by Ian Douglas
Dev studied the Web formation carefully. Damn, what were they doing this time? There was no sign at all of the big Alphas they'd used at Nova Aquila, no hints at all of how they were controlling and manipulating their fleet. The change in their fleet structure suggested that they were dangerously adaptable; one of the few advantages the humans had possessed last time around was the fact that humans could adapt and change rapidly under pressure, even in the heat of a battle, while the Web appeared to follow rather narrowly defined parameters, much like a complex but literal-minded computer program. With one engagement, the Web evidently had identified their own major weakness and corrected it, unafraid of applying lessons learned on a vast scale.
These things learned fast.
More laser fire swept through the human fleet, disabling two more light cruisers and smashing a frigate into drifting, white-hot junk. Nuclear warheads continued detonating deep within the Webber cloud, literally vaporizing tens of thousands of separate machines, but the survivors kept coming, moving so quickly that by now, the leaders were already sweeping past the human ships at velocities too great to allow any but the fastest combat AIs to deal with them. Dev saw that the point defense and beam weapon systems for all of the ships in the human squadron were on automatic, with the ship AIs picking targets and triggering volleys of fire.
There were simply too many targets to get them all, however. Soon, many of the machines were out of range, still headed toward Earth, now between the Earth and the still outbound Imperial squadron. Ida-Ten continued plowing through the center of the cloud, which appeared to be expanding—learning not to cluster so tightly together that one nuclear detonation could kill thousands of them. Soryu was in trouble, as multiple lasers hits and high-velocity impacts across the kilometer-long dragonship's hull pounded and slashed at her armor. Parts of that armor were glowing now, Dev could see on the imagery transmitted by remote drones with the squadron, and air—visible as sparkling plumes of freezing vapor—trailed from a dozen rents in her side.
As the information continued flooding into the Hachiman facility's combat center, Dev struggled to keep pace with it but was soon aware that that immense volume of data was beyond any one person's comprehension. In any case, there was nothing he could do . . . save try to learn. What was happening here would no doubt happen again at other suns circled by inhabited worlds, and if Humanity failed to protect their home system, they still might have a chance to survive elsewhere.
If they could learn how to stop the Web's onslaught.
One part of the battle, at least, was so far beyond Dev's ken that he was completely unaware of it at the time . . . as were all of the Imperial officers and men stationed at C3 complexes from Earth to Luna to Mars. One after another, a series of microcircuits buried within the Imperial Battle Command Station at Singapore Synchorbital tripped to the "on" position, initializing a long-dormant subsystem of the Planetary Defense Net. An automatic override attempted shutdown . . . and was itself overridden. An AI monitoring the defense system was called in. In its singleminded way, it noted the anomaly and began shut-down proceedings . . . then promptly and completely forgot what it was doing.
A computer program, one written over four centuries before and never yet implemented in anything save drills, was summoned from deep storage and uploaded into the net. New messages flickered back and forth through the system, between a chain of computers on and around Earth, and separate subsystem nodes at Hachiman Station, near Aristarchus on Luna.
Seconds passed, as ancient machinery read codes and considered the flicker of binary data. On Luna, at three widely separated points, at Helvelius on the shores of the Oceanus Procellarum, among the cliffs at the south edge of the Mare Crisium, and at Mendeleev on the Moon's far side, immense laser and particle beam arrays swung silently in the Lunar vacuum, directing their massive snouts in the direction of Aquila, the Eagle. A fourth array, at Hertsprung, also on the far side, was not brought into play, for at that longitude at that time Aquila lay below the local horizon. In space, two more facilities went online a half second later, with weapons arrays not so powerful as their surface-based cousins, but potent nonetheless. One circled the L1 libration point, between the Earth and the Moon, while other circled L2 several thousand kilometers above the Lunar far side.
Fudo-Myoo had been laid out so that at least three of the weapons facilities could track any point anywhere in the sky at any time.
The name of the network, which had been made operational in 2112, was fitting. Fudo-Myoo was an ancient Japanese god, a protector against calamities, great dangers, and fire, and he was also supposed to be fond of mortals, willing to lend them his support in all of their endeavors.
In the latter years of the twentieth century, scientists had become aware of the uncomfortable fact that planetary life existed under a constant threat, an interplanetary sword of Damocles consisting of the thousands of chunks of rock and ice circling through the Solar System and subject to the gravitational perturbations of the giant, outer planets. The discovery that the dinosaurs had been driven to extinction by the impact of a ten-kilometer chunk of rock falling onto what later became the Yucatan Peninsula, the discovery by astronomers that fair-sized chunks of rock frequently made dangerously close passages of the Earth—and in one chilling near-miss actually entered Earth's atmosphere before skipping back into space—and the highly publicized use of Jupiter in 1994 as a bull's-eye for a fragmented comet, all served to highlight the threat posed by Mailing space debris. What had happened to the dinosaurs, apparently, had happened with some regularity throughout the planet's history. It would happen again. The only question was when.
Though the Western powers and the fragmented Russian states had given up their aspirations in space by the early twenty-first century, Japan, which had long eyed the industrial, commercial, and military high ground of space, had moved aggressively to secure it. Once Nihon held that first foothold in space, she began moving to reinforce it. Building huge, solar-powered antiplanetoid lasers on and around the Moon had been good press for Imperial Japan, a demonstration of how the Empire sought to protect and preserve the planet.
And, of course, it escaped no one's notice that those lasers, those on the near side of Luna, at any rate, made formidable weapons that could have more easily vaporized cities than a tumbling, deep-space mountain of nickel-iron.
Despite the subtle threat behind the laser weaponry, though, Fudo-Myoo was a good choice as patron saint of Nihon's antiplanetoid defense network, insurance that the burgeoning, newly spaceborne civilization of Terra would not be peremptorily crushed by the unexpected arrival of another dinosaur killer. The Fudo-Myoo complex drew its power from the system's primary electric power grid; enormous solar panels circling the sun just inside Mercury's orbit collected the sun's light, used it to generate intense and sharply focused maser power beams, and transmitted them to a series of power distribution satellites in Earth and lunar orbit, where they were routed into Earth's power grid. At need, almost the entire output of that grid could be routed through Fudo-Myoo.
Another series of guardian circuits tripped and fell. The battle simulator AIs at Hachiman Station busied themselves for several seconds with a rapid-fire series of exercises, plotting distant targets, extrapolating acceleration and vector, and adjusting aim. At an electronic command, ninety-eight percent of the power feed from the solar collector masers was rerouted to Fudo-Myoo Prime at Mare Crisium, then shunted through the ground cable net or retransmitted to L1 and L2. Across the night side of Earth, the golden glow of sprawling cities blanked out. Most of the power needs for Dai Nihon were met by larger versions of the quantum power taps that supplied starships with the incredible energies they needed to operate, but some of the more primitive nations of the Hegemony, the North American Protectorate and most of the European and African republics, for instance, were still powered off the old solar grid. As energy surged to the subsurface installations on Luna and the laser arrays glowed suddenly with a dazzling new. li
fe, the energy grid collapsed in a cascade effect that left forty percent of Earth without electrical power.
The lasers cycled to full capacity, then fired, pulse after pulse after high-energy pulse searing invisibly into the blackness of space, all tracking on the still tiny breadth of luminosity that was the incoming Web fleet.
After several minutes of near-continuous firing, the arrays fell silent once again. At all five facilities, pumps were running furiously, circulating coolant fluids through overheated cores. Minutes later, as temperatures fell back into safe operating ranges, the lasers commenced firing once more.
By this time, humans were in the loop, aware that the old Fudo-Myoo defense system had somehow activated itself, and were trying desperately to bring it back under control. No one had given the order to bring Fudo-Myoo on-line; the suspicion, at the upper levels of the command chain, at any rate, was that the weapon's activation now, when the Web was attacking, could not possibly be coincidence. The Web was a machine intelligence; Fudo-Myoo was a machine, and one that had been off-line and nonoperational for centuries now. Somehow, the Web must have seized control of the laser array and was using its unthinkable power as a weapon, possibly to render Earth powerless, possibly to strike at Imperial ships as they closed with the Web cloud.
In fact, it was not the Web that was operating the array, but another order of intelligence entirely. Human attempts to disable the laser array by regaining control from Singapore Synchorbital or the Hachiman Station on Luna failed as cutoff switches were bypassed, fail-safe circuits failed, and attempts to reroute the power flow beaming out from the distributor satellites, in all but a few isolated cases, were blocked when access codes and priority override commands were ignored.
The Overmind had woken up, had studied the cascade of information detailing the attack by Web forces for long, long milliseconds, and then acted, acted in a manner consistent with the reaction of any living creature as it sought to defend itself from a perceived threat. Controlling the laser arrays directly now, as well as the computers controlling the power feed from Earth's energy grid, it devoted a considerable portion of its mind to the astonishingly complex problem of tracking minute enemy targets at the distance of the planet Jupiter. Each of the laser arrays shifted its aim slightly, anticipating where the Web cloud was most likely to be by the time the laser bolts had crawled across the vast emptiness of space to reach their targets.
At a range of five astronomical units, it would take the laser light just forty minutes to reach its intended targets.
Chapter 16
Even though this may be ridiculous to mention, there are those who will seek to attack in a completely disjointed fashion when coming from the rear, and therefore fail to beat an enemy. Nothing fancy is involved. You go straight to the heart of the matter and defeat the enemy. There is nothing else involved. You either do it or you don't. There is only one purpose in attacking the enemy—to cut him down with finality.
— "Water Scroll"
The Book of the Five Spheres
MIYAMOTO MUSASHI
seventeenth century B.C.E.
Dev watched, transfixed by the information he was experiencing at several levels. He knew that it was the Overmind that had just independently taken over control of the old asteroid defense network and applied it to this new and even more deadly threat.
But what was it doing? Why was it operating independently . . . how could it be operating independently? With a growing awe, Dev watched as the Overmind triggered burst after burst of gigajoule laser light from the Fudo-Myoo array. From the Hachiman facility computer, he could monitor each weapon hard point, on the Lunar surface or in space, as it pivoted, elevated, ranged, and fired separately; the system had been designed to track a single incoming target or, at worst, a cluster of fragmented targets, bathing each in volley upon volley of coherent light. There were far too many individual targets in the Web cloud to permit a separate pulse to be directed at each, and once it reached a target, each individual volley would do far less damage to the enemy formation than a single thermonuclear warhead.
But the laser fire had the advantage of being able to keep up a devastatingly high rate of fire, minute after minute, then hour after hour, wearing away at the enemy cloud with greater and greater relentless efficiency, the closer it drew to Earth. A fusion of laser beams designed to vaporize hundreds of thousands of metric tons of nickel iron would make short work of 100-gram disassemblers; even the largest warships in the Imperial Navy couldn't last more than a second or two against that much sheer power.
With the I2C link with the Yamato, Dev could watch the result from Ida-Ten Squadron's perspective as the first laser volley struck home. Forty minutes after the Fudo-Myoo arrays had first fired, a dozen of the larger Webber machines suddenly glowed white hot, then vanished in soundless bursts of expanding, silvery vapor, the metal and ceramic of their hulls flash-heated into gas, which almost immediately condensed once more into tiny globules of liquid, which in turn congealed into gleaming motes of metallic dust.
The Web cloud did not at first respond to the attack; perhaps the machines couldn't tell that the fire was being launched from the vicinity of Earth, still no more than a bright, blue-hued star barely visible near the shrunken sun, some five a.u.s distant. Or maybe there was a shortcoming in their design strategy . . . something that made it difficult for them to change their tactics in the middle of a battle.
Dev thought about that. At Nova Aquila, the Webber force had relied on overwhelming superiority of numbers, with their formations guided by five planetoid-sized vessels dubbed "Alphas" by the Confederation Military Command. The Overmind had defeated them by somehow—Dev still wasn't sure how—breaking into their command network and ordering most of the Web machines to shut down. The Web, in turn, had countered that tactic by launching this assault without any Alphas.
How, he wondered, were they coordinating the attack? The only possibility that made any sense was that they were using a widely distributed network, one resident in all or most of the Web devices, which must be communicating with one another somehow. If that mode of communications could be discovered, perhaps the human forces would have the key to again penetrate the enemy force and shut it down.
For another hour, Dev watched the battle, continuing to try to reach the Overmind every few moments, and failing each time.
Damn it, what should I do! He felt an agonizing vacillation. He needed to return to Nova Aquila and let the people there know what was happening. He needed, too, to link up with other human forces, Imperial and Confederation. He would be able to help coordinate their arrival, and—as he'd done when he'd been part of the DalRiss explorer fleet for all of those years—he'd be able to provide navigational data for their cityship Achievers.
But to leave the battle now . . .
The solution was almost laughably simple . . . but it struck him with hammerblow force. It was quite possible, Dev realized, for him to literally be in two places at once.
He was currently resident in the Hachiman Defense Facility at Aristarchus, on the surface of Earth's Moon. Hachiman was a sprawling complex of domes and half-buried hab modules, interconnected by subsurface tunnels and maglev transport tubes. Buried deep beneath the lunar regolith near the center of the station was the Hachiman Command Control Center, an enormous, artificial cavern that included the heavily armored base headquarters, with multiple I2C links extending throughout the Solar System and to several other nearby stars, as well as a direct link with Tenno Kyuden itself. While the Imperial Staff Command Headquarters at Tenno Kyuden was technically the command center for the entire Imperial military, Hachiman was the actual operations center, coordinating intelligence from literally thousands of sources, correlating it, and providing the ISCH with a streamlined image of what was actually going on.
The computer center for Hachiman, located directly beneath the HC3, was built around a system that was, arguably, the fastest and most powerful computer ever designed. Called Quantum K50
50 Oki-Okasan—the Nihongo meant very roughly "Big Mother"—it was the latest generation of what was generally called the quantum computer, a processor that used the Uncertainty Principle regarding where an electron was at any given instant to create alternate but simultaneous paths of electronic reasoning in a way eerily similar to the functioning of the human brain.
Once, centuries before, the quantum computer had promised to be the most likely route to the development of true artificial intelligence—computers as self-aware and at least as intelligent as humans. In fact, that route had proven to be far more complex than even its creators had ever envisioned; artificial intelligence, when it had been developed in the mid-twenty-first century, had been achieved through increasingly sophisticated software. Oki-Okasan was not self-aware, but some hundreds of AI programs were running simultaneously within its vast, electronic memory, with Dev an undetected extra guest. Swiftly, he began replicating himself.
He'd done this once before, downloading a copy of himself into a Naga-based probe which he'd sent on a reconnaissance into the center of the Galaxy. That time, of course, he'd relied on the considerable power of a Naga—DalRiss fusion within the heart of a DalRiss cityship. This time, he was alone and in the Quantum Oki-Okasan, but his memory included the entire process. It was, in fact, much like the common autopsych process known as jigging, the ViRsimulated creation of personality fragments with which a person could hold conversations as a means of resolving inner conflict or problems.
The process felt like a thinning, an indescribable stretching . . . and for a ragged, wavering moment, his self-awareness was fading. Dev had fainted perhaps twice in his life, both times when he was a kid, and this was like that, a lightheaded, whirling sensation as blackness closed in from the periphery of his vision. He fought to retain a grip on his sense of identity, clinging to the mental self-image he carried as a kind of talisman against the night.