  “We’re receiving a message from the John Glenn, General,” called out one of the Klassekian com techs, in the excitement of the moment forgetting to go through the chain of command.

  “What does he say?” asked the General, raising a hand to silence the Com Officer who looked ready to discipline the errant Com Tech.

  “He says he is in position to attempt to take out that last Machine ship. And that he might be able to match velocities with the asteroid afterwards and nudge it into a miss.”

  “Tell him to do whatever he can. And Godspeed.”

  The General looked at the tactical plot, where the icon of the heavily damaged battle cruiser was now displayed, its vector arrow pointing to an intercept with the Machine ship and the asteroid it was escorting. With a thought the General ordered the plot to show the projected courses of the three objects, and sucked in a breath as he saw that the asteroid would be less than fifteen minutes to impact at that point.

  “Order all orbital batteries to take the asteroid under fire when it comes within effective range,” he ordered Camstock.

  “But…”

  “I know, Captain. The asteroid will be coming straight at us, and there is no way our weapons are going to move it off its course. The best we’re going to be able to do is knock some chunks off of it, maybe heat it up a little. But I’ll be damned if we just sit here without doing all we can to blow that thing away.”

  “We’ll hit it with everything we have, sir,” replied the Captain.

  The com holo went dead, leaving the General with his owns thoughts, tuning out all of the background noise of the people still working their jobs in the war room, despite death coming for them from the sky.

  * * *

  Glenn moved forward, accelerating as fast as its grabbers would carry it, just a little over one hundred gravities. Captain Jamshidi sat in his chair, watching the tactical plot that showed their course intersecting that of the asteroid and its escorting ship.

  “This is going to be close, sir,” said the Tactical Officer, one of the three other officers on the half manned bridge.

  Jamshidi nodded. The battle cruiser was on a course that would allow them to shoot at the enemy ship while lining up to run into the asteroid, knocking it off its course. They would have one shot at it, and most probably be destroyed in the process. There were only a few hundred crew aboard, what was required to keep the heavily damaged ship running for the short period of time they needed her. Everyone was to bail out in life pods just before the collision. Or at least that was the theory.

  “Asteroid impact in eighteen minutes, nine seconds, sir,” said the Helm Officer, working to compensate for the unequal pull of the functional grabbers and some that were not so functional. “Time to our impact, four minutes twelve seconds.”

  “The enemy ship has noticed us, sir,” said the Tactical Officer, setting the weapons firing solutions.

  Glenn rocked from weapons hits, particle beams punching into the hull imparting their kinetic energy, while lasers superheated their strike points, causing explosions of hull matter into space. The battle cruiser returned fire with its two remaining laser rings and its one functioning particle beam accelerator. Though it outmassed the Machine vessel by a factor of two, it was outgunned in this engagement.

  A pair of terrawatt class lasers struck the enemy ship, blasting out armor and hull metal, burning deep into the guts of the vessel. The remaining particle beam accelerator fired energy dense beams of antiprotons from the two firing nozzles that were aimed at the enemy ship. The antimatter struck at point nine nine five light, exploding through the hull and into the machinery below.

  “We’ve lost laser C,” called out the Tactical Officer.

  “We only have two functioning grabber units left,” called out the Chief Engineer.

  “Hold her steady, Helm,” ordered the Captain as the ship started to slew off from the optimal course.


  “I’m having a lot of trouble smoothing out the pull from those two grabber units,” replied the Helm Officer. “With your permission, I would like to try something.”

  “Go ahead,” ordered Jamshidi.

  The Helm Officer pushed up the acceleration, pushing the grabbers to their limits. Since they were also the primary inertial dampers, some excess gravities came through, pushing everyone back in their seats. Then the gravities cut off.

  “That puts us on collision course,” announced the Helm Officer, looking back at the Captain with a tight smile. “I’ve set the ship to compensate for any deviations with the remaining grabbers, as well as our close maneuvering thrusters.”

  “Good job,” stated the Captain, his eyes still locked on the tactical plot. The ship shook, then shook again as the Machine ship kept hitting them.

  “That last one almost did us in, Captain,” called the Chief Engineer. “The beam came through the reactor capsule and just missed tearing open a MAM unit and a couple of containment tanks.”

  Jamshidi cursed under his breath. A hit to any of those structures and the ship would be ripped apart, if they were lucky. If more containment units went they would be an expanding cloud of plasma. The vessel shook and shuddered again, and a large section of the bow blew out.

  “We just lost our particle beam accelerator. All I have left is laser A.”

  “Then keep firing,” yelled the Captain. “If we don’t take him out, it doesn’t matter if we push the asteroid off course.”

  The battle cruiser kept trading shots with the Machine vessel, which was also showing significant damage. Then what almost happened to the battle cruiser happened to them, and the stern section of the ship went up in a brilliant globe of light, an antimatter breach. The Machine ship, what was left of it, tumbled off into space, clearly a wreck.

  “Abandon ship,” yelled the Captain as soon as he saw what had happened to his enemy. “All crew to the lifepods. Abandon ship.”

  Everyone on the bridge immediately jumped up from their couches and jogged from the bridge, everyone except the Captain, who waited until all the other crew were gone before he followed. The corridors were deserted, and only two of the pod doors were still open, a sign that the others had already gone on their journey. He stepped into the pod and sat in one of the seats, hitting the lit panel on the chair arm.

  The sequence set in motion, the hatch closed on the pod, while clamps on the seat locked in place on the suit. An instant later the pod was running down three hundred and fifty meters of acceleration tube leading from the middle central capsule of the ship to the outer hull. The pod was thrown out into space, its propulsion system kicking in and hurling it further from a ship that could still be deadly a thousand kilometers away if there was an antimatter breach.

  Jamshidi brought up the visual systems so he could watch his ship run into the asteroid, then cried out as the vessel exploded in space still tens of thousands of kilometers from contact.

  What the hell, he thought, wondering if he should have stayed aboard, realizing that he wouldn’t have made any difference if he had stayed on board to be converted to plasma with the rest. He ordered a playback of the event in slow motion, and cringed as he saw a trio of interceptor missiles, obviously launched from the crippled Machine vessel, slam into the Glenn amidships, punching into engineering and causing the final breach.

  Jamshidi put his face in his hands, shaking his head. He had the salvation of the planet in his hands, and it had been snatched away from him at the last second.

  * * *

  Wittmore stared in horror as the vector symbol of the Glenn disappeared from the plot, seconds short of its projected collision point. But did that mean their grabber units had gone offline, and they were still on course to collide? Or was it an indication that they had been destroyed, and nothing else could stop the asteroid from hitting the planet?

  “We’re receiving a message from Captain Vergar Slaviska,” called out one of the Com Officers in the war room. “He was in charge of the suicide strike by the unmanned fighters and FACs, and is reporting that the Glann was destroyed before it could make contact.”

  Then we’re dead, thought the General, looking at a holo that showed one of the small cities now under siege by the Machines. Should I just tell everyone to pack it in, because we’re not really accomplishing anything here.

  “Captain Slaviska is asking that we cease fire on the asteroid so he can get his two fighters in close enough to try to push it off course,” reported the Com Officer.

  Wittmore’s ears perked up at that. “Can they do that?”

  One of the tactical people in the war room started running numbers, then looked up at the General. “There’s a possibility that he could. If it was going to hit center mass on the planet, I would say no, but at its current trajectory, maybe.”

  Wittmore called up the holo com to the planetary defense battery headquarters. “Cease fire, immediately,” he ordered the officer in charge.

  “But, sir.”

  “Immediately, Commander. I want all fire to cease on that body as of five minutes ago. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir. Sending out the order right now.”

  Wittmore thought some more on the idea of two six hundred ton attack fighters pushing a multi-billion ton rock from its course, and saw the madness of the idea. But when it was the only plan on the table, he had to go with it, no matter how crazy it sounded.

  * * *

  “We’ve matched course and velocities with the asteroid,” announced the Pilot as the fighter came to an apparent stop next to the asteroid, a mere kilometer away. “Delta three one in same configuration.”

  “Tell Delta three one to follow our lead,” ordered Slaviska, his eyes staring at the asteroid that seemed to be hanging in space, though he knew it was speeding toward the planet with enough velocity to kill everything there. “Get us in close to that thing, and let me know when you’re ready to nudge in.”

  The Pilot nodded, then turned all of his attention back to his board. The holo by the Captain’s chair showed him their path in to the asteroid. The figures at the bottom of holo showed their distance, going from a thousand meters down to a hundred in a couple of seconds, then slowing as the Pilot cut in some decel and approached at a rate that would hopefully not lead to a total wreck when their fighter touched the metallic surface of the rock.

  “Get ready,” said the Pilot as he nudged the craft the last couple of meters. The Pilot had a soft hand, but the fighter still hit with some force, and the hard nose, a hollow construct housing most of its sensor suite, collapsed. The Pilot added just a bit of boost and maintained the contact before they could rebound.

  “Good job,” said Slaviska in praise, looking at the tactical holo that showed the other fighter also in contact with the rock. Good thing I insisted on the best pilots in the group for this mission.

  “Now give it all we have,” he ordered the Pilot, then looked to the Com Tech. “Tell our wingman to do the same.”

  The pilot started raising the boost of the grabber units, going from barely boosting to a force that would have had them accelerating through clear space at a thousand gravities. Strain meters in the hull showed the force that was being transmitted down its length. Yet another holo popped up within his view, showing a schematic of the ship with the red of damage running through it.

  “Are we doing anything?” he asked the Pilot, looking at the plot that showed the asteroid moving toward the planet within lines that indicated a path that would hit that world.

  “We are moving it, sir. But remember, we’re pushing something hundreds of millions of times our mass.”

  “Can you give me anymore?”

  “It’s not recommended, sir. But I’m doubling our thrust.” The Pilot manipulated his board, then mumbled under his breath. “I just hope we don’t break free of contact, or we’re going to be turned into jelly.”

  “Delta three one has also increased thrust,” called out
the Com Tech.

  Slaviska nodded, not sure what to say about the crews of the two fighters who were risking everything in what had to be the craziest plan they had ever been involved in. All had volunteered for the attack mission, but not for this. But none had balked at their orders.

  “Are we doing anything?” he asked the Pilot again.

  “It’s moving, sir. We’re changing the path. Whether it will be enough?” The Pilot shrugged his shoulders, not taking any attention from his own viewer screen.

  Slaviska nodded as he watched the plot, trying to will it to change appreciably, and knowing that even were telekinetics possible, it still wouldn’t have added much to the force that twelve hundred tons of fighters were generating. If only I had used fast attack craft for command and control, he thought.

  They were pushing the asteroid to a point behind the orbiting planet. The problem was, it was aimed almost a thousand kilometers in from that point, and would still kill most everything alive on that world with even a glancing blow.

  “Captain,” called out the Engineer from the back of the small craft. “The grabber units are overheating severely. If we keep this up we’re going to start losing units.”

  “Understood,” replied the Captain, not saying what they both knew, that there was no way in hell he was going to order the Pilot to cut back on their power. Either they pushed the asteroid enough to save the world, or these fighters would die in the attempt.

  * * *

  “We’re reading the instruments of the fighters through the Klassekian com techs, sir,” said the Orbital Defense Commander over the holo.

  “And?” asked Wittmore.

  “It’s going to be close. We’re estimating a sixty percent chance of a complete miss, but that depends on their grabbers holding out while being abused to the extreme.”

  “And what are the chances of that last?”

  “Not good, sir. Not good at all. But it’s all we have at the moment.”

  So all we have is prayer, thought the General, shaking his head. In his experience as a soldier, he had found that prayer didn’t do much but make the person using it feel better. He believed in things that were quantifiable, and spirituality was not. Still, he thought he could go ahead and ask the Universe for a favor. Checking the news casts from the planet for a moment, he found that the great majority of the people on this very religious world were already engaged in prayer. They still thought that their faith had played a part in saving them from the supernova. But even if that were true, how many times could the deities intervene to save one planet?