by Moulton, CD
"We gonna do it!"
I always get a kick out of TR when it has a problem like this. It gets very enthusiastic.
"Now tell me what the hell that `uh-oh' was for or I'll laser-clean the dome with you in it!" TR demanded.
"What if it's landed on some planet with an evolving culture?"
"Uh-oh!"
It surprisingly only took an hour and three quarters before we were ready to send our barrage. We came in with TR in the center of the bubble of the field, and the particles were beautifully focused to all strike very close to the same instant everywhere, so the brain wouldn't have warning to shield.
Then we waited. TR figured the impact moment for each level, but we could see or hear nothing, and TR wouldn't call the brain again, but would wait until it either came up toward orbit or gave no indication at all, which would mean it had already left the area, but our satellites would definitely detect it if it came out anywhere.
"I'm getting very weak radio signals," TR reported a while later. "It seems to be digitalized ... some kind of instructions ... to servos! It's sending servos to patch the holes!"
"Jam its signals!" I cried. "Don't let it patch! Can you?"
"Not from here. It can override at this range easily. There are four separate if close frequencies, so I can assume we hit it in four spots, at least. One thing I CAN do is trace the exact spot the signals are coming from and can focus a laser right ... AH!"
TR fired a very intense heat beam into the atmosphere. We then waited a little while longer.
"It's almost to the equator and is coming up fast toward one of our satellites," TR said. "We'll be waiting. I think my little beam fried its servos and maybe even the balloon. It should have thought to carry a spare."
"TR, try to get it to surrender," I suggested. "I think I can find where the other copies were sent if I can read this one's programming. The leader brain would've given them all areas to avoid in the future so as to not start fighting among themselves before it was able to take over from them.
"If we even could find out definitely how many there are, it would help."
TR tried to contact the brain and to get it to give it up, but to no avail. It simply refused to respond other than to fire at our signal, which we sent from a satellite by direct beam.
I have to say it was accurate. It hit the satellite dead center from inside the atmosphere.
"Play dead," I suggested. "Let's get clever with it and let it think it damaged you. It'll run as soon as it can, and you can finish it off.
"I can see it's not programmed for surrender."
"But it IS programmed for subterfuge. Incoming message."
"Empire ship! This is Tb fourteen SP!" came over the speakers. "I wish to negotiate! Maitan Empire ship! Tb fourteen SP wishes to negotiate!"
"I'll just ignore that crap line," TR told me. "It wants to negotiate itself close enough to me to be able to use its biggest weapons, and that's all. If we keep playing dead it might make a run for it. Once it's out of that atmosphere I can get this over with and we can start looking for others."
The call came again, then again, rising toward the fringes of the atmosphere. When it was barely visible it made the call a last time.
"Funny how good ol' Tb fourteen's broadcasting from that thing coming up, but has that tight light-beam com going down into the atmosphere," TR noted. "The beam almost makes a plasma through that soup. I can see it plain as anything."
"We're supposed to shoot that drone with a transmitter down and think we've shot down the brain.It keeps doing that. It's downright tiresome. It's program isn't flexible enough for it to stop using the same ploy over and over again."
"Uh-huh. It also leaves us not ever knowing for sure we got the real brain. I hope that one was the last one sent out."
"Yeah, only fourteen of them in that case. It should be easy enough to figure which stars the others were launched to."
We watched as the radio drone came into orbit. TR moved out far enough that it would be very difficult to see and we watched through the satellite's sensors.
"I'd say it'll try to come out fast in another spot," I said.
"I figure in a straight line for one of the moons. Derwop would be my first guess. It still has all the things the brain'll be looking for."
"I think we should shoot down that drone any time now so it'll know we're still here. That should make it move fast."
TR shot the drone, which exploded in a bright orange ball of flame.
"It got one strong radio pulse out," TR said. "Satellite six says its coming out right on line for another moon, but that'll change. It'll go to Derwop."
"I'd say it's coming out of atmosphere right about now while the satellite's watching what is, I sincerely hope, it's last cute drone," I replied with a tired sigh. "How clever and how totally predictable."
"Yeah. Now THAT one is damned well big enough to have everything to get it across space and even has a nice fusion generator working almost at maximum.
"It's going straight for Derwop."
"Let's go shoot down the other drone. We can do it without taking a chance it's a programmed brain in storage on that ship."
TR moved to intercept the drone, shot it down, then went to Derwop where we waited around the curve of the moon for almost an hour. "Here it comes!" TR warned. "It's detected us somehow and has a shield up.
"I put up all of mine, too. We've been hit with surprises from that thing's programmer before! Maita was almost destroyed by a cobalt fusion/fission device, as well as several other surprises.
"I guess it'll try some more of those."
Even with the full shields we were rocked by a blast. "Cobalt activated fusion and fission missile. That thing could crack a good-sized planet.
"I think we should let it land on Derwop if it will, but even it should know that'll be pointless if we know it's there.
"Clever time again.
"What do you think it'll do now?"
"It'll try everything it has in its little arsenal against us, because the one sure thing in all of this is that only one of us will ever leave this spot right here. We have to try to find a way to get through those shields, too. It won't open them if it thinks we can react fast enough to get through.
"Try random sequence blasts to keep it guessing. It won't open the shields that way, and we may be able to use the time to think of something."
I drew the computer records to me and read all the things that had been used on the brain before. Those things would be easy for it to defense, because they would be very much what it learned. The only thing that even might work would be the thing that got the last brain – and we couldn't use that here because of those shields.
TR was searching all its memories at the same time and all the records it could find that even might hold an answer. Each minute we were held at stalemate here was another minute for one of the other brains to be approaching another planet.
The fleet would be here soon, and I wanted to get busy doing something. If we could defeat this thing in this system it would be by a method none of those others would have a defense built in for and would be something they couldn't defense, either.
"What'll get through that shielding?" I asked. "It's mirrored, so it'll reflect energy. I can see that.
"Will it also stop all solid materials?"
"I was thinking about bombarding with mass like Maita did the first one. It built heat inside from compression of the impact on the field, but we couldn't really hope to accomplish much that way. You got an idea?"
"If there's a way to make a very small hole in the shield I might. All I want to do is to insert a small tube."
"I can send a minifloater to make an interference hole in the shield, but it'll be very small and won't hold for more than four point six seconds.
"What could you do with a hole ten millimeters across in four seconds?"
"If we insert a gas or liquid inside of that shield and can force the brain to keep the shield intact, wha
t happens to the inserted materials?"
"Gas will disperse to fill the vacuum around the ship and liquid will slowly be attracted to the ship by mass attraction – but very slowly."
"Then the gas would contact the ship more than the liquid in short time?"
"Yo!"
"Then I want a platinum tank – or several of them if you can hole the shield in more than one place. I want the ten millimeter tube of platinum out the end of it with a quick-release valve. I also want hydrogen fluoride gas compressed to a liquid in those tanks and enough water to keep it as a liquid for just a short while.
"The pressure of liquification will spew the liquified HF gas in there pretty fast, and it'll attack the antennae broadcasting those shields. The brain tried something on that order against Maita, but without having to hole the shield. That indicates it doesn't know we're platinum- coated and it would indicate its own ship isn't. Right?"
"Yo! We'll try!" TR replied, and I could hear the machines in the shop go into sudden frenzied action. TR had enough fluorine in storage and produced the HF gas while building the tanks. It also kept up a purely random barrage against the brain's ship, causing it to keep its shields up.
We were chancing shields that would allow very limited light through, so as to observe the mirror shield of the brain. We'd have to know everything about the shield to be able to use our little trick on it.
I watched as two floaters with some very complicated coils and equipment aboard moved exactly across the diameter of the field around the brain's ship, then moved close. Less than a quarter of a minute later they both exploded.
"They were supposed to," TR explained, before I began ranting. "They operated by absorbing the energy of the fields in a spot. We got a bunch of HF gas and acid liquid inside of there I think. I'm trying to figure the concentrations and how long they'll take to ruin the antennae and sensors.
"A lot of those sensors have glass lenses I think, so the HF should blind them by frosting a layer across each one.
"Maybe it'll figure what's going on, but maybe I can keep it occupied for long enough that the stuff'll work. Give it half an hour for sensor damage, and the metal deterioration should be enough by then, too. Hydrofluoric's pretty fast. It's about as active an acid as we have."
We waited, keeping up a random barrage for awhile, then I told TR to stop and move off a bit.
"We watched the shield for a predicted time. We should have some results by now," I complained. "Either we didn't get enough gas in or it's protected against it somehow."
"It may have been able to neutralize ... no! It won't attack the antennae while they're on! It'll collect around the bases of them from the ionic field, but won't react until the fields are shut down. It may get the glass lenses, but it won't get the antennae while they're on."
I thought for a minute longer, then said, "Start lowering the intensity of your beams a little at the time. That thing doesn't have any idea of how much power we carry onboard or how much we can generate. If it thinks we're weakening it might lower the shields to fire at us."
"I'll weaken the blasts, then we'll stand farther and farther off. It'll be the standard recharge mode as far as that thing is concerned. It'll run.
"I still think it'll try to hide on Derwop because of the ice backwash. We wouldn't dare to fire directly down onto the ice. The melting ice would form its own parabola, and the backwash would do us more damage than we could hope to do to anything down there. We have an added advantage or two it may not know about, too!"
"Such as?"
"At that temperature the HF will remain liquid. As a gas it wouldn't do much damage with the shield dropped. Nice little puddles of Hydrofluoric acid eating away at the base of the antennae. The ionic effect should be strongest around the energy shield projectors, so we should be able to overload them pretty fast if we have the time.
"I'm switching to projectile attack now, so it'll drop the energy shield, but will keep the matter shields in place as it runs. I'd hate for it to let the gas dissipate now. I'll have to be clever, too! It's not the only one who can play that game!"
I wasn't going to give TR the satisfaction of asking how it was planning to be clever. I waited to see what it would do.
The energy shield dropped around the brain's ship and TR fired a quick blast at it, but without the intensity to do much damage. TR increased the projectile attack, let our own shields begin to flicker a bit and retreated out of range of energy weapons while keeping the projectiles firing.
The brain's ship began moving around Derwop and dove as soon as it was out of direct line of sight. We watched it go aground and bury itself in a snowbank through a sensor satellite TR had launched along with the missiles. We wanted to know exactly where it went, so we were prepared. ONE thing worked like we planned! Maybe the HF would work, too.
"It'll depend on us taking hours to recharge and will use the time to recharge itself," TR said. "It's been very careful with its energy use, so far, so will plan to recharge, then to move before we could build enough energy to fight it.
"I estimate the acid will do a total job in three to four hours under these conditions. It would do it in fifteen minutes in warmer circumstances.
"You lays your bet and you takes your chances.
"It'll make a careful estimate that'll show it we couldn't possibly recharge sufficiently in less than six hours. That'll be based on an assumption we have fifty percent better facilities than it does.
"See? I can be clever, too!"
I used the waiting time to call the fleet and to talk with Ander, the Acnian commander, and Gohn, the Feach strategist. We decided to take scan patterns from as far as the ships could've traveled on their STL drives in the directions of computed paths for the nearest thirty six stars of a type that could appeal to the military mind of the machine. There were four stars besides this system that would've already been reached. TR and I would start inward on those while the fleet would work from the outside of the sphere inward. The systems they may have reached at that point had all been explored, and only one system had an emerging society, so we would go there first.
The ships would be easy enough to find and identify in space because of the large fusion generators that would necessarily be working to keep the ion drives going.
The reason I settled on thirty six was we had that many ships in the fleet out there. It was my hope there were nowhere nearly that many brain ships to be found.
The strategy would be to locate the ships, report exactly where they were, and try to destroy them before they knew they were under attack. No chances were to be taken. Period.
We went over all of the plans so Ander could deploy each ship to its target area and Gohn could discuss what we were doing with this one. We explained the whole process, and Maita, who had been listening in all along, suggested we do NOT believe for one tiny part of a second we had actually gotten the brain here until we had ten years proof.
We were to leave those detector satellites in orbit around Neepod and Nestar. They weren't interfering with anything and would show we accomplished our purpose, at worst.
Thing said we were right to try to get our hands on one of the brain's programs, but it doubted such a thing was even remotely possible. That thing was designed to make very damned sure it would never be read.
Z suggested we may be able to get a small floater close enough to attach and send us something in pulse/burst before the brain destroyed it.
We spent quite a while trying to think of a way to access the program from the brain. If we could do that we could find with fair accuracy where other copies were sent, but we didn't come up with very much. Even the robots were programmed to self-destruct if captured, so the brain would certainly have taken care of that problem before it ever arose.
T6 made its first big contribution to our plans. "Why not, if Ander can find one of them really far enough away from harming anything, get six fleet ships to surround it with a stasis field, move in with an energy barrier genera
tor riding the stasis field as it collapses slowly and have a man inside of the brain's ship when the stasis is broken?" it suggested. "It'll be very chancy, because the brain may self-destruct and kill the man, but there's a good chance there won't be any defenses inside of the ship, and the energy barrier, once installed, will let you dismantle the thing at your leisure."
Gohn said he thought the ships would be carrying programmed circuits in some kind of safe-box to be put together when the whole program was completed. Ander suggested the original brain was probably in pieces aboard the various ships in that fashion.
Maita and TR worked for awhile with the deployment theory for T6's suggestion while Thing did the math.
A stasis field with six points would work! It would be big enough to hold the brain ship and it might hand us a brain intact that we could read to find where all the ships were headed. The adventure offered would give us any number of volunteers to ride the field collapse. It would be another first for the history books.
Gohn would work out the details and, should a ship be found in the right area (It can't be close to any star for the field to be stable), it would be tried. Every least detail would be explained carefully to all involved with the extreme danger being stressed. Only volunteers would be considered.
TR and I had this one here, then we would be off to the inner worlds.
"Shall we see what we've accomplished here?" TR asked. "Other than seeing if we can be as clever as that thing, of course.
"I guess we'll have to figure about twenty tricks and check 'em all out or we'll get a nasty surprise again in a few years.
"Think we'll be able to handle this little job?"
I grinned and said, "Yo!"
Too Easy
The acid should've had time to do enough damage to where the shields would fail in short order. The special metals used in the antennae of those force fields won't stand up to an acid like Hydrofluoric or even some much less active acids. TR has a layer of what amounts to a specialized organic wax the caustics can't attack, but it must be renewed each time the shields are used, as the antennae tend to heat from the energy being broadcast and received through them and the wax slowly vaporizes off.
