Universe Vol1Num2

by Jim Baen's Universe

  The three Doomies had scrambled to the door with the dinner plate sized hole in it. Two had collapsed just inside the holed hatch. Freeze-dried blood crystals lined the corners of their bluish lips. The last one still tried to pull the peeled hood back over his face. He lay on the deck, fingers clasping at the torn seam beneath his chin, vainly trying to pinch it together. The ragged seam bubbled with escaping gas. His mouth gaped fish-like and his eyes had rolled back as hypoxia set in.

  Hicks plunged the screwdriver into the fanatic's carotid. Blood welled up beneath the polymer coating as he pulled the steel shaft free.

  "What the hell?" I demanded.

  "I was doing him a favor," Hicks said seriously. "He'll be too brain damaged for good intel. He'd die slow anyways."

  The Doomies hadn't removed the corpses of the crew, only shoving them aside. I saw the captain's body wedged beneath a control panel. The punch had mangled him badly. I recognized him from rank on the sleeves.

  "We need to figure out where they were going with our equipment." I walked to the pilot's station. Everything was clearly labeled and color-coded on the wrap-around screens. I found the course plot, a cartoonish representation of i-space travel.

  I had thought it would head back to Dromed's World, where we had just completed a two year mission bringing the rebelling human outpost under control. The Doomsday cult, despite nihilistic beliefs, could resurrect their uprising with the brigade's weapons. But the Doomies hadn't shifted the course one-eighty degrees. If I correctly remembered the captain's explanation of the navigation screen, the Marie Celeste was headed deeper into League space toward the nearest inhabited planet. That didn't make sense. None of the League members would need the archaic weaponry we used. Humans weren't allowed on League planets, except under contract.

  "You've traveled supercargo before. Can you fly this thing?" Hicks asked.

  "It's supposed to be straight forward. Aside from approaching a planet in i-space." I had listened to the crew's conversations over meals. In i-space, gravity wells were repulsive. It took expert piloting and well programmed computers, to enter a system shedding velocity, and not overshoot. "I'm not sure how they planned to pull this off."

  "The bastards are going for a kill, not a theft." He held up a piece of crumpled paper with the squiggles of ornate calligraphy that he had pulled from a Doomie's body. "It's his message to God."

  The kid was right, I realized with a shock. In imaginary space, planets were repulsive. But if a ship tunneled down into real space at a hefty fraction of c, the relativistic mass would suck the planet and the ship together. A guaranteed collision requiring less skill than billiards to line up. We humans had already killed two planets with kinetic bombs during the Spider War, and that was why humanity was under sanction. Destroying another inhabited planet, now that we knew the rules, would end it for all of us. Extinction.

  "Then we'll have to turn this ship around." I sat at the pilot's station. "Just need to find a help menu."

  I discovered a flight checklist, half-complete, which was almost as good as a help menu. I read through the steps and pulled up the appropriate screens. I only had to key in the coordinates of the destination and the drive would alter the ship's course. Dromed's World was the only safe set of numbers I could recognize on the checklist. We'd at least get within range to signal for assistance from the task force that had relieved us. There were standard ship-to-ship maneuvers to drop us back into real space. I entered the coordinates into the computer and pushed the pilot's seat back.

  "Too easy, sir. Too easy." Hicks popped a bubble, which sounded like a whip cracking over the suit-to-suit radio.

  Nothing happened.

  A flashing yellow message appeared at the top of the pilot's screen. Engineering Bridge Manual Override.

  "It's not over yet," I said without enthusiasm.

  "That means you can't steer it from here?"

  "No, I can't. At least one bad guy survived at the other end of the ship. Must have taken control when we decompressed the ship." I stood up and gripped the hammer. "It's time for your plan."

  "Yes, sir," he said. "Follow me."

  We ran down the long bowed corridor. The sensation of running uphill was unsettling. The galley, storerooms and crew quarters had automatically sealed. They would remain shut until the corridor was repressurized. We slowed as we reached the aft end of the ship. The hatch to the drive room had a punch hole through it. No way to lock us out. We ducked into airlock number four.

  "How many punches are there?" Hicks asked.

  "Only one. Don't know how many charges are left."

  "So they've got the punch down here." He slugged me in the chest plate. "Take your hits on the armor. It can take serious damage before failing. We don't have face shields, so the visor is the weak point. You know what to do to stop this ship. I don't. You need to stay alive. Are we on the same freq?"

  I nodded.

  "We go in. I break left and you break right. Don't hang in the door. Those plastic wraps the smegheads got won't stop a hammer. No hesitation. Bang bang."

  I could only see my own warped reflection in the steely gaze of his glasses. Adrenaline made my hands tremble. "A simple plan executed in a bold, audacious manner."

  "Amen, sir. Time to close with the enemy." He scrambled up the ladder out of the airlock.

  I followed him. We approached the punctured hatch cautiously. Through the hole, I saw movement.

  Hicks kicked the hatch open and rushed into the drive room, breaking to the left. I followed, but went right. The far bulkhead housed the spherical monopole drive.

  Only one Doomie stood at the engineering controls. The polymer layers distorted his snarl and wild eye glare. He held up the punch, like a miniature jackhammer, and aimed at the kid. The wide muzzle flashed and Hicks flew backwards to bounce off the bulkhead. Shards of dull armor plate scattered over the deck.

  I lunged at the Doomie, swinging the hammer. He moved fast in his lightweight League suit. The punch turned toward my midsection. The crushing weight hit me on the chest before I could connect. My face struck my visor and the back of my head cracked against the helmet as I slammed into the opposite bulkhead. Everything had a reddish cast to it. My ribs creaked as I fought to suck a breath into my emptied lungs.

  The Doomie brought the punch directly up to Hicks' faceplate. But nothing happened. Charges depleted. He tossed the punch to the deck and picked up the dropped screwdriver. He thrust the sharp tip into Hicks' crystalline visor. The center of the visor crazed white, and the screwdriver broke through forming a small hole. Glittering dust blew away from the kid's helmet.

  I struggled to my feet, still unable to draw a breath. I had lost the hammer, but I dived at the Doomie before he could stab again. I blacked out for a second from the pain in my chest after I hit him with my shoulder. The next thing I saw was the pasty-skinned bastard standing over me as I lay on my back. The screwdriver was in his hand pointing at my face, cocked back and ready to thrust.

  My hammer seemed to appear from nowhere, barely slowed by smashing across the back of the Doomie's head. The fanatic leaned to the side and fell flat.

  Hicks stood over him. A big pink wad was stuck in the middle of the cracked faceplate. His glasses looked like they had fallen off, but were stuck against the back of the bubble gum, reinforcing the hasty seal on his visor. He had to turn his body sideways to see around the blockage in his helmet.

  "You still alive, sir?" He extended a hand to help me up.

  I stood slowly with his assistance. I staggered to the engineering controls, a scaled down and Spartan version of the cockpit. I keyed in the coordinates to return us to Dromed's World and untoggled the override switch. The drive shifted course this time. Relieved, I turned toward Hicks and managed to speak. "How much oxygen do you have left?"

  "Some." His suit was battered. Only the edges of his chest plate remained attached. He pointed at the makeshift patch on his visor and gave me a sidelong glance. "I don't know how long thi
s will hold though."

  "Let's fix the damage we've caused and get some atmosphere back in here."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Sergeant," I asked as we started back to airlock number one. "Once we do that, think I could try a chunk of that gum?"

  "If we make it through this, sir." He stumbled beside me. "I'll give you a whole pack."

  The damage to the airlock turned out to be worse than I had first estimated. The titanium crowbars had punctured the cargo-side hatch and bent the latching mechanism. The airlock required shipyard level repairs.

  I caught Hicks gasping when we climbed into the corridor. "What's your air reading?"

  "I thought we'd be up to pressure by now."

  Cursing, I snapped my buddy umbilical to Hicks' suit. After the pressure sensor stunt I had pulled earlier, my gauges read low too. Since we couldn't bring the corridor back up to atmosphere, the crew compartments remained sealed off. I maneuvered Hicks to airlock two and secured him inside, where he could properly repair his visor.

  I clambered back to the cockpit and hooked up to the pilot's secondary life support while settling in the seat. The weight of my suit shot pain through my ribcage. By taking shallow breaths, the pain faded to a throb and I could assess my situation.

  At least five days to get in range of the command cell at Dromed's World and coordinate a rescue from i-space. I considered adjusting the controls to increase our velocity, to speed our return, but only for a second. Anything beyond changing course exceeded my knowledge base. Bodies of crew and Doomies were scattered through the ship with pieces floating in the hold. I should gather the remains, but the investigation team would have me on charges if I disturbed anything not vital for our immediate survival. And Hicks was confined to the airlock until he fixed his suit. If he could fix it.

  "Are you doing okay, sergeant?" I asked through the suit-to-suit radio.

  "Yes, sir." Hicks reply lacked the hollow chewing-on-the-microphone sound, so I knew his helmet was off. Tinny game music played in the background. "Got the gum off my viewer glasses and they still work!"

  I settled in to monitor communications, pulled up a writing program on the armchair screen, and began drafting an award recommendation for Hicks. Headquarters wouldn't let me submit it until after the inquiry, but I figured that I should capture the sergeant's actions in writing while the events were fresh in my mind. Before he reminded me that he was still a kid in spite of what we'd been through.

  ****

  Robowar

  Author: Greg Benford

  Illustrated by Laura Givens

  Most likely, robots will make our battlefields less bloody

  …for some.

  People seem to especially like to order others around. That may be the greatest social use of robots.

  —Isaac Asimov, in conversation

  In 1994 Michael Thorpe, a former model maker at George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic, began public, live robot fights in San Francisco. These Robot Wars began as displays of engineering craft and imagination, allowing the geek community of the area to show off their inventive, destructive talents. Most of the gladiators looked like moving junk piles, springing clever knives, hammers, spikes, electrical arcs and other instruments of mayhem upon their opponents.

  Thorpe quickly drew a large audience. Hundreds of technonerds proved quite willing to spend thousands of dollars and hours of labor to make combatants that they hoped might survive for a few minutes in the ring.

  A few of the battlers looked benign, but even that was a disguise. A 14-year-old girl brought a ladybug-looking robot whose pretty red shell lifted to deploy a hook, which then skewered rivals. Their very names aimed at intimidation—Toecrusher, Mauler, The Hammer, Stiletto.

  Their audience grew steadily until a legal dispute closed the games, but not before a promoter saw their potential. Similar contests went through a brief pay-per-view series, then ended in 2000 with a slot on TV's Comedy Central. There, "battlebots" showed their dual nature—focus for malicious mayhem, plus inadvertent comedians. They offer ritual violence directed by their creators using remote control, so they are only the simplest sort of the robot species, incapable of independent thinking and action.

  These are techno versions of aggression, a weird blend of the "sports" of cock fighting and tractor pulls—and the direct descendants of demolition derbies. The audience experiences both jolts of slashing, banging violence and the hilarity of absurd scrap heap machines doing each other in. Robot toys have been around for decades, but they were weak, simple and did no real damage. Robowar fighters are genuinely dangerous.

  We have become used to connecting with events like these, through adroit identification with technology. Since the 1950s children could buy robot toys, which steadily got better. Sojourner's 100-meter voyage on Mars in the 1990s, which took an agonizing month to accomplish, enraptured millions. The adventures of later plucky Mars rovers (Spirit, Opportunity) took them through many-kilometer journeys lasting years. With telepresence human guidance, even time-delayed at Mars, this capability is developing very quickly as software takes over the routine navigation and piloting between commanded destinations.

  The Gulf War of 1991 and then Gulf War II of 2003 onward both provided robo-conflict without Allied blood. In Gulf War I the machines died (at least on the allied side) far more scenically (smart bombs, etc.) than the few allied casualties; Iraqi losses got much less play. In the Second Gulf War several hundred robots dug up roadside bombs and a robot attack plane, The Predator, quietly prowled the skies day and night, inflicting casualties usually without warning. In 2005 the first robot bomb disposer appeared in Baghdad; it could shoot back with good aim at 1000 rounds a minute. A soldier nearby controlled it with a wireless laptop, the first offensive robot used in combat. Some got destroyed. Newscasters then used "kill" to describe the destruction of both people and machines. Then in 2005 came robot infantry, able to assault and fire while moving forward on tank-like treads. Plainly, more is to come.

  Commanding these at a distance recalls a video game quality, and indeed, the troops using them have a long background in such skills. Fresh into the millennium, this gives us TV's BattleBots with its three minute slam-bang bouts. Here is violence both real and absurd, calling up memories of the delicious humor of the old Road Runner cartoons. Robots assault each other with clippers, buzz saws, spikes, crushing jaws, and other ingenious devices, often cobbled together from domestic machines like lawn mowers and power tools. In their BattleBox they can use any strategy, inflicting mortal wounds, while the human audience sits safely beyond the BattleBox's shatterproof glass walls, watching flying debris clatter against the barrier. The Box has its own tricks, with sledges, rods, saws and other bedevilments which pop up randomly to wound one or both the combatants.

  All this gets played for ironic laughter, with over-the-top commentary from the sidelines. The rules of human combat get satirized into weight categories: lightweights below 87 pounds, up to super-heavyweight between 316 and 488 pounds. Their creators range from aging engineers to 12-year-old Junior High amateurs. A certain cachet attaches to one who has made his or her robot from the least expensive parts, and especially from scrap.

  More such shows are coming, like the SciFi Channel's "Robodeath." Though the robots now contending have budgets of only a few thousand dollars, inevitably under the pressure of ratings the sums will rise. Roller robots built from blenders will give way to walking, stalking specialists with specifically designed pincers or scythes or guns.

  History's arms race between human armies will be rerun in madcap, technofreak fashion on full fast forward. The warriors will get heavier, their armor thicker. Instead of being run by their creators from the sidelines, there will come competitions for robots that can direct themselves, concoct strategies in real time, assess opponents' weaknesses and find new uses for their own armaments.

  All in good fun, of course. But as the human battlefield begins to accept more machines with greater capabilities, th
e comic mayhem of BattleBots will blend in the evolutionary chain with the coming of combat robots fighting among humans—and finally, inevitably, against them.

  In the 1984 film Terminator, a woman confronted with the nonstop violence between a robot killing machine and a man sent to save her, asks, "It will never be over, will it?" Once machines can fight on equal terms with humans, what social force could stop their use? Worse, if directed by artificial intelligences, would fighter robots not carry out the competition between these two intelligent "species" inhabiting the Earth?

  The relentless energy of the Terminator class of robot (Arnold Schwartznegger) confirms this woman's wary prediction as it pursues the two humans with single-minded ferocity, until crushed by a foundry press. That advanced robotic intelligence could have the fanatical concentration of humans, with immense strength and endurance added, makes their use as soldiers seem inevitable.

  Robot Armies?

  Most robot research funding comes from the US Department of Defense. Obviously armies would rather lose a machine than a man. Robots don't get hungry, feel fear, forget orders, or care if the robot next to them gets killed. Even better, for the accountants, they have no downstream medical or retirement plans. In 2005 the Pentagon owed its soldiers, sailors and airmen $653 billion in future retirement benefits, which it had no clear plan to pay. Indeed, each fighting man costs $4 million over his median lifetime. Robot fighters will certainly cost less than a tenth of that. They can even be retrofitted later for domestic jobs and sold off.

  The Bosnian conflict of the late 1990s was the first campaign fought without a single casualty on one side, because the U.S. used only aircraft. None were robots, but that lossless victory whetted appetites and has probably set the mold. In 2000 Congress told the armed services to develop within a decade robotic ground vehicles and deep-strike aircraft. The goal is to make about a third of all such machines independent. The goal is combat without casualties.