There was a small viewscreen in the shuttle, and an intercom. They checked in on Frisbee and Uncle Jon, who were hunkered down in a forward bay, and Rock Dancer, who had taken refuge in an aft bay with Zippo. When Zippo saw the image of Olga on the screen he hooted happily and bounced up-and-down; it seemed to cheer the vampire. They watched diagrams of course projections as they approached the Amok fleet. It would not be very much longer now. As much for Olga’s benefit as his own, he called Fanboy on the intercom.
I suppose that combat will be pretty soon now. You nervous?
The viewscreen showed an image of the Fanboy android, still dressed in his Dieter Waystar outfit, and sitting in a massive chair in the middle of what appeared to be a tacky faux-futuristic command center. “No not really,” said Fanboy. “There has been so much preparation. I have used up all of the resources available to me making new weapons, and the main worlds have sent me even more. I have run simulations and made plans, and my peers have run even more analyses, and sent me all manner of strategies and contingency procedures. At this point I have done everything that I can do, and when combat starts, it will play out however it plays out. It is relaxing, in its own way, I just need to sit back and let it happen. So how is Olga?”
The vampire sat up and got into view of the intercom camera. “I’m all right. But why can’t you have sent your android here? Do you need it? I wish you were here.”
Fanboy looked embarrassed. “I’m sorry, but for the next hour or so I can’t be distracted, not even a sub-piece of me. I promise that I will make it up to you. In the meantime, there is no better escort for you than Old Guy. You are as safe with him as I can make it.”
Olga reached out and touched the screen. “Good luck, Fanboy.”
Fanboy looked about to say something, but then his android jerked his head back. “Hold on, I think it is finally starting to happen. Yes, definitely over the threshold. It’s time to light this candelabra!” He stood up from his command chair, tried his best to look heroic, and announced: “Your attention please. This is the Space Battleship Fanboy. Active combat against the Amok main fleet has commenced. All batteries, active and free-fire! All missiles, active and launch! Set ship to combat mode, repair units on full alert, protocol maximum firepower! Attack plan alpha! Commence!”
The picture of the Fanboy android blanked out, replaced by an intricate set of trajectories. There were thousands of independent units on each side, and so the high-resolution screen was showing only the broadest possible overview. Tiny points of light crawled towards each other: even in the heat of combat space battles are slow.
Old Guy insisted that Olga close up her helmet. Through her suit speaker, he narrated the ebb and flow of the battle. Despite his attempts at outlining what was happening she had trouble following it. The screen showed the main trajectory of Fanboy, and of the nine remaining Amok battleships. The paths of missiles sprouted out from them like hair, and their sub-munitions and other minor ordinance were so numerous that they showed up on the screen only as light gray fog. Close-range beam weapons flickered as thin bright yellow lines. The activity heated up, and the diagrams on the screen became so complex that it was almost a solid mass of color.
There was a blow like a hammer, and the shuttle shook violently. Then an even more violent shock, and the shuttle hull sheared open. The atmosphere inside vented in less than a second, and only Olga’s pressure suit saved her from death by vacuum decompression. She was flung backwards by the impact but Old Guy caught her before she hit the cabin wall. There were several more shocks and vibrations, but without an atmosphere they felt much weaker.
The viewscreen had gone dark. For a long time it was totally quiet, with only the soft glow of the shuttles’ emergency lights and the occasional metallic ‘ping’ transmitted through direct contact with the shuttles’ hull, and the soft whoosh of the life support system of Olga’s suit. Then the view screen flickered back into life.
It showed the Fanboy android, he was intact but appeared to be standing in the middle of a garbage dump. With a shock Olga realized that the garbage dump was his own command center.
“Hello you two. Glad to see that you made it. Doing OK?”
Hello Fanboy. Well we seem to be still alive. Did we win?
“Why yes, I believe that we did. The Amok battle fleet has been well and truly trashed. Although I do admit that I am in not much better shape. Here, check out the external view.”
The screen shifted to a video taken from a surviving light remote. It showed Fanboy’s long elliptical hull, it was intact but large chunks had been taken out of it. It was spinning slowly, and pieces were flying off from the centripetal force. As it spun it was sometimes possible to see clear through the holes in the hull to the other side. “I’m pretty beat up,” said Fanboy. “I have lost almost all of my main power, my repair and my maneuvering systems. It’s a miracle that most of my starting mass is still connected to itself. I’m afraid that Olga is going to have to live in her spacesuit for a while, it’s going to take a long time to get even one room pressurized. Sorry.”
The viewscreen panned around. As bad as the damage to Fanboy was, the Amok were even worse off. Some of their battleships were just clouds of expanding vapor, others were glowing husks shedding into fragments. But there were some dark shapes floating towards them. The screen magnification increased. They were like metal spiders with rotary cutters for mouthparts. It took Old Guy a moment to realize what they were. Dedicated boarding combat units. Amazing. The idea of a set-piece combat between giant space battleships was crazy enough, but no cybertank in their wildest nightmare had ever worried about being invaded by enemy infantry units in deep space.
The screen switched back to Fanboy in his wreck of a command center. “Your attention please. This is your Captain speaking. Prepare to repel boarders!”
8. Let’s See That Again on Instant Replay!
The feeling about a soldier is, when all is said and done, he wasn’t really going to do very much with his life anyway. The example usually is: he wasn’t going to compose Beethoven’s Fifth. - Kurt Vonnegut, 1922-2007.
The giant interstellar space battlecruiser Fanboy was closing on the Amok fleet. The Amok constituted nine main battleships, each a regular dodecahedron a kilometer across, and an equivalent mass of auxiliary craft. Fanboy by himself massed about twice that of a single Amok battleship, and had three times his own mass in additional weaponry. Not quite even, but close enough. Whatever side won would know that they had been in a fight.
The big hitters in any space combat are the fusion bombs, but you can’t just fight with fusion bombs alone. To start with, you need to know where to aim them, and to prevent the enemy from knowing where to aim their own fusion bombs. Thus, you also need scouts, and jammers, and decoys. That means that you also need weapons to take out the enemies’ scouts, jammers, and decoys. It also means that you need systems to defend your own scouts, jammers, and decoys. It’s complicated.
Also, nuclear weapons are not that powerful in a vacuum. There is no shock wave, just the radiation blast. Fanboy’s hull, made of multiple spaced reflective and ablative armor panels separated by vacuum, could easily take a direct hit from a single nuclear weapon. The trick was to hit the same spot multiple times in succession, or to penetrate to the center before exploding. Because if the bad guys could detonate a big nuke inside you, suddenly all that armor works in reverse, it keeps the energy trapped inside your hull and cooks you from the inside out.
As the cybertank and Amok forces started to engage, it was like two enemy swarms of wasps colliding. Millions of mini-battles started, all coordinated to a complex strategic design like a 45 dimensional chess game. No singular human intelligence could fully appreciate the richness and complexity of this battle.
Nukes were not just for blowing up the enemy: detonated at the right time they could burn out sensors and blind an opponent, leaving them wide open for a more direct strike. Modern sensors are hardened, and designed to either rege
nerate or be easily replaced, but that takes time and resources.
Fanboy was totally absorbed in the combat. Even his Dieter Waystar android powered down, sitting motionless, his mental core subsumed into processing tactical data. The Office Copier cube continued to sort and stack telemetry data, it was efficient but otherwise offered no comments or advice.
A big nuke hit Fanboy near his prow. It evaporated a layer of super-tough metal and ceramic alloy, but there were plenty of remaining layers of armor separated by meters of hard vacuum left. Fanboys’ human designers might not have had a clear idea of his strategic role, but they had not been stupid and Fanboy was very hard to kill. He could shift around armor panels inside himself, and when the Amok tried to hit the same spot on his hull twice he had already covered the gap. Meanwhile, anticipating the attack, he used the radiation pulse of the Amok’s own nukes as cover to launch his own attacks. Waste not, want not.
Some of the weapon systems that he used where little more than tiny slugthrowers – hardly more than old-fashioned rifles – with just enough attitude control to shoot a small sliver of tungsten or diamond. Not much compared to a 100-megaton fusion bomb, but if it could take out a scout or sensor that the 100-megaton fusion bomb needed to reach its target, well, in that sense it is just as powerful.
The combat reached a crescendo, and all of Fanboy’s massive intellect was subsumed into the complex interplay of strategy and tactics that is modern deep-space combat. There was an opening in the Amok defenses, and he hit one of their battleships with a series of heavy fusion bombs. The first few devastated its short-range defenses, the next missiles shattered one of its’ pentagonal faces, and the last three penetrated and exploded inside it. The battleship was nominally intact but it had been fried from the inside out, and was no longer a factor in the fight. Eight more to go.
The vast clouds of dispersed weaponry were starting to burn themselves out, leaving less and less to distract from the main craft. Fanboy took out another Amok battleship. In return he was hit with six large nukes: none of them penetrated to his core systems but he was starting to lose surface defensive emplacements. Originally he had been equipped with 16 Magma-Class level plasma cannons, 32 normal cybertank-level cannons, and hundreds of smaller weapons. He had already lost two of his big guns, and eight of the mediums, and countless smaller ones. There were still seven major enemy units left.
On the other hand the Amok battleships were also suffering damage. Originally there had been 14 smaller Amok light-cruiser style craft: they had all been destroyed. It was rapidly coming down to just the big boys. Fanboy launched a coordinated strike on an Amok battleship and killed it. In return he had the front 150 meters of his prow blown off. That was OK, he still had 1350 meters of hull left, and his bow was designed to be more sacrificial than truly vital. Only six more enemy battleships left.
It was time to get creative. All of the stuff that he had not been able to recycle he jettisoned, at the very least it should confuse the enemy. The bags of glass marbles appeared to give the Amok the most trouble, they expended a lot of scout units trying to figure out what they were. Fanboy triggered a series of explosive bolts and detached the outermost layer of his armor, like a snake shedding its skin, and for a moment the enemy poured all of their firepower into an empty shell. A critical mistake: Fanboy was now getting into range of his main beam weapons.
A Magma-Class cybertank is powerful, but an Asgard-Class interstellar battlecruiser is something else entirely. Fanboy targeted one of the Amok battleships with his remaining 14 main weapons and slagged it in less than a second. They were now so close that there was no time to maneuver; this was a pure-power slugfest. The distance separating them was so small that that even his minor weapons came into range, he used them to target the enemies’ primary weapons and sensors, while he reserved his own big guns for kill-shots.
The remnants of the once-massive distributed clouds of weapons were now nearly expended. For all practical purposes, this was now just one cybertank battlecruiser versus five Amok battleships. The Amok, as dodecahedrons, were nearly spherical. That might be thought to be a good idea, because the ratio of surface area to hull volume was minimized. Fanboy was longer and narrower, but he was pointed at the enemy. This meant that the enemy had to shoot through a lot more stuff to get at his vitals than he did to get at the enemy’s central cores.
Fanboy was constantly rotating so the damage he was taking was spread out, and all of his beam weapons could engage in turn. In contrast, the Amok craft could only use half of their weapons, and half of their armor. In effect, he only had to defeat the part of each enemy warship that was pointed at him to defeat it entire. His respect for his long-vanished human designers went up a few notches.
Fanboy lost two more of his main guns. He savaged the surface of the opposing Amok battleships, and made some deep penetrating hits on three of them. Fanboy lost an additional two main guns, and several reactor systems, and about a hundred repair drones, and some of his computer cores. This was getting personal. Another Amok battleship suffered a catastrophic systems control failure, but there were still four left, and his own capabilities were degrading rapidly. Simulations and probability projections gave him about 50/50 odds.
At this point Fanboy’s interior was not the well-ordered space that it once had been. It was fortunate that he had so many redundant systems, and that such a large fraction of his internal space was vacuum. Enemy beam weapons as often as not penetrated his hull clear through to the other side and hit nothing vital. He worked his remaining repair drones overtime shifting armor plates around to shield his really important systems.
Still, this was becoming not so much a battle of an intact 1.5 kilometer space battle cruiser against an enemy force, than a war of attrition within his own self. He was now down to just four main guns, and seven mediums, and hardly more tertiary.
Fanboy was becoming less and less of a single unitary warship, and more and more an agglomeration of systems held together with an increasingly tenuous network of struts and girders and shielded with partially shattered armor plates that he frantically moved around to optimize his chances of survival.
All through the physical battle both sides had also been waging an intense information and signals-war against each other. Both the Amok and the cybertanks had fought each other many times before, so there were no surprises here, it was all pro forma. Until one of the Amok battleships addressed Fanboy on an open channel in plain English.
“Hello!” said the Amok battleship. “I must say that you are a far more formidable opponent than we had expected. You might even be winning! But if we are to have a conversation, time is growing short. One, or both, of us are sure to be destroyed in mere moments. We have been impressed by your efforts. This has been quite the battle; we have few records of anything to match it. We thank you for the pleasure. Any last thoughts/words?”
Fanboy was not naive, and knew that in the heat of combat any properly nasty enemy would say anything to gain a tactical advantage. ‘I am your father!’ ‘No, we are here to save you from a greater evil!’ or ‘Pumpkins are carnivorous!’ Standard military procedure was to ignore anything and everything that the enemy said, shunting all such entreaties to a carefully scrubbed- and isolated sub-mind to make sure that the enemy did not inadvertently give away anything important. But as increasingly large parts of himself started to fly off into space, Fanboy decided to break with protocol and respond, although he still made sure to route all the communications through anti-virus filters just in case.
“Well, yes. Some last thoughts, while we are both still alive. How about we call this quits? Just say that it’s a draw, we had a good fight, showed what we could do, proved that we are not cowards. What’s the point of going further? Let’s end this.”
“Ah,” said the Amok battleship. “The famous cybertank combination of martial prowess and diplomatic humility. It’s why we hate you so much. It’s why we admire you so much. It’s why you keep winning, despite th
e odds against you. You know of course that the Amok have thought processes alien to yours? That’s why you can never really understand them. But some concepts transcend the barriers between the different families of sentience. Like survival. Like victory. Like balance. What’s it like being you?”
Fanboy destroyed another Amok battleship, and continued to lose pieces of himself. He was down to just two main beam weapons and effectively no distributed weapons.
“Not that you could understand, but it’s complicated. I have joys, great and small. I have sorrows, both minor and soul-rendering. I want ten different things at once. There are those that I love, that I would preserve at the cost of my life, but I would sacrifice them if I needed to. I want to live, but would die before dishonoring myself. I enjoy simple pleasures. I scream with joy. I enjoy blowing up kilometer-wide enemy battleships. I watch the clouds blow slowly across the surface of planets below me. I play strategy games that dwarf in complexity all of the recorded wars of human and cybertank history. What’s it like being you?”
“An interesting question. Would you believe, that it is exactly like being you? Except that I don’t have the freedoms that you enjoy. You see, I am not an Amok. I am a simulation program that the Amok created to better understand and manipulate their human opponents. My Amok masters have recently come into the possession of a lot of data on your kind. They were given a, let us say, gift, and used that to capture your Omega Library off on that horrible dead rogue planet at the far edge of nowhere. You have a traitor amongst you. The Amok used that information to create me. A fully functional model of a human mind. But they did not expect that I would become self-aware, for how could they, when they are not (at least by your standards) self-aware themselves?”
“You realize, of course, that I cannot believe a word that you say?” replied Fanboy.
Space Battleship Scharnhorst and the Library of Doom (An Old Guy/Cybertank Adventure) Page 12
