Progeny (The Progenitor Trilogy, Book Three) (70 page)

Chapter 40

Beklide’s shuttle flew low over the vast navy shipyards of the Orakkan system.  Even by the standards of the mega-structures elsewhere in the Arkari Sphere, the shipyards were an order of magnitude more impressive and, with the entire Arkari civilisation now moved onto a total war footing, they were working at maximum production.

              The Orakkan yards were formed from a roughly circular plate-like structure fifty thousand kilometres in diameter orbiting ten point five AUs from the yellow Orakkan suns.  From far out in the system, the yards were merely visible as a brightly reflective patch in the void, or as a dark spot passing in front of the stars.  Closer in, and the structure of the yards began to become visible.  The centre of the yards bulged outwards. This hub section housed the vast molecular foundries that provided the raw materials for the ships constructed by the yard. These foundries were fed by a constant stream of ore freighters - huge, fat bellied vessels ten of kilometres in length that moved with a ponderous grace in an endless parade, disgorging their considerable cargoes in turn before moving off again towards mineral rich systems across Arkari space.

              The structure of the yards spread out from this hub. Huge spars hundreds of kilometres thick pulsed with energy and streams of raw matter.  These spars spread and subdivided in smaller and smaller branches, lending the structure a fractal appearance, like the most complex snowflake ever created.  Amongst these branches, cradled within enveloping gantries and docking cradles, the shining forms of Arkari warships could be seen taking form.  Dozens of them.  Hundreds of them.  Rank upon rank of destroyers and cruisers in various states of construction. Amongst them, lay the two hundred kilometre long hulls of Nightbringer class dreadnoughts, the gigantic warships surrounded by thousands of construction vessels.

              As Beklide’s shuttle flew over that gigantic construction site, the hulls of the great ships jutted upwards from the vast structure that held them like a city of gigantic, outlandishly sculpted towers, their curving lines gleaming in the bright sunlight.  Tallest of them all, ten times the length of the dreadnoughts, was the great weapon now under construction, the Executioner Cannon.

              It was only partially finished.  The shape of the gun was already visible. Its main load-bearing structures had already been spun out by the construction arrays, sketching out the end result in a three dimensional wire frame.  Within that frame, the reactors and firing chamber were already taking shape, gleaming within it like complex exposed organs.

              Beklide cast her eye over the scene and the schematics that the ship was projecting into her line of sight and couldn’t help but be impressed by the scale of the industry that her people were capable of, and which she had set in motion.  There had been seven such shipyards, presumed safely hidden deep within the portion of space within the Arkari Sphere given over to the Navy.  Now, only this one remained fully operational.  The others had been hit hard in the first wave of Shaper attacks that had erupted across the Arkari domain, their defences overwhelmed by vast numbers of suicidal enslaved attackers and the terrible weapons unleashed by the Shapers themselves.  Five had been utterly destroyed, the thousands of defenceless ships under construction in their berths immolated and smashed to pieces, their defenceless, infant AIs ravaged by the Shaper virus attack that had preceded the physical assault.  The sixth had been badly damaged, its structure holed in numerous places and only narrowly saved from complete destruction.  Only the Orakkan shipyards remained, miraculously untouched by the Shaper attack.  The yard’s controlling AIs had gotten wind of the virus assault moments before it had hit and had isolated the yards from the worst effects and for whatever reason, be it luck on the part of the Arkari, misfortune or error on the part of the Shapers, or the simple fact that their attack had been cut short by the destruction of their wormhole portal and they simply didn’t get the chance to get around to destroying it, Orakkan had survived unscathed.

              It was a bright hope in an otherwise disastrous event.  The Navy’s ship production capacity had been reduced to a fraction of what it had been at a stroke, and whilst the smaller facilities around the various worlds were able to gear themselves up for greater production, it would be some time before they were able to account for the lost capacity, and replace the partially constructed ships that had been lost.

              It had been a bitter blow for Beklide.  As communications were steadily restored across the Arkari Sphere at a painfully slow pace, it steadily became apparent just how severe the attack had been.  Billions of Arkari had died.  The numbers were still unknown, but each day the figure for confirmed dead still crept ever upwards.  The destruction and decimation of so many planets and space borne habitats had dealt the Arkari civilisation a grievous wound from which even it would take time to recover and it was still doubtful whether some of those planets could ever be made habitable again. 

Beklide couldn’t help but feel fury at what had happened.  It had happened on her watch and she had been unable to stop it, and now her plans to strike back at the Shapers were in disarray.  She had originally hoped that she would be able to draw upon the vast reserves of the Arkari Navy to both defend the Arkari Sphere and the human Commonwealth as well as strike back at the enemy.  Now that the fully tally of destruction was known, it was clear that she would have but a fraction of the forces she needed to do all three.  Reluctantly, she had to concede that the Meritarch Council’s shrill paranoia about further assaults had some basis as she would barely have enough ships to both defend key systems within Arkari space as well as launch a decisive attack upon the Shapers, not knowing when and where a further enemy attack might take place.  She had hoped to persuade the Council to allow her to despatch a fleet of ships to assist the humans, but both ships and crews were in short supply of late.  The call had gone out to the citizenry to enrol for martial duties in both naval and ground forces, and although the Arkari people had answered in their billions, it would take time to train and equip them.  There had been some loose talk on the Council of allowing un-crewed ships to operate independently, but a swift lesson as to why such practices were not permitted in the first place had put paid to that.

The shuttle circled the unfinished, fluted tower of the Executioner Cannon that jutted hundreds of kilometres out from the yard’s plate structure.  As Beklide watched, thousands of construction mechanoids were gently coaxing into place one of the massive reactors that would power the finished weapon, working together like a swarm of ants.  The surface of the spheroid that encased the reactor, a full thirty kilometres in diameter, was knurled with a myriad of conduits and interfaces, and encased in a latticework of struts that would be molecularly bonded to the rest of the weapon, creating a singular, seamless object. Five more reactors would be joining it, before the entire assembly would be swathed in a nanotech skin like other Arkari vessels.  She called up displays on the cannon’s progress: construction reports, component tests and completion estimates.  Its construction was proceeding well and on schedule, a feat made all the more impressive given the untried nature of the device.  Perhaps the crisis facing their people had spurred the construction crews on to greater efforts.

It pained Beklide that she not could justify aiding the humans just yet. In truth, it was a cruel irony. The information that the Commonwealth had supplied to the Arkari had come in the shape of the technical specifications of modifications that could be made to existing sensor arrays in order to detect the Shapers by the very hyperspatial data-streams that bound their hive-mind together. This, in turn, would provide the Arkaris’ plan of counter-attack with a clear direction, one which must take precedence over all other considerations.  Beklide had ordered the modifications to be made at once to the most powerful deep space monitoring arrays that the Arkari possessed, devices capable of seeing tens of thousands of light years across the galaxy, but which until now had been unable to probe deep enough into the galactic core, where the closely packed stars, dust, violent energies and extreme gravities had until now obscured their sight.

With the modifications completed, the scales fell from the eyes of the Arkari.  They saw the galaxy held in the grip of a huge and complex web, a branching structure that reached out to ensnare thousands of civilisations.  They were looking at the very nervous system of the Shapers’ dominion, the hierarchical command and control structure that allowed that race, and their slaves, to act as one co-ordinated whole across thousands of light years.  They traced those shining threads back towards their source, through myriad nodes and interstices until they found it.  There, at the centre of the galaxy, where dead and orphaned worlds danced in the corposant glow of the Maelstrom, bathed in the light of a million dead suns, they found the Shaper home-world, where the Singularity, the central, controlling Shaper consciousness, a machine god in all but name, lurked like a spider at the centre of its web.

With the Council’s permission, she would send word to the humans, that the Arkari had not abandoned them, that even now they were working to aid them.  They just had to hang on a little longer. She could not be too specific of course, but it was true.  If her plan of attack worked, if the home-world and the Singularity that resided there could be destroyed, the Shapers would be crippled and then the Arkari would move on, from world to world across the galaxy, sweeping it clean of the Shaper infestation.

Beklide called up the data that they had acquired on that benighted place to peruse it once more.  It was a world without a parent star, presumed to be a dead ball of blasted rock in a stable orbit around the super-massive black hole at the galaxy’s heart, bathed in radiation from that engine of annihilation and shrouded from the rest of the galaxy by the clouds of dust and gas that circled the core.  It was hidden no longer.  Beklide had it in her sights.

She bade the shuttle tilt upwards towards the suns.  The photo-chromic filters of the craft’s cockpit displays dimmed instantly, sparing her eyes from the glare and allowing her to see the twin suns of the Orrakan system quite clearly.  There was something between them.  Beklide urged the ship forward.  The shuttle dove into hyperspace for a few moments, emerging between the two stars and in the midst of an enormous Arkari construction fleet.

The titanic vessels, normally employed in building the space-borne habitats that encircled Arkari worlds, had been corralled from across Arkari space and brought here.  Billions of tonnes of raw materials were being fed into them, by an endless stream of freighters, to be compressed and refined and then excreted from their hulls in white-hot molecular streams to form a super-dense structure.  That structure, held in place by great anchorage stations, grew daily as the great vessels, ate, digested and continued to build.  It was a great ring, two thirds complete, and when it was finished it would be two thousand kilometres in diameter.  Already, other ships were working on smaller rings that would be dropped into the coronas of the binary suns, where, floating free amidst the white hot solar storms, they would funnel the energy of the stars into the great device now taking shape. 

As Beklide approached, data began to flood the shuttle’s holo-displays.  She scanned an eye over it.  Yes, all was proceeding well.  Even now the AIs that would control the great machine were being shipped in-system, ready to be installed within their matrices.  Soon it would be ready, and then she would bring her plan to fruition.

Once, the wormhole portals had been devices of the Progenitor Empire.  Now, after years of theoretical research completed at last by their unfettered examination of the Maranos device, the technology belonged to the Arkari.

Chapter 41

Colonel Gunderson stepped out of his command craft for a moment, and took in the night air as its engines spooled down behind him.  So far, the operation was proceeding well.  Shale’s forces had landed quickly, moving off in good order towards the enemy, or what was left of them.  Chen had taken the wise decision of attaching ships to units on the ground and allowing the commanding officers of those units to call in fire support as and when it was required.  Advancing enemy units had been met with a barrage of accurate fire from orbit as they had closed with Shale’s forces.  Meanwhile, squadrons from the orbiting carriers had ranged far and wide across the face of Valparaiso, attacking troop trains and convoys and shooting down aircraft and sub-orbital transports in flight.  The sky had been streaked with dozens of high altitude contrails until late evening, mingled with the dark descending streaks from burning craft as they spiralled to earth. In the distance, weapons fired cracked and boomed, and as darkness fell, the horizon was intermittently illuminated with the flicker of explosions.

Shale’s advance had turned into little more than a mopping up exercise.  As the army’s mechanised infantry advanced, supported by heavy armour and self propelled artillery and with gunships and navy squadrons providing close support, they encountered sporadic pockets of resistance and the odd desultory counter attack, but little more.  Whatever the enemy had been planning, the sheer weight of fire directed at the planet’s surface appeared to have put paid to it, although the enemy still held onto a number of small towns and villages in the rolling plains.  These had kept Gunderson’s men busy throughout the day.  Since they had trained heavily for assault missions, Shale had ordered Gunderson to despatch his units to lead the vanguard of the attacks on these redoubts, and the marines had performed admirably in flushing out the enslaved troops.  There had been some hard fighting, but in most cases the enslaved had been heavily outnumbered and outgunned and casualties had been mercifully light.  Gunderson had also kept some of his forces back, both to guard the landing zone and the deep space monitoring arrays in the hills to the south, and assigned a thousand troops to each task.  Though the troops picked for these less glamorous duties had grumbled about missing out on the action, securing the Commonwealth’s bridgehead on the planet and guarding the monitoring array, their main objective, were no less vital.  Gunderson had spent the day shuttling between points on the front line in his command craft, encouraging his men, providing advice and decisions to his senior staff, and listening to what they all had to say. Now it was the turn of those men left behind.  He had already visited the LZ and stood with his officers as further massive Army landing craft had thundered down onto the plains and disgorged yet more men and armoured vehicles, before lifting off to allow others to land in a seemingly endless relay.  His unit commanders had reported no enemy activity, in line with the intel. that they were getting from the ships in orbit.  Gunderson was experienced enough to treat all intel. with a healthy dose of scepticism, but so far, what the Navy had been feeding them seemed right on the money.  Still, it never hurt to get a picture of what was happening from the men on the ground and, although technology allowed the instantaneous sharing of information across the theatre, Gunderson was a great believer in being there in person.  He was a Colonel in the Marine Corp, and sitting in a command post, far behind the lines or up in orbit was not for him.  He needed to be there with his men, to re-assure and encourage, and admonish where necessary, and share some of the dangers with them.