Transhuman

  A communication window opened in Revick's vision to show the Goblin woman sitting inhumanly calmly. "We won't have seen the last of the enemy. They are tenacious, so they'll be back," she said.

  "I know," replied Revick. There was a thump as a large missile left the cruiser and sped off.

  "What's that?" asked the Goblin, startled.

  "Humans call them dougies," said Revick. "Revenge would no doubt refer to it as a long range communication drone; I have called for the cavalry."

  The convoy hung in the empty darkness of interstellar space while the bioships were repaired. A strange auxiliary vessel sailed majestically down the cruiser's flank, its shape reminding Revick of a reconstruction that he had seen of the ancient ammonites that had once sailed Holy Terra's oceans.

  The ammonite-vessel sailed up to a damaged carapace bioship and, extruding its tentacles out of the shell, it prodded and probed the carapace. Other auxiliary vessels shaped like all manner of living things moved around damaged vessels, like bees around flowers. Something that looked like a centipede walked up and down a bioship, legs rising and falling in waves.

  "The Goblins are signaling," said Revenge.

  A window opened in the middle of Revick's view to show the Goblin woman. "We are sorry for the delay but the essential repairs are almost finished. We should be underway within the hour." She paused. "Thank you for staying but I fear that this delay has doomed us. The enemy has had more time to arrange our destruction."

  "Possibly and possibly not," said Revick. "Now they will be looking in the wrong place."

  "Let's hope so," she said, and the window winked out.

  Revick went back to watching the auxiliary craft buzz around the bioships. He found it wonderfully restful and the simile of a garden came back to him. The craft moved purposefully as individuals, but apparently randomly as a group. Then, as if a switch had been thrown, all the auxiliaries streamed together into a river of boats that flowed toward a large spherical vessel on the edge of the fleet. Revick had dubbed it the giant diatom, and it was clearly some sort of engineering support vessel. The auxiliary craft disappeared through giant hatches that shut after the last had entered. The bioships powered up with detectable movement of fins and vanes, like athletes flexing their muscles, then, all together, dived into the multidimensional matrix. Jagged silver whirlpools opened up around each ship, and they sank into nothingness.

  Revenge waited a moment for the disturbance in space-time to dissipate, then followed the Goblin fleet. The cruiser sank with a splash that blinded Revick's senses until Revenge switched over to the detectors used in the matrix and he could see and hear again. Revick heard the murmur of the bioships drive motors up ahead, a murmur that grew to an oscillating hiss as the cruiser overhauled the lumbering merchantmen. When they caught up, Revenge slowed down right behind the convoy.

  "Revenge, crawling along like this is hopeless. We would be hard-pressed to defend ourselves if attacked, let alone anything else."

  "I agree. I have been looking through my records of escort tactics and think I have found something," said Revenge.

  "Oh?" said Revick

  "What do you know about Bayesian mathematics?" asked Revenge, accelerating the cruiser to military speed.

  "Ah yes, Bayes' Theorem. If I recall correctly, it was devised by the pre-Singularity mathematician Thomas Bayes, 1702 to 1761," said Revick.

  "Your degree was in the history of science, as I recall," said Revenge.

  The cruiser crossed the bow of the convoy and headed away out into the matrix.

  "From Cambridge," said Revick, with false modesty.

  "Third Class," said Revenge, cruelly "So do you know what Bayesian mathematics actually is?"

  "Um, something to do with probability, isn't it?" asked Revick

  The cruiser made an abrupt turn to bring it back towards the convoy's route.

  "As you say, something to do with probability," said Revenge "If I programmed a random navigational course we would make a difficult target, yes?"

  "True, but we would rapidly lose the convoy that we are supposed to protect," observed Revick.

  The cruiser made a looping turn toward the convoy's rear.

  "Bayesian maths allow a subjective adjustment to random probability such that, although each individual course change we make will be random in time and direction, the sum of the changes will tend to keep us close to the convoy."

  "Well, if you are on top of the situation, then I may as well go and lounge on the beach with a 'gee and tee.' You don't think that I might meet that blonde there, do you?"

  "You never know your luck," said Revenge.

  The blonde was running a finger down Revick's arm and telling him how much she liked muscular men when the alarms went off, depositing him back into the matrix.

  "This had better be good," said Revick, who was not in an agreeable mood.

  "There's something out there," said Revick. "We were pinged by a targeting device. I am about to mount a search using active detection."

  "No! Don't do that," said Revick, blonde forgotten. "You have that Bayesian random-number generator still running on the helm?"

  "Yes."

  "Then let's just listen, because right now, they don't know that we know that they are out there. We may be able to catch them flat-footed, so to speak."

  Revick strained to listen and once thought he heard the hiss of drive motors but he could not get a fix. The cruiser moved on through the matrix, occasionally making Bayesian course changes. There was no evidence of any hostile activity at all, so Revick played back the data that had alerted Revenge. It certainly sounded like a targeting ping, but odd things happened in the matrix. His mind drifted to spectacular blondes with devastating smiles, and he sighed deeply. The cruiser was coasting past the rear of the convoy when the helm responded to a Bayesian probability event by making an abrupt turn away from the bioships.

  A salvo of hypervelocity missiles streaked through the gap between the cruiser and the convoy, moving so fast that they left holes in the energy matrix that sounded like a slap across the face. The cruiser would have been skewered like a fish on a trident, had not the gods of Bayesian probability decided to initiate a turn when they did. As it was, the cruiser rolled and pitched in the missiles' wake.

  Revenge raised the engines to full power and kept the cruiser in a tight turn until they had reversed course. Targeting devices tracked the missiles' course back to a likely point below and on the starboard of the convoy. The cruiser raced across the side of the bioships ejecting rattlers out of ventral and dorsal dispensers. Rattlers were small, fast, overpowered capsules with extraordinarily inefficient engines that massively disrupted space-time, making it impossible to obtain a targeting fix through the affected area. They were the next best thing to a smoke screen.

  Racing ahead of the rattler screen, the cruiser's detectors picked up four spacecraft closing from the flank and below. Revenge outran them, screening the convoy by the distortion field so that the bioships could turn away from the attack while hidden. Revenge fired more rattlers, from bow dispensers, that shot far ahead of the cruiser, extending the screened area so that neither the cruiser nor the attackers could locate each other. The cruiser's bow swung, as Revenge prepared to crash through the field and engage the enemy.

  "No!" Revick yelled, "grabbing" the helm, causing Revenge to pause for a whole microsecond, meaning that the mentality was paralyzed by indecision. A split second to a mentality was equivalent to an eon of human thought. Revenge finally came to a decision and relinquished control. Revick chopped the power and threw the helm hard to port away from the enemy. The cruiser slewed sideways, ripping through the matrix in a long slide and creating a teardrop wake of ripped energy strings that recombined in sheets of golden energy.

  Revick slammed the helm back to starboard and opened the throttles to maximum power. The heavy cruiser pirouetted in its own length, the hull groaning and twisting with accumulated torque. It slid forward, picking u
p speed and smashing through the last remnants of rippling golden energy with a noticeable clang. It was almost up to military speed when it entered the disruption field at a forty-five degree angle. Revick's maneuver had lost them time and momentum, so the front edge of the field was now far ahead. Revick was deaf and blind once they entered the field, which meant that he could not see out but by the same token, nothing could see in.

  The cruiser slid out of the distortion field to find four silver enemy warships perfectly positioned to ambush the Terran ship, had it emerged from the field on anything like its predicted course. The nearest enemy ship ran along the edge of the field right in front, offering a near parallax-free, dead-astern angle. Revenge did not miss opportunities like that, so the bow gun spat a full salvo, all five shots hitting the enemy ship in the rear. The first two struck the hull and smeared across in dancing lines of yellow energy. The third penetrated, exploding deep inside, and the fourth and fifth burst amongst spinning debris. Energy strings consumed the smaller fragments, leaving just a handful of hull sections floating upward to the surface.

  The enemy formation split like a shoal of fish threatened by a plunging kingfisher. Two broke to the right, away from the distortion field, and the third dived. Revenge turned to starboard after the breaking pair, giving Revick his first good look at the foe. The enemy ships were silver cylinders with blunt rounded ends. Masts projected at forty-five degree angles in crowns around the bow and stern.

  A series of thumps sounded from the cruiser's launch tubes, followed by the buzz of flutterbug motors. Flutterbugs were torpedoes with contra-cycling lateral drive motors that looked a little like insect wings and made a characteristic stuttering sound, hence their popular name. The weapons were controlled from the cruiser in their initial approach, switching to self-guidance in the terminal stage of their attack. Six of the bugs went after the pair breaking right, and two followed the deep-diving enemy ship.

  The rearmost of the pair picked up four bugs. It ejected small countermissiles that fired charges at the closing torpedoes, destroying two. The surviving pair flew into the target ship and stuck, dropping off their outer hulls and drive motors. The torpedo cores deployed drilling arms and bored into the enemy ship. A few seconds later the target ship slowed, tumbling end over end toward the surface.

  The second ship twisted violently to avoid the bugs, firing antimissiles constantly. It destroyed both of the little robots but in doing so gave Revenge a firing solution. The bow gun spat another five shot salvo, one of which caught the enemy vessel on the bow. It staggered under the attack but managed to fire a lance of blue fire back at the cruiser. Revenge went into a corkscrew evasive maneuver, and the lance passed harmlessly under the stern.

  The enemy ship slowed, apparently crippled, giving Revenge an easier target. A tight salvo straddled it, scoring two or even three hits, and it came apart in a shower of silver shards.

  "I've lost track of the fourth," said Revick. "It must have dived very deep."

  "Yes," said Revenge. "I lost contact with the torpedoes as well."

  "Do you think that the bugs hit?" asked Revick.

  "I don't believe so," replied Revenge. "They switched to self-guidance and then vanished. We have sustained almost no damage, an astonishing outcome. The hull may never be quite the same again but at least it is in one piece."

  The mentality paused for a moment and then said quietly, "How did you work it out? How do humans make these decisions? Your minds work ridiculously slowly, so how did you calculate where to position us like that for a perfect ambush?"

  "I don't know," said Revick. The mentality clearly meant the question seriously so he tried to answer. "It's like seeing a pattern in my head and knowing where everything will be. I really don't know how it works; I just do it."

  "You just do it," said Revenge in a sarcastic voice that imitated the human's. While they talked, it had maneuvered the cruiser back up to the convoy, which had resumed its original heading. "Your new biological friends want to talk to you."

  A window opened to show the Goblin spokeswoman. "We couldn't follow the battle after you screened us. What happened? Where are the enemy ships?"

  "Oh, we destroyed three, but I am afraid the fourth may have eluded us," said Revick, with mock annoyance.

  "You destroyed three?" said the Goblin, faintly. "But your ship is unmarked."

  "They missed and we didn't," he said, terminating the connection. It would not hurt to give the Goblins something to think about.

  The convoy crawled on, the cruiser following its Bayesian programmed course. Revick grew bored with watching the bioships and retired to a pool hall that he frequented, located in a zone that he called downtown. He drank a few beers, hustled a few players, got into a fight, and pulled a dangerous-looking brunette with whom he shared a taxi home.

  Revenge woke him earlier than he had anticipated. "A ship is approaching on the port bow."

  "What?" he said, hitting his head on the bedpost, to the amusement of the brunette. She blew him a kiss and faded away, her pursed lips and hand being the last to go.

  "I should never have suggested that overgrown bloody computer read Alice In Wonderland," he said, rubbing his forehead.

  "No worries, though," said Revenge, with sadistic satisfaction. "It's one of ours."

  "You bastard," replied Revick.

  By the time he reached his study and plugged in, the new ship was cruising alongside. Her design was not dissimilar to the cruiser, but she was smaller and more flattened dorso-ventrally.

  "That's the light cruiser, Belle Isle," said Revenge.

  "Any humans onboard?" asked Revick.

  "A single pilot, called Bryseis," replied Revenge.

  "A woman pilot," Revick said, with a hint of anticipation.

  "It really makes no sense exposing human females to the dangers of the dark," said Revenge. "The Council tried to forbid it, but humans made such a fuss that it had to concede under the terms of The Covenant."

  "Could you, um, set up a communication link to Belle's pilot," said Revick, trying to speak casually.

  "I anticipated your interest and have already done so," said Revenge, dryly. "Hold on, I'll ping her."

  A small opaque window opened in Revick's mind and he waited and waited.

  "Are you sure that this link is working, Revenge?" asked Revick.

  "Absolutely, I am in contact with the mentality, Belle Isle, and it assures me that its pilot knows you are waiting."

  Revick kept the link open but reduced it to a small square in the top left of his vision and got on with the important job of piloting. Actually, he kidded himself, as Revenge was perfectly capable of running the ship without him.

  The communications window flashed green, so he expanded it to fill his vision. There was a click, and he found himself looking at the head and shoulders of a slim woman with short-cut, light brown hair and pale gray eyes.

  "Well?" she asked, favoring him with a quizzical glance.

  "Ah, um, hello," he stammered.

  She raised an eyebrow. "That's it, is it? You dragged me away to say hello?"

  He had been out in the darkness so long that he had almost forgotten how to talk to real women, who behaved so less compliantly, and so much more interestingly, than computer simulations.

  "Um, no," he said. "I thought we should discuss tactics."

  She refocused sideways on something, before looking back at him. "Revenge has already updated Belle on the situation. You have something else useful to say?"

  "I notice that you are junior in service to me," he said, sounding pompous, even to himself.

  "That's right. Do you intend to pull rank on me often?" she asked.

  "Someone has to be in command," he protested. She did not reply and the silence stretched on. "That will be all for the moment," he said, escaping by severing the connection.

  The two cruisers prowled around the slow-moving convoy like stags around a herd of does. They were now deep in Terran Territory, and Re
vick thought it extremely unlikely that the convoy would be attacked again. Admiralty House, at Port Luna, had dispatched a number of deep space cruisers to beef up the frontier defenses in this zone, as well as putting Belle Isle under his command.

  He had made a number of efforts to chat to Bryseis, without noticeable success. The woman pilot was punctilious about observing naval niceties, but gave him the impression that she regarded him with amused contempt. A few more days and the Goblins would be out of their jurisdiction and the light cruiser would be reassigned.

  Revenge broke into his deliberations. "Belle Isle has picked up what might be the sound of engines."

  "Where? Whose?" asked Revick.

  "I have analyzed the data, and they could be enemy engines down in the higher dimensions, and behind us," said Revenge.

  The two Terran cruisers turned and raced like terriers to the rear of the convoy.

  "Do we have a triangulation?" Revick asked.

  "To an approximate degree," replied Revenge.

  The cruisers slowed down and began to search, moving around each other in complex patterns. Revick listened intently but could hear nothing of any significance. Eventually, the cruisers made a parallel run across the suspected zone, dropping buoys that sank swiftly into the higher dimensions. Revick switched to the detection equipment in the buoys and was rewarded by the sound of a faint judder of engines. Then, the devices dropped away into the depths and disappeared out of range.

  "Gotcha," said Revenge. "I have a triangulation on a target off to port."

  The two cruisers accelerated into a turn and made a second run, each ship dropping more buoys in an X-shaped search zone. The sound of enemy engines was much stronger when heard through the second buoy pattern. Revenge triggered charges that destroyed the devices in a designated sequence of energy bursts, illuminating the target to the cruisers' passive detectors.

  "That was a powerful bounce back off the target," observed Revick. "It's either extremely reflective—"

  "Or very large," interrupted Revenge. "I had worked that out."