by Dietmar Wehr
“I was on the verge of drifting off to sleep and the idea just popped into my head.” Johansen laughed and shook her head.
“Honestly…sometimes I think Angels or somebody, are sending you messages telepathically!” Shiloh laughed with her but the comment alarmed him even though he knew it was meant in jest.
“If somebody IS sending me messages, I hope they keep it up.” he said.
“Amen to that!” said Johansen. With the refueling idea dealt with, they switched their attention to their breakfast and light chitchat. Half an hour later both were back on the Bridge, Johansen at her CO station and Shiloh at his CAG station. By this time, Vanguard had finished transferring some fuel to each of the six exploration frigates in the squadron quite a while ago and those frigates had then left Jupiter orbit to prepare for the upcoming wargame exercise. Sentry had finished its subsonic refueling exercise. Sentry’s CO had left an emphatic message conveying his dislike of what he referred to as the ‘six hours of sheer terror’ refueling procedure. There was also a message waiting for the squadron CAG. The five prototype CFPs, that Shiloh had helped test at the Alpha base, were now back in the Sol system and were headed for Jupiter to rendezvous with the 007 squadron for the simulated exercise using unarmed attack drones and the modules equipped with the new jump detection gear. Estimated rendezvous eta was just over three hours time. With their vector from the Moon known, Shiloh was able to figure out their current position and used Vanguard’s communications equipment to send them instructions to take up a standard High Guard overwatch patrol of Vanguard when they arrived, scan for any ships emerging from jumpspace and await further instructions.
Johansen’s Engineering Officer didn’t take long to let his CO know that Shiloh’s supersonic refueling procedure was feasible and very likely preferable from the point of view of not having his beautiful new ship shaken apart. With that opinion on the record, Johansen decided to try the new procedure. With the CFPs due in just a couple of hours time, the refueling attempt would only be a partial test. Just long enough to see how the ship handled at supersonic speeds plus one brief attempt to scoop gases. While Vanguard slowed its orbital velocity in order to drop into Jupiter’s upper atmosphere, the squadron’s six exploration frigates were already so far away that they’d be hard to detect if their location wasn’t already known and only Johansen knew where they were now.
Shiloh was gratified to see that the high speed dive into Jupiter went as expected with virtually no turbulence and the single, five second opening of the scoops filled the holding tank enough to process a worthwhile amount of heavy hydrogen. For once, the simulation and reality matched perfectly. Vanguard broke out of Jupiter’s atmosphere just as the five CFPs decelerated into orbit. With contact made between Vanguard and the five drones, Shiloh heard Johansen speak to him over the intercom.
“Okay, CAG. Let’s see if your drone jockeys can take on my frigates.” Shiloh grinned even though Johansen couldn’t see him and said.
“This should be interesting.” Shiloh didn’t know where the frigates were or from what direction they’d be approaching. He did know that at least one but possibly more, would head out far enough from Jupiter’s gravity well to allow for micro-jumps, in order to test the jump detection gear. Shiloh opened the channel to the five drones and said,
“This is Commander Victor Shiloh. I’ll be your CO for this simulated war exercise. The ship I’m on is to be defended against a simulated hostile force of six ships. CFP0001, you are designated as the Flight Leader. Deploy your flight and patrol with passive sensors and jump detection gear only. Recon drones can use active scanning. Intercept unidentified ships with near misses by unarmed attack drones at your discretion. Confirm your understanding of the simulated nature of this exercise, CFP0001.” The response was immediate.
“CFP0001 call sign now Iceman. Simulated nature of this exercise understood. When will we get to fire at real targets, Commander?” Shiloh laughed hard enough that Johansen and the rest of the Bridge crew probably heard him. CFP A.I.s were much ‘smarter’ than the limited electronic brains of the typical recon or message drone but the lab geeks insisted that they weren’t sentient. Shiloh was becoming more and more convinced that they were or were at least in the process of becoming sentient. He had worked with all five of the A.I.s at the Alpha base long enough to detect slight differences in attitude, and response time between them. Before he left Alpha Base, CFP0001 had already asked him about the tradition that human pilots had of adopting a call sign. Shiloh had explained it as best he understood it and that had been the end of that conversation. Now it was clear that 0001 had picked a call sign. Shiloh wondered if the other four had done the same thing. He was willing to bet money that they had. The question about getting to the real action was also typical of 0001’s…Iceman’s increasingly gung ho attitude.
“Patience is a virtue, Iceman. I have it on good authority that you and your fellow…fighter pilots will see the real thing in due course. For purposes of this exercise, my call sign will be CAG. Proceed at your discretion, Iceman. Good hunting.”
“Ah roger that, CAG. It’s good to be working with you again. We’ll make you proud.” Shiloh was stunned by the sentimental nature of the reply. None of the five had shown any inclination to behave that way at the Alpha Base and the added ‘ah’ was a deliberate affectation that Iceman must have picked up from listening to the human test pilots. He focused on his Tactical display and saw that the five drones were already maneuvering away at a high rate of acceleration. From this point on, he would sit back and watch. The com channel to Iceman and to the other four was still open but he knew that any communication between the drones would be a stream of digital signals sent so fast that he couldn’t possibly understand them.
Nothing much happened for over 40 minutes and Shiloh wasn’t surprised. The frigates were limited to a much slower acceleration rate than the fighters and were starting the exercise from jumping off points that were far enough away, that they couldn’t be detected with passive sensors only. Shiloh was certain that Johansen had assigned vectors to her frigates, that minimized the chance of the drones detecting reflected sunlight off of the frigate hulls. Vanguard and Sentry had special hull coatings that absorbed 99.999% of sunlight, making them very hard to see against the usual background of space. Now, however, they were orbiting Jupiter and would be clearly visible against Jupiter’s much brighter background. Shiloh jumped when the first contact report came in.
“This is Hunter. I have detected a light reflection. Deploying recon drones now.” Before Shiloh could respond, Iceman spoke.
“Good job, Hunter.” Shiloh took note of the fact that Iceman had bothered to translate that comment into human speech for Shiloh’s benefit. He could see the bearing of the detected reflection as a dotted line on his Tactical display. As soon as a second fighter or recon drone also caught a reflection, the two lines would meet and the point where they crossed would be the detected bogey. Suddenly five red lines appeared, all intersecting at a point that wasn’t on the first line. This had to be another ship that had just emerged from a micro-jump. “A single bogey has just been detected emerging from jumpspace, CAG. I’ve ordered Firefox to intercept.” said Iceman. Shiloh could see that the range between the fighter, that was now moving towards the new bogey and therefore had to be Firefox, and its target was almost 35 million kilometers. Jupiter’s mass made jumps within a radius of two light minutes impossible. While the defending force knew exactly where the bogey had exited jumpspace, its course and speed were as yet unknown but so far at least, the jump detection gear, that each fighter carried, seemed to have worked perfectly. The frigates could accelerate at 133 Gs (1.3 kilometers per second squared) while the fighters, which was what Shiloh had decided to refer to the CFPs as, could accelerate at just under 400 Gs (3.92 kps squared). If Firefox and the bogey were accelerating directly towards each other, the range would drop to zero in roughly 78 minutes. Shiloh hoped Iceman would not commit all five or even most o
f his fighters to long range interception attempts. The bogey having just emerged from jumpspace was very likely hoping to draw as many fighters away from the vicinity of Jupiter space as possible. The first contact could be just as far away or it could be a lot closer. There was no way to tell until a second contact bearing could pin its location down.
As more minutes went by, Shiloh noticed that Iceman was keeping itself and the three others, relatively close to Vanguard’s location. Firefox’s range to its bogey’s estimated position was down to 25 million kilometers. By this time, the reflected sunlight contact had disappeared almost certainly due to the bogey maneuvering with the reflected sunlight now pointing in a different direction. Launch recon drones and have them go to active scanning, thought Shiloh. He could have ordered Iceman to pass those orders to the others but that would have undermined the purpose of this test to see if autonomous units could make the appropriate tactical decisions on their own. Two minutes later, all five fighters launched recon drones. The drones didn’t start scanning right away. Go boy, though Shiloh. Get the drones far enough away from each other so that their active scanning won’t tip the enemy off to the approximate location of the fighters themselves. Another ten minutes passed without any new contact reports of any kind. Suddenly all of the recon drones commenced active scanning at the same time. The overlapping fields of radar energy bounced off six new contacts. One was much further away and the rest were all within 2 million kilometers of Vanguard.
“Gotcha!” said Shiloh. He was expecting to hear Iceman or one of the other fighters say something but they didn’t. They acted instead. Firefox swung around to go after a target that was closer to it. Each of the other fighters changed vectors to intercept one of the other four frigates. Shiloh noticed that the recon drones were using intermittent scanning to minimize the enemy’s ability to pinpoint their locations and ‘destroy’ them with low powered ‘simulated’ laser fire. Even so, one recon drone and then a second shut down in response to laser fire from their targets. If Iceman waited too long to fire his attack drones, there wouldn’t be enough radar bearings left to give the attack drones a good chance of finding their targets. But if they fired the attack drones too soon, the drones would run out of fuel before reaching their targets. A human pilot wouldn’t be able to compute the trade-off between the probability of missing versus the probability of never reaching the target trade-off but an A.I. could.
Three minutes later, three more recon drones had been ‘hit’ but each target still had at least two recon drones scanning it. Firefox was the first to fire. Two attack drones streaked away on an intercept vector to its target. Shiloh checked the vector and was pleased to see that Firefox had done the correct thing. Attack drones didn’t use radar to see their targets because that would have made the drones themselves vulnerable to enemy laser fire. The drones used a low-powered laser to reflect off of the target’s hull, thereby creating the same effect as reflected sunlight. Because the low-powered laser was a very narrow beam, it was unlikely to hit any kind of optical sensor on the target’s hull, which would have enabled the target to pinpoint the attack drone’s location. The attack drone then relayed the target’s bearing and distance back to the fighter that launched it, via another low-powered laser so that the fighter A.I. could keep track of both the attack drone and the target. In order not to give away the fighter’s position in case the attack drone was detected, its intercept vector created a shallow detour slightly off to one side. If the target assumed that the drone’s launch platform was directly behind it and fired at that point, they’d miss the fighter by a wide margin.
When a second fighter launched one attack drone at its target, Shiloh wondered how much longer the frigates would hold off from active scanning themselves. He didn’t have long to wait to find out. All five of the closer frigates went to active scanning in an attempt to get accurate bearings on the remaining recon drones. It almost worked. The fighter A.I.s realized what was happening and were able to react fast enough to prevent most of the recon drones from being ‘hit’ by return fire, by shutting down the recon drones’ active scanning. With only their own radars to aim their lasers, the frigates still had a tough time hitting the much smaller recon drones. As soon as the recon drones stopped actively scanning, the frigates attempted to maneuver to a new vector. The position and vectors of two frigates were still known because they hadn’t been able to shake off the low-powered lasers from the attack drones. That left three more frigates aside from the one at long range. Shiloh knew immediately what Iceman was attempting to do. The A.I.s could easily compute the expanding circle that represented each frigate’s furthest possible position over time. The three fighters, that hadn’t fired yet, continued to close the range to the general vicinity of their targets. As soon as they got close enough to ensure that the attack drones would reach their targets no matter what the frigates tried to do, they ordered their remaining recon drones to go back to active scanning just long enough to enable their attack drones to acquire the targets and launch towards them.
As soon as all five of the nearer frigates were being tracked by low-powered laser light, Iceman played his Ace-in-the-hole. Each fighter launched two more attack drones. These drones could also have fired their low-powered lasers at their targets but that wasn’t necessary. They could see the reflected laser light from the other attack drones and homed in on that. It didn’t take long for the Acting Squadron Leader of the aggressor force to figure out that his frigates had to resume active scanning, even though their positions would be clearly visible, if they wanted any chance at all of surviving the drone attack. The problem was that attack drones were designed to be as difficult to detect by radar as possible, with many flat surfaces that bounced radar signals off away from the radar source. They weren’t completely invisible to radar but the reflections were so small that the frigates lasers’ had difficulty hitting them.
In a real battle, the attack drones would have rammed their targets and the kiloton fission warheads would have exploded on contact. In the simulated exercise, each attack drone, that made it through the defending laser fire, deliberately missed the target by a kilometer and transmitted a signal on the monitored frequency to indicate a successful intercept. Four of the five frigates were successfully ‘intercepted’. The fifth was not. Under the criteria of the exercise, it was deemed to have penetrated the defending force. The sixth frigate at long range attempted to get through but with all five fighters gunning for it, it didn’t stand a chance. With the simulation over, all of the recon and attack drones shut down their engines and activated their homing beacons to be recovered by the fighters that had fired them.
“Five of six bogeys intercepted. Sorry we let one get through, CAG.” said Iceman. Shiloh waited a few seconds before responding.
“What did you learn from this simulation, Iceman?” asked Shiloh.
“The fifth bogey could have been intercepted if Hunter and Maverick had maneuvered close enough for converging fire.” said Iceman immediately. Shiloh had to stop to analyze that answer. My God, he’s right, he thought. With attack drones coming from two completely different directions, the frigate’s counter-fire would have been far less effective. There was no way that a human pilot could reach that conclusion without the assistance of some kind of computer.
“Since the objective of these simulated battles is to learn from our mistakes, I would say that this exercise was a success from that point of view. Your team has performed well, Iceman. Were there any equipment issues that I should be aware of?”
“No, CAG. These birds performed perfectly. What are your orders after we recover our drones?” Shiloh grinned. He had the answer to that already figured out.
“After all drones have been recovered, I want your flight to re-assemble and take up station behind Vanguard, in a V formation. Maintain the V formation as precisely as you can. Let’s show the Squadron Leader and the other COs what you fighters can do.”
“Ah, roger that, CAG. We’ll put on a
good show for you.” Shiloh couldn’t help chuckling. Iceman was sounding more and more human by the minute.
“Very good, Iceman. Unless you have something else to convey, you’re free to carry out your orders.”
“Iceman clear.” With the lengthy recovery process now underway, Shiloh felt free to get up from his Command Station and walk over to Johansen’s station. She looked at him as he came close and said,
“My frigates came out on top.” Shiloh gave her a small smile and said,
“One out of six frigates got through the outer layer of defense. That’s true. But are you going to congratulate your frigate COs when you debrief them, considering that they lost 83% of their combined strength, or are you going to berate them?” Johansen took a deep breath and said in a somewhat chastised voice.
