Space Battleship Scharnhorst and the Library of Doom (An Old Guy/Cybertank Adventure)

by Timothy J. Gawne

  On a few dead rogue planets the cybertanks had found the remains of previous visitors that hadn’t made it off. Some of them were over half a billion years old, their structures so vacuum-welded and corroded by micrometeorites and hard radiation that they were little more than cryptic monuments to the hazards of these worlds.

  The ‘live’ rogue planets were more hospitable. Their background heat could mask the energy output of a cybertank outpost, but their infrared signature made them overall easy to spot. Some alien civilizations seemed to covet this sort of rogue planet, so there were possible territorial issues here. A dead rogue planet however, is coveted by nobody, and is nearly invisible in the spaces between the stars. As long as you are careful to bring enough energy along with you to make sure that you can get back off of it, and you limit your activities so that the thermal signature doesn’t give you away, it is about as a good a place to hide as any in this universe.

  But not perfect. If the cybertanks could find a rogue planet, some other civilization could as well. Which was why the Omega library had major league defenses and, more importantly, three completely redundant systems for blowing itself up should that prove necessary.

  The Raptor-Class cybertank “Stochastic” was the current guardian of the Omega Library. He wasn’t really thrilled with the duty assignment, but it was serious and valued work. Hopefully he would get to do something more fun next time.

  Stochastic thought that the name “Omega Library” was pompous and stupid. Certainly this was the most remotely located library that the cybertanks had made, so technically the name “Omega” was appropriate, but still. Stochastic had argued that if they really wanted to have tight security they should give the library a boring and misleading name, like “Tubular Alloys,” or “Flood Control Dam No. 3”, but so far he had been outvoted.

  From the surface the Omega Library looked like a completely barren rock, pitted with small impact craters and with a temperature just barely above absolute zero. It was naturally dark in color, and so almost invisible in the spaces between the stars. The cybertanks had hollowed out elaborate networks of caverns kilometers beneath the surface, using slow efficient techniques that minimized heat generation.

  There were several kinds of data storage in use at this facility, including old-fashioned physical books and memory-wire. However, most of the data storage was in the form of large blocks of crystal. The crystals were the toughest kind of read-only memory that the cybertanks had been able to devise. The data was encoded in the pattern of crystal grains deposited one layer at a time via vacuum deposition techniques. They were bulky and slow, but in theory they could hold information intact for over a billion years.

  The cybertanks who had first built the facility had modeled the archives on an Egyptian city of the dead, with the crystal data units shaped into obelisks and walls covered with hieroglyphics. Androids fashioned as Nubians wearing golden armor and carrying long spears stood a silent and unmoving vigil. Simulated torchlight flickered weakly barely reaching past the first few rows of obelisks that stretched out into the darkness. The entire network of tunnels was in hard vacuum, so the silence was more absolute than any terrestrial human tomb. Stochastic found the whole thing to be boring, clichéd, and singularly lacking in wit or charm, but it was too late to change it now.

  The energy budget of the Omega Library was strictly limited. Partly this was to avoid cutting into the stored fuel reserves, but mostly to avoid generating too much heat that would diffuse up to the surface and paint a giant infrared hot-spot on the surface of the rogue planet. Stochastic’s main hull was in low-power standby mode in a deep armored and shielded hangar. Most of Stochastic’s actions were electronic, patiently transcribing new data onto fresh obelisks via remote data-enscriber machines, and cross-checking new datacores with older, obelisk-inscribed data. He did, however, have the time and energy to indulge a few hobbies.

  His favorite humanoid android was an anonymous but realistic male slacker/tourist. Tall, well-muscled, and with tousled auburn hair, he wore a Hawaiian shirt with a brightly colored flower design, tan shorts, sandals, and cheap plastic sunglasses. He walked casually through the city of the dead, making inane comments to the unmoving Nubian guards (“Hey, how’s it going Egyptian dude?”), and snapping badly-framed photographs with a compact digital imaging device. It was Stochastic’s way of making fun of the original designers of this place.

  A cybertank has a lot of internal data-storage, but not unlimited. On a mainstream world there are vast public databases, but even so not everything gets put online. It was Stochastic’s pleasure to send his humanoid android searching through the Omega Library for new things to read. Ideally he wanted to find something that was found nowhere else, but even something that he did not carry internally and had never read before would do.

  His slacker/tourist body walked past a line of obelisks, and turned into a low passage that wound several hundred meters into the rock. It opened up into a single small room; the caretaker’s private library. Rows of modest bookshelves, two overstuffed armchairs each with a small side-table and Tiffany reading lamp were the sole furnishings. In cybertank society all data is supposed to be shared openly, but the succeeding caretakers of the Omega Library had made it their guilty pleasure to keep just a few little bits to themselves. Most were located here, but some they hid in secret vaults here and there throughout the Omega Library that succeeding caretakers had to find. It helped to pass the time.

  Many of the books were the personal logs of previous caretakers; there was little of interest in them save for the fact that they were about the only truly unique pieces of data in all of cybertank society. There were a few other obscure works, some of which were considered so unimportant that they were hardly ever available online, others were publicly-available but in rare editions, or that had unique annotations and notes.

  There was a third edition of Thomas Malthus’ Essays on the Principle of Population, with notes by his secret love-slave William Godwin handwritten in the margins. An edition of “Free to Choose,” by Milton Friedman, defaced with some of the most graphic and exotic pornography in the history of the human race by Cedric the Mad. This was the actual physical book that the brilliant artist had himself worked on. Certainly the artwork itself was widely copied, but copies are cheap. This was the original thing itself, and therefore priceless. Stochastic lovingly caressed the spine of the book; it was a tangible link with history.

  There was the personal copy of “Notes From an Explorer,” by Space Admiral Li Gong. Each page had a strand of hair tucked away near the spine, every one unique and taken from one of her many associates, colleagues, rivals, and lovers, and with a handwritten message from them in the margins. The great passion of her life had of course been the polymath Astringent, and he had been completely bald, so he had donated a pubic hair. Stochastic wasn’t quite sure about this, but he supposed that tastes must have changed over the millennia.

  He considered reading the historical work “The Human Commanders Revisited,” by the Mountain-Class cybertank “Uncle Jon.” It was a classic history, and on the cover page Uncle Jon had handwritten a note to his friend “Muffin” that concluded with the phrase “Eat my shorts.”

  He settled on an edition of “The Importance and Futility of Reason,” by Herman Shikibu. The basic text was widely distributed, but this had been a customized version given to a close friend. The annotations were not static, but living circuitry embedded into the pages. They changed as you were reading, reacting to your page turns and touch, linking different ideas together, sometimes praising the reader, sometimes insulting him or her, or making jokes. Some chapters had issues; they didn’t like other chapters, and would periodically make snide comments about them in the margins and try to persuade the reader to skip them. The technology behind the book was a one-off that had not been duplicated, and it never read the same twice. He settled back into an armchair, opened the book to the first page, and began to read.

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  The primary defense of the Omega Library was anonymity, so there were no armadas of active weapon systems orbiting overhead, just the bare cold rock and hard vacuum. There were, however, a few deep scouts in far orbit overhead; very quiet, very dark, drifting and listening and waiting for any uninvited guests that might wander by.

  One of these was an ancient human-constructed void ripper. It didn’t have a name or an identification number. It was about 1,200 metric tons, jet black, with a main hull studded with an irregular array of curving blades. Currently it was in hunting mode. All of its higher functions had shut down, and what passed for a nervous system was only the slow movement of currents through superconducting pathways powered by the tiny thermal gradients caused by starlight falling on its hull. In hunting mode it was about as inert as anything can be without actually being dead, and in the depths of space, cold and dark is how you don’t get noticed.

  The void ripper trailed thin cables thousands of kilometers long behind it, like the tentacles of a Portuguese Man-of-War jellyfish. The cables could pick up the faintest electrical or magnetic disturbances from enormous distances. Some of the cables had small chemical sensors embedded on the surface that checked for traces of molecules that might indicate a technological intruder. The void ripper had multiple meter-wide black eyes, faceted and pointing in all directions like a spider. They focused heat images onto supercold sensors, waiting patiently for something that was just slightly warmer than the rest of space and not where it was supposed to be.

  The void ripper had drifted like this around the Omega Library for over a thousand years. It might continue to do this for millions of years if nothing woke it up. Then, a tiny speck of infrared briefly activated one small piece of an imaging sensor. Its circuits twitched, but did nothing else. And then, another flicker of infrared, stronger than last time, and that did not go away. The weak superconducting currents weighed their options, and then pooled their efforts. Together they had just barely enough power to activate a tiny switch that itself had just enough strength to flip the void ripper into search mode.

  Internal power sources activated, faster and more powerful logic circuits woke up, and the ripper examined its surroundings. Nothing much had changed since the last time it had been in search mode, but there was this little speck of infrared heading towards the dead rogue planet below. It wasn’t broadcasting an IFF “identify friend or foe” code, so it was a valid enemy. Patiently it calculated an intercept trajectory, reeled in its tentacles, and slowly nudged itself along with stealthy low-thrust drives. Its surface temperature had still not risen more than few degrees Kelvin above ambient.

  The ripper was slowly closing on the enemy, when it registered several more infrared contacts. Then several dozen more. One of them pinged the ripper with an active radar pulse. Then two more did. It has been located. It shifted to full combat mode.

  The void rippers are not self-aware, but they are not simple unconscious computers either. They have an animal-level affect. On old Earth one of the nastiest animals around was the baboon. Zoo-keepers would comment on how baboons would catch squirrels, and then rip out their intestines just to hear them scream. Baboons were ill-tempered at best. Void rippers are something else altogether.

  Imagine that you took a strapping young adult male baboon, vigorous and aggressive, and you spent several months driving it crazy with random electric shocks. Now get it pumped up on amphetamines. Now kick it in the testicles, hard. You are about halfway to the level of malevolent craziness of a void ripper in combat mode. At the end, the humans had seemed so calm and centered. Why they built the void rippers no cybertank could say. Perhaps it was just a miscalculation. Everyone and everything makes mistakes, according to some percentage.

  The ripper activated its main reactors and high-thrust engines and accelerated towards the nearest prey. The enemy dispersed decoys and launched missiles at it. The ripper trashed the missiles, ignored the decoys, and activated its full suite of armaments. It had its own missiles, decoys, plasma cannons, railguns, x-ray lasers, and more exotic weapons. The first enemy unit it shattered into fragments with a railgun. It would have preferred slowly tearing its victim apart with its curving blades, but that did not appear to be possible just now. It destroyed another dozen enemy. The enemy fought back, and there were a lot of them. The ripper destroyed yet another dozen units, but then it took a hit. Hurt but not killed, the ripper screamed in frustration on all open radio frequencies, which was to alert its masters, and then plunged back into the combat.

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  Stochastic was still reading Shikibu’s book when he heard the scream of the injured void ripper. Then he heard its death cry. Time to go on alert. He shifted his full awareness to the external passive sensors. There were a fair number of enemy units incoming on his position. The signals analysis indicated Amok, but that didn’t make sense, they were supposed to have been wiped out years ago. So much for that intelligence.

  Stealth was no longer an option. He activated the sleeping Omega Library defenses. But especially, he readied the self-destruct triggers. It was not that important to defend the library, as to make sure that it didn’t fall into the wrong hands. Still, he couldn’t just destroy the entire library until he was sure that it was under serious attack. That was Stochastics’ first mistake.

  As the defenses of the Omega Library woke up, active scanners came online. There was a large armada converging on the dead rogue planet, apparently Amok. It was a formality, but before opening fire Stochastic transmitted the standard diplomatic protocols proclaiming non-hostile intent and suggesting that the invaders go elsewhere and have a nice day. That was Stochastics’ second mistake.

  The oncoming armada sent a transmission in return. And all of the defenses of the Omega Library shut down. Then all of the self-destruct mechanisms shut down. Oh holy neo-liberal fuck.

  To a human, cybertanks may seem imperturbable, but they are not. They get flustered and hesitant just like any biological human. It’s just that they think so fast that they get over it in a millisecond or two. Stochastic had a moment or two of panic, then got over it. He was screwed, but he still had a duty to perform, and he was determined to execute it to the best of his ability.

  If the detonator for a vial of nitroglycerin malfunctions, you just need to hit the nitroglycerin or drop it on the floor - it will still explode. But nuclear weapons don’t work like that. They require precisely timed control signals, and if they are blocked, you can’t bang on one with a hammer and get a mushroom cloud. If you are locked out of the control circuits of a nuclear weapon, it won’t explode. Stochastics’ ability to wipe out the library with nuclear weapons had just been taken away.

  The data-storage crystals had been made to last. A fusion bomb going off in one of the caverns would have melted them into meaninglessness, but not much else would affect them. You could shatter them with a strong enough physical impact, but it would only be a matter of time for any reasonably competent technological civilization to reassemble the shattered fragments. To really destroy the information via non-nuclear means you would need to reduce each data storage crystal into powder using diamond-coated grinding wheels. Which, with hundreds of kilometers of corridors filled with data storage crystals, would take a freaking long time.

  Stochastic’s main weapon could vaporize a data crystal beyond reconstruction, but only one at a time, and there were an awful lot of data crystals in the widely dispersed caverns of the Omega Library. Time to act. First, Stochastic warmed up his own main hull and the few remotes and other systems over which he still had direct control. Then he worked to see if he could undo the over-rides that the Amok had placed on the defensive and self-destruct systems: it looked hopeless, but he would keep trying. Then he needed to decide on priorities.

  He had two main goals. One, was to destroy as much of the data in the library as possible before it was captured. The other, was to alert his fellow cybertanks that the data breach had occurred, so that they c
ould prepare for the consequences. Given that the Amok had shown far too much knowledge of how this base worked than seemed credible, the second option was clearly the highest priority.

  Thankfully, he had time. The Omega Library spanned hundreds of kilometers of tunnels, but embedded in a rogue planet over 15,000 km in diameter, they should be hard to find. The cybertanks had buried conductive wires in the planetoids’ crust to defeat deep radar, and hollowed out other caverns and emplaced resonators to confuse seismic scans. Let the Amok land on the surface and then start digging for him, he might have months before they found him.

  It took Stochastic about 16 microseconds to realize the flaw in this reasoning. If the Amok had known the codes required to deactivate the planetoid’s defenses, which should have been impossible, they might also know the location of the tunnels and caverns of the Omega Library. Oh fuck.

  Stochastic waited for the Amok to land on the surface. There were an awful lot of them. He continued to fail in his efforts to reverse the over-ride commands, so he used his few personal repair drones to try and switch some of the defenses into manual mode, and he ran simulations and made contingency plans.

  The instant that the Amok landed, they all headed for known entrances to the library. Oh fuck fuck fuck. Fuck. They knew everything, and he didn’t have much time after all.

  First things first: head to the surface and warn his comrades. He drove his main hull at 110% maximum safe speed up a steeply sloping tunnel to the nearest entrance. As he did this, he instructed his few personal repair drones to destroy the most important data crystals. The holiest of holies were the crystals containing the original design parameters of the cybertanks, especially the parts describing how the human psyche had been mapped onto the conformation of a cybertank computer core. If that fell into enemy hands they might was well all kill themselves.