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

by Timothy J. Gawne

  Yes, the Magma-Class were amazingly powerful. A pity that you could almost never get them where they needed to be. Because they are so freaking huge and heavy. Their strategic mobility rating is very close to zero (one wit claimed that it was actually negative, but never explained how that would make logical sense). So succeeding designs had moved to more moderate tonnages, but the Magmas, being sentient, couldn’t just be scrapped. If they wanted to hang around they were perfectly welcome to.

  Most Magmas had already opted for a rebuild, using their logic cores as the seed to grow a new mind in another (and almost always more svelte) chassis. A few Magmas had decided to stay as they were, but settled down into fixed positions, experiencing the world either in electronic databases or via remotely controlled systems. Rock Dancer, however, hadn’t been happy with either option. He liked himself the way that he was, but he couldn’t stand staying still. The problem was that every time that a Magma goes somewhere, it crushes everything flat under its treads. Even when he had moved to a desolate wasteland in the middle of nowhere, whenever he went from point A to point B he would be inundated with complaints from his peers. “Dammit, you just triggered an earthquake! Will you stop that?” and “Hey knock it off, I’m trying to do some seismology and can’t hear anything with you blundering around like that.”

  Finally Rock Dancer had gathered up the energy, got himself up into space, and settled in the asteroid belt. It was the best decision that he had ever made. He could drift from rock to rock as elegantly as a zeppelin, bothering no-one and enjoying the view. He could even land on minor planetoids, and in the low gravity gently half-drive and half-float wherever he wanted to go. Nobody told him to hold still; nobody told him to speed up and get out of the way. Most of the time he got around by using super-efficient low-thrust ion engines powered by vast black solar panels that he extended like dragonfly wings.

  Most of his peers had little use for asteroids; they were all for the big showy terrestrial planets. Certainly the rocky planets had a lot of resources, and energy, and it was easy to bring stuff together. You could do a lot in the asteroids. The trick was realizing that because everything is so spread out, you just have to be patient. And Rock Dancer was very patient.

  Although designed for terrestrial use, a cybertank is in many ways an ideal spaceship. Heavily shielded, industrial-grade power reactors, integrated repair and manufacturing systems, and sophisticated sensors and computational systems, all bundled into a compact and efficient unit. He had been out here for centuries, floating around, building minor industries, operating and maintaining a vast network of sensors and exploratory probes. It was almost his own private mini-civilization. He was of course in constant communication with the rest of his peers throughout the system, but only by long-range communications. That suited him just fine.

  There were a few other cybertanks that had fallen in love with the asteroid belt. They had their own zones, but they traded advice and info all the time, and were in effect a little club. Then there was that idiot starship “Fanboy.” It was always pestering him about something or other, or trying to come up with reasons to physically visit him in person. Fanboy didn’t get it. His problem was not that he was too big, he was just too impatient. He could have picked himself a zone in the asteroids somewhere, and floated free and been involved in any number of long-time-scale projects. Possibly he could have had himself reclassified as a minor planetoid. If he put on mass, perhaps Fanboy could have had his own moon.

  But no, Fanboy had to be in someone’s face all the time complaining about not being in short-response-latency communications with other people. He was acting like a ground-based system, where being more than a thousand kilometers from the nearest person was considered lonely. More like painfully claustrophobic. When the neighbors get much closer than a dozen light-seconds away how can you have any peace? Anything that wants to make a home in space must first be patient and enjoy spending time alone. Fanboy really needed to turn himself into a cybertank and settle on the surface of a planet, he would almost certainly be much happier that way.

  Now Fanboy had invited him to some waste-of-time dinner party. Rock Dancer was about to send his regrets, when he checked his databases and realized that he had not attended any physical event with one of his peers in over a century. Even by his standards, that was a while. It was possible that be might be getting out of touch, and might be seen by his peers as passing over the edge of eccentricity into something less acceptable. He checked the guest list: amongst those listed as definitely attending were the Mountain-Class “Uncle Jon,” The Horizon-Class “Frisbee,” the Odin-Class “Old Guy,” The Spirit-Class “Doubletap,” a vampire, and an office copier. Wait, it looked like Fanboy had also snagged the Mountain-Class “lowercase.” Now that was a cybertank that Rock Dancer wanted to meet again.

  Hmm. This was tempting. He knew several of these people from old acquaintance, and others by reputation. How had Fanboy gotten people of this caliber to attend one of his parties? He was a little jealous. Nobody like this showed up at any of his parties. Wait, that was probably because he never actually had any parties. Fanboy had gotten this stellar guest list via the simple strategy of asking. Rock Dancer wondered if he really was out of touch, a bit. He radioed back his acceptance.

  There was no question of him flying his main hull there in person. The most efficient thing would be to transmit a submind, and have Fanboy load it into a body onsite. However, Rock Dancer wasn’t sure that he wanted any part of his mind being processed in that spaceships’ archaic excuse for a data-space. Best to send a physical body directly. He could get a payload from where he was in the asteroid belt to Fanboy’s current orbit around Alpha Centauri Prime in a few days, but that would take a fast burn and waste enormous amounts of energy. There were several low-energy trajectories that he could use, but they would take a lot longer. Fortunately there was time.

  He started to ready a small cargo pod, then woke up and refurbished a humanoid android. He hadn’t used it in ages, so he had to tear down and rebuild the joints, and completely replace the skin (which had dried out and cracked in the vacuum of his main cargo hold. He really should get out more. He set his internal calendar to remind him every fifty years, if he forgot). It was a realistic replica of some human male political leader that had been thought important at one time, but was now not even a footnote. He was a Eurasian mix, average height, average build, perhaps the hands were a little on the large side. Some cybertanks made a big deal out of choosing a humanoid android, and acted as if it was an important personal statement. Rock Dancer had never gotten into that, and had had picked this form at random from the database. As this was going to be a dinner party, he made sure to also overhaul the android’s olfactory senses.

  On a whim, Rock Dancer decided to take Zippo the space monkey along with him. Zippo would appreciate the activity of a party. Now, where had that monkey gotten to? His android body wandered through the narrow corridors of his capacious hull, calling out “Zippo! Here Zippo! We’re going on a trip! Come here boy!” In one particularly messy cargo bay he heard something stir, then saw two bright and eager eyes open.

  Zippo was not sentient, but did have animal-level emotions. He was the only thing out here that was not either Rock Dancer himself, a piece of Rock Dancer, or a mindless automaton. He was a pet, and gave Rock Dancer something to keep him company without all the hassle and fuss of dealing with a true peer-level mind.

  Zippo was shaped like a generic monkey, only made of metal and tough lightweight ceramics. He had a long prehensile tail, and the rapid scampering gait of a Terran macaque. Although he had the mental awareness level of a monkey, he was not a monkey, but a sophisticated piece of machinery. Sometimes Rock Dancer would give the space monkey a job to do. Zippo would tear into it with the happy enthusiasm of a spaniel chasing tennis balls, because he was a good and loyal little space monkey. But mostly Rock Dancer left Zippo to his own devices. Zippo had an insatiable curiosity, and when anything was happen
ing he would be happily scampering and exploring here and there, poking into things.

  Sometimes Zippo would climb on the outside of his hull, and watch the stars with him, or stare with rapt fascination as multi-armed remotes constructed a complex deep-space probe. Zippo had miniaturized attitude jets and thrusters, so that if he had fallen off of his hull he could slowly jet himself back. That wasn’t strictly necessary: Zippo had never lost his grip when outside, and if he had then Rock Dancer would have sent another unit out to retrieve him, but Zippo would have been a poor excuse for a space monkey without attitude jets and thrusters.

  Zippo really liked it when they landed on an asteroid, because then Zippo could race around on the ground. He would peek into all the little industrial facilities, and run in long sweeping jumps in the low gravity. One time Zippo had raced ahead of him, and run all of the way around the asteroid. When Zippo had come up on him from behind his main hull, he had reacted very strangely, making loud distress cries and racing back around the entire asteroid in the other direction and diving into a cargo hold and refusing to come out. Finally Rock Dancer got it: Zippo though that he had encountered another cybertank, one that looked like Rock Dancer but was not Rock Dancer – because rock dancer was tens of kilometers in the other direction – and it had freaked the little space monkey out. At first Rock Dancer had laughed at this, but when he saw how miserable Zippo was he felt ashamed, and comforted him until he calmed down. Perhaps he should make Zippo more intelligent? But creating something sentient was taboo without permission, and making Zippo smarter might be crossing over the edge…

  Zippo’s favorite activity was driving off of a planetoid with him. On a few of the appropriately-sized planetoids, Rock Dancer had constructed curved launching ramps. Zippo would be on the top of his hull, and Rock Dancer would start to drive up the ramp. As the curve of the ramp pushed him down, he got more traction, which let him accelerate even faster. As he got to the end of the ramp he would be going pretty fast. The ramp and then ground would fall away and they would sail off into free space. Zippo would hoot with pleasure, eyes widened to their maximum aperture with excitement, and Rock Dancer would broadcast “wheee!” on all clear radio frequencies. This seemed to annoy some of the stuffier cybertanks back on the main worlds, an effect which Rock Dancer secretly enjoyed.

  Rock Dancer leaned his humanoid body over and addressed Zippo directly.

  “Who’s a good monkey? Are you a good monkey? Yes you are! Yes you are!”

  Zippo did enthusiastic backflips while making stereotyped monkey “oot oot oot” sounds. One of his old colleagues, the cybertank known at the time as “Whiffle-Bat,” had complained about the design of Zippo. “That’s not real non-human primate behavior at all,” he had said. “You have mixed up the behavioral characteristics of a domestic Terran dog, with an unrealistic kids-cartoon view of a monkey.” Well, perhaps he had. If Wiffle-Bat wanted a ‘real’ robot monkey, that would unpredictably scream with rage and attack things, destroy any delicate equipment that it could get its hands on, and maybe throw synthetic feces, well, Wiffle-Bat was welcome to it. Rock Dancer would stick with Zippo.

  “We’re going on a trip! Yes we are! Come on, Zippo, let’s go!”

  Zippo was smart enough to understand the word “trip,” and he scurried around the cargo bay in a burst of energetic happiness. Rock Dancer walked his android body out of the cargo hold, and Zippo ran circles around him. They climbed out of the hatch together, and squeezed into the little cargo unit. Zippo had a lot of energy, but when nothing was going on he curled up and entered sleep mode. There hadn’t been much happening around here lately (at least not that would interest Zippo), so he had been sleeping a lot. Zippo didn’t know where they were going, but he know that a “trip” meant that he would sleep a little more, and then wake up somewhere new and interesting. The cargo unit detached, and slowly accelerated in a trajectory that would eventually take it to Fanboy and the party. Zippo clung to Rock Dancer’s android body, and, happy with the anticipation of a trip and at being with his master, he powered down into sleep mode.

  Rock Dancer went back to his usual pursuits. He and his fellow asteroid-lovers had constructed a network of large and capable space telescopes and other sensors. A lot of the observing time was taken up with formal surveys and studies organized by the cybertanks back on the inner worlds, but he sometimes just grabbed some observation time and looked around. It was beautiful out there. From his vantage point he surveyed a vista that the cybertanks would never visit in person if they lasted a billion years. Far away he saw swirling galaxies colliding in ultra-slow-motion splendor. Closer to home he could image individual planets. Many were the territories of alien civilizations. He spent long months watching their dark and shrouded homeworlds, seeing the faint light-specks of fusion-powered engines, or catching hints of vast orbital constructions, and wondering what it was all for.

  Sometimes he would have a glimpse of combat between alien civilizations; this was exceedingly rare but did happen. The captured images and fragments of radio signals told of conflicts vastly far away, between opponents using weapons and strategies that were strange and inscrutable. Because of the speed of light, some of these battles had been over before even the first cybertank had been constructed.

  Space was mostly peaceful and calm, but within a mere 1,000 light years range there are over four billion cubic light years of space. A lot can happen in that sort of volume. Occasionally he would find a major war, and link all of the telescopes in the system into one massive synthetic telescope with a virtual aperture light-hours across. At that time the cybertanks interested in military strategy and comparative technology would be in a state of bliss, but even so, a majority of the cybertanks in the system would stop what they were doing and watch the unfolding battles in (what passed for) real-time.

  Rock Dancer almost felt sorry for those cybertanks who were so wedded to the inner rocky planets. There was so much beauty and life out here in the asteroids, and beyond. You just had to open yourself up to it. Oh well, to each his own.

  He checked his internal clock. His android-body self and the space monkey Zippo must have arrived at Fanboy’s party by now. He hoped that they were having a good time, and looked forward to when he would re-merge with the fragment of himself that he had sent so that he could see how it had all gone. Perhaps someday he should have a party of his own? The humans had written copious notes on how to plan successful parties, and the cybertanks had contributed to this list as well, but still, throwing a party was very much an art and not a science. It might help if he consulted with some of his friends. But that might be seen as pathetic. Hmm. This party thing is trickier than it looks. Rock Dancer would have to think about this.

  He was drifting along, when he encountered a small probe that didn’t register as friendly. He tried interrogating it, got only Amok signatures back from it, and then he killed it with an X-ray laser. He logged the contact with his peers to sunward, and didn’t think much of it. The Amok had been wiped out decades ago, but surviving bits and pieces of that insane civilization sometimes showed up. It was no big deal, they would be cleaning up the remnants of that mess for millennia.

  Then two more Amok probes showed up. Rock Dancer killed them as easily as he had killed the first, but this was troublesome. Where there is bat guano there’s bats: perhaps there was a more serious Amok contingent inbound. This could be worrisome. He increased his internal activation level, and powered up all of his remote distributed sensors and telescopes.

  At first there were just ten fuzzy blobs in the far infrared. He tasked more sensors on them, and increased the resolution. There were, indeed, ten contacts scattered in a loose formation about 1,000 kilometers apart. They were each a kilometer across, but covered in a stealth black coating that made it hard to tell what they were. He sent out more alerts, and continued to watch.

  His sensors noticed a change in the contacts. They must have assumed that they would be in scanner range by now, because
they were shedding their stealth coatings. The contacts were each solid, single constructions, shaped like dodecahedrons. Massive pentagonal faces, twelve to a contact. These weren’t just missile launch pods, these were true interstellar battleships, their surfaces studded with antennae and heavy weapons emplacements. What the heck?

  He sent out the alerts and data-feeds to his peers. The first replies came back in a couple of minutes from the closest of his fellow asteroid-dwellers. They expressed astonishment, said that they were going to start warming up their weapons systems, and offered to lend him use of their own surveying equipment and long-range sensors. Then the replies came in from the core worlds. They were tsunamis of demands, advice, half-baked-simulations, proclamations of support, preliminary analyses, so much stuff that it was effectively useless.

  In time the data traffic settled down. The first serious military analyses had been done, and it looked like the cybertanks had been the victim of the old ‘expert trap.’

  When you keep fighting the same enemies, you get better and better at it. Eventually you reach such a high state of refinement that you become an expert. Then some blundering amateur comes around and does what you didn’t expect, and catches you off guard.

  Giant space battleships (like that idiot Fanboy) did not make sense. You can pound on them with one nuclear missile after another until you wear them away. So the cybertanks had worked on developing ever more refined stealth missiles and micro-interceptors and scouts. Now they were faced with giant space battleships and they weren’t ready.

  There was nothing special about these Amok space battleships. The cybertanks could have destroyed them easily, if only they had had enough warning to prepare. Which they did not have. A single missile would be easily intercepted by their defenses. A lucky hit would cause some damage, but not so much that it couldn’t be repaired before the next hit: only a coordinated strike with thousands of missiles could take out this force, and the cybertanks had a time limit.