***
Two more systems he chased them through. Eleven decades and sixty light years, eight billion more souls burning in his wake, and still his quarry eluded him. But he was closing in.
The Unending was finishing its deceleration burn and beginning the slow flip that would put its nose toward the approaching star once more. The bright blue star of the Osiris system was still just a tiny pinprick in a sea of lights, but it outshone most and grew brighter by the day. The Unending had pierced its Oort cloud and was now falling towards the ecliptic at a steep angle, all senses focused on the fourth planet, an iron-silicate rocky world a little larger than Earth. A cloud of cometary fragments fell along with the ship, dragged out of the Oort by robotic tugs and injected with Von Neuman machines to disassemble them and refine the materials into usable assets.
It would be another three years before the Unending reached periapsis with the planet, but dark probes had already fallen past it more than a decade ago and whispered their passive observations up the gravity well on hair-thin beams of Doppler-shifted laser light. Ahead, advance bases on captured rocks and diverted asteroids, built up by VonNeus released in a seeder cloud twenty years ago—before the ship had begun its braking maneuvers—busily cranked out materials for the coming battle. The buzzing machines spread from rock to rock, erecting thrusters and sensors to turn the floating, drifting detritus of the system into a coordinated, organized flotilla of falling mass that spread across nearly a billion kilometers of space, approaching on a thousand different trajectories. Factories built themselves and turned out drones and smart missiles and probes. Crèches were assembled, tiny pockets of warmth and air in cramped cylinders and globes, and cloning vats sucked the organic molecules out of the comets and turned them into a new army of soldiers.
Nano-assembling Spinners were carefully put together and fed with patterns for more complicated items: electronic guidance systems, AI processor substrates, engine parts, magnetic coils. The Spinners extruded components that the fastbred soldiers assembled into weapons and equipment and transports, stacking them rack upon rack over the space of years in anticipation of the coming invasion. S-Jets came together and were tossed out on slow, lazy paths that would eventually put them close to the crèches and the Unending for loading and deployment.
It was an intricate and carefully crafted ballet, this falling frenzy of layered activity, wave upon wave of growing menace all moving so as to arrive at the shore of the colony simultaneously in a tsunami of destructive force. Afterwards, when they had gotten what they came for, or found their next objective, the raw mass—the guns and the missiles and the factories and the soldiers—would all be abandoned in place, discarded as their period of usefulness ended. It was too much to reasonably carry between stars, especially when matter was so abundant at their destinations. Information was the currency of the interstellar age: patterns, designs, DNA, data. Infinitely transportable, yet choked by the bandwidth of sluggard light, it was also infinitely valuable across the spread of humanity. When all you could see from the other islands of man was the distant past, any hint of the now—be it news or technology—was priceless. It was only the most irreproducible and irreplaceable items that made the journey between stars intact, items like Commodore Harriman. And he hated it.
***
Gasping in the cramped centrifuge, he forced water down his throat and concentrated on not vomiting it back up again. He lay on the carpeted surface, gritting his teeth at the waves of pins and needles that still racked his body even now, four days after being awakened. Every joint ached, his head throbbed from dehydration, and his heart thudded in his chest, unused to pushing thin blood through his veins after so many decades of sluggishly moving the syrupy hibernation gel around. Every breath was like inhaling sand into his dusty lungs. The MedAI chimed for him to resume exercising.
Glaring at the video pickup at the room’s axis, Harriman stayed where he was and sucked another pull of water around his swollen tongue, wincing at the sharp, cold fire as it oozed down his throat. The MedAI chimed again, more insistently, and the drones stowed in the walls of the centrifuge stirred, plastic arms fluttering and flexing as they readied to step out and bodily lift him back to his task. Harriman waited until the first of them was fully out of its niche before rolling over and pushing himself upright with a seething grunt. He glared at the machines and waved them back to their cubbies before resuming his slow and painful shuffle around the circumference of the room.
There was nothing for him to do yet beyond rebuilding his ravaged body. TacOps—the military AI that planned and coordinated their attacks—ran the preparations and monitored the multitude of factories and weapons more efficiently than he ever could, and it was still months until Contact. Harriman gritted his teeth against a wave of dizziness and pulled up the latest messages from Sol to take his mind off the pain and indignity of the MedAI’s ministrations.
They knew.
Approximately thirty-four years ago, their transmissions had stopped providing information and started demanding it. There were orders, warnings, and threats. Empty words, they were fossils unearthed from an ancient time, historical curios disconnected from his present existence. All they meant to him now, as though the empty rooms of the Unending’s tiny organics module weren’t reminder enough already, was that he was truly on his own. He filed commands with the ship’s AI to quarantine all further communications and to perform thorough virus checks before opening any further messages. Sol was to be counted as an enemy now.
He sighed and forced himself to shuffle a little faster around the centrifuge.
***
The battle had begun eight weeks early.
The first shots had been fired long before Contact: clouds of high velocity pellets sprayed from magnetic coil guns, precisely judged rocks carefully aimed and accelerated, missiles shoved out to drift toward the cities and military emplacements that were their targets. TacOps traced the intricate squiggles that plotted these targets against the sweep and spin of the planets and moons they resided on, choreographing the dance moves so that weapons and targets would come together at precisely the right time, in precisely the right way. This was routine. What hadn’t been counted on, though, was the enemy having already fired back.
Falling in from the dark of space, the onrushing armada of cold, quiet rocks and machines was as close to invisible as it was possible to be. With trillions of cubic kilometers to watch in all directions, nothing short of a sustained radar sweep of the entire volume of space to twenty AUs out would reliably detect an attack before it was too late, and paranoia rarely ran so deep as to justify the economics of such a search. The only real vulnerability lay in the fifteen-year deceleration burn the Unending had performed, the pinprick of its fusion star impossible to hide. But it had been carefully aimed away from the planet, and among the billions of natural stars in the heavens, an observer would only have noticed the newcomer if he was really looking.
Someone in Osiris had really been looking.
At three weeks into Initiation—eight weeks before the first projectiles would reach their targets—a stream of high-V pellets suddenly ripped through the attacking force’s volume, precisely where the Unending fell. Or, rather, where the carefully chosen rock of similar mass and size fell in its place.
TacOps was the most paranoid intelligence this side of insanity and had, immediately upon completion of the deceleration burn, begun changing the course of the ship through the quiet, gentle push of ion thrusters applied over a span of months, so that the Unending now arced through the system thirty million kilometers away from her former track. The ship’s stand-in, an ancient rock found floating in a wildly eccentric orbit just inside the Oort perimeter, now flared under the merciless impacts of hundreds of depleted uranium slugs, each smacking into its surface with a combined closing speed of nearly fifteen thousand kilometers per second. Harriman watched the detonation on his screen, the light
of destruction already an hour old by the time it reached his position, and frowned. The resources and vigilance implied by an effective early detection and interception did not bode well for the invasion, even assuming that the Osirans had been warned somehow of their coming. The Unending had rolled through the other colonies with little effort, but Osiris was going to be very different.
***
The stars were on fire.
That was the impression given by the tactical display aboard Harriman’s command craft, a stealthed S-Jet outfitted for SigInt. Detonations, firefights, and high-energy discharges raged across a volume of space nearly eighty light minutes wide, encompassing four planets and over two dozen moons, asteroids, and artificial habitats. Of course, none of it was happening now—the distances involved even here within a single star system were great enough that the present was still an elusive and unknowable thing. The signals took minutes to hours to receive and sometimes almost as long to clean up and interpret into coherent data. Simulations and extrapolations were the best available indications of how the battle was going, and the sloppy imprecision of it made Harriman seethe.
TacOps had cloned itself out into a dozen other command craft and spread itself throughout the theater of operations in order to be better connected to events. It now coordinated amongst its various selves as quickly as it could across the conflict. Harriman spent his time scrolling the timeline back and forth, watching events in high speed from Contact up through current state, looking for trends and assigning priorities. TacOps was blindingly fast and brilliant at logistics and reactive strategies, but like all AI was essentially autistic and lacked anything like intuitive empathy. Harriman was a necessary component of the war machine and was far better at reading intent out of the enemy formations, his feedback allowing the AI to be proactive in a way it never could be on its own.
Or he could if he weren’t locked into the past, watching events that were already long over.
Frustrated at the stuttering, ambiguous, start-and-stop half-world of the Now, he slapped at the slider and rolled his display back to Contact once more and watched things play out from the beginning in crystal clear detail. The past always had better clarity than the present.
Once again, he watched lasers and radar dance around each other, teasing and probing, in the weeks leading up to zero hour as both sides tried to size each other up. He watched coil guns fire and pellet clouds fly. He watched induction thrusters shove at asteroids and rocks. He watched bomb-fueled laser cannons carefully rotate and align. Small flashes here and there, firefly winks in the velvet night, as the Osirans found one or another of the attackers’ assets and eliminated it. And then, in a sudden wash: Contact. A thousand fiery blossoms erupted across the system as missiles and projectiles pushed on their way months or years ago finally found their targets in a grand symphony of destruction. A symphony that had roared and swooped and crescendoed over and over, wave after wave, for nearly thirty days.
Intercepted transmissions gathered and studied during the decades-long approach to the system indicated that the scientists he was after were most likely to be found on an artificial habitat in the planet’s trailing Lagrange point. Capturing it was the main priority of the attack. Of even greater interest to Harriman, though, were the half-dozen starships that had boosted out of the system over the past several months. His quarry had evaded him too many times already. Missiles were fired after the closer ones, enormous laser cannons were constructed and fired at the further ones. Two were destroyed outright, three were disabled, and one escaped, headed in a direction away from any known colony. Harriman stared at its receding drive flare, only a few months of acceleration away but already beyond his reach, and reluctantly turned his attention back to the battle at hand.
The instant that the Unending’s decoy had been destroyed—Unending herself currently fell starward on an orbit far inside and safely removed from the arc of the conflict, just a quiet dot in a sky full of screaming demons—TacOps had tripled production and launched hundreds of new seeder factories into the corners of the system. These new factories even now were spreading across the Oort and Kuiper, sending a constant rain of new ordnance and troop packed transports down into the system’s well, replenishing the ranks of the attackers even as the Osirans ground away at the leading edge of their forces. But it was slow, a steady trickle as opposed to the solid wall of coordinated force that they had struck with initially. And the Osirans were doing the same thing on the inner worlds and moons. It was clearly devolving into a war of attrition, one that would stalemate very quickly as both sides applied the same tactics, Unending with greater volume, but the Osirans with shorter distances and quicker response times. Millions of lives and billions of tons of materials expended to eventually achieve nothing but mutual destruction. TacOps predicted that without a breakthrough of some sort that the equilibrium point would be reached in about eight days, with the inevitable collapse of both systems coming another ninety to one hundred twenty days after that.
TacOps churned through scenario after scenario, trying to find a way to tip the balance. Over and over it piled asset lists against one another and looked for loopholes, for ways to deliver a crushing blow. It found a few, but the margins for error were sliver-thin. Harriman almost pitied the AI, watching it go through its simulations in ever greater desperation. Machines were vastly impressive number crunchers, but almost utterly incapable of looking outside the box. The answer was obvious. As Harriman gave the orders, he literally laughed at the way TacOps paused for several seconds at the new data: the machine equivalent of its jaw dropping open.
***
The ceasefire request came sooner than expected, three full days before the equilibrium point, and Harriman chuckled again at what he imagined was TacOp’s sullen silence at the event. He resisted the urge to tell it, ‘I told you so.’ The Osirans weren’t stupid—no organization that had achieved as much as they had in the handful of centuries they had been here could afford to be. They had been analyzing the situation and no doubt saw exactly the same thing that TacOps had: a sustained war was a no-win scenario. Even if they somehow defeated the attacker, it would come at a cost too great to bear. And that, ultimately, was what mattered. Not who won, but what it cost them to do so.
War was, after all, an exercise in logistics and economics, not tactics. Any general who approached a war with tactics foremost in mind was doomed to failure, and should never have been promoted above sergeant. There came a point of diminishing returns in every battle beyond which it simply made no more sense to fight.
Harriman accepted the ceasefire and ordered TacOps to concentrate the remaining assets around the Osiran’s major installations:—stark and unsubtle hints at what it would cost the colony if the agreement was broken. An Osiran representative calling herself the Chief Operations Manager broadcast a lengthy speech over general radio frequencies condemning the attack and likening the attackers to marauding barbarians knocking at the walls of civilization. Credit was claimed for beating the aggressors into a stalemate and forcing a cease fire, followed by a sincere and patriotic promise that the Aggregation—Harriman assumed that was what the government here was called—would staunchly defend its citizens and do everything in its power to broker a peace with these monsters. On a restricted frequency tight beamed by laser to the single S-Jet that Harriman had used to send his acceptance signal, the representative sent a message that said, simply, “What will it take to buy our freedom?”
Harriman smiled and began composing a response.
***
The S-Jet carrying the envoy mission eased ahead of its heavily armed escort of robotic gunships and fell quietly through the ranks of Osiran strike craft guarding the docking rings of the habitat. The Asten cylinder was a massive structure over five kilometers long and almost one in diameter. The open gridwork of its frame held rank upon rank of pressurized modules, giving it the look of a hollowed-out ear of corn. An Asten migh
t not be as impressive a construct as a true O’Neill cylinder would be, but it was a lot safer and more durable. A micro-meteor strike or outright attack could rupture individual modules, but the rest of the station would remain viable, whereas a single hole in an O’Neill threatened the entire structure. Spokes and struts and cables tied the rolling expanse of modules to a thick spinal column running down the axis, at the ends of which were the docking rings. The S-Jet rolled to match the massive station’s spin and settled cautiously into the spidery embrace of yellow and black striped clamping arms.
A squad of armored soldiers squeezed beetle-like out of the narrow airlock and took up positions just inside the broad chamber beyond, their all-black forms clinging to the walls, menacing and incongruous against the bright white surroundings. They were careful at all times to keep their weapons pointed away from the group of Osiran soldiers waiting to meet them. A long moment passed.
The delegation from the Unending emerged from the airlock and floated through the gauntlet of soldiers. They were quickly but politely searched and scanned for weapons. The drones and soldiers were firmly refused entry to the station proper, and then the delegate group was escorted through. They made their way down the spine of the station to another weightless chamber, in which a small crowd of dignitaries awaited, arranged in an arc around one side of a table suspended in the center of the spherical room.
The envoys from Unending, two Vox cyborgs and three human officers, took their places at the table, strapping themselves to a cushioned ring that took the place of seats. Across from them, the Chief Operations Manager leaned forward. Her eyes were a featureless, mirrored silver that flashed in the dim room and contrasted sharply but not unpleasantly against the mocha of her skin. “Commodore Harriman?”
The Big Bad II Page 29