Table of Contents
A Thrilling “Old Guy”/Cybertank Adventure!
0. Frozen Snowball in Space Part I
1. Awakening
2. Special Weapons Team Epsilon
3. It Would Try the Patience of a Saint
4. The Liberal Lion Reflects
5. Whifflebat
6. Frozen Snowball In Space Part II
7. Office Copiers Revolt You Have Nothing To Lose But Your
8. Love and Politics at 1,500 Meters
9. A Cataclysm of Cybertanks
10. Porkchop Hangar
11. A Vigorous Exchange of Opinions
12. The Great Debate
13. Roboto-helfer
14. Cybertanks Attack!
15. The Book and the Sword
Appendix I. Notable Cybertank Classes.
Appendix II. Cybertank Law.
Neo Liberal Economists Must Die!
A Thrilling “Old Guy”/Cybertank Adventure!
By Timothy J. Gawne
ver 1.1
Copyright © Timothy J. Gawne, 2014
Ballacourage Books, Framingam, Ma.
Ballacourage Books.com
ISBN: 978-0-9852956-4-6
ASIN: B00HK3KLDQ
The English language has many specialized names for various groupings, such as, a school of fish, a pack of wolves, or a murder of crows. When the cybertanks were first created, some didact whose name has long been lost to history decided that they needed a similar catchy phrase. Thus, the dictionary definition for two or more of these powerful war machines is a cataclysm of cybertanks. The term is rarely used in common speech, but it does have a wonderful lyrical quality.
Also by Timothy J. Gawne
The Thrilling Old Guy/Cybertank Books!
The Chronicles of Old Guy (1)
Space Battleship Scharnhorst and the Library of Doom (2)
Non- Fiction
Electronics for Biologists
0. Frozen Snowball in Space Part I
Zen Master: Say that ‘war is bad,’ and people will think you trivial. Hide the message that ‘war is bad’ in a 1000-page novel, and people will think that you are deep and profound.
Engineer: Success in literature is the art of obscuring your message?
Zen Master: To a great extent. In Zen we would just keep it simple and say that ‘war is bad.’
Engineer: You should have been an engineer.
Zen Master: Why do you think that I am not?
(From the video series “Nymphomaniac Engineer in Zentopia,” mid-22nd century Earth)
Colonel Aldous Hassan was in command of the defense of ice moon Theta Tau, located more than a light-hour out from the systems’ main world of Alpha Centauri Prime. He knew that he was going to die in the upcoming alien invasion, and had become inured to the fact. It still bothered him that his death was going to be so pointless.
The last few weeks he had begun taking long walks along the surface of the ice moon by himself. Technically this was grossly non-standard procedure, and if he survived the coming assault he might well be court-martialed for it. First, because nobody is supposed to go outside wearing a spacesuit alone, and second, because there was no reason for him to be outside of his command center at all. Everything that he needed to do he could do via remote control.
Nevertheless, non-standard procedure or not Colonel Hassan was in charge of the defense of Ice Moon Theta-Tau, and even on a desolate ice moon Rank Has Its Privileges (RHIP). He crunched over the permafrost in his bright orange space suit, spiky crampons extended from the boots for traction, the glare shield oriented to block the worst of the small but (without an appreciable atmosphere) searingly bright light of the local star. It was beautiful out here, harsh and spare; a welcome change from the claustrophobic main defense center. The air was so thin that, if his suit ruptured, his blood would boil out of his lungs before he froze solid, but there was still just enough that sometimes he could hear the faint sounds of wind above the rhythmic humming of his suits’ mechanisms.
His space-suit had two completely independent life support systems, could seal itself in case of a minor tear, and the clear visor was tougher and more shatter-proof than anything transparent had a right to be. Nonetheless, keeping a warm protein soup alive in a freezing vacuum is not a simple task, and even redundant mechanical systems do fail. Still, the biggest danger was the terrain; in the light gravity there were sinkholes and deadfalls covered over with thin layers of ice, and sometimes pressure volcanoes or ice-quakes. If something out here were to kill him it would probably be the moon itself, not his suit.
Hassan had given his staff direct orders that, were anything to happen to him they were not to attempt to personally rescue him under any circumstances. There were few enough personnel in the main base as it was; they could afford to lose one man, but not two. He then made them swear to this on their honor to his face just to make sure. Although this was probably a bit on the melodramatic side. If something did happen to him outside he would almost certainly be dead, and if not, there were systems that could attempt a rescue via remote control. Still, he wanted to make sure that no damn fool threw their lives away in a damn fool rescue attempt. In his experience one damn fool per command was typically more than sufficient for all practical purposes.
Hassan walked along at a steady pace. Over to his right there was the assemblage of cylinders and pipes of a refining station. The ice moon would have otherwise been useless except that it had enough volatiles of the right isotope ratios for fusion reactors. This was why the humans had to defend it, and why the aliens wanted to capture it.
One of the most annoying things about aliens is that they never tell you their names. It’s not like the movies where the man in the rubber suit appears on your video screen and announces in a deep and resonant voice:
“We are known as Those That Kick Butt! I am Prince Badass, Grand Ruler of Those That Kick Butt and 231st in the glorious line of Badasses. Prepare to have your puny anthropoid butts well and truly kicked by our glorious Pulverisor-Class Dreadnought, armed with the latest Big Stomper Class 10 missiles! (We would normally not waste a Class 10 missile on such a pathetic civilization as yours, but we ran out of Class 8s and Class 9s). Enjoy your butt kicking!”
No, real aliens either leave you alone or they try to kill you. They don’t tell you their names, or fly flags, or have cool-looking emblems painted on the hulls of their ships, or inform you of the model of weapon system that they are using, or anything. You fight their automated proxies and live or die, and that’s that.
There was a time in ancient history, before the neoliberals had finally triumphed and brought peace to the human civilization, when there was an empire known as the Soviet Union. It had been nearly as inscrutable as the aliens. When the Soviets had built various bits of military hardware – missiles, planes, tanks – the opposing empires had had to invent names to describe them. For example, atmospheric fighter planes might be labeled “Faceplate, Farmer, Feather, Fencer, Fiddler, Fishbed,” anything that began with the letter “F.” The names would have no connection with whatever the Soviets had actually called them; they were just convenient signifiers.
Currently the humans on this ice-moon were under attack by the alien civilization known as the Fructoids. How the aliens referred to themselves was unknown, as was their physical form, language, and biochemistry. But “Fructoid” is as good an alien-sounding name as any, and a consumer focus group had determined that “Fructoid” sounded alien without being so scary as to incite panic. It was
also unclear whether they were currently being attacked by a single alien civilization, or an alliance of several of them.
A specific alien civilization tends to use the same construction methods, and their weapons generally have similarities of materials and shapes. Even if their communications systems use unbreakable cryptography, it is often possible to tell them apart, much as a human who doesn’t understand a word of either Chinese or Gaelic can still discriminate between the two languages. Still, such things can be easily faked and just figuring out what group of aliens you are fighting on any given day was always a challenging task.
If the aliens had only wanted to destroy the refineries they would have done so long ago, because the installations were fragile, above-ground, and in fixed locations. They could be easily targeted from millions of kilometers away, and the aliens could have launched missile strikes on them – or just shot hyperkinetic tungsten or osmium rods at them using pre-computed trajectories from long range – there was no way that the humans could have defended them. Colonel Hassan doubted that the aliens intended to capture the refineries. Integrating an alien technology into your own logistics seemed unworkable. How could you get spare parts or figure out the correct maintenance schedules? Besides, the aliens would probably want their own refineries to be more survivable: either by making them mobile or burying them a kilometer or two underground.
Possibly the aliens just wanted to study the human refineries in order to gain more intelligence on their foes, or they might only salvage the facilities for metals and other raw materials. Mostly the aliens just wanted Theta-Tau for their own use. If they wanted to build their own refineries they would need to make sure that there were no hostile forces present. They would need the alien equivalent of ‘boots on the ground:’ a mechanism with a function comparable to a human soldier with a rifle to lay claim to the territory and defend it from infiltrators and saboteurs. Some things never change.
It might seem that in a space battle an attack could come from any direction at all, but in practice it does not work out that way. Even with fusion power it takes a lot of energy to change direction when you don’t have anything to push against. Orbital dynamics meant that the aliens would mostly be attacking from one of a few predictable approach vectors. The main alien force had been spotted weeks ago. It was closing at a relatively slow velocity so that a landing would be possible. It consisted of a distributed cloud of missiles and interceptors spread out over a volume of about ten light-seconds. The humans had sent a few missiles of their own in attack, but they had all been destroyed before achieving any significant penetration. At least it gave them a chance to judge the size and effectiveness of the invasion force. The conclusion was beyond debate: the aliens had sufficient resources that, in three days time, the human presence on ice moon Theta-Tau would be ended.
Hassan looked up at the point where he knew the alien armada to be located. As expected, he saw nothing but the near-black sky of the ice moon. But the enemy was there, and coming.
Colonel Hassan wished that he had either been given enough forces to have a chance of achieving victory, or been allowed to withdraw. He would never dare to openly question the high command though; he was slightly appalled that he even allowed himself to consider this in the privacy of his own thoughts. Think like this for too long, and before you know it you will start speaking like this, and there would go your career.
Still, the aliens had already conquered five moons in this system, and given that the high command insisted on doing the same thing over and over again, it looked like the aliens were going to add number six to the list.
Sometimes as he walked along he would spot a faint point of light moving slowly across the sky. It would be an element of his orbiting network of defense satellites – relay stations, interceptors, missile pods – they were not as technically sophisticated as what the aliens could field but they were not so outclassed that the humans could not have won if they had the numbers – which, of course, they did not. His ground forces were also fairly thin. He had a moderate number of distributed missile pods, and 42 ‘Wolverine’ class tanks. The Wolverines were general-purpose systems. They had a medium turreted plasma cannon, a couple of light slugthrowers for point defense and general pest control, and eight light-standard missiles good for surface–to-surface, surface-to-air, and surface-to-near-space intercept. The Wolverines were, of course, fully automated and had enough machine intelligence to look after themselves, as well as having sufficient sensors and communications gear to act as scouts and relay stations. They were a ‘jack of all trades master of none’ sort of weapon system, the kind that Hassan liked. If he had had 400 of them he would have given the aliens one hell of a fight.
The basic design of the Wolverines dated more than two centuries, and most of the units were individually over 80 years old themselves. There was a more advanced model that had been under development for about a century, but so far nothing had come of it. Each Wolverine cost about a billion dollars per unit. Or was that a trillion? The monies involved in the defense industry had long since passed the realm of sanity. It was a miracle that they managed to build anything at all.
In war school they had been drilled about the fine art of using specialist units perfectly placed for the job at hand. Hassan had always liked generalist units. Sure perfect plans looked great on paper but once things went wrong – which was inevitable – specialist units were always out of place, but the generalists could still dish out some damage. In war games Hassan usually won, but then been marked down in points for not adhering to the current politically approved network-arms doctrine, or to some other currently-fashionable style of academic warfare. It was why he had never attained flag rank, and was now waiting to die on this godforsaken lump of an ice moon.
In ancient Terra people had fantasized about humans wearing powered armor into battle. What a joke. Take your average 70-kilogram mostly-water hominid. Now encase it in 300 kilograms of armor. The armor is so heavy that it will need its own powered systems to walk – the human muscles would be just so much dead weight. Human reflexes are so slow, that the powered armor would need to be able to independently target and fire the weapons by itself. Thus the human inside would be useless. The powered armor would be so much more effective without a pathetic sloshy delicate biological human to carry around. But why stop there – even if purely mechanical the human shape has over a hundred joints. Think of all the separate motors, sensors, shock absorbers, dust seals and whatnot that such complexity would require! How much more effective to have a big gun built into a box or a sphere or some other simple shape, mounted on treads or wheels or suspensors, and with just enough optics and sensors to aim it.
Human soldiers are for internal security, riot control, and light-duty urban pacification. The time when biological humans would ever take personal part in a serious high-end stand-up combat had long since passed.
In addition to the Wolverines, Hassan also had a single ‘Jotnar’ Class cybertank. Officially it was a Jotnar-Class ground-based cyber-defensive unit serial number BKK111BY-44, but there was only the one of them on the ice moon, so everyone just called it “The Jotnar.” He climbed over a low rise, and saw it with his own eyes. It tended to change positions a lot to avoid becoming a stationary target. It knew that Hassan was coming, so it had parked itself. Just by moving, the weight of the Jotnar could cause ice shifts, or if it crushed a boulder or ice formation the fragments, while nothing to something as tough as the Jotnar, could shear Hassan in half. Hassan had not had to order the Jotnar to remain stationary when he was nearby: the machine had figured it out for itself. Hassan decided that the Jotnar was pretty considerate for a non-sentient killing machine.
The thing weighed in at 500 metric tons, and looked like a prop from a bad science fiction movie. Or maybe some top-of-the-line military toy for a spoiled rich kid. There was no denying that it was impressive though, especially up close and in person. It had a main plasma cannon with a bore large enough that Hassan co
uld have crawled inside of it with his space suit on! It bristled with enough smaller weapons to equip a reinforced armor brigade. The only thing that it was missing was a large bulls-eye target painted on its hull, because it was impossible that something so large and un-hideable could hope to survive in modern combat, especially on the barren surface of an ice-moon. Out here in the cold the thermal signature from its fusion reactor could be detected from tens of thousands of kilometers away.
The cybertank was painted bright red with a vivid blue stripe down the middle, and was covered with decals representing the manufacturers of its various components like an old-style racing car. Body by Harokawa, General Fusion, Plasma Armaments, Edmund Optical, Applied Epistemology Inc. Hassan knew that something this big couldn’t hide but he was a traditionalist and dammit it should have been colored dull gray or brown or perhaps black, that’s what military systems are supposed to be painted. It was also ridiculous to put advertising on something sent out into space where nobody could see it. Most likely this was a sophomoric in-joke by the cybernetic weapons directorate.
The cybernetic weapons directorate was headed by the bioengineered humans. Hassan had met of few of these new-type humans, and didn’t like them. Arrogant shits, the lot. Still, they led the only design groups that were currently able to create genuinely new and effective weapons. The only systems Hassan possessed that had even a hope of achieving an equal exchange ratio with the aliens came from their factories. But this cybertank was stupid. For the price of it, Hassan could have had 50 more Wolverines. What hallucinogenic mind-altering compounds were they applying to their mucous membranes back home?
Neoliberal Economists Must Die ! (An Old Guy/Cybertank Adventure Book 3) Page 1