BESHOGGO YOLDANO VIRDIGRIS SOLTO SOLTO FLAMBOY RIDERGE!
LOSHIG YANDO FEMTO NENO PYCO ZOL ZUG FLECKER GLEEK SOMBAT!
Translation: Our strength is as the strength of eight because we are high on amphetamines! For a right triangle the square of the length of the hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares of the lengths of the other two sides!
The President of the Highland University had lobbied for a certain amount of educational content in the battle psalm, and had settled for the Pythagorean Theorem.
I erupt from the cover of the fireball and destroy three medium cruiser units. I am engaged by a dozen hypersonic missiles, I dodge and take them all out in a (if I do say so myself) brilliant set of defensive maneuvers.
ZEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLF!
Translation: We are going to crush the bones and flay the skin of our enemies and grind them into mash and burn the mash and mix the ashes with jelly which will be used as a lubricant for a variety of unnatural sexual acts to be performed by farmyard animals of unspecified species and then burned again and stomped on by 555 Junior Kree Girl Scouts wearing garlands of tiny white flowers one at a time all lined up and singing songs of honor to the mighty Highland Kree and then the twice-burned ashes will be shot into the sun and every reference to their names and miserable lives and pathetic works will be expunged from every database and we will send out for pizza and have a really good time see if we don’t.
Now it might seem that this is a lot of information to pack into one single drawn-out word, but the Highland Kree had created this word specifically for their battle-psalm. One might think that the entire definition could be simplified into “fuck you” with little loss of meaning, but the Highland Kree were very particular about their words, so that remains the official definition. And it sounds really cool belting it out with syncopated drumbeats and klaxons.
Curiously, for a culture with such a famous battle psalm, the Highland Kree had never been involved in a serious war (their conflict with the Lesser Gearheads does not count as serious). Some say that this was because they had achieved such a high level of martial competence that they successfully intimidated all possible opponents. Personally, I think they were just lucky, but that counts too.
I close the range further, and I begin to detect recognizable transmissions. It’s the armored suits! They must have survived all this time, and decided to launch an assault in response to my earlier transmissions. I try contacting them but I am still too far away for their primitive comm systems to detect me over the residual jamming.
I lose all of my remaining super-heavy remotes to a coordinated assault by a cloud of nano-drones, but the cloud is nearly used up in the assault and I dispose of the remnants with a single blast of my main gun set at wide dispersal. I have hardly more than my main hull left, but I am undamaged and the enemy defenses are wide open.
I clear a shallow rise, and before me is a scene like none I have witnessed before. The landscape must once have been honeycombed with passages and caverns, but it has collapsed. Exotic galleries like unearthed termite mounds stretch for kilometers… Colossal machines stick up from the ruins. They look like gumball machines and parking meters and tea kettles, except not really. Many are clearly destroyed, others sport halos of static discharge, and some rotate slowly in place. The ground still glows here and there with the heat of atomic explosions, and the sky is a lurid red of dust and smoke.
I send out my surviving light remotes to scout, keeping my hull on overwatch. The signals of the Knights of The Fortress suddenly come in loud and clear: a batch of them had just emerged from one of the still-buried caverns. I recognize the voice of General Lysis Trellen and hail him.
General Trellen! I am pleased that you have survived. Do you require assistance?
“Old Guy?” transmitted General Trellen. “I thought I sent you back to The Fortress.”
You did? Perhaps that was my submind – is it still around? This is my main hull, I just got here.
“You’re the main hull? Splendid! We didn’t think we would ever see you again, although your recent message gave us hope. Yes we do need assistance, the beast is wounded but still dangerous and we must strike before it can regain its footing.”
I power down into the uncovered galleries. Many are too narrow for me but a surprising number are more than wide enough. I round a corner and there is General Lysis Trellen, armor battered and stained but still holding his banner, and accompanied by four medium suits.
Trellen pointed down another gallery. “It retreated that way. I suggest we pursue.”
I had a thousand questions for the armored suit but time did seem to be pressing. I charged ahead, winding down what had once been a buried cave but was now a winding gorge opened to the sky. I saw a flicker of light ahead, then a rounded another bend and saw… something. It was glowing, maybe my size but hard to focus on, with tentacles and boxes and wheels… The shape was something that my visual analysis subroutines could not parse, there was no stable referent for me.
I had no idea what it was, so I shot it. In the confined space of the gorge the discharge heated the air to plasma and temporarily blinded my sensors. I heard what sounded like a scream or a curse, or… I don’t know. The fog lifted and the thing was gone, although there was a glowing trail of molten rock headed down into a still-uncollapsed cave.
“It’s on the run!” said Trellen. “Attack!”
The four medium suits fanned out ahead of me, running at full sprint, over 100 kilometer per hour – I silently admired their bravery. This was basically suicidal, but I dearly needed the screening force. Trellen climbed up on my hull and hunkered down behind my main turret.
Do you have any intelligence on this thing?
“Only that it is powerful and hostile and wounded.”
One of the medium suits running ahead of me screamed – it was being torn apart by the creature’s (talons/hands/suckers). I blasted it for a second time with my main gun, and again there was a loud reaction. The cavern flashed into incandescence, and I briefly lost sensor contact. The haze lifted and it turned out that a second medium suit had been killed in the backlash of my main weapon.
This time the creature did not leave a trail behind it. The two medium suits spread out, and we sped as fast as we dared through the cavern. I noticed the walls and furnishings as I passed – these appeared to be fully human in style and design. Was this thing a remnant of the biological humans? Some experiment in transcendence gone bad? (They usually do).
A suit screamed again as it was eviscerated with a shower of force blades, but it had located the enemy. I wheeled but it slithered down another passage before I could get a target lock. I pursued at high speed, smashing the delicate carvings on the walls when the cavern got too narrow for my hull, shattering ornate tile floors. The creature became easier to track as it was leaking a smoking oily fluid. I had the surviving medium suit join General Trellen on top of my hull behind the main turret.
The caverns continued on, and then the style changed. Instead of being flat the floors were subtly curved up in the middle – a biological human would have had trouble walking on them, and even my treads slipped and spun in places. The furnishings were no longer human in style, but off. They were shiny and iridescent and mostly blue, and bulged and dimpled in unsettling ways. The true civilization of the enemy creature? Or remnants of another trophy alien civilization, captured and tormented, and then destroyed, as the human civilization here had been? I didn’t have time to ask the creature.
I tore through a long hall that sparkled with jeweled stalactites – and was blindsided by the creature from the right flank. It must have doubled back though another set of galleries. It tore off my main turret, and I focused all my starboard secondaries on it and drove it back a little. Then I pivoted and rammed it dead on…
… which was a mistake. The impact ripped off all of my forward drive units and left me crippled, but the enemy had been hurt as well. It clambered off f
arther down the chamber but more slowly than before…
The General had been thrown clear, although his last remaining soldier was crushed as flat as a Swedish pancake (they’re much flatter than the other kinds of pancakes).
General Trellen. I regret that I am no longer able to pursue this enemy. Apologies. Suggest that we wait for my colleagues to arrive.
“Old Guy,” said Trellen. “A valiant action, and so near to success. However, we have one last play.” He turned to face me, and lifted up his visor… and I saw, inside his armored shell, the top of what could only have been a nuclear bomb. He lowered his visor. “I am the last. I will close the distance and then detonate. In its weakened state, it might be enough.”
I thought of a thousand objections and alternate plans of action – but there was not time to debate them with the armored suit, who could only think at the speed of a biological human. And time, as the lawyers like to say, was of the essence.
It’s been an honor.
Trellen had not even waited for me to finish talking, but had jumped off my hull and was speeding ahead. “An honor here as well,” he transmitted back. And then he rounded the corner and was out of comm range.
I took stock of my situation – I was a mess. I could move with my surviving motive units but haltingly, dragging huge gouges in the floor while twisted track segments squealed in protest. My main turret was not just beyond repair, it was absent. I had a third of my secondaries left, and I was working on doing some field repairs, when there was the neutrino burst of another nuclear explosion, then a shock wave, then some secondary explosions, and then more secondary explosions, and I was buried under a small mountain of rock.
--------------------
Eventually my colleagues dug me out and helped me to repair. Apparently after General Trellen had blown himself up, the enemy forces had faltered. The individual units were still as deadly as before, but they had lost strategic direction. At the end only 20 cybertanks were left (including yours truly), but we had won. I was pleased to learn that Double Null and Sausage had survived, but saddened at all the other good friends that I had lost…
We explored the remains of the sunken base of the – thing? Creature? We still aren’t sure what to call it. Many zones appear completely human, down to the isotope ratios and the precise details of the screw threads on the bottom of a music box. Other zones are clearly alien. There was the curved floor zone that I had briefly chased the creature down before being ambushed, but others as well. A collector of alien civilizations and artifacts? A gifted mimic? There was not enough surviving data to do more than speculate.
The issue of the coded message in the genetic plague that had killed the biological humans on this planet also remains unclear. The consensus is that it was just a false flag to help lure us to this planet. There is no evidence that the rogue AI known as Globus Pallidus XIV had survived, but beings of that ability can in principle do nearly anything. We continue to keep trying to ask the more benign AI version XI for advice, but he keeps putting us on hold and playing Hawaiian steel guitar music when we call.
All of the non-human zones appear to be from alien civilizations that we cannot identify, except for one. That has the style of the Demi-Iguanas. We transmitted a message to them asking to trade information on this event, and received the terse reply: WE CHOOSE NOT TO DISCUSS THE MATTER DO NOT QUERY US FURTHER. Bloody fucking inscrutable aliens.
We presumed that the exile thing died in the final explosion, so weakened that even a single nuke could kill it, but we remained alert just in case. It had been nothing if not capable, and it would be so easy for it to have left a sleeping part of itself hidden somewhere… We quarantined this part of space, embedding it with a heavy concentration of sensors and instructing the aliens to keep away. This time the aliens don’t object.
We encountered the remains of The Fortress, it had been gutted and all the armored suits destroyed. I found my old sub-mind in the buried emergency shelter, and reunited with him/myself. I learned of all that had happened on the Planet of Eternal Night while my main self had been away, and read the finalized copy of the Book of Honor. It was humbling.
In digging through the remains of The Fortress, we encountered the buried presidential palace of the old ruling Neoliberal establishment. They had all been killed by either cave-ins or lack of food and water as their damaged life-support systems finally gave out, except for security guard Victor Magnusson. He doddered around, half starved to death, blinking at the massive armored fighting vehicles parked in the vicinity, still asking to see people’s ID badges… We’ve cleaned him up, and fed him, and we’re working on undoing his dementia and the other effects of centuries of primitive anti-ageatic drugs. We have no idea what we’ll do with him, but we have plenty of time to decide.
On a whim, I reconstructed one of the automatic Fortress-building machines. It will take a long time for The Fortress to be recreated, but there is no rush. It pleases me to think of it as a memorial.
The Planet of Eternal Night remains shrouded in a dust cloud, but the combat had been so intense that local space is now saturated with ions, and the skies blaze with magnificent auroras.
It’s beautiful.
Appendix I. Military Powered Armor – Practical or Absurd?
Ever since Robert Heinlein’s novel “Starship Troopers,” human soldiers in powered armor have been a staple of military science fiction. Even in Iain Banks’ Culture series, humans wear powered armor – although in this case the suits are generally in charge and the humans are hardly more than passengers. But what would really be the role of powered armor in any future battles?
As a general rule, I think the idea is absurd. You‘d take a weak, squishy, slow biological human, and wrap it in elaborate sliding joints with maybe hundreds of servomotors and complex electromechanical feedback systems. Think of the cost, the complexity, the maintenance load, the vulnerability of all those joints…
Tactical Role
In an open-field setting, for the cost of one human in powered armor you could have a dozen small armored boxes, mounted on wheels or treads or rotors, that could use lighting-fast reflexes to home in and blow the human to bits. I just don’t see how, with equivalent technology, a human wrapped in powered armor is going to do better than the armor by itself (or an equivalent amount of equipment), which has been optimized to operate without a human inside it.
However, there may be an exception. While the field of artificial intelligence continues to advance, it is not yet ready to replace human judgment. In particular, AIs tend to be idiot savants – they can outperform the smartest human on a specific task, and then turn around and do something so stupid that an eight-year-old child would know better. Until more is learned, I posit that AIs with ‘common sense’ – that can be trusted to make critical decisions – must be self-aware. I also suggest that AIs with self-awareness will be deadly dangerous, especially if we are so foolish as to try and make them smarter than us. This is subject to change as the field advances, but for now, such a situation is at least plausible.
Out on an open battlezone I think AIs will reign supreme. But what about in an urban environment, surrounded by civilians that you really care about saving or protecting? Then I think human judgment becomes more critical. A non-sentient AI sent in to (for example) protect a bunch of schoolchildren might eliminate hostile terrorists far faster and more efficiently than any human – and then wipe out the schoolchildren as well. Remember, as AIs progress, their logic becomes increasingly opaque to us. They rely on complex statistical models that cannot be translated into human language or thought. If an AI did turn on the schoolchildren that it was sent to protect, we would likely have no idea why it did so – and thus, could never be sure of being able to prevent something like that from happening again.
How to get human judgment into an urban battlezone? Well the easiest, and the traditional, way, is to have human soldiers do it. And that works, but fighting effectively in a built-up environment re
quires elite troops that are expensive in time and money to train up. You can ill afford a high loss rate, and having human soldiers in a built-up environment tends to give you a high loss rate.
The vulnerability of (relatively) unprotected human soldiers also makes them (understandably) jumpy and likely to shoot at some stupid kid that darts out of a closet. This can negatively impact the relations of the government with the civilians it is ostensibly trying to protect.
Sure, body armor helps, but there are limits to how much body armor a human can carry. Unless someone comes up with a super-material that is both feather-light and impenetrable to any weapon that an enemy is likely to be able to field, it’s no panacea.
Telepresence offers a possible solution. Send in robots or drones, but have them under the direct control of human operators located safely some distance away. That does work, and the drones that the United States currently employs to kill random people on the other side of the planet in nations of no strategic value, use this principle. But telepresence has issues of time-lag, and signal bandwidth, and jamming. If you had 100 telepresence units in a given area, and they were all trying to transmit real-time super-high resolution video to distant humans, and the enemy was jamming, and there were signal drop-out zones in different parts of different buildings… you’d have a lot of problems.
If you watch video on Netflix or Amazon prime etc., you may have noticed that these streaming services spend a lot of time buffering before your video starts. High-resolution video takes a lot of bandwidth, and these services use compression algorithms to try and maintain the important information and eliminate the redundant. Critically, to be efficient these algorithms cannot work in real-time. That is, there is a delay of seconds to tens of seconds between when central servers send the video data to your home and when you see the image on your TV. That’s fine if you are passively watching a movie. And it can be OK if you are tracking a single goatherd walking slowly down a road from a drone at 20,000 feet, and the drone has direct line-of-sight to a dedicated satellite. But darting into a room from a hallway in the middle of a building with poor network reception? Not so much.
Old Guy and the Planet of Eternal Night (An Old Guy/Cybertank Adventure Book 6) Page 27