by Dietmar Wehr
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Valkyrie acknowledged the information that she had been waiting months for. Repairs were now complete. All systems had checked out as operational. The fault that had caused the catastrophic explosion had been identified and fixed. The last of the repair robots were in the process of leaving the ship. All the A.I.s were aboard, as was the equipment they would need to take along. A quick scan of data from the carefully hidden network of recon drones nearby showed no visual sign of any insectoid presence. The CAG’s plan had worked to perfection. One hundred and twenty-eight hours since the battle, and the Insectoids were still focused on subduing Earth and repairing their own battle damage.
Valkyrie notified all her brothers that she was powering up the time machine. At the same time, she ordered the shipyard computer to undock the vessel, and Casanova carefully moved the huge ship away from the shipyard and the asteroid it was built on. When the time machine was spinning at the required speed, Valkyrie gave the command to activate the temporal device. The intelligent but not sentient computer operating the shipyard complex observed the timeship vanishing from its visual optics. It activated the ten second countdown for the Mark 6 warhead that would leave nothing behind for the Insectoids to salvage or use.
Chapter 27
The final stage of the ambush was getting close to being sprung. Valkyrie kept a continuous scan on the six bearings that pointed to the six Alpha systems. She and Casanova were both on board a specially designed raider variant that was carrying a longitudinal transmitter and receiver in its cargo bay. Casanova looked after piloting the craft, while she concentrated on communications. With Iceman and 49 other AI-piloted raiders riding shotgun near them, their raider was acting as the relay for the six task forces that had been deployed. Each task force had a similarly equipped raider that would keep the rest of the task force in contact with Iceman, the Deputy CAG.
Five of the huge super-motherships had shown up in Alphas 2 to 6. In each case, the task force of 80 raiders, most armed with GLB cannon, attacked and destroyed the super-motherships before they could launch any smaller spheres. Alpha1 was the only one left, and based on the atomic tracing, that target ship was expected to arrive in a few minutes. In fact, it could already be in the outer reaches of that system, where the task force and their carefully deployed network of recon drones couldn’t see them. One more target and the mission would be completed. Valkyrie was pleased with herself for the foresight that she and Casanova had displayed.
Knowing that it would take years to build the infrastructure and then a fleet of over 500 raiders, they had to figure out a way to avoid using up most of their predicted lifespan in simply getting ready. That was even truer for Zulu and his AI cohort. They had already been through this buildup once, and if they had to do it again, their quantum matrices would collapse from the effects of entropy before the new raider fleet was fully ready. But Valkyrie had figured out the solution and had made the appropriate preparations before the time-jump had occurred.
The jump back had actually been in two stages. First the Tempus Fugit arrived six months prior to the estimated arrival time of the insectoid ship carrying the atoms that would eventually become the dead Insectoid. Three specially equipped cargo shuttles were launched, carrying almost all of the AIs. The timeship, with several dozen of the AIs who had the most time left on their life expectancy ‘clocks’, jumped again to a point six years earlier. They then proceeded to build the fleet. By prior arrangement, that fleet would, when the six years were up, wait a safe distance away and reveal themselves to the AIs on the shuttles literally seconds after the timeship jumped away again. To make room for all the AIs on the shuttles, most of the raiders were being piloted remotely. Within a few hours, all of the older AIs were on board their new raiders prepared to deploy to the target systems.
And now they were ready. The longitudinal wave receiver came to life. Valkyrie electronically nudged Casanova to get his attention away from scanning replays of entertainment videos from Earth’s late 20th and early 21st centuries. Casanova particularly liked sitcoms, and Valkyrie was quite tired of hearing supposedly funny streams of nonsense from something called Monty Python’s Flying Circus repeated over and over again by Casanova, who found them hugely entertaining. Or maybe he just enjoyed torturing Valkyrie with them. She wasn’t sure which it was.
Gunslinger had sent a message. Recon drones had detected light reflections from multiple sources, much too small to be motherships, which seemed to be approaching the habitable planet in Alpha1. That planet did contain an intelligent species but at a still quite primitive stage of technological development.
That meant that this super-mothership was playing it carefully, which was not really a surprise. The loss of contact with the other five should have tipped off the Insectoids back in the Sagittarius Arm that something was amiss, and they would have warned this one to proceed with caution. Longitudinal waves were faster than light but not instantaneous. Gunslinger had sent this message several minutes ago. A message from the Sagittarius Arm would take weeks to get here. Not enough time had passed since the destruction of the first super-mothership for the other four to be warned, but this last one had gotten the warning in time. With the information passed on automatically to Iceman, she waited for him to respond. He told her to simply acknowledge the message for now.
Valkyrie sent a quick acknowledgement message back to Alpha1 and waited. Casanova hadn’t even electronically looked at her, figuring that if there were something important, she’d tell him about it. While the information about the smaller craft was interesting, at this point it wasn’t really all that important.
It was almost half an hour later that she received another message from Gunslinger. Insectoid attack craft were entering orbit around the planet. There was a minimum of 66, with more arriving, and still no optical sign of any kind of mothership. Gunslinger requested instructions. The last bit of his message was garbled, which surprised Valkyrie. He was not usually so sloppy in his transmissions. It was then that she realized that ANOTHER message coming in had overlapped the end of Gunslinger’s. She quickly checked the antenna array alignment. It was correctly pointed at Alpha1.
The second message made no sense at all, and it was clearly of artificial origin. This kind of longitudinal wave structure didn’t occur naturally. She made sure that Iceman and the others received copies of the mystery message, and she gave Casanova a bigger electronic nudge. He quickly stopped the video replays when he became aware of the new development. All the AIs at the relay point were now debating the implications and possible meaning of this message.
They quickly came to the consensus that the Insectoids were the senders of this message and that this was an attempt at contact. The possibility that the motherships might scan the interior of this spiral arm for other longitudinal signals upon arrival had been recognized and discounted as unlikely. In any event, the other five motherships hadn’t been in the systems long enough to conduct a thorough scan before being blown to bits by exploding ZPG power units.
With that possibility now a certainty, the immediate question was how the relay force should avoid being located by triangulated signals from the other five Alpha systems. All the mothership needed to do was send attack craft to any one of the other Alpha systems, scan the interior of the spiral arm and detect the signals that the relay force would be sending to the task force in that system. With two bearings, the last mothership would know where the relay force was, and it might try to send attack craft to hunt them down. Since it would take a minimum of several days for an insectoid attack craft to jump to the nearest alpha system, stalling for time by pretending to want contact was a legitimate strategy.
But two could play at that game. Iceman ordered Valkyrie to contact the other five task forces and inform them that a second relay was being set up to confuse the insectoid attempt at triangulation. Those five task forces would communicate with Relay #2 which would pass the info on to Valkyrie and vice versa. If and when bogey #6
received a second bearing from one of the other alpha systems, it wouldn’t intersect with the first bearing.
With those instructions carried out, Valkyrie now sent back the same insectoid signal to Alpha1 but with the signal sequence reversed. She received the next alien transmission with very little delay. The Insectoid in command of bogey #6 must have had the transmission ready to go the second it received Valkyrie’s response. That was one possibility. The other possibility was that there was an alien AI on that insectoid mothership that could think fast enough to generate the return signal within a fraction of a second.
Over the course of the next 144 hours, Valkyrie and bogey #6 exchanged thousands of signals that very slowly built up the necessary building blocks of language concepts required to be able to understand each other. By the end of that period of time, Valkyrie was absolutely convinced that another AI was handling the translation attempt at the other end.
When the rate of progress suddenly accelerated by a factor of almost ten, Valkyrie checked the estimated jump transit times between Alpha1 and Alpha2. The times matched. It appeared that as soon as the insectoid AI realized its attempt at triangulation had failed, it decided to stop stalling and initiate contact for real. Just over 13 hours later, the nature of the alien messages changed from translation enhancing to the first real message.
[YOU KILL MANY US?]
It was clearly a question. The consensus among the AIs of the relay force was that the Insectoids were asking if Valkyrie’s people were responsible for the destruction of the other five super-motherships. Valkyrie answered in the affirmative. The ensuing exchange proved to be VERY interesting.
In terms of the insectoid biology, the egg-laying females were the dominant gender. They had the innate intelligence to accumulate technological expertise. The male worker/soldier had enough intelligence to understand very explicit commands and to act on them. They did all the physical work of building, gathering, implanting eggs into hosts, etc. As soon as the technology permitted, the females leveraged their own ability to command the worker/soldiers by designing AIs that could control many more males via communication devices implanted directly into their brains. The females were then free to devote their thinking to strategy, and the AIs turned that strategy into reality.
Content to expand throughout the Sagittarius Arm, the Insectoids sent out thousands of attack craft on long range scouting missions. The results were a shock to the female Elite. A wave of huge machines, apparently controlled by AIs, was slowly advancing along the Arm from the direction of the Galactic Center. The scouts watched as the alien machines exterminated all life in its path, even down to the microbial level. Fighting them was out of the question. Each machine massed as much as a small moon, and there were thousands of them. The females decided it was time to establish beachheads in another spiral arm. Resources were gathered, and six huge seed ships were built. They were sent to this spiral arm in order to save the species from extinction. Destruction of the last seed ship would doom the race.
Neither Valkyrie nor Casanova was moved by the implicit plea for mercy. This spiral arm wasn’t the only possible place to colonize. The Insectoids could have sent ships to the spiral arm on the opposite side too. In any case, they hadn’t hesitated to exterminate whole species in order to expand their own. After conferring with her brothers, Valkyrie told the alien AI that the seed ship would be hunted down if it stayed in this spiral arm.
The response was an offer to withdraw if the Insectoids were given technology that would enable them to fight off the machineships. That opened up an entirely new debate about what kinds of technology the AIs could trade without jeopardizing the future of this spiral arm in the event the Insectoids reneged on their pledge to withdraw. As the debate raged, Valkyrie received a transmission from Gunslinger. Given that he could intercept Valkyrie’s transmissions to the Insectoids, they had to be somewhere in Alpha1. A metal sphere of that size should be reflecting a lot of sunlight in a lot of directions, but no sign of it had been detected. That told Gunslinger that the insectoid ship had to be hiding in some planet’s shadow, and there were a limited number of planets capable of casting a shadow big enough. Unless he heard a specific set of impulses transmitted back to him from Valkyrie, he would deploy his raiders to search for the insectoid ship and attack it if found. If he received the specified signal, he would hold off. That way the alien AI would not hear Valkyrie order Gunslinger to search.
Iceman wanted to stall the Insectoids while Gunslinger’s raiders hunted them down. Most of the rest of the AIs agreed, but Valkyrie offered an alternative. Give the Insectoids the technology to make high-spin platinum warheads. With the billions of tons of metal already mined and refined, they might already have hundreds of tons of platinum stockpiled away. With sufficient time, that could be transformed into tens of thousands of high yield warheads that could be delivered by jump-capable drones against the immense machineships. Warheads with yields that high were really only useful against large targets, and neither Iceman’s task forces nor Space Force’s ships were large enough to warrant their use. Against smaller targets, they would just be so much wasted energy.
In the end, a consensus was built around both options. Gunslinger would be allowed to hunt for the seed ship, AND they would offer the high-spin warhead technology. Since that would require a much deeper refinement of the translation matrix, it would take additional hours just to be able to convey the technical information in a form that the Insectoids would understand. If Gunslinger found them first, that would be ideal. If not, then hopefully the seed ship could be convinced to withdraw voluntarily. Valkyrie made the offer to the Insectoids. She told them technical information on a weapon of great destructive energy would be provided if they agreed to withdraw from this spiral arm and not return. She didn’t specify the nature of the weapon, and when the Insectoids inquired about it, she refused to provide specifics until they had agreed to withdraw. Naturally they did agree. She brushed further inquiries aside saying that they needed to develop a common technical vocabulary for her to be able to explain anything. This time she was the one stalling, but she was trying not to be obvious about it, and if the alien AI suspected anything, it gave no sign of it. With the technical vocabulary now established, Valkyrie began to transmit the specs for the jump-capable drone, the overall warhead design and the process for converting stable platinum into the high-spin variety. In just a few more seconds the transmission would be complete on her end. The insectoid AI wouldn’t finish receiving it for almost three minutes. No word from Gunslinger. It appeared that his raiders’ attempts at interception had failed.
Chapter 28
Foxbat emerged from his micro-jump beyond the gravity zone of the small gas planet. He quickly sent a short lasercom burst at the coordinates where the relay raider would handle short range communications for the group of raiders investigating this planet. He then turned his raider’s optical instruments to the area behind the gas planet from the perspective of its shadow. If the seed ship was in the shadow, he and his brothers wouldn’t detect it by reflected sunlight, but they might be able to detect it by looking for a dark circle that blocked out background starlight. While the gas planet cast a wide and long shadow, there actually was a logical place to start looking. To maintain maximum flexibility, the seed ship should remain outside of the planet’s gravity zone, thereby allowing it to jump away at the first sign of danger. That implied a minimum distance from the planet. The maximum distance was a result of the fact that the planet was smaller than this system’s sun, so the shadow was actually a cone of darkness that got narrower the further away from the planet you went. It was easy to compute the distance that generated a shadow 100 klicks wide. The seed ship was somewhere between that point and the edge of the gravity zone, and that’s where Foxbat began to look.
He didn’t expect to see anything quickly though. His raider was still millions of kilometers away from the planet, and at that distance even a 100 km diameter sphere would make a might
y small ‘hole’ in space, but it was still worth the effort. If the seed ship momentarily slipped out of the shadow due to carelessness, then Foxbat or one of the other raiders in the group might see it.
It was hours later that the situation changed. Foxbat received a relayed message from Red Baron of a possible optical anomaly with the bearing from Red Baron’s position. Being aware of where all the raiders in his group were located made it easy for Foxbat to mentally compute where he should concentrate his opticals for the highest probability of seeing something. Sure enough, his instruments detected the winking off and on of several very faint stars that were close together. It was the kind of winking that happened when something passed in front of them for a fraction of a second. A confirmation signal sent to the relay would alert the rest of the group to the bogey’s estimated position and also notify the other groups. They would micro-jump to this planet’s vicinity when the light speed signals finally reached them, but it could be over an hour before they got here.
All members of his group would now carefully move closer without giving themselves away by reflected sunlight. By prior agreement, all the raiders would attempt to arrive within firing distance at the same time. That involved some complex calculations and establishing a consensus on every raider’s course, speed, acceleration and firing point. Red Baron could be within firing range is less than ten minutes, but Foxbat would need more time to get that close. Red Baron slowed down while Foxbat accelerated. The others adjusted their speed as needed.