Old Guy and the Planet of Eternal Night (An Old Guy/Cybertank Adventure Book 6)

by Timothy J. Gawne

  We walked around the bloated shape of the arkship, and this time we travelled in silence. We came to a place just under the armored curve of a piece of hull section, and there was a sign that said “LIBRARY.” We pushed past the plastic-sheeting doors, and entered. And I was dumbfounded.

  Pascal’s library was, as expected, covered with a layer of cheap gray plastic sheets. Someday, if I live long enough, we’ll have proper doors, but thin plastic sheeting is so efficient.

  I stepped through, and I saw… books.

  Books? In a library? That didn’t make sense. Libraries only have books in old movies. Libraries have data terminals, and meeting rooms, and coffee.

  The books looked like, well, books. Physical objects, paper pages, all that…

  “This must mass over a thousand kilograms,” I said. “You could encode a hundred times this information into a solid state drive that weighed a few tens of milligrams. You shipped physical books light years?”

  “It’s not about mere information,” said Pascal. “It’s about knowledge, and wisdom, and being editorial, and having the correct references, and chain of custody. These are precious beyond their weight in platinum.”

  “But… books?” I said, and I suspected that I had said it stupidly.

  Pascal went to a shelf, and gently caressed the spines of the volumes. “Yes. Books. Our technology has seduced us into thinking that information is somehow more important than knowledge, but it’s not. Tell me, lieutenant Trellen, suppose you were on a mission somewhere, and you had a choice. You could have the entire recorded history of the daily rainfall and wind patterns for Brazil for the last four centuries, or know if the enemy was going to attack in the next 24 hours. What would you choose?”

  “Well,” I said, “the latter, obviously.”

  “Yes,” said Pascal, “obviously. The meteorological records of Brazil have far more information content than the simple yes-or-no question will the enemy attack soon, but are far less important. Now, what if these weather records were, in fact, not even accurate? It would all be rubbish, even if it were beautifully formatted on a large-screen video display with dancing clouds.”

  I scratched my chin. “I still don’t see how the mission planners let you ship all this dead weight of physical books. Every kilogram transported between stars costs a small fortune!”

  “Well,” said Pascal, “it has been shown that, statistically, colony missions with a Librarian are 8% more likely to succeed than those without. I told you that not everyone back on old Earth was a moron. There are those that want things to go well.”

  I gave her my most skeptical-looking expression. The kind that I usually reserve for commanding officers that insist that an upcoming mission will be a cakewalk. “So what makes you so special then? No offense. You are clearly intelligent, but you are just one of ten thousand people, and by your own admission some of them are pretty sharp.”

  “True,” said Pascal. “But consider this. Of all those ten thousand people I am the only non-specialist. This week already I have solved two serious problems involving water recycling and power distribution that these brilliant specialists couldn’t handle because – well, because they are too specialized. And that doesn’t count my fixing your personal financial problems. You are welcome.”

  “But wait a minute,” I said. “Isn’t the president also a non-specialist?”

  Pascal found this amusing. “Touché. The difference is, that I am a non-specialist because I know a lot about many things. The president is a non-specialist because she knows nothing about anything. But the thought is charming.”

  “Do you really have such a low opinion of our president?” I asked.

  “Your virginity is showing again,” said Pascal. “Pray that it does not get deflowered, because you won’t enjoy it. But here, I have something for you.” She reached over to a bookcase, and pulled out a slender leather-bound volume entitled “The Essentials of Self Control,” by Protonicus. She handed it to me.

  “A book?” I said. “You want me to read a book?”

  “Yes,” said Pascal. “Although you need to read it carefully, line by line, in order. Not skimming or flipping back and forth, as is the current custom. You must mentally engage each line; that’s critical or it won’t work.”

  “And I should do this why?” I asked.

  “If, after you have read this book, and you still don’t know the answer, then you shouldn’t have,” said Pascal. “Otherwise you will be begging me for more.”

  “Very well then, “I said. “I will give it a try.”

  “Splendid,” said Pascal. “But first you need to sign it out. And heaven help you if you don’t return it. Hell has no acrimony like a librarian whose books have not been returned before the due date.”

  Pascal wrote my name down by hand in a physical ledger. With a pen. I think I saw something like that in an ancient video. “Really?” I said. “Old time written records?”

  Pascal pointed to a small stack of drawers on one wall. “That is the card catalog. That is far more important than any book here, critical though they are. Because while the data are sacred, the catalog is divine. Break the links between data, and the data might as well not exist. So when we Librarians keep records, we take it seriously.”

  “But… written records of who took what book out when? Wouldn’t it be so much more efficient to just have an application on the datanet?”

  “These written records,” said Pascal, “cannot be hacked, or erased in an electromagnetic pulse attack, or be inaccessible due to network failures… There is efficiency. And then there is verifiable truth.”

  I was trying to think of some pithy riposte, when my comms beeped. It was sergeant Villers.

  “Hello, Lieutenant,” said Villers. “I thought you might want to know that we have a problem.”

  “Please state the nature of said problem,” I said. Damn, I’ve been talking with the AI too much, it’s bad for your mind.

  “Well,” said Villers, “all of our distributed scout drones are going off-line, starting with the furthest out and then working their way in. Right now we only have coverage to about 60 kilometers out.”

  “Do you have any data on the enemy?”

  “No,” said Villers. “Our scouts just wink out, one by one, with no contacts. If this isn’t a weird software glitch, we are facing a serious opponent.”

  I didn’t hesitate. “Sound the alarm. Alert the Captain and the other platoons. Put the defense grid on full active scanning. I am heading back now. And please inform the executive branch that the military needs free zone access. Trellen out.”

  I stood up and ran out of the Library, and headed back to my HQ. To my surprise Pascal was running along behind me.

  “You should stay in your library,” I yelled over my shoulder.

  “No,” shouted Pascal back. Well if she wants to put herself in danger, that’s her problem.

  I made it back to the HQ, huffing and puffing from the jog. Pascal entered right behind me, and wasn’t breathing hard.

  “Status, Villers?”

  “Sir.” Sergeant Villers gestured towards a screen that showed the overall tactical deployment of the forces in our sector. The dots indicating where our scouts are located only extended out to 50 kilometers. As I watched one of them blinked out, then another.

  “You’ve gone active?” I asked.

  “Yes sir. Nothing on radar, nothing on lidar. Our scouts are just vanishing.”

  “Send out a few illumination rounds from the auto-mortars, pick this section here, were we still have some units left. Maybe we can get a visual.”

  Villers keyed in the commands, and I heard the whumps from the auto-mortars stationed in front of the HQ building. Villers activated the video feeds from the scouts in the areas; the illumination shells burst and the landscape jumped into bright focus.

  And there was nothing there. Just barren dirt and rocks.

  “How could they be doing this?” asked Villers. “Nano-drones?
Long-range infrared sniper lasers? But I’m not getting backlash signals, there should be some electromagnetic overspill no matter what the enemy is using.”

  I accessed my own terminal, and also couldn’t get a fix on what was killing our scouts. I asked our military sub-AI node for advice.

  “Query: list possible methods by which our drones are being destroyed.”

  The AI was silent for a bit, then typed me back its considered answer.

  No possible methods consistent with known physical laws can be determined. This unit suggests that you are hallucinating and require psychiatric help.

  Oh the sublime wisdom of a non self-aware AI.

  “Unless the force overcoming your scouts is the threat itself,” said Pascal, “one generally kills scouts to blind an enemy to the real attack. Something else is coming.”

  “You think?” said Villers “Glad you’re here, Ma’am, us military types would never have thought of that.”

  At that point Captain Johnson contacted me on the comms. “Lieutenant Trellen, report in.”

  “Sir, Trellen here. Our scouts are being wiped out by an unknown method. Negative on all sensors, even active. I lit up a sub-section with illumination shells, negative on visual. Sir, if our scouts are being taken out, there may be something else inbound.”

  “Agreed,” said Captain Johnson. “The other platoons report the same. Pull back all remaining scouts. We’ll only lose them. Set a perimeter at the edge of the illuminated region around the ship. Issue personal weapons. Detail some of your men to stand guard. I want some human eyes and ears out there as well. I will alert the executive. Johnson out.”

  I opened the arms locker with my biometrics, and distributed the weapons. Most of us took medium carbines, 5 mm hypervelocity osmium-cored rounds, 50 rounds a clip, the standard personal sidearm of the regular army. Hardly more than ceremonial against a serious enemy, but confidence building. And, you never know.

  Private Brendan hoisted out a man-portable railgun, you could blow holes in the side of a medium armored vehicle with that piece of kit. We all helped ourselves to a generous selection of back-up weapons, seeker grenades, and body armor.

  “I’d like a gun too,” said Pascal.

  “Librarian Pascal,” I said, “I respect you, I owe you, and we have shared danger together. But professional soldiers do not freely give their weapons to civilians. So please do not ask me again.”

  Pascal gave out a faint “hrumph.” “Then how about some body armor?”

  I sighed. “We have spares, so suit yourself. But you really would be safer back in your library.”

  “I know,” said Pascal. “But you wouldn’t.” She picked out a men’s size small armored vest, and pulled it on over her tunic. At least she seemed to know how to fasten the straps without help. She also put in a set of adaptive hearing protectors and auto-dimming goggles. Battlefields are noisy places and unlike in the movies you don’t want to be around weapons fire without ear and eye protection. So at least she seemed to know something.

  I detailed privates Harlan and Walters to perimeter guard duty. Harlan was a small, twitchy man who always got on my nerves, but he was capable enough in a scrap. Walters I didn’t know well but then I’m not going to tear my best people away from their consoles and have them stand slack-jawed on the front lines with a rifle.

  Time passed. With our defense perimeter constricted, we were not losing scouts anymore, but then all we could see was the pool of light around the arkship. We ran diagnostics, and probed around us with radars and lasers and spotlights, but saw nothing. We went back over the last few microseconds of the transmissions of the destroyed scout drones, and again, got nothing. Then private Harlan called in.

  “Hello, Lieutenant Trellen, sir. This is private Harlan. I think I know what we’re facing.”

  “Private Harlan,” I said. “I’m listening.”

  “Then check out my video feed,” said Harlan.

  I accessed his video. Harlan had ventured out right at the very edge of the illuminated region. He was using light amplification so the image was grainy. I saw… a creature. It was clearly dead, with multiple gunshot wounds spread across its torso. The most striking feature of the thing was its jaw. Most Terran vertebrates have a mouth with two upper and two lower rows of teeth that meet together when the mouth is closed and the gut opening is in between. This thing was of a different plan. Its jaws were more like meter-long scissors: the lower one was a single arc of bone on the left side, the upper one a single arc on the right. Beneath these was an extensible orifice apparently designed to gobble up anything that the big jaws had cut apart. The body of the creature was lumpy and pallid, like raw chicken, with three oddly asymmetrical legs splayed out around it.

  “Private, where are you exactly?”

  “I’m about two kilometers out from the perimeter,” said Harlan. “I got bored, and thought I would mess around and see what’s out here. You know there is a kind of lichen that glows when you kick it?”

  “Splendid,” I said. “And your little friend there?”

  “Ah yes, I also found this lovely. Uh, I think I hear its buddies. Request permission to run back home in terror. Sir.”

  “Permission granted, private,” I said. “And good job. Now move it. Trellen out.”

  I sent copies of the video feed of Harlan’s monster to Captain Johnson, and the other platoon lieutenants. Five seconds later Captain Johnson contacted me.

  “So that’s what’s incoming,” said Johnson. “Odd that it doesn’t match the technical sophistication of the attacks on our scout drones, but if they have the numbers we may be in trouble. I have called the executive branch and they assure me that the president is safe. So no help there. The civilian police have been alerted. They may possibly be of use but they are not under our direct command and have only light weapons. I have also been informed that the Librarian is with you. You are to give her a weapon. That is a direct order. Johnson out.”

  I handed Pascal a carbine. “Try not to look smug.”

  Pascal looked about as smug anyone I’ve ever seen look smug. And that’s pretty darned smug. “Oh? Why not?”

  “Please try not to shoot any of us by accident,” I said. “As professional military, we take that sort of thing personally.”

  Pascal did a quick check of her carbine, ejecting and reinserting the clip, verifying that the digital scope was operative, and loading seeker rounds into the underslung grenade launcher. Perhaps she wouldn’t shoot any of us by accident after all.

  These creatures have no thermal signature, no radar cross-section, and no electromagnetic emissions. We could target them on visual only, and we had a very limited selection of illumination rounds. We’d have to wait for them to come close enough to our colonies’ lights that we could see them.

  It was five minutes later when the first wave appeared into the fringe of the colony lights. Over a thousand of these weird vertical scissor-jawed creatures were running in an odd almost hopping gait, pouring out of the darkness hardly more than a kilometer away.

  Our automated defenses had been preprogrammed for this. The auto-mortars were dropping fragmentation rounds right into the middle of the larger groupings, and the light cannons were dropping individual creatures with single precise shots to their spines. However, there were an awful lot of them, and for all that our systems slaughtered them, the front edge of the alien horde was getting closer and closer to the colony boundary, and a kilometer is not that long a distance.

  The AI decided to chime in.

  Calculation: rate of attrition of enemy forces insufficient to prevent perimeter breach. Close combat is now certain.

  An AI with relevant advice? It does happen from time to time. I called the police and told them what was coming. Then the wave hit, and the creatures were on top of us.

  Fortunately they attacked with mindless ferocity, slicing up the person closest to them with no sense of strategy, not setting ambushes or cooperating amongst each other. That w
as the only thing that saved us, but it was still bloody.

  The automated weapons that we had couldn’t fire safely within the colony boundaries. A non-sentient AI just can’t be trusted in these conditions, not if you don’t want to risk a slaughter of your own people. So it was up to us. We left the HQ and spread out and began to perform a sweep. I heard screams from a distance as people were being attacked, then screams closer, and then they were on us.

  I will give my troops credit, they performed well, standing their ground and blowing the aliens apart one at a time. Private Walters was caught from the side and had his left leg sliced off, he shrieked and tried to swing his rifle around but was too slow, and the thing sliced his torso in half vertically from his crotch to his sternum. I blew it apart with a burst from my carbine. Fortunately they were not that hard to kill if you placed rounds in the center of the torso.

  Brendan had found a high vantage point on a light crane, and was methodically blasting them with his railgun. Railguns have a peculiar hard sound, and when the rounds impacted the aliens blew apart into pink mist.

  Railguns are great, but it takes a certain kind of mentality to use one effectively. For example, Brendan wasn’t up high just for the view: if he missed, the round would impact into the ground, and not tear through the middle of the colony killing everyone in its path. You need to think kilometers out from your target when you fire one of these weapons, and Brendan was good at that.

  Pascal, however, outdid us all. She shifted fire and took out targets with the precision of an AI. There were five of the aliens down the end of the street. Her rifle snapped up and she took out all five with precise shots, no wasted motion, no taking time to adjust her aim, just BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM in rapid sequence. It was also how she walked, always putting herself in the right tactical position, always scanning. I’ve seen textbook simulations of close-combat tactics that were less impressive.