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

by Timothy J. Gawne

  It was Roomba that spotted it first. “I think we are in trouble,” he said. He immediately started mobilizing our distributed weapons.

  Trouble? How so?

  “You see that little asteroid over there?”

  Yes. It’s a kilometer across, and on the same orbit that it was on during the last survey.

  “Indeed,” said Roomba. “Except that it’s about ten million tons less massive than before. The only way that it could have lost that much mass is if it’s been hollowed out and we have been set up. Now stop wasting my time asking stupid questions and help me fight.”

  The Shrapnel must have been eavesdropping on us, or perhaps just noticed the sudden change in the disposition of our forces. The asteroid was fractured open by timed nuclear bombs and guided missiles spilled out of its hollow core like candy from a pinata. Oh bloody neoliberal hell. The Shrapnel must have been working on setting this trap for more than a century, patiently excavating the asteroid, building missiles and bombs, and waiting for just the right time.

  What followed was typical for an intense short-range space combat – countless thousands of missiles and millions of jammers, decoys, interceptors, sub-munitions, sub-sub-munitions: the works. It’s fascinating in its complexity and richness of course, and the recordings are all on public access, but there was nothing tactically or strategically novel about it so I will omit a full description from this written account.

  I do have to admit that Roomba really saved the day. Jerk or not, his leadership of our defense was inspired. We had been caught off-guard and out-gunned. We should have been destroyed. Instead, his tactical brilliance saved most of us.

  But not, unfortunately, Roomba himself, or McMansion, who both perished as the enemy tactical systems, realizing that they were going to lose overall, threw everything that they had into taking out our two heaviest hitters.

  I may not have liked Roomba personally, but I will always have the deepest respect for his abilities and his sacrifice. Sometimes heroes are not warm and fuzzy, but they are still heroes.

  The enemy missile swarm had been destroyed, but there was still no sign of the Shrapnel. We orbited the planet and debated what to do. I was unhappy about losing our strongest artillery, and most of our distributed weapons, and felt that we should call for more reinforcements and wait. Relic, however, insisted that we needed to press the attack: he argued that the Shrapnel must have used up all of its missiles in this one strike – there would have been no reason for it to hold back – and that it would never be more vulnerable than it was now.

  What settled it was when Relic got a lucky radar and seismic reading of something very much like a Shrapnel-Class cybertank on the surface of Hawiya. He quickly lost the contact, but not before he got a location and bearing. We dropped a bunch of fusion bombs on the projected track, but more from due diligence than any realistic prospect of being able to target the Shrapnel in this metallic soup of an atmosphere. We didn’t detect any secondary explosions, and cloud-top sniffer probes didn’t pick up any increase in the traces of the Shrapnel’s unique hull alloys, so we must have missed. Which means that the Shrapnel is still down there, still active, probably without major backup, but who knows really?

  I am often accused of being crazy – and the preponderance of the evidence does frequently lead to this conclusion – but I am not stupid. I did not want to go down on Hawiya, but Relic was insistent and persuasive, and our metaphorical blood was up, so we landed on the wretched hellworld and took up the hunt for the Shrapnel.

  Optical visibility was zero. Radars at maximum power could detect out to five kilometers – maybe. Seismic sensors worked, but the planet was so tectonically unstable and the hypersonic winds created so much vibration that it was hard to get anything definitive. The hypersonic wind also negated any form of acoustic sonar.

  On top of that, the radiation, temperature, and pressure, meant that we had to forgo our usual escort screen (A cybertank without an escort screen of heavily armed combat remotes is a lot like an old biological human without clothes – there is something almost indecent about it). Not ten minutes after landing I had five minor systems ruined by the acid and my maintenance drones were working full time keeping me from falling apart, and we hadn’t even entered active combat yet. What the heck are we doing on this stupid planet anyhow?

  We are spread out in line abreast, just 10 kilometers apart trying to track the trail Relic had picked up. That’s when Frisbee drove over a buried nuclear landmine. It didn’t destroy him, but the ground collapsed underneath him and he ended up buried about 200 meters down and badly damaged.

  At least we could communicate easily enough via sound through the rock.

  Frisbee, how are you doing down there?

  “How am I doing?” replied Frisbee. “Well I am alive and intact – mostly – but I’m pretty well stuck down here, and having one hell of a time trying to keep the acid and radiation out of my damaged seals. I’m afraid that you will have to dig me out.”

  “It would seem,” said Skew, "that we have been expected. Here let me check out how bad it looks from the surface.”

  Skew drove over to the edge of the hole that had swallowed up Frisbee – and another atomic landmine went off right under him, and Skew was buried as well. Dammit I should have seen that one coming, it’s one of the oldest tricks in the book. Set secondary mines near the primary to take out any would-be rescuers.

  “Oops,” said Skew. “I too am intact, but well and truly buried. Feel free to dig me out, oh I don’t know, when it suits your busy social schedules. I’m not going anywhere.”

  Now it was just Relic and me, and we should have stayed and guarded Frisbee and Skew, but Relic charged off following the Shrapnel’s trail swearing revenge. There was no way that I could stand up to the Shrapnel on my own, so I reluctantly tagged along after Relic. I was careful to follow in his tracks so that any more deeply buried atomic landmines would get him and not me.

  Eventually we came to the entrance of a very large cave. The smoothness of the walls and the flatness of the floor made it clear that it had been artificially excavated. Relic claimed that the trail headed inside, and that he should go in first, seeing as he was more heavily armored than I am. I objected, pointing out that Relic could fire over me in support and not the reverse, so I headed in first.

  Out of the wind there were indeed tread tracks on the ground and they were the same pattern as the Shrapnel’s. The tunnel wound around and after about two kilometers I turned a corner and came face-to-face with the Shrapnel. The bottom half was a conventional cybertank chassis, but the top had that blue-gray sheen of the Amok Assassin Clone modules – you could see the faint grid of lines where the modules were joined. It was configured for maximum close-range attack mode, with four enormous cannons all pointing at me.

  I fired my main gun at it and the entire superstructure evaporated. It had been empty. What?

  At this point Relic, who was right behind me, opened up with both of his front main guns, and blew my primary turret clean off my hull. Ouch. I didn’t see that one coming.

  OK I get it. This was a trap. The enemy was not the Shrapnel, but you all along. You used it as bait so you could lure us here and kill us.

  “That, by now, should be obvious, although too late to do you or your friends any good,” said Relic. “The Shrapnel never booted to sentience. I killed Little Black Cloud and Taco, and damaged myself so that I could blame the Shrapnel. I sent the unit out here on automatic, and all the while that I was pretending to be hunting it I was laying this trap.”

  But why?

  “Why? I’m not sure. I just like killing cybertanks.”

  You must have gotten quite the thrill taking out Roomba and McMansion then.

  “Sadly, no. Space battles don’t do it for me. It has to be close and in person, and the cybertank that I am killing has to know that I am doing it. I only destroyed those two because I knew that I would have to whittle down your forces so that I could take you. S
till, I get to kill you, and then I will go out and kill your crippled and trapped friends, so not a bad yield, not bad at all.

  It’s been two centuries since you killed Little Black Cloud and Taco. You have to wait a long time between thrills.

  “Who says that I’ve had to wait that long between pleasures?”

  I had to think about that last statement for a while. I shot two hundred rounds from a railgun at Relic’s main hull – the projectiles made a staccato sound as they impacted, but did no appreciable damage. Relic blew away my offending railgun with one of his primaries.

  “You knew that would be pointless. A last show of defiance in the face of certain death? How trite.”

  Something like that.

  -------------------

  Stowed away in a corner of one of Relic’s internal hangars, one of my humanoid androids woke up. I had packed it in with a lot of other stuff and left it in standby mode. I had timed my railgun fire against Relic’s hull to send the digital activation code acoustically, coded in the intervals between shots, and also to tell my android self that Relic was the enemy.

  I pushed my android self out of my crate, stood up, and adjusted my blue suit. Then I walked off to the side of the bay, deep within Relic, and started pulling fiber-optic conduits out of their sockets.

  A speaker crackled into life. “Old Guy? Is that you? What do you think that you are doing?”

  I am going to tear you apart from the inside, of course. Your armor won’t help you in here.

  I smashed several hydraulic lines with a titanium girder that I had found.

  “You suspected me all along?” asked Relic.

  Sadly no. This was just something I decided to take along for the heck of it. Pure coincidence that it happened to be in the right place at the right time. There was another one in McMansion’s bays, and some other tricks that got blown up in the space battle, but this one I got lucky with.

  “You realize that this is pointless. That’s just a humanoid android. I can easily destroy it with a couple of maintenance drones.”

  I smash some minor power couplings. Bring it on.

  I am confronted with four of Relic’s maintenance drones – squat, blocky, powerful, with heavy cutting jaws. I smash the first two with my fists, destroy the third with a really nice flying roundhouse kick that sent it soaring across the bay to shatter against the far wall (I was showing off with that one), and then tore the fourth drone in half.

  “What the – you brought along a super-powered android? But that’s…. that’s…”

  Pointless? Never done? Tactically insane? Something that is going to beat the living crap out of you from the inside? Yes on all counts.

  I am jumped from behind by something more powerful than a mere maintenance drone. Heavy claws tear at my android’s synthetic flesh, leaving the highly armored surface revealed. It’s a bear-shaped robot. It’s not a combat unit, but the thing is huge. I activate the thermal lance in my right arm and slice it into huge bear-shaped pieces. Then I carve a hole through a bulkhead and look for more things to smash. I come across one Relic’s computer cores, which I pulverize. Something as small as a human shouldn’t be expending this much power; I extend metal vanes from my back and they glow white-hot dumping the heat load. I’m starting to enjoy this. Is this how serial killers get started? I hope not.

  --------------------

  “Please stop,” said Relic. “I will let you and your friends live.”

  I don’t believe you.

  “I suppose not. Still, I have a lot of redundant systems. It’s going to take you a little while to destroy all of me. In the meantime I will at least have the pleasure of killing you before I die.”

  I had expected as much and was already accelerating to maneuver my main hull behind the wreckage of the Shrapnel. Relic shot at me, but missed. He was clearly having trouble adapting to the damage that I was doing to his internals. Nevertheless he was still more than capable of destroying me. He charged forwards and smashed the wreckage of the Shrapnel aside; he shuddered as my android trashed yet more of his internal computer cores, then readjusted and zeroed in on me. I was at the end of the cave and had no room to maneuver, and at this range he couldn't miss even with his damaged systems. Relic was right: I am not capable of destroying his internal mechanisms fast enough and now I am done.

  Relic stopped and I waited for the kill shots. And waited. That’s when I noticed that Relic had completely frozen. And I got a hail from a friendly voice.

  “Hello there Old Guy!”, said Skew. “Were you trying to have all the fun without me? What were you thinking?”

  Skew had somehow managed to dig himself out of his hole (Skew does hold the cybertank record for glacier-surfing: if anyone could wriggle out of a deep hole it would be him). He had tracked Relic and myself into the cave, and come across us just before I was due to be blown to pieces. Normally a Raptor couldn’t possibly take on a Bear-Class, even by surprise and from the rear, but Relic had been so internally damaged and disoriented that he didn’t notice Skew’s approach. Skew had fired his main gun on maximum cycle and the successive shots drilled through Relic’s heavy armor at point blank range and killed him.

  Eventually we dug Frisbee out of his hole, repaired ourselves, and left Hawiyah. And good (no, not good, superb) riddance to that miserable excuse of a rocky planet.

  My super-android had been destroyed when Skew killed Relic from behind, but some of its memory cores were just intact enough that we were able to piece together its last moments.

  We were feted as heroes on our return, though the loss of Roomba and McMansion was of course sad. Still, the congratulations seemed a little lacking in enthusiasm, and I don’t blame people. Of all my many victories and narrow escapes, this is the one that leaves me with a bad taste. To think that one of our own could have been so corrupt and perverted.

  We all know that we are psychologically human and that, in theory, any psychiatric illness or evil that the biological humans had fallen prey to could happen to us as well. However, most human psychopathologies need a trigger to manifest - physical suffering, sexual abuse at a young age, losing a job, being forced to read Ayn Rand - things that don’t happen to a cybertank. We had hoped that we would have been spared the worst of the human flaws, although we were always aware that statistically one of us could become a monster. It’s disappointing to have it confirmed.

  4. Heilige Vergeltung

  “Nothing is impossible if you don’t take life too seriously.” – Comic character ”Die-Cut,” 20th century American Empire, Earth.

  The biological humans have been gone for many thousands of years. Nonetheless, from time to time we find some of the bits and pieces that they left behind. Things like Heilige Vergeltung.

  I like to think that I am a ”people-person” kind of cybertank, but every now and then I am driven to take a sabbatical and go off exploring on my own. So it was that I had been cruising through deep space for several years, with the goal of exploring a distant and – we thought – empty and unclaimed star system.

  At first everything went according to plan. I floated through the system, and I and my attendant swarm of remotes catalogued the planets and major moons and asteroids.

  While our intelligence said that the system was not currently claimed by any technological power, I still have to proceed cautiously: our information could be wrong or out of date, and there is nothing like an uninvited guest to stir up trouble. However, so far this place seems deserted: no active transmitters, no signs of large-scale energy sources, no bright points of fusion drives.

  I do find some debris floating around. It’s cold and long-dead but clearly technological in origin. Chunks of metal, flat sheets and discarded bolts and wires, but also some complete systems: deep-space probes and communications relays from the look of them. I examine one up close and am surprised. The device is clearly human in origin, dating from a time before the cybertanks. There is no record of a human presence in this system. Perhaps this
was one of those unregistered colonies?

  There is one rocky, Earthlike planet in the system, and the debris field is densest in that zone, so I head over. The planet has an atmosphere but no liquid water or life. It’s mostly deserted, but in one spot on a wide flat plain near the equator is a large concentration of tall metal buildings. They are shielded against deep radar – I have some other scanning technologies, but they yield results that are intriguing yet ambiguous. A few kilometers away from the buildings are piles of metallic scrap – so mangled that it is impossible to tell what they are from. Time to go down and do a little exploring!

  I land my main self, and drive over to the buildings (one nice thing about dead planets is that you don’t need to worry about squishing the locals – remotes are all well and good but there is nothing like tooling around in your main hull). Stylistically the buildings look human, like the sort of generic industrial sheds that, even today, are in common use with us cybertanks. The walls are simple corrugated steel, the roofs are flat, there are no windows but here and there are large metal doors – some small enough for a human, others multi-segmented and potentially able to open wide enough to let a cybertank drive through. With neither rain nor life it’s hard to tell how long they’ve been here. They are not covered in vines, nor corroded by moisture, but there does seem to be deep pitting by wind-blown dust that is consistent with an age before us cybertanks came on the scene.

  The buildings are set far apart from each other, separated only by flat hard-packed dirt. Again, more in keeping with an industrial zone than a regular city. That lets me drive my main hull around, a rare pleasure.

  I examine the nearby pile of scrap, and I am shocked to realize that it’s the site of a massacre. There are a variety of medium and light armored units, transports of various styles, and dead humans in environment suits. Without bacteria or water there is no decay; the dead bodies are gray and mummified behind their plastic faceplates.

  This can’t have been a proper battle – the human forces are too clustered together. They have been hit from behind. They must have been surprised in bivouac by a vastly superior enemy, and cut down as they tried to escape. I recognize some of the weapons from my historical records: there is a late-model Wolverine-Class robot tank, 100 tons and pretty tough for its size, but it’s been sheared nearly in half. Farther on I spot a Mjolnar-Class self-propelled howitzer. It weighs in at 150 tons, but its hull has been shattered and the treads fragmented into separate links by whatever weapons that took it out.