Crusade (Exile Book 3) Read online

  Shaaaaa was a Tohnbohn strike cruiser…but Frozen Memory was one of his Vistan battlecruisers and he was going to miss her.

  “Swimmer-Under-Sunlit-Skies had a note attached to the report that said he was expecting that,” Connor said with a chuckle. “Translation was funky, it always is with those guys, but something along the lines of ‘this report is dark-water-beast-crap.’”

  The Vistans had two mouths and hearing sensitive enough to allow for echolocation, which made their language mostly incomprehensible and utterly unpronounceable to humans. The translation programs in Vigil’s computers were working overtime these days.

  At least the Matrices could translate their own communications.

  “Let’s get those ships out of here,” Isaac ordered. “That brings us down to five battlecruisers and thirty-one strike cruisers. It should be enough.”

  The massive icon at the center of the holographic display mocked him. His people had never fought one of the Regional Construction Matrices before. The AI on that spherical ship was in charge of the Construction—terraforming—operations across dozens of worlds. It had already Constructed dozens of worlds.

  It had tried to Construct Vista, a process that had killed nine-tenths of the planet’s population before they could be evacuated to the nearest world where the Construction process was complete, now known as Refuge. It had tried to Construct the Skree-Skree homeworld.

  Isaac’s scouts suggested that this particular RCM was responsible for the deaths of at least seven intelligent species before it had encountered the Republic and the Republic’s allies.

  That ended today. His thirty-six ships might not be enough to punch through the eighty warships around the RCM, let alone deal with the six-kilometer black sphere of the RCM’s primary hull, but he had to try.

  If nothing else, well…that his fleet didn’t look like enough was the point.

  2

  “Something about this stinks,” Connor noted several minutes later. Their damaged ships had vanished into warp, heading back to a rendezvous point almost half a light-year away.

  “Other than the fact that we’re advancing on an artificially intelligent starship almost six kilometers across?” Isaac asked. His remaining ships were holding a perfect formation, with four-ship escort boxes around each battlecruiser and the extra cruisers spread out into wings that expanded their lines of fire.

  Even the Matrices had stopped firing missiles, he noted. Adrienne Gallant’s engineers back in the Confederacy had been professional paranoids and had built in an AI-operated failsafe to activate a warship’s defenses against cee-fractional objects.

  Those same failsafes were present on every ship in his fleet and had proven, again and again, that they were capable of engaging even the Matrices’ reactionless missiles traveling at point nine nine cee.

  Vigil and Dante now carried the K-sequence AIs, and those Matrix-descended systems were far more capable than the Republic’s original Confederacy-built AIs. Even the strike cruisers, which still lacked full Matrix offshoots, had far more capable AIs than had been available to the Republic four years earlier, when they’d first been designed.

  Nothing in Isaac’s fleet even carried missiles. The Matrices were just as effective as shooting them down. Even a single one of the recon nodes that served as destroyer escorts for the Matrices could absorb every missile the Republic could build. The RCM…well, they had only a limited idea what it had for weapons or defenses.

  “Well, yes, we’re charging willy-nilly at the largest starship we’ve ever seen,” Connor agreed. “A ship we know nothing about, at that.”

  “We know what XR-13-9 has for defenses,” Isaac pointed out. “Which represented a huge leap of trust on their part.”

  It was amazing what rescuing the last survivors of an AI’s creator race could do for that AI’s opinion of you.

  “We do, which is why this stinks,” Connor replied. “Where are the fortresses, Isaac? Where are the mines, the missile platforms, the multi-shot gamma-ray laser satellites? Where are all the fixed defenses we know the Matrices can build—but that XR carefully didn’t tell us how many they’d built around themselves?”

  Isaac looked at the hologram.

  “Not here,” he said slowly. “Alstairs!”

  “Admiral?” the Captain replied instantly.

  “Full spread of sensor drones, right at that big bastard,” Isaac ordered. “If there’s something up with it, I want to know.”

  “You don’t think they’re hiding the defenses?” his operations officer asked.

  Isaac gestured at the screen. “There’s nothing but empty space between us and the gas giant they’re orbiting. That they weren’t punching out was already feeling wrong, but you’re right.

  “If that’s the RCM, then all of the defenses are missing.”

  “You think it’s a decoy?” Alstairs asked as dozens of new green icons materialized on the hologram. Unlike the capital ships, the drones did have reactionless drives—and being only somewhat larger than Matrix missiles, they moved at eighty percent of the speed of light.

  “It might be an ECM screen, in which case I’m wondering what the other jaw of the trap is,” Isaac replied. “But everything says that it’s a six-kilometer Matrix ship, and the only six-kilometer Matrix ship anyone knows about is a Regional Construction Matrix.”

  “It could have built another one,” Connor suggested.

  “It could have,” Isaac agreed. “But budding off a new AI of that scale is a massive project. Just building D and dumping most of Thirteen-Nine’s memory into them ate up enough resources for multiple combat platforms.”

  Or so XR-13-9-D, the direct bud from XR-13-9 that was the patriarch of all of the K-series AIs, had said. If Isaac was going to start mistrusting D again, he was in real trouble.

  “The hull alone of an RCM is at least an eighteen-month project,” VK interjected into the conversation. “Building a Matrix Core of sufficient size to hold the full capabilities of a Regional Construction Matrix would take at least twice that.”

  “Drones show she’s there,” Alstairs reported. “The buggers are just as trigger-happy as always.”

  They were thirty minutes from range and rapidly approaching the point of no return. Isaac had to make the call and his gut said something was wrong…but that it wasn’t wrong enough to counter everything he’d put together.

  “We continue the advance,” he said calmly. “Make sure the sub-commanders know we think there might be something wrong here, but the truth is that it can’t be more dangerous than an RCM.”

  All three of his subordinate flotilla leaders had different ranks. Swimmer-Under-Sunlit-Skies was the Third-Among-Singers of the Guardian Star-Choir of Refuge. ThreeHeart was one of three Lords of Seven Stars among the Skree-Skree’s Sworn Guardians.

  Oohoon was…well, Oohoon. The Tohnbohn didn’t really go in for titles or ranks as humans understood them. Someday, Isaac would work out how their society was organized, but for now, Oohoon was in command of their ships. That had to be enough.

  Sub-commander covered all his bases, though. People knew who he meant.

  “What if they took an RCM hull and packed it full of guns?” Connor asked softly. “Our Matrices built Interceptor, but we haven’t seen much in terms of variation in the Rogues’ line of battle.”

  “Protocol should resist that level of resource application toward combat units,” VK replied. “But…the RCMs, especially, are not entirely bound by protocols outside the Core Protocols.”

  “And we all know what happened to the Core Protocols,” Isaac observed. Those had, after all, included prohibitions against harming sentients. Repeated tachyon punches had turned those sections of the Rogue’s code, at least, into swiss cheese.

  “So, we could be looking at, what, a Matrix dreadnought?” Connor asked.

  “If we are, we need to know,” the Admiral replied grimly. “And if we are, I still think the plan will work. Let’s see what they do when we cross the point
of no return.”

  He smiled coldly.

  “If they don’t do what I expect, that does suggest that ship is not a Regional Construction Matrix, after all.”

  “Well, that’s definitely an answer,” VK concluded, the AI seeing the same data as the humans without needing to study the holographic presentation.

  “Agreed.”

  Isaac’s answer echoed in the quiet of the flag deck. His battlecruisers and strike cruisers were advancing on the Matrix position, and the Matrices had finally responded. The combat platforms, recon and security nodes, and recon nodes were all ships he’d expected to come out at him. Those were the subordinate Matrices the Rogues used as warships.

  He hadn’t been expecting the big ship to come out to meet him. They’d “known” that was the Regional Construction Matrix, which meant that it would either run or hang back while its defenders counterattacked.

  His battle plan had hinged on the Rogue Matrices doing one of those things. He hadn’t expected the big ship to sortie with the smaller AI warships.

  “All right, VK. Give me an estimate,” Isaac ordered. “If that thing is a dreadnought built on an RCM hull chassis, how bad are we looking at?”

  “We have no basis to expect new weapons systems on Rogue ships,” the AI replied. “They’re limited to the same pulse gun, gamma-ray laser and reactionless missile arsenal as the rest of the unmodified Matrices.

  “Given the mass and hull surface available, however…my calculations suggest approximately twenty times the armament of a combat platform.”

  “So, over a hundred grasers, thousands of pulse guns and an insane number of missiles,” Connor concluded. “With that many launchers, could they actually get missiles through?”

  “Negative. Our own pulse-gun armament is sufficient to deal with a functionally infinite number of incoming missiles,” VK replied confidently.

  Isaac said nothing, his hands already flying across his controls as the tactical crew drew in the usual engagement spheres. Range was mostly limited by the ability to hit with lightspeed or near-lightspeed energy weapons. Even using tachyon com–equipped drones to provide real-time targeting data, accuracy dropped off to nearly nothing at about half a million kilometers.

  Across the entirety of both fleets, only the battlecruisers actually carried weapons that could land heavy hits beyond that range. Their heavy particle cannons could hurt a combat platform at half again that range, as could Valiant and Dante’s high-gamma-frequency lasers.

  “Effective range is in ten minutes,” Connor reported. “Your orders, Admiral?”

  They were already past the point of no return. They were too close to the gas giant the Rogues had been orbiting to bring up their warp drives safely, and they had too much velocity to reverse course and escape the Matrices and their reactionless point one cee drives.

  “If the situation was worse, we could risk warping out,” Isaac noted softly. “But this is still doable, I think. Get me Twenty-Five.”

  The Matrix dreadnought was clearly calculating that the allies had identified it for what it was by now. Its core AI also decided that it had enough grasers that a low hit probability was entirely acceptable.

  The computers calmly drew the gamma-ray lasers in on the hologram as thin red lines. Dozens of them. Hundreds. There were sixty AI warships approaching Isaac’s fleet, and there were a lot of energy weapons on board those ships.

  “Hits along the line, but they don’t have the energy to breach the armor,” Connor reported. “Maybe half a dozen hits, but that’s a lot of fire.”

  “All battlecruisers, target the dreadnought,” Isaac said calmly. “It’s a big target. We’re going to ring their damn bell. Fire.”

  Four heavy particle cannons, eight gamma-ray lasers and four high-gamma-frequency lasers fired at one target. Over half of the beams struck home, a six-kilometer-wide target easier to hit than anything else in play.

  “I’ve got vaporized armor and that’s it,” VK told them. “No breaches, no critical system damage. The range is too long for the amount of armor on that beast.”

  “It’ll have to do,” Isaac said. “All ships to reverse thrust, maintain beams on target and focus fire on the dreadnought until I order differently. Standard range?”

  “Now,” Connor half-whispered.

  The occasional hits were starting to become more common, and they were hitting with real force now. New icons flickered across Isaac’s fleet as armor plating shattered under the fire and damage reports trickled in.

  “Dreadnought continues to absorb our fire,” the AI said. “We’re punching through now, but it has a lot of mass. We’ve knocked a couple of grasers out, that’s all. She’s going to rotate to protect them.”

  “Do it,” Isaac murmured. More icons marked the dreadnought as multiple systems went down on the target.

  “She’s down at least ten grasers…she is rotating,” Connor ordered.

  “Execute Mousetrap,” Isaac snapped. “All ships, break off, target the combat platforms.”

  The dreadnought was now ZDX-175-25’s problem. The plan had been for their Matrices, Matrices that had kept the prohibitions against killing and were phenomenally angry at their cousins who hadn’t, to ambush and destroy the RCM.

  Now a modified version of that plan came into effect. Fifteen combat platforms accompanied by thirty recon nodes tachyon-punched into the star system, three hundred thousand kilometers behind the dreadnought.

  The need to pull ships all the way back to Exilium, almost a hundred light-years away from the Skree-Skree home system, had limited the ability of the ESF to fully upgrade its ships. Any Matrix unit was capable of self-replication—which meant they were also capable of self-upgrading.

  The forty-five friendly Matrix warships weren’t carrying grasers. Aided by the survivors of their creators, the Assini, they’d upgraded their energy weapons to zettahertz lasers.

  Those beams were capable of punching through the armor the Rogue Matrix dreadnought carried at over seven hundred thousand kilometers. At three hundred thousand kilometers, they tore through the entire dreadnought like it was made of tissue paper.

  The rest of the fleet focused on the combat platforms, hammering the ships with particle cannons and lasers as they closed. The dreadnought didn’t die easily either, and grasers lashed Isaac’s fleet, sending new red icons cascading across his displays.

  “Dreadnought is down,” VK reported. “Power signatures are disrupted, conversion cores are—”

  The dreadnought disappeared as her matter-conversion power systems destabilized into tiny suns.

  “Iago is gone,” Connor reported. “Macbeth and Othello have taken critical damage and we’ve lost another of ThreeHeart’s cruisers. Sir, we can’t—”

  “We take them,” Isaac cut him off. He’d known when he had chosen not to break off that it was going to cost. “As few get away as we can manage.”

  The Matrices could replace AI cores faster than he could replace crews, but at this point, the allies could replace ships faster than a single Regional Construction Matrix could.

  “Hammer them,” he ordered grimly. The holographic display announced the loss of another Vistan strike cruiser, eighty people they’d rescued from the death of their world only to lead to their deaths here.

  Two of his allied combat platforms blew apart as well…and then it was over.

  “Estimate six combat platforms and eighteen lesser nodes escaped,” VK reported. “The rest have been destroyed. Along with the dreadnought.”

  Isaac exhaled. His focus was always on the other list.

  He’d once thought Othello was a cursed ship, but she was still there. So was Macbeth, but the damage codes suggested that wasn’t going to last.

  Including Iago, six more strike cruisers had been lost finishing the job. None of his battlecruisers were undamaged. His own Matrices had lost three combat platforms and five recon nodes.

  And they hadn’t stopped the Regional Construction Matrix.
/>   “All ships to form up on the debris field and deploy shuttles for search and rescue,” Isaac ordered, forcing his voice to level calm.

  “Sub-commanders are invited aboard Vigil for operational discussions in two hours. I want full damage reports and supply status for every vessel by then. Can we manage that, Connor?”

  “Priority is S&R, I assume?” his operations officer asked, his voice shaken.

  “Exactly.

  “I’ll make it all happen.”

  “Thank you, Aloysius.”

  3

  The detailed damage reports weren’t any better than the estimates and high-level reports Isaac had received as the battle ended. He’d lost fewer ships than he’d dared hope, but nine strike cruisers and eight Matrix warships was still a lot of dead people and AIs.

  Worse, he’d fought the battle he’d been expecting to…but his intended target hadn’t been anywhere near this system. He flipped through the astrographic charts as he waited in the conference room.

  The three-dimensional map he had filling the room stretched from Exilium on one end, the Constructed World he and his fellow Exiles had colonized on arrival, to their current location at the other. The Skree-Skree home system was ten light-years away on a not-quite-direct line to Exilium.

  The Tohnbohn’s Bohon System was twenty light-years away but “up” from that direct line, putting them ninety-two light-years from Exilium.

  Vista was in the Hearthfire System, thirty-six light-years from their current position and “down”, putting it seventy light-years from Exilium. Refuge was the same distance from Exilium and thirty-four light-years from here.

  Every warp drive ship in his fleet could travel at two hundred and fifty-six times the speed of light—the Matrices were even faster. With Matrix- and Assini-augmented construction facilities, they’d built the new strike cruisers quickly enough that the older ships with slower drives were only used for home defense now.

  Exilium was building a lot of battlecruisers and strike cruisers now. Crewing them was a nightmare, which was the main reason he had the allies he did. They were building their own ships, but the arsenal of this alliance was humanity’s manufactories in their tiny colony.