Old Guy and the Planet of Eternal Night (An Old Guy/Cybertank Adventure Book 6)

by Timothy J. Gawne

  Colonel Villers, a medium suit whose banner was a silver starburst on a blue field, spoke up. “Their communications could have gone down, and they no longer have the ability to repair or rebuild them.”

  “There is also the issue of false messages,” said a Captain Withers. “They are so subtle, and so convincing, that listening to them can be painful. That’s why we have nearly abandoned long-range communication, by any means.”

  “Or,” said Captain Brendan, “it’s a trap.”

  “You have already made that point,” said Villers.

  “Think about it,” said Brendan.

  “Indeed,” said Trellen, “it could be either, or something else altogether, and yet the data are too compelling. We must mount an expedition and make sure.”

  “The Lesser Redoubt is 1,200 kilometers away,” said Captain Harlan. “No unit of ours has survived even a third of that range from The Fortress since the humans died out.”

  I can make such an expedition. My armored hull can cruise at over 100 kilometers per hour. I can get there in 12 hours, and with respect, my main self is tougher than any of you.

  “We cannot ask a stranger to take such a risk on our behalf unescorted,” said Trellen. “We will also want to confirm the status of the Lesser Redoubt with our own optics. Nevertheless your offer is accepted. We leave within the hour.”

  Will you be able to keep up with me?

  “We can maintain a steady pace of 60 kilometers an hour almost indefinitely. We shall proceed at that speed.”

  Captain Brendan lumbered to his feet. “The heavy weapons company demands the honor of this mission. You will likely need our firepower.”

  Trellen shook his head. “No, Captain, your company lacks the endurance for this mission, and I will not sacrifice our most potent units on such a risky venture. Your place is here.” Captain Brendan looked about as unhappy as a suit of powered armor could look, but he said nothing further. He sat down again, the reinforced steel chair groaning under his weight.

  Captain Harlan spoke up. “My scout troopers are ideally suited to such a mission. We are faster and longer ranged. Send us.”

  Again, Trellen shook his metal head. “No, Captain, I fear that on this mission we will need more staying power than your company, valiant though it is, possesses.”

  “At least assign some of my scouts to the mission!” said Captain Harlan. “You’ll need a screening force.”

  “Agreed,” said Trellen. “Pick six of your best, Captain Harlan, and they shall lead the way. For the main force, I shall go, with my own entire company.”

  At this there was a general consternation, and the suits of powered armor fell to arguing with each other. “The general can’t risk himself,” “We should have the honor,” “I still say it’s a trap,” and variants on these thoughts.

  Eventually Trellen himself stood up, and hushed the council to silence. “No, I have determined that I and my company shall undertake this mission. In my absence Colonel Villers will have the command. I have full faith in his abilities, and I expect all of you to support him as you have supported me.”

  Colonel Villers stood up and bowed. “Thank you, General. The Fortress will eagerly await your return.”

  If we wait a couple of years, I can reactivate sufficient factories that we could travel with a full army.

  “An attractive notion,” said Trellen, “but time may be of the essence. Two years may be too late.”

  After all these centuries, do you really think that two more years will matter?

  “I do not know,” said Trellen, “which is the point. What if we wait two years and find that that was one year too long? I have decided. We leave now.”

  Very well – but if you could supply me with some refined metals, I could repair my main weapon in three days. My firepower would then be ten times greater than it is now.

  Trellen thought about this for a moment. “Agreed then. Three days. Please give us a list of the materials that you require and they will be delivered to your main hull. This meeting of the council is now adjourned. Gentlemen, you are dismissed. Now, Old Guy, let me brief you on what we know of the enemies on this accursed world.”

  Good idea. And while we are at it, tell me about this Lesser Redoubt. Does it have any special history?

  “A special history?” said Trellen. “Yes it does. There was a minor political schism. Some of the humans wanted to put all of their resources into building a space ship and fleeing this world, others thought that a folly, suspecting that whatever had attacked the original colonists was likely still out there, and that we should concentrate on building our defenses here.”

  So the Lesser Redoubt was where the people who wanted to build a space ship moved to?

  “Correct.”

  Then perhaps they have already left this world?

  “Perhaps they have, perhaps not. Soon we shall find out.”

  4. The Journal of Lysis Trellen Part II: Arrival

  ”There are no great men, only ordinary men who have overcome extraordinary challenges.” – Admiral William Halsey, 20th Century Earth

  The damaged colony arkship The City of San Luis Obispo was set to auto-land on an unknown planet in an unknown part of space, and that looked to be exciting. Still, that was twelve hours away and I got bored waiting. Therefore, I defrosted a librarian.

  Technician Sandipan had been stunned multiple times by the security drone. In the movies stunning someone with a taser is a lark, lah-di-dah oh I’m stunned oh now I’m happy, but the reality is very different. Stunning someone causes massive pain and muscle and tendon tears. Between that and being bashed about while I had tussled with the drone, Sandipan was very badly injured. She needed serious pain medicine; of course those are off limits to the rank and file. Might cause addiction or be stolen, and suffering builds character in the lower classes. Private Brendan gave her some only-slightly-better-than-useless anti-inflammatories. With surprising gentleness for someone of his brutal appearance, he applied cold compresses to the worst of her bruises and did his best to make her comfortable.

  Sergeant Villers and I tried to learn what we could from the data access terminals, but with limited success. The ship’s AI was adamant that the planetary landing sequence was proceeding according to plan, but it was difficult to get anything more specific out of it.

  In frustration I rechecked the manifests for the hibernating colonists, looking for those that could be readily accessed. Hydrologist. Agronomist. Tax Collector. All charming but I think of little use in the present circumstances.

  And then I found an entry. Librarian. Oddly, there were no additional qualifications to this entry. No CV, no listings of sub-skills, just… Librarian. And the name: Sister Pascal. Was that a real name?

  A librarian. Probably a useless functionary who would fetch coffee for people who were searching databases on their own terminals. Nevertheless, I am having trouble finding the information I need, and a librarian is supposed to help with that. If she is of no use after all, well then she can just suffer along with the rest of us. So I set her to defrost.

  I floated over to where this so-called ‘Sister Pascal’ was supposed to wake up. I watched as the slab that contained her hibernating form was detached from the mass of frozen colonists, and robotic arms snaked out to attach cables and pipes to it. Various machines clicked and whirred. I could hear fluids being pumped back and forth, and finally there was a little ‘ding’, like when a microwave oven has finished cooking something. A door opened in the side of the slab and the naked form of Sister Pascal was released to float free.

  She looked unremarkable: not exactly cute, but not ugly or old either, although the gel clinging to her body did not help in that regard. I would have guessed her age at about 35, assuming that she wasn’t using anti-ageatics. For the first 20 seconds she was as disoriented as I or my troops had been. Then she closed her eyes, was still for a few seconds, then reopened her eyes and fixed me with a steady gaze.

  “You have a pr
oblem,” said Sister Pascal. “Please describe the nature of the emergency.”

  A fast recovery. This one may be tougher than she looks. “The ship is damaged, and all but one of the crew are dead. The ship’s AI says that we are lost, and set to land on an unknown planet in about ten hours. The AI also claims that it’s all under control, but you know AIs, they never tell you the one thing that you need to know. I gather you are a librarian, and I thought you might help me search the databases.”

  She nodded. “Well, that makes sense. But we have not been introduced.” She held out her right hand. “I’m Sister Pascal, of the Order of the Librarians Temporal. Pleased to meet you.”

  We shook hands. “Lieutenant Lysis Trellen, combined ground forces attached to the arkship City of San Luis Obispo. The Librarians of Time? What exactly is that?”

  “I am a member of a group of scholars sworn to the preservation of human knowledge,” she said. “The temporal means that we are secular, that is, we don’t worship knowledge for its own sake, but for practical, here-and-now purposes.”

  I considered that. “Am I to understand that you don’t make coffee or schedule meetings?”

  Sister Pascal grinned. “Only as needed. Why, do you need a meeting scheduled?”

  “Not currently, but we do have coffee. I believe that it is called space coffee.”

  “Splendid,” said Pascal. “Let’s get some of this space coffee, and then get to work.”

  -------------------

  I found Pascal one of the obligatory blue jumpsuits, and we both helped ourselves to an aluminized pouch of freeze-dried coffee. You took the flattened pouches, used a hot-water injector to inflate them, and then sipped the coffee using a kind of straw/valve thing. It wasn’t bad. I was starting to feel halfway decent.

  Sadly the same thing could not be said of Sergeant Villers, who had developed a severe case of space sickness. The arkship crew would have been carefully screened against this, but as we were not supposed to wake up until we had landed, none of us army types had. It was just dumb luck that Brendan and I were unaffected, at least for now. We used dermal scopolamine patches and he stopped retching (a very bad thing in zero G), but that made him woozy. We haven’t even entered serious combat and already I’m losing forces. That’s unfortunate.

  Sister Pascal stared typing at a terminal. To my surprise, it granted her access authority. She turned off the voice interface. “Always best to deal with an AI via text,” she said. “Even the best of them can misunderstand, and text is faster.”

  I looked over her shoulder, but couldn’t make and sense of what she was typing. “What language are you using?”

  “This? It’s Logal4, a structured query language. Less ambiguity than English, and that’s important with AIs. You never program?”

  I tried to make sense of what she was doing, but while superficially it looked like written English it wasn’t English and I could not follow it. “No, I’ve never programmed. In the academy we were taught about AIs, but only using voice commands. For the most part we were told not to trust them.”

  “Sensible,” said Pascal. “But if you ever want to learn, I can give you the right references. You never know what might come in handy.”

  She tapped on her keyboard for a bit. “Well, as you might expect, my access is limited. Executive functions are behind hard firewalls, and the landing sequence is locked in.” She looked up from her terminal. “Apparently you were the one that decided to land us? Really?”

  “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” I said.

  Sister Pascal found this hysterically funny. “Yes you could say that. I’m surprised that the AI accepted your authority on a command decision like that: probably some emergency exception decision tree deep in its logic core. Anyhow congratulations. Without your quick decision we’d all be dead.”

  “Is that the case?” I said. “Then, you are most welcome.”

  Pascal went back to her terminal. “The ship is still reporting that it can land on the planet successfully. Oddly, we are in a dust cloud with no star sightings. Inertial navigation systems are scrambled, so we could be anywhere, which should not be possible. Our original projected course took us nowhere near any dust clouds, and the log indicates no course changes during the flight. Though I suppose that could have been overwritten.”

  “This is undeniably a strange situation,” I said. “What can you tell me about the planet?”

  “Not that much. Without any light we can only do crude scans, thermal and long-distance radar, and limited emission spectroscopy. It is probably a rogue planet, cast off from its home system and drifting in inter-stellar space. It’s got enough geothermal heat that the surface temperature is livable, it even has a breathable oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere. I don’t know how that could happen without photosynthesis, but there you have it. It makes our chances a lot better.”

  “I still have difficulty comprehending how something as big as this ship can make it down to a planetary surface in one piece.”

  Pascal arched an eyebrow. “And you signed up for this voyage anyhow?”

  “No,” I said, “I didn’t sign up, I was assigned to it. On threat of termination of contract. In any event, I was just going to go to sleep on one planet and wake up on another. I never thought I would be awake when it landed, so I never worried about it.”

  “Yes,” said Pascal. “Well, the arkship is a fairly mature and reliable design. The main engines have already put us on an insertion course. The bottom is covered with 10 meters of ablative foam, which will burn off in about 20 seconds. Then the single-use ventral fusion thrusters will come on line, and the whole ship will descend and land, hopefully on a flat plain. Then the crew will be killed, and the executive section will activate and take control. The remaining colonists will be woken up in stages, according to the specific program that will be selected depending on the local circumstances and the need for their skills.”

  “That sounds rational,” I said. “But wait… what was that part about the crew being killed?”

  “Yes, the crew will be killed after landing has finished as they will then be of no further use. You are surprised?”

  “But,” I said, “they are the crew! They could be useful. Why kill them, if they have succeeded in getting the ship down in one piece?”

  Pascal sighed. “How much do you know about Neoliberalism?”

  I frowned. “That sounds suspiciously like politics. An officer can get court-martialed for talking like that.”

  “Well, I’m not an officer,” said Pascal. “If it doesn’t work out you can report me for treason, but right now you need to listen. Neoliberalism is the ethic of the ruling class. Neoliberalism triumphed not so much via direct battles and invasions, but by destroying all other competing organizations. Leaving people with no other alternatives to chaos.”

  “You mean,” I said, “like going after an enemies’ command centers?”

  “Something like that,” said Pascal. “So think about this. The ship’s company is smart, and capable, and has a clear organizational hierarchy. It has a captain who is used to being in charge, and officers and a crew that are used to obeying him. They will be awake when the ship lands, and the executives will be asleep, and helpless. They will also be a long way from the central authorities on Earth. How tempting do you think it might be for the crew to decide that they want to run things?”

  I thought about that for a bit. “That sounds crazy, but it makes sense. Is this in the database somewhere?”

  “No,” said Pascal, “it’s behind the executive firewalls, and I can’t access it. But I know Neoliberals and I know how they operate. It’s going to happen as surely as water on a planet runs downhill. I just don’t know how they are going to do it, and that’s the trick. How to avoid it.”

  “I encountered a security drone that the ship AI said didn’t exist. It only had nonlethal weaponry, so it would be hard to get rid of the crew using things like that.”

  “Yes,” said Pascal
, “it was probably part of a system that will secure a perimeter around the executives after landing, but having real lethal weapons active inside a space ship is too dangerous. Too easy to damage a critical system by mistake. Tell me, Lieutenant, how would you arrange for the crew to die, if it was you?”

  “Let me see. Poison gas could do it, but then the ship is compartmentalized, and I would expect a lot of the crew would be in vacuum suits during landing, in case of a depressurization.”

  “Yes,” said Pascal. “They would have to put over-rides in the suits, so that at a given signal they shut off.”

  “That’s possible,” I admitted. “All of the vacuum suits have embedded microcontrollers running life support, so there could be anything baked into them. I’m not sure I’d actually use poison gas, too much risk of contamination. Maybe an anesthetic, and then executive security gets rid of them after they have woken up? Or just hypoxia, that would be simplest.”

  “My thoughts exactly,” said Pascal. “And it would make it easier to explain away the crew dying – systems failure, they ran out of oxygen, such a tragedy – not that Neoliberals bother much with believable explanations, nowadays.”

  “Well,” I said, “that’s a charming paranoid fantasy. Also, if all the vacuum suits are sabotaged, how are we going to survive if you are right?”

  “I’m thinking about it,” said Pascal.

  “Could we just go back into hibernation and pretend that none of this happened?” I said.

  “Sadly, no,” said Pascal. “Prepping someone for hibernation takes a lot of preparation. The main crew had limited facilities for that but everything else is defrost only.”

  “You realize,” I said, “that this is crazy?”

  “Perhaps. If I’m wrong and nothing happens after landing, you will have my heartfelt apologies and you can refer me for psychiatric help. But if I’m right and we do nothing and we all die, well, I won’t get to say I told you so.”

  “And so… I guess this is similar to Pascal’s Wager?”

  Sister Pascal broke into a wide grin. “A scholar in the ranks! You surprise me, Lieutenant Trellen. Now let’s get ready. I have a plan.”