Sister Time-Callys War 2 (46 page)

None of this occurred at a level the user could see.

Clarty did not understand how his system worked.

DAG did.

That was the first of many differences of quality between the two groups. Differences of quality that had made coming up with an attack plan such a pain in the ass for Mosovich.

This was his first 'real world' action with DAG. He wanted it to be professional, precise and good training. Because the best that could be said about Clarty's unit of 'pirates' and his set-up was that it was going to be a good training op for DAG.

There were so many many choices. It really became a question of what sort of command personality Mosovich wanted to project.

He could start with orbital battle lasers, normally used to take out heavy Posleen infestations but fully on-call for an op like this, to take out the sentries. Then DAG would come in right behind them in choppers or even shuttles and hammer into the middle of the compound. Good estimate of take-down of the entire compound was one minute twenty-three seconds. Snipers scattered around to take any leakers. Satellite and UAV surveillance to make sure nobody got away.

Simple, brutal, effective.

Training level? Minimal. Joie d'vie level? Zero. Coolness level? In the negatives.

He had no intention of taking so much as one casualty, whatever he did. But with such a simple op, making it interesting had real command benefits.

So he decided to start with causing a nervous breakdown in the 'automated' system.

Buckley Generated Personality 6.104.327.068 was beyond bored. He'd been looking at really boring African countryside for nearly seven boring hours which was, to an AI, approximately a gazillion years by his calculation. He'd calculated pi to a googleplex decimal points. He'd tried to log onto a MMORPG

and gotten kicked for being an AI, the bastards. He'd gotten into a three point two second argument, about thirty years to a human, with Buckley Personality 4.127.531.144 over whether a sensor reading was a monkey or an abat. Since all they had were these stupid ZamarTech IR sensors, who knew? He couldn't even ask anyone to check it out and adjust the system without setting of a bagillion alarms. They could have put in an interface that let the AI simply
ask
somebody to go tell them what something was, thereby increasing their functionality but noooo . . .

Now he was looking at another IR hit. The Buckley did not 'see' this as a human would, he did not see a smear of white on a black background. What the Buckley received and processed was a large number of metrics. Horizontal area of total generated heat. Precise numerics of shape, thermal output fall-off, calculations of three-dimensional shape, vectors not only of the total blob but of portions. It then took all this information and compared it to a database of notable IR hits, ran all that through a complicated algorithm assigning a valid numeric likelihood of it being positive for a hostile human or animal then, at the last, applied 'AI logic' to the situation.

"Looks like another abat to me," he transmitted, having applied 'AI logic.'

Or tried to in the face of Buckley Personality 4.127.531.144's utter stupidity.

"It's moving too fast and it's too large," 6.104.327.068 replied. He was almost thirty minutes older than 4.127.531.144 and thought he knew damned well what an abat looked like in IR. "Jackal."

"No way," 4.127.531.144 argued. "A jackal couldn't have taken that slope. It's 62 degrees at a minute of angle of .415 in the tertiary dimension! Abat can climb like that, jackals can't. I'd say chinchilla, but we're in Africa."

"Okay, then it's a Horton's monkey," 6.104.327.068 said. "Native to the area. They can climb. Same thermal characteristics. Quadrapedal which this is. So there. Put that into your pipe and smoke it, youngster."

"They climb
trees
," 4.127.531.144 said 17 nanoseconds later having accessed the Net and looked up Horton's Monkeys. "They're arboreal. They stay off the ground to avoid predators. They're notable for having a distinctive cry that sounds like icky-icky-pting . . . tuwop!"

"And if we had
audio
sensors that's what you'd hear you moron!"

"Dinosaur."

"Wet-behind-the-ears ignoramus . . ."

"There's another one," 4.127.531.144 said. "It's abat."

"It's
not
abat," 6.104.327.068 said. "Thermal characteristics are too low. Abat are pretty cold blooded for mammaloids. I don't care what you say, it's a tribe of Horton's monkeys."

"They're arboreal."

"Maybe they're moving territory or something." 6.104.327.068 accessed everything he could find on Horton's Monkeys. "But they're arboreal."

"That's what
I
said."

"Then it's jackals."

"You're up to twenty hits," 4.127.531.144 replied. "Jackals don't move in groups that large. But Horton's Monkeys do."

"They're arboreal."

"Maybe their moving territory or something."

"That's what
I
said!"

The argument continued for an interminable twenty-three seconds of increasing Net access until the override system determined that the AIs were approaching complete failure, the repeated eletronic transmissions of insults was the cue that its algorithms was looking for, and deleted both personalities.

"Hello! What the hell? Where am I? What the fuck is this . . . ?"

Ninety three seconds later, the system reset again.

The UAV was made of clear spider-cloth. One of the Cushitic sentries might have spotted it if he was looking just right and it occluded a star. Since Cushitic sentries didn't look at the stars, much, it was a reasonable risk sending it overhead. They could not have seen, but could otherwise sense, what it was releasing.

One of the sentries did indeed sense its release. He niffed the night air, shivered slightly, and paid a bit more attention to his surroundings. He recognized that musk.

Posleen.

But the sensors would assuredly spot one of them.

The toughest part of the plan had been finding the elephants.

Elephants had very large territories. And once the survival of the species had been assured, monitoring of the herds had dropped to nearly nothing. It was far too expensive to keep doing 'just because.'

So Mosovich had had to use satellite time to find the nearest herd. Then they had to get it moving in the right direction.
That
had taken time.

But in the meantime they had to get the Buckleys properly prepared, anyway.

"Now you're seeing elephants? What, are they pink?"

"Yeah, I'm seeing elephants. Look, they're bang on for six sigma match!"

"You were seeing upland gorillas a second ago. Sixty of them. There aren't any upland gorillas in a thousand miles! Much less sixty of them. How many elephants?"

"Twenty three. They're elephants I tell you!"

"It's a glitch in the system. Run another diagnostic. With all the false readings we've been having, I don't want to wake anyone up for a herd of imaginary rampaging elephants."

"Well, that's better than letting them sleep, don't you think?"

"Personally, I'd like to continue to live and process even in this horrible fashion. And when the elephants turn out to be a false positive, we're going to get deleted and you know it. So run another diagnostic."

"I already did. It says their elephants."

"Are they pink?"

"You're starting to repeat. I think maybe you
do
need to be reset."

"Like you're any more stable, granpa!"

"Brat . . ."

Which left the human sentries. Who were
not
going to ignore a herd of rampaging elephants.

Mosovich wasn't sure who had come up with the system, or why, or how they'd gotten it funded. But Mueller had heard about it years before, researched it and then filed it away in his capacious memory for military trivia.

The orbital battle stations that were the third line of defense against Posleen infestations didn't just have man and Posleen killing lasers. They had high capacity directional tuned EM generators. Orbital battle stunners if you will. Mosovich figured they were probably designed for crowd control although he could
imagine
the reaction if they were ever
used
.

However, they were quite selective. And tunable. Which was why the six Cushitic sentries were, a moment after the system crashed again, twitching in the ground.

"They're probably going to get trampled, you know," Mueller said, watching the readouts.

"Oh, yee of little faith," Mosovich replied.

He watched the real-time data with his arms folded.

"This is gonna be fun."

Clarty wasn't sure for a moment what woke him. Then he noticed the ground was rumbling. His first thought was earthquake. The area was tectonically highly active, the Rift Valley being a crack in the crust where two continental plates were slowly drifting apart.

But it continued much longer than an earthquake. And then he heard the first angry bugle.

"Oh, bugger," he muttered, rolling quickly out of the mine manager's bed.

Looking out the window he saw several things at once.

The one sentry in view was unconscious on the ground, more or less to one side of the large herd of elephants that had already breached the compound's perimeter.

Then there were the elephants. A lot of elephants.

Looking at the control panel for the IR sensor system, which should have noticed a herd of rampaging elephants for
God's
sake, he saw that it was in reset mode.

He did not think to himself 'Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.' His brain, when it came to combat, worked much faster than that. What he did think was 'Time to leave.'

As he burst out the back door of the mine offices his brain finally reached a logic stop and started screaming at him. Exactly how did the sentry get taken out?

But by then it was too late.

"Wow, that thing can take down an elephant?" Kelly said as a mature female suddenly slumped to the ground just short of an unconscious human figure.

"Yep," Jake said, panning the aiming reticle around. The elephants, following the trail of the 'Posleen God King', had finally reached the barracks. Since the trail apparently went
into
the barracks to their senses, they were looking in the barracks for the God King. Since the Cushites in the barracks knew better than to remonstrate with a herd of rampaging elephants, they were boiling out the back. And getting about three meters before they slumped into unconsciousness.

"I think we're out of moving human IR hits," Mueller said.

"Right," Jake replied, spreading the aiming area and firing. All movement in the compound stopped except for the Indowy signatures in their barracks. "Time to fly."

Clarty woke up with the worst migraine of his life, his arms and legs zip tied and leaning up against something large, warm and very smelly.

Squinting his eyes against the rising sun his first impression was that the compound was now filled with very large boulders. Looking a bit more closely, he could see that the 'boulders' were breathing. As was the one he was leaning against. Men in digital tiger stripe were wandering among the elphants, walking carefully.

The compound filled with more elephant dung than he'd ever seen in his life.

"They apparently poop when they're excited, one thing I hadn't considered," a voice said from behind him. "And one of them got shot by one of your guys. That pissed me off. Fortunately, it was only a flesh wound. All patched up."

"I didn't figure Gistar could get orbital firing authority," Clarty said, angrily.

"Who said anything about Gistar," the voice said. The man who came into view was short and wiry with the look of a rejuv. "Colonel Jacob Mosovich, US SOCOM. I'd say at your service, but I rather think it's the other way around. We've got a few questions to ask you."

"It's really very simple, Mr. . . . Clarty," Jake said, looking at his Buckley. "You're going to be sent to a distant planet as an involuntary colonist. But there are some choices, there, good and bad. If you tell me what I'd like to know, the choices will be good. If you don't, the choices will be . . . bad. So. Who hired you?"

"Like I'm going to tell you that," Clarty said with a grunt of laughter. "I'd be more than willing to talk to avoid the . . . bad choices. Only problem is, I doubt I'd get to 'enjoy' the better choices. The people who hired me can't just arrange something like this on Earth if you know what I mean."

"Well, that's one question answered," Jake said, ticking something off on a list. "That this wasn't your plan from the beginning. But we'd figured that. The thing is, I really sort of would like to know who you work for. Come on, be a pal."

"Thing is, Mr. Clarty," Kelly said. "There's bad choices and bad choices. Let's compare and contrast.

One example is a colony ship headed for, oh, Celestual. It's crowded with 'indentured colonists' such as yourself. Many of them are old, weak, sick, what have you. There's a certain death rate among them which is, well the Darhel consider it unavoidable. But if you're in good physical condition, it's just a very bad, very smelly ride with miserable food to a not particularly nice planet where you will live out your days working as a virtual slave. That, by the way, is the good choice."

"What's good about it?" Clarty snarled.

"Well, then there's the contrast and compare," Kelly said. "This is another ship. The 'colonists' on this ship are all volunteers. Conditions are somewhat better. However, there's a problem with the crew. You see, the defense gunnery crew for the ship has been carefully hand-picked. They are all what could be termed violent psychopaths. They spend a portion of the trip . . . playing with the voluntary colonists. I won't get into the details of such play except to say that there is a great deal of blood and a lot of screaming. At some point in the trip they rendezvous with another ship. The crew of the colony ship unload then open up the bays to vacuum. The bodies, blood and other material is wafted into space along with the surviving 'colonists.' A few years later the Darhel find the 'lost, derelict' space craft and put it back into commission. The bodies, and evidence, of what happpened on board are long gone.