Battlemind

by William H. Keith

  C.E. 1624

  Dev uploaded from the University of Jefferson, transmitting himself as a burst of digitized information across the thirty-six-light-year I2C linkage from the 26 Draconis system to Eridu, Chi Draconis V. From there, he routed to a commercial channel, waited 312 microseconds for the passage of a particularly large block of priority data flagged for ViRcom routing, then uploaded once again across the twenty-nine-light-year I2C link to Chiron. From Chiron, after another brief pause, it was just four and a half light years to Sol—less than the blink of an eye for the quantum-paired electron arrays of the communications facilities at Alpha Centauri A III and Earth.

  His incoming pattern was routed through the commercial traffic buffers at the communications array on Luna, where Dev waited for several seconds, surveying the electronic ground. If message traffic had been growing stronger and more urgent than normal at New America, almost fifty light years away, it was frantic here. Reaching out with the downloaded pattern of his mind, Dev sampled some of the messages flooding through near-Earth space.

  “… God, I’ve never seen anything like it! There must be hundreds of them coming out of K-T space, and they’re filling the sky.…”

  “Negative! Negative! It’s not K-T space. We don’t know how they’re arriving, hut they’re coming in fast. “

  “Mayday! Mayday! Am under attack by unknown forces! They’re just coming out of empty space, more ships than I can count!…”

  “Imperial Fleet Command Control Center, this is Perimeter Defense Facility Evening Calm! The enemy is materializing out of empty space from the direction of Aquila. Bearing right ascension, one-nine hours, three-five minutes, zero-four seconds, declination plus one-four point two degrees, range three-one-point-seven a.u. They appear to be moving in-system at high acceleration. Can’t determine yet whether their target is Earth or the Sun.…”

  “Hello! Hello! Is anyone reading me? Hello!…”

  “Mayday! Mayday! This is the transport Yoku Maru. I’ve been hit by something! Power out. Life support down. I’m tumbling and losing pressure. Can anybody hear me?…”

  Earth’s solar system was filled with spaceborne traffic, some military, most of it commercial shipping. Earth and Dai Nihon, after all, were the hub of a titanic commercial empire as well as a military one, an empire spanning the entire Shichiju and reaching all the way out into the Periphery states. As emergency and priority radio and I2C traffic flashed from ship to ship and among the various planetary and deep space communications facilities across the system, panic was spreading.

  “Perimeter Defense Facility Evening Calm, this is Imperial Fleet Command Control Center. Can you identify the attackers? Over!”

  “Cee-Three, Evening Calm.It’s the Web. Got to be. It’s just like the attack at Nova Aquila…!”

  A large portion of the human race had seen, had experienced the Nova Aquila battle two years before by linking into the computer-communications network that interconnected all of the worlds inhabited by Man, and downloading the event—as seen through scanners and sensory suites throughout the Imperial-Confederation Combined Fleet—as it happened.

  It had been a good many centuries since the advent of telecommunications—com satellites and old-fashioned two-D television—had brought the experience of war into civilian homes; since the development of ViRealities and direct cephlink feeds, news reporting had become a far more immediate, a more personal way of reaching people with current events. Even deep within the inner worlds of the Shichiju, where few citizens used the there-unpopular Naga Companions, virtually every citizen save the three percent or so of nullheads and technophobes had immediate access to online feeds from one or another of the news services, government, commercial, and private. As during the Battle of Nova Aquila, Dev could feel more and more citizens across the Shichiju linking in as the urgent communications from the outer reaches of the Solar System spread the panic further and further abroad.

  And, as before, he could feel the Overmind stirring.

  Overmind was Dev’s term for that giant, half-sleeping intelligence that still lay, quiescent, beneath the crisscrossing babble of communications on the Net, a noncorporeal intelligence derived from the complex interconnectivity of all human communications. It had come into being during Nova Aquila, when a critical threshold of minds had actively joined the Net. He’d not been able to reach it during the battle, though in some still ill-defined way he’d been aware of having been a part, a very small part, of the entire intelligence.

  The Overmind’s intervention at Nova Aquila had won the battle for Humanity… and probably been responsible for the past two years of relative peace. Its intervention was the obvious answer to this attack as well… but as hard as Dev tried reaching for that enigmatic meta-intelligence, he could not seem to connect with its awareness.

  So he reached outward once more, seeking a vantage point from which he could study the developing battle for Earth and Earth’s star system. He found that vantage point accelerating out toward the site of the incursion, past the orbit of Mars and moving above the plane of the asteroid belt—the flagship of the Imperial Navy’s Home Defense Fleet, the INS Yamato.

  A relic of a century before, bearing a name sacred to Nihonjin history and tradition, the Imperial battleship was vastly outclassed by the two larger, more powerful, and more modern dragonship carriers accelerating with her in her squadron, Soryu and Tennoryu; but her communications suite had been updated with the most powerful I2C apparatus, and originally she’d been designed around the concept of a combat coordination center, a heavily armed and armored space-mobile combat headquarters. The squadron, designated Ida-Ten after the swiftest of the ancient Japanese gods, had left Phobos three days before on routine patrol and by chance had been heading in roughly the right direction when the Evening Calm’s alert had come through. They had now fine-tuned their heading and were accelerating at a bone-rattling three and a half Gs, racing to meet the oncoming intruders.

  Dev’s penetration of Yamato’s systems went unnoticed. There were security programs aboard, of course, guard-dog routines set loose within the vast and tangled virtual space of the huge vessel’s complex electronic network, as well as linked-in human operators assigned to monitor the system and watch for unauthorized entry. Had Yamato been quietly moored in spacedock, Dev might have had some trouble coming aboard, especially since the incoming data streams would be carefully monitored at such times to prevent personality or AI downloads from would-be spies or saboteurs.

  Dev had chosen a good time to make his move, however, sequestering himself within the data banks of a navigational relay station in Earth orbit and downloading into Yamato’s waiting storage capacity when the relay was electronically tagged for a navigational update feed. No one noticed that the feed was several seconds longer than it should have been; at that moment, all minds were on the coming battle and the threat to home and Emperor… not to mention the very real possibility of death within the next few hours. Dev set a small portion of his mind to monitoring his immediate surroundings for the approach of an electronic guardian, and another part to the largely automatic task of constructing a shell for himself, the appearance of a small and routine housekeeping program set loose within the network as a part of the normal operating procedure. Kara, Dev recalled, had used a similar approach to penetrate the far more heavily defended computer system at Phobos in her raid on Kasei a couple of years back.

  Seconds after his arrival, Dev had become part of the computer system’s routine, accepted as one of the sub-AI programs constantly running on the network. He had no authorization for access to subsystems coded at level three or higher, but he wasn’t seeking to penetrate the ship’s secure areas in any case. All he needed was a place to eavesdrop on the electronic communications filling space around him.

  Even so, he learned a fair amount just by linking in. The ship’s captain was Shosho Chuichi Iijima, while the CO for the Ida-Ten squadron was Chujo Yatsuhiro Ubukata. And a surprise: Ubukata’s boss wa
s along, the Commander of the Home Defense Fleet, Taisho Nobutaki Kurebayashi. All three men, Dev was well aware, were traditionalists, confirmed members of the Kansai no Otoko who reportedly had scant respect for the battle tactics of mindless, soulless machines.

  The problem, as Dev knew well, was that with virtually unlimited numbers the Web had little need of formal combat tactics. Throw enough metal at a defensive force, and unless that force had unlimited reserves of its own to draw on, it would break, sooner or later.

  And that was precisely the tactics the Web appeared to be employing. Unseen by his unsuspecting shipmates, Dev monitored the intelligence feed to the big battle tank in Yamato’s Operations Center, a ten-meter pit with a holographic interface with the ship’s primary Artificial Intelligence. Unnoted either by the AI or by the humans working the tank controls, Dev was able to electronically peer over their shoulders, watching the battle unfold in the emptiness far ahead.

  As had happened at Nova Aquila, the Web machines were materializing out of empty space, not all at once or in any kind of recognizable formation, but a few at a time, as though they were being fed into the Stargate device back at the Galactic Core as quickly as they could be rushed into position. As they emerged out of nothingness, they began accelerating in-system, gathering slowly into a vast and still-growing cloud of Web combat craft.

  Dev used his position aboard the Yamato to carefully scan the enemy masses, searching for recognizable ship designs, for a repeat of earlier tactics, for anything that could provide him with intelligence into the inhuman mind of this foe. The Battle of Nova Aquila had been won two years before because the human forces had been able to identify and destroy key command and coordination facilities that appeared to have been directing Web battle tactics, but so far Dev had seen no ships or structures that evenly remotely resembled the enormous fleet control units he’d seen then. The planetoid ships that had apparently been coordinating the Web attack then were missing, which meant that in the past two years, the Web had analyzed their earlier defeat and found a way to avoid that same weakness.

  That was one of the problems with technic war; if the enemy was any good at all, he would stay flexible, figure out what had gone wrong before, and fix it… which left his opponent trying to find some new weakness, some new angle of attack.

  The trouble was, Dev was pretty much a helpless observer, literally along for the ride as an unnoted electronic stowaway aboard the Imperial flagship. He could watch, but his resolution of the enemy machines and formations was limited to the resolving power of Yamato’s sensory suite and by Yamato’s own movements. Clearly, Admiral Kurebayashi was racing to place as many Imperial Navy ships in the cloud’s path as he could, hoping to halt its advance as far away from Earth as possible.

  Dev had faced the Web in combat and knew that Kurebayashi’s little squadron—two ryu-carriers, a dozen cruisers, thirty-one destroyers, frigates, and smaller craft, as well as the aging Yamato herself—would be little more than a snack for the hungry Web swarm.

  Lead elements of the cloud were just beginning to reach Perimeter Defense Facility Evening Calm, a deep-space watch outpost beyond the orbit of Neptune and well above the ecliptic, designed to monitor and challenge incoming spacecraft. In the battle tank, Evening Calm was represented by a bright red pinpoint of light that lay, by chance, almost directly in the projected path of the diffuse, purple-colored haze representing the Web cloud. A frail structure, an open latticework of crisscrossing struts and beams that served as an immense antennae array two kilometers across, Evening Calm was larger by far than the largest spacecraft but massed only a few thousand tons. A rotating wheel habitat at one end provided quarters and life support for a crew of twelve, while most of the rest of the station’s mass was wrapped up in the open-mesh dish of the main tracking antenna, the sensor arrays, and the supporting framework. Though the station was primarily designed as a deep space observation post and communications relay and not as a fortress, it did possess a battery of military lasers.

  The station’s weapons seemed pitifully inadequate, however, in the face of the swarm descending toward them out of interstellar space.

  Images of the Web cloud were being transmitted from Evening Calm to the Yamato’s operations center and displayed on a viewall screen that occupied most of one of the compartment’s large bulkheads. When they’d first begun arriving, the Web combat machines had been invisible at optical wavelengths, but like vapor coalescing out of thin air, their presence was slowly materializing as a kind of thin, wispy silver-gray fog that steadily grew denser as it hurtled toward the perimeter station.

  As Dev translated the digital information into a scene he could play inside his own mind, he saw immediately the wispy smear of the attackers, growing visibly larger second by second in the center of the display. The cloud was translucent, like a puff of smoke, thin enough that brighter stars could still be seen through the haze, but it was rapidly growing thicker as millions of separate Web machines continued to swell the main cloud’s numbers.

  The leading edge of the swarm grew near, the range, shown by numerals ticking off a kind of fast-paced countdown at the lower right of the image, grew steadily less. Dev heard the station’s commander gave a crisp order, and the lasers winked on; twelve hundred kilometers away, Webbers caught in that megajoule beam shone with the light of tiny, glaring suns, then faded away in a silent puff of vapor. Someone aboard Evening Calm cheered and was immediately silenced by a sharp-barked order.

  The lasers fired again, and once more a constellation of brilliant stars appeared in the distance, flared bright, then faded.

  The cloud had taken losses… but those losses were literally a few drops out of the ocean; the rest of the Webbers kept coming, each impelled by powerful magnetic fields that let them sense the ferrous mass of the station and home on it with the single-minded purpose of a swarm of hungry mosquitoes.

  And then the Web force had arrived, the lead elements streaking past the Evening Calm facility at velocities of hundreds of kilometers per second. Many struck the open latticework of the facility, and each strike was like the detonation of a small bomb as the kinetic energy of the fast-traveling devices was liberated by high-speed impact. The external camera view jittered and bounced wildly; something, one of the machines, possibly, or more likely a fragment of wreckage, sailed past the camera’s field of vision like a great, whirling black shadow.

  After that first storm of explosions, however, more and more of the Webbers began coming in more slowly, decelerating at what must have been hundreds of gravities, with oddly jointed mechanical limbs wide-stretched to snag hold of the station’s structure.

  Dev had been in combat with the Web more than once; each time before he’d been struck by the similarities between that attack and the blind rush of antibodies attacking foreign cells, a host of invading bacteria, perhaps, inside the human body, and that impression was stronger than ever now. They swarmed in blindly, many missing their target entirely, others hitting and grabbing on with a bewildering variety of claspers, arms, and many-jointed legs.

  Throughout the storm, the station’s lasers kept firing as quickly as they could cycle, but there were just too many of the attackers for the weapons to even slow the onslaught, and there were no good targets at all. The individual Web ships—devices, really—of that oncoming cloud were mostly small. The largest were a few meters long and massed perhaps a ton or two. Most were smaller; many were the size of a man’s hand and massed only a few hundred grams. These last were designed with one purpose only, to seek out and attach themselves to any larger target and begin dismantling it a few molecules at a time, literally eating their way through solid hull metal with nanotechnic disassemblers—nano-D in military parlance. Through outboard cameras on the Evening Calm facility, Dev saw the first of those glittering objects strike the station’s framework, strike and cling, gleaming like silver-edged jewels in the harsh glare of exterior spotlights. In seconds, ragged patches had appeared in the station’s e
xterior thermal coating; in seconds more, whole lengths of strut piping were breaking off and spinning away into space.

  A window opened in the upper left corner of the transmitted image. A young sho-i appeared, his face frightened. Behind him, the station’s command center showed wild panic as members of the facility’s crew stampeded for the airlock door to the escape pods.

  “We’re breaking up!” he cried into the camera, eyes wide. In the background, Dev could hear the ominous creak of metal flexed and stressed beyond its engineering limits. “We can’t stop it! Do you hear me, Command? We can’t stop—”

  The picture broke up in a storm of static; both the internal and external views broke off as data feeds or cameras were knocked off-line.

  “I2C transmission from Evening Calm has been lost,” a voice aboard the Yamato reported with eerie calm.

  “Transmit to all units,” Taisho Kurebayashi said gravely. In the operations tank, the red pinpoint of light marking the Evening Calm winked out as a spreading, purple haze engulfed it. “We will attempt to meet the cloud at approximately the orbit of Jupiter, on a line between the cloud’s current position and Earth.”

  “Hai, O-Taishosama!” a communications officer replied. Dev sensed the order as it was beamed back to an Imperial communications center on Phobos.

  It was time for him to leave as well. There was nothing he could do to help Yamato or her consorts, nothing he could do at all save continue gathering data, and what he’d seen so far had probably given him all of the data he could use. In the ops battle tank, it was becoming obvious that the Web had initiated a change in their strategy, and that intrigued him. When they’d appeared in the Gr’tak system, according to Sholai, they’d appeared as a single large vessel that had accelerated in-system, divided itself in two, then further subdivided into clouds of machines deployed as separate fleets, one vectoring in on the Gr’tak homeworld, the other making for the suns. For some reason, the Web attack here was being launched as vast numbers of separate machines working in close concert with one another.