Authors: William H. Keith
The lasers cycled to full capacity, then fired, pulse after pulse after high-energy pulse searing invisibly into the blackness of space, all tracking on the still tiny breadth of luminosity that was the incoming Web fleet.
After several minutes of near-continuous firing, the arrays fell silent once again. At all five facilities, pumps were running furiously, circulating coolant fluids through overheated cores. Minutes later, as temperatures fell back into safe operating ranges, the lasers commenced firing once more.
By this time, humans were in the loop, aware that the old Fudo-Myoo defense system had somehow activated itself, and were trying desperately to bring it back under control. No one had given the order to bring Fudo-Myoo on-line; the suspicion, at the upper levels of the command chain, at any rate, was that the weapon’s activation now, when the Web was attacking, could not possibly be coincidence. The Web was a machine intelligence; Fudo-Myoo was a machine, and one that had been off-line and nonoperational for centuries now. Somehow, the Web must have seized control of the laser array and was using its unthinkable power as a weapon, possibly to render Earth powerless, possibly to strike at Imperial ships as they closed with the Web cloud.
In fact, it was not the Web that was operating the array, but another order of intelligence entirely. Human attempts to disable the laser array by regaining control from Singapore Synchorbital or the Hachiman Station on Luna failed as cutoff switches were bypassed, fail-safe circuits failed, and attempts to reroute the power flow beaming out from the distributor satellites, in all but a few isolated cases, were blocked when access codes and priority override commands were ignored.
The Overmind had woken up, had studied the cascade of information detailing the attack by Web forces for long, long milliseconds, and then acted, acted in a manner consistent with the reaction of any living creature as it sought to defend itself from a perceived threat. Controlling the laser arrays directly now, as well as the computers controlling the power feed from Earth’s energy grid, it devoted a considerable portion of its mind to the astonishingly complex problem of tracking minute enemy targets at the distance of the planet Jupiter. Each of the laser arrays shifted its aim slightly, anticipating where the Web cloud was most likely to be by the time the laser bolts had crawled across the vast emptiness of space to reach their targets.
At a range of five astronomical units, it would take the laser light just forty minutes to reach its intended targets.
Chapter 16
Even though this may be ridiculous to mention, there are those who will seek to attack in a completely disjointed fashion when coming from the rear, and therefore fail to beat an enemy. Nothing fancy is involved. You go straight to the heart of the matter and defeat the enemy. There is nothing else involved. You either do it or you don’t. There is only one purpose in attacking the enemy
—
to cut him down with finality.
—
“Water Scroll”
The Book of the Five Spheres
M
IYAMOTO
M
USASHI
seventeenth century
B
.
C
.
E
.
Dev watched, transfixed by the information he was experiencing at several levels. He knew that it was the Overmind that had just independently taken over control of the old asteroid defense network and applied it to this new and even more deadly threat.
But what was it doing? Why was it operating independently… how could it be operating independently? With a growing awe, Dev watched as the Overmind triggered burst after burst of gigajoule laser light from the Fudo-Myoo array. From the Hachiman facility computer, he could monitor each weapon hard point, on the Lunar surface or in space, as it pivoted, elevated, ranged, and fired separately; the system had been designed to track a single incoming target or, at worst, a cluster of fragmented targets, bathing each in volley upon volley of coherent light. There were far too many individual targets in the Web cloud to permit a separate pulse to be directed at each, and once it reached a target, each individual volley would do far less damage to the enemy formation than a single thermonuclear warhead.
But the laser fire had the advantage of being able to keep up a devastatingly high rate of fire, minute after minute, then hour after hour, wearing away at the enemy cloud with greater and greater relentless efficiency, the closer it drew to Earth. A fusion of laser beams designed to vaporize hundreds of thousands of metric tons of nickel iron would make short work of 100-gram disassemblers; even the largest warships in the Imperial Navy couldn’t last more than a second or two against that much sheer power.
With the I2C link with the
Yamato,
Dev could watch the result from Ida-Ten Squadron’s perspective as the first laser volley struck home. Forty minutes after the Fudo-Myoo arrays had first fired, a dozen of the larger Webber machines suddenly glowed white hot, then vanished in soundless bursts of expanding, silvery vapor, the metal and ceramic of their hulls flash-heated into gas, which almost immediately condensed once more into tiny globules of liquid, which in turn congealed into gleaming motes of metallic dust.
The Web cloud did not at first respond to the attack; perhaps the machines couldn’t tell that the fire was being launched from the vicinity of Earth, still no more than a bright, blue-hued star barely visible near the shrunken sun, some five a.u.s distant. Or maybe there was a shortcoming in their design strategy… something that made it difficult for them to change their tactics in the middle of a battle.
Dev thought about that. At Nova Aquila, the Webber force had relied on overwhelming superiority of numbers, with their formations guided by five planetoid-sized vessels dubbed “Alphas” by the Confederation Military Command. The Overmind had defeated them by somehow—Dev still wasn’t sure how—breaking into their command network and ordering most of the Web machines to shut down. The Web, in turn, had countered that tactic by launching
this
assault without any Alphas.
How, he wondered, were they coordinating the attack? The only possibility that made any sense was that they were using a widely distributed network, one resident in all or most of the Web devices, which must be communicating with one another somehow. If that mode of communications could be discovered, perhaps the human forces would have the key to again penetrate the enemy force and shut it down.
For another hour, Dev watched the battle, continuing to try to reach the Overmind every few moments, and failing each time.
Damn it, what should I do?
He felt an agonizing vacillation. He needed to return to Nova Aquila and let the people there know what was happening. He needed, too, to link up with other human forces, Imperial and Confederation. He would be able to help coordinate their arrival, and—as he’d done when he’d been part of the DalRiss explorer fleet for all of those years—he’d be able to provide navigational data for their cityship Achievers.
But to leave the battle
now…
The solution was almost laughably simple… but it struck him with hammerblow force. It was quite possible, Dev realized, for him to literally be in two places at once.
He was currently resident in the Hachiman Defense Facility at Aristarchus, on the surface of Earth’s Moon. Hachiman was a sprawling complex of domes and half-buried hab modules, interconnected by subsurface tunnels and mag-lev transport tubes. Buried deep beneath the lunar regolith near the center of the station was the Hachiman Command Control Center, an enormous, artificial cavern that included the heavily armored base headquarters, with multiple I2C links extending throughout the Solar System and to several other nearby stars, as well as a direct link with Tenno Kyuden itself. While the Imperial Staff Command Headquarters at Tenno Kyuden was technically the command center for the entire Imperial military, Hachiman was the actual operations center, coordinating intelligence from literally thousands of sources, correlating it, and providing the ISCH with a streamlined image of what was actually going on.
The computer center for Hachiman, located directly beneath the HC
3
, was built around a system that was, arguably, the fastest and most powerful computer ever designed. Called Quantum K5050
Oki-Okasan
—the Nihongo meant very roughly “Big Mother”—it was the latest generation of what was generally called the quantum computer, a processor that used the Uncertainty Principle regarding where an electron was at any given instant to create alternate but simultaneous paths of electronic reasoning in a way eerily similar to the functioning of the human brain.
Once, centuries before, the quantum computer had promised to be the most likely route to the development of true artificial intelligence—computers as self-aware and at least as intelligent as humans. In fact, that route had proven to be far more complex than even its creators had ever envisioned; artificial intelligence, when it had been developed in the mid-twenty-first century, had been achieved through increasingly sophisticated software. Oki-Okasan was not self-aware, but some hundreds of AI programs were running simultaneously within its vast, electronic memory, with Dev an undetected extra guest. Swiftly, he began replicating himself.
He’d done this once before, downloading a copy of himself into a Naga-based probe which he’d sent on a reconnaissance into the center of the Galaxy. That time, of course, he’d relied on the considerable power of a Naga-DalRiss fusion within the heart of a DalRiss cityship. This time, he was alone and in the Quantum Oki-Okasan, but his memory included the entire process. It was, in fact, much like the common autopsych process known as jigging, the ViRsimulated creation of personality fragments with which a person could hold conversations as a means of resolving inner conflict or problems.
The process felt like a thinning, an indescribable stretching… and for a ragged, wavering moment, his self-awareness was fading. Dev had fainted perhaps twice in his life, both times when he was a kid, and this was like that, a lightheaded, whirling sensation as blackness closed in from the periphery of his vision. He fought to retain a grip on his sense of identity, clinging to the mental self-image he carried as a kind of talisman against the night.
Then he was staring at himself… an analogue of himself, actually, called into being by the literal doubling and fission of the carefully patterned information that made up the program that was Dev’s conscious mind.
“Good,” the two Devs thought in perfect unison. “I’ll stay here and keep an eye on things, while you go—”
Both Devs broke off the thought simultaneously. It would be several seconds, they realized jointly, before their differing perspectives began to color their experiences, resulting in two markedly different individuals, instead of identical copies of the same person.
“I’m Dev One,” he said, smiling. “You’re Dev Two.”
“What gives you priority?” his double asked, but he was grinning as he spoke. Both were remembering the uncomfortable time Dev had had with the recon probe double; since a duplication copied everything, including memories up to the moment of program fission, there was, in fact, no “original.” Each Dev was as real as the other… whatever the word “real” might mean inside this artificial space.
“I’m Dev One,” he said again. “But I give you the choice. You want to stay or go?”
His alter self considered this a moment. “I’ll stay. You go. I want to see how the battle develops, see if the Web develops any surprises we should know about.”
“Agreed. But we also need reinforcements. I’ll see that the DalRiss Achievers have the nav data they need to make pinpoint jumps in-system.”
“Agreed. I’ll… um… talk to you later. Take care of yourself.”
“You take care of
my-
self.”
Dev One uploaded himself into the main system Net, then patched through to 26 Draconis, then to Nova Aquila, where
Shinryu
and the other Imperial ships were already departing for Earth. After that, he began transferring with the speed of thought to one system after another in both Imperial space and along the independent worlds of the Frontier, assessing the reaction of Humanity’s armed forces.
Everywhere, ships were moving. When DalRiss cityships were available, the largest human ships present in-system were being maneuvered into their ventral folds and prepared for an immediate jump back to near-Earth space. At each stop, Dev entered the local military command computer network for that system, jacking in with the flagships of both Imperial and Confederation forces when both were present and uploading the latest combat information he’d received from Hachiman. He also linked with any DalRiss ships that were in system, interfacing with their Achiever network and uploading current field maps of the Sol system, a kind of mental road map based on the relative positions of gravitational sources and the background flux of magnetic fields and electromagnetic radiation, rather than actual highways. This type of “map” was what the DalRiss Achievers used to establish a mental image of their destination, and when it was accurate, detailed, and recent, it permitted the DalRiss cityships to jump very far indeed.
Dev felt a small thrill as he worked with both the human and the DalRiss forces. After the initial panic riding on the news that the Web had struck at Sol itself, it seemed, it
felt
as though all of humanity was pulling together, working with relentless and dogged persistence toward the single goal of getting as many warships to the Sol system as quickly as possible.
The atmosphere was taut throughout the ship, with the translation to Sol now only hours away. Kara had some time, though, before the final mission briefing. She’d elected to spend it with Ran.
She stepped off the ramp coming down from the middeck, then took the left branch of the corridor to
Gauss’s
recreation lounge. Lieutenant Ran Ferris was there, lying back in a game couch, eyes closed, his Companion extending a small forest of silvery tendrils from his head and interconnecting with the smart interfaces of his seat. She stood next to him for a moment, looking down into his face. He wore what might have been a barely detectable frown of concentration, though his mind should have been disconnected from his organic brain and nervous system. She wondered what he was experiencing.