Nebula (9 page)

The next topic was the defense plan. They’d been working on it for more than ten years, changing things as they made advances in exploiting the alien technology. The current plan relied heavily on using the robots on Mars and Titan and the facilities that the robots had built there.

Billingsley excused himself. “I have some other things to attend to, so I’ll leave you in Brad’s hands. He’s the expert in the war planning anyway. I’ll see you later.” And he departed the room and let Brad continue.

“Our defense plan is a pretty simple one,” Brad began. “Those tend to be the things that work best. The simpler the better. If you’re familiar with Sun Tzu’s writings on warfare, you’ll know that a battle is usually won or lost before either side takes the field. Understanding both your own capabilities and the enemy’s and planning to make the best use of available leverage are what determines the outcome. So, we’ve been planning and replanning as we learn more and are able to do more.

“We have advantages and disadvantages relative to the enemy. Our big disadvantage is that the Earth is a well-defined target, and its precise location can be predicted for as long as the enemy needs. Their fleet, on the other hand, can move and maneuver at speeds that can outrun the plasma weapons and that can almost outrun the x-rays. We’re easy to hit, and they’re not.

“But we also have four big advantages. The first is surprise. We know what they are planning, and they don’t know what we can do to stop them.

“The second is our ability to take control of the robotic systems that they placed on Mars and Titan. They may suspect that we were able to copy some of their technology, but they don’t know at this point that we visited the sites on Mars and Titan and are about to be able to use them for our own purposes.

“The third is our very good understanding of their biology. We probably know more about them than they do about us. We’ve already designed and fabricated some biological agents that should be deadly to them and that would spread rapidly and be almost unstoppable. Our main problem would be how to deliver them and get them to spread across the entire enemy fleet, but I’ll get into that a bit later.

“Finally, our fourth advantage is time, as I said before. We’ve been planning and updating the plans for many years, and we’ve been building the support systems to match the requirements. They haven’t been able to do this, since they spent the past decades flying at near light speed, so their time has been compressed. They have to go with plans that were conceived, in large part, even before they found Earth.

“The combination of our advantages, relative to theirs, is what gives us confidence that we can successfully defend Earth. OK, let’s get down to the details.”

The plan was simple, as Brad had said. Basically, Nebula’s advanced force would establish a covert presence near the facility on Mars and disable the base on Titan so that the aliens wouldn’t be able to use it, even if they did find it. All the enemy would know for certain was that the exploratory team met with a disaster but had been able to establish a base on Mars. Nebula would let the enemy land on Mars, thinking that they were in control of that base and that the humans were unaware of it or of the nearby presence of their fleet.

Then, with the help of the robots, now under clandestine human control, the biological agents would be inserted into the alien spacecraft that traveled back and forth to the main fleet. The fleet itself would probably remain outside the solar system, since most of the ships were transports and needed to keep their distance from the battle. It would probably be defended by some of their own warships, and quite a bit of back and forth traffic would probably occur as they were preparing to introduce their biological agents into Earth’s atmosphere. The enemy would think that they were doing this covertly, since they would probably be confident that we hadn’t penetrated their base or their robotic systems. It was important that they remain ignorant of that.

The plan was also based on the alien procedure to link all their transport ships when loitering. They had airlocks and passageways that could extend between ships, forming an enormous city in space. This was shown clearly in the records that were discovered in the ships that crashed on Earth and the robotic systems on Mars and Titan, and it was one of the major factors in conceiving the approach for a biological attack.

But there were obviously a number of complicated and risky things that needed to be done to accomplish the plan, and that was where all the efforts were now focused.

First off, Nebula needed to be able to take control of the robotic systems while making it seem that they were still under alien control. This was no easy task, but progress looked good so far. Harry would be a big contributor here, since brain-to-machine links could be covert and could supersede the alien control in subtle ways. The robots could seem to be responding to alien direction, but they could still carry out small tasks directed by the humans. The objective was to have the robots deliver the biological agents which were designed to have relatively long incubation periods, during which they were highly contagious. If everything worked as planned, the contagion would spread across the fleet before any of the aliens were even aware that they had been attacked.

A major problem that had not yet been solved completely was how to take control of the sentry robots at the base without alerting the enemy to the fact that humans were present. Fortunately, Nebula scientists were well aware of the sentries before the first flights to the bases on Mars and Titan, and they were able to duplicate the exchange of signals that the sentries would expect to see when a ship approached. This was all made possible by discovering a sentry that was damaged but almost intact in the robotic ship that had crashed in England. Nebula’s engineers were able to reconstruct the expected challenge-response process and could now fool the sentry into thinking that our ships were friendly ships. But they hadn’t yet been able to take control and still have the sentries behave properly when the enemy ships arrived. That was one technical problem that remained to be solved.

In fact, inserting clandestine, dual behavior in all the robots was probably the biggest technical challenge. All of them had to be under human control but still seem to be responding as the aliens expected. Here’s where Yuri and Ludmila would work with Harry to develop the right software modifications to be downloaded into each type of robot. Their job was to be able to create a stable network among the robots and humans, and that required software that could handle interactions among the semi-autonomous, intelligent systems. Harry appreciated the difficulty of dealing with a single complex, adaptive system. Here they were dealing with multiple, interactive systems, including both human and robotic intelligence, and unless the software could impose stability, the likelihood was that everything would just collapse into a state of chaos. Harry was very happy to know that Yuri and Ludmila would be working on the team, since Yuri was probably the world’s leading expert on interacting intelligent systems, and Ludmila was similarly recognized in the field of computer science.

“OK so far?” Brad asked.

Harry nodded, “Sure, I understand, but it still seems like there are some pretty hard things to do before you can pull this off. You’re also relying completely on a supposition that the aliens will do things exactly as they did before. Like, what if they don’t connect all the ships? How would you spread the contagion?”

“Don’t worry about the connections between ships. They do this for practical reasons, and they always do it the same way. When they loiter, they need to be able to reestablish commerce across the ships. They have specialized equipment on the ships so that some of them can grow food while others do maintenance on energy sources, or other things like that. When they’re traveling at high relativistic speed, they don’t need to worry about those things since almost no time passes on the ships. But when they loiter for months or years, they do need to take care of the normal housekeeping across the fleet. Even the warships will connect to the others when they’re not patrolling the defensive perimeter.”

“OK, so if we can take control on Mars and get the biological agents into the ships that return to the fleet, it looks like your plan will work, but what if it doesn’t?”

“First off,” Brad replied, “the plan is
our
plan. You’re part of it now, Harry. Second, if this doesn’t work, we could lose in the end. We still have our combat ships, but we really don’t know how well we would do against the alien warships. They have a lot more experience and may have other types of weapons that weren’t on the ships that crashed here and that weren’t listed in the records that we extracted. But remember that the alien battle force has its limits too. We don’t have battleships or heavy cruisers, but our fighters can move at relativistic speeds like theirs and would be hard to hit when they maneuver on the attack. We would also have the advantage of surprise, so we could win if the main plan fails, but we don’t want to get to that point.”

The rest of the day was spent going over
some of the details of the plan so that Harry could understand how everything fit together. The final stage, if the covert operation on Mars and the biological attack on the alien fleet succeeded, was a direct attack on the remaining alien ships. The force built at Nebula Two and housed at Ops was intended to do the final mopping-up once most of the alien population had become sick or died. This was clearly a war of annihilation. That was what the aliens intended, so it set the rules for the war.

Billingsley returned to the room just as Brad was finishing. “So, I think that you’ve had a full day by now. Let’s break, and you can pick up tomorrow. I think that Brad wants to take you to Ops for the rest of the familiarization. Let’s call it a day.”

Harry woke early the next day. His accommodations were comfortable enough, and he certainly was tired. He should have slept until they came to wake him, but the information from the day before weighed on his mind. It was all true, strange and frightening, but definitely not a hoax. He could see that. Strange as it seemed, he was now part of an army that was going to defend Earth. It was crazy, like a continuation of that grade-B movie, but it was real, too real.

“Sometimes, ignorance really is bliss,” he thought, as he got out of bed and shaved, showered, and brushed his teeth, just like any normal morning. Then he got dressed and wandered out into the hallway. There was a dining room somewhere to the right. He remembered Brad taking him there for dinner. Now he needed a cup of coffee and something to eat, just a small bite, maybe a bagel or a piece of toast. His stomach was in no mood for much this morning. The tension that had built up during the night took away most of his appetite, but he knew that he needed to get something into his stomach.

He found the dining room with no problem. It was only five or ten rooms down the hall to the right, as he remembered, and the coffee machine was ready to serve. He found some sliced bread in one of the cabinets and put it into the toaster.

Just as the toaster signaled that it was done, Brad walked in. “I see that you found your way back to our modest dining hall. Did you sleep well?”

“Actually no,” Harry replied as he started to spread some strawberry jam onto the toast. “I guess that I was too worked up from everything that you threw at me yesterday.”

“We usually try to go a bit slower with new recruits, but your case is different. We’ve got a tight schedule, and we had to dump it all on you and get you into the program as fast as possible. Today we go to Nebula Ops. That’s where you’ll spend most of your time until we’re ready to go to Mars. We have some laboratories and small manufacturing facilities there. It’s nothing on the scale of Nebula Two, but it’s what you and the others will need for the work that remains before we deploy.”

Harry had finished preparing the toast and was pouring a cup of coffee when it sank in. “Are you using the word we in a general sense, or are you implying that I’ll be going to Mars with you? That’s what it sounded like.”

“You’re now part of my Advanced Force Operations team. We’re the ones who will do the work on Mars. So, yeah, you’ll be going there with the rest of us once we have everything squared away down here. We still have work to do to get everything ready for the operation.”

“Wait a second,” Harry replied, almost spilling his coffee. “What the hell would I do with you on Mars? I told you I’m not a soldier. I’m just a lab rat, a researcher. I can’t help you fight with alien soldiers and robots that are coming here.”

“OK, look. We don’t intend to fight them on Mars or anywhere else until the final battle to wipe out what’s left of their fleet after the plague kills most of them. Your role will be to help us make the connections to all the robots. We need to have direct brain to robot control so that we can apply Yuri’s and Ludmila’s technology and keep everything hidden from the enemy. We need to be on Mars to work with the machines there since any greater distance would introduce too much time delay. It all has to be very nearly real time for it to work. So you’ll help us finish the work that your predecessor was doing, and then you’ll be with us on Mars to do the job there. That’s why you’re here Harry. You have a big role to play in all of this.”

Harry stood silently for a few seconds and then asked, “So what about Titan? Will I go there too?”

“No, as I explained we abandoned any thought of using Titan for any manned operation and disabled all the aliens systems there. We don’t need it, and there are environmental issues with trying to establish a covert presence there. Mars is all we need, and we’ve already prepared a well-hidden outpost underground and pretty close to the area where the alien facilities are. We destroyed most of the alien structures and robots on Titan in a way that made it look like a small asteroid strike, very convincing if I may say so. If the aliens do detect the wreckage, they won’t suspect anything. The only thing that we left there that could be useful is a small array of very covert sensors that we installed. If an alien ship finds and inspects the destroyed site, our sensors will alert us that they’ve arrived in the solar system. Other than that, Titan isn’t a player in our plan. Let’s save the details for later. Finish your coffee and toast, and we’ll head out to Ops. You can have a better breakfast when we get there. We’ve got a lot to do today.”

The trip from Nebula Prime to Nebula Ops was uneventful and more or less the same as the first trip to Prime. The two undersea facilities were separated by thousands of kilometers, so the trip was made in a spacecraft, the same one that they flew in on the previous day. Milo was the pilot again, and he said almost nothing, keeping in character.

When they arrived, Harry could see immediately that Ops was much larger than Prime. The arrival chamber was huge, still hexagonal but about fifty percent wider and quite a bit higher. The doors on two of the walls were also much bigger. They looked to be thirty to forty meters wide and about ten to fifteen meters high, taking up almost all the area of those two walls. The entry doors in the receiving chamber, the one where the ship waited until water was removed, were also the same enormous size.

“I see that you’re adequately impressed by the size of Ops,” Brad said, as he n
oted Harry’s wide-eyed stare at the huge chamber with its enormous doors. “If you think that this is big, wait until you see Nebula Two. That one is half again as big as Ops.”

“I’m impressed,” Harry replied. “But how in the world did you ever build things this big under the ocean floor, and why do they need to be so big?”

“We had a lot of time. Remember that Nebula began its work many years ago. We also were able to use machines built on alien technology. Almost all of the work was done by robots. I’ll introduce you to some of them that work here.”

“Didn’t all that construction cause a lot of noise that the Navy’s sensors could detect?”

“Nope - alien technology again. We have almost one hundred percent acoustic and seismic cancellation in all our facilities and all equipment that moves under water. The spacecraft have that too. That’s why we can splash down into the ocean and not be detected as anything other than a possible whale fart.”

“So, why the huge size?”

“We operate out of here with some pretty big ships. The one that we just took is one of the smallest. It’s just a shuttle that we use, mainly on Earth. The one that Yuri and Ludmila flew to Mars and Titan is bigger, and we have a few warships that are even a bit bigger than that one. You’ll get to see them all. But for now, there are other things that we need to do.”

Brad had promised a better breakfast once they arrived at Ops, but instead, he took Harry directly to a large room that appeared to be part laboratory and part construction area.

“This is our development and integration facility for the technology that we’ll use on Mars. We already deployed quite a bit, but we still need to finish the development on the trickier stuff, the things that you’ll be working on, plus some of the biology and chemistry that Nigel and a few others are getting ready for the operation.”

At that point, Nigel Forsythe and a heavyset woman, who appeared to be in her late 40s or 50s, and an Asian man of about the same age approached from across the room.

“Hello again, Harry,” Nigel said as he extended his hand. “Glad to see you joined our team. We can use your help.”

They shook hands, and Nigel continued. “Let me introduce Gladys Dombroski and Mikio Nomura. Mikio is one of my co-workers in the biology unit, and Gladys is our lead chemist. You’ll get to know them well. We’re all part of Brad’s AFO group.”

Harry shook hands with the other two as Brad stood by. “What’s your AFO?” Harry asked, turning toward Brad.

“That’s the Advanced Force Operations team that I mentioned to you. We’re the ones who will do the operation on Mars. We’re also the developers as well as the eventual users. It’s a very high tech team. There are nine of us, including you. You already met six. The other two are Judith Glass, our electronics genius, and Doug White, our materials scientist. You’ll meet them soon.”

Nigel continued, “The work is coming along pretty well, except for the delay caused by the unfortunate loss of Lars. He almost had the interface problems solved, but he needed to go topside to consult with one of our other developers who remained at his university. That’s when he got into trouble.”

Brad interjected, “Lars Angstrom was the member that we told you about. He was our expert on brain-machine interfacing and general cybernetics, and was working on the problem of dealing with the multiple types of robots. He was working with Yuri and Ludmila to solve the problems of the interacting intelligences and the need to partition all the behaviors and stored data so that our intrusion into the alien systems could be kept secret. They seemed to be on the verge of a major breakthrough when the accident happened. Lars wanted to consult with another of our researchers, topside, and we thought that we could sneak him there and back, but we ran into some unexpected problems when he was recognized.”

Harry was well aware of Professor Lars Angstrom’s reputation. “I used Angstrom’s text on cybernetics in my graduate course. It’s the gold standard, well ahead of its time. We all thought that he died ten years ago in some freak boating accident in the North Sea. I guess that’s another of the mysterious disappearances that Nebula uses to take people into this world.”

“Right,” Brad replied, as he took Harry by the arm and led him off toward the area from which Nigel and his two companions came. The other three walked along.

They entered a small area near one of the corners of the room, and Harry saw a number of machines that appeared to be robots of some sort. A man and woman were working with one of them, and when Harry and the others approached, they put down their tools and came over to introduce themselves.

“Hi, you must be Harry Ambrose,” the man said, as he removed his safety glasses and took off his gloves. “I’m Doug White, and this is my colleague, Judith Glass. We’re the mechanics on the team.”

“Not quite,” Brad remarked. “Both of them are world class researchers. Doug is one of the best materials scientists in the world, and Judith is his equivalent in electrical engineering.”

“Brad’s being kind,” Doug countered, as he walked up to Harry and shook his hand. Judith followed suit. Harry had never heard of either of them, but that wasn’t surprising, since science and engineering researchers tended to form very narrow interests
, and their circle of friends and acquaintances were similarly small and centered on their work areas.

“We’ve been expecting you,” Judith added, “and we’re really happy that you’ve finally arrived. Lars’ loss has been a big blow to all of us. We not only were close friends, but we also relied on him to help with some of the design concepts that we’re trying to perfect. Let’s show you what we have.”

They walked over to the area where seven robots were standing. Five were crude, open frameworks, with small mechanical actuators and electronic modules suspended within their open structures. They also had what appeared to be sensors and arm-like appendages attached to the outside structural members. Some had legs that looked like insect legs, and others had both legs and wheels. The other two were much more complete, with outer shells, but they had the same sorts of arms and legs, and both also had wheels. All but one of the robots were small, at most one meter in height and width. The other one was about the height of a human and looked menacing. It had what appeared to be sensors all around its body, and had a tool that looked a bit like a flashlight at the end of one of its six arms.

“OK, meet the crew,” Doug said, as he pointed to each of the robots. “The big guy here is one of the alien robots that we rescued from the ship that crashed in England. He’s a sentry robot. You can see that he’s pretty well equipped to see things, lots of eyes and ears. He also has that x-ray gun, the thing that looks like a flashlight.

“The other one with an outer shell is the only other alien robot that we were able to rescue and repair. This one is a worker bee. It’s able to do a pretty large number of tasks, and it’s a lot more intelligent than the sentry. The big guy has a very well defined and limited mission, but this one is very adaptable. We used it as the model for the others that we built here. Ludmila constantly remarks on the artificial intelligence in these guys. I’m sure you and Ludmila will have a lot of discussions about that. She and Lars were continually marveling over the design, so it must be pretty good.”

Judith then explained the work that they were doing. “We built these five robots based on what we learned from the ones on Mars and Titan. Each of them represents an exact functional replica of one of the types that the aliens put there, but they’re smaller, and we didn’t bother to give them outer shells. But all the mechanical capabilities and the programming are identical to the alien robots. We made some changes in the electronic design to make it easier for us to build them from standard integrated circuits, but from a functional standpoint, they’re identical to what we’ll have to deal with on Mars.”

“This lets us iron out all the technical wrinkles,” Brad added, “and we can use them to practice the mission, so that we get everything right. We can’t afford any errors once we get to Mars. The main problems are being able to control them when the aliens arrive and to keep everything that we do secret.”