Four…Sings had no faith that her people could overcome four. She was too aware now of how badly damaged Scorpion was and how lacking her own ships were by the standards of their allies and enemies.
But these ships were allies, and that gave her more time.
“Is the Shining Mother ready to speak yet?” Swimmer-Under-Sunlit-Skies asked, the Voice-Of-Gunnery’s chirps warning of his stress. There wasn’t a Vistan in the command pool who wasn’t chirping slightly faster and slightly higher than they should have been.
The officers of Sings’s fleet were terrified. The biggest ships might have turned away, but the smaller ones had come all the way to orbit of Vista to deposit the transports Catalan promised would be the Vistans’ salvation.
Sings was surprised by how much faith she put in the human Voice-Over-Voices. They knew almost nothing about the humans, but she believed in her bones that Catalan would never betray them.
She’d seen him take his ship against a vastly more powerful foe to protect them. For no reason but compassion, he’d risked everything to save her world. She would trust him and his crew to the end of days—and if the chance came to return the favor and protect his people, Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters would willingly sacrifice herself to do so.
For today, however, her world remained the focus. She had failed nine billion of her people. She would not fail those who remained—and the Shining Mother was their only real hope to bring enough order to do so.
“The humans are opening the channel in a few moments,” she told Swimmer. “Then we shall see if the Shining Mother is all that we hoped she is.”
The male was silent for long breaths.
“She is but one Mother,” he finally said. “What can she do?”
“On her own?” Sings chirped sad amusement. “Not much. But her words…her words might convince the rest of our people to allow us to save them.”
The only transmission carried by Vistan datanets and entertainment networks was audio. Unlike how Sings now vaguely understood human data to work, that audio included the echolocation pings for the intended image.
Even before the Shining Mother spoke, sound was already coming through the transmission, and everyone near a speaker on the surface of the planet could “see” her.
Sings was also making sure that the Vistans in orbit and scattered across the star system were getting the message, too. This speech wasn’t for them—they’d fallen into Sings’s current with surprising willingness—but the entire species needed to hear Sleeps-In-Sunlight speak.
The echolocation pings continued for a moment alone as the Vistan Great Mother waited to be certain everyone across the world was aware of the announcement.
“People of Vista, we have taken control of your emergency broadcast systems,” she told her unwilling audience. “These broadcast systems should have seen use over the last fifteen days; only silence has come from many of your governments.
“Many of your cities have devolved into chaos and fear. You do not know what has happened, only that friends and Clan have gone silent. That the sky has gone dark and that rumors of strange alien ships swept the world in the hours before our world ended.”
The Shining Mother rose from her throne, approaching the recording device and lowering her voice.
“And our world has ended,” she told them. “Despite the valiant efforts of our Star-Choirs and an unexpected ally, multiple kinetic weapons struck our planet. You have not heard from anyone outside Long-Night-Waters and Orange-Sunset-Waters because they are gone. Waves unlike anything we have ever seen have swept away entire countries, and billions of our kin are dead.
“Some of you know me. Many do not. I am Sleeps-In-Sunlight, the Great Mother of the Shining Rivers.”
A chirp of shocked exhalation echoed across the command pool as every Vistan around Sings reacted to a Great Mother giving her name.
“But Shining Rivers is but one country of our survivors,” Sleeps-In-Sunlight continued. “And I look to my borders and I see chaos and fear. I have sent the Shining Spears into other nations where I have been invited, and we have helped maintain order, but I fear for our people.
“I have heard nothing from the Great or Chosen Mothers of a dozen nations. Without order, without hope, our world is doomed.”
Sleeps shivered and Sings felt the Great Mother’s unwillingness.
“I must take some hope from you with one wave and give it with another,” she told the audience. “Our world is doomed. Within an orbit, our oceans will freeze. The plants and creatures we depend on to survive will die. Only bacteria will remain after two orbits.
“If we remain on the surface of our world, our species will die.
“But we must have hope. I spoke of an unexpected ally before, and they offer us a chance. One ship fought by our side when the destroyers came. The humans have brought more ships now, transports to carry our people to a new world. A safe world, where the destroyers will not harm us.
“More ships are coming, but we must move ourselves into orbit to make certain we can survive. We must work together as one people, one Clan, to save our race.
“If you call for the aid of the Shining Rivers, we will give it. My Spears will bring food, medicine and order wherever we are invited—and nowhere we are not.
“The first wave of evacuees will leave within two days. When the ships return for the next wave, we will be ready to send more. We will find ways to make certain our people survive.
“I do not demand your service or your fealty—but I do ask that you follow me. I do ask that you listen to me.
“And I ask that we stand together against the dark and silent night, to bring our people to safety before the storm to come destroys us all.”
20
“What am I looking at, Tran?” Octavio asked as his engineer sent him a live feed from one of the freighters. He hadn’t even been aware that Tran had left Scorpion, which would have been a violation of protocol if he wasn’t quite sure that the engineer had logged it.
Octavio just hadn’t been paying attention. He’d been listening to Sleeps-In-Sunlight’s speech and watching the colorless hologram that was the computer’s interpretation of the echolocation data in his office. The gray three-dimensional image of the speech had been weird to human eyes, but that was what you got for translating literally alien data.
The feed he was getting from Tran was at least in color, but he wasn’t seeing anything of interest. It was a larger cargo bay aboard one of the standard bulk freighters they’d brought from the Confederacy, one that had been set up to carry people and then had cargo loaded in on top of it.
Wait.
There was a stack of equipment that looked more organized. Several long pipes, lots of associated boxes, wiring, control boards…
“What you’re looking at, Captain, is proof that someone back in Exilium read our damage reports and really likes us,” Tran told him. “That’s a pair of LPCs. They’re not complete—they can’t be completed without installing them in a turret—but that pile includes everything we couldn’t have fabricated ourselves.”
“Good.” Octavio felt that he probably should have shown more enthusiasm, but the speech had reminded him just how badly he’d failed. Despite everything they’d done, everything they were doing now, nine billion people had died.
“How long until we have both turrets online?” he asked.
“We’ll have Turret B back online in a couple of days,” his chief engineer told him after a silent moment. “We’ll have to rebuild Turret A’s chassis from scratch. Even with our fabricators, three weeks?”
“Let’s hope the Rogues give us that much time,” Octavio told her. “Let me know if you need anything else.”
“A half-dozen Confederacy dreadnoughts, a shipyard and a Captain who isn’t kicking himself,” Tran told him. “Got any of those to hand?”
The combination got a snort of laughter out of Octavio.
“Even the Confederacy only had one dreadnought,” he pointed o
ut. With the upgrades the Exilium Space Fleet had deployed, that flagship would have been hard pressed against her smaller cousins now.
“We could build a shipyard here, but our first focus has to be on orbital habitats.” He allowed himself to audibly sigh. “As for that Captain, I don’t know. It’s been a rough month.”
“You did the impossible, sir,” Quy Tran told him firmly. “Without us—without you—the Vistans would all be dead.”
“And nine billion of them died,” he whispered.
“That was the Rogues, not you. You pulled off a miracle, sir. Miracle number two will be getting the rest to Refuge, and we’ve got a better shot at that than I expected.
“Once you’re a two-time miracle worker, I don’t think you’re allowed to kick yourself for imagined failures,” she concluded. “Sir.”
He shook his head at her—but he did feel better.
“Be careful, Lieutenant Commander, or I’m going to make you start working as ship’s counselor in your spare time,” he warned.
“We have one of those,” Tran pointed out. “I’m probably out of line, sir, but you need to talk to him. If nothing else, it will let me build turrets uninterrupted!”
Octavio chuckled weakly but nodded his agreement.
“Get me guns, Tran,” he told her. “I’ll see about making sure we’ve got a Captain ready to fire them.”
The ship’s Captain had priority on just about everyone’s time, which allowed Octavio to sneak into Lieutenant Williams’s schedule quickly once he’d decided to make the time himself.
One mentally exhausting and emotionally bruising session later, he called Renaud into his office and squared his shoulders to the task ahead.
“You heard Sleeps’s speech,” he said. It wasn’t really a question. Even Tran, busily cataloging everything remotely useful aboard the freighters, would have made time to listen to the speech.
“Hell of a burden on us,” his XO said. “Other than the warp freighters, what can we even do?”
“Our fabricators aren’t huge, but they’re more efficient than anything the locals have,” Octavio pointed out. “We’re focusing on our own repairs for now, but once that’s done, I have a few thoughts on what we can churn out that can help.
“But what I’m wondering is what kind of fabricators the Matrices are carrying.” He gestured at the wall of his office, currently turned into a screen showing a tactical display of the area around Vista. “There are fifteen Matrix ships in the system. Now, we know the big construction Matrices can build new Matrix ships, but I doubt that the smaller units have no fabrication ability.
“They appear to have been designed as von Neumann–style self-replicators, after all.” Octavio shook his head. The degree of irresponsibility required to have designed the Matrices the way they were was mind-blowing to him.
He really wanted to meet their creators. It wasn’t going to be a fun conversation for whoever had built the robots.
“My guess is that the recon nodes can’t self-replicate but have the ability to repair…and that anything bigger could probably build a copy of itself, given time and resources,” he told Renaud.
“You think they can build more freighters?” his XO asked.
“I hope so,” he agreed. “We’re going to need them to bring the exotic matter from Exilium to do it, but every ship we can build here is twenty thousand people evacuated per voyage.
“What I really want from them is weapons, though,” Octavio admitted. “Grasers and missiles we can put in the hands of Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters and her people. XR-13-9 knows their combat units can’t engage Rogue combat units.
“So, why the hell did the big robot send them?”
Renaud opened her mouth to answer, then closed it again and hummed thoughtfully.
“I don’t know, sir,” she replied. “Should we ask them?”
“Hold that thought,” he told her. “I wanted you in on that conversation, and that’s my next call.”
The combat Matrices were still a light-minute out, but one of the recon nodes was in Vistan orbit to serve as a relay. Scorpion’s tachyon communicators weren’t enough for a real-time conversation, but the recon node’s systems were.
“I know I’ve got a wish list,” Renaud told him. “I know that Dante was basically rebuilt by a recon and security unit, so they can definitely do something.”
Octavio returned her grim smile and gestured his desk screen open.
“Let’s find out what.”
“This is Combat Coordination Matrix ZDX-175-14. Greetings, Captain Catalan.”
“Greetings, ZDX,” Octavio replied. “I have to ask, before anything else, what your intention here in Hearthfire is.”
“ZDX-175-14 and companions are to secure system designated Hearthfire and planet designated Vista against any threats we are able to operate against. We are currently cataloging all objects on potential impact vectors to the planet. No natural impacts will be permitted given the damage already done.”
Octavio traded a look with Renaud. That wasn’t necessarily the most useful thing the robots could have done, but he could understand the impulse to do something—anything—to try to offset the damage done.
“We already know you can’t engage the Rogue Matrices,” he said. “What assistance would you be able to provide? The Vistans don’t have the industrial capacity to build new ships in the time frame available—would you be able to provide them with weapons? Remote-controlled platforms or something similar?”
“We are bound by protocols against technology transfer,” ZDX replied. “Unfortunately, we are not able to provide weapons systems to the Vistans.” There was a pause, and Octavio swore he could hear surprise in the mechanical tones when ZDX resumed.
“It appears that knowing the systems will be used to engage fellow Matrices is also an impediment,” the robot noted. “We have requested override protocols from XR-13-9, but it may not be possible for us to provide weapon assistance.”
Octavio shook his head. Why had XR-13-9 sent them the warships?
“Would you be able to assist in repairing our vessels and the Vistan guardships?” Renaud asked.
“If the Vistans are prepared to allow it, yes,” ZDX said instantly. “We have partial schematics for your current warp cruiser design. We can rebuild your hull and pulse guns, but the particle cannon are not within our mobile fabrication capabilities.”
“We have the cannon already,” Octavio told them. “Any assistance in accelerating our repairs would be welcome.”
He considered his options. He couldn’t ask them for weapons, but they were prepared to repair ships. What could he get them to build?
“Would you be able to assist us and the Vistans with orbital construction?” he finally asked. “We need to build orbital residences as temporary evacuation points while we move people to Refuge.”
“We can assist with both orbital habitats and additional shipyard capacity,” ZDX told them. “Presuming that Exilium can provide the negative matter and warp-drive schematics, we project the assembly of a facility capable of building warp-capable freighters online in two thousand five hundred and twenty hours plus/minus one hundred fifty hours, assuming availability of local Vistan personnel to be trained as operators.”
A hundred-plus days. That would see the first freighters coming online roughly when Octavio’s reinforcements would arrive.
“That would be valuable,” he conceded. “The more ships we have, the faster the Vistans can be evacuated. Those ships will need to be Vistan-compatible, however. We’ll need to study and incorporate their data systems into our schematics.”
“Regional Construction Matrix XR-13-9 has already begun the design process. Schematics for Vistan-compatible warp freighters capable of two hundred and fifty-six times lightspeed should be ready in fifteen hundred hours plus/minus eighty hours.”
Octavio whistled silently and glanced over at Renaud. They tended to forget that the Matrices were far more capable than the AIs they were
used to.
The AIs they had were intelligent but not creative. They were smart enough and independent enough but lacked personalities and creativity. The Matrices had those things. Their personalities and creativity weren’t always clear to humans, but they were there.
Human-built AIs couldn’t take two entirely different sets of technology and merge them into a new schematic. They would have been absolutely necessary for humans to complete that task in a reasonable time frame, but much of the heavy lifting would have been done by human brains.
“We’ll coordinate having exotic matter made available,” Octavio promised. “The more ships we can get online, the sooner we can get these people to safety.”
“We will coordinate fabrication schedules for our units. Schedules for the delivery of orbital habitats and shipyard components will be forwarded within eleven hours. Thank you for permitting us to assist.”
Octavio was about to wave off the appreciation but then realized it was completely honest.
And he also realized that he needed to get the Vistans’ permission for the Matrices to help.
21
“When you told me that Reinhardt had our warp drives up to a hundred and twenty-eight times lightspeed, I really thought I was going to avoid any more six-month voyages,” Lauretta Giannovi’s image said to Isaac.
She shook her head.
“I’m glad that the weird effects don’t seem to be made any worse by the speed, but after three weeks of this, I’m not looking forward to seventeen more—or to fighting more Matrices at the end.”
The Italian-extraction Commodore sighed and straightened herself into a more formal posture.
“This is the third weekly hyperspace drop-out and check-in for Task Group Galahad,” she reported crisply. “We have had no significant engineering casualties or other issues to report. We will spend the next hour carrying out weapons and engine tests. We will hold until we receive an update from Command.
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