Conflict!

by Dale Moorhouse

  The following cycle we were just finishing our sweep at the two and a half light-kilocycle distance we got a message from one of our scouts out towards the edge of the galactic arm. They had been checking out a system that we had visited before and found traces of some mining activity our earlier forward scouts had either missed or was new. The description of the find made me think the Plague had gotten ahead of us. Several small moons had been reduced to rubble, and a planet had been destroyed.

  Our ID group was looking into it, and I didn’t have much time to spend on it now, but I asked the forward scout to loiter there until we could send additional scouts to help keep an eye on the area and double check the space between that star system and Sol. A deca later Silent sent me a message; he had dispatched a pair of our latest recon ships with an AI Swift Fang escort to check the space around the system while the original scout would land on one of the larger pieces of rubble and go completely passive. That was all he could do, for now, I thanked him for taking care of it.

  “We have your back Jase. If you don’t hear from me for a while, it is because there is nothing to report,” he said before he closed his comm.

  Knowing I was covered, I went back to analysing data coming in from our supporting Swift Fangs as we continued our sweep and prepared to move out to the Three light-kilocycle mark.

  Everything remained quiet until we were just finishing up our final sweep when one of our scouts out at the boundary of our patrol zone got a faint trace of something right at the very edge of her sensor range. I ordered Missy to take us to rendezvous with our scout and had our sensor operators turn our range up to max.

  When we came out of jump, we were about a thousand klicks farther out from our scout who reported they were still receiving intermittent returns on their scans. It took a few ticks, but we started getting faint returns as well, so I ordered a short-jump that would take us a hundred light-cycles closer to the source. I had our sensor operators to go to passive scans only while our weapons officer brought our weapons and shields to maximum. We were already as stealthy as we could get.

  Our next exit from jump got us stronger returns than we had been getting but not as strong as they should have been. I felt the source of the returns was heading away from us, so I ordered a jump of three-hundred light-cycles to position us in the path of whatever was trying to avoid us.

  Thermopylae dropped out of jump a few ticks later and went totally silent with our passive scanners listening. After twenty centas we began getting some artefacts that indicated something was approaching and as we watched them it became clear they were approaching obliquely to our course and would pass ahead of us by a few thousand klicks. We opened our hanger doors and quietly as possible pushed our AI Swift Fangs out then closed the doors again. The Swift Fangs used their manoeuvring jets to give them enough momentum to spread out across our bow with a few hundred klicks between them where they waited quietly in full stealth mode.

  Over fifty centas went by before we got a decent read on our target. They were registering as Plague vessels, but we had never seen this behaviour before and needed to learn more. We tight beamed our Swift Fangs to hold fire, shadow and observe unless attacked. The indications were there were only a handful of ships in the approaching group, but we weren’t sure of their class yet nor had we any inkling of their purpose. They were simply moving across our course at a little over .1 C and didn’t seem to have seen us or be in any hurry.

  They came within a few kilometres of some of our sensor probes, and we finally got a good look. There was one harvester and a few Swift Fang clones that looked like they had been in a fight and lost. The harvester was definitely having drive issues, and most of the Fangs had holes in their hulls and scorch marks around the holes suggesting they had encountered a powerful beam or plasma weapon.

  As we were watching, the harvester’s drives flared briefly then the back end of the big ship came apart in a violent explosion that scattered the Fangs. While one of them used its peripheral jets to try to regain control, it rammed another Fang, and they both went up in a flash of an anti-matter explosion. Something had weakened their containment field, and the force of the collision had been enough to cause it to fail. The rest of the ships quickly hoovered up material from the expanding debris clouds of the three dead ships, a clear indication that what ever had hit them was some distance away and these ships were low on reaction mass for their fusion drives.

  I gave instructions to our Swift Fangs to finish them off and asked that any drones that escaped any of the vessels be captured and brought to Thermopylae after they were neutralized. While my instructions were being carried out, our intelligence staff ran their course in reverse to try to get an idea where their attackers might be. All indicators pointed to a couple of systems on the outer edge of our spiral arm, an area technically on our back trail, that we hadn’t had time to explore given they were over fifty lightyears away. I made notes in my log to put together an expedition in that direction after our upcoming battle was over. If we even survived.

  The rest of our final sweep was quiet and uneventful. Our Swift Fangs found only two drones intact, unfortunately, both weren’t salvageable, so they were sent to our shredders and added to our reaction mass supplies. Waste not, want not. We brought our Swift Fangs aboard for refuelling then dispatched our entire contingent of them to take up station as pickets, part of our early warning and security system for the final battle.

  I went back to my command centre on Mother of Glory to get updates on our war preparation and was pleased to see the production of munitions from both the Warms and Colds was up by nearly 20 per cent.

  After building the components for additional hull sections needed by the Weasels the Eastern Consortium as we were calling the alliance between Japan, Korea, Taiwan, India and Israel shifted their production over to fighters for the AI fighter squadrons we were building up. The design was modified some by the Consortium engineers with some collaboration with the Weasels, hundreds of units were being churned out each week by the mostly robotic factories in all four countries. The Weasels had sent down one set of jigs for the Consortium to use as a template to build more jigs which they timed to the completion of the new 3D printers used to create the tubes, struts and other parts required to assemble the fighters.

  One modification made by the Eastern Consortium was to put hinges on the rear spars of the “wings” so they could be folded back against the fighter’s spine. They also repositioned the hard-points by a few centimetres so the racks that held ordinance could latch onto existing struts of another fighter when its wings were folded, allowing fighters to by stacked nose-to-tail, making them easier to transport. This change also allowed more fighters to be housed in the carrier hangars.

  The wings could remain folded until after the fighters were launched when they would snap forward and lock in the ticks before the pilots fired up their engines. The basic fighter could be used for both AI and conventional pilots and was interchangeable simply by switching out the life support module for an AI module.

  There were plans to make similar modifications to the bombers as well, but that would have to wait. The critical task right now was to get as many craft flying as we could and destroy the mega-swarm.

  As I was getting ready to eat dinner when Silent commed me, “Jase, I have the resolution on the missing nuclear weapons issue. One of our ground assets found them deep in the desert in a country called Algeria. I had Bebe, and one of her special units pay them a visit.

  “One of our small warriors was able to infiltrate the tunnels where they were hidden and get a count; the warheads were all there, and we were able to capture them. Once we knew their exact location, we were able to snatch them with a tractor beam and pick up the scout.

  “We launched twenty-one warheads into Sol and used the twenty-second to sanitize the area.

  “There are no living witnesses, and the local government is claiming that the explosion was from military sources destroying a terror
ist training camp which is at least partially true.”

  “Silent, you have made my day! I can go to dinner without having that worry on my mind. Thank you!”

  25

  WE WERE READY AND FLEET trains had short-jumped to a position ten light-ticks away. Each attack element consisted of six carrier groups and their support ships that included a bevvy of specialized armoured freighters capable of launching millions of Dopey Joe Mark IIIs or Cracker-3s. All in all, we had a little over six million ships, including our fighters and bombers and nearly half were driven by our AIs. We just didn’t have enough flesh and blood who could qualify to take the implants that allowed our combat pilots to interface more directly with their team-mates and ships.

  Each fleet train was accompanied by a few armoured freighters that had been converted to hospital ships that were staffed with med-techs and thousands of civilian volunteers to act as nurses and support staff. Those of us on the pointy end would have to rely on our combat medic trained warriors and stasis fields until our wounded and injured could be moved to one of the hospital ships. Because of their atmosphere, the Squids had their own dedicated ships, but the rest were ready to treat any species.

  The Terrans, Weasels and Mmrrreeowwn all required similar environments, but the Warms and Colds were reptilian, each required specialized environments for optimum health but could survive for short periods in our environment. We simply equipped half of our treatment rooms with the additional capability to support them, and a good number of our med-techs were volunteers from both lizard species who were trained to work on any of our oxy breathing species.

  We hoped we had covered all the bases in terms of contingencies, but we were sure to have missed something—that devil’s spawn Murphy was out there somewhere waiting for his chance to smack us up alongside the head. As overall commander of this effort, I had really been feeling the stress until I had a moment of clarity just before the start of this mission and something that I’d heard many years ago came back to me, none of us is getting out of this life alive.

  For me, most of the coming battle was going to be about waiting. I had to wait for our armada to get all of its ships in position and while I did that, I had half of my general staff transferred from one of our armed freighters to Thermopylae and our new mobile command centre that occupied most of the space on the deck where our secondary bridge was located.

  The other half went to Destiny and an identical centre aboard her. Blue, her commander, had volunteered his ship as soon as he heard my plans to set up the two mobile command centres. Johnny was in command of that centre, and he and Blue had struck up a friendship that had become quite strong. They weren’t Bonded, but both had a similar turn of mind and an amazing sensitivity towards each others mindset. They could often complete each other’s sentences, and it seemed their thoughts ran in parallel. Blue was always respectful of me and was quick to share his thoughts and ideas with me, but Johnny was where his loyalty lay and most of the reason I selected his ship for the backup command centre.

  Our last ships were approaching their positions when the ones ahead of the mega-swarm began releasing their DJ-3s by the millions. The swarm was in a roughly cylindrical formation similar to the smaller swarm we had encountered much earlier. This one had a front a little over two light-ticks or more than five-hundred and forty-thousand kilometres in diameter and at least sixty-five light-ticks or over seventeen and a half million kilometres long. We wanted to turn the oncoming swarm, but we also wanted to destroy as many of them as we could in the hopes of killing off the prime leadership at the same time.

  We had no idea if there even was a prime leadership, but the organization of the swarms we had already killed suggested a typical hierarchy shaped like a pyramid with an ever-narrowing leadership as the pyramid was ascended. We were also gambling on the plague leadership leading from the front. Our final gamble was that this mega-swarm would stick together and bunch up. If it fragmented to a bunch of smaller swarms, we were well and truly screwed.

  Our field of DJ-3s was deep as well as wide and would engage the first ten light-ticks of the swarm when they finally went active. We had decas to wait until that occurred, and as time passed, we watched our ships move on our holographic battle display as they kept their positions relative to the swarm. We started a second battle display showing just the first twenty light-ticks of the swarm and expanded it until we could see tiny points of light that represented clusters of one-hundred DJ-2s. The swarm was just a transparent red smear at this scale. It almost looked like it was dense enough to walk on.

  It started with just one small flash that I’d have missed had I not been looking directly at it. Then almost instantly the first half of the swarm coruscated in a tide of destruction that reduced the red smear to a barely pink stain across that volume of space. As we watched, even that slight stain seemed to evaporate away as more of the Plague ships died. We had to increase our magnification and focus on just small segments of the swarm to catch any presence of survivors. I knew it was too easy, and there must be thousands if not hundreds of thousands of the Plague left, but our sensors were estimating the losses to the Plague above 95 per cent. Even if accurate that leftover fifty-thousand ships in the space we had just attacked, we had to make sure none escaped.

  Silent commed and said, “Our probes are updating our data as I am reporting this. We estimate the first sixth of the swarm engaged had over two million ships and that between one hundred and two hundred thousand remain. It will take a few more centas before we can determine how many survivors remain functional.

  “We are seeing a slight shift in course, down and towards the outside of the arm. We will keep tracking it and update you when there is anything to report.”

  “Thank you, Silent. I’ll keep watching my display.”

  I replayed his update for the command centre staff and saw a brightening of mood and all were intently watching their displays and monitoring the probes. Missy commed to say she was maintaining her distance relative to the swarm as was our escort.

  A deca later we could see the swarm had deflected a little over a degree from their original course and I also saw the survivors of the initial attack had decelerated and was letting the swarm absorb them into its ranks. Our probes had moved in closer and could see the Plague ships that had been damaged and lost power were being pulled aboard harvesters where they would most likely be converted to reaction mass. Fuel was fuel.

  When the swarm had moved and filled up the volume of space we had cleared they were still maintaining their new heading, and I passed the order to launch the second attack after our ships carrying the DJ-3s were resupplied. This would take the rest of this cycle and part of the next. As the ships were replenished, they would move to the rear of the swarm while the forward most groups would close across the front of the swarm and release their payloads, carefully maintaining their distance and staying out of Plague sensor range.

  I was surprised at a couple of things I was noticing in the Plagues behaviour; they weren’t probing ahead to try to locate who had just attacked them and while they must know an enemy was close by, they didn’t seem to care. It made me wonder just how smart the Plague AIs really were particularly in contrast to our latest efforts, some of which are in control of our Swift Fangs. I decided to get Rusty involved.

  Rusty came to my office adjacent to the command centre, and I related my thoughts and suspicions to him over the next twenty centas. He readily agreed that what the Confederation typically referred to as Artificial Intelligence wasn’t really intelligence but only better computers, faster database organizational routines and better algorithms for search, access and retrieval of information coupled with additional programming that allowed for guided recursive searches in a kind of feedback loop that came close to emulating intuition.

  I asked him to carry that line of thought farther and begin comparing the actions of the Plague to our AI, Swift Fangs. I also wanted a more comprehensive definition of intelligence that
also incorporated the concepts of self-awareness with the proviso that none of the test subjects would be programmed to think they were aware of themselves much less given the concept of wants and needs. My observations and experiences with our cats had led me to believe that any intelligent entity had first to understand that it existed and had a purpose in the universe and that it had to have a moral compass that bordered on instinct rather than pure logic. It had to feel that something was right or wrong.

  He wasn’t aware of my observations, and I wanted to see if he would come to at least some of the conclusions I had on his own. It was a test and maybe an unfair test, but I had faith that he would tumble to it and be able to expand upon it on his own. That he was recording and using engrams in his latest AI endeavours suggested to me that the Mmrrreeowwn were way ahead of us and possibly the rest of the Confederation in understanding how the brain worked and how the mind was formed and behaved. I was hoping so, but I couldn’t say precisely why. It just felt like the right direction.

  After he left my office, I checked the battle computer and found that the Plague was still proceeding on its new course. The battle computer also brought me up to date with the status of the armada. The last of our ships had been replenished, and the new cap across the head of the swarm was almost in place, and the time to launch the second attack was less than a deca away. I decided to get something to eat, so I headed for the officer’s mess.

  I was just getting ready to order when Rusty came in and headed for my table. He let Silky jump to his lap and head over to where the cats had their bowls before he swung his legs under the table and scooted his chair in. He quickly ordered one of the standing menu items, in this case, the stew with a small plate of Bannock bread and a salad, then smiled at me.