The trajectory of the Amok warships would take them past the main world of this system in about two weeks, which was not enough time to build up sufficient heavy-duty nukes and mount them on the right launch vehicles and get them into the appropriate intercept courses in time. So they were screwed. But how had the Amok managed to attack with just the right mix of forces, at just the right time, and on just the right trajectory? It seemed unlikely. The cybertank strategic planning committee understood that fluke events occurred, but it did not trust them.
After a day or so, things settled down. The Amok bore in remorselessly, and the cybertanks planned and planned, tried to build up their defenses, to manufacture enough units in time to mount a proper defense (even though it was almost certainly pointless, it wouldn’t be sporting not to try), and dig in and hide as much as they could to salvage after their upcoming nearly inevitable defeat.
From Rock Dancer’s position, it looked as if the Amok would pass his position by a closest approach of about four million kilometers. Tiny by astronomical standards, but far out of reach of even the 100,000 kilometer maximum possible range of his main gun (and at that range even his weapon wouldn’t do much more than burn out sensors or fry light unshielded units). A small number of cybertank missiles attacked the Amok battleships; they were easily destroyed before they even got close, but the point was not to win but to probe the Amok defenses.
The Amok targeted him with active radar locks. Well this was probably it: the next thing would be an attack by 50 nuclear missiles and he would be vapor. Rock Dancer waited for the inevitable missile lauch. He set up a cloud of decoys, interceptors, and scouts, but he was sitting alone in the middle of empty vacuum and realistically there was no way that he could win. And he waited... and waited. The Amok were not launching missiles at him. Instead, two of their battleships were diverting to intercept him. Apparently the enemy was going to close with him, and engage him with short-range weaponry. What??
Rock Dancer would have called this action insane, but so far the Amok were on schedule to win, and calling whatever wins ‘insane’ is disrespectful to reality. He considered his options. He had some missiles in the area, and his friends had diverted some more heavy weapons that should make it to him in time to be of use. But, if the enemy were going to attack him up close… well… Rock Dancer was first and foremost a cybertank. Any battle is important. But an ‘up close’ battle is a challenge to his very cybertank-hood (there are languages other than English where this concept sounds better, but you get the idea). Rock Dancer had a plan.
There was a decent-sized planetoid a little ways off of his current position. He reeled in his solar panels, fired up his main reactors to full, and shifted to high burn. With luck he would get to the asteroid before the Amok engaged him. He would land on the rock, and literally use it as a shield. He would drive around dodging the Amok, and if they got close enough maybe he could shoot at them with his main gun. That would be one for the record books.
A day went by. The Amok sent out various scouts and probes, which dueled with his own scouts and probes, but nothing heavy. He made it to the planetoid, and landed on it. So far so good. He had about a day left. He wove a network of jammers and missiles around the planetoid, making a few last minute additions from his own machining center and accepting last-minute donations from his fellow asteroid-dwellers. The planetoid had too low a gravity for him to maneuver quickly on his treads, so he jury-rigged thrusters on top of his hull to push him down, letting him get decent traction. The planetoid was nearly featureless; he had just enough time to rig up a crude dozer-blade on the front of his hull, and dig out some deep trenches.
The Amok battleships were nearly in range. From the scans and analyses, their main weaponry looked to be of similar power to his own, although they had many weapons to his one and the battleships were even more massive and more heavily armored than he was. There was a smaller Amok ship that accelerated ahead – it might be classified as a light cruiser. It must have been hiding in the radar-shadow of its larger brethren. It was also an armored dodecahedron, but only 100 meters across. At 12,000 kilometers it opened fire on him. Rock Dancer had anticipated the attack, and spoofed the light cruisers’ aim with jamming and decoys. He fired his main weapon back. Energy beams are nominally invisible in a vacuum, but a Magma-class main weapon is so powerful that trace contaminants from his own construction, from the target, and even from the few bits of dust in inter-planetary space, created a visible streak. The beam pierced the Amok light cruiser from one end to the other. Initially it seemed unaffected, but then it started to veer off course, and then partially exploded as its internal systems failed. First blood to the cybertanks.
Destroying the Amok light cruiser had been satisfying, but now the main Amok ships would know what he was capable of. Oh well, couldn’t be helped. The Amok battleships launched a salvo of missiles at him. These were not gentile elegant stealthed missiles. There were hard-burn short-range sprint missiles, accelerating at 1,000 gravities and headed directly at him.
He had to assume that they were nuclear-armed. He used his own missiles to intercept them, and launched chaff and jammers and used every other trick that he knew of. The Amok almost got him. But not quite. The last Amok missile made it to within 30 meters of his position, and he lost his outer forward starboard tread. Otherwise he was effectively undamaged. Well, well. This was getting to be rather interesting, after all.
The Amok battleships continued to close. And here was the big decision: were they going to stick together, or split up?
If the Amok stayed together as a team, they would totally outgun him, but be could hide on the other side of the planetoid and snipe at them while he waited for them to go past. But. If they split up, and one went by on each side of the planetoid, he would have nowhere to hide... but might – just might – be able to do some serious damage. So what’s it to be, Amok? You going to play it safe, or go for it?
For a while it looked as if the Amok were going to play it safe. Rock Dancer was disappointed at missing a serious battle, but also relived that he was probably going to live. Then one of the Amok battleships split off and headed on a trajectory that would take it to the other side of the planetoid. OK, now this battle got interesting. Nominally he was outgunned. But dealing with terrain was a cybertank’s forte. Bring it.
Rock Dancer used the network of trenches that he had excavated into the planetoid to hide. He waited until the nearest Amok battleship was just 8,000 kilometers away and then he scooted out from his trench, and fired. His beam hit the Amok battleship right in the middle of a massive pentagonal face. There was evidence of serious damage, but not crippling. He saw the Amok weapons start to swivel towards him, and he scuttled back into his trenches just as a massive series of energy blasts scoured the planetoid. The trench wall protected him from the worst of the blast, but still he lost most of his top-level antennae and sensor-masts.
He hurried along another set of trenches, then popped up and took another shot at the passing Amok ship before scooting back and suffering only minor damage in retaliation. He did this three more times. He could hide but they couldn’t. The trick was to spoof their scouts just before he stuck his hull up so that they couldn’t anticipate his movements and fire on him when he became exposed. The enemy battleship was starting to show some wear, but was still functional. Time to end this.
Rock Dancer triggered some decoys and heavy jammers. If it had been in prime condition the Amok battleship would never have fallen for this, but it over-reacted and sprayed random fire on the planetoid. Damaged and with its energy reserves depleted, the battleship was vulnerable. He targeted all of his surviving missiles in a coordinated strike. Pieces of the enemy battleship blew off into space, and most of its surface weapons emplacements were down. Now for the good part. Rock Dancer emerged from his trenches and targeted the Amok battleship, now at the ludicrously short range of 5,000 kilometers from his position. This was so close as to be claustrophobic, even for a terre
strial unit. He fired at what he judged to be a weak spot, and was gratified when the enemy ship started to show signs of distress. He fired two more times; he could see the glow of secondary explosions through the holes that he had blasted in its hull.
The Amok battleship was not destroyed, but it had been heavily damaged. From his scans it looked as if it would not be able to repair itself in time to assist its fellows in assaulting their main world. In other words, even though nominally intact, the enemy unit had been made strategically irrelevant.
He had done it! He had really done it! He, a cybertank, had actually defeated a space battleship in single combat! That was when he noticed the five Amok light cruisers arcing around the planetoid behind him in a low-skimming trajectory. Oops. He was exposed and out-of-position, and unable to bring his main weapon to bear in time. He still gave a good account of himself, destroying one and moderately damaging another two of the light cruisers with his secondary armament and remaining missiles. When the four surviving Amok light cruisers curved back away from the planetoid, there was only a large molten blob of metal sitting on the surface.
5. Dinner with William Tecumseh Sherman
“If the Bad guys cheat, and the good guys play by the rules, then the bad guys will win. If you’re not cheating, you’re not in the game.” Odin-Class cybertank “Old Guy.”
Olga thought that the party was off to a great start, but she was not entirely pleased with the space monkey.
Olga Razon was a vampire, female, and several thousands of years old. She had been invited here by a cybertank interested in history, something called a “Mountain-Class” that – for reasons that nobody would explain to her – answered to the name of “Uncle Jon.” When she first saw the space monkey, it had zipped past her and she had mistaken it for some sort of giant rat, and screamed and dropped her drink. After she had helped clean up, she had gotten a better look at it. It didn’t really look like a rat at all. She still didn’t like it. It was some kind of robot monkey-thing, with big staring glass eyes and a prehensile metal tail. Even though she was the only person at the party that clearly did not like the space monkey, it became fascinated with her and was constantly trying to get her attention or move closer to her. Olga wondered if perhaps it was part cat.
She had known when the cybertank “Old Guy” has discovered the planet where she and her fellow vampires had moved, but she had never had a chance to talk to him directly at the time. Over the years, the occasional cybertank or one of their emissaries had come to visit, mostly they just wanted to chat or do biological research.
But “Uncle Jon” was an historian. He wanted to fill in the gaps in their records, and live eyewitness subjects were of particular interest to him. According to him human memories could not be extracted as readily as they could from a computer system, they were ‘associative,’ and required the proper context. So she had agreed to go with him back to one of their main worlds. She didn’t regret the decision – this had been an interesting experience. She had been frozen and travelled to Alpha Centauri Prime, a planet that had originally been settled by the humans themselves. Uncle Jon had been an attentive host, they spent a few hours each day while he checked her memories against the established archives, showing her movies, reading her stories and seeing what sort of recollections he could dredge up. Most of the time though he gave her the run of the place and made sure that she was well looked after and entertained.
The cybertanks had a rich and sophisticated society, but much of it was in complex simulations and virtual realities that were out of her cognitive reach. She walked through some of their human-scale constructions – the Physical Library of the one they called “Double-Wide,” preserved human apartment buildings, art museums – but a great deal was just not to her scale.
Thus, whenever she had a chance to attend one of their events where they showed up as humanoid androids she always accepted the invitation. There is only so much relating to a multi-thousand ton metal box on wheels that a vampire can tolerate, really.
This party was in a massive spaceship that, again for whatever inscrutable reasons, they referred to as “Fanboy.” If Olga had been a one-and-half-kilometer long space battleship armed with enough weapons to destroy ten planets with megatonnage to spare, she would not have tolerated being called “Fanboy,” but then she was just a multi-thousand year old vampire and perhaps was not qualified to pass judgment on their culture.
The inside of the ship was mostly hard vacuum, but there was a large pressurized cylindrical zone in the middle where a human crew would have lived, if Fanboy had ever had a human crew. Fanboy was spinning slowly, giving them a standard earth gravity at the outer wall of the pressure cylinder. The décor seemed a little harsh to her: it was all sterile plastic and chrome, with white glow panels set into the ceilings and walls, and Spartan plastic tables and chairs. Here and there were large viewscreens, showing scenes from outside the hull, or 2D excerpts from Fanboys favorite combat recordings. In the ancient past this style would have been considered futuristic, but Olga found it boring.
Olga was getting used to walking on the curving floor, and dealing with the subtle distortions of movement and balance that come from being on the inside of a rotating cylinder, but it was harder than she had expected. It looked easier in the movies, but then, most things do.
Tonight she wore a simple black dress, short to show off her long and flawless alabaster legs, a single string of white pearls, a long blond wig, and low black shoes. Surely the little-black-dress had not gone out of style? And if it had, well, then surely it was time to bring it back.
She was sitting in a lounge with several of the humanoid robots that the cybertanks called “remotes.” One was a replica of General William Tecumseh Sherman, animated by her patron “Uncle Jon.” A craggy face with a short wiry black beard, he wore the uniform of a major general of the 19 century North American Union army, with a black ribbon wrapped around one arm in memory of the assassinated president Abraham Lincoln.
Another was some sort of generic nerd or geeky academic, which was animated by a cybertank known as “Frisbee.” Ectomorphic build, plain white shirt with an “I Speak Klingon” button on it, narrow black tie, clunky spectacles, and straight black pants. Olga had known plenty like him over the centuries before she left earth. Dime a dozen, if sometimes better in bed than expected.
And then there was the one known as “Old Guy.” This time he had shown up not as an historical figure, but as a custom-built construct. He presented as an athletic male, in his late thirties by the scale of societies that had not developed anti-aging medicines. European, dark hair, clean-shaven, clad in a simple light blue suit. Nothing special, but there was something about him that she found deeply attractive. It was, she decided, his sense of confidence. He was completely at ease with himself. She had met one or two genuine biological human males like this in her long life. She remembered back to the time when she had had that affair with Stanley Baldwin (what gets written in the history books so often does not do justice to how people really were). Careful there, she thought. This is just a machine that is only shaped like a man. Don’t get carried away here. Focus.
Uncle Jon had produced an antique bottle of whiskey.
“Now this is the genuine article, I can trace it back all the way to the American Civil War, to the time of the original General William Tecumseh Sherman himself in the 19 century. Care for a taste?”
Uncle Jon poured everyone a small amount of the whiskey into shot glasses.
Olga was dubious. “Really? This whiskey goes back all of those thousands of years? That’s almost as old as I am!”
Uncle Jon laughed. “Oh no, not even high-proof whiskey can last that long. It’s the bottle itself that is genuine! The whiskey I made myself. Still, I think that it’s pretty good, and the bottle adds – how can one say it? Presence? Style? Historical depth?
They all sniffed at the whiskey, and some made small sips. Olga drank heavily from her cup of blood, then also
tasted the whiskey. Not bad, she thought.
Frisbee addressed Olga. “If you don’t mind me asking, why do you vampires still like whiskey? Why haven’t you become connoisseurs of different blood types?
“We vampires have an inbuilt craving for blood”, said Olga. “And it gives us sustenance. But flavor-wise, blood is blood. Type A, type O, it’s all the same. However, we still possess our sense of smell and taste, and can appreciate the aroma of a fine whiskey, even if we can no longer digest it (although pure alcohol is fine). Isn’t it much the same with you?”
“Mostly,” said Frisbee. “We can equip our androids to process human foods, but it’s so much work and mess that we rarely go to the effort. Tasting, in the presence of fine company, is by far the greatest pleasure. In that we are alike.” He sniffed at his whiskey again, and nibbled the tiniest piece of an aromatic sliver of cheese.
“But I still don’t understand why you do this,” said Olga. “You are massive armored tanks. Why go through the charade of pretending to be humans, going though the motions of enjoying fine whiskey and exotic cheeses? Isn’t this rather pointless?”
The others looked at each other and smiled, gently. Old Guy, in his raspy voice, was the first to speak up.
Ah, but you see, the human psyche is both fixed and plastic. Every human – male humanoid, female humanoid, cybertank, spaceship, whatever – has a core mental image of what it is. It is the foundation on which it is constructed. That’s why, even after humans developed the ability to change sexes easily, they almost never did it, because it would have violated their core image of what they were. On the other hand, for brief periods the human psyche is also plastic, that is to say, adaptive and mutable. Did you ever drive a car, or fly an airplane?
Space Battleship Scharnhorst and the Library of Doom (An Old Guy/Cybertank Adventure) Page 7
