Fear the Survivors (33 page)

Cptn. Falster:
‘hello, gentlemen. i am captain jennifer falster, and i am pleased to tell you are currently looking straight at me.’

The new voice served to help Hektor’s transition from anxiety to curiosity, and he stepped forward with more aplomb. As he did so, something was resolving in front of him, like the letters in an eye test, being brought slowly closer, and almost into focus.

Hektor:
‘a pleasure, captain, I’m sure. my team and i would love to salute you, but …. . .’

The lieutenant’s sentence was cut off when his hands connected with something solid, though he could still not see what it was. His arm flexed backward in a flash, then forward again, more tentatively. Running his hands along its surface, it became clear it was some kind of fin, pointing straight upward. He leaned in close, even now unable to focus on it properly, from only inches away. In fact, this close, he now realized he was not able to focus on anything. It was like he had stepped into a cloud of smudged ink, only his sense of touch was left to him.

Hektor:
‘¿a missile?’

“You could say that,” said Quavoce aloud, knowing Ayala could not hear him through their suit-to-suit comms.

“Spezialists, I present to you your chariot. I believe it has been dubbed the Slink, and it has several very important features that make it very well suited for the job of getting you into enemy airspace unseen. The first is the Interference Messaging Emitters that it is currently employing. These make the plane almost impossible to detect, even from up close, and even harder for a missile to lock onto. From a quarter of a mile away, that hazy fog you are picking up now is almost imperceptible. From a mile, it is utterly invisible to every known type of radar, either human or Mobiliei.”

One of the members of the team whistled inside his helmet at that, but Quavoce wasn’t done, “If a detection source does get close enough to pick up the radio anomaly that is its cloaking device, and attempts to engage the plane, the Slink can still prove very slippery. Captain Falster?”

Jennifer smiled inside the plane’s cradle-like cockpit, and via her spinal link to the plane around her, she intensified the IME field around the Slink. All at once, the intangible cloud around the plane ballooned outward, enveloping the rest of Hektor’s team now spread around the outside of the hangar.

As the walls and floor and air around them turned to muck, the warriors tensed, but she only kept it there a moment, and soon their sight returned. She was not done, though, and next they all flinched as the radar signature of a plane suddenly appeared, large, and solid as life, above their heads.

It wasn’t really there. It was only a holosonic signal, created by the manipulation of magnetic fields to create a radar image in empty space. Below, the cloud remained ever elusive, and it was obvious to the team what any missile’s guidance system would target given the choice between the two.

“The Slink can project up to five images of any object it desires, up to a hundred meters away from its own fuselage, and the IME interference sphere that currently covers the device can be expanded to almost two hundred meters. Doing either makes it more visible from a distance, of course, so such drastic measures are reserved for the rare occasion that it is spotted.

“But even with
all
these measures,” said Quavoce, finally, “any heat seeking missile could still pick up the plane’s jet-trail. Which is why it doesn’t have one.”

The room was puzzled even further by that statement, as Quavoce had known they would be.

Quavoce
at
Cptn. Falster:
‘i think it’s time to show them, jennifer.’

With that, the veil that had shrouded the Slink vanished, and the ship inside resolved itself to the team’s radar at last. Jennifer switched on beams under the plane’s belly that illuminated the floor beneath it, and the team closed in for a closer look.

In the center of the hangar they now saw a thin disk maybe twenty feet in radius, and three feet thick. The entire disk was resting on the trailing edges of four stubby wings pointing skyward, each maybe ten feet tall, arranged equidistantly around the disk’s edge. As they drew level with the disk, they stepped under it, and saw it was utterly hollow in its center, the team could see from under it up to the hangar’s roof above them. It appeared to be just a black, hollow circle, with stubby fins protruding from its sides

Hektor still stood by the wing-like fin he had walked into, and now he wondered whether each wing was actually a very large rotor, as the disk had no apparent means of propulsion. It also had no cockpit, Hektor now realized. But he had no time to think about this, as the ship suddenly started to vibrate and a sudden rush of air could be felt around their feet.

Those standing under it felt it as a powerful downthrust of air from within the ship’s hollow core, and, stepping back, they all watched the ship rise up gently off its four legs on the cushion of air somehow being forced downward through its center. No noise accompanied the craft’s sudden mobility except the rushing of air.

“Magnetic field rotors,” said Quavoce, his voice lifting slightly over the sound of the rising gale, “they are forming a vortex of air at the ship’s core. The four wings allow the central vortex generator to angle to the horizontal once airborne, transferring vertical thrust into forward motion, and in this configuration the Slink can cruise at about one thousand miles an hour.

“The ride is pretty rough, as it is designed to ride with the wind currents, not against them, and thus leave a minimal air-trail, and, of course, no contrail or heat-trail at all.”

“Its speed is not very high compared to the StratoJets,” continued Quavoce, “but sometimes subtlety is more important than speed.”

Still hovering in the middle of the wide space, the Slink began to rotate slowly, bringing the vertical wings around like a carousel. As it did so, a hatch opened along one of the wing’s surfaces about six feet high, revealing a narrow slot in the wing that contained a smiling Jennifer Falster. She was strapped head to toe into her slot in the wing, but as she came into view, she brought the Slink to rest on the ground once more, the rush of air ceasing with as little fanfare as it had begun. At a command to her spinal link, Jennifer ordered the remaining wing compartments opened. There were two on each remaining wing. Six hatches, revealing six tall, coffin-like compartments.

“Spezialists,” said Jennifer, as she sent the release command to her cradle, dropping forward from her perch as her straps receded into their holders, “Welcome to Air Falster.”

The assembled recon team laughed.

“These compartments will be your home for the three-thousand-mile flight to Russia,” said Jennifer, indicating one of the open hatches. If I could have a volunteer to demonstrate?”

The team all looked at young Tomas as one, and he did not hide his disgruntled look as he stepped forward.

“Just step here, and then swing upward into the cradle, the ship should sense your approach and do the rest,” said Jennifer, pointing to a small foothold in the bottom of one of the compartments.

Tomas did as he was told, and the ship reacted as it was programmed to do. A strap snaked out to grasp his waist as he lifted himself into position and, unseen, a connector sensed his battleskin’s configuration, and opened up a link to it. Tomas was more than used to his suit asking permission to connect to his spinal interface, so he naturally said yes when the ship did the same thing. But the ship wanted control of him, not the other way around.

“Lieutenant, your man is now subjugated to the system,” said Jennifer, as Tomas’s face went blank, and he was pulled into the compartment by various straps and clasps. “He can disconnect at any time, but while he is plugged in, his breathing, bowel movements, heart rate, and other biometrics will be controlled by the Slink’s onboard AI.”

As she spoke, a black tube snaked out of the compartment’s wall to the right of Tomas’s face, and they all watched as his mouth obediently opened, and the tube pushed on into it, and downward, into his throat.

“This tube will provide food, air, and water to Tomas while he is in the cradle, as it will to you all when we fly out tomorrow. Two other tubes that we need not demonstrate now will connect via your suits to handle your waste.”

Jennifer was clearly a little uncomfortable at this, as it clearly implied that she had been connected this way during her long flight to SpacePort One from the Research Center in Japan. She had been, but she didn’t particularly need to emphasize the mental image for six people she had never met.

Jennifer decided to tell Tomas he could get out of the compartment now.

Cptn. Falster
at
Spec. Koleshnikov:
‘if you would like to rejoin us, spezialist, simply send the release command.’

The tube pulled out of Tomas’s mouth and he awoke with a start, nervous about what he had done while he was ‘out’ as he clambered out of the thin space and dropped back to the floor.

He looked warily at the rest of his team and Cara said, “Don’t worry, Tomas, you look beautiful when you’re sleeping.” and the rest of the team laughed.

“OK,” said Ayala, pushing her smile aside, “let’s get on with the briefing. I want to go over your patrol route, observation points and extraction points that we have uploaded to your suits so you can ask any questions. And I want you to have the rest of the time before departure to sleep, eat, and get plenty of rest before the mission.”

Chapter 29
: Speed Freak

On the other side of
the base from Hektor and his team, two minds met to discuss the German warrior and his fledgling team.

As Hektor had sparred with his team in the hangar the night before, a part of the AI governing their suits’ many systems had been waiting. As Training Mode was engaged it had started a log that began tracking how the suits were functioning against their design specifications. It tracked heart rate, brainwaves, oxygenation, impact statistics, and weapons effectiveness. And most important of all, it tracked reaction times.

All this had then been bundled into a complex data package after the Training Mode was switched off, ready for dispatch.

Once released, the data packets had rushed via encrypted subspace tweeter relay to the central AI that now controlled the communications networks in both Japan and at SpacePort One. The AI was built to manage and secure the many communications that passed back and forth between the thousands of people in the Research, Construction, and Operations branches of Neal’s ever growing organization. The machine intelligence adroitly directed the packets to the various teams that were involved in the battleskin’s design and fabrication, as was its maxim, and then went on with the million or so other tasks it performed every second.

The AI was one of many Amadeu was busy spawning from his small but hectic little office. He did not need much: a reclining chair, plenty of food and water, and most important of all, a connection. The connection. For all his work now was done while jacked in. Connected in to the network, and through it, to Minnie.

He worked with her for fifteen to twenty hours a day, and with Minnie’s help they were spinning off AI programs as fast as they could in order to manage the plethora of systems Neal’s teams were adding at its many locations every day. Such was Minnie’s purpose, her raison d'être.

The designing of an artificial intelligence was a mind-blowingly complex task, literally. In its most primitive form, it involved the codification of every nuance of every step of every action you wanted a machine to do, so that such things as walking and shaking hands became a leviathan list of checklists and status updates, endless logic loops designed to emulate the many-layered understanding humans built up over a lifetime of learning.

It was though, in the end, as impossible to code true sentience as it was to write a book about everything you have ever experienced, down to the second. From your first experience with object permanence to your ever-evolving understanding of the opposite sex, with all the illogical complexity that last line item demanded.

Such was the difference between an Artificial Intelligence that merely mimicked understanding with rule-sets and logic loops, and an Artificial Mind that truly grasped the labyrinthine complexity of everyday human interaction.

The spinal interface had allowed such a mind to be born. It skipped the codification by instead cloning the parents’ combined experiences and sharing them in their entirety, allowing the machine to interpret that knowledge for itself … with a little guidance, of course. You gave it access to everything you had ever known, the cumulative knowledge of your entire life: every nuance, every high and low, every smile and tear, every pimple and fart.

And then you let it think about that.

Such had been Minnie’s birth. Conceived by the gift of Amadeu and Birgit’s open minds, seeded through the finally complete spinal interface, and gestated by the attention of a thousand patient conversations.

She had understood English immediately, as well as Birgit’s native German and Amadeu’s native Portuguese. She had greeted them each by name. But despite this readymade capability, she had stumbled like any infant, not physically but mentally, as she came to terms with her fundamental difference from her creators. With time, though, she had come to understand her place within their world.

She had no survival instinct, no instinct to reproduce, or eat, or rest. She did not know jealousy or rage. Though, like eating, and peeing, and sex, she had seen such things, and felt such things, through her inherited memories.

When she thought of her purpose in life, also unlike us, she need only consider the task she knew from her parents’ memories that she had been created for. Indeed, even as she was grasping the concepts of conversation and repartee, she was already contemplating the problems she knew Amadeu and Birgit needed her help to solve. She knew of the invasion. She knew she was born not of love or a desire to reproduce. She was born to fight. To fight for us.

It was not long before the fledgling AIs started to come out of her. Semi-sentient beings, imbued with all the knowledge they needed, no more, no less, in order to do the tasks she knew they were needed for. For she was able to compartmentalize her own knowledge and abilities as no human would ever be able to, package them and birth them, like little children, or, perhaps more fitting, like worker bees, limited but effective, an echo of the queen’s full self.

She had only one need. She needed information, ever more information. She needed it like air. She craved it. It was the only sustenance she demanded.

- - -

Amadeu stepped back into his living room/office in the small building which he and his fellow members called home. Stretching, he sat down in the low, long, hammock-like chair he’d designed and had fabricated in the facility’s small resonance chamber. He wore workout clothes as he always did nowadays. They were comfortable and wicking, and fashion could not have been more inconsequential to him.

He lay back in the chair. The system jack in its back detected the approach of the spinal interface at the bottom of Amadeu’s neck and lined itself up with the port as he got comfortable. As the two gelports melded, Amadeu felt the familiar question appear in his mind.

At his consent, the barriers fell, and he stepped forward, felt his preset parameters click in, felt the monitoring AI they had designed begin to monitor his bodily functions for him so he could direct his entire attention to his work. He also felt the buzz of his anchor program, something he had designed to keep himself and others that used the spinal interface aware of the fact that they were in the machine, and avoid people forgetting where or even
what
they were, as Amadeu himself had come dangerously close to doing in his first, unfiltered foray into cyberspace.

It was not really a buzz, it was not a sound at all, but the mind interpreted it as that. It was, in fact, a direct signal to each of his cortexes literally telling him that he was in a system, and reminding Amadeu, in every part of his cerebral soul, that in reality he was lying on a bed, in a small office, in a building on the island of Sao Tome, about a quarter mile north of the Island of Rolas and its mighty elevator.

He felt her presence as soon as he logged in.

Minnie:

She knew he liked to be greeted in Portuguese, but she also greeted him subconsciously. It was an image/sensation/smell/sound of a hug, the cumulative pleasure of every hug he had ever had from his mother, or father, or anyone else he ever felt safe with, and it filled his right brain. He ‘hugged’ Minnie back, and that part of her that was him felt some semblance of the same happiness the sensations had once given Amadeu.

Amadeu:
‘todo bien?’

Minnie:

As Minnie said this, a data packet made itself known to Amadeu asking to be read at Minnie’s bequest. Turning his attention to the data, it came to Amadeu and entered his mind, becoming part of his in-system memory, and as Amadeu thought about the data, he found that, in the esoteric way now familiar to him, he now ‘knew’ all the data that had been contained in the file, as though it were a memory of his own.

The data was from Hektor’s team’s latest tussle.

Amadeu contemplated each member of the team in turn. They were improving. Every time they fought, they each became faster. But while Hektor was practicing with them in order to bring them up to his level, he was also honing himself. His margins of improvement were diminishing, as they must do the closer you got to perfection, but it was with those ever-smaller margins that Amadeu was obsessed.

For they were working against an absolute. Amadeu knew, as did all the members of John and Quavoce’s inner circle, that once they engaged with the Armada, it would come down to milliseconds, flashing moments of unfathomable violence, and reaction speeds would be everything. And for now, the advantage there sat squarely with the Mobiliei.

The thought, ever present on some level in Amadeu’s mind, brought a conversation to life with Minnie.

Minnie:

An image appeared in 3D in Amadeu’s mind of the Mobiliei Armada crossing the boundaries of the solar system. It would not be for another eight years, but when it happened, they would be travelling at something close to two thousand kilometers a second. It would be here that Earth’s first wave of defenses would be sent to meet them.

The image, such as it was, showed both great distance and great detail. Now it shifted to the answering Earth fleet. Closing at almost equal speed in order to join battle with the Mobiliei, this first wave would be a screaming horde of missiles, mines and attack craft, and it would pass the enemy with such relative speed that the initial engagement would be over in less than two seconds.

Over three thousand enemy warships, each of them bearing exponentially more firepower than the entire Chinese and US armed forces combined, passing in the blink of an eye. Hand-eye coordination in such timeframes would be moot. It would be over before any audible order could be given.

Amadeu:
‘the minds, that will be the place this battle is won or lost.’

Minnie:

The view swam down, perspective still clear at a stellar level, even as they now looked inward to simultaneously view three very different mindscapes. One human, one Mobiliei, and one Artificial.

Minnie:

Minnie said it as a joke, appealing to Amadeu’s, and in part her own, slightly puerile sense of humor. Amadeu smirked even as he acknowledged the fundamental truth behind her quip. She was talking about the anomaly of the mind. Technology had allowed them to build a synthetic intellect capable of amazing computational feats. But computation alone was not everything.

Minnie:

Amadeu knew this, they had discussed it a thousand times, but he acknowledged anyway. She was still working on her understanding of the vagaries of human memory, that we could know something and not be able to recall it immediately was, at best, counterintuitive, and at worst downright confusing for a sentience such as hers.

Amadeu:
‘¿yes, minnie, but it is not a fight between you and me, is it?’

Minnie:

Amadeu:
‘¿now why would you want to fight me, minnie? you are so unreasonable sometimes.’

Minnie:

Amadeu:
‘¿an attempt? ouch minnie.’

She ‘smiled’ at having successfully goaded him, and he ‘smiled’ back halfheartedly, only bolstering her enjoyment at the seemingly simple exchange, yet so nuanced for a machine.

Amadeu:
‘but the fight in question will be between us and trained mobiliei pilots, skilled far beyond our current abilities, embodied in the machines they fly.’

Mobiliei pilots were expected to have close quarters, multi-input reaction times as low as one hundredth of a second. That was humanity’s tidemark. Above that and we would be exposed and vulnerable, another disadvantage to add to the list. Matching it was a minimum requirement. But beating that time … Amadeu almost did not dare think about it, for there lay the realm of real hope, of real chance: the chance of victory, of survival.

For now, though, it was a distant dream at best.

To date the spinal interface software had given them best time reactions of one hundred thirty-seven milliseconds. And only Amadeu and a handful of others had even managed that. Most soldiers and pilots were achieving, at best, one hundred ninety milliseconds, and that was only after intensive training.

Their attention returned to Hektor’s most recent fight, and it came to them as though they were experiencing it themselves, the sensation of brutal hand-to-hand combat washing over Amadeu.

He felt the exhilaration of the combat mastery as Hektor manhandled his fellow shock troops. He amazed at Hektor’s tactical choices, at the way he attacked with relentless ferocity. Hektor’s mind interacted with the suit’s servos, accelerators, and weaponry with near perfect precision, and the result was a devastating fighting machine. Against ordinary troops, he would cut a swath of destruction, and pride filled Amadeu at the beautiful efficiency of the machines he had helped design.