Old Guy and the Planet of Eternal Night (An Old Guy/Cybertank Adventure Book 6)
Page 26
Waiting for us was Colonel Villers. He had a large hole blown clear through his torso, so you could see through to the other side, although it did not seem to discomfit him.
You have a hole going through you.
“Why, yes, I do. Splendid powers of observation on your part, but it’s only a flesh wound.” I heard the sounds of combat echoing through the corridors, probably not far off. The colonel cocked his armored head and listened to them. “I would love to hear all about the battle, but time presses. Here, take these.” He gave me a small metal box, and large heavy leather-bound book. “Here is a condensed archive of all that has occurred in The Fortress, and here is the Book of Honor.” It was a little awkward but I managed to hold onto them while still clinging to Wolfram’s back.
A plasma beam ricocheted through a corridor and hit the ceiling over our heads.
“Time for you to go,” said the colonel.
Wolfram raced in the other direction. He dodged through several narrow back-alleys, then hurtled down a long flight of stairs to an armored metal door. The sergeant punched in a code, the door opened, we ran through and I could hear the door closing behind us.
We must have gone ten kilometers out from The Fortress and, from the angle of the descent, maybe three or four kilometers deep. We passed through eight more doors like the first one. Finally we ended up in a place that looked like the inside of a 20th century Terran naval submarine. It was all narrow catwalks and banked arrays of water tanks and pipes and storage cubbies.
In what looked like a control room, the sergeant set me down in a chair in front of a simple console. “This place was built by the humans, before my time. The idea was that if The Fortress was over-run, a few might survive in case other humans arrived. It’s well buried, and shielded from magnetic, thermal, acoustic, and other sensors.
The sergeant indicated the console. “There are cables going to the surface. You can passively listen, and if your fellows ever make it here you should be able to tell. There are transmitters as well, but do not use them unless you are certain that it’s your friends. Some of the monsters are pretty good mimics, and this place’s only defense is secrecy.”
He showed me the main controls, and insisted that I repeat his instructions back to him verbatim so that he could be sure that I understood.
All right sergeant, I understand, but we’ll have plenty of time to go over these systems. There is no rush.
“But there is. Now that I have completed my mission, I am going back out to join my brother knights in the defense of The Fortress.”
What? But, you realize that they must all be dead by now? Or soon will be.
“I know that,” said the sergeant. “But I am going anyway. Last check: you good on this place’s systems?
Yes sergeant. I have it down. But seriously, there is no need for you to throw your life away.
“It’s my life,” said the Sergeant. “And now, goodbye. If your fellows ever make it here, tell them about us.” And with that the sergeant left, locking the door behind him.
--------------------
My legs weren’t working, but my arms were strong enough for me to slowly but surely drag myself up and down the cramped spaces of the shelter. I explored it, but there wasn’t much to see. A lot of it was recycling systems for food, water, and air. I don’t think they were working but that didn’t matter to me. There were a couple of low-power long-life solid state reactors, minimal thermal signature and no moving parts to create vibration, but more than enough to keep my batteries charged.
With nothing better to do, I read through the Book of Honor. It listed centuries of the battles and accomplishments of the Knights of The Fortress. It started out back when the knights had been fully human. It was disconcerting to realize that, at the end of the book, many of the accounts had been written by the armored suits that had taken up the names of the humans that had started it. But then again, why not.
I found some pens in a locker, and finished it. The final page had Sergeant Wolfram, likely the last remaining armored suit, depositing a submind of the cybertank known as Old Guy in the survival shelter, to watch over the records. Then the sergeant left to join his fellow Knights, and the book was complete.
After that there wasn’t much to do. I didn’t dare go outside, and listening in on the passive sensors yielded only static with occasional garbled signals I could not decipher.
I wondered at the hostile figure that I had encountered. Was it truly human? Or perhaps I should say, human-derived? It claimed to have been exiled – and given its unpleasant attitudes, I could well see that. But then, by whom? More advanced humans? Aliens? But then why not just kill it, than let it hang around as a menace to others? With no new data, and my speculations only leading around in circles, I soon tired of the sport, and settled down to wait for something to happen.
16. The Journal of Lysis Trellen Part VIII: Holocaust
“Revenge is an act of passion; vengeance of justice. Injuries are revenged, crimes are avenged.” Samuel Johnson, Earth, 18th Century.
And it had all been going so well.
The Fortress had been completed, and was now a cube five kilometers on a side. I adjusted to the death of the biological Lysis Trellen (although there is a piece of me that still feels the loss, and I have occasional nightmares about it). Even without him, I have continued to lead the military with sufficient ability that I have not been replaced. I have been accepted as myself, and accorded a place of honor in this society.
And what a rich society it is. Who would have though how much could have been packed into one large cubical building. We have artists, writers, and scientists to rival any on old Earth. Parks and nature preserves and museums. At times it seems a pity we could not have spread across this world, but maybe it’s just as well. By now there might be billions of us all cutting each other’s throats for a scrap of food or kilowatt-hour of electricity.
The planet continues to assault us with strange creatures, but lately I think it’s been slacking off a bit. Perhaps it’s getting bored playing with us. One can always hope. Outside the walls of The Fortress non-sentient offensive drones are on constant lethal patrol: sometimes they blast away at shadows or even blow each other up (typical non-sentient AIs) but they are outside The Fortress so nobody cares. Inside, my Brother Knights and I, backed up by regular soldiers running automated combat systems under direct tele-control, have gotten very good at dealing with unwanted guests. How some of these continue to breach our perimeter is unclear. We’ve sealed the foundations five times over and nothing larger than a grain of sand should be able to slip past our local scanning grid.
The starship faction left to found their own fortress. They had apparently been making good progress, despite the push-back from the local monsters, but we haven’t heard from them in a few months. I’m organizing a heavy reconnaissance mission and we’ll be off to see if they are in trouble, or not, in a few days.
The anti-ageatics have extended the lifespans of the biological humans, but not made them immortal. Entropy can be delayed but never denied. The old Doge, Oliver Schmidt, finally passed away and was give a state burial and a quite inspiring bronze statue memorial outside the chambers of the Council of Eleven. Other old friends passed. Even Sister Pascal, dead at the age of 834, may she rest in peace. But others rise up, and fresh new generations and the joy of making new friends and having new comrades leavens the sadness of what was left behind.
I suppose it was too good to last, but I never said that. You learn early in the military, not to jinx things.
The first sign that something was wrong came when the lights in The Fortress flickered. All of us suits powered down and then rebooted, which was weird but didn’t seem to do us any lasting damage. The physics people working on neutrino detectors reported odd findings, as did some other research projects, but nothing else. So we thought nothing of it.
It turned out that this was a coded signal to activate genes that had lain dormant within every bi
ological man, woman, and child in The Fortress. Slowly at first, and then more rapidly, they all began to die. Or more literally, to rot in every cell at the same time.
We had thought ourselves advanced, and taken pride in the scientific achievements that we had made since the founding of the colony. This plague reminded us that we were just a single vulnerable city, cut off and without support, facing an enemy of vastly greater sophistication. We couldn’t even tell if the plague was purely biochemical, or incorporated quantum or other meta-biological effects. The damned thing altered itself whenever it was placed into an instrument.
As the last of the biological human scientists sickened, in desperation I used the most extreme techniques of mental discipline of the Librarians Temporal to try to take their place. I speed-taught myself the equivalent of four doctoral degrees in less than a month. Though not biological, my neural nets can still be disrupted by over-use: I skirted very close to the edge of madness. I made several novel discoveries about genetics and protein folding mechanics. I would have won several major awards, had there still be anyone giving out major awards. I dared to think that I might be making progress. But I failed. I was, after all, just one human mind, faced with a problem beyond the merely human.
I could write volumes about all the details of the deaths of the humans. The frantic efforts by the medical doctors and researchers to find a cure, the panic and hysteria of a few, the calm dignified stoicism of the many. But I won’t. It’s too painful and anyway I assume, if anyone ever reads this journal, that you can likely figure it out yourself. I will only say that five years after the mysterious pulse, all of the biological humans were dead.
I had been through this before, but my fellows had not. It was a tough time for us. Some reset the synaptic weights of the neural networks, essentially wiping their personalities clean. With no humans to learn from, these remain blank, but at least they are a source of spare parts. I would normally despise suicide as cowardice, but if nobody needs us, if there is truly no reason to go on living, then, perhaps, I can sympathize.
My old friend Captain Brendan persisted in walking around with the dead corpse of the biological Brendan inside him, even long after the body had begun to decompose. I eventually talked sense into him. We gave the remains a decent funeral, and cleaned the captain out, but it was a grisly business.
So there we were, protectors, with nothing to protect. We couldn’t make more of ourselves, or clone more humans. There weren’t enough of us, and we were soldiers, not doctors and scientists. Even if we could have developed the technology to clone more humans on our own, surely we would just lose them again.
We considered shutting down, but where there is life there is hope. I persuaded most of us that we needed to keep functioning. There are, most likely, humans still alive on other worlds out there beyond our dust cloud that envelops the Planet of Eternal Night. Perhaps someday they will make it here, and need our help.
And perhaps, just perhaps, someday we will get lucky and get a chance to take vengeance on whoever or whatever has been playing with us. Probably not, not anymore than a mouse can expect to take vengeance on a mountain lion. We are too outclassed.
But you never know. We will bide our time, and survive as best we can, and never forget, never give up. However many thousands of years we have to wait, however bleak our prospects, we will not stop if there is even the slightest chance to get back at the enemy. Who knows, in time even the mighty may be laid low, and vulnerable even to those such as us. On our sacred honor, we all so swear.
17. Old Guy Rides Again
“Where did all these damn Indians come from?” – General George Armstrong Custer, 19th Century Earth (attributed).
My fellow cybertanks and I on the surface of the Planet of Eternal Night had retreated to a small and shrinking defensive perimeter. The jamming was almost impenetrable – I had contact with Double Null on my left flank, and Sausage on my right, and that was about it. I had a tight little perimeter of my own remotes, but I was purely defensive. The major combat swirled around me at a complexity that I could not follow.
“Old Guy,” said Double Null, “we’ve just lost Dead Cat Bounce, and Punch Buggy. Combat is heating up.”
“Also Skeptic is gone,” said Sausage. “But the entire enemy front in one sector is collapsing. I think that playtime is over.”
Playtime? This is playtime?
“In a manner of speaking,” said Double Null. “We’ve been hard pressed but the enemy has aimed more to herd and whittle us down than to destroy us outright. It’s just now realized that it’s miscalculated. We’ve inflicted heavy losses on it as well, and we’ve learned more and more of its tricks. The enemy cannot afford to play games with us anymore, it’s just trying to kill us.”
“Try to stay between us,” said Sausage. “This war is about to get serious.”
The intensity of the jamming around me increased even more – I could barely even get IFF pings from Double Null and Sausage. My defensive screen was heavily engaged but I think I was not a sufficiently high priority target and I survived. Waves of exotic particles swept over me, shockwaves from all manner of detonations, and an increasing number of my smaller remotes had their control systems fried. I pulled many of them into my internal bays, and tried to shelter the rest behind my main hull.
I got a piece of a garbled transmission from Double Null: “Sausage, hold on
I trundled along at a steady 60 kilometers per hour (if there is one thing an armored fighting unit should not do in this kind of combat, it’s hold still. Why did God give us treads, if we were not meant to maneuver?), but I had no clue what was around me or how the combat was going. Now and then the black sky was lit up with the tracery of beam weapons and the subtle flashes that were the merest overspill of energy weapons that make fusion bombs look like water pistols, but in general the planet remained as obstinately black as ever…
And then there was a bright flash on the horizon over to my left flank, and a burst of neutrinos. Then another. Someone is setting off old-style nuclear weapons! How quaint. It’s as if in the middle of a 23rd century combat between semi-sentient all-combat-aspect razorcrafts, a side starting shooting large wooden arrows with a ballista.
The jamming started to lift, and I can detect that my comrades are far over to my right flank, and heavily pressed but not, I think, overmatched. Another nuclear weapon goes off to my left: the position is hardly 500 kilometers from the recorded position of The Fortress of the armored suits. Could they have entered the battle? But their weapons are primitive even by my standards – what could they hope to achieve?
I am reminded of the ancient game of Chess. The weakest piece on the board is the pawn – but in the endgame, when the strong pieces have been cut down, a single pawn often decides the issue. Maybe the enemy is stretched so thin that even antique armored suits can discomfit it – and maybe a wily old cybertank can still be of service.
Crud it, I’m going for it. I wheel in the direction of the nuclear explosions, accelerate to flank speed, and set my escort screen to assault formation. I turn up all my sensors to full power active forward scanning, and clear through the residual jamming. The path in front of me is hardly defended. I half expect to be blasted apart at any moment, but this could work!
I need to play some combat music. It’s been a long time since I’ve done that in a real scrap, and this might be my last one. But what song to pick? Wagner is so overused as to be beyond cliché, ditto Holst or the Ramones. I know, I’ve got it – the Battle Psalm of the Highland Kree. I crank up my external speakers to a volume that would liquefy the bones of an exposed biological human. The pounding beats of the 29th century battle psalm echo out across the landscape.
BLAROO! KREE UMBAREE GLEE FORNSWEEENOODLE BLIVITY OG OG YUT!
Translation from Kreeish into standard
English: We are the Highland Kree and we are going to fight and win.
As with so much of the best combat music, the Battle Psalm of the Highland Kree is inspiring and bombastic, with a powerful beat… and lyrics that range from lame to outdated to just plain weird. The trick is to ignore the words and go with it. I’m getting pumped. I overclock my circuits, remove the safeties from my reactors, and tear across the landscape leaving behind a plume of dust kilometers long.
BLAVADO UMGURTIK FOOLAMANE ISTAK GROT NIBBLING NI WONG!
Translation: Our cause is just, our thoughts are clear, we have great legs.
I come across one of the buried cylinder-things with the cable-like tentacles that had nearly got me when I first landed on this planet. Not this time. One of my heavy remotes blasts it into vapor with a single antimatter micro-warhead missile, and I race on without losing speed.
ZETOG ZETOG! ALLOGORO MONDAT KREE BEEDLE BEEDLE SNIFTY TO-RAH! TO-RAH! FEMBOO ZORT KLABURA!
ZETOG ZETOG! MONGORO ZIFTY-TWEE BLEPHERO BORBYRYG FLANT OOK OOK OOK!
Translation: To Arms! To Arms! The Highland Kree are getting ready for war and the heavens will tremble with our wrath! To Arms! To Arms! Highland-Brand tapered roller bearings are the best in the galaxy!
Apparently the Highland Kree had been having budgetary problems, so they sold off a few lines of their battle-psalm to various corporate interests. There are revised versions that substitute more generic martial sentiments for the advertisements, but I’m a traditionalist.
There is an enemy unit 20 kilometers ahead of me, but I am unfamiliar with the type. It’s a flying disk 60 meters across, and I’m detecting a strong energy buildup from it. I shoot at it with my main gun… and the shot is deflected. I kamikaze three of my super-heavy remotes into it and its shields are overloaded and it goes up in a massive fireball. I only have three of them left but this is hardly the time to worry about keeping a reserve. I power through the fireball, using it for cover as I close the range.