Tethered Worlds: Unwelcome Star

by Gregory Faccone

  "No, pull back to the bulwark. Protect it as long as we can."

  The penetrators expended themselves finishing the yard. It went entirely flat and offline.

  "First blood to you, octal." Jordahk glanced at the chrono. Not even a minute and a half had elapsed, and his opponent was gaining momentum. "What did we lose, Max?"

  "Numerous non-essentials," Max said, "a lot of conduits. My response time is down about ten percent."

  Jordahk surveyed the battlefield. "Dangerous faults for a general: Recklessness."

  "Sun Tzu is it now?" Max said.

  "Look at him. He's hardly spent anything on defense."

  "Maybe with twin compies he doesn't need to."

  Jordahk felt like prey in the crewroom. His blood was in the water. "Maybe," he said. "You're almost to the drone's bulwark?"

  "Yes, his yard's definitely trap-filled, but he's not fighting me."

  "Calc up a string of pulses."

  "With my current burden, that will be three."

  Firewalls weakened the longer they were probed. The octal's prime fence had been probed since the beginning of the thresh. Jordahk estimated the wood was thin. "That'll be enough."

  The pulse string pinged ready.

  "Fire the first at the drone bulwark, if possible," Jordahk said. "Take your best guess."

  The flashing pulse passed unmolested through what was left of the drone's yard and struck its bulwark hard. Stones shattered and dislodged, leaving a hole bored halfway through. Max had guessed well.

  "Fire the second right through his prime fence. Follow up with probes. Make him engage us."

  The octal's prime fence shattered upon impact, allowing the pulse to detonate completely in the yard. Like troops behind a tank, probes rushed in. The octal's attention was split between drone and prime. Finally, he started burning cycles on defense. Yellow and whites probes clashed anew.

  Jordahk fired the third pulse right along the path of the first. Unmolested, it slammed directly into the drone's damaged bulwark. Stones exploded out of the white flash. The bulwark was penetrated, and the inner court beyond was vulnerable.

  "Any special defenses in the drone inner court?" Jordahk asked.

  "No, just looks like standard hedge maze stuff. No denser than the yard."

  "Then swarm in there, Max, with every probe we can spare. Make a lot of noise and confusion. It doesn't even have to be effective."

  As Jordahk suspected, the octal had no stomach for a protracted defensive battle in the drone. He retreated all the way back to the gray brick walls of the drone's mansion, saving his cycles for another overpowering attack.

  "If he's going to cede it," Jordahk said, "we'll take it. Sweep up the yard and court."

  Max cleared out any remaining high ground and flattened the hedges. With no resistance, little time was required. The flattened territories flashed once and went translucent simultaneously. Just like that, two firewalls were down.

  "Two-for-one, Max!"

  A surprised reaction reverberated through the crew. Apparently the octal was not one stylishly bested.

  "I'm pretty sure that wounded his pride," Jordahk said. "Let's use that."

  The octal's probes pounded on Max's rapidly crumbling bulwark. Beyond it in the hedge maze of the inner court, Jordahk spied the most likely thoroughfare.

  "Max, build us a bastion proxy right there."

  A complex spiral began growing where Jordahk indicated.

  "Don't tell me," Max said, "Dangerous faults for a general: a delicacy of honor."

  "You're catching on. Now he's got something to prove. He's going to come barreling in."

  Confirming Jordahk's suspicion, the violator's probe activity dropped low. Something big was calcing.

  "Keep up appearances, Max. Keep probes working on the drone's mansion, and see if you can't snake some through the prime yard."

  Max's probes met little resistance as the octal worked on some offensive monstrosity. The placement of Jordahk's bastion proxy was excellent. Max outdid himself building an extra half circle on the spiral before the attack came.

  True to octal form, this attack was also oversized. A bloated static torpedo followed by something even larger traveled over Jordahk's flattened yard. The train slammed into the stone bulwark, shattering it in a cascade of virtual stones. The bloated torpedo didn't even detonate, continuing on into the hedges of Max's inner court before finally exploding near the bastion proxy. The ruinous red sphere filled the hedge maze.

  "You know the drill, Max. Resist everywhere but the path to the bastion proxy."

  The static torpedo was initially powerful enough to engulf the entire court. The larger trailing attack plowed through the chaos intending to bore even deeper into Max's dwindling real estate. But he held the hedges long enough so the leading edge of the static torpedo's destruction entered the bastion proxy.

  The torpedo's red sphere stopped expanding. Violent energy swirled down the spiral. The large, secondary attack barreled straight for it. The realization of what was happening dawned on the octal. The secondary attack tried to change course and steer around, but it was too late. The whirlpool-like bastion proxy had it, too, spiraling it down as if caught in a black hole.

  It detonated at the bottom. The combined power of both attacks was an awesomely destructive torrent making its way back up the spiral. Status indicators across Jordahk's VADs turned red as Max strained to channel it.

  "Can you hold it, Max?"

  Jordahk heard a muffled clicking sound followed by an uncharacteristic delay before Max answered. That put a spike of worry into Jordahk more than anything else had so far.

  "I've got it," Max said. He didn't sound right.

  The bastion proxy allowed Max to disperse the destructive power of those two attacks into every dead-end, spare module, and dispersion plain across his entire system. The spiral filled to the top. It glowed red, continuing on to white. A disconcerting crackling sounded before the status indicators finally eased back from danger levels.

  Max was over the hump. He continued to divert destructive force from multiple secondary "surprises" encompassed in the mammoth, trailing attack, whatever it was. When the last of it was safely shunted, the bastion proxy went dark and crumbled. Max's inner court still stood.

  The crew went from rapt silence to gushes of chatter. A curse erupted from the octal, escaping the sound buffer's muffling.

  Waves of coolness emanated from Jordahk's new coat. He wondered why before seeing his hand flushed and sweaty.

  "Look," Jordahk said, shaking his hand, "if you can't contain an attack, just let it go and shut the sector down. This thresh isn't worth it."

  "That was more stored power than either of us expected," Max said. The grizzled AI veteran sounded like himself again. "There's something strange about the way he's getting such yields. I had to build an emergency channel to our cylinders to dump the excess."

  Cylinders were independent and replaceable hardware modules. Usually they performed some sort of specialty function. Jordahk had two installed currently. One was a number cruncher used to boost Max's processing power. The other was a gift from his father, a custom module to mimic some of history's greatest thresh teams.

  "No permanent damage at first glance," Max said, "but we put the number cruncher in the red. I'll run a diagnostic when we're done."

  "Let's take advantage of what we learned while he was calcing that mess," Jordahk said. "Press full force into the prime yard. I don't think he's got the will to defend a lost cause. He's all about big flashy moves."

  Max's probes swept the yard, meeting only token resistance. It went offline almost anti-climatically, and the octal's prime side stone bulwark was exposed. Jordahk reaped a good view of the prime mansion. Its ebony brickwork was rather Gothic. Max must have felt theatrical for its depiction.

  Jordahk had taken down both yards plus the drone's inner court, three territories. Max's yard was long gone, and his wide-open inner court wouldn't last.


  As if to punctuate that thought, several pulses assaulted it. Not even oversized pulses with penetrator surprises. The octal had learned not to risk any more big attacks.

  Jordahk had no time for defensive preparations, and the battle devolved into a "P&P street fight." Using only pulses and probes, he defended every scrap of high ground, determined to make the octal fight for every sector. It was a brilliant piece of "fighting withdrawal" that earned him a whole 30 seconds. Then the inner court winked out, and Max's blue mansion stood exposed and alone.

  Four minutes had elapsed. The octal wasn't going to win the big coin with a quick victory, especially fighting for each territory like that. Time was working against him. Then again, Jordahk had no plan for lasting nine minutes. It might as well be a year.

  "This is where you usually come up with some kooky but winning strategy, kid," Max said. "Or at least a strategy."

  If processing power was even a little closer, Jordahk might try the Fabian strategy. Avoid the pitched battles and drag out a defensive war of attrition, but the separate violator cores worked together efficiently—too efficiently. It was more than what the octal's software could accomplish. His intuition refused to let go of that thought.

  "The highest form of generalship is to balk the enemy's plans; the next best is to prevent the junction of the enemy's forces," he recited.

  "Oh boy, here we go," Max said.

  "Bring up a graph of total enemy processing cycles." Jordahk stared at the new VAD.

  "He's calcing something again," Max said, but Jordahk was far away in thought.

  "Overlay total enemy probe count." The new information was added to the graph. "Throw in the spikes of our peak offense and his response delays." Again the graph updated. "There's something there, I can feel it."

  "I'm not seeing it," Max said.

  "We've got to get down to the drone's core. He's cut some corner."

  "We won't have much left by the time we get there, and his prime core will still be safe behind lots of territory. We also won't be at nine minutes. Is that a risk you want to take?"

  Jordahk pondered the big picture. He and Max weren't going to make it at the rate they were losing ground. "It's a hunch, Max. As they say, Vir Supra Machinalis."

  Max snorted. The AI had developed a lot of character over its long life. "I hope for both our sakes you're 'supra' enough to overcome that machine."

  "Okay, let's "junction prevent." First we whittle down his prime side. Make him sweat and defend to prevent some doomsday attack from calcing. Fire up a debt bomb."

  In the lull, the debt bomb icon filled rapidly. Jordahk asked Max to disguise it as much as possible like a pulse. A debt bomb was like a seed. It needed time to germinate. Even a few seconds of misdirection would help.

  Max launched the debt bomb. It traveled over defunct territory, dodged a few probes, and exploded on the prime side stone bulwark. It blew out a few stones like a weak pulse. A nice touch, Max was on his game. The near invisible debt bomb began growing.

  "Knew he wouldn't look too closely," Jordahk said. "Okay, let's drag out defense."

  He indicated a couple of key walls within the rooms of his mansion to be fortified. Once the brick exterior was down, the octal would find the mansion's rooms no easy territory to conquer. As the debt bomb grew, Max finished fortifying just in time for the next attack.

  Yellow probes raced across Jordahk's dead territory and slammed into Max's mansion. Bursts of light flashed on the surface, and a pulse careened into bricks reddening with damage. The firewall represented by a mansion's façade was quite strong. Jordahk felt a spike of irritation that the octal divined its exact weakest spot. He let it pass through practiced mental drill. Irritation would not serve him. The mansion interior was ready to defend.

  When a jumbo static torpedo closed on the mansion, Max predicted the façade wouldn't hold.

  "Try to spread the damage out," Jordahk said. "I'll take a larger breach over damage to our interior walls."

  After the initial red flare, the torpedo's spherical destruction flattened as Max fought it hardest in the center. Bricks rapidly went from blue to red before crumbling. The entire mansion undulated under the ferocity. When it was over, the bricks were nearly gone, but the interior rooms, while exposed, were undamaged.

  "When's that debt bomb going to sprout?" Jordahk asked.

  "A few more seconds."

  A mass of yellow probes closed on the mansion. Max's white army met them head-on, but they stood little chance in a straight head-to-head probe war with the firewall gone. He needed a defender's territorial advantage. Jordahk pulled back into the interior and the losses reversed, but the retreat continued. Would the octal keep feeding probes at that Pyrrhic level once he realized a debt bomb was growing out of control under his nose?

  Finally the debt bomb blossomed into a growing octopus of vines across the last stone bulwark. Such attacks were best degraded early before the vines choked everything they entangled. A debt bomb wasn't an active attack, so Jordahk could devote his resources elsewhere.

  "Pour everything into probes, Max. Force him to choose; the debt bomb or the probe war."

  The number of enemy probes leveled off but did not drop. The debt bomb's vines slowed. Somehow the octal had managed to accomplish both.

  "He's getting a bead on the debt's growth algorithms," Max said.

  "Already? Can you insert a new set?"

  "I can. But I'll have to let go of probe production."

  Jordahk would lose ground the second he let go of probe production. "Smeltin' rocks! I'm in the same bind I just put him in."

  The debt bomb crushed the bulwark, leaving a smattering of fading stones. But the once thick vines were fast becoming scrawny as they moved into the inner court. Jordahk had to hand it to the octal; he played this turn pretty well.

  "Change up the debt bomb." He exhaled long. "We've got to keep his extra processing power occupied."

  The debt bomb grew again, snaking deep into the hedge maze. The vines strangled and uprooted everything in their path, slowly flattening the inner court. But Max lost territory for the algorithm swap. It became a seesaw cycle. Neither opponent could press without their defense suffering. They both lost ground with each counter-attack. It was a crazy, vicious cycle.

  "This is stupid!" Jordahk said.

  It became clear that neither could pull out, and both would lose a territory. That deal was worse for Jordahk, and a worry line creased his forehead. "We can't go sector for sector."

  He watched with exasperation as his mansion interior was trashed. Max changed up the growth algorithm one last time, losing another wall in the process. The prime inner court flattened, leaving the octal's Gothic mansion exposed.

  It was an ugly exchange Jordahk couldn't afford. Max was losing even more ground than he should.

  "Max what's going on?"

  "I think the number-crunching cylinder is more damaged than we thought. I'm getting less and less out of it each cycle."

  Jordahk was down to a couple of interior walls and Max's sanctum. Before him, both of the octal's mansions stood intact. The ebony edifice was no doubt hard to crack, and creepy. Jordahk's only hope lay in getting to the drone core. But what was left to do it? He brought up a system status VAD. It flickered, followed by all his VADs flickering.

  Exasperation spiked. "What now?"

  Max didn't answer right away. "He's penetrated our VAD control sector. He's trying to overwrite my display commands."

  Max rerouted the VAD system. Jordahk drew a glowing line with his fingers between dwindling resources deciding what was most important. The VADs blinked off, reset, and then reappeared normally with one exception. An out of place VAD showed visual noise. It would not be dismissed.

  "We couldn't stop it all. He's penetrated with a grief VAD. I think I can still obscure it."

  The grief VAD's noise coalesced into the image of his opponent.

  "Sneaky," Jordahk said. "Don't waste cycles trying to get
rid of it, Max." Surprisingly, his animosity toward the octal had faded. "Let's see him and let him see us."

  The grief VAD sported the image of Cranium Archimedes. Jordahk saw him anew; slightly less the elitist urban brat confronted before. Certainly still too cocksure, but behind the octal tats were trickles of sweat and eyes too wide. One didn't need excessive intuition to realize more was occurring here than a thresh.

  With sound muted and mouths distorted, the octal was content to stare Jordahk down. But his expression now included an additional element. Was it surprise? Respect?

  "Max, what's the wager status of the hard coin bruiser?"

  The wager VAD jumped to the top and Max highlighted specifics. "He's not a winner, and he's slowly losing his stake. If the octal doesn't win in another minute and a half, he'll lose it entirely."

  "Is there an eye picking him up?"

  Max tapped one. A new VAD showed the bruiser.

  He was big and strong, but not lean. His relatively skinny legs did not fit the rest of his body. A standout trait was splotched olive skin on hands and neck, like he'd been splashed recently with a corrosive chemical. Jordahk half remembered the bleached spots being pale. Now they were tinged with red.

  The bruiser was expressing his unhappiness at the octal with mouthed words that Jordahk couldn't hear but clearly understood. The octal's eyes darted back and forth from bruiser to thresh. Then a determined but strangely disgusted expression crossed his face.

  "His output's dropped to absolute zero," Max said. "Few things require that level of resource, and fewer are good."

  "I think this thresh is about to get desperate." Jordahk surveyed his dwindled territory. Little stood between Max's core and the violator. "We need a break, Max."

  "I may have it. Following your protocol, I've seen enough to plug numbers into our trick package. The results are... surprising."

  The trick package was Jordahk's collection of irregular, obsolete, and downright kooky options. It had grown quite large over the years. He needed every trick to bluff, steal, or swindle victories from his father and Highearn.

  "You're kidding." Jordahk's eyebrows shot up in disbelief. "No one's used that in a serious thresh for, well, forever. Maybe that's why he's vulnerable to it, being all about the latest. Can you even make one?"