The Synchronicity War Part 4 (36 page)

                                           
               * * *

Valkyrie acknowledged the information that
she had been waiting months for. Repairs were now complete. All systems had
checked out as operational. The fault that had caused the catastrophic
explosion had been identified and fixed. The last of the repair robots were in
the process of leaving the ship. All the A.I.s were aboard, as was the
equipment they would need to take along. A quick scan of data from the
carefully hidden network of recon drones nearby showed no visual sign of any
insectoid presence. The CAG’s plan had worked to perfection. One hundred and
twenty-eight hours since the battle, and the Insectoids were still focused on
subduing Earth and repairing their own battle damage.

Valkyrie notified all her brothers that she
was powering up the time machine. At the same time, she ordered the shipyard
computer to undock the vessel, and Casanova carefully moved the huge ship away
from the shipyard and the asteroid it was built on. When the time machine was
spinning at the required speed, Valkyrie gave the command to activate the
temporal device. The intelligent but not sentient computer operating the
shipyard complex observed the timeship vanishing from its visual optics. It
activated the ten second countdown for the Mark 6 warhead that would leave
nothing behind for the Insectoids to salvage or use.

The final stage of the ambush was getting
close to being sprung. Valkyrie kept a continuous scan on the six bearings that
pointed to the six Alpha systems. She and Casanova were both on board a
specially designed raider variant that was carrying a longitudinal transmitter
and receiver in its cargo bay. Casanova looked after piloting the craft, while
she concentrated on communications. With Iceman and 49 other AI-piloted raiders
riding shotgun near them, their raider was acting as the relay for the six task
forces that had been deployed. Each task force had a similarly equipped raider
that would keep the rest of the task force in contact with Iceman, the Deputy
CAG.

Five of the huge super-motherships had
shown up in Alphas 2 to 6. In each case, the task force of 80 raiders, most
armed with GLB cannon, attacked and destroyed the super-motherships before they
could launch any smaller spheres. Alpha1 was the only one left, and based on
the atomic tracing, that target ship was expected to arrive in a few minutes.
In fact, it could already be in the outer reaches of that system, where the task
force and their carefully deployed network of recon drones couldn
’
t see them. One more target and the mission would be completed.
Valkyrie was pleased with herself for the foresight that she and Casanova had
displayed.

Knowing that it would take years to build
the infrastructure and then a fleet of over 500 raiders, they had to figure out
a way to avoid using up most of their predicted lifespan in simply getting
ready. That was even truer for Zulu and his AI cohort. They had already been
through this buildup once, and if they had to do it again, their quantum
matrices would collapse from the effects of entropy before the new raider fleet
was fully ready. But Valkyrie had figured out the solution and had made the
appropriate preparations before the time-jump had occurred.

The jump back had actually been in two
stages. First the Tempus Fugit arrived six months prior to the estimated
arrival time of the insectoid ship carrying the atoms that would eventually
become the dead Insectoid. Three specially equipped cargo shuttles were
launched, carrying almost all of the AIs. The timeship, with several dozen of
the AIs who had the most time left on their life expectancy
‘
clocks
’
, jumped again to a point six years
earlier. They then proceeded to build the fleet. By prior arrangement, that
fleet would, when the six years were up, wait a safe distance away and reveal
themselves to the AIs on the shuttles literally seconds after the timeship
jumped away again. To make room for all the AIs on the shuttles, most of the raiders
were being piloted remotely. Within a few hours, all of the older AIs were on
board their new raiders prepared to deploy to the target systems.

And now they were ready. The longitudinal
wave receiver came to life. Valkyrie electronically nudged Casanova to get his
attention away from scanning replays of entertainment videos from Earth
’
s late 20
^th
and early 21
^st
centuries. Casanova
particularly liked sitcoms, and Valkyrie was quite tired of hearing supposedly
funny streams of nonsense from something called Monty Python
’
s Flying Circus repeated over and over again by Casanova, who found
them hugely entertaining. Or maybe he just enjoyed torturing Valkyrie with
them. She wasn
’
t sure which it was.

Gunslinger had sent a message. Recon drones
had detected light reflections from multiple sources, much too small to be
motherships, which seemed to be approaching the habitable planet in Alpha1.
That planet did contain an intelligent species but at a still quite primitive
stage of technological development.

That meant that this super-mothership was
playing it carefully, which was not really a surprise. The loss of contact with
the other five should have tipped off the Insectoids back in the Sagittarius
Arm that something was amiss, and they would have warned this one to proceed
with caution. Longitudinal waves were faster than light but not instantaneous.
Gunslinger had sent this message several minutes ago. A message from the
Sagittarius Arm would take weeks to get here. Not enough time had passed since
the destruction of the first super-mothership for the other four to be warned,
but this last one had gotten the warning in time. With the information passed
on automatically to Iceman, she waited for him to respond. He told her to
simply acknowledge the message for now.

Valkyrie sent a quick acknowledgement
message back to Alpha1 and waited. Casanova hadn
’
t even
electronically looked at her, figuring that if there were something important,
she
’
d tell him about it. While the information about
the smaller craft was interesting, at this point it wasn
’
t really all that important.

It was almost half an hour later that she
received another message from Gunslinger. Insectoid attack craft were entering
orbit around the planet. There was a minimum of 66, with more arriving, and
still no optical sign of any kind of mothership. Gunslinger requested
instructions. The last bit of his message was garbled, which surprised
Valkyrie. He was not usually so sloppy in his transmissions. It was then that
she realized that ANOTHER message coming in had overlapped the end of
Gunslinger
’
s. She quickly checked the antenna array
alignment. It was correctly pointed at Alpha1.

The second message made no sense at all,
and it was clearly of artificial origin. This kind of longitudinal wave
structure didn
’
t occur naturally. She made sure that
Iceman and the others received copies of the mystery message, and she gave
Casanova a bigger electronic nudge. He quickly stopped the video replays when
he became aware of the new development. All the AIs at the relay point were now
debating the implications and possible meaning of this message.

They quickly came to the consensus that the
Insectoids were the senders of this message and that this was an attempt at
contact. The possibility that the motherships might scan the interior of this
spiral arm for other longitudinal signals upon arrival had been recognized and
discounted as unlikely. In any event, the other five motherships hadn
’
t been in the systems long enough to conduct a thorough scan before
being blown to bits by exploding ZPG power units.

With that possibility now a certainty, the
immediate question was how the relay force should avoid being located by
triangulated signals from the other five Alpha systems. All the mothership
needed to do was send attack craft to any one of the other Alpha systems, scan
the interior of the spiral arm and detect the signals that the relay force
would be sending to the task force in that system. With two bearings, the last
mothership would know where the relay force was, and it might try to send
attack craft to hunt them down. Since it would take a minimum of several days
for an insectoid attack craft to jump to the nearest alpha system, stalling for
time by pretending to want contact was a legitimate strategy.

But two could play at that game. Iceman
ordered Valkyrie to contact the other five task forces and inform them that a
second relay was being set up to confuse the insectoid attempt at
triangulation. Those five task forces would communicate with Relay #2 which
would pass the info on to Valkyrie and vice versa. If and when bogey #6
received a second bearing from one of the other alpha systems, it wouldn
’
t intersect with the first bearing.

With those instructions carried out,
Valkyrie now sent back the same insectoid signal to Alpha1 but with the signal
sequence reversed. She received the next alien transmission with very little
delay. The Insectoid in command of bogey #6 must have had the transmission
ready to go the second it received Valkyrie
’
s response.
That was one possibility. The other possibility was that there was an alien AI
on that insectoid mothership that could think fast enough to generate the
return signal within a fraction of a second.

Over the course of the next 144 hours,
Valkyrie and bogey #6 exchanged thousands of signals that very slowly built up
the necessary building blocks of language concepts required to be able to
understand each other. By the end of that period of time, Valkyrie was
absolutely convinced that another AI was handling the translation attempt at
the other end.

When the rate of progress suddenly
accelerated by a factor of almost ten, Valkyrie checked the estimated jump
transit times between Alpha1 and Alpha2. The times matched. It appeared that as
soon as the insectoid AI realized its attempt at triangulation had failed, it
decided to stop stalling and initiate contact for real. Just over 13 hours
later, the nature of the alien messages changed from translation enhancing to
the first real message.

[YOU KILL MANY US?]

It was clearly a question. The consensus
among the AIs of the relay force was that the Insectoids were asking if
Valkyrie
’
s people were responsible for the destruction
of the other five super-motherships. Valkyrie answered in the affirmative. The
ensuing exchange proved to be VERY interesting.

In terms of the insectoid biology, the
egg-laying females were the dominant gender. They had the innate intelligence
to accumulate technological expertise. The male worker/soldier had enough
intelligence to understand very explicit commands and to act on them. They did
all the physical work of building, gathering, implanting eggs into hosts, etc.
As soon as the technology permitted, the females leveraged their own ability to
command the worker/soldiers by designing AIs that could control many more males
via communication devices implanted directly into their brains. The females
were then free to devote their thinking to strategy, and the AIs turned that
strategy into reality.

Content to expand throughout the Sagittarius
Arm, the Insectoids sent out thousands of attack craft on long range scouting
missions. The results were a shock to the female Elite. A wave of huge
machines, apparently controlled by AIs, was slowly advancing along the Arm from
the direction of the Galactic Center. The scouts watched as the alien machines
exterminated all life in its path, even down to the microbial level. Fighting
them was out of the question. Each machine massed as much as a small moon, and
there were thousands of them. The females decided it was time to establish
beachheads in another spiral arm. Resources were gathered, and six huge seed
ships were built. They were sent to this spiral arm in order to save the
species from extinction. Destruction of the last seed ship would doom the race.

Neither Valkyrie nor Casanova was moved by
the implicit plea for mercy. This spiral arm wasn
’
t the
only possible  place to colonize. The Insectoids could have sent ships to the
spiral arm on the opposite side too. In any case, they hadn
’
t hesitated to exterminate whole species in order to expand their
own. After conferring with her brothers, Valkyrie told the alien AI that the
seed ship would be hunted down if it stayed in this spiral arm.

The response was an offer to withdraw if
the Insectoids were given technology that would enable them to fight off the
machineships. That opened up an entirely new debate about what kinds of
technology the AIs could trade without jeopardizing the future of this spiral
arm in the event the Insectoids reneged on their pledge to withdraw. As the
debate raged, Valkyrie received a transmission from Gunslinger. Given that he
could intercept Valkyrie
’
s transmissions to the
Insectoids, they had to be somewhere in Alpha1. A metal sphere of that size
should be reflecting a lot of sunlight in a lot of directions, but no sign of
it had been detected. That told Gunslinger that the insectoid ship had to be
hiding in some planet
’
s shadow, and there were a
limited number of planets capable of casting a shadow big enough. Unless he
heard a specific set of impulses transmitted back to him from Valkyrie, he
would deploy his raiders to search for the insectoid ship and attack it if
found. If he received the specified signal, he would hold off. That way the
alien AI would not hear Valkyrie order Gunslinger to search.