Authors: William H. Keith
Dev had just arrived at the Hachiman facility when I2C-relayed images and information began flooding back down the communications lines from Kurebayashi’s squadron, carrying details of vector, speed, and weapons readiness. The divergence between the three separate Web groups was no more than a few thousand kilometers, if that, but a projection of their separate courses suggested that one was heading for Earth, a second toward Kasei—old Mars—and the third toward the Sun.
Dev wondered about the three-part assault. At the DalRiss homeworld, there’d been two inhabited planets but they’d orbited two different stars in the widely spaced Alyan double system. The Gr’tak home star was also a double, but more closely spaced; only one world in that system had been inhabited, if you didn’t count the artificial worlds built within hollowed-out planetoids.
In Man’s home system, however, three worlds were heavily populated, Earth, Kasei, and Luna… and the Lunar population could be considered an extrapolation of the space-dwelling community in near-Earth space, the tens of millions of people living in the synchorbitals or in space colonies in extended Earth orbit or at the various LaGrange points. Though there were countless other settlements throughout the Solar System—on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, on and within hundreds of the drifting chunks of rock in the Asteroid Belt, on Mercury, in Venus orbit, in extended solar orbits—the Web had apparently zeroed in on the two largest concentrations of human population in the system, Earth-Lunar space, and Kasei, which had a permanent population of some hundreds of millions of people, as well as extensive military bases and facilities.
The strategy made Dev wonder. Were the Webbers really going after the two largest population centers? Or—as seemed likely from much of what he’d sensed in Web strategies before, and from what he’d learned from the Gr’tak—was the Web possibly unaware of most human activity? Could they be focusing on Kasei and Earth because those were the two strongest sources of EM radiation, or because they were the obvious primary nodes in the Solar System’s far-flung computer net, or because they had the most ship activity in near space and low orbit?
Could that selective blindness of the Web be used? Dev wondered if, rather than trying to wake the Overmind up, they should be trying to shut down all EM and computer/communications/control activity on and around Earth to, in effect, make Earth invisible to the alien mind.
He dismissed the idea almost at once. Earth’s real problem was not that it was visible to the Web, but the fact that Earth’s
sun
was visible to them; once Sol went nova, it wouldn’t matter much whether the Web could see the Earth or not.
Again, he tried to summon the Overmind, wondering what set of circumstances or conditions there might have been at Nova Aquila that had brought the meta-intelligence to life then that was missing now. Something was happening there; he could feel the Overmind’s mental focus, the way it was studying…
something,
but he was no more able to communicate with it directly than an ant might have been able to communicate with the human over whose shoe it was walking. The Overmind seemed distant and preoccupied, totally involved with some other problem completely beyond Dev’s ken.
In deep space, out well above the plane of the far reaches of the Asteroid Belt, the Ida-Ten Squadron was in range of the nearest elements of the Earthbound cloud. The relative velocities of the Web clouds and the Imperial squadron were still high, on the order of nearly two thousand kilometers per second, but the AIs aboard the human warships had factored the speed difference into their fire-control equations and determined the best instant to commence the final part of the deadly dance.
Tennoryu
opened the engagement, loosing a cloud of high-velocity missiles tipped with thermonuclear warheads. Earlier battles with the Web had demonstrated that nukes were among the most effective weapons for dealing with Web mass-attack tactics. Lasers, particle beams, and other beam weapons could vaporize or disable Webbers quickly as they slashed through clouds of massed, oncoming machines, but a twenty- or fifty-megaton thermonuclear device, detonating in the heart of a Web attack cloud, could reduce tens of thousands of them to vapor in a literal flash of star-hot plasma and cripple thousands more. Webbers appeared impervious to electromagnetic pulses and radiation; given the environment they must have spawned in, at the Galaxy’s Core, that was only to be expected.
Minutes after the first launch, warheads began detonating within the Web cloud, savage, death-silent strobings of actinic light ballooning against the darkness and swiftly fading into fast-cooling invisibility. At the same time, the ryu-carriers,
Soryu
and
Tennoryu,
began launching their war-flyers. Each warship carried a complement of several hundred warflyers; it seemed a pitifully inadequate shield to throw up against such awesome power.
The Web attackers, for their part, neither swerved nor slowed. They continued approaching, the gentle drift of individual members of the cloud slowly filling in the gaps torn in their ranks by the detonating nukes. For the first time, Web weapons other than the nano-D of the smallest units were unlimbered and fired. Lasers flicked across the intervening space, touching the dark expanse of the dragonships’ hulls, slashing across duralloy and nanoflage in ragged flares of searing light. A light cruiser, pinned in a deadly crossplay of high-energy lasers, writhed in an apparent agony as her midsection flared up with the heat and the light of a small sun. Secondary explosions from overheated slush-H reaction mass tanks ripped out her heart and snapped her spine; in another moment, the two surviving halves of the ship drifted apart, enmeshed now in an expanding cloud of sparkling vapor, ice crystals, and debris.
Dev studied the Web formation carefully. Damn, what were they doing this time? There was no sign at all of the big Alphas they’d used at Nova Aquila, no hints at all of how they were controlling and manipulating their fleet. The change in their fleet structure suggested that they were dangerously adaptable; one of the few advantages the humans had possessed last time around was the fact that humans could adapt and change rapidly under pressure, even in the heat of a battle, while the Web appeared to follow rather narrowly defined parameters, much like a complex but literal-minded computer program. With one engagement, the Web evidently had identified their own major weakness and corrected it, unafraid of applying lessons learned on a vast scale.
These things learned
fast.
More laser fire swept through the human fleet, disabling two more light cruisers and smashing a frigate into drifting, white-hot junk. Nuclear warheads continued detonating deep within the Webber cloud, literally vaporizing tens of thousands of separate machines, but the survivors kept coming, moving so quickly that by now, the leaders were already sweeping past the human ships at velocities too great to allow any but the fastest combat AIs to deal with them. Dev saw that the point defense and beam weapon systems for all of the ships in the human squadron were on automatic, with the ship AIs picking targets and triggering volleys of fire.
There were simply too many targets to get them all, however. Soon, many of the machines were out of range, still headed toward Earth, now between the Earth and the still outbound Imperial squadron. Ida-Ten continued plowing through the center of the cloud, which appeared to be expanding—learning not to cluster so tightly together that one nuclear detonation could kill thousands of them.
Soryu
was in trouble, as multiple lasers hits and high-velocity impacts across the kilometer-long dragonship’s hull pounded and slashed at her armor. Parts of that armor were glowing now, Dev could see on the imagery transmitted by remote drones with the squadron, and air—visible as sparkling plumes of freezing vapor—trailed from a dozen rents in her side.
As the information continued flooding into the Hachiman facility’s combat center, Dev struggled to keep pace with it but was soon aware that that immense volume of data was beyond any one person’s comprehension. In any case, there was nothing he could do… save try to learn. What was happening here would no doubt happen again at other suns circled by inhabited worlds, and if Humanity failed to protect their home system, they still might have a chance to survive elsewhere.
If they could learn how to stop the Web’s onslaught.
One part of the battle, at least, was so far beyond Dev’s ken that he was completely unaware of it at the time… as were all of the Imperial officers and men stationed at C
3
complexes from Earth to Luna to Mars. One after another, a series of microcircuits buried within the Imperial Battle Command Station at Singapore Synchorbital tripped to the “on” position, initializing a long-dormant subsystem of the Planetary Defense Net. An automatic override attempted shutdown… and was itself overridden. An AI monitoring the defense system was called in. In its singleminded way, it noted the anomaly and began shut-down proceedings… then promptly and completely forgot what it was doing.
A computer program, one written over four centuries before and never yet implemented in anything save drills, was summoned from deep storage and uploaded into the net. New messages flickered back and forth through the system, between a chain of computers on and around Earth, and separate subsystem nodes at Hachiman Station, near Aristarchus on Luna.
Seconds passed, as ancient machinery read codes and considered the flicker of binary data. On Luna, at three widely separated points, at Helvelius on the shores of the Oceanus Procellarum, among the cliffs at the south edge of the Mare Crisium, and at Mendeleev on the Moon’s far side, immense laser and particle beam arrays swung silently in the Lunar vacuum, directing their massive snouts in the direction of Aquila, the Eagle. A fourth array, at Hertsprung, also on the far side, was not brought into play, for at that longitude at that time Aquila lay below the local horizon. In space, two more facilities went online a half second later, with weapons arrays not so powerful as their surface-based cousins, but potent nonetheless. One circled the L1 libration point, between the Earth and the Moon, while other circled L2 several thousand kilometers above the Lunar far side.
Fudo-Myoo had been laid out so that at least three of the weapons facilities could track any point anywhere in the sky at any time.
The name of the network, which had been made operational in 2112, was fitting. Fudo-Myoo was an ancient Japanese god, a protector against calamities, great dangers, and fire, and he was also supposed to be fond of mortals, willing to lend them his support in all of their endeavors.
In the latter years of the twentieth century, scientists had become aware of the uncomfortable fact that planetary life existed under a constant threat, an interplanetary sword of Damocles consisting of the thousands of chunks of rock and ice circling through the Solar System and subject to the gravitational perturbations of the giant, outer planets. The discovery that the dinosaurs had been driven to extinction by the impact of a ten-kilometer chunk of rock falling onto what later became the Yucatan Peninsula, the discovery by astronomers that fair-sized chunks of rock frequently made dangerously close passages of the Earth—and in one chilling near-miss actually entered Earth’s atmosphere before skipping back into space—and the highly publicized use of Jupiter in 1994 as a bull’s-eye for a fragmented comet, all served to highlight the threat posed by infalling space debris. What had happened to the dinosaurs, apparently, had happened with some regularity throughout the planet’s history. It would happen again. The only question was when.
Though the Western powers and the fragmented Russian states had given up their aspirations in space by the early twenty-first century, Japan, which had long eyed the industrial, commercial, and military high ground of space, had moved aggressively to secure it. Once Nihon held that first foothold in space, she began moving to reinforce it. Building huge, solar-powered antiplanetoid lasers on and around the Moon had been good press for Imperial Japan, a demonstration of how the Empire sought to protect and preserve the planet.
And, of course, it escaped no one’s notice that those lasers, those on the near side of Luna, at any rate, made formidable weapons that could have more easily vaporized cities than a tumbling, deep-space mountain of nickel-iron.
Despite the subtle threat behind the laser weaponry, though, Fudo-Myoo was a good choice as patron saint of Nihon’s antiplanetoid defense network, insurance that the burgeoning, newly spaceborne civilization of Terra would not be peremptorily crushed by the unexpected arrival of another dinosaur killer. The Fudo-Myoo complex drew its power from the system’s primary electric power grid; enormous solar panels circling the sun just inside Mercury’s orbit collected the sun’s light, used it to generate intense and sharply focused maser power beams, and transmitted them to a series of power distribution satellites in Earth and lunar orbit, where they were routed into Earth’s power grid. At need, almost the entire output of that grid could be routed through Fudo-Myoo.
Another series of guardian circuits tripped and fell. The battle simulator AIs at Hachiman Station busied themselves for several seconds with a rapid-fire series of exercises, plotting distant targets, extrapolating acceleration and vector, and adjusting aim. At an electronic command, ninety-eight percent of the power feed from the solar collector masers was rerouted to Fudo-Myoo Prime at Mare Crisium, then shunted through the ground cable net or retransmitted to L1 and L2. Across the night side of Earth, the golden glow of sprawling cities blanked out. Most of the power needs for Dai Nihon were met by larger versions of the quantum power taps that supplied starships with the incredible energies they needed to operate, but some of the more primitive nations of the Hegemony, the North American Protectorate and most of the European and African republics, for instance, were still powered off the old solar grid. As energy surged to the subsurface installations on Luna and the laser arrays glowed suddenly with a dazzling new life, the energy grid collapsed in a cascade effect that left forty percent of Earth without electrical power.