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

by Timothy J. Gawne

  “And oath of fealty?” said the head of the medical division. “That sounds like kid stuff.”

  “It’s like the Council of Elrond after all!” said the IT guy.

  Pascal looked bemused. “Yes, not a bad idea. Something to remind us. It’s your idea, Trellen. Would you lead us in one?”

  Oh darn, there I go again, forgetting the zeroth commandment of the army: thou shalt not volunteer. “OK then, I will give it a shot. You all repeat each line after me, but the part where I state my name, you each state your own names. Here goes:”

  “I, Captain Lysis Trellen, as a member of the Council of Eleven, do solemnly swear to serve the colony and the people of the Planet of Eternal Night, to the best of my abilities, to place the needs of the colony above my own even unto death, by my sacred honor, may the inscrutable forces that govern this universe strike me down should I prove false.”

  Everyone repeated after me. Nobody giggled. Maybe I got away with this after all.

  “Not bad,” said the IT guy.

  “Not great,” said the head of the medical division. “But good enough. Points for making it up on the fly.”

  “Very well then,” said the newly elected Doge of the Council of Eleven, Oliver Schmidt, “we have an official oath of fealty. I shall enter it into the record. And now, if I may have that motion to adjourn again?”

  The motion passed, and we all filed out. The IT guy stopped to chat with Pascal for a bit. He was still complaining that the Council of Eleven was a boring name.

  “Give it time,” said Pascal. “Things are not cool because of their names, names are cool because of the things that they are associated with. The Council of Elrond is only cool because of the well-known work of fiction that it occurred in. If we make this colony work, I assure you that the Council of Eleven will be a name of high esteem.”

  “You mean, like Microware Silverlight Office Suite with the Biomorphic Processing Options?”

  “No,” said Pascal. “Not like that.”

  11. This Means War

  “I think there should be holy war against yoga classes.” – Werner Herzog, film director, 20th century Earth.

  I have already covered the events of the so-called Planet of Eternal Night, and the (apparent) escape of my main hull. My peers and I had debated what to do, but while we assembled a mighty armada, we finally settled on just waiting and watching. And for a very long time nothing happened. Until something did.

  Which is how so many wars begin, in my long experience.

  Six massive objects erupted from the quarantine zone that we had set up around the dust cloud, burst through our skirmish lines, and headed in towards our nearest main systems at something like 97% of lightspeed, burning with ultra-short blue-shifted radiation. That’s fast, and made it impossible to coordinate our defenses or get adequate warning to evacuate. Especially as we didn’t know for certain what their purpose was until very, very late…

  The objects tore into our systems. We hit them with everything we had, but they were so massive and moving so fast that at that point it didn’t matter. We shattered three of them, but their momentum made the fragments continue on and they all impacted into their target stars.

  Nothing at this scale happens all that rapidly. For a while it looked pretty boring. There was a small bright point of impact on each star, and ripples spread in the photosphere. A naïve observer might have assumed that the projectiles had been swallowed whole. But we had completed a preliminary analysis, and knew that the systems were doomed.

  The cybertanks in the affected systems tried frantically to evacuate, but you can’t just jump in a car and drive out of a stellar system. Resources have to be marshaled, complex machinery warmed up and brought on-line… Meanwhile the stars sat there, as peaceful and shining as they had for ages before…

  Choices had to be made. Many cybertanks decided to be left behind, sacrificing themselves so that others would have the resources to flee. Some, orbiting gas giants in the outer parts of the systems, decided to hide on the far side of these worlds, hoping that the bulk of the enormous planets might shield them from the shockwave. A few stayed at their posts, analyzing data from the projectiles and their impacts, surveying for residual specks of the exotic matter that they had been made of, and relaying the data out system until the very last microsecond.

  Through it all the laser-links to our other systems were abuzz with activity. Last messages to old friends, subminds, fragments of memories, advice, partially-completed works of literature, all of it fleeing on photonic beams that not even the outer shell of an exploding star could hope to catch.

  The computer cores of a cybertank are fairly large and heavy, but it’s surprising how much static data you can squeeze into a few grams of matter. Tiny petabyte data capsules were shot out of linear accelerators at 99.9% of lightspeed. Not even they could outrun photons but if they had enough of a head start then by the time the photon burst of the shockwave caught up with them it might have weakened enough that they could still survive… these contained the compressed core memories of many of my peers. Not the entire persona, not by a long shot, but enough to act as a seed for a new cybertank, with luck.

  Now you might think that we cybertanks would have contingency plans for such a situation. And we did, sort of: the ejection of the data capsules at near lightspeed, the cybertanks staying at their posts relaying data, it wasn’t a panic. Still, there is only so much you can prepare for. Like asking a 16th century human what her plan would be if she was unarmed and suddenly attacked by the entire 20th century German 11th Panzer Division.

  Throughout this, the stars in question sat placidly. Ordinarily it takes millions of years for radiation in the middle of a star to percolate out to the surface. But it takes a lot less time if you push hard enough.

  There was a brief moment when the surfaces of the doomed stars were covered with intricate patterns of ripples and fracture lines, and then there were no stars, only the shockwave as the outer layers were blown off.

  The leading edge of the shockwave was photons and neutrinos and suchlike. There was no warning when this hit; when you saw it you were dead. The inner planets were shattered, and lesser moons and space stations simply evaporated. Following close behind the photons were the ions, the heavy particles, and these dissolved what was left of the inner planets and moved outwards.

  The expanding shell headed out, tearing the atmospheres off the gas giants and, in some cases, even destroying these mighty planets outright.

  In the course of a few hours there was only the spherical halo of the radiation and debris heading outwards from each targeted system, slowly dissipating as it expanded and leaving behind the angry main bodies of the stars. They will likely settle down again… in a few tens of millions of years.

  The initial attack over, we surveyed the damage and pondered our options. The destruction of six of our systems had been painful, but it was hardly a mortal blow to our civilization. We have dozens more major systems and hundreds of lesser outposts.

  Some of us felt that this had crossed a line, and that we had to counterattack. I was part of this group.

  Others of us felt that it was a trap, and that we were being deliberately provoked and baited into attacking. I was part of this group also.

  We tried asking the local alien civilizations what they know about the forces that lived in the dust cloud. We offered to trade valuable information and kilotons of rare earths, but as typical, they had nothing to say on the matter. Bloody smug aliens.

  And so we launched our assault into the dust cloud. Unfortunately, there had been setbacks with the Shadow Class development program, and I was still a well-past-my-sell-by-date Odin Class. I’d milked the ‘doddering old elder voice of wisdom being underestimated triumphing by being sneaky and lucky and having powerful friends thing’ for as much as I had cared to. I was so far out of date that even I was getting tired of it, and I had looked forward to being rebooted as something bleeding edge.

  T
hus it was that I initially declined the invite to join the invasion. That was hard for me, but a cybertank has to know its limits and I had long since reached mine. However, it was decided that, as the only cybertank to have been inside the dust cloud, and to have made contact with the locals and to have left a personal submind behind, my insights might be useful, and I was respectfully asked to join in.

  Well, I could not say no to that, but in my present state I would be unable even to draw fire effectively (me! Old Guy! Not trying to draw fire! I’ll never live this down). Well, duty is duty; you can’t have fun in every war now can you?

  It’s not like I haven’t had upgrades since I was first constructed. My weapons are all significantly more powerful and longer-ranged, and my sensors are higher resolution. I even had my reactors upgraded to produce 40% more output. Still, there is only so much you can do with an older design before the only way up is to start over from scratch.

  On this trip, in my designated role as living fossil and possibly useful source of local intel, I will be escorted by my old friends the Sundog Class Double Null and the Corona Class Sausage. So at least I will be in good company. I have also been given a few extras – I guess you could call them the cybertank equivalent of crutches; something to help the drooling geezer from falling over. I’ve had a second skin applied over my regular armor. It’s only a centimeter thick and hardly masses anything. I have been promised that it is not sentient, but it’s smart, and can react and defend me from threats that, unaided, I could not even understand let alone counter. My internal bays are packed with signals-warfare units. Again, I am promised that they are not self-aware, but they do have a lot more raw processing power than I do and with luck they will prevent me from being hacked or jammed or tricked by the modern electronic-warfare equivalent of a fool’s mate.

  I’ve also got my own screen of combat remotes – no cybertank, even an obsolescent one, should leave home without an escort screen. Six of them are advanced super-heavy units, broad glassy-graphite colored arrowheads 20 meters long, any one of which would have been more than a match for my original main hull, and dozens of smaller units. I have them clustered about me in a close, defensive formation.

  The armada consists of over a thousand cybertanks and innumerable auxiliary and remote systems, spread out over a front of half a light year. We advance into the cloud, and at first encounter nothing, not even traces of the exotic matter used for the star-exploding ordnance.

  Deeper in, and we start to detect anomalies. Then hell breaks out.

  Double Null and Sausage keep me informed as best they can, but it’s complicated. We are waging by far the most challenging battle that the cybertanks have ever faced. Damn but I wish I were state of the art again.

  In the beginning of human combat there would be one man with a big club fighting another man with a big club. There could be strategy – feints, counter-strikes – but mostly it’s just one big club against another. Individual skill. Then you would have many men with clubs, and now there is the issue of strategy: perhaps use a small force to distract the enemy while your main force attacks from behind. Then come horses, chariots, archers – combined arms. How to use all these different weapons together for maximal effectiveness.

  The next stage was when economic factors came into play: integrating the productive factors of the entire society for war. Then espionage, then cyberwarfare, propaganda, diplomacy… We tend to think of the history of warfare as the evolution of bigger and more powerful weapons – and it is – but it is the integration of disparate elements that really defines the evolution of combat.

  The forces set against us ranged from the simple to the exotic, but they were controlled with amazing finesse and coordination. Intelligent missiles, nanotech swarms, causality engines, weak-force bombs, zero-point energy disrupters… we had never fought a war at this level before. Some of the weapons cannot even be described in English, any more than you can explain the purpose of a 25th century electronic countermeasures suite to a dog by barking at it (Wonderdog 37 excepted, naturally).

  We tried negotiating, but the enemy refused to communicate anything other than deceptions and jamming signals. Oh well, at least we made the attempt.

  We learned, we adapted, but still we were losing ground. We were down to fewer than a hundred cybertanks, and our escape route back out through the dust cloud was cut off. At long range we finally made deep-radar contact with the Planet of Eternal Night. It became obvious that we were being herded towards it. Being herded somewhere by a superior force is a bad thing, so we tried to slip away around the flanks or break through in an unexpected area. We inflicted heavy losses on the enemy, but not enough to get free.

  I made a suggestion, and to my surprise, it was accepted. Significant resources were devoted to transmitting a single powerful burst signal at the Planet of Eternal Night. It probably won’t make a difference, but you never know.

  We were forced back closer to the planet, and knowing what the enemy was trying to do gave us an edge. Still we took a heavy toll of the opposing forces, but not enough. Eighty-eight of us cybertanks made planetfall intact, myself still miraculously in one piece, and guarded by Double Null 50 kilometers on one flank and Sausage 50 kilometers on the other.

  “Hey Old Guy,” called Double Null on short-range encrypted microwaves, “this place bring back memories?”

  You could say that. Not good ones. What’s our tactical situation?

  “Not great,” said Double Null. “We’ve whittled them down, and every minute we fight them we figure out more of their tricks, but we’re still outgunned. All surviving cybertanks are now on the planet’s surface, and our space-based weaponry has been reduced to a perimeter hardly ten million kilometers out and shrinking.”

  “The tactics have changed,” said Sausage. “They are no longer trying to destroy us outright. They are concentrating on attriting our distributed combat reserves. Wasteful of them: the more we know what they won’t do, the more we can fine-tune our tactics to hurt them.”

  Pets. Or Trophies. That’s what we are intended to be. The intelligence running this place likes to – I don’t know – play with things. People, armored suits, now cybertanks…

  “That makes as much sense as anything,” said Double Null. “It fits with the hypothesis that your main hull was allowed to escape in the hopes that we would attempt a rescue, and when that didn’t work, the enemy sent long-range sun-destabilizers to draw us in.”

  “If so,” said Sausage, “then the enemy may have been a bit too cute. I bet it’s regretting the decision to try and capture a bunch of cybertanks right about now. Hey Double Null, watch your rear. There’s a cluster of spatiotemporal distortions coming your way. And Old Guy, steer 30 degree to port and max your speed.”

  I wasn’t exactly sure what was going on, but I complied. I could sense Sausage and Double Null next to me, and I could feel the backlash of their incredibly powerful and subtle weapons as they were fired. The black sky was stitched with faint white lines, and the backwash of colossal energies, but there was so little overspill into the visible spectrum that the landscape was still hardly more than stygian.

  I was attacked by a swarm of – well, I don’t know what they were. Small nasty bitey things that broadcast memes so toxic that I had to set my internal signal filters to max. I tried to shoot these things down with my own point-defense weapons, but couldn’t track them. Fortunately my second-skin was up to the task. It just ate them when they impacted. I think it made my new skin even stronger. A defensive armor that can power itself up by eating small enemy units. That’s so cool.

  Oh I can’t wait to be state-of-the-art again. I’m reduced to just maneuvering where I am told, keeping my signals discipline tight, and watching in a mixture of confusion and awe at the swirling melee that was unfolding around me.

  As far as I could tell, we were in one hell of a fight, but still losing. We were down to a small bubble of combat power, covering less than a quarter of the planet, when w
e detected a burst of neutrinos, and the previously dead-black sky of the Planet of Eternal Night lit up with a glorious aurora.

  12. The Journal of Lysis Trellen Part VI: First Steps

  “A beginning is a very delicate time.” Frank Herbert, novelist, Earth, 20th century.

  A decade went by. The colony prospered, mostly, and people raised families. The Council of Eleven remained the central governing structure, and Oliver Schmidt was still the elected Doge. I think that the ancient Venetians would have approved.

  I had my first beer in over a decade (not counting hibernation on the trip here). It was good. I am told that beer will remain a luxury for years to come, but it’s nice that we have enough slack to take a break from algae paste, now and then.

  I’ve read about a quarter of the books in Sister Pascal’s library, and she’s helped me practice some of the more difficult mental techniques. I don’t know how I managed to function before. I look back on my previous life and I think, was I really that stupid? Pascal tells me that this is the normal reaction of a talented mind that is finally exposed to properly curated information, and that if I ever get tired of running the military the library has an opening for novice archivist. High praise, I think.

  It’s funny, how hard it is to explain what the library gives to those who have never taken the effort to use it. On the one hand I feel more organized; more rational than ever. I make better decisions, and I have a lot of control over my emotional state and sleep patterns. I can even access my spinal and autonomic reflexes (surprisingly, voluntarily suppressing severe hiccups turns out to be one of the hardest techniques to master). On the other hand I’m not superhuman. I can’t fly, or order people to do things with just the sound of my voice. The reality of the Library is somewhere in between those who think it’s mostly a fraud, that reading books can’t possibly do all that we claim, and those who think we are sorcerers with mystical powers plotting to enslave everyone else.