The aliens are landing a sizable ground force on the side of the continent opposite from my main hull. It’s clear that, whoever or whatever they are, I am far outclassed. I call up FCD#4.
Hello FCD#4. Sorry to bother you, but we seem to have been invaded by aliens. They refuse to answer any of my calls, and they are assuming what looks like an aggressive attack formation. I just thought that you should know.
“Hello Old Guy. Yes, I detected severe atmospheric disturbances that are consistent with your statement. They left many vortices and heat-trails and that is a nuisance. Are they enemies of yours?”
I do not know, although their refusal to identify themselves suggests that possibility.
“I have been undisturbed for millennia; their arrival so soon after your own suggests that you led them here. Thus, this is your fault. Please leave this planet at once and, with any luck, they will leave with you.”
I did not purposely lead them here. This is not my fault.
“Your intentions are irrelevant. If you led them here then you led them here and it is indeed your fault and you are interfering with my purpose. Please make them go away.”
As you wish. I shall boost to orbit shortly and leave. I regret any inconvenience that I may have caused you.
I gathered up my energy reserves, recalled my remotes, and began to power up my anti-gravitic suspensors. That was when I got another call from FCD#4.
“Old Guy! These aliens are not after you. They are destroying my floodgates! They are digging up the remains of the old human habitations, but they are not doing it gently. They are using high explosives and fusion burners – they are killing me and trashing this planet’s ecology. Can you help me?”
Now I might have been tempted to tell old FCD#4 to go and stuff himself, but he couldn’t help how he had been programmed, and he was family. Still, I was overmatched and did not see what I could do.
FCD#4, I am sorry, but this alien force is vastly superior to me. Even with my own modest martial skill, and some allowance for luck, simulations show no conceivable path to victory. In addition, my closest allies are many light-months away. Therefore, even though I have already called for backup, it will not arrive in time.
“Old Guy, perhaps you cannot defeat this force on your own. Could you lure them to a specific location? In particular, there is a plateau in the north-west sector of this continent. If you could arrange that the aliens would be there in 34 hours I might be able to pull something together.”
You don’t think that a few tornadoes or thunderstorms would inconvenience a modern armored force, do you? I assure you that it would be pointless.
“No, I have something a little more drastic in mind. Trust me. Can you do that?”
I believe so. Given that I cannot calculate any other options, it seems worth a try.
The aliens were dedicated to wiping out the elements of FCD#4 and digging around the ruins of the old human structures, but they were spread out. I charged out of the north and engaged the enemy in a series of hit-and-run raids. I used cover and terrain and misdirection. I killed the enemy units piecemeal with my main plasma cannon. I was completely focused and tuned into my tactics. You could even say that I was monomaniacal; perhaps there is a little bit of Flood Control Dam No. 4 in all of us.
I am more powerful than any single alien unit, so they are going to have to concentrate to defeat me. They abandon their efforts at digging up old human sites and attempt to envelope me. I beat a fighting retreat, leading them to the designated zone without – I hope – making it too obvious that’s what I am doing.
While this is going on I notice that FCD#4 is frantically opening and closing floodgates all over the continent. It must be having some effect, the sky turns a very ominous looking dark orange. There is a lattice of hexagons high in the sky, some sort of vortex cells. There is nothing in my meteorological databases like them. If FCD#4 really can whip up some big tornadoes maybe I can use them as cover? It’s not much of a chance, but it is at least something.
Finally I am on the plain at the appointed location and hour. The enemy is closing in and I have perhaps 15 minutes left. At this point if I tried to fly away they would just shoot me down. Retreating into the ocean is also not an option. I can operate underwater, but am not currently well equipped for that and they could easily depth-bomb me.
The sky darkens and then a hole like a giant black eye opens in the middle of it. I can see stars in the blackness. How is that possible? I see the faint outline of something huge moving slowly down out of the eye, which has expanded to reach almost from one horizon to the other. I’m not sure exactly what this is, but I suspect that it is a mass of super-dense super-cold air plummeting towards the ground. It only looks slow because it is so massive. Shock waves are forming at the leading edge; it’s locally supersonic! I run simulations and the optima course of action is clear: to drive as fast as I can away from this thing!
I accelerate to 160 kilometers per hour and tear across the hardpacked landscaped. I disperse chaff and decoys, the aliens still manage to get some decent hits on me, but nothing critical. Then a wedge of super-dense cold air hundreds of kilometers long and traveling over a thousand kilometers an hour hits the ground and it’s like the Hand of God striking the Earth. And I don’t mean your goody-two-shoes New Testament God, I mean the Old Testament God, the one that would cleanse the world of sin with apocalypse.
It takes a lot to impress a 2,000-ton war machine that has survived the inside of an atomic fireball. I am impressed. It feels like the entire planet is going to shake itself to pieces. In places the soil liquefies from the vibration and alien units sink into the ground. I scramble to stay on more solid footing.
All the smaller combat systems on both sides are instantly wiped out by the shock wave. If it was just the high wind the more heavily armored units would mostly be OK (it takes a lot of wind to tip over a compact mass of a few hundred tons of metal), but the massive wave of air is scouring megatons of dirt and rock from the ground, accelerating them to hundreds of kilometers an hour and blasting everything clean. I am in a better position than most of the enemy units and, though they outnumber me, my relatively large size gives me more resistance to this ultra-sandblasting.
At first I am just trying to stay alive. The wind-driven rocks sleet off my hull. My hull is tough, but there are a lot of rocks. I lose most of my external sensors and antenna, but have enough hardened units that I can still navigate. In places the ground seems to vanish beneath my treads as the wind tears it away, and I frantically maneuver to avoid being buried or falling into crevices.
The winds start to slow. Although still impressive, they are slightly down on the apocalyptic scale. Now I can worry about more than moment-to-moment survival. I replace some of my destroyed sensors. The enemy has taken a lot more of a beating than I have. I shift into attack mode and, even as I still have to dodge the worst of the gusts and be careful of where I drive, I can start to pick them off again. Decimated by the storm, tactically off-balance, and nearly blind, the surviving alien units are easy prey. FCD#4 and I are victorious.
-------------------
I field-repaired myself and hunted down a few light alien stragglers. FCD#4 worked to reestablish the weather systems and slowly the atmosphere began to calm down.
FCD#4, that was impressive. I didn’t realize that so much atmospheric power could be unleashed on such short notice.
“It was not short notice. I was building it up as soon as we first met. I intended to keep it in reserve and use it as a defense if the need arose. If your intentions had proven honorable – as they have – I would have allowed the energy to dissipate in a more controlled manner. It was only that which allowed to me to use it against the aliens in such a rapid time frame.”
Oh. Well, that makes sense. Still, that is quite a weapon that you have there.
“A standard terrestrial thunderstorm has more energy than a large fusion bomb. What I unleashed here was many orders of magnitude larg
er. Still, it is an unwieldy weapon and it will take me years to undo the damage to the weather patterns. The gouges left in the ground by the wind are going to fill in as lakes: more effects to calculate. And I have lost a significant fraction of my floodgate capacity.”
I can rebuild your destroyed facilities. It’s the least that I can do, considering.
“That would be most generous, thank you. And then please leave and don’t come back, because you seem to attract trouble and I would like to get back to my job of regulating the flow of water on this planet.”
--------------------
So I repaired the damaged parts of FCD#4. He was made of advanced self-healing materials, but regeneration from a blasted foundation was not something that even he could do on his own. And then, as promised, I left.
I did leave behind some stealth probes deep in the system. Every now and then one of them will make a weak, low-bandwidth, encrypted transmission back to me. So far there have been no additional attacks on FCD#4, and the latest transmissions show him still there, distributed in hundreds of dams, sluicegates, and spillways over the single continent, presiding over a benign and stable climate. It’s possible that, when we cybertanks have either been defeated by a more powerful enemy or, more hopefully, evolved to a higher plane of existence, that FCD#4 may be the sole surviving representative of the human civilization.
There are worse legacies. Perhaps someday an alien species with a compatible biochemistry will settle the place, and they and FCD#4 might come to a mutual understanding like he did with the old biological humans. Stranger things have happened, and will.
9. Be Careful What You Wish For
“Always forgive your enemies – nothing annoys them so much.” Oscar Wilde, 19th Century Earth.
It is a characteristic of the human psyche that it must have a fixed physical self-image. For a biological human that would be either a male or female body. The original humans might have dabbled in virtual realities, seeing what it would be like to live as an octopus or a snake or a distributed cloud of nanobots, but only as a novelty.
The same is true for the cybertanks – we enjoy sending different parts of ourselves into bodies modeled after anthropoid humans, and we have any number of specialized remotes of various forms that we use for different purposes: spider-drones, snake-bots, rollogons, whatever. But our core identity is locked to our primary armored hulls.
However, we are a diverse civilization, and there are always those who experiment with transforming themselves into different forms. They may rebuild themselves into mountain-sized industrial facilities, or kilometer-high metal trees, or giant armored centipedes. Usually it turns out to have been a passing fad, and eventually the cybertanks in question will return their bodies back into their original form.
But sometimes, by whatever fluke of personality, a cybertank will stick with its new shape. Such as my old colleague Moby Cybertank, who had started out as a Horizon-Class cybertank, but had spent the last millennium traversing the Greater Equatorial Ocean of Alpha Centauri Prime as a two-kilometer long megaship, the largest self-mobile individual in the entire history of our civilization.
We cybertanks are pretty big, but even with fusion power and advanced drive-trains, past about 10,000 tons mobility starts to become an issue. In space it’s even worse: there are no economies of scale, and something twice as big takes twice as much energy to move. That’s why the second largest self-mobile individual – my good friend the Space Battleship Scharnhorst – mostly just orbits around planets and almost never changes course.
But an ocean vessel does have an economy of scale - bigger is really better. Even with all of our technology, an ocean-going ship is by far the most energy-efficient means of bulk transport.
Moby Cybertank (just “Moby” to his friends) is two kilometers long, 200 meters wide, with a top main deck 80 meters above the ocean surface. He’s a blocky shape, but sticking up hundreds of meters into the air are a dozen wing-sails that he uses to give himself a little extra boost when the weather is right (with fusion power his saving energy this way is, as he would be the first to admit, only a hobby). The top deck is covered with solar cells – again, more of a hobby than anything else – with only the occasional sensor mast above them. Between the top deck and about 10 meters above the water level are encrusted all manner of cranes, hangars, portholes, weapons, radars, extended balconies with entire reproduction Polynesian villages, delicate crystal gardens, and whatever other practical and whimsical constructions that something two kilometers long with nearly unlimited time and resources should care to build onto itself.
Alpha Centauri Prime is not a water world like old Terra, but it still has some decent sized oceans. The Great Equatorial is the largest of these: about 5,000 kilometers East-West, 2,500 kilometers North-South, and mostly pretty deep. Moby therefore has plenty of they used to call ”sea-room” to play in. Moby was going to make a transit from an industrial city at the Eastern end to another city at the far Western end and, as I was headed in that direction already, I asked if I could hitch a ride.
Moby was moored offshore. There was a long dock extending out to his main side-loading hatches. These were bustling with activity as automated bulk haulers of various makes were loading and unloading cargoes, but the dock and hatches were far too small for my main hull. Thus, I waited on the shore until Moby had finished his regular business and disconnected from the dock. As he floated free, he lowered his main rear loading ramp into the water and I tread-paddled out to him. Tread-paddling is sort of like dog paddling. It’s not very fast and not very pretty, but if you don’t care about that it will move you through the water without having to build on extra propellers and stuff, or waste the energy of suspensors.
I clamber up the ramp and drive into his main central bay. Moby raises the ramp behind me and starts his engines. Seawater sluices off of my hull and drains away into the perforated deck. The main bay is over a kilometer long, although most of the time it’s subdivided with water-tight partitions that slide in from the walls. Still, even the tail end of the bay is over 150 meters long. I have plenty of elbow room. I park where Moby indicates on the deck, and then I unlimber some of my maintenance drones to help with dogging my treads to the deck, so that I don’t slide around if Moby hits rough weather. This is mostly a formality: there has never been any storm rough enough on the Great Equatorial Ocean to have caused Moby more than few degrees of tilt, but it’s standard nautical practice and as with any ocean, you can never really know what the ocean might have in mind this particular day.
Moby gives me guest privileges on his local data network, and I poke around to see what he’s been up to lately. As I expected, he has filled the entire Great Equatorial Ocean with his own systems. Robotic cruiser subs prowl along with their black silent forms, buried missile silos and mining facilities dot the seabed, and free-floating sensors and probes fill every cubic kilometer of the ocean, while overhead his own personal geostationary and low-orbit satellites keep a watch from afar. With just the forces that he has deployed in this one ocean, Moby could put up a pretty good defense of the entire planet. It’s a thing with us cybertanks, that if we stay too long in one area we end up accumulating enormous arsenals. We can’t help it. It’s just so easy for something that is effectively immortal, and has effectively unlimited resources, to decide to build one more missile battery or cruiser sub…
“Your old friends the Space Battleship Scharnhorst and Olga Razon are also coming for a visit,” said Moby. “If you hurry you can greet them in person on my aft landing pad.”
Yes, I think I will. Let me warm up a humanoid android and I’ll be there shortly. Are you going to join us?”
“No,” said Moby. “You know that I don’t go in for that anthropomorphic thing. I’ll just watch and talk via speaker.”
But you build human-sized rooms and gardens. Why do so if you have no intention of taking on a humanoid form and inhabiting them?
“Why did the old-style humans build d
oll-houses and model railroads when they had no intention of living in them or riding on them? I just like building human-scale structures. Anyhow, you should hurry up if you want to meet your old friends in the plastic flesh.”
I activate a generic male humanoid android, dress it in a simple blue suit (some things truly do not ever go out of style), and drop out of a hatch on the bottom of my main hull. The deck is still slick with seawater so I have to watch my footing. There is a ladder at the port side of the bay, I climb it and, using directions downloaded to me from Moby, thread my way through some narrow corridors and stairways and make it to the top deck just in time to watch the shuttle land.
“Is that android supposed to represent someone famous?” asked Moby. “I don’t recognize him from my files.”
Nope. Just a regular guy in a blue suit.
“Didn’t you always used to do famous human historical types like Amelia Earhart, Herman Shikibu, or Frau ’The Spike’ Bruchenwald No. 37?”
That was a phase.It was fun for a time, but then I outgrew it. We’re making our own history now.
It’s a bright clear day: blue sky with only a few wisps of clouds here and there. At first all I see is a faint glowing spot high up in the sky for the shuttle is still enveloped in plasma from the heat of reentry from near-space orbit. As the shuttle comes closer it slows down and the glow fades as the heat-load decreases. The shuttle comes closer and suddenly it’s nearly on top of us. It appears to be moving too fast, but at the last second it executes a perfect upwards flare, the landing gear extend out of their wells, and it settles down using its vertical thrusters precisely in the middle of the landing deck with barely a thump. Even for a sophisticated machine that was a show-off landing.
The bottom of the shuttle is covered in black heat-resistant tiles, but the top is white with the words “RCSN Scharnhorst” painted in red. We all wait a few minutes for the worst of the heat to dissipate. A hatch opens in the right side of the shuttle. Moby might not be into humanoid androids, but he has arranged a dozen of his maintenance drones in a sort of honor guard – lined up six on each side – flanking the hatch, to humor his guest. A light metal staircase unfolds out of the open hatch to the main deck surface and out steps the humanoid representative of the Space Battleship Scharnhorst.
Confessions of a Sentient War Engine (An Old Guy/Cybertank Adventure Book 4) Page 17