by B. V. Larson
He decided to go now. If he got caught, so be it. He could escape again, but this time toward high-tech transport, not away from it.
Checking his tools and harness and lacing up his trusty boots tighter, Straker clasped Melgar’s hand. “Thanks, buddy,” he said.
“Thanks, buddy,” Melgar replied. “Melgar friend. Stray-kurr friend. Come back to Melgar and Neeka.”
“I come back, if I can.” Straker handed Melgar the bag of cave-moss he still carried. “Goodbye.”
“Goodbye, friend Stray-kurr.” Melgar lifted his hand in farewell.
Straker did the same, feeling oddly sad to be leaving, and then readied himself. He gripped the line tight and swung in until his feet hit the wall. Then he walked up it, pulling himself up the braided vine, as he’d learned long ago at Academy when they’d taught the cadets how to assault the upper floors of buildings. It was much easier than lifting his whole weight by his hands.
When he reached the edge of the wall, he rolled onto the flattened top, staying low in case of observers. He pulled the lineup after and coiled it, and then detached the grapple and tossed it back. The metal tools it was made of were obviously scarce and valuable to Melgar’s people, and Straker didn’t need them.
He low-crawled across the broad wall’s roof until he could peek over the inner edge. Beyond the gap were high-rise buildings like the one he’d leaped the bicycle across. Damn. There were too many windows, too many potential observers. He’d need to wait for nightfall after all.
Or maybe not. He spotted an air handling unit with him atop the wall—the wall that was not solid, after all, but hollow. It was, in essence, a kilometers-long tall building with controller facilities and security rooms inside it, if it was the same as the other barriers he’d passed through.
He used his knife to pry open the cover of the air handler and remove a filter. This gave him a way into an intake shaft a meter in diameter. He tied off his line to a sturdy pipe and lowered it gently, silently down the chimney.
Then he followed, climbing downward as quietly as he could. He passed horizontal ducts that were too small for him to enter, obviously intakes that would lead to air processors to heat, cool and humidify the atmosphere to perfection for the urban dwellers. He despaired of finding a way out until his feet reached the bottom and he stood on metal.
There, he discovered a horizontal duct large enough to crawl through. It ended at another filter. He cut a hole in it and found the whirling blades of a high-speed fan. There, he stopped and rested in the noise and the vibration.
He searched for a way to disconnect or cut power to the fan, but the controls and wires must be on the other side. He couldn’t risk shoving his knife into it and stopping it by force. Besides the noise, a repair crew would probably be called. He resigned himself to waiting for night, when presumably there would be few people around. Perhaps the fan would even periodically stop on its own.
Straker lay down on the metal and slept, exhausted.
When he awoke, the light from the top of the shaft had faded to dark. He had no idea what time it was, but more importantly, the fan was still. He took out his hand-light and turned it on. He couldn’t fit between the blades, but they were thin, no match for his strength. He bent several of them toward himself, creating an opening that he wiggled through.
Just as he dropped to the concrete floor of the utilities room on the other side, the fan started up again. It moved a few centimeters before jamming with a loud hum. A green light on a panel turned red and began to blink.
He had to go quickly, before someone sent a maintenance worker to investigate the malfunction. Checking his harness and readying his pain-wand, he eased the door open and slipped into an empty corridor. He chose the direction toward the city and, after two turns, found a door that should lead outside.
Unfortunately it had a palm-lock on it. Straker pried open the scanner box and tried to short-circuit its innards, but he was no brainiac, and this tech was unfamiliar. He readied himself to escape into the urban landscape, stepped back, and kicked the door open.
When he stepped into the dimly lit alley, he saw a figure leaning casually against the opposite wall. “Having fun, Straker?”
Chapter 25
Sparta System, at Leonidas, the moon of Sparta-3
The cruisers with Indomitable backed up on impellers and echeloned to withdraw around the side of the moon, Leonidas. They didn’t waste effort firing. Instead, they preserved themselves from the inevitable storm of enemy fire.
Now only Indomitable faced the enemy, barely peeking from behind the moon. Under Trinity’s control she continued firing, spreading the great particle beam in order to increase hit probability, although that meant lower power. By doing so, she took several smaller ships and a dozen drones out of action.
Unfortunately, Victory launched drones to replace those it had lost. It appeared the AI considered 512 the optimal number to enter battle with, but had more in reserve.
In return, the enemy concentrated dozens of primary beams on Indomitable’s nose. The battleship was too big to evade such strikes, but she did spin to help distribute any hits and make it difficult for the enemy to target the same spot more than once.
Engels glanced at the large damage control schematic. Everything in the green so far. Chief Quade hovered over his noncoms and their boards, speaking into his comlink, directing crews to be ready.
“Incoming projectiles,” Tixban said.
Now, the enemy began firing their railguns. Indomitable’s sluggish evasive maneuvering was enough to make most of the long-range shots miss. Many struck the surface of the moon instead, like bullets ricocheting off an infantryman’s cover.
“Order our surrounding force to open fire,” said Engels suddenly. “Railguns and beams. Tell them to mix in submunitions.”
The communications team dutifully passed her orders, but Tixban turned an extra eye to her. “Ammunition is not unlimited. The range is still extreme. Hits are unlikely.”
“But possible. And they’re firing from astern. It’ll complicate the enemy’s evasion calculations, and as they get closer and Victory slows down, it’ll become more effective.”
“You are grasping at straws, Admiral.”
“We don’t need that defeatist attitude, Lieutenant.”
Tixban turned away. “Of course, ma’am.”
“I see it as trying to gain any edge we can.”
“Yes, Admiral.”
Engels growled under her breath. Tixban should know better than to say something that might hurt morale, but Ruxins weren’t renowned for their tact.
Indomitable suddenly shook with the firing of her great railgun. Engels watched the cluster-munition break apart and spread into fist-sized tetrahedrons. None of those would kill a ship like the usual 900-ton bullet, but they would strip weapons, antennas and fittings from anything they hit. No captain would want to lose half his sensors and point defense beams to such a strike.
Trinity fired another such shot, and another, for a total of seven. The later clusters overtook the earlier ones, so they arrived in a circular pattern. The enemy ships, all perfectly controlled by Victory, moved out of the way and Engels groaned.
Then she cheered as Indomitable fired her particle beam. One enemy superdreadnought had evaded directly into the center of circle, the eye of a steel storm. Now it had nowhere to go, and took the near-lightspeed discharge on the nose. Its icon turned red in the tactical hologram, crippled. “Well done, Trinity! Score one for creativity over processing power.”
“Thank you, but I doubt it will work again. Still, they are entering medium range and everyone’s fire will become more effective. I suggest it’s time for the next phase.”
“Right,” said Engels. “Pass the word to begin sniper fire.”
The ships with Indomitable, withdrawn behind the moon, now moved to slide out, barely making themselves visible to the edge of the oncoming enemy formation. They then fired their primary weapons in a dense arc, whi
le only a small portion of the Hun ships could return fire. Like snipers in cover, they were partly protected by the bulk of Leonidas.
“They are evading out of arc, as you predicted,” said Tixban. “Your plan is working.”
“It needs to, or we’re sunk. Comms, pass the word to follow them around the moon, just enough. They know the goal: to let all our ships fire at a few of theirs, and only those few can fire back at us. Helm, we do the same. Trinity—”
“We’re already coordinating our fire. There’s no need to micromanage us.”
Engels suppressed a grin. “I see the Zaxby part of you is coming out.”
“That can only be a good thing.”
“It is if you can shoot as well as you talk.”
“We can.” Indomitable’s particle beam intersected another SDN, damaging it severely despite its violent evasion. Engels wondered if Victory had any consideration for the crews inside. After all, it was possible to reroute so much power away from the inertial compensation and gravplating systems, and evade so strenuously, that organics inside would be injured or killed.
Another chill went through her as she realized that if Victory became the blueprint for future flagships, crews might be obsolete. Remotely operated warships could dispense with organics and their needs. They would become mere robotic weapons, extensions of the AI’s will… with nothing at all as a fail-safe.
Maybe the crew on Victory itself was enough. Surely they must have the command staff aboard, and enough safeguards and kill-switches to retake control if the AI went mad. But even so, it put more and more power in the hands of fewer and fewer people. With conventional warships, at least there was the possibility of a crew refusing unlawful, immoral orders—say, to indiscriminately bombard civilians, or to try a coup against the chain of command—but if the AI itself wasn’t properly programmed with a sense of morality from the start…
“We’re not damaging them fast enough,” said Tixban. “Our tactics are preserving the forces with Indomitable, but we will only have degraded their combat power by approximately seven percent by the time they arrive at our position. They will then round Leonidas and, I suspect, crush us like bugs.”
“You’re becoming quite the master of Earthan idiom, Tixban,” said Trinity.
“It seemed an appropriate metaphor.”
“It’s a simile, actually.”
“Focus, people,” snapped Engels. “Trinity, is what Tixban says true? Taking our Archer surprise into account, will we be crushed like bugs?”
“No. However, we will be fighting at a severe disadvantage until our converging fleet arrives.”
“How long will we have to hold out?”
“Approximately eighty minutes.”
“And then?”
“My projections indicate we should win—barely. However, there are many too many factors to be confident. We used estimated values for so many variables that our end-stage calculations could diverge by as much as an order of magnitude.”
Engels sighed. “In other words, you don’t really know.”
“A wise human once said that predictions are difficult, especially about the future. The more complex the situation, the more one single variable could divert the possibilities toward the unexpected.”
“Funny how we used to think that if we could just get enough computing power, we could forecast everything.”
Tixban said, “I find it highly ironic that prediction itself is subject to the underlying inability to predict the future. One cannot predict prediction.”
“I’m getting a headache,” said Engels. “You brainiacs can talk philosophy later. Right now, I need an edge. Trinity, you said you had a few tricks up your sleeve.”
“We do, and we’ve factored them all in… except one.”
“What’s that one?”
“We’d rather not say.”
“What, tempting the fates? You say it, it might come true?”
“Or not come true. And there is the morale aspect.”
Ah. Trinity didn’t want to speak publicly. “Route it to my comlink.” Engels made sure the earpiece was properly seated before Trinity’s voice spoke.
“Admiral, we may have found a way to tap into Victory’s FTL comm system.”
“That sounds promising.”
“Yet the FTL transceiver we’ve cobbled together is crude and hurried. We’ve had only hours to extrapolate and experiment to create something that needs months or years of research to do properly.”
“Okay, it might not work. But if it does…”
“We may be able to hack Victory directly. However, we will have to be very close to her.”
“So I’ll order Indomitable to charge her, even ram.”
“That will never happen. Victory is far too nimble. Once the range is close, she will never even allow herself to remain in Indomitable’s forward arc, and as she is able to control over one hundred ships and five hundred drones, she will be able to counter almost any tactic.”
“Then how can you do it?”
“Underspace. We should be able to survive long enough in the midst of battle, where there are so many competing priorities even for Victory. But to do that, we will have to leave Indomitable, giving up our control of her firepower.”
Engels sat back and let out a long breath. “So it’s a huge gamble.”
“Or…”
“Go on. Spit it out.”
Now Trinity seemed to sigh. “Or it’s a final long-shot, after Indomitable has been degraded to the point of irrelevance.”
“You mean destroyed.”
“It is possible.”
“That’s why you want me aboard. You think we’re doomed.”
“We think the possibility is too high to ignore.”
Engels shook her head. “I can’t do it. But if we do have to abandon ship, I’ll haul ass to you.”
“It will take at least four minutes to reach us even if you use an internal vehicle under my control. If Indomitable is heavily damaged, the way may not be clear. We may not be able to wait for you.”
“Then you go and take the long shot, if you’re willing. I’ll just have to ride it out here. Indomitable is big enough that even if she’s out of action, the bridge crew should survive for rescue ops to find us. If we lose the battle and we’re captured, you need to get away and carry all the information Straker and the rest need to carry on the fight.”
“I would be very sad to see you captured or killed, Carla Engels.”
Engels’ eyebrows went up. “You said ‘I.’ Was that Zaxby, or are you starting to dis-integrate?”
Trinity’s voice reflected uncertainty. “I—we—don’t know.”
“I sure hope you’re not losing your mind. Remember, every other AI has gone crazy.”
“We’re deeply aware of this, and pay a possibly inordinate amount of attention to our own mental state. It appears that the organic portions of our mind act as corrective filters and brakes against Indy’s tendency to think so fast she loses control of her own impulses.”
“Really.” Engels rubbed her face. “Then I’m glad she isn’t alone in there, no matter how weird your synthesis is.” That sparked another thought. “I wonder if that’s how the Huns overcame the AI problem.”
“Linking with organic minds? Interesting idea.”
“It’s not a new idea—only a taboo one.”
Trinity said, “But taboos never remain forever in the face of wartime technological progress. The mechsuiter or pilot’s brainlink synthesis with an SAI is but one step on the road to what we have become.”
“Admiral,” Tixban broke in, “the enemy is approaching their decision point.”
“Thanks, Tix.” Engels rerouted her own focus to the hologram’s tactical view.
The Hundred Worlds fleet continued to slow as it entered short range and approached Leonidas. Soon, Admiral Niedern—or the Victory AI, perhaps—would have to commit to one of three choices.
They could round the moon opposite Indomita
ble.
They could turn to round the moon directly into the face of Indomitable and her attendant fleet.
Or they could split up and come around the moon from multiple directions.
The third option seemed the least likely to Engels. It would expose a part of their fleet to concentrated fire from their Republic enemies. It would be hardest to coordinate. It would, however, have the advantage of attacking from all sides and creating a swirling melee, where their numbers and Victory’s deft coordination should maximize its AI advantage.
The second option, a direct attack, was the most conservative, but would allow the Republic forces maximum advantage. They could keep the moon’s edge as cover against their more numerous enemy the longest. It would be a direct force-on-force contest where Indomitable could do maximum damage before the dogfight phase.
That left the first option as the most likely, Engels thought.
She was right.
The enemy fleet moved opposite to the Republic ships, using their impellers. Impellers allowed course changes in any direction, though with far less force and thrust than fusion engines, so the Huns were able to stay nose-on even as they flew more and more crabwise to round Leonidas, with their soft-launched missile wave in front of them.
“Now!” said Engels. “Tell Commodore Dexon to lock in his final updates and execute the first phase.” She’d needed to know exactly where the Huns would go. Unless they made some random change, now she did.
Sixteen Archers sitting on the dusty surface of Leonidas activated their underspace generators as one, but instead of lifting off, they dropped straight into the massive bulk of the moon itself—and became undetectable, even to their friends.
* * *
War Male Dexon rubbed his lips and tongue together. They were sheathed in keratin, the same material that made up animal hooves or human fingernails, and this rubbing was analogous to a human biting those nails or chewing on a lip, a nervous habit.
