The Chronicles of Old Guy (Volume 1) (An Old Guy/Cybertank Adventure)

by Timothy J. Gawne

  Sharktopus responded. “Have you reviewed the figures on how much in the way of resources this attack will cost us? The total industrial output of this entire system for the next 20 years just might cover it.”

  Granted. But if we do nothing the Amok will continue to attack us whenever and wherever they want, with forces that become more deadly each time. The resources required to maintain our defenses at continuous high alert through all of our systems dwarf those that would be needed for this one attack. Let’s do this thing!

  “If we took the resources that we are willing to commit to this attack, and used them instead to further build up our capabilities, 20 years from now we could have twice as strong a force!” said Sharktopus.

  Indeed. But do you think that the Amok will not be doing the same thing? Or that defending from their continued attacks will not divert so many resources from any long-term building projects that we end up even weaker than we are now?

  Sharktopus responded. “But what if the Amok attack not us, but some of the other civilizations? We might not have to spend the next 20 years defending from Amok attacks.”

  May the fates grant us enemies that do exactly what we would like them to do.

  The debate went on for another 23 milliseconds realtime: about ten hours subjective. The vote was 64% for the attack and 36% against.

  1,654 cybertanks were present in the main attack wave, along with 12,435 major weapons platforms, 34,443 deep-space probes and scouts, innumerable micro- and nano-scouts, 45 capital ships, and 136 void-rippers, all spread out over a significant fraction of a light-hour. Everything is encased in disposable black stealth cocoons that are cooled to avoid infrared detection. Waste heat and drive exhaust are directed in very narrow vectors pointing away from the target system; we should be almost invisible.

  It is a tradition that anyone arguing for a war has to participate, which is why I am here floating in deep space. It is only fair. It is also a tradition that anyone arguing against the war has to participate as well, as punishment for not doing a good enough job of talking us out of it.

  Most of the cybertanks in the invasion fleet travel solo. With our armored and shielded hulls, fusion reactors, repair facilities, and sensor arrays, we are each nearly a spaceship as it is. Just strap on a drive unit and some extra fuel and – presto! – instant starship. Currently I am drifting in loose formation with the other cybertanks that make up my squadron.

  The Horizon class “Smoking Hole” is our nominal leader. Basically, he’s good at everything. There is the Thor class “Wiffle-Bat,” a friend and rival of mine from way back. He is nearly as ancient as I am: the Thor was a slightly improved and up-gunned Odin class, though with lighter armor. Wiffle-Bat tends towards introversion, but he’s handy enough in a scrap. His main interest is exobiology.

  My squadron also has a Golem class that answers to the name of “Bob.” I don’t know him well, but he seems a decent enough sort, for a Golem. Golems can be weird. In place of a turret they have this stepped pyramid thing, as if someone had dumped a Mayan temple on a bunch of treads. A Golem projects powerful directed energy bursts from the pyramid, which can be used either as brute weaponry or for signals warfare. In combat their effectiveness varies randomly from pathetic to awesome, depending on the details of the material properties and geometry of the enemy, and the skill of the Golem in manipulating their complex energy modulation systems. Bob loves his job and his main interest is information warfare.

  It had become a cliché in several European languages to use the name “Bob” in a comical sense for things to which it is ill suited. Bob the dinosaur. Bob the builder. The planet Bob. Bob the simplified computer interface software. Bob the designated driver. The Almighty Bob. Bob the killer goldfish. Bob the Golem-class cybertank. The name suits him. You’d understand, if you knew Bob.

  We also have the Raptor class “Skew.” The Raptor is a fairly recent make, conventional all-around design, good balance of firepower, defense and mobility. When not killing aliens Skew enjoys working on structural engineering projects and composing audio-band music. He is generally laid back and easy-going.

  Rounding up the squadron is my old friend the Magma class “Double-Wide,” who masses about as much as the rest of us put together. We are also hosting a military observer from the Office Copier civilization. Its name is “Office Copier Military Observer.” It does not say much.

  We pass the time as we usually do, noodling around in our data spaces, and chatting via directional laser links.

  So, Double-Wide, what brought you out of retirement? I thought you had decided to settle down with your library?

  “The Physical Library has enough associates that it will get along fine without me. The tactical sub-committee thought that the Amok were unpredictable enough that an old Magma class might come in handy. Something about wanting to make sure that what needs to get blown up positively absolutely does get blown up. I think there was also some mention about keeping you out of trouble.”

  Very droll. Want to make a bet that it takes us a year to get you back up off the planet again?

  “I will have you know that I have designed a new armored landing system. Once I touch down, it automatically folds up and digs itself into a hole and waits. I think getting off the planet will not be a problem for me this time.”

  We can always hope. But what do you think of our approach?

  “I have heard it said that deep space combat is the most beautiful thing we have ever achieved,” replied Double-Wide. “So many trajectories, so many details, unfolding over light years in graceful slow motion.” He sent a 3D plot of our attack force: points of different colors representing our own units, elegant red lines indicated where they had been, blue, where they were headed. Other colors represented probabilities of enemy units and estimated detection ranges. Gauzy gray clouds indicated regions where intelligence was too spotty to even hazard a guess. There were a lot of gray clouds.

  I suppose there is a certain esthetic to it. So much thought has gone into optimizing this attack. Pointless though. It’s similar to the effort that used to go into designing pre-exodus terrestrial forts, like the work of the Napoleonic military engineer Vauban. Triangular bastions perfectly calculated to cover each other, those finely tuned ravelins, tenailles, and crownworks. All lovely in theory, but as soon as a more powerful enemy comes along all that sophisticated construction gets blown into dust. Skill in warfare is a fantasy. Victory comes from bigger battalions, technological superiority, and luck.

  “That’s rather a negative attitude,” suggested Skew. “We all know that no plan of battle survives contact with the enemy and so on and so forth, but it helps to start with some idea of what you are going to do. And making these plans gives the control-freaks in the tactical committee something to do other than get in our hair.”

  “I’m on the tactical committee,” said Bob.

  Good points, both of you.

  Wiffle-Bat entered the conversation. “What do you think the odds are that the core Amok are an organic species?”

  The Amok are nothing if not mutable. Surely whatever progenitor species the Amok once had has been diluted to nullity many generations ago.

  “Perhaps,” said Wiffle-Bat. “But I wonder. The Amok we have encountered are mostly biomechanical: a blending of organic and machine technologies. They do not seem to have the ability to evolve new variants on their own, at least, not so quickly. My research suggests that machine civilizations create only machines. Organic civilizations create machines, and biological organisms, and everything in between. I suspect that behind the Amok is a still extant biological controlling race.”

  “Do you have hard evidence for this?” asked Smoking Hole.

  “No,” admitted Wiffle-Bat. “But I have run numerous simulations on the matter.”

  May God preserve us from the conclusions of numerous simulations not based on real data.

  “Scoff if you like,” said Wiffle-Bat, “but I wager that we find something u
nusual in the core of that system we’re heading towards.”

  The only unusual thing that we might find in an Amok-inhabited system is something expected.

  “Seriously,” countered Wiffle-Bat. “Machine civilizations can create organic forms, but usually just for specialized tasks, or for some whim. Biological civilizations must create machine forms. I think that this has an effect on the style of their constructions. I am telling you, all the signs point to a core organic Amok species.”

  Hmm. Perhaps.

  Skew chimed in. “We’ll find out soon enough. In the meantime: I’ve finished composing a new piece. I’d appreciate your feedback on it. Care to listen?”

  We stop chatting for a bit, and Skew transmits an audio recording real-time on our local network. It’s a simple piece, performed by a single unaccompanied banjo. The melody is slow and elegant, lovely and sad at the same time as only a banjo can be. Skew is a very good composer. I look at the stars around me and observe the nebula. We have inherited the esthetic sense of our human creators: the night sky is beautiful, and it’s always night out here. Ahead is the target system, the center of Amok activity in this region. At our current distance it still just appears as a single star only slightly brighter than the rest. Such a small thing. It could easily kill us all.

  Skew’s piece ends, but none of us pick up the conversation again. We drift in silence for a while, heading steadily closer to the bright point of light ahead of us, and the Amok, and pain, and death, and acts of heroism, and maybe – if we are lucky and smart – some measure of victory.

  Time passes. We coast closer and closer to the Amok system. Sooner or later we know that despite our stealth cocoons we will be detected, but every day that we avoid being seen gives the Amok one less day to prepare for us.

  One of us is spotted. We must be close enough to have passed their outer picket line, and looking back at the system they saw our outward-pointing exhausts. Or perhaps one of their telescopes got lucky and saw us eclipsing a star. By itself this is not enough to sound the alarm. Both sides send out lone probes from time to time. But the Amok dispatch more scouts in response, and detect more of us. Still more scouts – still more contacts – the Amok are now aware that they face a full-scale invasion.

  We head further in-system. We have been watching for a long time and have a good idea of the enemies’ disposition. There are three rocky planets, all industrialized, one heavily. Some big moons orbiting the gas giants farther out also appear to have a significant presence. There are a few installations hidden here and there in an asteroid belt, and innumerable deep-space probes and monitoring stations, but it’s the rocky planets that are the real prize.

  At one time the humans thought that the Earth was the center of the universe. Then when they realized that there were other planets out there they decided that terrestrial planets were the key, and conceived of interstellar flight as only a means of getting from one planet to another. Later they decided that this was arrogant, that planets were tiny on a stellar scale and vulnerable to attack, so that any space-based civilization would naturally concentrate on colonizing nebulas and the atmospheres of gas giants and comets in the Oort cloud and suchlike. Only later, when confronted by the realities of interstellar colonization, did the humans realize that they had gotten it right the first time, and that rocky planets are the place to be.

  A terrestrial planet with a molten core and active plate tectonics provides a concentrated wealth of resources unmatched by anything else in this universe. Rich mineral deposits of all kinds, any number of energy sources, volatiles, shielding from cosmic rays, you name it. The only down side is that getting things out of the gravity well is expensive, so stuff like really big space structures need to be built in orbit, but other than that, planets are it.

  In the Sol system all of the asteroids put together are less than 1% of the mass of the Earth – and with poor mineral deposits, no gases or liquids, limited energy sources, long travel times between sites, and the need to shield everything against radiation and micrometeorites, the asteroids are not all that valuable. Gas giants have potentially massive resources, but they guard their cores with thousands of kilometers of hyper-compressed gases and liquids, and an even deeper gravity well. We still haven’t figured out anything useful to do with a gas giant.

  On top of this, for a technologically sophisticated civilization a planet is an essentially indestructible fortress. The gravitational binding energy of the Earth is about 2*1032 joules. Assuming perfect efficiency, that’s how much energy you would need blow it up. That’s about 25 trillion tons of antimatter. We can’t destroy a planet, and neither can any other civilization that we know of. Planets are built to last.

  Clearing a primitive biological civilization from a planet is easy. Dump a radioactive Cobalt or Zinc bomb on it, wait a few years, then take possession and move in the furniture. But once a civilization develops radiation shielding, and becomes independent of the biosphere, that trick doesn’t work anymore.

  Sure, you can turn the surface molten or destabilize the crust with enough fusion bombs, but that takes a LOT of fusion bombs. More than we have ever built by a wide margin. You could divert a large planetoid so that it impacts your target world, this will also destabilize/turn molten the crust - and take thousand of years – IF the right planetoids are in appropriate orbits – and IF you have completely uncontested space superiority during this time. Even if you do pull this off the planet will be useless for millions of years.

  If you want to defeat an enemy that is based on a planet, you need to go down on the surface and deal with them up close and personal. And that is something at which a cybertank is very, very good.

  We continue our inwards progress. The cybertank armada is distributed across the entire system, but it is concentrated on the approaches to the rocky planets and moons. Our stealth missiles and the Amok stealth missiles wage a slow, patient war of attrition against each other. A few of us die. We get some lucky hits with fusion bombs on some of their industrial facilities. We lose five capital ships to enemy action. Our capital ships are not supposed to enter combat directly. They are black cylinders, five kilometers long and one kilometer in diameter, intended as mobile manufacturing/repair/computation centers. We expected to lose more than five by this time so losing only five is a victory of sorts.

  The Spirit class “Curmudgeon” is hit by a missile and tumbles out of control squealing on all radio frequencies for two days until another missile silences it. I like to think that Curmudgeon was not aware during this time, and that the broadcasts were just mindless electronics stuck in a loop.

  The void rippers patrol deep in the Oort cloud of this system. They play no role in our immediate combat, but seek out the hidden and lost, the deepest monitoring stations of the enemy, and any hidden surprises that they may have left for us on a timer to come out of hibernation millennia knows when from now and attack us when our guard is down. The void rippers will be fighting centuries after our war has finished. They unspool wire antennas thousands of kilometers long, they sniff for the faintest electromagnetic spoor, and they sift single molecules from the hard vacuum of deepest space. Sleek and black with curving bladelike appendages, they hunt patiently for their prey.

  All the void rippers are left over from the humans. We still don’t know how to make them – or perhaps, we haven’t bothered figuring out how to make them because we don’t want any more of them hanging around. They are nasty pieces of work. Like junkyard dogs left outside to guard the property, we don’t let them in the house.

  If we were content to drift through empty space we could probably avoid detection forever: remember, space is BIG. But we have to concentrate into specific trajectories to attack the main planets. That makes it possible for the Amok to find us, but that’s OK, because it flushes the enemy units out into the open as well.

  More time passes. As we get nearer, the attacks on us intensify; more of us die, but the losses are within acceptable limits, so we press
on. This part of the battle is one of stealth remote versus stealth remote. We have an edge: the Amok units are sophisticated but have only limited autonomous capability, and are dependent on orders from the main planets. It takes a long time for orders to travel out from the planet, and jamming only makes this worse. On the other hand the cybertanks are spread throughout the system, we are each fully sentient and possessing vast computational resources, and our capital ships are in large part optimization and signals warfare computers. We have a significant advantage in tactical flexibility: we slowly cut away the Amok defenses.

  My squadron is assigned to the attack on the main inner planet. We launch gravel bombs into near orbit: a dirty trick, the orbiting rocks will slowly sandblast everything the Amok have around the planet without endangering armored landers that only have to pass through the gravel belt once. We fusion bomb the surface from orbit; their defenses are worn down but their core industrial capacity, spread out and dug in, is almost untouched. If we were to leave they could replace what we have destroyed in months. Time to hit dirt.

  My squad-mates and I coat our undersides and treads with quick-hardening ablative foam, and aerobrake onto the surface. We could float down on suspensors but that would burn up most of our fuel reserves. So we hit the atmosphere right behind a massive barrage of fusion missiles and kinetic energy rods. We scorch six long flaming trails across the sky, the shockwave from each of us is nearly a kilometer across – I have to admit, it’s a spectacular way to travel.

  As we slow down the pressure of the air abates; aerobraking is no longer effective. We switch to suspensors and gun our treads, shaking the ablative coating off. The squadron hits the ground fast and hard, our suspensions bottom out and we create a shock that registers as a medium level earthquake. Dust shakes up from the ground all the way to the horizon. Pods with combat remotes have preceded us and we link up with our networked weaponry and surveillance systems.