Exodus: Machine War: Book 2: Bolthole Read online

  “And does Bolthole have a gate?”

  “They have a personnel gate,” said Sean, shaking his head. “I am hoping to have a ship gate open there in a couple of weeks, a month at most.”

  “Then I will go ahead and jump through to Bolthole,” said Bednarczyk, a slight smile, the first the Emperor had seen on her face, appearing. “I’ll want to see what I’m dealing with. Now you know that we’ll more than just ships. I’ll need missiles, antimatter, Marines and planetary defense weapons. And I guess that wormholes are out of the question.”

  “Only the four that have already been brought out to Bolthole,” said Sean. “Sorry, but not my call. I can’t control the laws of physics.”

  “Too bad. That would really give us a leg up. But I’ll have control of what I have there, right?”

  “Half of them, Admiral. You may use two of the wormholes for whatever you need to use them for. But two must remain in the system, one as a ship gate, one for personnel and cargo.”

  “OK. Mission accepted, your Majesty. Is there anything else we need to discuss? No? Then Bednarczyk out.”

  Sean looked over at McCullom, his face alternating between a smile and a frown.

  “Exasperating, your Majesty?” asked the CNO.

  “Very. But I think she’ll fight for us. And that’s all that counts.”

  “At least they can’t resign on a combat front,” said McCullom. That was an option no military personnel had available during wartime. The people under her would either have to learn to deal with the Admiral, or they would have to just suck it up and soldier on. There was really no other option.

  * * *

  MACHINE SPACE

  “What the hell are they doing?” asked Commander Petrov Standanko, looking out of the com holo at the officer in charge of their little two ship squadron.

  “I think we are about to see a little bit of what that thing can do,” answered Commander Roberta Matthews, a sick feeling in her stomach.

  In reality, they were about to see what that huge monster of a ship did almost two and a half hours ago. It was in the past, and there was nothing she could do about it. Hell, there was nothing we could do about it even if we were within firing range.

  The probes had raced into position at five thousand gravities, against the twenty gees of the Machine battle station, the term they had decided to use when describing it. They had been in position for over a day before the arrival of the machines. Using their gravity lens visual systems, they had given the destroyers some good views of the surface of the planet. What they saw had amazed, delighted and terrified them.

  The natives, who seemed to be some kind of mollusk with an outer protective layer of segmented shells, sliding around on a single foot, had developed an early industrial society. It reminded Roberta of something out of the Victorian era on Old Earth, pictures she had seen of the brick construction and smokestacks. Of course the buildings were different, as suited different physiologies and histories. And the most delightful thing was that they did not seem to have any weapons, and war was a thing that didn’t exist on their world. They couldn’t be certain of that, but even at that level of development there were signs. Old battlefields and new, even some campaigns still going on, a common occurrence at this time. There were sailing ships in the harbors, and a few steam vessels as well, but no noticeable warships. And the entire land mass of the planet seemed to be of a relatively similar level of development.

  Not that weapons would have done them any good against what was coming from the heavens. Not at their level, and maybe not at the level of the Empire. What they did have were telescopes, the budding instruments of a science that was curious about the heavens, without knowing that monsters existed there. They would have seen something as large as the battle station as it approached. And it must have panicked them to see a stellar body in such a motion, coming closer, possibly to hit their planet.

  The battle station settled over the night side at first. The viewer on the destroyers could see that part of the planet, their powerful gravity lens systems capable of discerning objects less than ten meters across at that distance. At first they could see the lasers that had to be kilometers wide. Like most such beams they were invisible, until they intersected the smoke and debris that the lasers were sending up into the atmosphere. At that time they could see the outlines of the red beams through the atmosphere as they incinerated the population centers of the world they had come to kill.

  Flashes appeared on the surface, huge continent covering blasts of massive kinetic weapons that lit up the entire dark side of the planet for a few moments. When they died the glowing hundred kilometer hole in the crust glowed with magma.

  The station orbited around to the day side of the planet. Most of the buildings on that side had collapsed from the seismic waves of the impacts on the other hemisphere. Now the angry red of scores of huge particle beams appeared, linking the upper atmosphere with the surface, destroying everything that still stood, and everything that was trying to hide.

  Matthews wanted to turn away, to stop viewing the horror that was an entire world, billions of years of evolution to reach a point where intelligence was rising to the point where they were only centuries away from space themselves, die. It was her job to watch, no matter how much it hurt.

  She finally turned away when the smoke was too dense in the atmosphere to see anything. Infrared was still available, and all it showed was a surface that was hellishly hot, unable to support life. They continued to watch for the hours that it took the machines to crawl back out of the gravity well of the system, until they were near the orbit of the largest gas giant. At that point the battle station launched some of their eight thousand ton weapons, aimed at the gas giant.

  “What the hell do they expect those to do?” asked Standanko.

  “I’m betting those are nanite packages,” said Roberta, still sick to her stomach at the destruction of the world she had witnessed, now sure that another ecosystem was doomed. Most cold and temperate zone gas giants had some form of life in their atmospheres. The majority were microbic, but many had developed some truly spectacular life forms. And the nanites in those packages would be sure to kill the entire ecosystem over time.

  “It’s time to leave, Petrov,” Matthews told the other Skipper over the com. “I want you to head back to Command Base, by way of Klassek. Show them what we’ve seen.”

  “And what are you going to, Roberta? I hope nothing stupid.”

  “Hell, no. We’re bugging out and heading to Bolthole. They need to know about this thing as well.” Though I’m not sure what they’re going to do about this thing if it comes their way.

  Moments later, both destroyers jumped up into hyper VII and started to accelerate onto their different vectors. The machines had nothing that could catch them. Unfortunately, the same could not be said for the places they were going.

  * * *

  BOLTHOLE, MARCH 8TH, 1002.

  “We are so glad to see you, Captain Francois,” said Admiral Anaru Henare, shaking the battleship commander’s hand, then gesturing him to a seat.

  “Probably not as happy to see us as those wormholes,” said the Captain. He took the comfortable seat in the Admiral’s office, in the command center, five kilometers below the surface of the metallic asteroid. It would take over an hour for our most powerful laser to bore through that armor, thought the Captain.

  “We’re going to be taking all of those holes off of your ships, with the exception of the one we will be leaving on the Shogun Kamakura. One of them will be used for an eventual ship gate, though I’m afraid you won’t be going home through it, not just yet. We have too much need for ships, and even one as damaged as yours is an asset we can’t afford to give up.”

  “Understood, ma’am. And I understand you want to keep Kamakura armed as heavily as possible.” After all, the other battleship did not sustain the kind of propulsion and electromag field damage his ship did, and they were probably the most survivable vessels
in the small force out here past the fringe.

  “And one hole will be installed on this asteroid as a passenger and cargo gate,” continued the Admiral. “We can start using it right away. We have some needs we can’t meet right now.”

  Francois nodded as he looked over at the holo, watching the vector arrows of the force that had come out to rescue his own. He had been happy that most of them had made it. They needed those ships, and any others they could their hands on.

  “Your ship will still be deployed with my fleet,” said the Admiral.

  “Any chance of some time in the docks, sir? We could barely make four hundred gravities on the way in, and my electromag field is a sieve.”

  “I’m afraid not, Captain. Right now we are working on other projects in our dock spaces, and we don’t have the supermetals to spare for repairing your grabber units. Maybe when we get some through the wormhole.”

  Are we likely to get any of those resources out here, with the war still going? thought the Captain, not really thrilled about how his ship would be operating at less than a hundred percent. Probably less than seventy percent, all told.

  “You will be assigned to Rear Admiral Khrushchev’s close in defense force, which will take some of the pressure off as far as maneuvering is concerned. Kamakura will be assigned to Rear Admiral Nguyen’s force. Of course, all of these deployments are provisional. We are getting an overall theater commander out here in a day or so, a five star, and final deployments will be up to her.”

  “I have to say, sir, that while it is nice that Fleet thinks enough of us to send us a fleet admiral, I would feel much better if they sent us some squadrons of battleships.”

  “That’s being talked about, son,” said Henare with a grimace that made his facial tattoos stand out on his face. “Unfortunately, so far it’s just talk.”

  “And can I ask who the new commander is, or has that been decided.”

  “Oh, it’s been decided alright, by the Emperor himself. Though I’m not familiar with the name. An Admiral Beata Bednarczyk, I think.”

  “Bloody Beata,” exclaimed Francois. “Bloody hell.”

  “So you know her?”

  “I served under her when she was a captain, and I an ensign. She was a bloody tyrant on her command deck, and scared the hell out of her crew.”

  “That bad,” said Henare with a groan.

  “No, sir. That good. Because if she scared her own people, she also scared the hell out of the Crakista. She was a bloody genius.”

  “So you’re telling me it’s a good thing we’re getting her?”

  “Good and bad, sir. I know I shouldn’t be talking about a superior like this, but…”

  “Go ahead. I want to know what I’m in for.”

  “She’s arrogant, opinionated, and a stickler for discipline. But she walks the walk. I would hate to have to fight her. And if the damned Machines actually had feelings, I would feel sorry for them as well.”

  Chapter Ten

  No one knows when a robot will approach human intelligence, but I suspect it will be late in the 21st century.

  Will they be dangerous? Possibly.

  So I suggest we put a chip in their brain to shut them off if they have murderous thoughts.

  Michio Kaku

  ENROUTE TO KLASSEK. MARCH 13th, 1002.

  “We’re picking up something ahead in hyper VI, sir,” stated the Sensor Tech who was on the current bridge watch.

  “What do you have?” asked Commander Petrov Standanko, who was filling his own bridge watch, leaning forward in his chair and looking at the tactical holo. They had been heading toward Klassek for the last three days ship’s time, almost five Galactic Standard Units. They were currently four ship days from that system, or ten of the Galactic Standard Days that would pass in that system before they got there. There had been some traces of Machine vessels on the way, mostly at maximum tracking distance. Single ships, a few small groups, obvious patrols of this space. Since the Lindberg was in VII, they were blowing past any enemy ships, invulnerable to them in the higher dimension.

  “It’s at extreme range, sir,” said the Tech, shaking her head in confusion. “Very extreme range for something in VI.”

  Petrov left his chair in an instant, taking quick steps to the station. “Let me listen,” he said, grabbing the extra pair of headphones at the station. The Commander had come up through both sensors and tactical, and he still kept up with the latest developments in both. He settled the headphones and listened to the sound of the graviton waves coming at them through all the dimensions of hyper that they transited. He looked at the three dimensional sine wave on the holo over the sensor station board, his eyes narrowing as he tried to determine where he had seen a wave like that before.

  “It’s definitely something used by the Machines, sir,” said the Tech, running some numbers on his board. “Either we’re getting a misread on the range, or this is something really big.”

  It’s something really big, thought the Commander, watching the plot as it firmed up, the distance dropping. They were closing the distance, moving through the equivalent normal space distance at four times the speed of the bogie.

  “That’s another of their battle stations,” said Petrov as the memory returned to him.

  “But, that thing was heading toward Bolthole in VI,” said the Tech, a confused expression on his face. “How did it get here”

  “This is a different one,” said Petrov, concentrating on the track. And there’s no telling how many of them the Machines have made. Two, a half dozen, dozens? Even one was a nightmare, something that would probably take a large task group to take down, more than they had out here.

  A half an hour later it was confirmed, as the smaller signals of twenty odd escorting vessels now appeared, and the track of the station was clear. They blew past that station and its escorts, traveling for a half hour before the escorts fell off the plot, then over an hour and half later the station, the size of its propulsion system putting out massive amounts of gravitons.

  Petrov looked over at the large plot of the region, their arrow heading toward Klassek, ten days away, that of the Machines heading for the same target, forty days out. And he couldn’t think of anything in that system that could stop this engine of destruction.

  * * *

  The Machine brain aboard the battle station noted the organic controlled ship passing them. It could not feel anger or regret, it could not wish. It could run the figures and see that it had no hope of destroying that ship. It ran more numbers, calculations of probabilities, figuring out what it needed to strike at a ship in hyper VII, and coming up with no answer. The organics had the answer obviously, which meant it needed to capture one of those ships. Which meant finding a way to get something up into VII to strike them without destroying them, forcing them to translate down. But what could that be? It had tried one of its weapons on the other organic scout that had passed through its formation in hyper VII. The weapon had worked perfectly across its limited range. Unfortunately, the two hundred thousand ton ship had been destroyed when it translated down, leaving nothing of interest to the escorts that had translated down to see if there was anything left.

  The Machine thought for a longer period of time than it normally took for any problem. An answer came. Not one it could implement by itself unless the organics proved to be particularly stupid, and these creatures were showing no sign of such a predilection.

  The Machines had powers that the organics were not aware of, because it could not be traced or quantified. It took most of the energy of the huge station to accomplish, but while in hyper, basically coasting along with only the need to keep its hyperfield up, it had energy to spare. It opened the microscopic portal to eight, a dimension that nothing could travel in even if the opening had been more than a micron in diameter or lasted longer than a millisecond. With that portal open it sent a burst of gravitons toward the home region, a short message that would inform more of its kind of what they needed to do in
this area. It would take time, but more of the stations would soon start this way to reinforce this effort to capture the tech of these organics.

  * * *

  BOLTHOLE.

  “Could I test one of these weapons, sir?” asked Nazzrirat Andonna, looking down at one of the assembled particle beam rifles that were set aside for quality control.

  “You don’t have to call me sir, Nazzrirat,” said the Supervisor with a smile. “Call me Quan.” The human looked him over for a moment, then picked up one of the rifles. “This thing really isn’t built or your physiology, son. I think there are weapons on the drawing boards for your people, taking into account the way you’re put together.”

  And that may never happen, thought the Klassekian, looking down at the weapon like the ones he had been watching the robots put together for weeks now. He knew how it was supposed to work, having studied the manuals. But that was not the same as actually firing the weapon, seeing it work firsthand.

  “I think I can figure it out, Quan. I’ve been studying the manuals while I’m here.” He noticed a look of disapproval on the human’s face and quickly added, “to help me to make sure that the robots were putting everything together properly on every station I worked.” From what he understood, some supervisors kept their workers on the same station at all times, while they became extremely proficient at the work. But Quan liked to rotate his crew, so that the workers could handle any station at need.

  “OK, son. If you think you can handle it, we’ll let you give it a try. Here,” he handed one of the rifles to the Klassekian, who hefted it with some clumsiness as it really was not made for his body and limbs. “Follow me.”