Exodus: Machine War: Book 2: Bolthole Read online

  The enemy ships were up to point five light, and it looked like none of the craft would be able to make it to the barrier at any conceivable velocity that would allow them to jump. Then…

  “Enemy is decelerating at two thousand gravities,” yelled out the Tactical Officer.

  “Can they make it down to jump velocity?” asked Nguyen, afraid of the answer.

  “It depends on how good their jump drive is, sir. I really couldn’t say.”

  “Jump to V in twenty seconds,” called out the Navigation Officer.

  “Prepare to fire a spread back at them as soon as we exit into V,” ordered the Admiral.

  “And if they don’t make the jump, we waste our missiles,” said the ship’s Captain over the direct com.

  “I’m betting these bastards do make it, Captain. And I want them to enter into a surprise. Clear?”

  “Jumping in five seconds,” called out the Navigation Officer, and the Com Officer sent the orders via grav pulse to all of the ships.

  “Jumping, now.” The lights dimmed on the bridge as the hole between the dimensions formed in front of the battle cruiser. The ship slid through the hole, the bright red background of VI changing to the slightly less bright red background of V. The nausea struck. The Admiral held back the vomit that threatened to erupt up his esophagus. I must be getting old, he thought as he held down his gorge and looked around, seeing the slightly disoriented crew going about their jobs. I bet the damned machines don’t suffer from translation sickness, he thought, as the ship shuddered slightly with the release of its four remaining hyper capable missiles.

  Now, if only they’ll jump in the right place, he thought. If the enemy ships came in after the missiles had passed their jump point, they would again be forced to decel and turn about, dropping back into normal space well before they reached their target. Of course they were already decelerating, trying to kill velocity so they could reverse their vector. It didn’t take long to kill most of that velocity, coming to a coasting velocity of point one light.

  The Admiral stared at the tactical holo, watching the vector arrows of the enemy ships as they continued to decelerate on the way to the hyper barrier. He wasn’t sure if they were going to make it, and was hoping that they had miscalculated, which would solve all of their problems with this group.

  “Translation directly behind us,” called out the Sensor Officer. “Emergent velocity, point four one light.”

  “Faster than we or the Cacas,” said Commander van der Griff, turning from his navigation board to look at the main tactical plot, which showed the enemy ships, coasting ahead for a moment before they again started their acceleration. Right into the small swarm of twenty-three missiles that had acquired them as soon as they translated in, sitting in a coast, waiting, giving off a minimal graviton signature as such small objects that were not accelerating, only using enough energy to generate their hyper field. In a space that was filled with graviton emissions of scores of ships accelerating, decelerating and changing dimensions, making it extremely difficult to track objects so small. Until they were in the perfect position to strike.

  When the fire cleared there were five enemy ships still in pursuit. They opened fire on the human force, each launching four of their eight thousand ton missiles. Twenty of the weapons drove forward at forty-five hundred gravities. A lower rate of acceleration than any human missile, something that seemed counter-intuitive when the extreme acceleration of their ships was considered. Then again, it had to be remembered that the ships were basically unmanned, and machinery could handle a lot more of the stress of extreme acceleration than any possible organic form.

  “Take them under fire at maximum range,” ordered Nguyen, waiting for another launch.

  The plot showed the large weapons coming in, overtaking the human ships that were coasting, maintaining the velocity they needed to translate down at the next waypoint. The launching vessels were again accelerating at two thousand gravities, trying to close the distance before the human force reached the next barrier and had to jump again.

  At ten light seconds distance the human force started to fire its very limited supply of hyper capable counter missiles. They sped off at ten thousand gravities acceleration, heading directly into the large targets. The weapons, it was almost crazy to call them missiles, tried to evade. They had the strength of their own electromagnetic fields, much stronger than a human missile could generate, as well as a strong laser battery. Their weakness was their lack of maneuverability as compared to human missiles.

  When the wave of counters hit, they took out ten of the enemy missiles, pointing to another weakness of the weapons. They packed a much heavier punch than any human missile, but due to their size, there were fewer of them in an attack wave. Smaller missiles used their weight of numbers to break through defenses, while the large machine weapons lacked those numbers.

  Lasers took out eight more of the weapons as they closed. Against beam weapons they showed their quality, resisting heavy beam strikes that would have totally destroyed a human missile in an instant. Still, when hit with multiple beams from a number of ships over sustained time, they blew apart much like any smaller weapon.

  Three made it through, one to hit a light cruiser, shattering the ship, blasting the remains back into normal space. Two detonated close to their targets, missing the human ships and self- destructing at closest approach. A destroyer lost two of its laser rings and a couple of grabber units, while another lost a good section of its stern.

  The enemy fired another four weapons each, moving toward the human force at forty-five hundred gravities acceleration as before. And again the human ships released a wave of counter missiles. None of the vessels were carrying many of the hyper capable interceptors, and this launch depleted all of the Exploration Command vessels, only the Fleet heavy cruisers and a couple of destroyers still retaining weapons. This time they took out thirteen of the enemy weapons, leaving seven to close into beam weapon range. Only one got to attack range, and it was blasted from space before it could close the gap and cause any damage.

  They’re testing us, realized the Admiral. They want to measure our capabilities, and losing a dozen ships is no big deal to them. No funerals to attend, no memorials to erect. No medals to give out.

  “They will be in beam range in four minutes,” called out the Tactical Officer.

  In normal space beam range was less than a light minute, with the chance of a hit going up as the range decreased. In hyper there was the added complication of photons falling out of and back to normal space. Beams lost about half of their power over that light minute range, and were a fourth of what they had been when leaving their projectors by the time they reached two light minutes.

  “Jump to IV in two minutes,” called out the Navigator.

  “Connors is reporting degradation of her acceleration capabilities,” said the Flag Com Officer. “Maximum acceleration at two hundred gravities.”

  Which they won’t need to go as long as we stay together coasting at point three light, thought the Admiral.

  “Get all of the heavy cruisers on the com,” ordered Nguyen. “I want them to pull the same trick we did on the last translation.”

  The ships jumped, the enemy vessels within two minutes of being able to fire. The machine vessels continued to decel, reaching their maximum jump velocity just before the barrier and jumping down, then hitting the acceleration again.

  Three of the five vessels fell off the plot as they ran into missiles. Two continued on, pushing their acceleration, closing the distance.

  “Seventy-five seconds to maximum effective beam range,” called out the Tactical Officer. “Enemy vessels maneuvering evasively.”

  “All ships, open fire with lasers,” ordered Nguyen. “Maximum spread.”

  Every ship in the force turned to present their broadsides to the oncoming missiles. Like all Imperial ships, they could boost at any orientation, through to transit from one dimension to another they had to approach
the rift they opened through their narrow aspect. Being minutes away from such a transit, that was not a problem at the moment. The ships started firing while still in the process of turning, the weapons they could bring to bear opening up, the others releasing as the rings oriented to point at their targets. Wide spread meant two things. The beams were focused to arrive as a spotlight that would cover an entire vessel, while the ships also fired their beams both at the target and all around it. This way they would be sure to get some laser energy into the enemy ships.

  The two vessels started outgassing, alloys vaporizing off their skins, nothing extreme, but enough to damage sensors and some of the laser focusing lenses. Moments after they started getting hit with light energy, the machines fired as well, concentrating all of their fire on one of the light cruisers. They suffered the same problems as the humans hitting their target, with a tenth of the beam energy trying to hit the cruiser actually getting to it.

  As the range closed the fire became more accurate, and both of the machine vessels started taking armor shattering hits as beams became more focused. One of the machine vessels went into emergency decel, hitting over twenty-five hundred gravities, falling back.

  That’s the one that’s going to report their take of this fight, thought the Admiral, wishing he had saved some hyper capable missiles for this moment. The other ship continued in, its hull now rippling as laser energy transferred gigajoules of heat into the hull.

  “Translation in one minute,” called out the Flag Navigation Officer.

  “And that bastard is going to run right into the barrier,” stated the Fleet Tactical Officer.

  The enemy vessel was in visual now, only slightly blurred from the transfer of some of its photons from hyper before they got to the humans. The hyperdrive projectors top and bottom were a wreck. It was amazing that the thing was still able to maintain hyper, but it was obvious it would be translating down at the barrier. It made no move to decel, instead putting its remaining grabber power into acceleration at four hundred eighteen gravities.

  “We need to turn, sir,” called out the Flag Navigation Officer.

  “Order the turn,” said the Admiral, watching as the hyper barrier came up, the timer counting down.

  An explosion rippled over the hull of pursuing enemy ship, turning it in a spin. A cheer went up across the flag bridge. The enemy ship was now doomed, while the human force had all reached the proper alignment and were opening the holes between the dimensions they would jump through a second later.

  For the Exploration Command light cruiser Onrust that second didn’t come fast enough. A blast of high energy photons hit two of the stern grabbers as the remaining units were still engaged in lining her up perfectly on the rift she had opened to her front. She slid around, out of proper alignment with a hole that was not much larger than her amidships circumference. If given two seconds more she could have corrected. She didn’t have that time, and the ship hit the opening sideways. The sections that actually hit the sides of the hole were compressed into degenerate matter by the extreme gravity in an instant. The bow and stern of the ship, no longer protected by a hyperfield, fell out of hyperspace in a catastrophic translation. The midsection of the ship suffered a fate just as terrible, as the fluctuations in the hyperfield that normally protected it during transit ripped apart people and machinery. Antimatter breached as the ship fell into hyper IV, the remains of the cruiser converted to plasma, and then translated out of IV.

  The machine vessel hit the barrier, glowed for a moment as the hull rippled and stretched, falling apart, then translating down into normal space. Its remains reentered normal space, no part more than a kilogram.

  “Shit,” growled Nguyen as he saw the ships, one of his and one of the foes, falling off the plot. Over eight hundred people, gone. In almost any kind of analysis he had won the running battle. But he had lost people, living intelligent beings, and he didn’t care how many computers were destroyed in return.

  The force continued on, no longer bothered by the enemy. They picked up tracks here and there, machine ships transiting hyper on incomprehensible tasks. But nothing approached, nothing tried to interfere. And finally they dropped back into normal space, the Bolthole system appearing ahead, as the tactical plot filled in what information it could gather.

  “Get in touch with Bolthole command,” ordered the Admiral. “Let them know their reinforcements are here.”

  Chapter Six

  What’s casual for a robot isn’t necessarily what’s casual for a human.

  Alan Tudyk

  MACHINE SPACE, FEBRUARY 24th, 1002.

  “Well, it looks like the damned thing can move up into hyper,” said Commander Petrov Stadanko of the scout destroyer Charles Lindberg.

  “But how far up can they go?” asked Commander Roberta Matthews, standing on the bridge of the Sir Edmund Hillary.

  She was looking at the tactical holo, that showed the enormous object, which had to mass in the hundreds of billions of tons, moving through hyper I, the massive graviton wave of its translation basically blotting out all of the other noise of local space. It had to be the largest object to ever transit into hyper. At least in the memories of any species around today. It had accelerated at twenty gravities all the way to the limit, decelerating down to point one light before making the jump. At least it can’t perform like one of our ships. So now we just have to find out how fast it can travel in hyper.

  The trio of destroyers had been hanging around the system now for over a week, playing hide and seek with the machines. Since the machines didn’t seem to be able to transit in VII, it had been fairly easy to avoid them. The only risk had been coming out of hyper, that they might be translating into a waiting trap. That, and the possibility that this enemy might try to sneak in some missiles ballistically while the human ships were in normal space. And every time the human ships translated back into normal space, the nearest enemy ships boosted at them, maximum accel. Every time, even when it was apparent to the humans that the enemy was not going to come close to them before they got away.

  And I bet they’re just waiting to capture one of our hyper VII vessels so they can reverse engineer that capability, she thought. When the machines had left the Empire, hyper V was the benchmark, with hyper VI only a theory. They had built VI drives based on theory. The problem was that opening up a higher dimension wasn’t only a problem of increasing the power by more than four times. There was a certain graviton resonance that needed to be projected, as well as the geometries of the hyperdrive projectors. The machines might actually have learned more about that from observing her ships, but she still thought they would have problems developing a VII drive without a working model to play with.

  They kept tracking the ship?, battle station?, whatever it was. They still weren’t sure of its function, but she doubted that it was a cargo ship. The entire one hundred and three kilometer diameter structure screamed death. That thing was made to deal death. Of that she had no doubt. And death on a massive scale.

  “We have some possible destinations for the Machine force, based on their current course,” called out the Navigation Officer.

  Which could change in a moment, thought the Commander, nodding toward her officer. The tactical holo changed, showing the location of the system they were outside of on one edge, and the blinking stars of systems just outside of the Machine’s area of control on the other. There were scores of stars that could be the destination, five of them with red lines, indicating the most likely targets, and a dozen yellow for possibles. All were either G or K class stars, the most likely to harbor life. And I’m sure they’re not heading there to say hello. The most likely answer was they needed a system to test that beast on.

  They followed the progress of the monster, moving up the levels of hyper until it hit VI. At that point it started to accelerate at twenty gravities, which seemed to be its maximum.

  “Why do they have such a low acceleration rate?” asked the Navigation Officer, her eyes lock
ed on the holo. “It can’t be because of the lack of enough inertial compensators. My God, they’re machines.”

  “They had to burn several hundred tons of antimatter just to get up to hyper VI,” said the Tactical Officer. “Enough to run a fleet across the breadth of the Empire.”

  And they had a shitload of antimatter production satellites in that system. But how many years’ worth of their total production did it take to fully fuel it.

  They waited in normal space, light hours outside the system. There was no hurry to follow the huge ship, not yet. They could overtake it in VII at a low rate of velocity, half of the maximum. They would be able to follow, pass, drop down ahead, go back into hyper, all without risk. And I don’t need to get arrogant, just because we are better at them in one aspect of technology.

  “We’re getting the visual take of the station, I mean ship, jumping into hyper,” said the Sensor Tech from his station.

  A telescopic zoom of the station appeared, looking as smooth as a billiard ball from this perspective. The image enhanced, zoomed in again, showing a small section that was a mass of devices. They could figure out the functions of some of them. Laser and particle beam emplacements, missile tubes, hatches, electromagnetic field projectors. The zoomed out again, trying to pick out some of the larger structures. The large rip in space opened, leading into the first dimension of hyper

  “Back up the time and give me an infrared view,” ordered Matthews, leaning forward in her chair.

  The image reversed in fast motion for a couple of seconds, regressing a couple of minutes in time. The view changed, shifting into the red. And in that view the entire structure glowed like a small star. They could pick out the grabber units in this view, glowing white as they fulfilled their primary and secondary functions, converting inertia to heat, and unloading a mass of the waste heat from the reactors.

  “That’s a hell of a lot of heat,” said the Tactical Officer.