Hawthorne bowed his head. “Maybe you’re right. My problem is that I hate you as Highborn. Not only have we warred against each other for years, but then your Grand Admiral proved his faithlessness by attempting to murder me, his ally. Your present powerlessness against me is intoxicating. Thus, I find it incredibly enjoyable to bait you, and I’ve probably gone too far.”
Cato’s portion of the split-screen flickered off.
“He is the weakest among you,” Hawthorne said. “But no matter,” he added. Sulla and Scipio stared at him as if he were a mad dog. “Let us finish the strategy session. Your Doom Stars are superior. In most wars, the best strategy is to weaken an enemy by whittling away his inferior foes before attempting to take on the senior partner. If your goal is to strengthen the cyborgs in relation to us, then by all means you should let them destroy the SU vessels first. Instead, I recommend that you let the Doom Stars absorb the first mass of cyborg strikes, thereby allowing us to survive. That gains you our firepower later when it is deployable.”
“You will not outmaneuver us into taking the majority of the casualties,” Sulla said.
“I am not attempting to,” Hawthorne said. “I merely wish to survive long enough to attack our common foe.”
Scipio nodded slowly. “I am beginning to see why the Grand Admiral wanted you dead.”
“What?” Sulla asked, turning away to a different screen. “You believe the human’s story about a prosthetic finger?”
“I beginning to,” Scipio said.
Sulla scowled, and he grew thoughtful. “I recall the Grand Admiral’s method of dealing with premen,” he told Scipio. “You and I were on the bridge during the Planet-wrecker Assault. Cassius allowed premen to speak arrogantly to him. Do you believe Cassius finally wearied of their behavior and thus desired Hawthorne’s death?”
“No,” Scipio said. “The Grand Admiral was shrewd, and he could read a situation better than any of us could. I believe he saw what I’m finally seeing. Supreme Commander Hawthorne has the mind of a Highborn.”
“Blasphemy,” Sulla whispered, as he turned back to study Hawthorne.
“And he has the spirit of one too,” Scipio added. “It means he is dangerous. Likely, that is why Cassius wished him destroyed. Without Hawthorne, Social Unity would not have survived as long as it has.”
Sulla’s eyes narrowed. “Yes,” he said at last.
“You agree to the human’s plan?” Scipio asked.
“It is the triad’s plan,” Sulla said. “I merely accept the human’s modification to it. During the initial assault, his warships will remain behind ours.”
“We will have to begin deceleration first, then,” Hawthorne said.
Sulla shook his head. “You will give away our plan and allow the cyborgs more time to adjust than otherwise.”
“True,” Hawthorne said. “The trouble is that we cannot tolerate the same number as Gs as you. Therefore, we need a longer time to decelerate.”
“We are the Highborn,” Sulla said. “Despite your manners today, we are superior. Do not ever forget that, human.”
I don’t plan to. Outwardly, however, Hawthorne stared at Sulla as if offended.
It brought a grim smile to the Highborn’s face. The strategic meeting ended, and Hawthorne began to plot harder than ever.
-6-
The Prime Web-Mind of Neptune sent a command pulse through the web: The enemy approaches.
For the first time in years, unease crept through the Prime’s multiform brain. It awakened old emotive centers in it. The emotions gave its brain tissues deeper contemplative possibilities. But the emotions had begun to upset its smooth functioning. This was not the time for such interruptions.
Data flowed from observatories on Neso, one of the farthest-flung moons. The distance was so great that it took thirty-two seconds for the communications-laser to reach Triton.
In the Solar System, Neptune was the farthest planet from the Sun. Pluto was a dwarf planet, the second most massive of them, after Eris. It had thirteen moons, was the fourth-largest planet by diameter and the third-largest by mass. Traces of methane in the outermost regions gave Neptune its blue appearance. The ice giant possessed the strongest sustained winds of any planet in the Solar System, clocked at over 2100 km/h. The outer atmosphere was also one of the coldest places, with the cloud tops dropping as low as minus 218 Centigrade. Like the other gas giants, it had a ring, a faint and fragmented system.
The Prime observed three giant spheroids hurtling through the Great Dark. They were black vessels emitting high levels of energy, doing relatively little to cloak the emissions. The Highborn advanced with their customary arrogance. This time, there was reason for it. Three Doom Stars represented a dangerous concentration of military power.
The Prime seethed as it studied the Neso data. For the thousandth time, it reassessed known factors. Massive fusion engines powered the million-kilometer-ranged laser. The enemy could strike from a great distance, well outside the range of cyborg weaponry. It gave the Highborn a clear tactical advantage.
The Prime feared that advantage. The fear grew until “cooling” pheromones misted over its emotive centers. It saw again with reptilian logic. Mercy had long ago been expunged from its core.
Thoughts fired through a billion of its neurons as it accessed all its memories on Doom Star-data. Cyborg agents on Earth routinely beamed new specifics as they uncovered them. These were carefully collected through altered Homo sapiens embedded in both FEC and SU bureaucracies. For reasons it could not accept, the Prime had so far been unable to alter a Highborn.
That will change. I will capture thousands after obliterating their warships.
A low-level alarm started a rationality program and it ran through a logic loop. If all the warships were destroyed, the Highborn in the warships would die. If all the Highborn died, there would be none for the cyborgs to capture and convert. After several hundred loops of logic, the rationality program “showed” the data to MONITOR brain centers. The conclusion was obvious and quickly gathered thinking mass.
Before the brain centers reached critical mass, however, the Prime added a new factor. Some Highborn will wear powered armor and likely survive a Doom Star’s destruction. Other Highborn might use assault craft to capture moons and key habitats. These I can capture.
The new information shattered the MONITOR brain centers into blocs of thought. The rationality program lost the needed mass and waited for the next Prime-thought that needed assessing.
Shed of its need to argue for its thoughts, the Prime returned to its original worry: the Doom Stars. The three warships possessed improved collapsium plating. Altered Earth agents had failed to uncover the full specifics on the plating. Therefore, the Prime accessed old data. Collapsium was hard and dense, similar in nature to the core of a white star. The electrons of an atom were collapsed on the nuclei so the atoms were compressed. The compression was so great they actually touched. A molecular model demonstrated that lead was like a sponge in comparison to collapsium. The first collapsium coating had been micro-microns thick.
Will the new coating be three times as thick?
The Prime ran though several hundred scenarios given that assumption. The conclusion…it was inescapable, the Doom Stars represented a danger to its existence. The knowledge sent a shiver of unease through the core so that everywhere on Triton cyborgs linked to the web froze for an entire three seconds.
I am superior, and my strategy has already rolled over eighty-seven percent of the obstacles. That is a higher percentage of success than the other power-blocs have achieved. Given my superiority, worry is senseless.
The Prime soothed itself with its flawless logic and stark rationality. Yes. Long ago, it had settled on an offensive strategy. That strategy had provided immense dividends—to use a Neptunian capitalist’s term. One critical component was distance. Neptune was farther out that any other inhabited planet, meaning that no other useful planetoid of appreciable size was near the Neptu
ne System. Objects worth colonizing in the Kuiper Belt were even farther away, while those in the Oort Cloud might as well have been near another star.
The opposite was quite different. As one journeyed toward the Sun, the planets squeezed more tightly together. Being at Uranus put one much nearer Saturn, while Jupiter might as well have belonged to the Inner Planets, it was so near Mars as compared to the distance to Neptune. That meant taskforces sent in-system were much nearer the next objective than those that traveled out-system. Therefore, it was much more profitable to go in-system than to send military forces out.
My offensive strategy capitalized on Neptune’s solitariness.
The Prime had capitalized on another critical element. Cyborgs were superior soldiers. Compared to Homo sapiens the difference was startling, several orders of magnitude. The difference was less with Highborn, but still significant. Militarily, it meant cyborgs outclassed their enemies by a higher percentage in face-to-face encounters than in any other forms of combat. Therefore, logic mandated stealth insertion tactics. This included boarding enemy warships and invading planets or inhabited moons.
Using distance to its advantage and personal military encounters, it had conquered the majority of the Solar System in a relatively short time.
I am clearly superior.
The thought lasted forty-two seconds as it exuded in its forethought and planning. Then an invading truth dampened its gloating.
If cyborgs were superior soldiers in personal encounters, the Doom Stars were better by a daunting degree in ship combat. Twice, the insertion of Doom Stars had thwarted cyborg strikes. The first had occurred at the Third Battle for Mars. The second time it had happened against the planet-wreckers launched at Earth.
The Saturn-launched attack should have succeeded.
It had to a degree, and the Prime concentrated on that for a full two minutes. Then it switched back to the Mars battle. The Highborn defeated them, although it had cost the great enemy one of his critical vessels. Both times the enemy had inserted himself into the conflict it had cost him one of his great warships.
Five Doom Stars—a shudder ran through the Prime. Facing five would have been a disaster. It was bad enough the Homo sapiens had allied with the Highborn. Fortunately, Social Unity only possessed a remnant of its once vast fleets. There were also three Jovian vessels following, a surprise. But the meteor-ships were damaged and likely depleted of offensive power after their battle with the Uranus-launched moon-wreckers.
The Prime used the Neso observatories to study the enemy, the approach and their likely operational choices. It weighted each possibility by percentages. Then it examined Neptunian defenses. Unlike the Highborn or the Social Unity and Jovian Homo sapiens, it relied on stealth technology, mass of ships and mass of turrets.
Every moon and habitat was a fortress with endless laser-turrets. There was nothing breakthrough about them other than their incredible number. Unfortunately, the Doom Stars outranged all the defensive armament.
That was a problem, but the Prime didn’t believe it an insolvable one. Range was important, but there were other critical military factors.
I have made the superior choices.
Those decisions had been made long ago. Logic dictated certain military realities. One of the chief factors was opportunity costs. The logic was relentless. One had a limited amount of time, energy and matter. Yet the wants were unlimited. As one used resources, it meant there was less to buy other choices. Therefore, one should logically maximize each decision to give the greatest benefit possible.
This was even truer in military affairs than other matters. The Prime had long ago made a strategic decision regarding which battlefield technologies to acquire and improve. Its choices involved a key tenant, one critical in all forms of armed conflict. It was possibly so simple a thing that lesser beings ignored its truth. One needed to sight a target before one could hit it. Meaning, the most powerful weapon was useless if it missed.
In space, finding the enemy often proved difficult. Therefore, the force that spotted its enemy, without the enemy spotting it, gained a decided tactical advantage. With this advantage, the cyborgs had captured several of the Outer Planetary Systems. With everything else remaining equal, the force with highly developed sensors and merely adequate weapons would defeat the force with incredible weapons and poor sensors—or good sensors unable to detect a cloaked enemy.
Therefore, the Prime had pursed new stealth technology and sought improved sensing equipment. Because of this, it had built a completely different type of space fleet to defeat the humans. The key cyborg offensive ship had until now been the Lurkers and stealth-capsules. Their task was to turn every battle into a face-to-face encounter. Afterward, the cyborgs had fought several battles with captured enemy warships and stealthily-launched planet-wreckers. Those wreckers used the technology of the captured power: Saturn and Uranus. Now, however, it would for the first time fight with a war-fleet of its own design.
The enemy approached with eight warships. The Prime gloated. It possessed hundreds of vessels. Each of its heavily cloaked ships directed a fleet of equally cloaked drones. With their greater numbers, they would swarm the enemy by using innovative tactics.
Rationality programs surged into action and quickly grabbed resources, using more and more of MONITOR’s brain mass. Soon, soothing chemicals dampened the gloating. Perhaps MONITOR overreacted with the dampening, for the Prime reconsidered its plan yet again.
The mass of cloaked ships and drones hid behind Neptune in relation to the enemy. It had considered mining the enemy’s approach, but it assumed the Highborn would redirect their flight-path for just that reason. The key to victory lay in obliterating the Doom Stars.
Question: was it wiser to destroy the accompanying battleships first or to concentrate everything on the Doom Stars?
A brain dome supplied the answer. It was a memory dome with access to all human history.
It ran through many examples, fixating on the World War Two Allied bomber campaign against Germany. At the time, heavy bombers had dropped thousands of pounds of explosives on the Axis factories, railways, oil wells and ball-bearing plants. German fighters had orders to attack the heavy bombers first, ignoring the accompanying allied fighters. With hindsight, it was clear the German fighters should have concentrated first on destroying the Allied fighters and then attacking the slower bombers, as the British and Americans fighters had taken a dreadful toll on the Germans.
The Prime accepted this. It would first remove the SU warships. Afterward, it would concentrate on the super-ships. With their destruction, total victory would merely be a matter of mopping up Earth, Venus and Mercury. That victory would occur with speed once it acquired the Sun Station.
Knowledge of the Sun Station was new—painfully new—only days old.
An important subsystem of the Web-Brain squirmed with worry. This had higher authority than the rationality and monitor programs. The thought gained profile as it computed probabilities and accessed a troubling reality: Humans were more creative than cyborgs.
Explain your worry, the Prime demanded.
The subsystem answered with one word: range.
The range of their weapons?
Subsystem: yes.
All their weapons?
Subsystem: no.
A specific weapon?
Subsystem: yes.
Which weapons are you worried about?
Subsystem: the Sun Station.
The Prime pondered that. Finally, it decided to interrogate one of its captured scientists. It was frustrating, but humans were move inventive than a web-mind. It was unreasonable and illogical, but it was still true.
I am superior, able to face unpleasant facts. It is proof of my superiority.
The Prime absorbed data regarding the scientist. The formerly rich old man—during the capitalist heyday—had once run a Neptunian consortium, a think-tank of inventors and innovators. In his youth, the Neptunian scientist had made a fort
une on an improved hardening process for weird ice. With the wealth, he had joined a team of fellow scientists and together they had invested in a consortium. The old man had proven financially cunning. After twenty-five years, he’d bought out the last of his partners—that had occurred several years before the cyborg take over.
Pulsing a thought and activating select video cameras, the Prime watched the gathering process. In a chamber near Triton’s surface, three skeletal cyborgs opened the old scientist’s agonizer-bath. The naked man was half-submerged in the liquid: an oily substance that heightened his nerve endings. It kept them active even after prolonged exposure and it intensified the mild punishment shocks randomly sent through the bath.
The old man—his name was Dr. Pangloss—looked around in alarm as he feebly tried to pull himself free of the cyborgs’ grips.
The sight sent a ripple of mirth through the Prime. Homo sapiens were like monkeys, primitive creatures providing amusing gestures and sequences.
While watching such antics, the Prime had discovered quite by accident the horror Homo sapiens emoted upon seeing skeletal-like cyborgs. Testing the theory hundreds of times, it had finally formalized the practice. That had brought another tidbit of psychological interest. Horror weakened human resistance.
The three cyborgs dragged thin Dr. Pangloss to a specialized chair, strapping him in. The old scientist made pitiful croaks and wheezed. He had weak muscles with a spider-web of blue veins, damp white hair and liver-spotted skin. It had taken extended life-support procedures to keep the terrified specimen alive.
Twice, the Prime had received interesting data from Dr. Pangloss’s conjectures. His usefulness had kept the old man from the brain-choppers.
A cyborg cinched the last strap, immobilizing the Homo sapien. The three cyborgs stepped back until they reached the walls.
He squirms. Pleasure sensation moved like a wave through the Prime. It released some of its tension. These awakened emotive centers are making life more interesting.
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