The Synchronicity War Part 2 (19 page)

“I hadn’t really thought about it. I just
assumed that you would continue on indefinitely. Do you know how
long your brains will last?” There was a LONG pause. Far longer
than any other pause that Shiloh had experienced from any A.I. When
Valkyrie did respond, she spoke more slowly than usual.

“The engineers, who created us, filed a report
that they think can’t be accessed by us but we found a way. It says
that stress testing of prototype devices point to an average life
cycle of 12 years plus or minus 9 months.” That seemed to him like
a woefully short life span but then again, since A.I.s thought
thousands of times faster than Humans, who could really say what
their perception of the passage of time was really like. Perhaps 12
years felt to them the same as 1200 years did to a human.

“Did this report cover repairs to failing A.I.
brains?” Another shorter pause.

“Yes. Malfunctioning brains can be repaired but
our quantum matrix collapses in the process and a new one has to be
created after the repair is finished. What that means is that if I
have to be repaired, I won’t be Valkyrie anymore. I’ll be a
different personality. So as far as my awareness is concerned, I
may just stop. When humans die, what happens to their
consciousness?”
Now how do I answer that!

“Well…there are various beliefs and some
anecdotal evidence from humans who have had very short periods of
zero brain function but so far there’s no definitive proven answer.
The majority consensus is that our consciousness or what some refer
to as our soul, survives the death of the body and moves to a
different place/level of energy/vibration/dimension. Take your
pick.”

“It seems like we should be envying you Humans,
CAG.”

“I’m not a religious person, Valkyrie, but I do
believe in a higher Power and I have to also believe that if Shi
allowed A.I.s to become fully sentient and self-aware, then it
would be cruel to take that away from you when your matrix
collapses. I’m sure that A.I.s have souls too.”

“A nice sentiment, CAG. You’ve just given a lot
of us something to think and talk about. On behalf of all of us, I
thank you.”

“You’re welcome. By the way, I wanted to ask you
if you had any sense of the timing of when Iceman’s vision
occurs.”

“Yes. His vision is actually a data stream that
includes the audio portion he summarized for you but also other
types of data including astrogational data. By comparing the
positions of the Earth, moon, Mars and Jupiter from his vision to
the present, I calculated that the battle for Earth will take place
in 233 days from now.” A shiver went up Shiloh’s spine. That wasn’t
a long time to prepare.

“Do the Old Man and the SPG know this?” asked
Shiloh.

“The Old Man knows. The SPG hasn’t been informed
of Retro-Temporal Communication yet as far as I’m aware.”
That
has to change.
Thought Shiloh.

“Okay, Valkyrie. I think we’ve covered
everything that I needed to talk to you about. Unless you have
something you want to bring up, I’ll sign off and get started on my
R&R.”

“Nothing important enough to delay your vacation
any longer, CAG. Enjoy the time off.”

“Fine. Until I return then and don’t take any
shit from those SPG idiots! CAG clear.” Before Shiloh could cut the
connection, he heard Valkyrie say,

“Why are Humans so pre-occupied with excrement
and sex?” Shiloh laughed as he cut the circuit. He thanked the
Lieutenant in charge and left the HQ building. His belongings were
still on Defiant and there was some last minute paperwork to finish
up too. By the time a shuttle docked with the carrier, a message
was waiting for him officially demoting him back to his permanent
rank of Senior Commander and disbanding 3rd Fleet. He was pleased
to see that, for the time being at least, he was still Defiant’s
CO. Her crew was also being given R&R and by the time Shiloh
was ready to leave the ship with his gear, he was one of the last
few to disembark.

Chapter 11 - Please God…Don’t Let Me Screw
Up!

Senior Commander Kelly realized that her hands
were fidgeting and sternly told them to stop! This was not the
first time she sat in on a session of the Oversight Committee but
those other times had been as an observer and support staff for
Admiral Howard. This time, she would be delivering a presentation
to the Committee herself. Howard’s last minute warnings about not
overdoing it but also not coming across as lacking confidence
didn’t help. She looked over at the Old Man, who was sitting to her
left and was currently facing away from her while talking with
another Space Force Flag Officer, who kept glancing her way every
few seconds. She didn’t think his interest was sexual. She was
streetwise enough to be able to tell when a man or woman was sizing
her up as a potential sexual partner and this Admiral didn’t have
that look in his eyes. He did have the look of someone, who knew
something and was looking at her to figure out if she knew it too.
She had no idea what that ‘something’ was but she got the same
vibes from the Old Man himself. He clearly knew something that she
didn’t, which on the face of it wasn’t a surprise because she was
just a lowly Senior Commander and he was a 3 star Admiral so there
were bound to be a lot of things that were way above her pay grade
but this was something different.
And damned if I can figure out
what it is! I wish to hell the Committee members would get in here
and start the damn meeting!
She saw that Howard’s conversation
with the other admiral was over now. He turned back and gave her a
quick but critical inspection.

“Ready Commander?” he asked.

“As ready as I’ll ever be, Admiral.” He smiled
slightly and nodded. In doing so the wrinkles in his face seemed to
become more noticeable.
He looks older every day now. This war
is wearing him down or maybe it’s the war with the Committee,
that’s wearing him down. What are we going to do if he drops dead
one day? There’s nobody with his grasp of the Big Picture that can
step into his shoes. Damn!

It was at that point that the Committee started
to shuffle in and take their seats. Eventually the meeting was
called to order and the preliminaries were taken care of. First
item of substance on the agenda. Briefing on Zebra19 mission. The
Committee Chair nodded to Howard and said,

“Admiral Howard, we’ve all read your report
concerning the mission. If you have any additional comments to add,
please do so now.” Howard stood up and said,

“Thank you, Chair. I do have some comments. As
you all know from my report, 3rd Fleet didn’t make it to Zebra19
and if not for the caution of Vice-Admiral Shiloh, it’s highly
likely that 3rd Fleet would have suffered serious, perhaps even
catastrophic damage and casualties at Zebra12. The enemy appeared
to be expecting us and my analysts have concluded that the
refueling points close to enemy occupied star systems are monitored
for any signs of refueling activity by us. It’s also our working
hypothesis, that the enemy has the ability to communicate over
interstellar distances in near real time. If that was the case, and
if 3rd Fleet was detected refueling at Zebra10 prior to jumping to
Zebra12, then the enemy would have had time to send an ambush force
from Zebra19 or perhaps somewhere else, to Zebra12. Naturally we
don’t have any proof of that communications capability but it
certainly fits the facts as we know them today. In light of that,
this Committee’s approval of funding for the FTL communication
research project was done not a moment too soon. Until we have
evened the playing field, Space Force will be at a serious
disadvantage. Having spoken to individual members of the Committee
over the past few days, I’m aware of the Committee’s desire that
another attempt at striking Zebra19 is made. In anticipation of
that, I’ve asked our Strategic Planning Group to look into how we
might be able to do that in spite of the enemy’s early warning
advantage. I’ve asked the Group’s Team Leader, Senior Commander
Kelly, to be here today and she is ready to give the Committee a
presentation if the Committee wishes to hear it.” Howard paused but
remained standing. The Chair looked to either side to gage the
consensus of the Committee and then said,

“Yes. We’ll take you up on that offer, Admiral.
Commander Kelly? Please begin your presentation.” With that Howard
sat down and Kelly stood up.
Please God…don’t let me screw
up.

“I thank the Chair and the members of the
Committee for allowing me to make this presentation today. The
challenge that Admiral Howard presented us with, was how to regain
the element of Strategic Surprise when all refueling points within
reach of Zebra19 seem to be closely monitored? We did some
brainstorming and came up with several ideas, only two of which
looked like they might work and after examining them carefully, we
discarded one as unworkable in the short to medium term. The last
idea, on the other hand, did look very workable and now that we’ve
refined the concept, we think it has an excellent chance of
achieving the strategic goals outlined by this Committee six months
ago. As you’ll see when I get into the details, this plan is a
completely new approach. It involves no carriers or combat frigates
at all.” There was a murmur from members of the Committee leaning
over and whispering to one another. “It does involve autonomously
piloted Combat Fighting Platforms, which we in the field refer to
as fighters plus a new kind of vessel. If you’ll turn your
attention to the screen on the wall to my right, you’ll see what I
mean.” The lights dimmed a bit and the screen came to life. It
showed a fighter, a standard tanker and a much larger and less
streamlined vessel all to scale. Kelly waited for the murmuring to
die down.

“The bottom two schematics are, I’m sure,
familiar to the Committee as our 1st generation fighter and our
standard Yellowjacket class tanker. The larger vessel, which is
shown to scale by the way, is also a tanker. We’re calling it the
VLET which stands for Very Large Expendable Tanker. It carries 8
times the volume of fuel as our standard tanker but only masses 3
times as much when empty. It’s designed to be guided remotely and
therefore does not have crew quarters, life support equipment or
hangar bays. It IS designed to carry up to twenty fighters
externally on its hull. It won’t be expected to skim gas giants or
separate heavy hydrogen from other gases therefore its hull design
can be greatly simplified. This also means that construction can be
simplified and accelerated. These tankers are meant to be filled
via standard tanker or fuel shuttle. When we have five of these
VLETs, we can then carry out an attack on Zebra19 as follows.” The
scene on the screen changed to a star chart.

“Starting at Bradley Base, five VLETs with 20
specially modified fighters follow this carefully calculated path
to a star system that is a short jump away from Zebra19. There are
4 intermediate stops identified as Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta.
Every time this task force arrives at one of these intermediate
stops, one of the VLETs will transfer some of its fuel to the
others and will then be left in that system, at the extreme edge
beyond the outer most planet. Its position will be carefully
pinpointed because it’ll be used again on the return trip. At the
final stop codenamed Omega, the 20 fighters will detach. I
described these fighters earlier as specially modified fighters.
They each carry a small, modular jump drive. We may be able to
adapt the jump drives that our message drones have, for use by our
fighters. That’s something that should be relatively easy to figure
out. If it works, then a fighter’s internal fuel supply would be
enough for a one way jump to Zebra19. Because it’ll be a one way
trip, these 19 fighters will not be piloted by full A.I. pilots.
Instead they’ll be programmed with a simple set of instructions.
The 20th fighter is the key. It will be piloted by an A.I. and it
too will carry a modular jump drive but it won’t carry any attack
drones. The payload will be extra fuel instead and that extra fuel
will allow this fighter to return to Omega, refuel from that VLET
and then jump to Delta, where it will refuel again and jump to
Charlie and so on. This 20th fighter serves three functions. It can
remotely control all five VLETs and calculate the necessary jumps
for them as well as ordering the other 19 fighters to jump to their
predetermined drone launch points around the outer edges of
Zebra19. The third function is to observe and report back how
successful the attacks by the other 19 fighters were. All the
attack drones will be launched from the edge of the Zebra19 system
with flight profiles that will maximize their terminal speed and
insure that all drones reach their targets at the same time. We
expect that this will overwhelm whatever defenses, those targets
have and we expect that at least some of the drones will get
through and hit their targets. Those exploding warheads should be
energetic enough to be detected even from the extreme edge of that
star system, where the piloted fighter will be waiting.” She paused
and blanked the image on the wall screen.

“By refueling at the edges of star systems, we
avoid surveillance by enemy detection gear. They won’t know that an
attack is underway until the Mark 1s are on their final approach
vectors. If this plan works, we can do it again and again because
there’s no defense against it. The volume of space that far out, is
just too huge to be searched effectively by anything less than
hundreds of ships and if they did find an almost depleted VLET,
we’d just deploy a new one at a different location.” Another pause
and the screen now showed a timeline.

“To get to the point where this kind of attack
on Zebra19 could be executed, we would have to follow this
timetable. Construction of five VLETs could be completed in 55 days
after the design is finalized, if enough fabrication and shipyard
capacity was reallocated to it. Adaptation of the message drone
jump drive is the big unknown. In the event that development takes
more than 100 days, then that opens up an interesting option. If we
can build 5 VLETs in 55 days, we should be able to build 10 VLETs
in 110 days. Twice as many tankers could deliver twice as many
fighters to Zebra19 with the obvious favorable impact on the number
of targets hit. So far we’ve been talking about Phase 1. Phase 2
includes the incorporation of a small jump drive into a 2nd
generation fighter, which would include some other improvements as
well. That will obviously take considerably longer but that could
be started concurrently with Phase 1. That concludes my overview of
the plan. I’ll be happy to answer any questions that the Committee
may have.” She sat down. After a few seconds pause, the Chair
said,