Battlespace
Page 11
“Cassius?” Durand asked.
“Part of our command constellation…the network of humans and AIs that comprise the MIEU’s command element. Cassius? Why don’t you introduce yourself.”
A bright star appeared, marking the artificial intelligence’s focus of attention in the noumenon. “Hello,” a deep and mellifluous voice replied. “I am Cassius.”
“What’s special about an AI?” Durand wanted to know.
“My experience, for one thing, Madam Congressperson,” the voice of Cassius replied. “And, in reference to the discussion on reconnaissance, my ability to deploy copies of myself within suitably equipped hardware.”
“Copies?” Durand asked. “What do you mean?”
“Cassius is a computer program,” Ramsey said. “A very complex one, but a program, nonetheless. And, like any program, he can duplicate himself, so that we have two of him…or a hundred…or as many as we need.”
“Yes, but why?”
“I think I can answer that question, Colonel,” Cassius said. “Madam Congressperson, in a military deployment such as Operation Battlespace, the most valuable asset is manpower…the presence of individual Marine riflemen tasked with taking assigned objectives and holding them. Sirius is 8.6 light-years away from Earth. If a Marine is killed or seriously wounded, that Marine is out of the fight, and there is no way to replace him or her. An artificial intelligence such as myself, however, so long as there is sufficient available hardware, can make copies of myself virtually indefinitely. I could, for example, download a copy of myself into a suitably equipped SF/A-2 Starhawk. That copy could then pilot the vessel close to the Sirius Gate, in order to take measurements or probe for defensive positions, weapons turrets, that sort of thing. If the Starhawk is destroyed, the copy is destroyed as well, but no human Marine is harmed.”
“How do you feel about that, Cassius?” General Colby asked. “I mean, your copy would be as much you as you are, wouldn’t it? Just as alive—if that’s the right word?”
“The copy would be identical to the original in every respect, although from the moment of splitting off, the copy would begin acquiring memories and experiences from the new perspective, of course. So far as the copy is concerned, it would be the original, with all of the original’s memories down to the instant of separation. In so far as AIs think of themselves as ‘alive,’ sir, then, yes, the copy would be as alive as the original.”
“And you wouldn’t mind being sent on what might amount to a suicide mission?” Reardon asked.
“I—or my copy—would not see it as ‘suicide,’ Congressman. Military-grade AIs are designed to follow orders, to attempt self-preservation as a means of carrying out the assigned mission, but to do so without undue concern about personal survival. We do not feel fear in the way humans do—if that is what you mean.”
“I…see….”
“We anticipate using a number of Cassius copies on this operation,” Admiral Harris said. “If we are able to make contact with the beings controlling the Sirius Gate, it may well be Cassius, or one of his downloaded clones, who does so.”
“It’s important to remember,” Kowalewski added, “that Cassius and programs like him have a number of tremendous advantages over humans in this sort of work. They are un-afraid for their personal safety. They have immediate access to all of the electronic data stored within the mission’s computer net. They have reaction times measured on the order of milliseconds. If they find they need to speak ancient Sumerian, or some other obscure language in the database, they can do so. And they can be in immediate contact with the mission commanders and other personnel as needed, through noumenal linkage.”
“Then why send humans at all?” Reardon wanted to know.
“There are still some areas that humans excel at,” Ramsey said. He grinned. “Not many, but a few. We’re more flexible and can think outside of the box…outside of programming parameters, in other words. We’re better at responding to surprises. Humans can rely on intuitive processes. AIs cannot. We can act on a hunch, or a funny feeling, or a sense that something is wrong…and AIs cannot. Hell, we can tell jokes and AIs can’t. Not yet, anyway.”
“What does telling a joke have to do with commanding a Marine expeditionary force?” Reardon wanted to know.
Ramsey sighed. Were these people born this thick? Or did they have to work at it? “Humor, sir, requires peculiarly human traits such as empathy, surprise, the ability to think in terms of homonyms and double-meanings, a sense of the absurd. The point is that AIs and humans simply do not think the same way. Think about a problem in two different ways instead of only one, and you have a much better chance of solving it.
“The best approach in situations like this is to field a human-AI team, one that can make use of the strengths of both sides of the equation—artificial intelligence and human intelligence—in such a way that strengths are maximized and weaknesses eliminated. And that is exactly what we are planning for this mission.”
“I do enjoy working with humans,” Cassius added. “It seems that there is always something new to be learned from my association with you.”
“It still makes you wonder,” Durand said, “about the possibilities of downloading millions of AI copies into machines. It might make human soldiers and Marines obsolete.”
“I doubt that that will ever happen, Madam Congressperson,” Ramsey told her. “Artificial intelligence is still a tool, something we use to achieve an end, to carry out a mission. Cassius, for instance, is the electronic component of our command constellation, working with me and the human members of my staff to run the MIEU. The idea is to create a partnership with machine intelligence, not a rivalry. We work together and we do it very well.”
“Perhaps, Colonel,” Durand said, “but given how much we don’t know about intelligence, machine or human, I still wouldn’t make any long-term bets. Cassius and his sort could replace us yet.”
“Such an outcome might be theoretically possible, Madam Congressperson,” Cassius said. “But I hope not. A universe without humans, or the stimulation advanced AIs get from them, would be very boring indeed.”
It took Ramsey quite a while to realize that Cassius had made a joke.
7
11 DECEMBER 2159
Alpha Company, First Platoon,
B Section
Marine LaGrange Space Training
Facility
L-4
1438 hours, GMT
Hospitalman Second Class Phillip Lee sat huddled in almost total darkness, feeling the pressure of vac-armored Marines squeezed in tightly against him to left and right. The only light came from the HUDs glowing inside his visor and the visor of the other Marines around him. The glows stage-lit the faces revealed in the other helmets and cast weirdly shifting shadows through the crowded compartment as men moved their heads.
His own HUD continued to provide the usual reassurance of suit integrity, air flow, and system confidence, along with a graphic of the pod’s current position on its intercept course. All he could hear was the rasp of his own breathing and the pounding of his pulse in his ears.
This is what you volunteered for, he told himself. Right?
A soundless bump slammed him to the left—a sharp acceleration.
The driver must be lined up with the target now. He wondered how fast they were moving…ah, there it was. Eighty meters per second.
The vehicle was an CTV-300 series transfer pod, an ugly little vehicle called a flying coffin, a sewer pipe, or by the unfortunate acronym TRAP by those forced to endure their no-frills accommodations, among other, less flattering terms. It was a blunt and elongated hot dog shape eighteen meters long and two and a half meters thick, big enough—at least, so it claimed in the specs, to hold twenty Marines—a section or one half of a platoon—in two tightly packed rows. It had thrusters and fuel tanks on both ends, giving it a comic look the men called “double-assed,” and was carried by larger vessels like heavy munitions. They’d originally been des
igned to transfer cargo between ships and orbital facilities in space, but the Marines had early on seen their potential for use in docking and boarding maneuvers.
Lee felt a double slap on his right shoulder, the prearranged signal that his neighbor wanted to talk. The section was under radio silence, but plug-in cables allowed voice-powered communications suit-to-suit, more clearly than helmet conduction, and without leaking RF to a potential enemy listener.
His neighbor snapped the plug into the receptacle on the side of his helmet. The man, Lee decided, must have cat’s eyes to see in this almost lightless sewer pipe.
“You okay, Doc?” It was the voice of Gunnery Sergeant Dunne, the platoon’s gunnery sergeant, sitting on his left.
“I’m fine, Gunny,” he replied. “A few bruises never hurt anybody, right?”
“That’s the way, Doc. You just hang tight. When we go EV, you stick with me, understand? Just release when I do and follow me in. And remember to flex and dump when you hit. Let your suit absorb the shock.”
“Flex and dump. Right.”
He expanded his HUD feed of graphics showing the coffin’s path toward the objective. Thirty-seven kilometers left to go…closing at 80 meters per second…7.6 minutes…make it seven minutes or so to release. This is just a dry run, he told himself. A practice CBSS. Just do it by the book.
It felt good to know that Gunny Dunne was looking out for him, though. Never had he felt that link with the Marines as he did now—of the Navy Corpsman taking care of the Marines in his platoon…and the Marines taking care of him, in turn.
CBSS—Combat Boarding Search and Seizure—had been a routine task for Marines since the late twentieth century, when they’d begun boarding suspected terrorist or other hostile vessels at sea. Arguably, the practice went back to the Marines of the Continental Navy two centuries earlier. Stationed onboard American ships as sentries, ship’s police, and sharpshooters in the rigging, they would join boarding parties during engagements at sea with enemy vessels.
During the U.N. War of 2042, the Marines had expanded on the idea a bit by boarding the old International Space Station, at that time a U.N. orbital facility. What they would attempt to do out at Sirius was quite similar to the ISS operation, albeit with a few minor refinements.
Of course, no one knew if they would actually have to use the techniques they now were practicing. They wouldn’t know, either, until they reached Sirius and various robotic and AI surrogates had checked out the objective at close hand. The word was that Alpha Company was going to be designated as Recon Company for the MIEU, however. That meant that if a CBSS was required, they were the ones who would be on call to carry it off.
Five minutes.
He wished he could talk with the others around him, really talk, not just listen to the pep-talk chatter from the Gunny. The radio silence was to let them practice this evolution without suit-to-suit or command communications. No one knew for sure what kind of defenses they would be facing at Sirius, but everyone agreed the bad guys would be able to see them coming whether they used radio or not. What the hell was the point?
Damn it, everyone always said the hard part was the waiting, and Lee was learning that that was absolutely true.
Three minutes.
Alpha Company, First Platoon,
A Section
Marine LaGrange Space Training
Facility
L-4
1440 hours, GMT
Corporal Garroway—his promotion had only just been confirmed a week before—sat in near darkness, packed like an armored sardine into a narrow tin with nineteen other Marines. He’d been through this drill many times before, to the point that it was becoming busywork, not training.
The Marines of the MIEU had been coming up steadily from Earth over the past couple of weeks, flying up from southern California a platoon or two at a time. The brass was still sorting out the TO&E. Apparently, MIEU-1 was being completely reorganized, the changes based, in part, on the unit’s experiences at Ishtar.
They needed a Recon Company, for example. Normally, recon personnel went through specific and grueling training, but the decision had been made to draw all MIEU recon personnel from those men and women who’d been to Ishtar. It made sense, in a way…though Garroway would have been happier accepting that particular honor after going through the Basic Reconnaissance Course at Little Creek or Coronado. They’d told him he could download what he needed to know. He was Marine enough to know that that was a seriously deep load of shit.
Still, when he’d been asked if he wanted to volunteer for Recon, he’d said sure. It meant a higher combat bonus…and it might mean some more interesting training, or, at least, so he’d thought. So far, though, it was still the old Corp routine—hurry up and wait.
At least until today.
A sharp thump shivered through the deck beneath his boots and he lurched to the side. They were decelerating now. The driver was adjusting the pod’s velocity so that the Marines wouldn’t smash into the objective at eighty meters per second. His HUD showed a much more leisurely approach velocity now of five meters per second.
A yellow light flashed on at the forward end of the compartment. All twenty vac-armored men stood up and positioned themselves, two lines, facing one another. They were in zero gravity, of course, except for the brief moments when the pod accelerated or decelerated, and his mind kept trying to tell him he and the other space-suited figures were standing on their heads. Then he felt a sudden queasy slewing sensation in his gut and a momentary wave of dizziness; the pod had just rotated ninety degrees. They were now approaching the target broadside—or perhaps broadroof was the better term. The pod’s dorsal surface faced the objective.
The clamshell doors of the overhead began opening up….
Alpha Company, First Platoon,
B Section
Marine LaGrange Space Training
Facility
L-4
1440 hours, GMTi
Lee looked up as the cargo compartment doors swung aside, and his breath caught in his throat. The objective appeared to be directly overhead…in so far as “overhead” had any meaning in the directionless tumble of zero-G. It was huge, much larger than he’d expected, a vast white-painted, rounded disk with some sort of apparatus at the center.
Each Marine grabbed hold of the gauntleted hands of the Marines to either side. Lee tried to rearrange what he was seeing in his mind. He was approaching the objective in a prone position, looking ahead at it; it was not hanging above his head, about to fall and crush him.
After a moment, his mind accepted this alternate orientation and his stomach settled a bit. He could sense the tension building around him, though. C’mon, c’mon, let’s do it already!
The timer display on his HUD flickered away the last few seconds.
And suddenly the deck dropped away beneath his feet, the pod racing away and leaving nineteen Marines and one Navy Corpsman hanging motionless in space.
Well, that was what it felt like. His brain knew that the pod had just decelerated again, hard, coming to a dead standstill relative to the target, and that the Marines, still retaining their five meters per second velocity, had simply kept on going.
Carefully, so as not to impart a tumble to the Marines to either side, Lee let go of their hands. The section became a cloud of independently moving figures, dropping headfirst toward the swiftly growing white disk. For a moment, panic clawed at his gut and throat. He was falling. Beside him, Gunny Dunne gave him a thumbs-up and the panic eased back a bit.
He looked back, toward his feet. The pod, with its fuel tanks and engine clusters at each end, was moving away quickly now, still dorsal side-on. Beyond, the Earth was in half-phase, an achingly beautiful swirl of white against azure blue; the sun was a dazzling glare to his left.
He looked back along the direction of his fall. That disk, he knew from the briefings, was the reaction mass tank of the vessel that was going to be his home for the next twenty years objective—the I
nterstellar Transport Chapultepec. Measuring over one hundred meters across, the gently curved surface of the R-M tank provided a relatively uncluttered and safe target for the training evolution. The single bit of clutter in all that vast expanse was at the exact center, where a gray dome reared twenty meters above the gentle curvature of the surrounding terrain. That, Lee, knew, was a temporary shield rigged over the Chapultepec’s forward drive thruster, the exhaust venturi used to slow the vessel from near-c during the last year of her flight. Normally, the forward thruster poked up through the R-M tank like the muzzle of a huge gun; the opening was a good three meters wide, a gaping maw that could easily swallow several Marines if they were unlucky enough to fall in.
The Marines around him were unshipping their weapons now, and securing them to their suit attachment points. The pre-exercise briefing had been incandescently clear: there would be no loaded weapons on this drop. Plasma guns and laser rifles would not be connected with their power packs; slug throwers would not be loaded. The opportunity for disaster with a platoon’s worth of Marines spilling out of the sky with loaded weapons was far too great.
Still, the point of the exercise was to get used to maneuvering in this environment with weapons and a full load of juice packs and magazines. Lee himself was carrying a Sunbeam LC-2132 laser carbine, a pathetically underpowered little weapon, but one that didn’t require the massive backpack of the LR-2120s, but he left it secured to his suit backpack. The ancient conventions that decreed that medical personnel go into combat unarmed had long ago crumbled, but the Navy Corpsman’s primary mission was still rendering emergency first aid, not combat. He wouldn’t need it.
Five meters per second. It didn’t feel as though he was moving at all, but the objective was slowly growing larger. Around him, Marines tucked their knees to chest and rotated, so that they were approaching feet first instead of helmet-first, and Lee did the same. His HUD ticked off the range…fifty meters…forty…thirty…
Alpha Company, First Platoon,