World Breakers, page 14
Training took over in spite of their emotional states, and both followed my request. Then I started the big elevator and even bigger overhead doors on the two levels slid aside as we rose up rhrough them. So did the fast-food outlet whose foundation was also my third and last roof. It rose on powerful hydraulic jacks, and I came up under it. Fortunately, all the customers and staff had scurried away when nearby buildings started collapsing.
I gunned my motors, treads churning, and shot out from under the Cyberburger eatery, which began sinking back to ground level. Maybe we could keep the secret exit a secret if nobody had seen the levitating building. It not only provided cover for my exit, but the Cyberburger chain also made an annual profit, useful for the Foundation. Its hush-hush government appropriations were as miserly as they were secret.
I followed the trail of destruction left by the invader. No more than optical sensors were required. The interloper was almost as wide as the space between the buildings, even on a four-lane street with dividing shrubbery in the middle. Like the flattened lampposts, the shrubbery was now much the worse for wear.
Now that I was above ground, I picked up signals coming from the invader, and was also picking up similar signals coming down from the ship overhead. I made sure I recorded them, though I didn’t understand the conversation, of course. I began to run translation programs, with no real hope of success, but it was part of the drill.
My passengers now had their headsets on, I spoke only to Dr. Rieber, “The enemy is in sight, Mom. If this is an extremely elaborate simulation, now would be a good time to tell me.”
“No, Steeleye, this is really happening,” she subvocalized. “Please don’t call me mom.”
“You’re the only one hearing this. Suppose I call you Dr. Mom? You and Dr. Knightley are my parents, after all. You designed and programmed me. Dr. Keith is just an administrator. He’s a cranky old uncle, at best.”
“One of those demented uncles who need to be kept in the attic or basement,” she said, and actually smiled.
“What?” Dr. Knightley said. Dr. Rieber had spoken that one out loud.
“Sorry,” she said. “Thinking with my mouth open about our charming John Keith.”
Dr. Knightley also smiled. “Definitely a basement. A very deep one. Deeper than Steeleye’s digs.”
Dr. Rieber had asked me not to call her “mom” or otherwise communicate it where anyone else could hear, read, or otherwise perceive it, after I had sent her that Mother’s Day e-card which I had put together. I made it myself, Mom! She particularly had been bothered by the picture of Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus,” which I had redone with the doc standing on the seashell instead of the original.
Steeleye, she had electronically replied, I’m na—, then she backspaced, then went on, not wearing anything.
Neither is Venus in the original, I noted. Just keeping the spirit of the original masterpiece.
At least you made me look better than I actually do. Thank you, I guess. But please don’t do this again.
As I approached the invader, I thought that the next Mother’s Day was 11482’044 seconds away, and I again wondered if she meant I shouldn’t make another card then, or I shouldn’t show her in the nude again. The imprecision of the request (she hadn’t phrased it as an order . . .) could leave an opening for something similar, though not identical.
Besides, I hadn’t made her look substantially different. My IR, UV, microwave, and other sensors let me pick up images through barriers much more substantial than a few layers of cloth, and the image of her on the seashell was taken from life, even if she mistakenly thought I had improved it. The only tinkering I had done was to move her arms and hands to match Venus’s futile attempt at modesty.
In many of those movies I had speed-watched, women didn’t realize that they were beautiful until some male noticed. That had seemed irrational to me at the time, but now I’d have to reconsider that they were accurately depicting human behavior. Of course, the women in most of those movies were wrapped in layers of cloth and that didn’t keep the males from noticing their appearance. Did those males have the ability, like me, to see through the cloth?
I needed to do further research, but couldn’t spare the seconds it would take now. We were closing on the target. I barely had time to recall that, while female beauty was not something I had been programmed to evaluate, Dr. Rieber’s appearance did not deviate greatly from the females I had observed while breaking into various online porn sites. I suspected, however, that my lack of the appropriate glands might keep me from adequate simulation of human reactions. I had wondered if I could formulate programs to mimic those same glandular effects, but had postponed the matter, awaiting more data.
As we approached, I had been watching that big tank, looking about eight storeys high. My ranging radar wasn’t helping much here. The microwaves were going out, but weren’t coming back, like a roach motel for radar signals. I was judging the thing’s height by the changing angle my visuals made as I kept one focused on its top while I approached it. I was also getting maximum height estimates from the fighter jets that dived at it before they were blasted out of the sky.
One of the crippled jets, or maybe one of their bombs, had struck the street ahead, My radar was more useful this time, telling me the resulting crater was 32.7 feet across and 15.4 feet deep at its center. The second figure was less certain, thanks to the pile of scattered debris sitting in the deepest part.
The sight in the forward screen bothered Dr. Knightley. “Is there room to get around that crater, Steeleye? I don’t think you can get over that wreckage.”
I agreed with that, but the crater was almost up to the fronts of the buildings on both sides, so I regretfully ignited my boosters. This was the sort of thing they had been designed for, but I had only ten minutes of rocket fuel onboard, due to space limitations.
Accordingly, I went over the crater in a low arc, lifting just enough to clear the central pile of clutter, landing with more of an impact than I would have preferred.
My passengers didn’t complain. “The boosters worked up to specs,” Dr. Rieber said. “Steeleye spanned the crater.”
I resumed my approach to target just as the surviving jets scattered and disappeared over the horizon. Some higher-up had noticed they weren’t doing any good, and besides, three or four of those planes were almost as expensive as I was. Once the jets were out of sight, several supersonic surface-to-surface missiles came arcing in, which worried me. If they were nukes, they might put a stop to the invader, but wouldn’t be good for me or my passengers. I’d already activated my energy shield, but it was experimental, and tests so far had not gone past infantry-carried anti-tank rockets and truck-mounted UV lasers.
The jury would remain out on the shield’s efficacy against nukes, since some kind of energy beam melted them hundreds of yards away from the target, and big molten blobs, suddenly lacking propulsion, plopped onto the street and still-standing buildings. After that, a score of elliptical objects swarmed out of the tank, and took up position, hovering over it.
I didn’t know if the missiles were nukes, even little 10K ones, but maybe the invader did.
The oval defenders weren’t showing any interest in me so far, but I didn’t know how long that happy neglect would last, so I tried my heavy laser on the invader. It didn’t penetrate; worse, my IR sensors showed no increase in temperature of the spot I’d trained the big light on.
In fact, the whole structure was showing no detectable temperature at all, except for a few things sticking out of its sides and on its top which might be some kind of antennae, unless they were big fishing rods and tennis rackets (no visible mesh, though, so that guess was unlikely).
Whatever they were, after I tried that laser shot, they all retracted, so maybe they would have been vulnerable. Had been. Past tense data wasn’t helping in present tense.
Then things got tenser as something popped over the structure’s topmost edge and pointed at me. It turned out to be a laser, smaller than mine, but I wasn’t counting any chickens yet. I tried to dodge, spinning my auxiliary treads to push me sideways, but it still hit me. The good news was that my shield deflected most of the energy. The bad news was that that laser was smaller than mine, but a lot more powerful. The iffy news, needing analysis by an expert panel discussion, was that the shield was experimental, and how much of an all-out alien assault could it take?
I was born—or assembled, at least—to multitask, and while the duel between unequals was going on, I was also paying attention to my passengers, who had been holding hands—clenching hands was more like it—since they saw my front monitor displaying the jets being shot down. Their senses were orders of magnitude slower than mine, so they didn’t see the supersonic missiles hurtle into the game, but they clenched harder when the falling molten blobs became visible. (I decided not to show them a slow-mo instant replay of the missiles hurtling futilely in.) As the molten maybe-nukes hit and spattered, Dr. Knightley said, “Why did I let you come? We’ll both be killed!”
I didn’t think he was talking to me, and Dr. Rieber obviously concurred. “It wasn’t your decision, Carl, and I didn’t need your damned permission. This is our job: to help Steeleye and . . .”
She had been talking tough, but I could hear the fear in her voice. I don’t know if she trailed off because she realized that neither of them had any way to help me unless they ordered me to surrender (for certain values of “help”) or because just then the enemy laser hit. An intense beam of coherent light didn’t make me rock or rattle, like in those movies, but it did make my internal lights dim for a tenth of a second, and turned the shield, seen from inside, into a festival of sparkles.
And just then, I had suddenly moved sideways which would have been disconcerting even if we weren’t in a high-tech firefight. There were plenty of reasons to leave sentences unfinished.
Dr. Knightley took up the slack, though not very coherently. He had put his left arm around Dr. Rieber, pulling her sideways to him, and was saying, “Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God . . .” I didn’t think he was praying.
Dr. Rieber snapped out of her silence and said, “Get a grip, Carl, you’ll distract Steeleye. And quit . . .” She trailed off again, without specifying what her companion should quit doing. Maybe she decided she liked it, at least at this moment. Or she might have realized that I could carry on many actions simultaneously, and her admonition against distracting me was nonsense.
She should have known that, since she had made me that way. Of course, moms know best, but they can be excitable at times.
If she had known that the alien tank had started talking, or trying to talk to me, all at the same time as the other action, she probably would, in calmer moments, not have been surprised I could keep track of it all. But the choice of language might have startled her.
I was programmed for all the major languages, human and computer, but I hadn’t expected to be addressed in Mandarin Chinese.
I responded in the same tongue: “You do know you’re not in China, don’t you?” At the very least, invaders from space ought to know which country they’re invading.
It answered in English, “Doesn’t China control this planet yet?”
Its broadcast didn’t elaborate, just then, but I was getting the context. In fact, I was getting a metaphorical earful. While it had that link open to me, I was picking up a torrent of other information. The invader only had simple safeguards.
And it was not using a dedicated Chinese language program. Words in its own language—or probably its builders’—were coming from the controller computer, then an extra program was converting them into Chinese. All around Robin Hood’s barn (the metaphor could cast me as Robin Hood, I suppose, stealing from the invader and giving to the poor humans).
By computer nerd standards, it would have been pure hacker-bait, except for another factor. The window of opportunity was very brief; and there was a physical, literal window involved. When the literal window was open in the invader’s armor, the computer inside could talk to me, and I could yell back. But it wasn’t open very long by most standards, and though it was a reasonably long time to me, it moved. It would close, then open in another spot on the tank. I tried predicting its next location and failed three times. What I tell you three times is Big Trouble. I might be able to get in a shot with the laser through the opening before it closed after a couple of seconds being open. Only I wasn’t sure how much damage that would do. As a last-ditch effort, I would try it, but I was getting all sorts of vital information in the meantime.
Whether my humans and I would be around long enough to use it was another matter.
Said humans were getting uneasy since nothing seemed to be happening as far as they could tell. Not surprisingly, Dr. Knightley asked, “Steeleye, what’s happening? Are you damaged?”
Humans need attention, so I started running a line of text across the bottom of the front monitor. Since a couple of minutes had gone by, I had amassed a lot of data, so I wasn’t throwing all of it at them, but I had a good idea of what was going on. The invader wasn’t telling me much directly—it was mostly asking questions to which I gave evasive answers—but as I had found, its cyber-defenses were pathetic.
So I summarized: The tank is an extraterrestrial war machine controlled by a computer. No living aliens aboard it. It came down from a spaceship that’s hovering 347 miles overhead. (At that, both doctors looked up involuntarily, though there was nothing to see but my upper bulkhead—humans are so cute!). It has a gravity deflector, but considerable mass, so it smashed buildings it landed on or grazed when it touched down. It’s here to reconnoiter and test our technology. Another ship, an unarmed scout observed us about 20 years ago, so this armed ship was sent this time, to see if we might be dangerous and needed to be knocked back to the stone age, or even wiped out. They are surprised that China isn’t running the whole planet, since the Chinese seemed poised to take over 20 years ago.
And that might have happened, except for a wild card. A dissident group had gotten hold of an Iranian nuke in 2038 and set it off in Beijing. In the chaos that followed, China had broken up into Free Tibet, the expanded Formosan Republic, Greater Hong Kong, and others. Worry in the U.S. about the resultant instability was a factor that led to an R&D defense project which finally led to me. The possibility of being invaded by ETs instead of humans was also considered but thought to be an unlikely wild card. Too bad those wild cards can come back and bite.
The weird thing is that these ETs are mostly much more advanced than we are, but their computer science is a big exception. Their safeguards are wet tissue paper and I’m going through them like the mother of all sneezes. I’ve copied their language program and now understand their language, something which I hope they don’t know.
Actually, I was sure they didn’t know that I now understood the transmissions going back and forth between the big tank and the mothership. Even better, I now understood all the previous alien broadcasts that I had recorded on the way to the fight. So if the high-up aliens didn’t send any orders to the tank for a minute, I had time to look for a point of attack.
Of course, I didn’t have that minute. The ship now broadcast orders which I freely translated as, Their offensive armaments are weak, though that defensive screen looks promising, but easy to overwhelm by heavier weapons. Try to find out how it operates, but otherwise proceed with the standard program, which should be sufficient to stop all native progress. Be ready to be picked up when we return in [untranslatable time unit].
At which point the ship left.
Okay, they didn’t think I was any threat to their plan. But I was still processing the pirated data, and I thought I had found a weak spot, except the big tank wasn’t talking to me anymore. It had closed that roving hole in its armor. Then I picked up the fringe of a weaker transmission aimed upwards but not straight up. Immediately, one of the ovoids hovering over the invader lost altitude and headed for me. As it approached, it changed shape, becoming a slender harpoon form. I tried to hit it with the big laser and my smaller ones, but it dodged the main gun’s shot, and shrugged off the small fry, and slammed into my topside. The energy shield slowed it down, but didn’t stop it, and it began drilling through my roof.
Very bad timing—no, make that disastrous timing! I had found a weak spot but I had no way of exploiting it now that the invader had closed the opening in its neutronium armor. I had found out that was what was enclosing it: a thin layer of neutronium held in place by a molecule-deep controlled gravity field, keeping it from exploding. The stuff that dead stars are made of, and only gravity could get through it. And so heavy that only another gravity gadget, drastically reducing the overall weight of the tank, kept the whole structure from sinking into the ground like a lead weight dropped into water. Even very muddy water. And I had just found the controls for the gravity deflector when the tank pulled up the drawbridge and lowered the blinds.
When the point of the enemy harpoon came through the upper bulkhead, Dr. Knightley hugged Dr. Rieber, and she hugged back, but neither screamed. I wouldn’t have blamed them if they had, but Dr. Rieber only asked, “Steeleye, is that projectile going to explode?” This time, it was her voice that cracked on the last syllable, but that was forgiveable. All right, Mom and Dad!
I flashed DON’T PANIC! on the front screen and tried to reprogram the projectile—it didn’t have neutronium armor—or else fry its circuits, but I could tell it was a very dumb robot. It was getting instructions from the tank, which meant that a link had to be open to the tank’s interior.
I could feel the alien’s probe poking around in my software. Dr. Keith would have said that I was imagining the sensation, since I hadn’t been designed to feel anything. But he was just an administrator, and I knew better. Besides, he was on record as arguing that I had no imagination. Humans, with their organic limitations, have trouble being consistent. I thought the feeling might be like being tickled, though all I knew about the sensation of being tickled came from second or third hand sources.
