Invasion

by Chris James

  Lorenzo didn’t reply. He looked up at Max, moved further along the workbench and took a disposable cup from a dispenser. He filled it from the water replicator, a small, squat device with a thin, bent metal pipe protruding out of it.

  Max demanded: “And there’s another thing: the Caliphate’s systems are completely unknown to us. How can we create something to defeat it? Well?”

  Lorenzo’s angular face turned askance. He nodded back to the screen and said: “It’s a completely independent super AI in there. Wolfram Omega.”

  Max felt yet another stab of disbelief, on a night that had delivered a year’s worth of stress in just a few hours. He stammered: “But, that—that is illegal… Where did you get it?”

  Lorenzo gave another laconic shrug and said: “My brother didn’t tell me, but I knew he had contacts which, if the military authorities had known, would very likely have seen him court marshalled.”

  “Really?” Max said in a tone thick with sarcasm. “If our country was not being blown to pieces around us, I might ask where he or anyone else could have got the money to pay for it. Honestly, friend, all the years we have known each other, I was aware of your past, but never thought—”

  “When your paternal grandfather was as notorious as mine, the effects can ripple down for decades.”

  Max shook his head in bewilderment and said: “With a Wolfram Omega, it really is possible we could do something. But I still think their super AI will have anticipated this. And we are probably just one of hundreds, maybe even thousands of people who are trying to do something simi—”

  Lorenzo cut Max off with a raised hand and a tut, followed by: “No, they are not.”

  “How do you know?”

  “One: all civilian comms have been burned out by the Caliphate’s microwave bursts. Without access to military hardware, people cannot possibly know even what is happening, let alone do anything about it. Two: all military hardware is currently subject to NATO’s super AI. Three: Wolfram Omega is the ultimate in quantum software.” Lorenzo paused and a mirthless smile creased his face. He said: “We are going to stop this war now, tonight, here.”

  Max felt his chest heave in and out with each breath. He gasped: “This is incredibly dangerous.”

  Lorenzo drank the water and threw the paper cup into a compost bin on the wall of the stifling basement. He returned to the screen laying on the bench, saying: “It could be. But once we let this little viper go, we shall run out of this building as fast as we can.” He looked at Max: “You have discarded all of your tech, yes? You are sure you have not forgotten anything?”

  Max replied: “I am sure, friend.”

  “So we only need to wait for our Wolfram Omega to create its little snake.”

  “What will it do? Send their ACAs into constant diagnostic mode?”

  Max wilted under Lorenzo’s look of feline contempt. He replied: “Hardly. This is not some kind of game, Max. And even putting their ACAs to sleep would not give us any significant advantage.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because our ACAs and lasers are too weak to destroy them.”

  “So what will the Wolfram Omega do?”

  “Set them against each other, to attack one another.”

  Air whistled between Max’s teeth. “If that works, it will truly be a miracle.”

  Lorenzo peered at the screen and tapped it. Without looking up, he said: “And why would it not work? Wolfram Omega acts like the most voracious cancer, only rewriting instead of consuming. That’s why they are illegal.”

  Confusion rose again inside Max. He said: “But it is only illegal for civilians. Our governments have it. NATO has it. Surely, if it would work, they would have used it by now, yes?”

  Lorenzo’s head snapped up. “We cannot be sure why—”

  “Or even if they already have tried it and it failed,” Max interjected.

  “But I estimate that the super artificial intelligence considered it, calculated the probability of success as too low, and discarded the option, potentially without even troubling to inform the humans.”

  “But I thought that did not happen any longer?”

  Lorenzo shrugged again and said: “Among this chaos, who knows? I think that perhaps all of those politicians, who have failed us so badly, have failed us in many more ways about which we do not know. Think, Max. How did they not see this eruption coming? Do you believe them when they say that the Caliphate was too secret, too hidden, and that they honestly knew nothing?”

  Max didn’t hesitate: “No, of course not. They must have known something was going to happen, but I think that they could not stop it. I think they tried, but they failed. So, instead of admitting their failure, they decided to pretend that they had known nothing all along.”

  “And now look. It is a travesty,” Lorenzo whined, his effeminate lilt for the first time grating on Max’s nerves. He went on: “And the most we can hope for is that those who led us into this disaster will have to pay in the same coin.”

  Max nodded to the bench and asked: “Is it ready yet?”

  “No, their interference is impressive. It is taking the Wolfram Omega some time to navigate the jamming.”

  “But it only needs the tiniest fraction of space. It is not as though we want to send an actual communication.”

  “Indeed. But it will become locked in a hyper-encryption battle to evade being defeated… There. It is complete. We have an estimated seventy-five percent validity for up to three minutes.”

  “Only seventy-five? That will not be enough. Do not attempt it,” Max urged as Lorenzo lifted his right index finger and it hovered above the screen.

  “I do wish you would have a little more faith. This is too small to be found. Like a virus, it will sneak in and poison their systems. It will stop this madness in less than a hundred seconds.”

  Max padded over to the door. His senses tingled with dangerous excitement. He asked himself silently if such a well organised attacked by an overwhelmingly powerful foe could harbour any such weaknesses which his friend thought the Wolfram Omega could exploit.

  Lorenzo turned and smiled. He said: “Although I do agree with you that now is the time to leave this building.”

  With his hand already pulling the door open, Max said: “So, you are not entirely sure then?”

  Lorenzo replied: “I am seventy-five percent sure.”

  “Do not do it, friend.”

  “Our leaders have failed. NATO fails us with each passing moment as more lives are lost. We must try.”

  Max caught his breath as Lorenzo’s finger stabbed at the screen on the bench.

  “There you are, you filthy bastardi,” Lorenzo hissed. He stepped back from the bench, his face creased in grim satisfaction. “Now we will see how those—” Lorenzo stopped abruptly when a spark crackled out from the screen.

  Max felt a strange, new pain in his head. He gasped and opened the door as an incredible searing sensation burned on the inside of his skull. On the bench, the screen fizzed with a burning electronic hiss and Max heard Lorenzo exclaim, “No, that cannot—” before Lorenzo shrieked in sudden agony.

  Max forced his legs through the doorway and out of the basement. He turned back and as the door closed behind him, he saw Lorenzo collapse in apparent agony, his form silhouetted by a bright, white-hot glare from the exploding screen. The door banged shut and Max fell down onto the hard, cold concrete steps which led up to the exit. The phenomenal pain that ran around the inside of his skull abated. Then, the lights went out and he could see nothing in the darkness, the outline of the bright conflagration jumping on his retina. He put his hands to his ears and felt them covered in a warm, sticky wet liquid. He turned over and smelled the dank, muddy moisture of the thousands of footsteps that had trodden on the staircase.

  Max crawled up the stairs. Behind him, Lorenzo’s shrieks weakened to a pathetic whimper before stopping. But something was wrong. Although the pain in his head had lessened, after a few seconds he couldn�
�t find the next step up on the staircase. He waved his arm out in front of him, the blindness caused by the power outage creating a growing panic. Suddenly and for no apparent reason, his jaw smashed into the concrete and his absolute confusion was complete. He reasoned that he should keep still and wait until his eyes adjusted to the darkness. Exhaustion swept over him and part of his mind reeled in amazement as it seemed he could no longer be certain which way was up. Through his confusion, he could make out distant click-clack sounds of metal on metal as Caliphate Spiders quickly positioned themselves at the weakest parts of the tower block to ensure its complete demolition when they detonated.

  Chapter 18

  06.51 Friday 24 February 2062

  MAJOR KATE FUS prayed with an intensity lacking since her first communion some twenty years earlier. The mid-range Autonomous Air Transport she was strapped into careered all over the sky, the super AI apparently determined to test the aircraft’s structural tolerances to their limits.

  Her stomach heaved but she’d eaten little in the intensity of the retreat over the previous few days. The lens in her eye relayed a simplified version of the super AI’s navigation as it directed the craft through the air in a ceaseless effort to evade the enemy. Digital representations made the battle space appear as a kind of vast Christmas tree. At the top were the low-orbit battle management satellites, protected by the heaviest shielding against attack from missiles and lasers. Underneath them, fleets of high-altitude ACAs climbed and dived and pitched and rolled and yawed as their controlling artificial intelligences sought to gain the slimmest tactical advantage. Lower still, at altitudes with which humans could more easily cope, the transports of numerous NATO units fled headlong from the approaching Caliphate machines. She counted more than twenty mid-range transports full of troops, each of which flew seemingly impossible courses of outrageous aeronautical extremes, but all of which fled headlong from the enemy.

  The odour of freshly extruded bile came to Kate’s senses and made her own stomach clench until she thought it might tear. She minimised the view from her lens and opened her eyes. The twenty or so other evacuees strapped in along the length of the fuselage opposite her lolled and grimaced in their seats, and she wondered if she looked as bad as they did. She closed her eyes again and manipulated the data in her lens to bring the immediate battle space into focus. It revealed a much tighter chase than she’d been involved in the last few days, at least since the hasty withdrawal from Plovdiv in Bulgaria.

  She swore silently at the maddening view in her eye as two lead enemy ACAs closed in on her transport. With twitches of her eye muscles, she tried to contact General Pakla, just to hear his voice a final time, but the comms request was declined. She zoomed the view further to see two Blackswans diving in a pincer movement towards them. She yelled above the tearing sounds of air rushing past outside: “Bolek, please tell me you have got this under control.”

  The super AI’s voice responded in its familiar tone of unimpressed indifference: “All steps are being taken to ensure the minimum casualties within the battle space.”

  Kate stole a glance at the others, all of whom appeared to be suffering too much discomfort to be fully aware of the growing danger. She shouted: “What is the probability of this transport being shot down?”

  “The figure is fluctuating. Please specify a timeframe.”

  “Before it is able to fucking land,” Kate spat, the cumulative effect of the noise, stench and relentless aerial acrobatics testing her patience.

  “Unnecessary profanity may be reported to a superior officer—”

  “I have the rank of major and this is a life-threatening situation, so shut the fuck up about profanity and answer the question.”

  “Insufficient data. Reinforcements have been assigned but may be subject to rerouting if new threats materialise, or the existing threats are reassessed and priorities change.”

  “Next time, just say: ‘I don’t know’.”

  “You will need to specify the exact parameters—”

  “Not now,” Kate yelled as the transport went into a near vertical dive. She squeezed her eyes and tensed every muscle in her body. The image in the lens twisted and upended as the transport accelerated towards the ground, some two thousand metres below them. Kate gasped when she saw the two foremost Caliphate Blackswans release their Spiders in geometric surges that inappropriately reminded her of a penile ejaculation. From the opposite side of the image, a swarm of hundreds of dots rushed in and collided with the Spiders, and she realised these were Equaliser bomblets launched by NATO PeaceMaker ACAs. She wondered why the super AI did not fire the missiles in the transport’s fuselage. From what she had seen and what had been reported, she doubted Equalisers alone would be sufficient.

  Her eyes opened to see the faces opposite her clenched in the same grimaces. The view through the transport’s windows offered only grey, impenetrable cloud, giving no indication of the fury raging outside in the battle space at the centre of which were the fleeing NATO transports.

  The lens zoomed the digital representation of the confrontation closer as more Equalisers collided with the approaching Spiders. The enemy’s flying super-AI bombs seemed to absorb an impossible number of Equaliser hits. Some of them peeled off towards the PeaceMakers above them. Kate knew the statistics: all available data from the first five days of the invasion suggested the Caliphate’s armaments enjoyed substantial superiority over anything NATO could field.

  The altimeter in the bottom-left of her view dropped through four hundred metres and her stomach and sinews squealed in protest as the transport came out of the dive and levelled out. Kate groaned aloud and tried to ignore the growing sense of foreboding, manifested in the sheer pain of tendons and muscles trying to cope with such punishing G-forces. Considering all of the data the lens furnished in her vision, she saw the chances of them escaping this confrontation wither. Then, one of the larger icons in the representation of the battle vanished.

  “What was that, Bolek?” she asked.

  “NATO autonomous aircraft POL509-101 has been destroyed.”

  “Reason?”

  “Enemy saturation of the battle space.”

  Another NATO transport fell out of the sky. And then another. The view in her lens shimmered, crackled and disappeared, replaced with a refined white noise.

  “What’s going on?” she asked, although she knew.

  “The enemy is projecting electronic interference into the battle space.”

  “Can’t you do something?”

  “Countermeasures have been activated.”

  Kate felt the transport lose more height. Through the windows, the tops of bare trees and evergreen firs streaked past. The graphic in her lens returned suddenly. She saw that NATO SkyWatchers in combination with missile-armed Blackswans and ground-based lasers were being coordinated, but still the number of Spiders reduced with painful slowness.

  “How many Spiders are still pursuing us? What about enemy reinforcements?”

  “We appear to have reached the forward edge of the enemy’s likely range based on its tactics to date. The probability is increasing that the enemy will reassign its assets remaining in the battle space. This should allow a window for further withdrawal and evacuation.”

  “How long do you estimate the window to last? And don’t say ‘approximately’ and then give me a precise figure.”

  “From nine to thirteen minutes.”

  “Estimate to where the enemy will reassign its remaining assets.”

  The Polish Army’s super AI replied: “Highest probably is reassignment for civilian pacification.”

  “Can we prevent that?”

  “To attempt to do so would involve reassigning insufficient reserves and carry the probability of almost-certain failure, leading to the loss of all assets involved.”

  “Next time, just say: ‘No’.” Misery engulfed Kate’s spirit. Memories of lines of thousands of refugees traipsing away from the direction of danger, hoping to be
saved, only for the enemy to overtake them and snare them into a fate which Kate tried not to imagine.

  “Landing in thirty seconds.”

  “What?” Kate opened her eyes to see the other evacuees rubbing their necks and stretching as much as they could in the confines of the straps that held them in their seats.

  In the seat next to her, an unshaven Romanian captain stretched his arms and concluded: “We must have reached Serbia.”

  Kate craned her head and saw bare trees and yellow grass outside. The transport bumped down on to the ground and halted. At once, the fuselage echoed with the sounds of clasps clicking open to free the occupants. Kate undid hers as well, and for the first time since the flight began, she ran a finger over the lip of her cleft palate. Her muscles expanded or contracted in relief, depending on what the journey had done to them.

  The Romanian captain noted: “We should alight at once so the transports can go back to evacuate more troops.”

  “But why have we stopped here, at a staging post?” Kate asked, not caring what the Romanian thought of a Polish major asking for such an explanation from a captain.

  “Major,” the man began in deference, apparently only now realising the rank of his travelling companion, “we will continue retreating in land-based transport because—”

  “Because all the air transports are needed elsewhere,” she finished for him.

  “Or are destroyed,” he answered pointedly.

  Kate wondered what had happened to him recently to make him say such a thing, but at once discarded the thought. She called out to the other evacuees: “Collect your weapons before disembarking. We are still at risk.”

  Kate took her place as an orderly queue formed at the rear of the transport and the mixed bag of NATO troops retrieved their Pickups from the armoury. “Bolek,” she asked in a quieter voice, “list any current threats at this position.”

  “Current data suggests negligible threats.”

  “Where are the land transports?”