Full Frontal Cybertank

by Timothy Gawne

  Two dozen other flea things leapt out of the underbrush, but Olga had a vampire’s speed. She jumped off the cycle while drawing the Sword of Gadolinia from its scabbard, and lay about her with a two-handed grip. The sword’s energy-reinforced cutting edge swept through the flea things without effort. Olga’s strikes were so fast that the sword hissed sharply as it moved through the air. In less than five seconds total all of their attackers were dead.

  Olga stood panting, surrounded by randomly strewn chunks and organs of giant flea-things. Zippo prowled around, trying to look fierce, making sure that all of the flea things were dead, and poking behind the closest trees looking for more.

  “That was fun!” said the sword. “It’s a pleasure to be wielded by someone of your skill, although I would like to fine-tune your footwork sometime. Say, are you all right?”

  Olga was breathing heavily. “I have the metabolism of a cat, remember?” She took some deep gasps. “I can walk all day, but large bursts of energy and then I need to recharge.” A few more deep breaths. “Just a moment.”

  “Funny that we should be attacked by such primitive creatures,” said the sword. “I thought this place was supposed to be populated by super-beings.”

  “It is,” said Olga. “But just as lizards may scurry about beneath the treads of a cybertank, who knows what sort of simpler things could eke out a living in the shadows of transcendent beings?”

  “I suppose so,” said the sword. “Let’s just hope that the next simpler things we encounter don’t have rifles, or even better, are friendly.”

  Recovered, Olga got back on the cycle and continued on. This time Zippo perched on the left front fender, and made a show of being especially attentive to the ground ahead.

  They were passing by a small glade over on the right, when something caught Olga’s eye. She dismounted her cycle and walked over to it, carrying the scabbarded sword at her waist.

  At first she could not tell what she was looking at. It appeared to be two irregularly-shaped holes in the ground, separated by a mangled pile of rubbish. The entire area was about eight meters wide and three meters across. She walked up to one of the holes, bent over to look into it, and was surprised when something invisible pushed her away. She put her hands out, and felt something warm and silky-smooth over the hole, but nothing visible. “Is this a force field?”

  “A force field?” said the sword. “No, I don’t think so. I’d say it was an object covered with nano-black. You know, a regular black object can still be seen: it has shine, and texture. A hole, however, is truly black, as multiple internal reflections absorb not just most, but all light. You can simulate the effect with a nano-particle covered surface, making it so black that it looks like a hole. That’s why you can’t see any surface detail, and why your hands look like they are being stopped by something invisible. You are touching a surface, you just can’t make out any details, and your visual system tells you that there is a hole beneath you. It was used as military camouflage for a while: black doesn’t always blend in, but nano-black makes it hard to interpret visually.”

  “Ah,” said Olga. She took a few steps back. “So what we really have here is a large nano-black covered object, that has been partially torn open in the middle. The torn open part is the only part that I can see directly.”

  “Olga,” said the sword, “I think I know what this is. We should leave now.”

  “And what is do you think it is?” said Olga.

  “A Ground Ripper. An advanced semi-sentient weapon system from the late-stage humans. Even a dying reflex spasm could easily kill us. We should get clear.”

  Before she could move, the black hole-shape on the left started to shift. At first it looked like the hole was moving through the ground, but then a black silhouette loomed over her. She got the impression of something like a dog’s muzzle, though huge, and covered with odd encrustations.

  The thing pushed up against her, and there was a suction as it inhaled her scent. Then it exhaled. Its breath was oddly acrid but not unpleasant, like gasoline and new-mown hay. Then it slowly lowered its head back on the ground, and lay still.

  “We should definitely leave now,” said the sword.

  Olga looked at the mangled center of the ground ripper. Now that she knew what it was, she could make out that it was vaguely dog-shaped, and almost cut in half in the middle – the front and rear parts were still connected, but only by a small bridge of tissue, probably near what would have been the creature’s spine.

  The wounded thing’s insides had the jumbled arrangement of animal viscera, but on closer inspection Olga could see that what looked like blood vessels and intestines were tubes and cables. “I wonder if I can repair it?”

  “Olga,” said the sword, “this thing is Dangerous. With a capital D, and italics. I don’t know how to repair it. You don’t either. It’s dead or soon will be. Let’s go.”

  Olga waded into the damaged center section. “Most sophisticated systems can self repair. Maybe it just needs a little help.” She pulled on one translucent plastic tube right next to the bridge between the two sections, found its severed mate from the other side, and held the two together. The tubing was stiff and it took all of her considerable strength to do so. After 30 seconds she let go, and the tubing had sealed itself back together. A little while later, and the tubing had started to fill from one end with a thin trickle of gray fluid.

  “You do realize that this probably isn’t going to work?” said the sword. “And if it does, it will probably kill you?”

  “Nothing wagered, nothing won.” It was fortunate for Olga that the ground ripper had been mostly sliced open – if it had had its middle crushed or destroyed entirely there would have been nothing she could have done. The ground ripper was so heavy that she could not join parts far away from the connecting link, so she started there. Even so it was slow going. Some things on one side she could not find a counterpart to on the other. Some things were so stiff that she couldn’t pull them together by hand – she used a portable electric winch, which helped with some but not all of these parts. Some parts didn’t seem to want to reconnect. Others were hazardous: she got a nasty electrical shock from one even through her insulating work gloves, and another was seeping an acid that caused her to throw her left glove away before it could eat down to her hand (fortunately she had a spare).

  The hours slipped by. Zippo had a variety of pre-programmed maintenance routines, but only on standard cybertank systems. Lacking full sentience, he could only peer with interest as Olga laboriously identified severed pieces and struggled to bring them together. The sword would have been useful had any cutting been required, but it wasn’t, so he stayed nearby where Olga had stuck his scabbard in the ground, and told Olga everything he knew about ground rippers.

  “So is this like that super-predator Mondocat that is always hanging around Old Guy?” said Olga.

  “Oh no, not a bit,” said the sword. “Mondocat’s species was biologically engineered, it is true, but she is very much a natural predator. She was born to a biological mother; she has given birth to cubs. She’s dangerous, but like all natural predators, only when she’s hungry or feels threatened. A ground ripper is a machine. This thing was manufactured as a weapon. It could burn a creature like Mondocat to a crisp almost without effort, and it’s dangerous all the time. The only reason this thing would have to not kill you would be if its master told it not to.”

  As more and more parts were reconnected, the net sum of all those separate tubes and pipes pulling on the opposite pieces began to shift even the heavy bulk of the ground ripper, and the edges of the gash began to move together. This let Olga start to connect up components that were steadily farther away from the original connecting link.

  Eventually Olga was connecting parts far away from where she had started working, closer to what she presumed to be its belly. She then realized that the wound had closed up so much that she could no longer reach inside, so she stepped back and watched. Slowly, ov
er a period of about two hours, the gap closed itself. Her last glimpse into its innards showed the component parts sorting themselves out on their own, and then the gap was sealed. The nano-black filled in over the wound, and suddenly there was just an enormous black dog-shaped hole in front of her.

  And nothing happened. The ground ripper remained silent and unmoving. Olga touched it, felt its smooth silky skin, and could feel faint vibrations from inside, but there was no reaction.

  “It might still be dead,” said the sword. “This could just be the last gasp of its auto-repair mechanisms. For all we know the central computer cores are fried.”

  “Maybe,” said Olga. “In any event, I’ve done all I can and it’s been a long day, so I’m going to set up camp and get some sleep.”

  At the sword’s insistence, they drove about two kilometers away from the unmoving body of the ground ripper. Olga left the sword lashed to the handlebars of the cycle to keep watch. She unbundled an inflatable sleeping bag, climbed inside it, and looked up at the sky. It was night now, but the sky was full of glowing orbital megastructures. Beautiful and inscrutable, they drifted back and forth, giving off considerably more total light than a full moon on old earth. She soon fell fast asleep, Zippo the Space Monkey curled up happily at her feet.

  ---------------------

  “Olga. Olga Razon. Please wake up now.”

  Olga yawned and stretched. It was early morning. The Sword of Gadolinia was telling her to wake up. She opened her eyes.

  An enormous black shape towered over her. It was the ground ripper. “Has it been here long?” asked Olga.

  “No, just arrived. I saw it moving in the distance, and called to you, but it travels fast. Now we find out if one good turn deserves another, or if we are on the menu.”

  Olga got out of her sleeping bag, and stood up in front of the black silhouette that loomed over her. “Hello, ground ripper. My name is Olga Razon. I am from the human civilization. I saved you last night. I believe that you owe me.”

  The ground ripper didn’t move.

  “Do you have any records of command codes or even if these things understand English?” said Olga.

  “Sorry, no,” said the sword. “It might not even have command codes, per se. Maybe more like a junkyard dog, set to guard a certain area without direct oversight. Not having codes would have the advantage of making it unhackable.”

  Olga put her hands on her hips. “Well then, Ripper – I think I will call you Ripper, for short – what are we to do?”

  The big black form bent over, and again inhaled Olga’s scent. The exhaled breath was as before, although a bit less acrid. Zippo, who had been peering out from behind Olga’s legs, moved out to the side to get a better look. The ground ripper noticed the movement, and oriented on the little space monkey in a way that reminded Olga of a hunting dog sizing up prey.

  She stepped in front of Zippo, blocking the ripper’s path. “No. This is Zippo. Zippo is a friend.” She stepped to one side, and made a show of pointing to the space monkey. “Zippo. Friend.”

  The ripper bent lower, and sniffed at Zippo, then withdrew.

  “OK then, that’s settled, Ripper. Would you by any chance know where the Dichoptic Maculatron is located? That’s what we’re looking for. Dichoptic. Maculatron.”

  The ground ripper did not respond, but simply turned around and walked off. As it did Olga saw its outline from the side, and it reminded her even more of a hunting dog – specifically, of a dog she had once owned, a so-called ‘lurcher,’ a cross between a greyhound and something else. The ripper had a deep powerful chest, long powerful legs, and a thick neck tapering smoothly down to a blunt wedge-shaped head. Its back and spine were relatively long and thin, and flexed back and forth as it walked. It was graceful, and completely silent – she couldn’t even hear the gravel crunch under its footsteps. Some sort of sound absorbing field? Olga couldn’t tell.

  There wasn’t much else to do but break camp and head off. They had traveled about 12 kilometers, and Olga looked back, and saw the ground ripper keeping pace a few hundred meters back. Protecting them? Stalking them? Only curious? She and the sword debated the matter, but came to no conclusions. They hadn’t expected to, but it passed the time.

  Zippo hooted in alarm, and Olga saw another pack of the giant flea-things ahead. This time however, the flea-things parted in front of them and did not attack. Perhaps word had spread of Olga’s martial prowess, or maybe the silent presence of the ground ripper was intimidating all lesser predators.

  They continued on, and eventually left the forest. They entered a strange terrain that was uniformly flat hard-packed dirt, and spaced in a regular grid extending almost to the horizon were large painted metal objects. They reminded Olga of ancient pumping stations, although what could need so many pumps was beyond her. The pumps (if that’s what they were) tended to cluster by type – in the current section they were painted baby blue, cylindrical, and about five meters tall and three wide. She touched one, and felt a faint thrumming. In the next section the pumps were more spherical in outline and painted glossy yellow. Fat half-meter wide pipes attached to these pumps with large bolted flanges, and disappeared into the nearby soil.

  There was no life or motion in the field of the pumping stations, other than Olga on her cycle and the black cut-out form of the ground ripper as it languidly paced behind them.

  They came to the far edge of the fields of pumping stations, and made camp. Olga woke up in the middle of the night, and watched the luminous orbital constructions float across the sky. She noticed that she was encircled by a band of total blackness – she reached out, and felt the soft warm hide of the ground ripper. She fell back asleep, and in the morning the ripper was a kilometer off, nosing through some of the nearby ruins.

  According to the maps that they had made from orbit, the ruins stretched out due west. To the south was a zone dominated by kilometer-wide sapphire pyramids walking on glassy tubular legs – this practically screamed transcendent beings and Olga and the sword had decided to avoid it for the time being. If they ran out of leads they might try walking up to them and asking politely, but for now decided that keeping a low profile with the major powers would be a good idea. North was a region of active volcanoes and sulfurous clouds – the terrain looked too hostile to enter without a good reason.

  The ruins were extensive, and in fairly good shape, as ruins go. Some of them looked to have been from the time that humans had colonized this world, before they lost control. Apartment blocks, warehouses… but no survivors, or useful records.

  Olga caught fleeting glimpses of strange animals lurking off in the distance, but whether through natural caution (predators are usually conservative in their diets, and it was doubtful that either vampire or talking sword or space monkey had been on the menu here for some time) or the black presence of the ground ripper, they stayed away.

  Except one of the local animals decided to get a little too bold. There was a blur and a rush of wind past Olga like a passing freight train, and the ground ripper tore through the walls of a nearby building and emerged holding a five-meter long centipede in its jaws. The ripper shook the centipede violently, then dashed it to the ground and incinerated it with a kind of energy beam that Olga could not identify.

  “Impressive,” said the sword. “Looks like some good deeds go unpunished after all. Your pheromones must be close enough to human standard to trigger a loyalty function.”

  They continued to pick through the scattered ruins. Olga was beginning to wonder if the ground ripper was scaring away not just potential enemies, but potential sources of information, but there seemed little point in complaining. They came upon an antique data terminal in what had once been a shop for women’s clothes. It powered up briefly then immediately shorted out. Olga had noticed that for some reason ancient machines, when reactivated after a long time, would often show a burst of activity before dying completely. There must be some technical explanation for that, although the swor
d said that it didn’t know why either. She resolved to look up the answer when she got back to the scout.

  There was a hall with several beverage vending machines, some of which were still operational, and could speak English. She asked about the Dichoptic Maculatron, but all they could do was extoll the virtues of whatever long-since-desiccated drinks they were trying to sell.

  The ruins were frustrating, but at least there were human-scale and human–accessible systems about, so Olga decided that they’d give it another week before abandoning the area.

  It was on the third day, as they drove quietly along a broad plaza towards what looked like a major municipal building, that they encountered a cybertank. It was sitting at the end of a long boulevard centered on the plaza about two kilometers away from them.

  “Hey sword,” said Olga, “I think that’s a cybertank. I didn’t think there were supposed to be any here.”

  “The Treaty of Ampersand prohibits any cybertank from coming here,” said the sword, “but there is nothing in the text that says that there aren’t any here already.”

  Olga got off her cycle, and waved at the cybertank. “Hello, cybertank! I’m Olga Razon, vampire, on a mission from the cybertank civilization. I’d say you are a Raptor Class, pretty old nowadays, but I know someone even older. You must have heard of the one they call Old Guy, he’s an Odin-Class? Or maybe Frisbee, he used to be called Whifflebat, back when he was a Thor-Class? Anyhow I’m on a mission to find someone called the Dichoptic Maculatron, I was wondering if you could help me?”

  The big cybertank did not respond, but Olga could hear the grind of its gear-trains and tracks as it started to move down the boulevard towards them.

  “Hello?” said Olga. “Raptor-Class?”

  The cybertank began to rotate one of its secondary turrets, and pointed the barrel at her. She could see the faint glow of the fusion igniters deep in the plasma cannon as they warmed up, and Olga had been around cybertanks long enough to know what that meant. “Oh fuck.”