The Chronicles of Old Guy (Volume 1) (An Old Guy/Cybertank Adventure)

by Timothy J. Gawne

  Double-Wide detaches from his custom landing system and powers away. The lander folds up, digs a hole, climbs in it, and pulls an armored cover over itself. Hey, that’s pretty neat. A damaged Amok surface-to-surface missile veers out of control and hits the lander dead center, leaving it a charred ruin.

  Told you so.

  Double-Wide does not even bother to reply.

  We had previously decided to restart the ancient custom of wearing bumper stickers. We were not to reveal our choices to each other until after we had made planetfall, and then we would vote on who had the coolest sticker. I take a quick peek at the rear hulls of my squadron-mates, the stickers are:

  Skew: “I Don’t Brake for Amok”

  Wiffle-Bat: “Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny”

  Bob: “Obama 2012”

  Smoking Hole: “My Other Hull is a Horizon Class, Too!”

  Old Guy: “At Least I’m Paid For”

  Double-Wide: “CAUTION: WIDE TURNS. If you see this vehicle behaving in an unsafe manner, please call 1-800-435-8842”

  I had to do a database search to figure out Bob’s sticker: the reputation of the Golem class for bizarre humor is maintained. I think that I like Double-Wide’s the best, though.

  Office Copier Military Observer lands in its armored pod, and emerges floating on a simple anti-grav sled. It looks like any other member of the Office Copier civilization: a cube four meters on a side covered with complex bumps and angles. It is not an active combatant but is well supplied with inbuilt point-defense weapons. It floats behind us and observes.

  I notice that the Office Copier has attached a small sticker to its lower left rear corner. Printed in neat block letters are the English words:

  “Lower Left Rear Corner”

  This is either the worst case of literalism in recorded history, or a very subtle joke. The Office Copier wins our contest by acclamation, although it expresses no opinion on its victory.

  Our squadron forms up and advances. Double-Wide takes the lead, with Bob a few kilometers behind. They are the heavy hitters. Smoking Hole and Skew guard the flanks, and spend most of their time taking out Amok that have targeted Double-Wide and Bob. Wiffle-Bat and I, as the oldest and least effective cybertanks, bring up the rear, zapping occasional infiltration units and sometimes scurrying forward to help support our heavier friends.

  The combat is a chaos of plasma cannon fire, missiles and anti-missiles of all kinds, with the occasional fusion bomb explosion. We encounter all manner of Amok variants: Assassin Clones, Doll Swarm, Fuzzy Moose, Blade Fetish, Ghost Monsters, Battle Spam. Thankfully there are no Happy Leeches, but then they would probably do more damage to the Amok then we are.

  Hey Double-Wide, you see that Assassin Clone unit at your 10 O’clock?

  “Yes, Old Guy, I have it on target lock, thanks for checking,” said Double-Wide. A single shot from one of his massive secondaries evaporates an Assassin-Clone unit that resembled a giant polar bear studded with gun turrets. “And how are you holding up?”

  So far so good. Lost my screen of light and medium remotes though.

  “Indeed. I have lost mine as well. The air is so filled with shrapnel, shockwaves and electromagnetic pulses that only armored systems, like a cybertank or heavy remote, can survive. Bob seems to be having fun though.”

  The Golem class is tearing through the Amok. The electromagnetic energy coming out of his pyramidal superstructure is so intense that the air around it shimmers, and static buildup causes electrical arcs to play around his hull. Sometimes nothing seems to happen, and at other times whole swaths of the enemy go dead as he taps into some weakness in their shielding or encryption algorithms.

  “We have a high value target ahead,”said Smoking Hole. “It appears to be a major industrial and defense target. It was too well defended to take out from orbit. Double-Wide takes the lead; the rest of us cover him.”

  We advance under fire. We launch a salvo of missiles from our surviving heavy remotes at the enemy facility over the horizon. The defensive emplacements are still tracking our missiles as we pass the crest of a low rise and the facility comes into view. We have pre-targeted our weapons and destroy all the defenses before they can traverse to engage us.

  The enemy installation looks like an enormous baked potato with huge orange funnels sticking out of it. Double-Wide starts to activate his main weapon. Immediately I backtrack, try to find a low part in the ground, and cover all my exposed sensors. Double-Wide fires. There is a massive pressure wave and a burst of EMP. I uncover my sensors. A deep scar in the ground starts from just in front of Double-Wide, extending out to the glowing crater where the enemy facility used to be, and fading off into the distance.

  “We are losing,” said Smoking Hole. “There is a change in plan.”

  “We are?” asked Skew. “But witness the total destruction of the late enemy facility, the copious amounts of Amok-related wreckage scattered around the landscape, and the 100% survival rate of our valuable selves. Surely this is a good thing?”

  “We are losing,” replied Smoking Hole. “We are winning tactical victories, but the Amok are churning out replacements faster than we can kill them, and each new wave is nastier than the last. Already some of the other squadrons are in danger of being overwhelmed. The Amok have more dug-in capacity than we had calculated.” He sent out a 3-D map of the local terrain. It shows us on the surface, and below a vast network of tunnels dug into the crust. “Since we touched down we have been using seismic data and building up a picture of the sub-surface. In sections almost the entire top four kilometers of this planet’s crust has been hollowed out. We need to go down there and root them out before we are overwhelmed.”

  Why can’t we just send remotes into the tunnels?

  “We’ve been trying that,” said Smoking Hole. “But none of the remotes make it more than a few hundred meters. The defenses are too tough.”

  “How about we drop fusion bombs from orbit and collapse the tunnels that way?” asked Bob.

  “An excellent idea, but we don’t have enough fusion bombs.”

  “Why not send some armored snake-bots down to infiltrate and blow the facilities up from the inside?” asked Wiffle-Bat.

  “Another excellent idea, but we don’t have any armored snake-bots, and no time to make enough. Here’s the plan. There is an entrance a few kilometers up ahead. It appears to intersect with a major underground complex. We go down and kill everything. Double-Wide, you are too big to fit in the tunnels so you get to stay up here and guard our rear. Let’s go people, we’re on a clock.”

  Cybertanks don’t have many phobias. We are not afraid of the dark (we can see in too many wavelengths), or of snakes, or spiders, or drowning, or open spaces. But we don’t like tunnels. Even the few underground passages big enough for us to fit into almost never give us any space to maneuver, and our shape is poorly suited to burrowing. If the roof caves in on me I will be pinned, my treads just spinning in place. I console myself that the only thing scarier than being a cybertank in an underground cave, is trying to fight a cybertank in an underground cave. I am developing this habit that when I am wrong, I am often seriously wrong.

  The entrance is a broadly curving ramp that heads down into a tunnel about 50 meters across and 25 tall. Smoking Hole heads in, and I follow. Double-Wide sends a message: “Take care of yourself, Old Guy. See you back on the surface.”

  No worries. Try not to make too big a target of yourself. See you soon.

  I descend the ramp and enter the tunnel. It’s cramped and dark, and reverberates with the echoes of my treads and engines. The 3D map of the tunnels is updating in real-time as new intelligence is gathered. A major side gallery disappears, and two new passageways flash into existence. The dynamic map makes it appear that the tunnel system is moving and growing as if alive. It’s kind of creepy.

  We emerge into a cavern fully a kilometer across. The ceiling is relatively low, hardly a hundred meters up, but the space stretches at least 10
kilometers into the distance. The engineering is impressive: the Amok are insane but not stupid. The walls are studded with the entrances to other tunnels, and here and there complex machinery of inscrutable purpose stick up from the floor or hang down from the ceiling.

  We encounter defensive fire of high volume, but too light to be a threat to a cybertank. We pick off their emplacements one at a time, and send our few surviving heavy remotes forward as a screen and advance. We had made it about two kilometers into the cavern when Smoking Hole was simultaneously pierced by two supercharged plasma beams coming from our right flank. He screams for about five milliseconds before his systems all short out. His internal stores cook off, his main turret blows off and oily dark smoke billows from his hull.

  We have been ambushed. The rest of us rush to reconfigure our formation. I can see our attackers: they are caricatures of cybertanks, hunchbacked and ugly, with crude slabs of armor and oversized treads. They each have a single massive forward-facing plasma cannon mounted in a dorsal ridge. They have no secondary or tertiary armament: these are dedicated cybertank-killers.

  I fire my main weapon and hit one: no damage, the armor is too thick. More of the tank-killers emerge from the side tunnels. They appear sluggish and stupid, but they are powerful and there are a lot of them. One of them targets me and I sacrifice my last heavy remote in the path of its fire. Skew hammers one unit, punching holes in it and disabling the treads on one side, but the tank killer is still operational and it uses the treads on the other side to pivot in place and continues to target us. Damn but these things are hard to kill.

  Bob is pouring energy into the enemy units, the reflected backlash threatening to overload my own sensors, but his efforts are completely ineffective. Odd: at this short range Bob should have at least blinded them. I watch one of them turn back and forth like a mole snuffling for grubs. I do a careful high-resolution imaging: they have no visible ports or sensors. Oh, I get it.

  Bob: these tank killers don’t have any external sensors or communication equipment: that’s why you can’t affect them. They must be tracking us through the vibrations in the floor.

  “That is an interesting hypothesis,” said Bob. “Then let me try something else.”

  Bob uses his energy projection equipment to set up vibrations in the walls and scattered machinery in the cavern. He is mimicking the seismic signatures of a cybertank. If I am right, then with the entire floor vibrating the enemy units will not be able to track us.

  At first it seems to work. The tank killers all stop. Then they start moving again. Uh oh.

  Oh shit! They must have a default program to fire at random when their tracking is jammed! Everybody dodge!

  The tank killers start firing at random. They are almost more dangerous than when they were actually shooting at us. The cavern is filled with a cat’s cradle of bright energy beams. The tank-killers hit each other; they are slow enough that we can dodge, but there is so much firepower spraying around that we likely only have about 10 seconds left.

  Wiffle-Bat takes a direct hit on his main turret. He suffers severe internal damage as well and loses motive power. He is still alive but out of this fight. Skew is clipped several times but suffers only minor injuries, he concentrates fire on a single tank-killer and blows it apart, but there are too many left. Bob has his pyramidal superstructure hit by a plasma beam: the damage appears light but his complex internal energy manipulation equipment is fried. We lose our jamming. We get a brief respite as the tank-killers stop their random firing and re-acquire their targets. Dozens of heavy plasma cannons start to swing ponderously in our direction. This might be it.

  Three powerful plasma cannon bursts impact on a single tank-killer and blow it apart. Two more take out a second. It’s Double-Wide, somehow he got down here, and he is taking out the enemy with his oversized secondary weapons.

  I thought that the tunnel was too small for you?

  “Not any more. It seems to have become enlarged. Or perhaps my diet is paying off. In any event I heard all the noise coming from down here and thought that you might need some help.”

  I notice that his flanks are deeply scored and trailing wreckage from the tunnel walls; he must have forced his way through.

  Double-Wide takes out another tank-killer, but there are dozens left. “Hmm. There do seem to be a lot of the little devils.” He starts to activate his main gun. “You might want to back off a bit. This could get loud.”

  Oh shit. Tell me he isn’t going to use his main gun in here.

  Everyone! Emergency retreat! Find some cover! Now now now now!

  I overload my motive units into full reverse. I make it about halfway back to the entrance when Double-Wide fires his main weapon. I duck into a side-tunnel and then the entire cavern is filled with super-heated gas and electromagnetic static. Most of my external sensors burn out, and the tunnel collapses on me.

  Compared to the chaos of combat being buried alive is almost relaxing. I try rocking back and forth on my treads for a bit, on the off-chance that I am not buried that deeply and I can shake the debris off, but this just wedges the rocks tighter against my hull, so I power down. I am mostly undamaged. The pressure on my hull is great but not outside my limits. I am cut off from communications with my fellows, not surprising this deep underground. I can sense vibrations though the rocks: there is still a lot of combat going on but it’s too distant for me to tell who’s winning.

  I could call for help by transmitting my own seismic signals, but that could attract the enemy as easily as my friends. I try sending out some low-power vibrations: no reply. If our side wins they will systematically probe for survivors, so there is no chance of getting left behind. Right now trying to rescue me would only distract my fellows. I decide to hold off on sending out a really loud seismic signal.

  I set my repair drones to work. They scuttle through my cramped unlit interior spaces making minor repairs. A hatch on my underside has enough clearance to open: I send a few drones out. There is a narrow zone of free space around parts of my hull. I need to scout out the closest open space, and then start the laborious process of clearing a path. First things first: I have to build a tunnel around me to take the pressure off my hull and free myself up.

  The repair drones start their slow careful work of excavation and construction. I notice that there is a small crevice that leads away in the direction of the side tunnel that I had started to move into. It’s too cramped for a standard light or medium combat remote, but a repair drone could squeeze through. Unfortunately they don’t have the ability to work without supervision.

  Stashed away in one of my small cargo holds I still have an old Amelia Earhart android. I wasn’t planning on using it this trip, but it’s as useful a source of spare parts and raw materials as anything, so I hadn’t gotten around to recycling it. I dig it out from behind crates of wire and metal sheets, and have the drones install new power cells. I load it with extra software routines for independent thought, send it on its way with a couple of spare drones, and get on with the business of freeing myself from the tunnel.

  I crawl out of the hatch and slowly make my way though the narrow free space around my main hull. It’s hot out here, about 200 degrees centigrade, some combination of being this deep underground and the residual heat of combat radiating off my hull. The Earhart android is not designed for hostile environments but as long as it doesn’t get much hotter I should still be OK.

  I pass the end of my hull and the crevice continues on. My two drones and I wriggle through the tight passageways. A snake-bot would be better at this but the human form is surprisingly versatile and I make good progress. One of my repair drones gets hung up on some wreckage, and I lift it free. In a few places it looks like the crevice had ended, but the blockages were minor and the drones used their rapid-cutting mandibles to clear a path. I lose communication with my primary self, and am alone with my drones.

  We crawl perhaps a kilometer and a half, and the crevice open up into a relati
vely intact circular tunnel eight meters in diameter. There are no active power sources here and the tunnel is completely dark. This body can see in low light but not total darkness and it doesn’t have a radar sense: I have the drones spread out and shine faint lights.

  As I walk down the tunnel I encounter a four-meter cube covered in protrusions. It’s Office Copier Military Observer. It must have come down after us, then tried to escape as I did when Double-Wide fired his main gun. It is still sitting on its suspensor sled, but an entire side has been sheered off and it appears to be dead. Probably it had been damaged near the entrance of the tunnel and then coasted in here on the sled. The shattered side of the Office Copier displays an amazingly complex solid-packed tangle of wires, rods, pulleys, gears, and other things that I can’t identify. Now it’s all torn and ruined.

  There is a rhythmic hammering from the far side of the wrecked Office Copier. Something is trying to open a hatch, but it’s jammed. I send out an IFF pulse. The hammering stops. After a time, I get an IFF pulse in response.

  The drones and I pry off the jammed hatch. Inside is a little cube about 40 cm on a side. We lift it out and set it on the floor of the tunnel. It’s surprisingly heavy. It pops out four short metal legs each of which has a small wheel on it. The little cube has a similar pattern of surface bumps and indentations as the big cube, but they are less elaborate. Each square face of the cube has a single fixed camera lens staring outwards.

  Who are you?

  The little cube sends me a simplified data-glyph that roughly translates as:

  -> QUERY RECEIVED

  |-> UNIT IDENTITY

  |-> OFFICE COPIER MILITARY OBSERVER EMERGENCY DATA RECORDER

  -> QUERY SENT

  |-> UNIT IDENTIFY

  |-> MISSION IDENTIFY

  I am a remote from the cybertank “Old Guy” assigned to independent duty. I am here to scout the terrain and report back. Care to join me?

  -> QUERY RECEIVED