Do you doubt my word?
“No, I don’t. First, because we go way back and I trust you implicitly. Second, because your story is the high probability. Assuming that forensics matches, we will find that the explosives had been touched by Doubletap, and that the vampire had been fighting with and injured by him as well. But others could argue that it was the vampire, or even you, that had set the explosives, and Doubletap touched them to deactivate them, and then he fought to prevent you and the vampire from detonating them. So far it is all circumstantial, and while you have many friends back home you have as many enemies.”
The vampire will corroborate my story.
“If she lives. If she remembers anything. And if anyone believes her, which they won’t.”
You wouldn’t have any video recordings of that area, would you?
“Please, the humans that designed me were post-neoliberal and didn’t believe in constantly surveilling everyone. And I have had better things to do for the last few thousand years than record and monitor all the tens of millions of cubic meters of my internal space where effectively nothing ever happens. Sorry. I don’t suppose your android has any inbuilt recording systems, do you?
Not that are sufficiently high-resolution enough to stand as evidence. What would have happened if the explosives had gone off?
“Well. Whoever or whatever set them chose their locations well. They were positioned on my mainline data conduits, primary, secondary and tertiary. I would have been crippled. I could have recovered from it, eventually, but not before the Amok battleships had destroyed me.”
Then I suppose that you owe her your life.
“I suppose so. But she was probably surprised and just trying to defend herself. There is not much credit in self-defense.”
Perhaps. On the other hand she could have just run away. But she didn’t. Over the long millennia I have learned many things, but one of the most important is to not over-think matters. If she saved your life, she saved your life.
Fanboy didn’t reply, but just kept looking at the dying Olga Razon. Old guy checked the local data network: Fanboy had dedicated a large fraction of his manufacturing systems to saving the vampire. He should have been using them to prepare for the upcoming battle with the Amok. Old Guy thought about raising an objection, then decided against it. What the heck. It’s his show. And one way or another, it will be over soon.
I imagine this means that you won’t be sending her back to the main planet in a cargo pod?
“Indeed not, she is in no condition to travel. I could try freezing her, but that is a delicate process and requires a stable physiology. The odds of her surviving freezing in her current state are hardly 5%.”
It would be a shame if you saved her, only to have her die in your fight with the Amok.
“Yes it would, but I intend to fight one battle at a time. If she stabilizes quickly enough I can try sending her back, but at some point I will be close enough to the Amok that they would intercept any isolated vessels. Well, we’ll see. Perhaps I will beat the Amok and the point will become moot.”
Old Guy watched as Fanboy continued to try and save the life of the female vampire. The rate at which her vital signs were declining had slowed; a positive trend.
There wasn’t anything that he could do to help, so he excused himself from the surgery and decided to assist in preparing for combat. He coordinated with Fanboy’s local network to find a suitable task for his android body. It looked like he would be best employed scouring the ship for bits and pieces that were not essential, and that might be recycled into combat systems. He exited an airlock out of the pressurized zone and into the main hull spaces. Most of the inside of Fanboy was in a vacuum, and the spaces were dimly and erratically lit. Many passages were narrow and cramped, others the size of small roads. Unlike a terrestrial system, there was no premium on making efficient use of space, and there were a surprising number of large empty spaces.
In a corner of one room were several piles of boxes; the manifest indicated spare parts for machines that had been obsolete for some time. Old Guy signaled for a cargo unit; the drone was just a flat slab of metal mounted on four wheels. He loaded the boxes onto the cargo unit, then climbed on himself, and rode it back one of the manufacturing centers. Then he unloaded the boxes, the cargo unit rolled off to some other job, and he busied himself with sorting out the different bits and putting them into the proper material feeds.
The job was slow and steady work, relaxing in its own way, and it gave him plenty of time to think. He checked the local network again: most of the cybertanks that had sent subminds to the party had transmitted themselves back home. Other than Fanboy, there was only himself, Frisbee, Rock Dancer, and Uncle Jon left. That is, if you didn’t count a comatose vampire, a space monkey, and an office copier.
Office copiers don’t send subminds over data links, and this one had declined the offer of transport home, so it was going to stay for the battle. As per usual diplomatic protocols, it had been allowed restricted access to the cybertank data networks. Periodically it sent encrypted reports back to its fellows. Office copiers frequently held themselves aloof, even in combat, but this one had decided to assist with sorting and stacking the voluminous telemetry data coming in from the Amok fleet. It was doing an efficient job of it.
The space monkey was helping to assemble combat drones, its tiny hands fitting parts together with manic intensity. Zippo was not smart enough to understand how to assemble a combat drone, but his computer subsystems did. Zippo only knew that he was a good space monkey and that he was being helpful. Biological monkeys don’t understand kinematics or advanced control theory, but their spinal cords and muscle groups do, so monkeys can easily race through trees. Old Guy watched Zippo for a while, and admired its speed and dexterity. Rock Dancer had done a fine job of engineering here. Perhaps Old Guy should adopt the design for some of his own lighter- duty remotes.
He opened a channel to his old friend Frisbee, who was similarly engaged with scavenging odd bits and pieces for recycling.
Hey, Frisbee, how are things?
“Things are fine, Old Guy. I’m in a forward cargo hold sorting out coat-hangers from an ancient collection of video conversion modules. At least I think that they are coat hangars. I cannot conceive of any other possible use for these things. It’s really quite amazing the amount of useless junk that Fanboy has accumulated.”
If you have never been in combat, and never needed to optimize your thrust-to-weight ratio, I suppose that accreting junk is only to be expected. Still, there is a lot more of it than I expected.
“There certainly is, although I suppose that as a fraction of his total mass it is still modest. Not to change the subject, but have you accessed the news from back home? Your little dust-up with Doubletap has caused quite the stir.”
I am aware of this. Doubletap claims that his android must have been intercepted by the Amok en route to the party and reprogrammed. Nobody has dared to publicly discuss the obvious alternatives – that Doubletap is a traitor, or that I tried to frame a fellow-cybertank – but the implications are there. It may only be a matter of time before people start to pick sides. I saw what this did to the humans, and I had hoped that it would never happen to us.
“There are also calls for shifting our civilization to a more serious war footing. Centralized controls on resources, restricting access to information, that sort of thing. Most of this is coming from the usual offenders but some is coming from people that I would never have expected.”
It is worrisome. You and I are some of the few who remember how it was with the humans. We all have access to the historical records, but that is not the same thing as direct experience. The Amok don’t worry me – we might lose this system, but we have plenty more and we will be ready for them next time. It’s what our reaction to them might do to our culture.
“Don’t forget, I am not the same Thor-Class that fought with you against the neoliberals back in the days when there were h
umans around. I’ve gone through a rebuild, and while I like to think that my core personality has hardly changed, and I still have the memories, nevertheless I wasn’t there. The number of cybertanks like yourself, with unbroken continuity and direct personal experience of those times, is dwindling rapidly. Currently there are only 58 of them left, and most had only brief contact with the humans. You are rapidly becoming unique.”
Frisbee forwarded Old Guy a live video feed of his efforts in the forward cargo hold. True to his description, the objects he was sorting looked not quite like coat-hangars, but even less like anything else. There was also a small brown fuzzy thing.
“Hey, Old Guy, take a look at this! It’s the mummified carcass of a rat! I wonder how it got in here? Perhaps while Fanboy was being assembled this zone was pressurized?”
I have no idea. I suppose that you could check the construction records and find out.
“It’s a Rattus rattus – smaller and less aggressive than Rattus norvegicus, but more of a climber than a burrower. Did you know that there are rats on all the planets that the humans colonized? Even the vampire planet has rats on it.” Frisbee gently picked up the mummified corpse of the rat. “I don’t see any sign of mutations, so it’s probably a generic Rattus rattus, but I’d have to run some tests to be sure. The species was starting to fractionate around then.”
I’m sorry, but we don’t have the time for it. Just throw it in the organic compound bin, finish off with your coat-hangars, and move on. Every kilo of junk we recycle is a kilo more of weapons that we can throw at the Amok.
“You’re right,” said Frisbee as he tossed the dead rat into a receptacle. It was so desiccated from long exposure to vacuum that the corpse partially disintegrated when it landed. “Odds are it’s just a rat, anyhow. And a kilo of stuff in the right trajectory is worth ten sitting at the bottom of a gravity well.”
So, what do you make of the vampire?
“What’s to make? She’s a vampire. The ecology of the underlying virus is certainly interesting, but there is nothing unusual in this specific example. Odds are that she’ll die in surgery, or in combat with the Amok later on. Fanboy seems quite taken with her though. He is certainly going through a lot of effort to save her.”
I suppose so. But she did stop Fanboy from being sabotaged, which would have led to all of us dying. So that makes us allies, however unlikely. It’s a cold uncaring universe out there. I’ll take all the allies that I can get. Also, it’s bad form to let an invited guest die during a party.
“Agreed on that, old comrade. Still, do you think that the two of them could ever really be friends? I mean, they seem to get along, but she is a sociopath.”
Why not? Domestic cats are sociopaths, but look at all the humans that enjoyed their company. Empathy is over-rated. If you find pleasure being with someone, and they find pleasure being with you, well, isn’t that enough?
“Like you and that poorly-named bioengineered super-predator ‘Mondocat’, perhaps?”
Perhaps. Although I don’t think that Mondocat qualifies as a true sociopath. Meanwhile let us continue our efforts as we recycle our way to victory! Let no ill-formed coat-hanger stand in our way!”
---------------
Fanboy steadily closed the range with the Amok battlefleet, while adding to his distributed cloud of weaponry. Against the odds, the vampire Olga Razon survived and regained consciousness. Old Guy wandered the length and breadth of Fanboy’s hull, finding all sorts of things to recycle into armaments. A pile of aluminum alloy tubes with diameters ranging from 4 to 45 millimeters. Several sets of exotic leather underwear, all size 32B. Pseudo-sentient nose art. A dog-eared plasti-sheet hardcopy of the May 2255 edition of The Journal of Deep Space Combat. Bags of glass marbles. Obsolete surface-acoustic wave processors. Coffee filters. How did this all stuff get here anyhow?
Old Guy took some time off to visit the injured vampire. Her condition was stable, and she was lying in a bed with multiple tubes and wires snaking out from underneath the plain white sheets. Her left leg was missing from above the knee, but the real damage was to her head. Even the heavy gauze bandages could not hide the fact that the right side of her skull was lumpy and deformed.
Hello Olga, how are you doing? Glad to see that you made it. We were worried about you there, for a while.
The vampire was not exactly what one would call ‘chipper.’ “Thank you,” she said in a weak voice. “I’m alive, for whatever that’s worth. Did you get that asshole Doubletap?”
Yes, I got him. Hit him with some lawn darts, then stomped him flat. I’ve had worse experiences.
“That’s right, Fanboy told me that. That’s good. But I meant the real one? The big metal one, the one that counts. Did you get him?”
Not yet. We’re not even sure if he was responsible. But we’re working on it.
“Well OK then. Figure it out, then kill him. Oh, am I supposed to say ‘please’? I can’t remember.” She gestured at her head. “The worst is the pain. I have headaches that don’t go away, worse than I ever thought possible. It’s hard to think.” She started to cry. “I don’t want to be like this! Whatever happens, promise that you won’t leave me like this!”
Old Guy checked the records, and saw that the vampire was on some serious pain medications. She was almost due for another dose, so he boosted the schedule and had the infusion pump give her another shot. After a brief delay, Olga sighed and relaxed.
“I should say thank you, shouldn’t I? Thank you. That’s so much better. But where is Fanboy? Why isn’t he here?”
Fanboy is getting ready to fight the Amok battlefleet. He is busy and cannot be distracted. So he sent me. He wants me to tell you that, if we survive, he can make you as good as new. He can regrow your leg, and rebuild your head, and even your missing eye. It’s just that it will take time, and he can’t start the process now.
“We’re all going to die, aren’t we? Killed by these Amok things? Why even bother?”
Old Guy patted her gently on the wrist. No worries now. Fanboy is eccentric but he IS a 1.5 kilometer long super-intelligent interstellar space battle cruiser (which is not a bad thing to be if you think about it), and if anyone can beat the Amok he can. He also has a lot of help. The whole star system is sending him reinforcements. Nothing is certain in this universe, but have faith. He can do this. He really can.
Old Guy got up to leave. “No, don’t go, stay and talk with me,” said the vampire. Old Guy was going to make an excuse that he had work to do, but in truth he and Frisbee and Rock Dancer and Uncle Jon had finally scavenged up about all the old junk that there was to scavenge. So he talked about his creator, commander, comrade, and friend, Giuseppe Vargas. He told her about the child that he and Double-Wide had had, “Smartass” and how proud they were of him. He rambled on about the Amok, and the Yllg, and bowling, and wizards, and somewhere along the way he realized that Olga Razon was fast asleep.
---------------
As Fanboy and the Amok fleet closed the range, there were more and more mini-battles between their lead elements. Light scouts killed other light scouts, stealthed sensor probes tried to sneak in for just a little closer view before they were inevitably killed, and heavier units charged forwards daring the main defenses to open up so that their effectiveness could be judged. Still, both sides were pulling their punches. They were saving up for the main event.
If you could kill the enemy at long range with a missile barrage, well, good for you. But if you try and fail, then you will have shot your bolt. The enemy will repair whatever damage you have done, and when the range is closed they will hit you with missiles AND short-range weaponry and you will be blackened toast. However, if you hold back, and the enemy launches first - then if they kill you all of your potential is wasted. So the big question in any space battle is: who pulls the trigger first? So far nobody had. But as the distance closed, the temptation to be the first to launch got higher and higher.
The vampire had moved out of critical con
dition, but was still badly mangled. They had rigged up a prosthetic leg for her, not even powered just bits of plastic and metal hinges and springs, incredibly crude but she could walk on it, with some effort. She still had the bandages over the crushed side of her head: Fanboy told her that they were needed to protect her from infection, privately he told Old Guy that he wanted to shield her from seeing how deformed she was. Underneath all of those bandages one might at least pretend that there was a beautiful woman.
In a cargo hold near Fanboys’ central axis was an ancient trans-atmospheric shuttle which had its own independent power systems and was pressurized. Old Guy had been deputized as a protector, and helped Olga move into the tiny craft. There were supplies of oxygen, fresh water, preserved blood, painkillers, and power cells. If Fanboy did lose the battle, there was at least a chance that they could survive in the middle of his wreckage and get picked up by friendly forces later after they had drifted away.
Olga had wondered why she couldn’t just stay in the pressurized zone, and Old Guy had explained how in space combat pressurized areas are extremely vulnerable to shock, and that Fanboy had needed to evacuate the air from it to make himself less vulnerable. They would be far safer in a small pressure vessel buried in the middle of his hull and surrounded by vacuum.
Old Guy had assisted Olga getting into her pressure suit, and tried to give her instructions on how to use it. The suit was an advanced model, manufactured just before the humans had stopped requiring such technological artifice to survive harsh conditions, and had many safety interlocks. Still, there were a variety of ways that a biological hominid might kill themselves in such a suit if they weren’t careful. Old Guy tried to tutor Olga in its proper usage: he worried more about her morale than he did about her abilities.
Space Battleship Scharnhorst and the Library of Doom (An Old Guy/Cybertank Adventure) Page 11