Confessions of a Sentient War Engine (An Old Guy/Cybertank Adventure Book 4)

by Timothy J. Gawne

  That still left us with the problem of what to do with the android that had been programmed to behave like Gotthard Heinrici. As a fully self-aware mind, it is against our law to deactivate him. Ultimately he decided to simply wander around and play tourist. He gave up his Wehrmacht uniform and now dresses in simple civilian clothes (“I am no longer in the Wehrmacht. I am retired! And well deserved.”).

  Sometimes he would argue historical points with Uncle Jon, but of course he had nothing new to add to the archives, because everything that he knew about historical events had in fact been programmed into him from these very same archives. I had hoped that he might get along with Silhouette, but the two didn’t like each other (“I don’t care if he saved Smolensk, Minsk, Omsk, and Kiev, he might be the most boring man in existence,” said Silhouette. “Der Fraulein has a sharp tongue,” said Heinrici).

  The last I heard he had decided to take a trip to the planet of the vampires. I wonder what Queen Olga will make of him?

  3. Relic

  “Second only to genius is the appreciation of it” – Dr. Michael Loop, 21st century Earth.

  It started shortly after the live performance of the Opera “The Battle of the Somme” that had been jointly put on by my old comrades, the Mountain-Class Uncle Jon and the Raptor-Class Skew. The ”stage” in this case was an entire plain stretching out to the horizon. The singers were humanoid robots dressed up as World-War I British soldiers. Trenches had been dug and barbed wire strung erratically across the terrain. The Germans were on the right and the allied forces on the left. There were real reproduction vintage weapons in use: heavy howitzers, shorter-ranged trench mortars, Maxim guns, and bolt-action rifles. The artillery raised clouds of smoke and dust that slowly drifted across the battlefield.

  There was a 50-piece orchestra off to one side that was composed of automatons dressed in identical black tuxedos. The opera was being recorded in high resolution from multiple viewpoints, but there was a live audience of some 200 of us that had sent humanoid androids and remotes of our own so that we could also witness it from a more intimate perspective. We were a diverse group: some dressed in late-Edwardian clothes appropriate to the period, some in more outlandish styles: a Pedagogue storm-trooper resplendent in polychromatic phase-armor; a Canoness of the Order of the Librarians Temporal, with sweeping red robes trimmed in ermine and a quasi-sentient weapons harness glittering on her shoulders; a simulacrum of Cedric the Mad, disheveled hair, beady pig-like eyes, and a shapeless work smock stained with random smudges of paint and blood. Still others showed up in anthropoid chassis of unadorned bare plastic or metal, or even metal boxes on wheels.

  Because our initial cultural inheritance was from the biological humans, so we have an interest in the human form. Certainly much of our literature and art and language is based on or refers to it. As we progress, and more and more of our culture derives from our own efforts, the human form is becoming less important to us, especially amongst the newest models of cybertanks. Still, cultural evolution is slow, and for the time being a majority of us still like to ‘dress up’ as a hominid from time to time.

  The protagonist of the opera, British Lieutenant Harry Felders, had started out as a young, intelligent, and patriotic man. He had been under no illusions as to the nature of war, and fully expected to die horribly in the trenches, but was determined to do his duty. As the opera progressed, and Felders witnessed the deaths of his fellows, the incompetence and unconcern of the commanding officers, and the futility of repeatedly conducting head-on infantry assaults on dug-in positions defended by machine guns and artillery, his mood had changed.

  The opera was reaching its finale, and the character of Harry Felders was singing a powerful solo in which he curses his commanders, the political leaders back home, and even his society as a whole. The music swelled powerfully. The artillery was increasing in frequency, and then the entire orchestra was wiped out in a rolling barrage, which resulted in an explosion of antique instruments, shredded tuxedoes and random robot parts.

  However, rather than ending the music, the opera shifted to a higher level. The heavy artillery became the steady beat of the base; shrapnel falling on tin roofs the snare drums; the twanging of barbed wire the strings. Felders cursed the small fluffy white dog that belonged to General Haig’s wife, and then he cursed the Pauli exclusion principle. It was a triumph, and it seemed to many of us at the time that this was one of the most sublime pieces of music that had ever been composed.

  Just as the solo was reaching its peak, the rolling barrage obliterated the lead singer. The barrage continued on, and then blew up the audience as well.

  --------------------

  One of the nice things about having an audience of humanoid androids animated by subminds is that any catastrophic destruction is accepted calmly and without screaming or panic. Some of the audience had been blasted apart entirely by the artillery, and their parts lay scattered around in clean little piles of rubble: so unlike the bloody smelly messes of dead biological humans. Others of the audience had been grievously wounded, missing arms, legs, heads; these accepted the damage with equanimity and were helped with quiet efficiency by those of us who were mostly functional. Missing parts were re-united with their owners, repair drones coordinated to the appropriate locations, and the more seriously damaged bodies just shut themselves down and were taken off to be recycled.

  The android inhabited by Uncle Jon was in the form of British General Julian “Bungo” Byng, and other than a large piece of metal shrapnel embedded in his back, he was intact and was helping sort out the bits and pieces of those who were more damaged. General Byng was a sad-faced European male with a scruffy fat mustache the consistency of a cleaning brush and deep circles under his eyes. His general’s uniform was rumpled and almost devoid of medals.

  Well. That was quite the musical performance, but don’t you think that blowing up the audience at the end was a bit, perhaps, melodramatic?

  Uncle Jon shook his head. “Not planned, I swear. Destroying the orchestra, yes that was intended, but not the audience. Really.” He indicated the piece of metal embedded in his back. “I am blown up by my own mortar!”

  There are many who might not believe you.

  Uncle Jon sighed. “I suppose. Skew and I will have to make reparations in any event, repairing or replacing the androids that we’ve destroyed, but you have to remember that we were using actual reproductions of early 20th century artillery pieces. Their tolerances are poor and the shells are unguided. This really was a mistake.”

  Also, the Pauli Exclusion Principle was not developed until 1925, nearly a decade after the battle of the Somme. It’s not like you to miss an historical detail like that.

  The android owned by Skew, who appeared as German General Georg Bruchmuller, wandered over. Bruchmuller, like Byng, was also a European male, with a similar appearance except that he looked slightly less disheveled and his bushy mustache turned up at the ends. “Uncle Jon and I disagreed about that. It’s an opera. I claim poetic license.”

  I thought this General Bruchmuller was supposed to be some sort of artillery genius?

  Skew shook his head. “Certainly the real Bruchmuller was an innovator in the use of artillery, but there is only so much control that one can have over such primitive ordnance. Especially those damn German 15 cm howitzers. You’d be lucky to get your shots within half a kilometer of what you were aiming at. I told Uncle Jon that we should have added some modern guidance systems to the shells.”

  Uncle Jon sniffed. “That would have ruined the authenticity. The agreement was that we use true reproduction weapons in the performance. Modern guidance systems? We might as well have done the whole thing in a simulation. Quick and easy, but nothing has the texture of base reality.”

  We cybertanks do spend a lot of time in simulations and they are invaluable not just as entertainment, but for evaluating plans and possibilities. We can easily create simulated environments that are pretty close to the real thing �
� but capturing the full texture of reality in all of its myriad complexity is so computationally expensive that it is often cheaper and faster to just build the real thing. Hence, an opera using physical artillery pieces. Getting the same level of fine detail in a simulation would have taken a year of processing on a computer the size of a planet.

  Besides, any species that does not value reality over simulated dreams is headed for extinction. Simulations are useful and fun, but even if we really could create simulations as detailed as physical reality, we would know the difference. To any sane species, it matters, what is real and what is not.

  It was then that I was approached by a representative of the Bear-Class cybertank, Relic. Now the Bear-Class is pretty heavy – at 18,000 tons, it’s almost at the level of a Mountain-Class. It has a chunky brick shaped hull, the main plasma-cannon armament is hardly stronger than mine, but there are four of them mounted in independent turrets at the top corners of the hull. The total firepower is still less than a Mountain-Class – and nothing like a Magma – but with four turrets it has a lot of targeting flexibility. Still, the main strength of the Bear-Class is its shear survivability. It has triple layers of armor, multiple redundant systems, and more self-repairing facilities than any other extant class. In combat they are slow, lacking in tactical mobility, but almost impossible to kill. They also have generous internal hangar space which can be very useful in the field.

  The representative of Relic took the form of a large brown bear (a Kodiak, I think). I suppose that’s appropriate for his class, but it always seemed a bit too cute for my tastes. Whatever.

  “That was an impressive opera,” rumbled Relic from his bear-shaped robot (Once someone referred to it as a ‘bear-droid’, which for some reason had made Relic very cross. ‘It’s not a bear-droid, it’s a bear-shaped robot!’, he had said. Relic can be prickly sometimes). “I especially liked the ending where everything got blown up. A very nice touch.”

  “I swear, that wasn’t planned,” said Skew. “The fortunes of war, and opera.”

  “I’m sure,” replied Relic, “but it was still impressive. Kudos.” Relic had his bear-shaped robot sit down on its haunches; his eyes were now at about the same level as those of us still standing.

  “Thank you,” said Skew. “But we haven’t seen you around for a while. What have you been working on, Relic?”

  “Oh this and that. But mostly trying to track down what happened to the Shrapnel.”

  “Still on that kick?” said Uncle Jon. “It’s been, what, over two centuries since the prototype Shrapnel-Class failed probation, killed its minders and escaped to who-knows-where. It was an untested class – probably dead from a fatal design flaw and drifting between the stars somewhere.”

  “Perhaps. But no chassis was ever found. And I have new evidence of where it might have headed. I have scoured space for light years around us, and performed a statistical analysis for traces of the unique alloy that the Shrapnel was made of. And I believe that I have located its target destination.”

  Which would be?

  “The hellworld, Hawiyah”

  Oh that’s just great. Hawiyah. The worst of the worst. Now by old biological human standards we cybertanks are well nigh indestructible, and we can live pretty much anywhere – an airless vacuum, high-gravity, low-gravity, toxic fumes, freezing cold, boiling hot, human-lethal radiation, that’s like a day in the park for us. But even we have limits, and Hawiyah is right there.

  Nominally earth-sized (and at least the damned place has a decent rocky surface to drive on), the planet has a corrosive acid atmosphere with a pressure at the surface of over 100 times the Terran standard. And when I say acid, I don’t mean the puny pH 4.0 acid rain that plagued old earth, I mean real acid, pH 1.0, that could eat through a centimeter of mild steel in less than an hour. The mean surface temperature is 800 degrees centigrade and winds of over a thousand kilometers per hour routinely scour the surface. The air is opaque and full of metallic dust particles which jam radar and abrade bearings. The radiation level would kill an unprotected human in seconds. A cybertank is designed to withstand worse during combat – but to live in such an environment? That’s another story.

  On Hawiyah you can’t use any but the largest and most strongly armored remotes. Sensing anything becomes difficult at all but the closest of ranges. The maintenance load is monstrous and a constant chore. Operating outside your own hull would have to be done in an armored bunker, and thermal management is an ongoing concern. If the Shrapnel really wanted to find someplace to hide, it could not have picked a better place than Hawiyah.

  Naturally I couldn’t wait to go there and get started.

  The Shrapnel-Class had been a radical new design that combined a relatively conventional 10,000 ton cybertank chassis with a superstructure based on modified Amok “Assassin Clone” modules. These modules could, in principle, reconfigure themselves to adapt to nearly any threat or perform any task. The design had potential, no doubt about that, but the reconfigurable modules created insurmountable mental stability issues.

  When the Shrapnel-Class had failed probation, it had had three minders. The Horizon-Class Little Black Cloud, the Mountain-Class Taco, and Relic. They should have been more than sufficient, but the Shrapnel had overpowered them, destroyed Little Black Cloud and Taco, badly damaged Relic, escaped off-planet, and accelerated into deep space before anyone could get enough velocity to keep up.

  Relic was obsessed with finding the escaped Shrapnel (not having passed its probationary period it did not merit a personal name). I don’t think that Relic wanted revenge for the deaths of Little Black Cloud or Taco so much – Relic had never been very close to anyone – I suspect that it was more about the damage to his pride.

  Well, a bunch of us got to arguing about this, and the upshot was that we put together a strike team and headed off to the hellworld of Hawiyah; with any luck we would find this rogue Shrapnel-Class and be done with it.

  Given the apparent power of the Shrapnel, our strike team was on the heavy side.

  There was, of course, the 18,000 ton Bear-Class, Relic.

  There was also the 8,000 ton Horizon-Class known as Frisbee. Now the Horizon-Class is not quite as up-to-date as it used to be, but it’s still pretty modern and packs a decent wallop. Frisbee is my oldest and closest friend – in his previous incarnation as the Thor-Class Whifflebat, we were amongst the very first cybertanks to be created. Frisbee always makes a big show of being an introverted academic obsessed with biological systems, and so it’s easy to forget that, ton for ton, his combat record ranks him as one of the deadliest cybertanks around.

  Next came the 20,000 ton Penumbra-Class, Roomba. The PenumbraClass is the latest model, very powerful, very smart, kind of an asshole, but then Penumbras tend to be like that. Still, in a straight-up combat he just might have been able to take on all the rest of us put together. I was glad to have his firepower and smarts on our side.

  There was the 3,500 ton Raptor-Class Skew. Hardly bigger than little old me, Skew is clever and fast. If you need someone to wreak havoc in a lightning raid behind enemy lines, Skew is your cybertank. Skew and I are also good friends. We’ve known each other for well over a millennium.

  Then there was the 50,000 ton Magma-Class that we’ve nicknamed McMansion, dredged out of semi-retirement and back into active combat service. It’s an older design, crude by today’s standards, but that massive plasma cannon mounted in a ball-joint up front is still the single biggest weapon mounted on any cybertank. If we are going up against something dangerous having a really, really big gun could turn out to be handy. Like most Magmas, McMansion is calm and patient, though he did complain once about having his excavations of a long-dead alien civilization interrupted.

  And of course yours truly, Old Guy, last surviving Odin-Class, living fossil (Relic might fit better, but the name is already taken), a svelte 2,000 tons, but still going strong. My weapons and sensors have been upgraded many times, but there is only so much that
you can do with an older chassis. I suppose that my tactical role in this expedition will range between scout/mascot/decoy/wise elder/screening force/cannon fodder.

  Because of my great age and small tonnage I am often underestimated. On the other hand, because of my combat record and past good luck I am often overestimated for being more cunning and sneaky than I really am. I can usually work with either.

  We also pack about 200,000 tons of assorted missile pods, combat remotes, and other armaments. That’s all well and good, but I ask myself: what can I bring along that is really weird? I mean, the standard weapons load is the standard for a reason, because it works, but every now and then it pays to have something that nobody would ever expect. I have a few ideas and hid some surprises in amongst the more conventional armamentaria. I should tell my comrades, but they would probably laugh at me and complain about the waste of mass – if they are not needed (and they almost certainly will not be) nobody else will be the wiser.

  --------------------

  We arrive in the system with the hellworld Hawiya without incident, passing the time between the stars with our usual pursuits. We enter the system and distribute our scouts. The trail of unique metal particles does indeed point to the hellworld, but we systematically check all the other planets and moons in the system, just to make sure. We bring our little armada into orbit over Hawiya and try probing it with long-range scans. If the Shrapnel is down there, and we can pinpoint its position, we can just drop rocks on it and be done. But Hawiya is nearly impenetrable to sensors, and the Shrapnel could always have dug itself a tunnel or bunker.