Exodus: Machine War 1 Supernova. (6 page)

“Show me,” she
called out, and the holo of the planet zoomed in to a view of the surface of an
ocean, and a long object with stubby wings streaking over the waves.

“Velocity is
point two six kilometers per second, ma’am.  About nine hundred and sixty
kilometers an hour.  We think it’s intended to fly under the enemy sensor grid,
and take out targets by surprise.”

“Time to nearest
potential target?”

“About seventeen
minutes, ma’am.  We’re picking up many others with the same velocity and
similar attack times.  Do you want us to fire on them.”

Albright thought
for a moment, zooming the holo back out to look at the battle between her ship
and the ballistic missiles.  Other missiles were rising from locations around
the larger cities, from their trajectories most likely defensive weaponry made
to shoot down the incoming weapons.  And
Clark’s
sensors were keeping
track of them as well in case they turned out to be something completely
different.

“Hold off on
firing on the, cruise missiles, I think they were called.  We’ll take care of
them once the ballistic missiles are gone.”

“Can you get
them all?” asked Lamsat, leaning forward and watching the tracks that were
ending with rapidity, though each wave of intercepts was further along their
arc.

“We’re trying,”
said Albright, looking up at the alien, then over at the other one, who still
had an angry look on his face.  “They’re easy to kill, but there are a lot of
them.”

“Then take out
the Honish missiles,” said Lamsat, looking over at H’rrana with glaring eyes. 
“They started this thing, after all.”

“You launched
first,” said H’rrana, slamming his right tentacles on the table.  “We only
responded.”  He looked over at the human.  “You need to destroy their weapons
first.”

“We only
launched because you were fueling your missiles,” screamed Lamsat, sitting up
as if he wanted to jump out of his own seat.

“We are
targeting all of your weapons, without regard for who they came from,” said
Albright, shaking her head. 
And if you weren’t so potentially important to
us I would just turn my back on both of you and fly away.
  She shook her
head again, knowing that last thought to be false.  She was mandated to contact
intelligent species, and part of that mandate was to help them survive.

How’s it
coming, Tactical?
the Captain sent over her internal com link.

It’s going to
be close, ma’am,
sent that officer.

Albright sent a
mental nod as she watched the holo.  There seemed to be fewer missiles on it
than a minute ago, despite fresh launches.  The laser emitters were providing
plenty of power from the crystal matrix batteries that fed them, while those
batteries were being continually topped off by the reactors.  In a fight with
another ship of her class, she would be going through laser power faster than
she could replenish it.  Against primitive missiles, not so much.  It didn’t
take much power to blast them from existence.  Only their numbers were causing
much of a problem.

“How many damned
weapons do you both have?” she asked in frustration, looking at the two
aliens.  She looked back at the holo and saw that there were even fewer
weapons, but the ones that were still up were closer to the territory of their
enemy.  And the low flying weapons were still up in mass, with growing numbers.

Come on,
thought Albright, watching as scores more warheads disappeared off the plot. 
And no more were rising from the continents, though there were still some
submarine launches.

“Tactical,
detail someone to take out every submarine you can locate with kinetics.”

“Yes, ma’am. 
We’re on it.”

“You can’t do
that,” said Lamsat in a stricken tone.  “My people are on some of those
submarines.”

“And they’re
launching weapons of mass destruction at other people on your world,” said
Albright, staring at the alien astronaut.  “Tactical,” she said again, knowing
that the aliens would hear her and relay this message to their world through
whatever telepathic sense they had.  “Target those missile fields as well.  I
don’t want them to be holding any surprises.”

All of the
aliens sat there in shock, staring at the human who had just ordered strikes on
their world.  Moments later the first of the kinetic weapons landed in the
water near the icon of a submarine that had launched weapons.  The vessel was
probably not at that point anymore, which didn’t really matter as the weapon
struck the water with the force of a multi-megaton warhead.  Any sub within ten
kilometers of that strike was gone.  There were more hits on the water, then a
bright flash as a kinetic came down on a missile field on the larger continent.

We don’t have
that many kinetics aboard
, thought the Captain.  Every ship carried some,
but they really didn’t expect to use them, especially Exploration Command
ships.   KE weapons were really nothing more than masses of iron, a ton each,
with a built in single grabber that could accelerate them up enough velocity to
generate megatons of force, along with their own acceleration due to gravity. 
They could always make more, but they didn’t have the time for that now.

There were more
flashes on the holo as the lasers kept taking out warheads, and kinetics
continued to strike subs and missile fields.  Then the well ran dry, and there
were no more kinetics to drop.  Albright was tempted to order missile strikes,
which could double as kinetics if launched without their warheads.  She
resisted the temptation, since, as an exploration vessel, she didn’t have that
many in her magazines to start with, and they were really the only weapons she
had for use against ships of her tech level or greater, if any came along.

“I think we’re
going to get them all,” called out the tactical officer over the com.  There
were only a couple of score weapons left, and, though the atmosphere was
roiling with explosive energy and electromagnetic radiation.  And then the
unthinkable happened, and the tactical system lost lock on one weapon, which
hurtled down on a coastal city on the larger continent.

The weapon
flared, brighter than the kinetics, and a mushroom cloud rose into the air and
into the stratosphere.  The city below the blast started to dissolve as the
blast wave moved out, following the thermal wave that set everything burnable
on fire.

“There were over
five million citizens in that city,” said H’rrana in a hollow tone.  He glared
at Lamsat, and tried to rise from his seat before the Phlistaran Marine pushed
him back.  “Your people murdered five million of our citizens.”

“In
self-defense,” yelled back Lamsat, returning the glare.

“And you,”
continued H’rrana, turning his gaze to the Captain.  “You killed thousands of
our people, with your strikes on our submarines and missile fields.  You too
are a murderer, and the blood of those people is on your hands.”

Albright
suppressed a flash of guilt and looked up to meet the eyes of the Honish
representative.  “I do not accept your guilt, H’rrana.  I saved billions of
your peoples with the actions of this ship.  If you didn’t want your people put
at risk, you shouldn’t have launched thousands of damned nukes at the
Tsazorians while my ship was in orbit about your planet.  And you,” she said,
turning toward Lamsat, “are just as guilty.”

She looked back
at the holo, to see the large mushroom cloud still rising from the nuke strike,
and the several smaller from the kinetics.  “My God.  We came here to tell you
people what danger you are in from that damned blue star, and all you can think
about is killing each other.”

She looked over
at her Marine Lieutenant, making sure she had his attention.  “Lieutenant
J’rrantar.  Would you please escort the gentlemen, and lady,” she nodded to
Nastra, “to suitable quarters.  They are our guests while we sort this
situation out.”

As soon as the
aliens were all out of the conference room Albright contacted Nagakami.  “Get
me the leaders of the two nations on the com.  I want to make sure we
understand the situation here.”  Moments later the heads of the two leaders of
Tsarzor and Honish appeared in separate holos floating above the table.  She
wasn’t sure if they could see each other, though both casts were also being
recast to the other side.  Albright took a deep breath and began the work of
diplomacy, making sure both leaders knew what was going on.

Chapter Four

It is hard to reason with a
species gone mad.

Old Brakakak saying.

“We’ve confirmed
it, Captain,” said Commander Sophia Romanov, the ship’s surgeon and
exobiologist.  “The last subject received the information from his brother as
instantaneously as to make no difference.”

And that
subject was over a light hour from his brother, who was on the planet,
thought Albright with smile. 
This is something that can really help the
Empire, if these people don’t let themselves get taken out by that damned
supernova.

That was the
problem here.  While there were some who were willing to leave the planet and
go with the Terrans, there were many more who had one excuse or another for not
cooperating, and those were willing to interfere with those who wanted to go. 
Point in fact was the newcast she was watching at that moment, where one of the
talking heads was telling the people of the planet that the humans were here to
kidnap them, to take them into space to labor as slaves at some diabolical
mining colony.  A second holo had a spokesman from the nation of Honish telling
his people that their God was near, and extorting them to resist any attempts
of the humans to get them to leave this world before the deity arrived.

And so much
potential here.
  They had proven that the natives could communicate mind to
mind, thoughts, images, sounds, across great distances with no degradation in
the signal, and without the passage of time.  Romanov had scanned them with
both external imagers and nanotech while they were transmitting and receiving,
and had found the area of their multi-lobed brain where the ability seemed to
reside.  The kicker was that only siblings from the same birthing seemed to
have connections with each other.  Some form of quantum entanglement, where the
cells of that section of the brain shared a quantum state with the similar
cells in those of the brother or sister.

The good news
was that Klassekian females, though only capable of one or at most two
pregnancies in their lifetimes, had large litters of from six to twelve babies,
all of them connected. 
And surely we can find a way to use this ability to
augment our fleet communications.  Wormholes are great, and expensive, and we
definitely will never have enough for all of our ships.  But with these people
in our com sections.

“What’s the next
step, Doctor?”

“I’d like to
take a couple of them into hyper and see if the effect works no matter the
dimension.”

“And for that,
you need to send one out to the
Lewis,
and let them translate into
hyper?”

“Exactly right,”
agreed Romanov.  “And I would like to test them across every dimension of
hyper.  We need to know the limitations of this thing as well as its benefits.”

“Go ahead and
set that up,” ordered the Captain.  “If you need
Lewis
to come in from
the hyper limit, I’ll order them in.  It’s obvious these people aren’t going to
be a threat to any of our space based assets.” 
It might be a different
story on the ground.

She had people
on the planet now, over a hundred, mostly researchers and their Marine security. 
About half of them were looking at the huge constructs that rose up above the
atmosphere.  They still had no idea what they were, or why they were put where
they were.  What was known was that they were impenetrable to any kind of
energy probe, and invulnerable to any kind of laser of material drill.  They
couldn’t even get an estimate of their ages.  All they knew for sure was that
they had been here since the beginning of written history on this world, and
there were legends of them that predated that history.

What in the
hell are you?
thought the Captain, looking at one of the huge, curved
spikes rising out of the mountains in the center of the continent.  The view
was from the ground looking up at the structure as it rose up through the
clouds, taken from the camera of the crew that was working that site, looking
for any evidence of a construction center that might have been used in raising
it. 
We’ve been here almost a month, and we still don’t know what you are.
 
She sat there staring at the structure, trying to will it to give up its
secrets, to no avail. 
There must be a reason you are there.  No one with
the tech to build something like this is going to just put it up for
decoration.  So what are you for?

“Ma’am,” came a
call over the priority com.  “We have a situation on the planet.”

What now
,
thought the Captain, looking at the source of the call, her heart skipping a
beat as she saw it was from her Security Chief.

*    *     *

Ensign Meridith
Danvers was new to service, and to Exploration Command. 
Clark
had been
her first assignment out of the Academy, and she was looking forward to many
voyages of exploration aboard this ship, or one like her.  Now it was looking
as if she might have reached the end of her career, and life, before either had
truly begun.

The Ensign had
thought she was safe, walking back to the shuttle on her own, not even dressed
in the light battle armor that security was wearing for this mission.  She was
not security, though she was armed with a military class laser pistol.  The
people in this city had seemed to friendly and helpful, answering all of the
team’s questions about the ancient construct that arose from the plain at the
edge of the city and swept up into the clouds.  Then there had been a slight
interuption in telemetry, and Lt. Commander Larson, the team leader, had
ordered her to check up on it, as all other hands were busy with mission
oriented tasks.

She had just
disengaged the locking protocol of the shuttle through her implant when she
became aware that there were locals closing with her.  A lot of locals.  She
just had time to send one warning squawk out and touch her hand to the butt of
her pistol when they were upon her.  She had time to throw two blows that sent
aliens to the ground, one with what looked like a broken neck.  Then something
hard slammed into her head, and everything went black.

When
semiconsciousness returned, she found herself being carried along through some
darkly lit hallways, her hands bound.  She wondered in almost panic if she would
be able to contact the ship.  It was obvious that she was not going to get
herself out of this with her own resources.  She could see one of the aliens to
her front waving her laser pistol in the air, and many of the rest seemed to be
armed with weapons that must have been taken from the shuttle.  As they reached
a branch in the tunnel most of the aliens headed away through the cross
passage, moving very quickly with that strange gait of theirs that seemed to
eat up distance as fast as a sprinting human.

Her head finally
cleared enough for an attempt at communication, she tried to raise the ship and
almost breathed out in relief as the warbling carrier wave appeared.

Help me
,
she thought over her implant, sending a transmission to the ship.

Stay calm
,
said the officer on the other side of that transmission. 
Keep your eyes
open, so we can see what is going on.  We’re tracking your whereabouts, and
will have a response team there as soon as possible.

The Ensign, an
assistant com officer who was also assigned to Sociology/Psychology, sent a
mental nod as she forced her eyes to stay open.  She knew she had to have
suffered some brain damage from that blow to the head, which, due to its
effect, had to have been given with a very hard blunt object swung with a lot
of force.  In someone who was not protected by military grade nanite systems,
she would still be concussed, and probably sliding into a coma.  But her
systems were in the process of repairing the damage to her brain, and, while
she still felt great fatigue, and a tendency to lose her track of reality,
things were improving.

But is that a
good or bad thing?
she thought, straining her hands against the plastic
restraints that were holding them together to her front.

She was hustled
through an open door which slammed shut behind her, then forced into an alien
chair that did not fit her body.  Skilled hands released her restraints, strong
arms forced her arms down to those of the chair, and she was secured in place. 
Bright lights shone in her eyes, and she caught sight of the aliens standing
around her, all wearing masks to prevent their identification.

“What did you
come here for?” asked one of the larger of the creatures, a shadow in the light
shining on her.

“We came here to
help your people,” she said, her tongue feeling the strange gaps in her teeth
that the aliens had left when they struck her.  “We are here to save you from
the supernova.”

“You lie,”
hissed the alien, his masked face lowered so his eyes could stare into hers. 
“You came here to destroy our culture, throw down our institutions of faith,
and eventually enslave us.  Admit it.”

“That is not
what we are here for,” she protested, crying out as a hand grasped her hair and
twisted.  “We mean you no harm.”

“Confess your
sins before us,” said another of the aliens, this one of gentle voice.  “The
God will have mercy upon you if you speak truly, and will punish you eternally
if you continue to lie.”

“It is not my
God,” she said, summoning up a bit of defiance.

“But you are on
his world, and so you are subject to his judgment.  Now tell us the truth. You
are here to enslave us, to bind us to the service of your evil kingdom.”

“Enough,” yelled
the first speaker.  “Is the cast going out?”

“It is,” said
another alien, this one with what looked like a camera pointed her way.

The leader drew
a long sword from its sheath and moved it into a position even with her neck.

We’re coming,
Danvers
, said the voice of the security officer in her head. 
Delay
them, somehow.

“Wait,” shouted
the Ensign.  “If you spare me, I’ll confess.”

The room shook
at that moment, and the leader glared at her, then drew his sword back.  It
blurred forward, and the last thing she felt was the razor edge striking her
neck.  She saw the room spinning, and wondered what was going on, until her
body came into view, the stump of her neck spurting blood into the air.  She
tried to scream, but there were no lungs attached to the severed head, and her
lips worked slowly as it hit the ground and rolled.  The world started going
dark, and she was gone.

A moment later
the door and part of the wall erupted inward, the powerful particle beam eating
through tough plastic and stone like it was thin spider webbing.

*     *     *

Gunnery Sergeant
Jack Hawks, Imperial Marine Corps, was the first through the door that his
particle beam had blown to splinters.  He was dressed in heavy combat armor, a
ton of alloy and electronics.  It had been a tight fit through the passageway
to this point.  In fact, the passage had only allowed the Marines to approach in
single file.  Still, the stealth outfits on the suits had worked perfectly,
hiding the massive suits both visually and electronically, getting them to this
door unseen, except by the few outlying sentries who had been silenced before
they could raise the alarm.

The battle armor
scraped the stone of the doorway, breaking off a piece here and there where the
width of the suit was greater than the entry.  Hawks aimed with his particle
beam rifle from the hip, the weapon’s sight projecting an image onto his HUD. 
He cringed as he saw the state of the Ensign’s body on the chair.  Her torso
and the top of the chair had been vaporized, as had most of one of her captors.

Bullets bounced
from his armor with a rattle, a few striking his faceplate to shatter into small
pieces of lead and alloy.  He swung his rifle and sent off a quick burst that
took out a pair of aliens, dropping what was left of their bodies to the
floor.  The Sergeant took a couple of steps into the room and fired once again,
taking out another alien.  Sense seemed to take over the others, and the
remaining four dropped their weapons to the floor.

Hawk swept the
room with his suit sensors, stopping on the severed head of Ensign Danvers
laying on the floor.

“Medic,” he
yelled into his com link, as another Marine came into the room behind him.  “We
need a medic here, right now.”

It only took
moments for the Naval rating to get there, wearing the medium combat armor that
the Fleet favored for shipboard duty.  The woman knelt down by the severed
head, looking it over quickly, pulling out a cryo bag and arranging it on the
floor, then placing the head into the bag and pulling the tab that ordered the
container to shrink to the size of the object it was holding.  Instantaneously
the container dropped its internal temperature to a hundred degrees below
freezing.

“Are you going
to preserve the body as well?” asked the Sergeant, pointing toward the remains
in the chair.

The Medic
hurried over and ran her scanners over the lower torso and the legs.  After a
moment she shook her head.  “There aren’t enough living cells here to bother
with.  It will have to be a complete rebuild from the head.”

And that will
take a good four months of regrowth
, thought the Gunny, just happy that the
person they had come to rescue was at least to be listed among the recoverable
dead.  He looked over at the aliens they had captured, standing under the guns
of several of his men.

“We’ve got her,
LT,” he sent over the com while the Medic secured the container that held all
that was now the Ensign.  “Tell the Old Lady that we got her.”

*     *     *

What an awful
ordeal she went through
, thought Captain Albright, as she wondered what it
must have been like to have her head taken off. 
She’s going to have
nightmares for the rest of her life, if she doesn’t opt for a selective mind
wipe. 
But that would, of course, be the Ensign’s choice.  Only people
given certain sentences by the courts could be wiped against their will.  But
she didn’t see why the young woman, once she was back in the realm of the
living, would elect to keep memories like those.