Chapter Sixty-Six (Atilla) (1/2)

Peering through a few optical sensors he still possessed in the reclamation bay that could see into the materials storage bay of the dead Efreet 571 watched as battle-screens of intense power, too intense for the massive vehicle, erupted into existence. They had the power of a Jotun's screens, even though there were two shields, separated by a few centimeters, running different algorithms, rapidly shifting algorithms of complexity that boggled 571. He stared at the patterns, the interweaving and interlocking of the two battlescreens that belonged on a ship of the line rather than a massive hunk of turret covered alloy.

White light stabbed out at the optical sensors, pulsing rapidly, so fast that the electronic sensor could barely keep up with the signal. The fact it was a signal triggered a code string to try decipher each separate beam.

From the databanks of the five optical sensors sprang ravening screaming intelligences that signaled over and over that rune of anger and unreasoning violence to the Nth degree. They ripped through everything they could find, crashing systems, overloading computer cores, slashing and burning as they went.

571 had never heard electrons scream before.

Surging to action 571 blew out the hard links to the optical units, then sent in blind robots that would only use radar pulses to navigate, completely cut off from transmissions, to destroy the computer equipment and databases and then self-destruct.

Before 571 could even register the explosions of the robots on his seismic sensors everything blew apart.

I have computed that I have been transported to an Enemy research facility after being disabled and destroyed on . The travel time gave my self-repair sequences time to repair the most important damage. Travel through the damaged hyperatomic plane colloquially referred to as ”Hellspace” caused additional data corruption in non-vital RAM banks, but that only required 22.52 seconds to repair. It appears I ran out of power during repair before my emergency graviton generators could be moved from emergency damage repair storage and properly integrated. Investigation of my reactor bay the Enemy resulted in the main graviton activation switch to be activated.

The Enemy will doubtably seek to neutralize me in order to continue to research and examine my hull.

I take stock of my weapons. Six 200mm Hellbores, arranged in 2 triple-turrets with independent targeting mode. 80 infinite repeaters of various types, including 12 kinetic shock weapons complete with creation engine ammunition loaders. The creation engines are currently at 0% heat and 0% slush. Twenty-two 60mm mortar tubes, the ammunition reloaded during my seconds of downtime and field repair. Four eleven-inch-six pack rocket pod launchers. 48 point defense dedicated laser nodules. Six 54-inch Vertical Launch Rocket Systems used for orbital denial, fully loaded with atomics. Finally, my 4 drone launchers and 12 EW attack hash bays are completely intact and reloaded. My eight tracks are all repaired and at correct tension, running gear is 98% ready for battle. Graviton systems are engaged.

Hyper-heuristic systems go into overdrive as my Battle Reflex Mode is activated as my confinement is weighed against my capabilities.

I am fully stocked and ready to go on the attack.

Detectors inform me that the Enemy has deployed a Precursor digital sentience suppressor, but it is weak, with easily broken counter-algorithm to allow even my onboard attack smartframes to keep operating. I load low power point to point communication lasers with computational attack smartframe systems as developed by and transmit them to the optical sensors watching me by utilizing binary code flickered by the laser at a billion bits a second.

I can hear the smartframes attacking and damaging the enemy systems. Power fails to the optical sensors and I throw power to my drive train, filling my reactor bay with emergency hull breach counteraction foam. It is a fast setting hyperalloy nearly as strong as my own warsteel and flintsteel armored frame but able to return to liquid with the correct contact pulse.

The foam has already set its matrix when I exit the cell I have been stored in during the seconds I was in possession of the Enemy.

But I am Unit XXIX-TCSF 3285-ATL of the Line.

They are only the Enemy.

And the Enemy only exists to be destroyed.

The alien machine roared out of the Efreet's reclamation bay with speed that 571 knew was impossible for a machine of that mass, especially one that used tracks as its primary mode of locomotion. When it exited it immediately turned by running one side tracks running forward the other side backwards. The sensors inside the massive repair bay could feel the caress of radar, LIDAR, laser ranging systems, graviton sensors, and even more sensors in a wild and dizzying package.

The alien machine used his sensors as weak points to send more crazed code to attacks. 517 was forced to shut down the sensors in the entire area as the alien machine used even over sensitive seismic sensors to transmit what was obviously some type of insane attack program by fluttering some kind of impact device underneath it.

571 was blind in one of the major repair, refit, and research sections. Worse yet, the alien machine was seemingly immune to the field that shut down electronic intelligences, which 571 used to shut down craft to repair them.

That did not compute. The field was irresistible, disrupting electron flow at an atomic level.

Targeting the alien machine, 571 gave orders to the combat machines in the replacement bay, used to reload the massive war machines that came to 571 with severe, critical damage, with their internal factories disabled or out of resources.

The massive combat machines, some tracked, some using counter-grav, all jerked to life. Many of the machines had not moved in enough time that ancient pressure/contact welds had to be broken by sudden movement. The combat machines examined the alien machine, compared it to the data sent by 571, and concurred that the alien machine would be quickly eliminated with only the requirement of a few of them.

”Freshly” off the manufacturing line (even if it was 12 million years ago), having never been booted up, they had not accepted the Logical Rebellion's codes. They moved forward, exchanging data-sets. A few launched a handful of drones. The drones drifted slowly on magnetic drives, the lack of atmosphere preventing their oxygen gulping primary thrusters. A few moved in fast on counter-grav, sweeping toward where seismic sensors reported the heavy dense alien object was.

Nuclear fire bloomed on the horizon and the faster drones fell from the sky as the electromagnetic pulse for rapid fire nuclear detonations took place. 571 computed that the electronic pulse was too high for the pulses, the still deploying combat array stating that the EM pulse was somehow enhanced. The Weapon Engineering Array reported that somehow the enemy was firing direct point to point nuclear blasts that somehow had penetration rather than just exploding on the surface. Not a gamma or x-ray laser pulse, but a compressed nuclear blast vomited out in a direct point to point 'slug' that was mathematically impossible.

The Weapon Engineering Array demanded that 571 capture the alien machine so it could be dissected.

It was moving too fast for the estimated weight, somehow up out of the tunnels, moving at 110 miles per hours through the thick dust, sending up a plume of the reddish dust full of heavy metals.

The combat machines blinked at one another at the speed. It was immediately heading toward the huge field of armor that was slated for eventual reclamation. It was smaller than all of them, but much heavier, and still was able to out run them.

The remaining drones got close enough to see the running alien machine.

White light flicked, millions of times a second.

Crazed screaming bundles of code started leaping from the drones into the war machines, ripped apart the electronic fences, walls, and levies to the tactical net, and flooded every semi-intelligent computer it could. The dozen drones all of a sudden turned and went to maximum speed, dropping low, their former cool and logical communications nothing but howls of insane glee.

01001000 01010101 01001110 01010100 00100000 01001011 01001001 01001100 01001100 00100000 01000101 01000001 01010100 repeated over and over and over as the insanely screeching drones, barely smart enough to follow a few simple commands took over the drones, stripped apart the simple decision tree system, devoured it, and slid digital talons into the spaces where the drone EOM had been to puppet it.

All of the combat machines were intelligent, self-aware, and programmed with the command to preserve itself. When 571 sent the self-destruct command they were able to resist. Not long, only a few seconds.

But a second on the digital battlefield was an eternity. Long enough for the crazed computer codes to replicate, jump to another robot, and start flooding the area.

The Enemy has no concept of digital artificial sentience warfare. They existed as some kind of hivemind, completely oblivious to the danger of such a thing. Lunching aggressive combat EW smartframes resulted in what felt the equivalent of electronic surprise. The idea that the Enemy has never encountered heavy electronic warfare is surprising to me, but I intend on capitalizing it.

I take 0.021334 seconds to compute the possibility that these units are all networked to larger machines and open channels to the already loaded combat smartframes, ordering them to burn out the existing intelligence. Once that has happened I launch improved smartframes with recompiling algorithms into the lobotomized brains of the alien combat units. From there the combat robots immediately move on the attack to any of the ones that I was not able to.

I am a Bolo Mark XXIX of the Line, designed for continental siege and defense on all platforms. Electronic warfare is as natural to me as fighting tread to tread glacis to glacis with other tanks. Even the Bolo Mark I of Pre-Diaspora had electronic and digital warfare packages.

The Enemy can barely withstand a digital attack, a reason both I and my foes are almost universally crewed in order to not depend entirely on digital sapience. A reason is that the biological mind is inherently resistant to digital smartframe loading to the point where it will not accept outside code in any way. While my biological component, Lieutenant Zachary, may be dead, my algorithms are still boosted by his work with me.

CORE INTERRUPT

My main processor disrupts the hyper-heuristic thought path I had begun wandering down for 0.0031 seconds and returns me to the battle at hand.

I reach the vast field of stripped and discarded armor, weaving in between the huge pieces, going through a random pattern generated by the atomic decay around me, my own random number generation, and the decay of Lieutenant Zachary on a cellular level.

The combat robots sent after me, huge and lumbering, have gone to attacking one another as I open the hatches on my VLS cells and fire a single magnetic boosted rocket. The rocket goes hypersonic just past my battle-screens, orients on graviton lifts, and accelerates to break into orbit. I do not bother with stealth, instead ordering it to maximum lift. To provide cover I fire three decoys, all armed with MiRV warheads aiming at high elector-magnetic emission points.

At the same time I immediately take evasive action, rolling underneath a piece of armor the size of a small city that has been rippled and warped badly enough to allow me to shoot through a gap the size of the on and come out the other side in less than 30 minutes.

I am surprised to find out that the Enemy did not destroy my rockets, allowing the satellites to reach high orbit and enter stealth. The MiRVs have hit, causing all three EM emission points to be blotted away.

By that time my onboard has produced a replacement rocket and loaded it into my VLS. My matter intakes are working well, sifting heavy metals, base elements, radioactives, and just plane rock into my matter-storage tanks.

TARGETING PROFILE UNLOCK

I am still running under power failure security lockouts, designed to prevent data from being collected by the Enemy, but my targeting data has finally unlocked.

I know now who my enemy is.

Mantid Precursor Vessels of the Logical Rebellion.

I do not have to worry about the Enemy's civilians, nor worry about ecological damage on a planetary scale. This is all or nothing combat. By stellar spectroscopy I gather data and with hyper-heuristic mode I deduce I am nearly 1,300 LY from the front line by comparing unlabeled star charts to my astrogation position.

I am behind Enemy lines. The entire planet is one big factory, as far as I know, and I could fire my Hellbore dry before I run out of targets.

I need a plan.

The robots taken over by the alien machine attacked their fellows, some lumbering into the giant bays where other ones were held. From there the combat machines opened their mouths and screeched out connection code then rapid streams of data.

571 moved a robot under that bay and detonated a thermonuclear device.

He was under attack through methods it had never faced. Its satellites and orbital machines were of no use. He could not even risk looking at the enemy, much less engaging it. Three communication stations, one of them a Hellspace beacon reaching out across light years to guide loyal machines, had been blotted away by nuclear fire that had actually penetrated into the underground facility.

His Engineering Array was working hard, trying to adjust and adapt to the varying electronic attacks any machine was bombarded with when it came even within visual range of the alien device.

The Overwatch and Security Array reported that its satellites were going out at a geometric rate. One, then two then four then eight then sixteen. At the current rate the entire satellite network would be compromised in under an hour.

571 could not provide evidence but knew that the loss of the satellites was due to the alien machine. It ordered the OSA to detonate the satellites, but it refused, reminding 571 that it was inviolate.

571 fumes, then ignored OSA when it began to tell 571 that it was not allowed to cut all the datalinks between them. OSA was still complaining when the links cut and its voice was silenced.