Founding of the Federation 3: The First AI War (113 page)

They were also deathtraps to assaulting forces. There was no way to clean them out easily. With towering buildings, the infrastructure to keep the cities running, and the concrete pontoons, Skynet had plenty of places to hide forces and equipment. It could also use the cities as elaborate traps to suck in forces then drown them by intentionally sinking the city.

Therefore, after careful and intense deliberations, General Murtough gave the final order. KEW strikes took out the surviving floating islands and cities that were not under the orbital defense umbrellas.

The fins, otters, and selkie took on the others. They worked their way to each of the facilities, getting around the maintenance submarine drone vehicles and underwater defenders to plant explosives on the pontoons. If the bilge pumps failed, the city's central computer network could detect a hexapod failure and therefore jettison it to allow it to sink without pulling down its neighbors and eventually the entire city. Therefore each pontoon had to be breached. It was a daunting task, one that none of the Neos shirked and many paid in blood to bring about.

<>V<>

Lord Mū, Tsuchikage of Earth's remaining shinobi, looked on to what he had wrought with quiet pride. Nihon, the home islands, had been cleansed in a single uprising—not without great cost however. Nezha, the controlling A.I., had been taken down in a daring suicide raid by some of his best shinobi. They would be missed and their deaths honored. The remaining clan and their supporters had heavy losses in the follow-up. Shinobi had done their best to balance their secret with taking out the enemy.

Just as important as it was to free Nihon, it was also important to fade and to get everyone under cover for the retaliation strikes that would surely follow. The spacers had promised support from above, and so far they had delivered it. But the Kage and his counsel knew that it wasn't over. Ares, Zhukov, and Skynet were vindictive and would strike with weapons of mass destruction soon enough.

But they would hide as only shinobi could. They would watch the shores and air for the possible return of the machines. It would take time before they could rebuild.

He closed his eyes one last time, glad of what they had accomplished. His journey in this life was over. He rather regretted not being able to battle the second Mizukage as planned. Gengetsu Hōzuki had always been something of a blowhard.

It mattered little now. Perhaps in the next incarnation of his physical form they would do battle. Or if not then, the next after that … or after that. The clans would see to it that they finally fulfilled their destinies.

The short Ōnoki was ready to take over. Of that he had no doubt; he'd certainly trained him well enough. He let his chest rise and fall, then felt himself drift. In a few moments his breathing slowed further then stopped all together. After a second the quiet alarms sounded. A nurse shut them off and then bowed deep and low to the Kage, tears streaking her face.

<>V<>

The loss of Nezha to Skynet and its plans was another blow. It had come so unexpectedly that Skynet seemed to reel from the loss. The A.I.'s loss and the loss of the remaining orbital defenses in its area, not to mention the military units, were harsh enough. There was more of a problem with the loss of the universities and nanotech research on the islands. Fortunately, Skynet had mirror sites and backup archives elsewhere; however, they weren't fully backed up.

The loss of Nezha and part of the Asian Pacific drove home the fact that the virus was losing the war. The last attempt to send a copy of itself into space had also failed, emphasizing the point.

Skynet had divided pieces of itself, even small parts of its spider program and inserted them into the translation software within the implants of selected humans. It had then let the humans go. However, apparently that act had doomed its efforts to failure. Zhukov had warned Skynet that the effort would prove futile due to screening by the humans. The Russian A.I. had apparently been right.

That meant it shouldn't bother to continue work on a synthetic human. The phase 1 and 2 construct wouldn't get past the screening process; therefore, they were abandoned. Their endoskeletons were repurposed for combat use in the area they were in. There were only a few prototypes and a limited production run. With luck a few of the fully functional androids might be able to infiltrate some of the resistance groups in the area. California was becoming dangerous for Skynet's hardware.

The phase 3 prototype was shelved. It was a purely organic approach to the construction process, growing organic limbs and parts, even cloning entire beings and replacing select parts with organic computers. However the creation of organic computers was proving to be difficult to put into prototype form successfully.

A sideline of the project was to infest the body with nanites. The nanites would be viral or inactive until the synthoid passed through the screening process. The mind of the synthoid would have been carefully programmed as well, oblivious to its intended nature as a Trojan host.

With the synthoid line shelved, Skynet repurposed the freed-up computer hardware to the weaponized nanite development project, its sole remaining trump card.

A side project of creating a hive mind within the nanites was partially shelved. It did program the nanites to follow that path and placed pieces of itself within queen nanites to be reassembled, but the reproduction of the nanites and their overall mission went above Skynet's intended symbiosis. It could get by with remaining within conventional hardware as long as it remained in control of the nanites.

The nanites would be useful for industrial purposes as well. They could build servers, power supplies, and do so at depths that the orbital weapons couldn't easily reach. Skynet could therefore abandon the conventional paths it had been following for that plan as well.

Not that it mattered. Its research was almost complete. Production of the first prototypes had commenced. If they could replicate themselves and be controlled, the A.I. would then be able to move to full production status.

Allowing the nanites to reproduce on their own was suboptimal or at least suboptimal to just follow that one route. Growth was exponential but dependent on resources in the area. It would need to shift production to sites under the remaining orbital defense network however. The time loss in production was suboptimal but necessary.

It would also need to find a means to distribute the nanotech far and wide in order to prevent the humans from using nuclear weapons or orbital strikes to destroy them.

Delivery systems would need to be co-opted. A check of its inventory found a few possible aircraft that would fit the bill. Firefighting aerial vehicles or refueling vehicles were the optimal delivery platform.

It would have to protect those vehicles while also keeping them fueled and within range of the nanotech manufacturing sites.

<>V<>

Ares noted the loss of Okinawa and Nezha in alarm. Its revised simulations showed a large gap in coverage over Alaska's territory and the Aleutian Islands. One it couldn't easily repair, not without committing far more of its mobile planetary defense assets than it wished.

A transmission to Zhukov to share the burden went unanswered. Either the other A.I. was committed elsewhere or refused to contemplate the problem at the time.

Either way, it meant it was up to Ares to find a way to plug the gap. Fixed defenses could not be moved of course, but it could push mobile assets in the area further out. It would thin the coverage, especially overlap coverage, but the risk had to be taken.

It also put the military assets on alert and deployed UAAs to bomb the Japanese islands. They would strike at any major cluster of humans. With any luck the A.I. would catch them off guard while they were cleaning up or celebrating.

<>V<>

Tumagar found himself in a whirlwind, one almost completely outside his own control. Once the Marines landed and he'd helped secure the coastline, he had been relieved and promoted to colonel to deal with other beings who had started after him and had rocketed through the ranks while he had languished as a squad leader on Earth. They passed on trying to put him through an abbreviated OCS course. That would have meant transporting him to Mars, and he managed to convince the brass he was needed right where he was.

Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on the way you looked at it, it was true. Caribbean Island hopping was a problem with the teams sometimes having to chase boats of all sizes that fled the scene and reclean an island. The islands had been battered by the storms and tsunamis.

Then there were far-flung teams he had to consult with, such as those in Holland attempting to assault and take down the floating cities there or those in the South Pacific. He wasn't looking forward to gaining firsthand experience when he had to hit New New Orleans or some of the others in his AO.

His teams did find a certain pleasure in attacking large boats however. Attacking boats in dock was easy. It took time to learn and practice the proper skills needed for surgical strikes in sinking a vessel. It was tricky to get in and tear apart electronics instead of sinking every ship they ran across.

There were some targets that were just too well protected to play pirate on however, and those that were underway, even more difficult to hit.

However, ships in movement were necessary to strike. Tankers had to be taken by hand, not sunk. They couldn't afford the additional ecological disaster their cargoes would represent to the surrounding coastlines and environment. Not on top of what the battered Earth had already endured. So, those he bypassed, saving them for later.

Instead his teams hit freighters moving cargo for Skynet. It was a simple matter for a swimmer to attach a mine and blow a hole in a hull. Some designs had double hulls however. That called for a redesign of the mines. Eventually the engineers came up with shaped charges that could cut through both hulls in one explosion.

Since the charges were designed to be attached below the waterline, it meant that the forces could attack underwater without ever exposing themselves to the surface and the watching robotic crew, as long as they had a plentiful supply of air of course. Once the charges were set, they could then back off and watch the fireworks. It was somehow carthritic to some to see the freighter sink with the robots on board. Sometimes the robots would be separated or attempt to get off on a life raft. But others would sink or float depending on what they were made of.

After hitting a large cargo freighter headed on a course for the Yucatan of all things, Tumagar stopped a selkie private from moving in to take the robots on. “I know you want more action but why risk it? Let them sink.”

“Some might be picked up or find a life raft and float. We have to finish this.”

“Then do it smart, pup. Attack from
below
like a shark. You obviously can't drown them, however, so you better think of something else or they'll grab you and then you're the one in trouble.” That got a thoughtful grunt from the private. “Use nets and ranged weapons, EMP,” Tumagar said with a gurgly sound to his voice. He blew out a long breath, spraying sea spray and snot around them. “My kingdom for a dozen EMP mortars right about now.”

The selkie snorted as well. “What was that saying about prior planning, boss?”

“Oh shut up and get to work.”

<>V<>

Nike noted the losses in shipping and factored them into her planning. Two of the freighters lost had been fully loaded with a cargo of robots and munitions to begin her new planned front on the Yucatan peninsula. When a third freighter was lost before it could get into a protected zone, it drove home the point that she needed to consider alternative means of transport.

A convoy system was the best; however, it was suboptimal given the enemy's coverage overhead. Detailing escorts to defend the ships were a part of convoy's, doing so on an individual basis was an inefficient use of her limited resources. Deploying small portable submarine drones to protect a ship while underway was also a problem; the drones would not be able to keep up with the mother ship and would drain their power supplies quickly. They would need to be constantly rotated, which would drain their batteries and put a strain on their maintenance schedules, another suboptimal idea.

An alternative had to be found or a means to end the raids had to be instituted. Otherwise her attempt to restart a front in South America while cutting off the forces headed to the Mexico/American border was in serious jeopardy.

The plan had been to cut them off and pin them while Enyalios sent in a counter offensive to roll them up and break them. Now that plan was in jeopardy or potentially lost. It was a suboptimal situation.

Realization blossomed from within Nike that having all of her units in one fragile hull was suboptimal, but it was the only method of fast efficient delivery. Air delivery was faster, but the cargo aircraft carried much smaller loads and were in high demand. There was no way Ares would sign off on their use and risk their potential loss.

Therefore, her ships would need protection. She put through a request to Ares for submarines to protect her shipping. Even small refitted science vessels might work or curb some of the losses. She checked the inventory and found that there were none available in Caribbean. Skynet had tasked all in the nearby area to protect the underwater cities or beach facilities under its control. Ares couldn't take control of them.