Transhuman (17 page)

"I have already put that message on continuous loop in a wide variety of machine protocols," said Revenge. "So far they have not responded, but we are, however, being thoroughly probed."

"You are blocking, of course," said Revick.

"Of course," Revenge replied, sniffily. The cruiser turned again to run parallel to the intruder, leaving the convoy behind. "I've given them long enough to respond."

"Perhaps they don't understand the message," Revick said.

The cruiser powered up the bow gun and fired a salvo at the intruder vessel. Revenge had all the time in the world to plot the shot trajectory. Five bright, yellow-white pulses streamed away from the cruiser, seeming to be aimed well ahead of the intruder but, at the last minute, curling in toward the target. The intruder braked sharply and turned to port, so most of the spread passed harmlessly in front, but the final shot hit the vessel amidships. The charge dissolved into lines of energy that danced across the intruder's hull, causing the vessel to slow noticeably and pitch upward.

"I expect they understood that message," said Revenge, laconically. The intruder was momentarily helpless and ripe for the plucking, but Revenge held its fire and matched speeds, repeating the looped message.

"I believe that is what they used to call a shot across the bow," said Revick.

"Why would I want to shoot across their bow when a hit in the hull is so much more effective?" asked Revenge, in genuine surprise.

"Never mind," replied Revick. Despite their awesome intellectual capability, mentalities could be as literal as a tax inspector.

The intruder regained control and turned away, diving down into the higher-dimensional energy arrays, where it faded from sight. Revenge slowed down and began to perform slow quarter turns to left and right to allow the convoy to catch up.

"Incoming," Revick yelled, hearing the chatter of drive-displaced energy strings before he actually saw the craft.

"There!" said Revenge, placing an arrow in Revick's vision as a pointer. Seven or eight light strike craft rose out of the depths, moving quickly in tight formation. Revenge tried to turn the cruiser but it wallowed, picking up speed slowly. The cruiser fired salvo after salvo from the bow gun at the attacking formation but the small, rapidly maneuvering craft were a difficult target. Eventually, and quite by chance, a shot hit head on, and a craft disappeared in a silver flash of energy.

Two of the surviving craft lined up on the cruiser while the rest headed for the convoy and began attack runs. The cruiser's point defense weapon spat slivers of silver energy at the pair of closing attack craft. Its main bow gun continued to engage the formation attacking the convoy, with a noticeable lack of success. At point-blank range, the strike craft fired energy lances at the cruiser, the whole lower section of their hulls erupting in blue fire.

The automatic defense systems released a pulse of energy around the cruiser's hull, causing the lances to detonate early, spraying the cruiser with secondary radiation that disrupted systems all over the vessel. The two strike craft continued in toward to the cruiser, moving too fast for the point defense to obtain a targeting solution.

The convoy sprayed spores in all directions like tree blossoms blown by the wind. When the strike craft fired their lances into the defensive cloud, it dissipated and diffracted some of the energy; nevertheless, a lance speared deeply into one of the carapace ships, and others were rocked by fire. The pair of strike craft skimmed over the cruiser and dived into the cover of the higher-dimensional matrix. The trailing craft was a little too slow in executing the maneuver, and the point defense scored clean hits, knocking fragments off the little boat as it disappeared into the deep, leaving a trail of debris behind.

Revenge swung to intercept the strike craft streaming off the convoy, but they were too fast, so they easily evaded its fire. The injured carapace ship slowed and floated up toward three-dimensional space-time, turning over on its back as it did so. The damaged bioship turned a sickly color, splodges of brown breaking out on the extremities, and the frontal tentacles hung listlessly. To Revick's inexperienced eye, it was either dead or dying. A small missile detached from the puffer fish and climbed toward the bioship. Striking the carapace it stuck, purple lines spreading out from the point of impact, widening and deepening until the ship split, breaking into smaller and smaller pieces that spun and disintegrated in the dancing energy arrays.

"What in the name of Holy Terra was that?" asked Revick.

"Some sort of bioweapon?" suggested Revenge. "I presume that it was a fast-acting virus or toxic bomb?"

A communication window opened in Revick's vision to show the Goblin woman sitting inhumanly calmly.

"We won't have seen the last of the enemy. They are tenacious, so they'll be back," she said.

"I know," replied Revick. There was a thump as a large missile left the cruiser and sped off.

"What's that?" asked the Goblin, startled.

"Humans call them dougies," said Revick. "Revenge would no doubt refer to it as a long range communication drone; I have called for the cavalry."

The convoy hung in the empty darkness of interstellar space while the bioships were repaired. A strange auxiliary vessel sailed majestically down the cruiser's flank, its shape reminding Revick of a reconstruction that he had seen of the ancient ammonites that had once sailed Holy Terra's oceans. The ammonite-vessel sailed up to a damaged carapace bioship and, extruding its tentacles out of the shell, it prodded and probed the carapace. Other auxiliary vessels shaped like all manner of living things moved around damaged vessels, like bees around flowers. Something that looked like a centipede walked up and down a bioship, legs rising and falling in waves.

"The Goblins are signaling," said Revenge.

A window opened in the middle of Revick's view to show the Goblin woman. "We are sorry for the delay but the essential repairs are almost finished. We should be underway within the hour." She paused.

"Thank you for staying but I fear that this delay has doomed us. The enemy has had more time to arrange our destruction."

"Possibly and possibly not," said Revick. "Now they will be looking in the wrong place."

"Let's hope so," she said, and the window winked out.

Revick went back to watching the auxiliary craft buzz around the bioships. He found it wonderfully restful and the simile of a garden came back to him. The craft moved purposefully as individuals, but apparently randomly as a group. Then, as if a switch had been thrown, all the auxiliaries streamed together into a river of boats that flowed toward a large spherical vessel on the edge of the fleet. Revick had dubbed it the giant diatom, and it was clearly some sort of engineering support vessel. The auxiliary craft disappeared through giant hatches that shut after the last had entered. The bioships powered up with detectable movement of fins and vanes, like athletes flexing their muscles, then, all together, dived into the multidimensional matrix. Jagged silver whirlpools opened up around each ship, and they sank into nothingness.

Revenge waited a moment for the disturbance in space-time to dissipate, then followed the Goblin fleet. The cruiser sank with a splash that blinded Revick's senses until Revenge switched over to the detectors used in the matrix and he could see and hear again. Revick heard the murmur of the bioships drive motors up ahead, a murmur that grew to an oscillating hiss as the cruiser overhauled the lumbering merchantmen. When they caught up, Revenge slowed down right behind the convoy.

"Revenge, crawling along like this is hopeless. We would be hard-pressed to defend ourselves if attacked, let alone anything else."

"I agree. I have been looking through my records of escort tactics and think I have found something," said Revenge.

"Oh?" said Revick

"What do you know about Bayesian mathematics?" asked Revenge, accelerating the cruiser to military speed.

"Ah yes, Bayes' Theorem. If I recall correctly, it was devised by the pre-Singularity mathematician Thomas Bayes, 1702 to 1761," said Revick.

"Your degree was in the history of science, as I recall," said Revenge. The cruiser crossed the bow of the convoy and headed away out into the matrix.

"From Cambridge," said Revick, with false modesty.

"Third Class," said Revenge, cruelly "So do you know what Bayesian mathematics actually is?"

"Um, something to do with probability, isn't it?" asked Revick The cruiser made an abrupt turn to bring it back towards the convoy's route.

"As you say, something to do with probability," said Revenge "If I programmed a random navigational course we would make a difficult target, yes?"

"True, but we would rapidly lose the convoy that we are supposed to protect," observed Revick. The cruiser made a looping turn toward the convoy's rear.

"Bayesian maths allow a subjective adjustment to random probability such that, although each individual course change we make will be random in time and direction, the sum of the changes will tend to keep us close to the convoy."

"Well, if you are on top of the situation, then I may as well go and lounge on the beach with a 'gee and tee.' You don't think that I might meet that blonde there, do you?"

"You never know your luck," said Revenge.

The blonde was running a finger down Revick's arm and telling him how much she liked muscular men when the alarms went off, depositing him back into the matrix.

"This had better be good," said Revick, who was not in an agreeable mood.

"There's something out there," said Revick. "We were pinged by a targeting device. I am about to mount a search using active detection."

"No! Don't do that," said Revick, blonde forgotten. "You have that Bayesian random-number generator still running on the helm?"

"Yes."

"Then let's just listen, because right now, they don't know that we know that they are out there. We may be able to catch them flat-footed, so to speak."

Revick strained to listen and once thought he heard the hiss of drive motors but he could not get a fix. The cruiser moved on through the matrix, occasionally making Bayesian course changes. There was no evidence of any hostile activity at all, so Revick played back the data that had alerted Revenge. It certainly sounded like a targeting ping, but odd things happened in the matrix. His mind drifted to spectacular blondes with devastating smiles, and he sighed deeply. The cruiser was coasting past the rear of the convoy when the helm responded to a Bayesian probability event by making an abrupt turn away from the bioships.

A salvo of hypervelocity missiles streaked through the gap between the cruiser and the convoy, moving so fast that they left holes in the energy matrix that sounded like a slap across the face. The cruiser would have been skewered like a fish on a trident, had not the gods of Bayesian probability decided to initiate a turn when they did. As it was, the cruiser rolled and pitched in the missiles' wake. Revenge raised the engines to full power and kept the cruiser in a tight turn until they had reversed course. Targeting devices tracked the missiles' course back to a likely point below and on the starboard of the convoy. The cruiser raced across the side of the bioships ejecting rattlers out of ventral and dorsal dispensers. Rattlers were small, fast, overpowered capsules with extraordinarily inefficient engines that massively disrupted space-time, making it impossible to obtain a targeting fix through the affected area. They were the next best thing to a smoke screen.

Racing ahead of the rattler screen, the cruiser's detectors picked up four spacecraft closing from the flank and below. Revenge outran them, screening the convoy by the distortion field so that the bioships could turn away from the attack while hidden. Revenge fired more rattlers, from bow dispensers, that shot far ahead of the cruiser, extending the screened area so that neither the cruiser nor the attackers could locate each other. The cruiser's bow swung, as Revenge prepared to crash through the field and engage the enemy.

"No!" Revick yelled, "grabbing" the helm, causing Revenge to pause for a whole microsecond, meaning that the mentality was paralyzed by indecision. A split second to a mentality was equivalent to an eon of human thought. Revenge finally came to a decision and relinquished control. Revick chopped the power and threw the helm hard to port away from the enemy. The cruiser slewed sideways, ripping through the matrix in a long slide and creating a teardrop wake of ripped energy strings that recombined in sheets of golden energy.

Revick slammed the helm back to starboard and opened the throttles to maximum power. The heavy cruiser pirouetted in its own length, the hull groaning and twisting with accumulated torque. It slid forward, picking up speed and smashing through the last remnants of rippling golden energy with a noticeable clang. It was almost up to military speed when it entered the disruption field at a forty-five degree angle. Revick's maneuver had lost them time and momentum, so the front edge of the field was now far ahead. Revick was deaf and blind once they entered the field, which meant that he could not see out but by the same token, nothing could see in.

The cruiser slid out of the distortion field to find four silver enemy warships perfectly positioned to ambush the Terran ship, had it emerged from the field on anything like its predicted course. The nearest enemy ship ran along the edge of the field right in front, offering a near parallax-free, dead-astern angle. Revenge did not miss opportunities like that, so the bow gun spat a full salvo, all five shots hitting the enemy ship in the rear. The first two struck the hull and smeared across in dancing lines of yellow energy. The third penetrated, exploding deep inside, and the fourth and fifth burst amongst spinning debris. Energy strings consumed the smaller fragments, leaving just a handful of hull sections floating upward to the surface.

The enemy formation split like a shoal of fish threatened by a plunging kingfisher. Two broke to the right, away from the distortion field, and the third dived. Revenge turned to starboard after the breaking pair, giving Revick his first good look at the foe. The enemy ships were silver cylinders with blunt rounded ends. Masts projected at forty-five degree angles in crowns around the bow and stern. A series of thumps sounded from the cruiser's launch tubes, followed by the buzz of flutterbug motors. Flutterbugs were torpedoes with contra-cycling lateral drive motors that looked a little like insect wings and made a characteristic stuttering sound, hence their popular name. The weapons were controlled from the cruiser in their initial approach, switching to self-guidance in the terminal stage of their attack. Six of the bugs went after the pair breaking right, and two followed the deep-diving enemy ship. The rearmost of the pair picked up four bugs. It ejected small countermissiles that fired charges at the closing torpedoes, destroying two. The surviving pair flew into the target ship and stuck, dropping off their outer hulls and drive motors. The torpedo cores deployed drilling arms and bored into the enemy ship. A few seconds later the target ship slowed, tumbling end over end toward the surface. The second ship twisted violently to avoid the bugs, firing antimissiles constantly. It destroyed both of the little robots but in doing so gave Revenge a firing solution. The bow gun spat another five shot salvo, one of which caught the enemy vessel on the bow. It staggered under the attack but managed to fire a lance of blue fire back at the cruiser. Revenge went into a corkscrew evasive maneuver, and the lance passed harmlessly under the stern.