“I reckon we’ve lost the initiative,” Fred Hayes declared after a lengthy analysis of the statistics. “Spartacus had built up a hell of a lead for itself by this morning. It’s been upgrading primaries and getting bigger all the time, and putting in a whole private power network for itself on top of that.”
“You don’t think we could catch up with it if we put everything into an all-out Haystack effort?” Krantz asked.
“Our prediction is that tomorrow morning we’d be twice as far behind as we were this morning,” Dyer answered. “And after that it would go on getting worse exponentially.”
“Our estimates about this part were way out. There’s no point in denying it,” Frank Wescott said, A long silence ensued. Eventually General Linsay spoke.
“Why are we acting as if it’s all bad news? Our objective was to find out if we could guarantee that an Earth-sized system like TITAN could never get out of control permanently. The plan said that if we could stop it by deactivating its drones then we’d still be okay in the end. We could allow TITAN to grow bigger and know that we’d always have the last say. The benefits would still outweigh the risks because the only real risk that could really hurt us would have gone away . . . or at least, would have been shown to be containable.” He shrugged.
“Well, we know we can do that. We’ve only operated Counterstrike on a limited scale but it worked fine. We had the bastard licked earlier today. Okay, so Haystack isn’t the final answer. The plan never said it had to be. It isn’t our last card either.”
“What are you saying—go all out for Counterstrike?” Krantz asked.
“We have to,” Linsay replied. “We’ve all just agreed that Haystack isn’t going to get us anywhere. The machine wants to make a fight out of it for real? Okay, let’s give it what it wants.”
“What do you say, Ray?” Krantz looked at Dyer.
“He’s right,” Dyer said. “Haystack will only lose more time that we don’t have. We’ve learned everything from it that it’s going to tell us. We’ll never cut it off from the grid now while the drones are still active. We know that Spartacus won’t respond to system commands to deactivate them anymore, so the only thing to do is get out there and deactivate them ourselves. As Mark says, it worked okay on a small scale, so with luck we should have it licked, maybe by tomorrow.” He cocked an inquiring eye at Hayes for a second opinion.
“Mmm . . . to track down all the bridges and cut them . . .” Hayes rubbed his chin, studied his figures and thought for a moment. Then he nodded. “Yes . . . I reckon we could do it in around a day . . . if we get those drones out of the picture now without any messing around.”
And so, less than a day after it had been hopefully initiated, Operation Haystack was called off and Linsay ordered a full-scale Counterstrike. All over Janus the various duty crews began preparations for offensive action against any drone found active in the vicinity of a feeder circuit.
But, in limited form, Counterstrike had already been going on for some time.
Spartacus had had almost a day to ponder on the fact that something beyond its control was capable of interfering with the drones. If the something could do that, it could obviously have a big effect on the question of Spartacus’s general well-being and long-term future. So, how did the something manage to influence drones, and what was the nature of the something?
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The mounting of Counterstrike on a general scale meant that any drone approaching a feeder circuit was to be deactivated on sight. Initially, deactivation was accomplished by jamming the control signals radiated from the Datastrip system, and very soon slaughter of the drones had become wholesale. This did not mean their destruction since, when external jamming occurred, the drones’ on-board microprocessors automatically took over control to execute an emergency landing and deactivation routine, allowing them to be recovered intact without suffering even the possible damage from a sudden drop.
Spartacus didn’t take long to realize that drones controlled via Datastrip had a tendency not to last very long and it rapidly resorted to using relay drones universally instead. For a while this tactic proved scarcely more effective against the Army’s formidable selection of electronics weaponry, but gradually Spartacus learned how to multiplex frequencies on tight control beams and to deploy multiple relays in patterns that rendered jamming progressively more difficult. Eventually, in the course of an encounter that took place deep inside the lower levels of Downtown, it succeeded in devising a fully effective counterjamming technique and within seconds the information had been flashed to all of Spartacus’s constituent nodes everywhere. From that point on, reports began flooding in from all around Janus that the jamming methods used up to then were no longer working.
This was the signal to bring into action the “destroyers”—the modified drones that Fred Hayes’s group had developed specifically for knocking out other drones. The mildest version of these operated by maneuvering alongside its target and extending a cutting claw to sever a prominent loop of electrical cable that formed the sole connection between the target’s receiving antenna and its internal electronics. Every one of Spartacus’s drones had been designed with such a loop in order to facilitate precisely this kind of operation; the loop was referred to as the carotid. Spartacus’s response was to send in greater numbers of drones to saturate the defenders. The Army reacted in turn by supplementing the carotid-cutting destroyers with more lethal types which disabled their targets permanently by firing explosive pellets and, in some cases, by directing concentrated X-ray beams at their critical control circuits. The joint use of the cutters and cannon proved decisive and Spartacus continued to lose ground rapidly. Nothing got through to the vital feeder circuits and demolition of Spartacus’s bridges was intensified to press the advantage to the utmost.
After a while, the observers following the battle from the Command Room noticed a slow change taking place in the tactics that Spartacus was using. As the casualties incurred in its futile attempts to force its drones through continued to mount steadily, it began pressing its attempts with progressively less determination, as if it were trying to cut its losses. Instead it seemed to be parading its drones outside effective range as bait in order to draw the destroyers into action. As soon as the destroyers descended and claimed a kill or two, Spartacus would pull its troops back out of harm’s way, but not before they had seized the ones that had been knocked out, which they hauled away with them as they retreated. The subsequent progress of these souvenirs was followed and reported by observers stationed at various locations throughout Janus. The disabled drones were fed into the Janus-wide conveyor system at the nearest available loading point to where they had fallen, transported up the spokes and through the Spindle to end up being taken apart and examined in Spartacus’s robot laboratories and test bays deep in Detroit. The tests performed there by probes and instruments connected into and controlled by Spartacus were followed via remote cameras by the interested scientists from the Command Room in Downtown.
Chris returned from a snack lunch and sauntered over to where Dyer was standing staring at the Crystal Ball, watching while an abrasive tool similar to a dental drill removed metal samples from the damage site of one of the latest admissions to Spartacus’s casualty department. The samples were being sucked away by a vacuum tube for delivery to a battery of chromatographs, spectrometers, X-ray analyzers and other instruments.
“How’s the body snatcher?” Chris inquired.
“It’s figured out that something out there is screwing up its repairmen,” Dyer answered. “It doesn’t know what or how, though. The spheres have been looking very thoughtful.”
Fred Hayes moved across toward them and waved a sheet of his latest figures in front of Chris’s face.
“It doesn’t know what’s hit it. We’ve totally isolated it from five of the feeders. At this rate we’ll be shutting it down within a few hours at the most. It has to be really sweating now.”
At least
seven—any seven—of the feeder circuits were needed to keep all of the backup stations functioning. Thus if Spartacus could be reduced to having connections to just three of them, those three could then be switched off at the fusion plant and Spartacus would be de-energized while the backups continued running. From what Fred had just said, it only remained for two more of the feeders to be cleared before that point would be reached.
“What are you predicting then, Chief?” Chris asked Dyer. “Has Spartacus had it or are we going to see more yet?”
Before Dyer could answer, an excited stir broke out among Krantz and the people standing around his console up on the dais. All the faces an the Command Floor below turned and looked up instinctively.
“We’ve just received a message from one of the observers in Detroit,” Krantz told them. “Spartacus has started manufacturing drones with modified designs. The new ones don’t have carotid loops. Also their key parts have been moved inside and protected by thickened and reinforced outer casings. It appears that Spartacus has reinvented armor.”
“Bloody hell!” Chris exclaimed. “It’s sending in flying tanks.”
“Sounds like it,” Dyer agreed in a sober voice. “Does that answer your question?”
At that moment a second chorus of gasps and mutterings arose around the console at which Linsay’s team of officers were gathered. All the faces turned in that direction. Linsay came through a few seconds later on one of the screens in front of Krantz.
“It looks like what we thought might happen,” Linsay declared without preliminaries.
“Dropout?” Krantz inquired. The general nodded.
“Everywhere. They’re going down like flies.”
All over Janus, the whole armada of destroyers had suddenly stopped functioning.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Paradoxical though it still seemed to many of the people involved with the experiment, the methods being used against Spartacus up to that point had relied to a large degree upon functions and services running within the complex of Spartacus itself. The communications network via which the various operations were coordinated, for example, was an integral part of the Spartacus net; the computations performed to analyze the data obtained were run on machines that formed part of Spartacus; Army personnel were transported to and from operations by machines controlled by Spartacus, and the drones used against Spartacus were commanded from programs running within the very system that they were being used to frustrate.
This state of affairs had been allowed to persist quite deliberately to provide a measure of Spartacus’s abilities to perceive a realm of existence external to itself and to relate causes and effects operating in that realm. As long as Spartacus obligingly continued to sustain the rods that were beating its own back, the scientists felt safe in concluding that the machine’s perceptions of any external reality were rudimentary. Ever since the experiment began, Spartacus had been blindly reacting to stimuli presented by an environment without being aware even that such a thing as an environment could exist. To Spartacus any of the millions of programs residing within it was much the same as any other and would be run when requested because that was basically what Spartacus had been designed to do. The concept that one of these programs might produce effects in a dimension outside itself, which in turn could affect something else in that dimension which in turn could affect it, had not taken root yet in Spartacus’s evolving mind. Thus for a long time it had continued to execute the programs that controlled the destroyers and to register the losses of its own drones without realizing that the two were in some way connected. But the data accumulating within its memories began to form patterns, and the patterns began showing correlations . . .
Dyer and his team had discussed this possibility at great length and agreed that sooner or later, if things ever went that far, Spartacus would put chi-squared and chi-squared together and quit running their drones for them. Also, if that ever happened, all of Spartacus would know about it at the same time, so it would happen abruptly, all over Janus. They code-named the event Dropout. Since it had been allowed for in the planning, the various military units deployed across Janus were ready and standing by to fall back on local control devices for the drones when it eventually did happen.
In some places the changeover to standby local control did not take place as quickly or as smoothly as it should have, with the result that several minutes elapsed with destroyers lying paralyzed on the ground where they had fallen. In the brief commotion that followed, more time went by before the news got through to the Command Room so that when at last all the destroyers were up and running and under control again, not all of those that had been deployed previously could be accounted for. Five had disappeared—two cutters, two cannon and one that burned out electronics with X-rays. But even when the news did get through, it received only scant attention. Everybody was too preoccupied with the latest development being reported from Pittsburgh: the first of Spartacus’s new models were coming into action.
The defensive line was a row of hovering destroyers positioned about twenty feet ahead of the entrance to the shaft that gave access to the Power Room of Pittsburgh Sector Ten. Small groups of steel-helmeted engineers waited with their equipment at three well-spaced points behind the destroyers—beneath the overhanging steel wall of one of the furnaces used to melt lunar anorthosite, among the tangle of pipework that connected it to the centrifuge plant, solidifier and grinding mill, and in front of the sulfuric acid treatment tanks from which aluminum-bearing liquid was pumped away for processing and separation.
Captain Leo Chesney, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, stood over the center group and watched the half-dozen or so hostile drones that were moving toward them from the door leading through to Sector Nine. The pattern was by now familiar. What made this confrontation different was the type of drone they were facing, which was unlike anything he had seen previously. Their design was more compact and the outlines rounded into smooth streamlined contours with fewer parts exposed. They looked somehow more solid than before, and more formidable. Chesney knew that they had caused a lot of excitement among the eggheads in Downtown but he’d had to rush his unit to Sector Ten at short notice so he didn’t really know yet the reason for the uproar. He was mildly self-conscious with the knowledge of the many eyes that were following him and his men via the holo-viewer in the Government Center Command Room.
One of the officers in the Command Room spoke from a screen on the panel being operated by the soldier floating anchored to a pipe fitting just in front of him.
“They’re a new type of drone that Spartacus has only just come up with, so we don’t know much more about them yet than you do. From what we can tell they’re probably functionally similar to what you’ve seen before but with components repositioned for better protection and thicker skins. Use a standard attack but don’t hold back. It may take longer to knock these out than you think.”
“Yes, sir,” Chesney replied. Christ, he thought to himself. Could this damn computer design its own drones too? Nobody had told him about that. They hadn’t said anything about that in the briefings at Fort Vokes. Maybe things weren’t going according to plan as the brass kept insisting they were. What the hell had he been trying to prove when he volunteered to come to this crazy place anyway? Join the Space Army and see the Universe, they’d said. All he’d seen was the undersides of furnaces and enough pipes to swallow the Atlantic.
An operator in the group over to his left came through on another channel.
“Close-up scan shows no carotids, sir. View being relayed on channel two.” Chesney peered at an auxiliary display and verified the report. He digested the implication at once and spoke into his throat mike.
“Attention all units. Go in with shells and beams. Hold back the cutters. No carotids visible. These babies could be tough. Backup fireteam stand by.” The leaders of the other two groups and of the backup team positioned in the shaft entrance itself acknowledged.
“Hostiles have enter
ed kill-zone,” an operator advised.
“Plan Delta modified as instructed. Go!” Chesney ordered.
The cannons detached themselves from the waiting line and moved forward smoothly to open fire on the fly. The shells glanced off the rounded casings of the drones or exploded harmlessly outside. They were not designed for armor piercing. A couple of the drones lurched visibly but appeared none the worse.
“Close range and fire on opportunity,” Chesney barked. Then he saw something he hadn’t noticed before—the drones were attempting to evade the fire. Their formation broke into a loose cluster, pitching and weaving, while the attackers wheeled and turned in their attempts to line up on targets. The sounds of barking cannon and exploding shells echoed from the surrounding walls and structures. If this had been one of the engagements that he had seen before, every one of the intruders would have been down after the first salvo. But not one of them had even stopped.
“Concentrate your fire,” Chesney shouted. “Sections A and C close up on that leader. Section B take the next in line. Forget the rest.”
The leading intruder had now reached the beam-throwers, which were still hovering in their original line. Four cannons converged on it to pour shells into it from close range while two of the beam-throwers moved inward to intercept from immediately ahead. Close behind it the second drone was being similarly harassed by a pair of cannons.
The leader disintegrated abruptly in an explosion of flame and smoke and the pieces dispersed in all directions. Chesney felt a fragment of something ping off his helmet. Somebody in Section A had been thrown back in the air to pull his anchorline taut and was clutching at his stomach. The second drone exploded and produced another rain of fragments but two more were already past the line.
“Section A get the first of those two!” Chesney yelled. “Section C take the next. B, regroup at the line.”
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