Samuels had hoped their boat would remain invisible. Since the Alcyone was still alive, they’d assessed the dangers correctly.
Chen pointed at the display. “There it is.” A long narrow shape rushed toward the center of the screen. “This’ll be bad.” He grabbed the console with both hands as the torpedo exploded, the sound lashed the hull, and the boat shivered.
Samuels looked around. “Status?”
Every station checked in with no damage. Chen answered last. “We lost the target bot, but even the closest of the others is fine.” He smiled proudly. “Jun Laquan did a great job when he designed these third-generation deep-sea mining bots. They’re tough enough to survive all kinds of disasters. Hard to kill.”
Chen frowned. “Now the question is, where did the blasted Americans go?”
Onboard the lead B21 bomber, Captain Glenn Roberson asked his co-pilot softly, “You aren’t blind, are you?”
The co-pilot answered, “I was going to ask you the same question. I can’t see a thing.”
Roberson patted around the cockpit, looking for controls with touch and a strong memory of the layout. Finally he managed to flip on the automated flight plan, which would complete the attack run and take them home.
The B21 had been designed for both manned and unmanned combat missions, but the unmanned software was even more buggy than the rest of the systems, so priority had gone to fixing everything else first. The unmanned operation modes were not yet certified.
The captain figured the uncertified software had a better chance of shooting the missiles and getting them home than a couple of blind guys, so once he had the automation engaged, he relaxed into an analysis of what had happened. “Lasers,” he said to his co-pilot.
“Lasers,” the co-pilot agreed. “I thought lasers for blinding enemy combatants had been outlawed. We signed some sort of treaty to that effect.”
Roberson responded with some acid in his voice. “Apparently the BrainTrust didn’t get the message.” He shrugged for no one in particular. “They probably think making someone blind is more humane than blowing them apart.”
The co-pilot agreed. “I suppose I’d be even more upset if we were falling into the sea in pieces.”
Roberson continued, “Besides, I suspect we weren’t really the target. You ever hear of the ‘laser-crazer?’”
“Am I going to get a lecture?”
Roberson laughed. “It was a prototype we built at the beginning of the century of a weapon that fired very short, very intense blasts of light, less than a nanosecond, and a million times more powerful for that moment than laser weapons.”
“And the point was?”
Roberson connected their radio to the CIC on the Kennedy, again mostly by feel. “The point was, it would create tiny cracks in any lenses it hit. The cracks would destroy the enemy’s photo-optic and high-IR sensors, knocking out the guidance systems for our missiles.”
A voice came on the line. “Admiral Beck here.”
“Admiral.” Roberson explained what had happened and that many of the terminal guidance missiles would fail until they found and took out the BrainTrust lasers. He warned that any pilots who came within visual range would have to be very careful. Very careful indeed. “In fact, don’t even try it. Keep the pilots out of line of sight from the enemy fleet.”
“Thank you for the information,” Beck said. “Good luck with your return flight.”
The passengers on the bomber remained silent for a while. Finally, Roberson voiced one more heartfelt desire. “Well, I kinda hope the medical ship, the Chiron, survives the battle.”
The co-pilot sounded puzzled. “Why?”
Roberson stated the obvious. “Because that’s just about the only place they might be able to fix our eyes.”
Beck resisted the urge to pull his hair, which was too short to pull successfully anyway. “Halt fighter launches. Land the planes already in the air.” Order, counterorder, disorder. He’d never thought he’d be the one demanding disorder.
Another of his staff officers, one who’d spent his formative years flying fighters off carriers, pounded his hand on the table. “Duct tape.”
The admiral turned to him. “Duct tape?”
The officer explained. “We can put duct tape over the face masks of the F35 helmets. They’ll be able to fly using the photo-optic sensors and the IR sensors and the radars. The pilots won’t hardly notice the difference. Really, you never look through the transparent faceplate anyway, except for the entertainment value.”
Lambert pointed out an issue. “That’ll work until the lasers blast the plane’s vidcams and you can’t see with them anymore.”
The officer shrugged. “There are six sets of visual sensors, and a human being can see plenty through a badly cracked window. When it gets too bad, they come home using radar.”
Beck nodded sharply. “Duct tape for the faceplates. Make it so. And get those planes in the air.”
Another officer gasped and pointed at the main screen. “We’re losing our drone.”
Cracks were appearing in the view as if the display screen were being shattered. But it was not. Rather, the drone’s sensors were being blasted.
Beck rubbed his eyes. “Get the satellite feed ready. In a minute or two, that’s all we’ll have.”
The sat operator warned them, “The controls on the satellites are sluggish and hinky, sir. Shouldn’t be a problem, sir, but thought you should know.”
Enemy action? Whim of fate? Or had the BrainTrust cut a deal with Murphy? Beck shook his head. Nothing he could do about it now.
Lambert went to the slowly disintegrating view on the screen and pointed to a set of exhaust trails written across the sky. “The bomber missiles are arriving.”
Beck watched with grim hope. “If this goes as planned, the Elysian Fields should be a burned-out hulk in a few minutes.” The Elysian Fields had been picked since, as a tourist boat, intel figured all visitor cabins would be evacuated, leaving the ship with the fewest personnel on board, hence the fewest casualties.
The admiral had been relieved to have a target like that one to serve as a demonstration with no civilians. He’d been very reluctant to order the attack on the Chiron as part of the one-two punch to force surrender, but if it were indeed the flagship, then much as it hurt Beck’s soul, the Chiron had to go. Leaving Colin Wheeler operational was too dangerous, no matter how limited the capabilities of the force he commanded. Chiron’s unscathed escape from the first attack had filled him with guilty relief.
He returned to the assessment of the current attack on the Elysian Fields. It wouldn’t hurt to remind his staff what was going on. “Because of our intel on the construction of these ships, we’ve had half the high explosive ordnance for the entire fleet swapped out for incendiary warheads.” These new warheads had been designed and manufactured in the last few years, since the BrainTrust had been given the designation “worthy adversary.”
Lambert muttered, “They’re hitting now.”
The sixteen Long Range Anti-Ship Missiles, LRASMs, slammed into what now looked like a crazy quilt of icebergs. Spikes of ice pointed randomly into the air, playing holy hell with the radar systems. The missiles no longer had optic guidance and the infrared was seeing nothing but ice, so the missiles flew in straight lines toward wherever they were headed before the lasers degraded their sensors and the pattern recognition software could no longer see the target. Beck thought it was a miracle that any of them hit the archipelago.
But for a moment, it seemed that Murphy had switched sides to favor the admiral. Only two of the weapons missed the archipelago completely. Nine of them hammered into ice mountains that were not the Elysian Fields. Both the high explosive and incendiary warheads produced negligible harm; ice was damnably hard, defeating the high explosive before it penetrated to the ship. And as for the incendiary charges, ice was, well, cold, and heating it to liquid took a lot of energy. The melted ice flowed down a few meters and refroze, making the lower
levels of ice thicker.
Two of the missiles hit the Elysian Fields fore and aft. Like the others, these produced little effect. But—and this was where Murphy really stepped in for Beck—the last three hit virtually the same location in quick succession. The first two were high explosive. The first cratered the ice, and the second blasted through to the titanium-plated magnesium of the ship.
The third missile was incendiary. It exploded as it penetrated the superstructure.
The magnesium started to burn with the unspeakably brilliant white light that was its signature. Ice melted and flooded the burning metal, but for magnesium, water was as good as oxygen. The magnesium stripped out the oxygen atoms and continued to burn, leaving the superheated hydrogen to disperse a short distance before burning out in the open air.
The flame grew brighter, an unstoppable glaring force of destruction.
A mutter that sounded like a soft cheer went around the CIC.
Beck breathed a sigh of relief. “At last, something’s gone right.”
Lambert had not yet joined in the cheering. “Has it?” He scrutinized the display harder, trying to put together an understandable view of the scene through the shattered lens of the drone. “It flared nicely there at first, but does it look like it’s starting to flame out?”
Everyone stared at the screen, trying desperately to extract information from the almost defunct sensor.
Beck gave his next order impatiently. The satellites were not as good for this kind of real-time analysis as the drones, but that was all he had now. “Bring up the sat feed. Now.” What the hell was happening?
In the CIC of the Chiron, Colin laughed until he was gasping for air. It got so bad he had to sit down. Wave after wave of relief swept over him. “It worked.”
Dash stared at him like he’d just dropped LSD and was hallucinating. “What worked, Colin?”
Colin craned his neck back and stared at the ceiling. “For years, I’ve been laying the groundwork. Every chance I got, ever since we started building our ships with magnesium superstructures, I’ve pointed out that the way magnesium combusts, if just the smallest burn began, the ships would probably go down.” He pointed at their main screen—a view from a satellite, where they could see the flames on the Elysian Fields.
Dash put her hand to her mouth. “Oh, my. The flame is dying out.” She smiled mischievously at Colin. “You are a scary old schemer, you know? I always wondered why you needed the titanium plating. After all, you could have doped the magnesium with elements that would give it anti-corrosion properties.” She started to laugh softly as well. “But you couldn’t, could you?”
Adjutant Lambert explained for the admiral. “They doped the magnesium with calcium. As the flames burn farther they release more calcium, until finally it quenches the fire. Those ships were never flammable.”
On the main screen in the Kennedy’s CIC, the white magnesium light faded out of existence before the BrainTrust bots finished clambering over the ice with hoses, pumping more ice slush into place. In a few minutes, the damage from direct hits from three of America’s most powerful anti-ship missiles would be fully healed.
Lambert shook his head in disbelief. “How long have they been working on this mass deception?”
Admiral Beck clenched his fists. “Colin Wheeler.” Beck had studied Wheeler for years, the same way he would have studied the tactics and strategy of an opposing admiral. “He set this up. Now half our ordnance is useless.”
Lambert extrapolated the conclusion. “We might run out of ammo before we sink their fleet.”
The helmsman of the South Dakota announced their arrival. “Sixteen hundred feet, leveling off. Speed three knots.”
Captain Tucker looked at Sonar. “Did we lose them?”
Sonar took a moment to answer. “About half of the bogeys have descended past the thermocline. We had only started to get a triangulation on them before we broke through the level, so I don’t know their distance.” Once they got a triangulation and were able to match a noise level with a distance, they could compute the distance to the bogey based on the loudness and pitch of the sound.
The captain laid out the plan. “Maintain three knots. Let me know when you get a triangulation. Hopefully, they’re as lost as we are.” He paused. “And make sure the torpedoes are ready.” He thought out loud. “Perhaps we’re deep enough that they can’t follow.”
Another loud cacophony of weak pings sounded around them. The sonarman spoke with disgust. “They’ve found us again.”
Tucker was fed up with being chased by whatever these things were. “Ping ‘em back. Pick one of the bogeys in the middle and throw a torpedo at it. Let’s see if we can score some collateral damage.”
The crew obeyed. A distant boom, muffled by the sub’s exterior acoustic tiles, filled the boat.
Sonar shook his head. “I think we hit the one we targeted, but there’s no indication of collateral damage. The rest are still coming.”
The captain felt a chill down his spine. “Full speed ahead. Let’s see if these things can reach and sustain thirty knots, or if we can get some distance.”
The ship came smoothly up to speed, but the sonarman spoke urgently. “More prop noise! All around us!”
The XO spoke for the first time. “While half of them came directly at us, the others must have spread out above the thermocline, then sunk without using props to create a net in front of us.”
Sonar spoke once more. “There’s one really close!”
A dim clang echoed from the tail of the ship.
After a moment, Sonar spoke more calmly. “There’s turbulence in our wake. I think one of them managed to clamp on to us.”
The captain had a plan. “Flank speed!” He ordered an abrupt change of course, and then a dive to one hundred feet above crush depth, far deeper than normally allowed. “Let’s see if they can take that kind of pressure.”
The XO shook his head. “If these are standard BrainTrust mining bots, Captain, they can dive far deeper than we can. They have no hollow area filled with air; they’re solid-state, with water flowing through any empty spaces. They could drop to the ocean floor here and start looking for valuable minerals.”
Tucker ground his teeth. He had a momentary vision of his sub with a bot digging the fingers of one hand into his acoustic tiles while the other hand waved overhead in the current like a bull rider at a rodeo.
Unfortunately, his boat was the bull. He had to fix this. What else could he do?
Worse, what else could that goddam BrainTrust bot on his tail do?
Overhead, squadron after squadron of F35s circled. Beck felt calm return to his soul.
Before he could give the attack order, Lambert offered his thoughts. “Sir, I think the low-slung ship in front of the fleet—Bogey Twenty-Nine—has the lasers.”
Beck looked at him, puzzled. “Why? All the ships have lasers. We saw them during Autonomy Day.”
“But those weren’t designed to generate those ultra-bursts to destroy optics. They could have built new ones, of course, but they’re all buried under the ice. Ice is transparent, but the surface of those frozen mountains is rough. Terrible for focusing.”
Lambert pointed at one of the side displays he had zoomed on the odd new interloper. “This ship is covered with ice too, but see all the bots running over the surface? See how smooth they’re maintaining the ice on the port side? Like a polished window.”
While Beck reformulated his attack plan, a staff officer asked an irritated question. “I don’t get it. Why didn’t the BrainTrust simply blast the bombers and the missiles out of the sky with those lasers if they’re so great?”
Lambert shook his head. “Making a laser into a death ray is an entirely different proposition from blowing out an optical lens. It takes unbelievable amounts of raw power with perfect focus to burn a hole in metal in the microseconds before the target wobbles enough to change the focal point. It’s not impossible, but it’s incredibly hard, compared to the l
aser tricks they’ve played before.”
The admiral proceeded with the attack. “I want fifty ship-based LRASMs fired at Bogey Twenty-Nine. Take that damn thing out.” He licked his lips. “And right behind them, I want all the squadrons to strike the Chiron. If they can find the deck of the Chiron where the CIC is located, focus on that.” His voice turned grim. “I want the command and control structure of that fleet decapitated.”
17
Breaking the Ice
Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.
—Dwight D. Eisenhower
President Eisenhower, in his last great address wherein he coined the term “military-industrial complex,” foresaw the state of military R&D almost a century in the future with shocking clarity.
Since all computer CPUs were required by American law to have a backdoor built in to ensure no criminal could escape justice, and since almost all CPU chips for the whole world were designed in America, the entire universe of computing lay open at the feet of the American government.
Of course, the crypto codes to unlock this backdoor were the most prized of all possible secrets, lusted after by governments and most corporations worldwide. Most of the people of America confidently presumed these most closely held secrets were inviolate and no one except the two million people in the Federal government had access.
A few dissenters complained bitterly about this sanguine mass delusion. In the NSA in particular, a majority of the analysts suspected the Premier of the Russian Union had, by a combination of blackmail, bribery, computer viruses, vidbugs, and brute-force crypto attacks, stolen the distributed parts of the master key.
Braintrust- Requiem Page 31
