For a moment I am nearly dumbfounded. The ancient biological humans briefly dabbled with powered armor for their troops, but quickly abandoned the approach as unworkable. All those joints and motors, all that complexity, the heavy life support systems needed to keep a delicate biological creature alive in combat – pure robotic systems are so much more effective as weapons.
But there is no denying that this is what I appear to be seeing. They match an obsolete mark that is in my databases, and even if they did not, the style of the joints is a dead giveaway. If these were just anthropoid robots, they would have simple hinges at the knees and elbows. However, they have the multi-level sliding joints that you would need if there were a human inside and you didn’t want to pinch them as they moved. Nobody would make such elaborate joints for any other reason, at least not that I can think of.
Additionally, these armored suits are communicating with each other and with sources in the giant cube using standard human telemetry protocols! Archaic, to be sure, but definitely human.
The armored humans (or whatever they really are) race down the canyon walls, and sprint towards the giant cube. That’s when I see four of the Meibomians like the one that I had fought earlier pass over the valley rim walls, and chase after them. The Meibomians are fast. They will catch up with the armored humans before they have made it half-way to the giant cube.
Now the first rule when dealing with aliens, is to not trust your instincts. If you see a bunch of cute aliens fighting a bunch of disgusting-looking aliens, well, they are both aliens, and who knows what they are up to: just let them have at it. Not our problem. Then there is the possibility that an alien faction might have decided to pretend to be human, and when dealing with technologically advanced civilizations it can be hard to separate reality from deception.
However. I am desperately in need of allies here, and am willing to gamble. I accelerate up over the ridge and drive down the canyon walls. Charging into a battle without a proper introduction is always hazardous. This time I decide to combine words with actions. I transmit in English on the old human frequency bands.
Attention human defenders. This is Odin-Class Ground-Based Cyber Defensive Unit CRL345BY-44. I am going to engage the enemy in their left rear flank. Suggest your forces lay down supporting fire. Over.
When addressing biological humans for the first time it’s always good to play up the logical loyal robot angle. If our relationship works out, they can get to know my fun side later.
I have still not gotten my primary armament working. Pity, or this would be a much shorter battle, but I do have half of my secondaries back up and running. And more than that, I am ready for this enemy.
It’s one thing to beat a cybertank once, but beating it a second time? That’s a lot tougher. I haven’t just been repairing myself the last day, I’ve also been running countless simulations and developing new tactics.
I target precise locations in the left leg joints of the Meibomian closest to me with all of my surviving secondaries. Its legs give way and it rolls over on its side crippled. Effective but it could have been even better if I had aimed 20 centimeters higher. I update my internal model of the Meibomian skeletal structure and continue the attack.
The three remaining Meibomians react to my presence, and wheel around surprisingly quickly for such large creatures. The closest one charges straight at me. I blast what I have judged to be its main sensory cluster with all of my weaponry, blinding it. The creature screams and continues its charge. I take advantage of its blindness to swerve at the last minute and give it a vicious clip. The edge of my hull slices open its flank as we pass. It’s still on its feet but wounded, and backs off to regroup.
Now at this point I expected the armored humans to have either continued running towards the safety of their fortress, or to have opened fire on me as well. Instead they have turned around and are blasting away at the Meibomians. They are armed with railguns and plasma cannons – small by my standards, but still larger and more powerful than anything that could be carried by an unaugmented human being. The Meibomians are strong but thin-skinned for such large targets. The armored humans concentrate their fire on one target, and take it down.
There is one undamaged creature left, but not for long. Between my own fire and that of the armored humans, it is shortly blasted to fragments.
The two crippled creatures are trying to crawl up out of the valley to escape, but the armored humans make no move to fire on them. Standard cybertank tactical doctrine is to never give up an easy kill, but then this place is hardly standard. I decide to address my new allies.
Human defenders. Query: should we allow the surviving creatures to retreat, or finish them off?
The armored humans seemed to look at each other before one of them responded. “No, save your energy. In their weakened state they will be consumed by others of their kind out there in the dark. In any event this planet has an unlimited supply of monsters. It matters little if these two survive to attack us again or another two in their place.”
Negative firing on retreating targets, confirmed.
I am burning with curiosity, but I decide to remain silent and unmoving. That old ‘loyal logical robot’ routine always used to go down well with biological humans.
The armored humans confer with each other. Eventually one of them heads in my direction. His heavy armor is a brilliantly polished chrome, plated like a late medieval knight with a variety of medals welded onto his left upper chest. His faceplate is anonymous steel studded with lenses and other sensors – I cannot see the face of the human underneath. In addition to his weapons, he carries a banner with the symbol of a chess rook on it.
The figure marches up until it is about 100 meters away from me, and plants his standard in the ground. His comrades spread out in a semi-circle 100 meters farther back, covering him.
“Hail, visitor. I am General Lysis Trellen, commander of this fortress. I respectfully ask that you identify yourself.”
Even through the weight of 300 kilograms of powered armor, I can read the body language. It speaks of confidence, and maturity.
Hello General Lysis Trellen. I thank you for your welcome. I am an Odin-Class Ground-Based Cyber Defensive Unit CRL345BY-44, but my nickname is Old Guy. I am a cybertank from the Human Civilization. I am marooned here under circumstances that, frankly, I do not fully understand.
General Trellen cocked his armored helm to one side. “May I speak with the commander of this cybertank?”
Sorry, there is no commander. I am completely cybernetic, on my own, nobody else in here but us quail. Currently I am at a loss as to where I am. One moment I was travelling between the stars with my comrades, and then we were suddenly wiped out of the sky, and I crashed alone on this quite remarkably hostile world. I encountered this giant cube structure and I saw you being attacked by four large creatures. And here we are. That is all that I know.
Trellen stroked his armored chin with his right gauntlet, and though his visor was impenetrable I nonetheless could read his body language. Damn but this has to be a human being.
“Completely cybernetic? Then how can we be sure that you are truly of the human civilization? We have long experience of assaults by creatures that claimed to be of human origin or allegiance…”
You are correct. I also have had several experiences where aliens pretended to be human, or used human clones as proxies. There is little limit to the deceptions that a technically sophisticated enemy might create.
We were both silent for a time. After a moment General Trellen spoke up. “Well then. We have set ourselves a puzzle. You could be yet another elaborate ruse, or you could be a valuable ally. However, we need allies and some risk would seem to be in order, and you did appear to save my men and myself from the Meiboms. That is our word for these creatures. What do you suggest that we do?”
I propose that we trade histories and records, and talk. The thing to remember is that aliens are alien. Some of them have acquired fragment
s of human records, or made informed guesses from observation. However, in the long run their different psyches inevitably betray them – there are non-sequiturs, obvious gaps in the narrative that no human would make but that an alien mind is blind to.
General Trellen nodded. “That sounds like a reasonable approach. We are not going to grant you access to our electronic databases, that would be too risky, but we will allow you to read to some of our written records.”
Agreed. I too am wary of allowing a stranger direct access to my data networks. I have sufficient remaining internal stores that I can print out a limited history, for a starter.
“We will bring our records out here to you. No offense, but I cannot allow something as powerful as you into our fortress, not yet.”
No offense taken. But there is an alternative. I could send a humanoid android into your fortress. It would have negligible offensive capacity and you could show it the records directly, without having to risk them out here.
“Very well. Know that we will thoroughly scan this android of yours, and it will be under constant guard. Is that acceptable?”
Very acceptable, General.
As I had mentioned previously, after my desperate efforts at making a safe landing I had used up most of my internal stores. However, I did have a humanoid remote in storage, and sufficient polymer to print out a small history book. It had nothing of military or technical value, but should have enough to begin to persuade any true human that I am not an artful fake.
I popped a small hatch on my underside, and a generic male android dropped down onto the ground. As usual for the last few centuries, it’s wearing a blue suit. This side of the galaxy or that, on the moon of a gas giant or in the middle of interstellar space, you can never go wrong with a classic blue suit.
The armored humans escort me into The Fortress. We pass through a door 50 meters wide and 100 meters tall – it’s oversized even for my main hull. I wonder what they have that is so large that it requires such a door? Or perhaps it was just for effect, to impress. Biological or cybernetic, we humans can be like that.
The entrance is a simple large cubical room with a concrete floor. The massive external doors slowly close behind me. The armored humans scan me with a variety of hand-held devices, and then one of them wheels in a larger and more powerful scanner on a cart.
Eventually they are satisfied and another door opens. This time it is to a corridor a kilometer long, lined with stone columns and gilt-framed mirrors each 40 meters tall and 10 wide. The floor is a polished hard stone like granite, inlaid with complex silver arabesques.
Impressive.
“Thank you,” said Trellen. “Most of The Fortress is taken up with the generators, and living spaces, and other practical things, but with over a hundred cubic kilometers to play with the designers could not resist adding a few embellishments. Now, if you would follow me?”
Trellen led the way down the vast corridor. I wondered that his metal boots did not chip the granite floor, but I noticed that there were rubber cleats over the steel. Two of his armored subordinates followed behind at a respectful distance, their railguns politely pointing off at the ceiling.
Eventually we turned into a side corridor, and from there into a small reading room. I noted that all the other doors had been sealed, and I saw no one who was not wearing armor.
“Here,” said Trellen. “We have left some of our histories for you to read. We will go over what you have given us, and then we will meet again and talk.”
That sounds fine to me. Thank you, General.
“You are welcome. I regret that we cannot give you the run of the place, but until we know each other better we cannot risk that you are something other than you appear to be.”
Again, not a problem.
Trellen walked out of the room, and got ready to close the door behind him. “If you need anything, just bang on the door and ask.”
I will, but if I’m just sitting quietly and reading then this android body can go for months without a recharge.
Trellen nodded, and closed the door behind him. I picked up one of the books, and began to read.
Outside the massive cube-shaped fortress, my main hull hunkered down and worked on repairing itself with the limited materials that I had available. I stared out at the dark beyond the valley, but saw only impenetrable darkness.
2. The Journal of Lysis Trellen Part I: Awakening
“In hindsight all history looks inevitable. The reality is that so much of history could have gone either way, so easily, but you have to have been there to really feel that.” – Brother Protonicus, Order of the Librarians Temporal.
It started in chaos and confusion.
There were loud alarms ringing, and bright lights, and pain; a terrible pain that wracked my whole body. I tried to scream but my mouth was frozen in place. I tried to move however my joints were so stiff that I barely wiggled my arms.
“Lieutenant Trellen. Lieutenant Trellen.”
I heard someone calling out, except it was faint, as if from a great distance, and I was too much in agony to respond. I think I moved my head a little, but everything was so blurry that I could not tell.
“Lieutenant Trellen. Can you hear me, Lieutenant?”
The voice again, closer this time but still faint. I took a breath, and my chest felt like shattered glass. This time I did scream, and that hurt even more.
“Lieutenant Trellen. You are undergoing emergency defrost. I need you.”
Trellen. That’s my name. I began to be able to make out shapes. A person. I can’t tell who.
Well I could go on like this for a while, but to summarize after about 20 minutes I was mostly coherent. I had been emergency-defrosted by deep-space technician first-class Nadia Sandipan. The colony arkship City of San Luis Obispo had suffered catastrophic damage, the senior crew had all perished in an accident, and we were all going to die. For some reason technician Sandipan thought that I could do something about that.
However, I have not introduced myself. My name is Lysis Trellen. I was born on Earth, I am 28 years old, and I am an indentured Lieutenant in the planetary armed forces, recently attached to the colonization team. I’m average height, close-cropped medium brown hair, light brown skin, with a taught muscular build although I am in no way a superior athlete. If you passed me on the street you would not look twice.
Right now I am naked, and covered in gel slime and electrode leads. I am just starting to feel good enough to think that maybe I should clean myself up.
Technician Sandipan was a petite young brunette, hair tied back in a tight practical ponytail, wearing plain blue overalls and zero-G Velcro slippers. She floated in front of me in the cramped interior space near where my hibernation cell was (all the interior spaces in the City of San Luis Obispo are cramped). She seemed very upset, and her attempts to describe the situation to me were bordering on the incoherent. I imagine that this had not been one of her better days.
“Let’s start at the beginning,” I said. “What was the last thing you were doing before things went wrong?”
“The last thing? Oh, well, I was just doing my shift as awake monitoring. You know that the ship is completely automated, but we always keep at least three crew awake at any one time just in case the AI decides to do something stupid. I was inspecting the water storage cells in the aft ventral bays when I felt the ship shudder. It was as if it had all been jerked ten meters to one side. The lights flickered and went out, but then they came on again.”
“OK,” I said, “and then what did you do?”
“I think we got hit by a meteor…”
I interrupted her. “No, don’t tell me what you think. Tell me what you did. What was your first action after the lights came back on?”
“Oh. Well I tried to contact the acting shift-captain on the intercom, but didn’t get any answer. I tried contacting the other person awake with me, the acting first officer, but got nothing there as well. I put out a blanket call through the e
ntire ship, and still nothing. So I decided to climb over to the main command nexus, as maybe it was a communication fault. However, the door next to the command nexus was on lockdown, and the dials said there was vacuum on the other side.”
“And then what did you do? And is there a towel or something around here?”
“Oh,” said Sandipan, “sorry.” She opened a locker and took out a thin blue towel, which she handed to me. I started wiping the goo off myself, which was harder than it sounds because I’m not used to zero G and it took me a while to figure out how to brace myself.
“Thank you,” I said. “Now, what did you do next?”
“Well, I decided to wake someone up to help me. The tag on your chamber said you were an officer, so I did an emergency defrost. Sorry, it’s supposed to be unpleasant. I hope you are OK, but I couldn’t think of anything else.”
“It’s fine,” I said, “I’m feeling better each minute, and I thank you for your concern. Anyway I hate to disappoint you, but I’m an officer in the ground army. I wasn’t supposed to wake up until we had made planetfall.”
Sandipan’s face fell. “But all the regular crew were hibernating in the command nexus! You’re all I could think of!”
“Don’t worry, I’m sure we will figure something out.” I looked around, and something was bothering me. It finally struck me: nothing. There were no alarm bells, no automated warnings, none of the regular crew were being defrosted. It shouldn’t be this quiet. “I thought you had said that this ship had an AI. Aren’t there emergency procedures that automatically start if the awake crew is disabled?”
“Yes, of course,” said Sandipan, “but the central AI core was in the floor under the command nexus. I guess it was taken out as well.”
I thought about that. “A ship this big, there must be backups on top of backups for a critical system like that. So why isn’t the ship trying to fix itself?”
Old Guy and the Planet of Eternal Night (An Old Guy/Cybertank Adventure Book 6) Page 2
