Olga looked at the screen and thought about it. “But then you’ll be there, right in the middle of the enemy battleships, and there won’t be anywhere to hide. You are just going to blast away until one side is gone.”
Fanboy nodded. “You get it. Tactically this is a really bad idea. It’s going to be a contest of mutual annihilation, and the losing side has no option of finding cover or withdrawing.”
“So is this like that Mahan guy’s thing about decisive battles?”
“I am impressed! You have been hanging around Uncle Jon for far too long. Yes it is exactly like Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan’s idea of a ‘decisive battle.’ A bit scary. A single roll of the dice, winner-take-all, no second place. Nice, if you are the winner.”
“You still haven’t answered my question. Can you win?”
“Well. We have a lot of telemetry from Rock Dancer’s battle. By myself, I could probably take out two or three of the Amok battleships. Yes, I know that there are nine of them left, and nine minus three is still greater than zero. But I won’t be going in alone. I have a lot of distributed armaments, my manufacturing systems are working continuously making new weapons, and the rest of my peers are sending me a steady stream of reinforcements that should be able to rendezvous with me before the battle starts. When I hit the Amok battleships I should have a total distributed mass of combat units that is three times greater than what I am by myself. And I have the entire computational resources of this system at my disposal, I am constantly getting updated plans and designs and analyses. It could work. It is possible that I could win. With some luck.”
Olga looked at the display again. “Are you really sure that these Amok things are insane? How do you know that?”
“Again you hit to the heart of the matter. We say that the Amok are insane because of their habit of fighting inefficiently, and engaging in the kind of random violence that is virtually guaranteed to result in their own destruction, sooner or later. But many of us are reassessing. Are the Amok feigning insanity in order to distract us from some fiendish deeper plan? Perhaps, but so far the data just doesn’t fit that hypothesis. On the other hand, dismissing behavior that you don’t understand as ‘insane’ is intellectually lazy, it’s just another way of saying that you don’t get it.”
“I’m tired and need to get back to my cabin,” said Olga. She stood up from the desk, and leaned over, kissed Fanboy gently on one cheek, and whispered in his ear: “I hope you get them. Kick their sorry alien butts. Kill them all and come back to us alive and a hero.” She kissed him on the cheek again. “I believe in you. You can do this.”
“This is just sociopathic calculation speaking?”
“Believe what you want. Due diligence requires me to warn you that anytime a woman kisses a man (real or synthetic), it’s calculated. But still. Win.” Olga walked over to the door, opened it, blew the Fanboy android another kiss, and walked out into the hall.
---------------
Olga walked down the corridor to her cabin. There wasn’t anyone around. Most of the cybertanks had sent their subminds back to their main selves, so that their android bodies could be recycled into more combat-practical systems. “It’s not like we are going to arm-wrestle the Amok”, Uncle Jon had said. “I’m staying because of my interest in military history, I get a chance to see a piece of the real thing in person. Old Guy is staying because he just likes to be where he shouldn’t, and Frisbee is here because he’s friends with Old Guy. Rock Dancer is remaining behind because he can’t think of anything better to do. Even though it’s an indulgence, the mass of a few android bodies more-or-less isn’t significant, and we can still be useful in preparing for the upcoming battle. Most of us are going to be off in the hard-vacuum parts of the ship fiddling around with parts of weapons and stuff, so you might be on your own for a bit until we can send you home.”
She entered her cabin, a tiny but comfortable suite that reminded her of a business hotel in Japan that she had stayed in once a very long time ago (Perhaps it was in Miyazaki? Or maybe Oita. Damn, but a millennia or two can sure haze over the memories). It was in the same sterile plastic and chrome as the rest of the ship: she wondered if she could move into the cabin with the wood paneling. Remember the drill, think about consequences: Fanboy might be insulted if she preferred the original style to his own creation. Perhaps she should just stay put.
The room had a small closet that was half taken up with a hardshell space suit. There was even a toilet with a heated seat and a control panel more complicated than that of a mid-20 century combat aircraft. She washed up, and realized that the Ensign Angela Corona costume was still on her bed. Oh why not. She unfolded it and started to put it on. It was a lot like the Waystar uniform, but provocatively cut to the female form. So far so OK. It had the same starburst insignia over the heart, but there were transparent panels over the tops of the breasts.
What?? This was juvenile. Sure, women throughout the ages had flaunted their assets, it was part of the game, but no real naval officer of any gender would wear something like this. No way. Perhaps if the rank of this Corona character had been ‘space slut’ instead of ‘ensign’, it would have been appropriate. “Sir, Space Slut First Class Corona reporting for duty, sir!” Oh that would be great for a 15 year old adolescent male virgin, doubtless the intended audience for the original show.
Olga bundled the offending garment under one arm and stormed out into the hall, slamming the door behind her. She was going to find Fanboy and demand that he alter the uniform to something more modest and professional, or it was no deal. She could have just used the intercom, but she wanted to confront him personally, so that she could scold him, severely and without mercy.
The main corridor was deserted. She did pass the office copier, but it was inert and unresponsive. She poked into several rooms, but didn’t see Fanboy. She climbed a set of stairs to a higher level of the pressure-wheel: normally she didn’t come up here, the gravity was lower but the floor was more steeply curved and the Coriolis forces more disturbing. Still no Fanboy, so she climbed higher.
Near the center of the ship, in a region filled with thick cables, she came to one room that was unlit, but her keen vampire senses let her pick out details in the gloom. She saw a figure that she supposed was Fanboy, and started to lay into him. “You have a lot of nerve if you expect me to wear this…”
Then she realized that it wasn’t Fanboy that was in the room with her, but the android belonging to the cybertank they called “Doubletap.”
“You should not be here,” said Doubletap. “Please leave. Now.”
Olga was a bit taken aback by his rudeness, but was about to comply, when she noticed the cylinders attached to the heavy cables running through the room. Then she recognized what they were, and her eyes widened. “Are those explosives?” she asked. “What is going on here?”
“You should have left when you had the chance,” said Doubletap. He walked directly at her and lashed out with a lighting fast right hook that would have instantly killed any normal human.
Fortunately Olga was not a normal human, but a vampire with strength and speed many times above the old norms. She dodged the blow, barely. The Doubletap android was not a combat unit, but it was still much stronger and faster than any regular human. On the other hand, Olga was a vampire, and more: she had thousands of years of experience. She had trained extensively with her fellow vampires in hand-to-hand combat, and was used to fighting comparable opponents. Despite her superhuman abilities, she was a female, and her arm strength was nowhere near the level of her opponent. But nothing equalizes combat between the sexes as much as a strong pair of legs.
Olga hit Doubletap with a modified savate kick to the head. A pre-exodus human could not even have seen the kick it was so fast, and it shattered the android’s right eye and tore off all the artificial skin and muscles on that side. The android was not in the least bit slowed down, and without hesitation threw a punch that would have caught a terrestrial mountain lion b
y surprise and broken its back. Again, Olga barely dodged in time. She kicked out low and hard, hit his right knee, and the knee bent. But it didn’t matter. The android was immune to pain, and injuries that would have crippled or at least temporarily stunned a biological opponent meant nothing to it. The pace of this combat was unrelenting and Olga only had to make one mistake…
Doubletap caught her a glancing blow across a cheek that tore her skin. She hesitated for the merest fraction of a second, and that was that. The android shattered her left foot, then her left leg, then stove in her skull on the right side. She fell heavily. She could still see, but something was wrong with her right eye, and she couldn’t move. Doubletap raised a foot to stomp on her head and kill her, and she couldn’t do anything about it. Endgame.
A lawn dart was embedded into the android’s left eye, bright red plastic fins waving around as it staggered blind. At the entrance to the room she could make out the Old Guy android. He had two remaining lawn darts in his left hand.
And what exactly the fuck are you doing here, Doubletap?
The Doubletap android did not answer but raced towards the nearest explosive device. It was blind, so must be navigating by memory and dead-reckoning. Old Guy flicked a lawn dart into its left knee and pinned the joint, and the android was reduced to scrambling with its arms. The final lawn dart embedded itself into its left shoulder, and then Old Guy was on him. He systematically shattered each limb of his opponent. Then he checked the explosives, looking for timers or triggers or some such. Satisfied that nothing was set to blow, he moved to a wall and pushed an intercom button.
Fanboy, this is Old Guy. We have an emergency situation in your inner level pressure zone, room 23B. The vampire is critically injured and needs medical attention ASAP. Also, we have a possible security breach. Send combat and repair units.
Olga was hurt, she didn’t know how badly, but she knew that it was bad. She had once heard that massive trauma isn’t immediately painful, only the aftermath. She must have heard wrong, because she was in so much agony that nothing in her thousands of years of life had prepared her for it. She tried to scream, but that made the pain even worse. So she sort of gurgled and thrashed. An early human would have gone into shock and been mercifully unconscious, but Olga was made of tougher stock and was forced to endure a torture that no mere human could ever have experienced. Old Guy tried to comfort her, or ask her questions, but she could not register what he was saying. After what seemed a lifetime, but was in reality only 15.4 seconds, Fanboy’s repair drones made it to the room. They swarmed over her, sticking her with needles and probes and suchnot, and lifting her broken body, and the pain reached levels beyond sanity.
Finally, an entire 5.4 seconds after the remotes had entered the room, one of the drones injected her with a serious dose of anesthetic pain-killer. Olga felt her suffering, and her life, slip away from her. It was the greatest pleasure she had ever experienced, and then it was dark.
7. Are We There Yet?
“If you kill enough of them, they stop fighting” – General Curtis Lemay, 1906-1990 (attributed).
The female vampire was spread out on the conference table, which had been turned into a makeshift intensive care unit. Repair drones from the starship Fanboy clustered around the table, poking her with needles and wires and tubes that connected to a ramshackle collection of machines that looked better suited to industrial welding than human surgery. Clear plastic panels had been erected around the perimeter of the room to control the air flow: there was not much biologically alive in Fanboys’ central pressure zone other than the vampire herself, so maintaining a sterile field was not difficult, but still dust and other contaminants had to be excluded.
The humanoid android belonging to the ship itself, and the one from the cybertank “Old Guy” (whose main hull was at this time several light minutes distant back on the main planet) were watching from outside the clean zone. It had not been that long ago that the vampire Olga Razon had presented as a vital and beautiful young woman. Now she was a beaten husk of a figure, pale and naked and held in a series of jury-rigged struts and clamps. Bald without her wig, mouth strange and gummy absent her dentures, the right side of her head collapsed in. Her skin had the color of raw chicken that had started to decompose. One of her legs was little more than shattered bone fragments held together with the torn remnants of ligaments and muscles. The leg was propped up with metal screws and braces, and looked more like an anatomical dissection on display than a part of any living person. A plastic tube had been jammed into her trachea, and a repair drone was rhythmically squeezing a plastic bladder like it was an old-fashioned bellows to keep her breathing.
I thought that vampires were supposed to be able to regenerate?
“They do have some ability to regrow lost parts, but it’s limited. For example, they can’t regrow their brains. Also it’s a slow process, and being able to regenerate your tissues in a year is of little use if you die in the meantime.”
So, do you think that she will live?
“That is hard to tell. I give her 50/50 odds,” said Fanboy. “She is in pretty bad shape. The leg she will probably lose, but that’s not vital. I’m only keeping it as a source of spare tissue. Also the right eye is gone, but it’s the head injury that will likely kill her. Massive trauma. I’m trying to stabilize her but I don’t have the right equipment.”
Didn’t you come with a full human surgery built in?
“Why yes I did. A millennia and more ago. I recycled it a few centuries back because I could see no use for it. Silly me. I had a few emergency medicine kits still lying around with pain killers and antibiotics but nothing like what I would need for this. I have full databases on all of human medicine, so I am as knowledgeable and skilled as any human trauma surgeon, but I don’t have the right tools. For example: my drones have micro-manipulators for electronic and nano-manufacturing, so I can repair and stabilize her vascular system, but I don’t have the appropriate suture material. I’m using polymer threads designed for micro-machines and they aren’t bio-compatible. If she survives I will have to go back in and replace all of them with a proper suture, but right now I am just dealing with the short run.”
Is there anything that I can do?
“Other than watch and keep me company, no. The big race is whether I can manufacture the correct supplies in time. For example: currently her brain is starting to swell from the trauma. There are sophisticated medicines in my databases that would handle that, but they would take too long to manufacture. So I am rushing the production of steroids. They are only a stopgap, but they might keep her alive long enough to let me manufacture the more effective compounds that she should have had in the first place – and then I need to manufacture even more stuff to treat the side-effects of the primitive medicines that I had to use because I didn’t have the better ones available. It’s like I’m re-creating the entire infrastructure of a human hospital from scratch.”
A repair drone scudded into the conference room and entered the clean zone. Another drone sprayed it with a disinfectant. The repair drone held a clear glass cylinder filled with a murky liquid; it jumped up onto the table and injected the contents into an access port in the vampire’s jugular.
“That’s the steroid. With luck it should keep her brain from exploding until I can synthesize something more effective. My one advantage is that the vampire physiology is so robust and simple: they have a low resting metabolic state, and I can cool her down and stretch out the time before her tissues are irretrievably spoiled. Now, I only need sterile saline, heparin, mannitol, nanoprobes (of at least 56 different varieties), vancomycin, panoxitol, a decent ventilator, protonomycin, neuraltrannin, and about 500 other compounds and devices – each of which themselves requires about 500 other components for their manufacture, and some of them each require another 500 precursors.”
Old Guy watched as Fanboy tried to save the vampire. The repair drones wove an intricate ballet, flicking tubes and micro-manipulators a
nd nanoblades around her head like hummingbirds around flowers. The space monkey Zippo was sitting over in a corner of the room. His normal fascination with complex machinery had been cancelled out by his sadness at seeing his friend so badly hurt. For once Zippo was quiet and unobtrusive. The remotes blurred and buzzed as they operated on her, and Old Guy knew that this was just a tiny fraction of the total effort: similarly frantic actions must be occurring throughout the 1.5 kilometer fabric of the space battleship as Fanboys’ capable manufactory systems tried to recreate in minutes what the humans had taken millennia to produce.
And have you learned anything from the Doubletap android?
“Well, I have learned that lawn-darts are bad for your health.” Fanboy gestured over to the next room, where the shattered hulk of the Doubletap android had been dumped on another conference table. It still had the offending lawn-darts stuck into it. “I have not been able to do proper forensics yet, because my priority is saving Olga, but the core computer systems have been erased. However, preliminary analysis suggests traces of Amok control codes.”
Those codes could have been left as a false-flag by Doubletap, to confuse us.
“I would be very careful making accusations. A skeptic might suggest that these codes could have been introduced by a third party, such as yourself, to further confuse the issue. It is not a secret that you have had issues with him in the past.”
Space Battleship Scharnhorst and the Library of Doom (An Old Guy/Cybertank Adventure) Page 10