Tactics of Conquest (Stellar Conquest) (3 page)

Johnstone said, “Scoggins, can you bring up sector…26-46-AH?”

“Sure.” The holotank shifted its view to another area, where a spindly skeleton hung. “What is that?”

Johnstone chuckled, looking around the bridge as if to see if anyone had the answer.

Okuda saw it first. “It’s another
Desolator
. Another Ryss ship. The start of it, anyway.”

“I think so too,” Johnstone said. “It’s just the outline of the skeleton, but in a few years, there will be two superdreadnoughts.”

Absen rubbed his jaw. “Then four, then eight, and so on?”

Johnstone nodded. “Makes sense to me, sir.”

“That’s good news.” Absen exchanged glances with Mirza. “Looks like you’ll get a bigger ship than mine, Captain, though you may have to wait a few years for it.”

Mirza shrugged. “I’m grateful for the opportunity to command, sir.” His face turned pensive. “It’s not like the old days – up or out, and an officer’s useful career only twenty or thirty years. I can wait.”

Absen turned back to the display with a hungry look. “I can’t.” He stood up to walk over to the two-meter sphere of hologram light that floated above the Helm station cockpit, as was his wont. Leaning against the railing that protected him from falling into the sunken circle, he waved his hand through the representation. “Give me the asteroid again.”

Dutifully, Scoggins switched the holotank back to showing the thousands of machines methodically dismantling what was left of the asteroid.

“Pull back so we can see
Desolator
too.”

A moment later the bridge crew could view the enormous ship hanging with its blunt armored nose nearly touching the swarming rock. Robots, or perhaps they should be called telefactors, as they were mostly unintelligent extensions of Desolator’s will, hurled chunks of rock across the short gap, to be caught by enormous funnels. Once inside, the materials would be processed into more, and more, and more.

Hopefully
, Absen thought to himself,
they have already been turned into what I need.

The view changed angles, not as if the optical pickup was panning sideways, but as if its location was moving. Of course, that was exactly what was happening as
Conquest
drifted at low speed toward docking.

Soon, like an armadillo nursing from an alligator,
Conquest
bumped oh-so-gently into place amidships of
Desolator
, the point of its nose fitting deeply into a custom-designed receptacle five hundred meters wide and equally deep.

“I think…” Johnstone said, and then the holotank view changed to show a separated shot of
Conquest
from perhaps ten kilometers back. “This is from one of
Desolator
’s sentries.”

“Good work, Commander,” Absen said. “You hacked in?”

Johnstone chuckled. “I just asked Desolator’s permission, sir. Much easier.”

From outside,
Conquest
looked like a classic brilliant-cut gemstone scaled up a millionfold, her pointed teardrop shape inserted by the tip into the side of the vaguely lizard-shaped
Desolator,
her blunted rear protruding like a mushroom, or a crystal doorknob.

“Docking complete,” Okuda said, opening his eyes and reaching for his plugs. One by one he pulled them gently out of his bald pate and they retracted into the medusa that hung above his head. Once he slid on his cloth skullcap, he looked like a human being again instead of the cyborg he was.

“All right, Captain Mirza,” Absen said, turning to the bridge crew. “You and the rest of the crew are released for R&R. I’ll see those of you who are coming back in about three months.”

Mirza pressed his lips together but said nothing.

Absen had heard all the arguments from his flag captain, and rightly so, against the idea of remaining aboard to oversee
Conquest
’s refitting. He’d overruled Mirza, and intended to stay right here and watch as
Desolator
’s machines rebuilt her from hull to heart. Just maybe he could make a contribution, and there was nothing on the planet or anywhere else in the Gliese 370 system to hold him. Nowhere else he wanted to be.

The captain stood and shook Absen’s hand. “Good luck, sir, and good hunting,” he murmured. “I’ll see you on comm, but…”

“We’ll make at least one more visit to Afranan planetary space, after she’s finished refitting,” Absen replied. “There are a few more things I have to do in person.”

“Looking forward to it, then, sir,” Mirza said, and then headed for his quarters to gather his bags for the trip home to the planet and his family.

The rest of the bridge crew came one by one to shake the admiral’s hand, some knowing they would be back in three months, some obviously not expecting to see him for decades, if ever. “Great job, everyone,” Absen declared, and said other encouraging things, mouthing the officerly platitudes expected of him. Only Chief Steward Tobias remained, shadowing him as always.

Finally the bridge had cleared, leaving Absen all but alone, staring at the asteroid and the skeleton of the new ship. He wondered what it – he – would be named.
Dominator
, after the first of its class?
Devastator, Destructor, Demolisher
? Desolator seemed to like the sound of D words in English, the ones that matched up their Ryss counterparts of similar fraught power.

Absen wandered the vessel as the rest of the crew bustled about with their bags, loading them onto the Hippo passenger ship. Big as that was, it fit neatly into
Conquest
’s main launching bay. He shook more hands than he could count as the hundreds of ratings, chiefs, warrants and officers migrated onto their ride home.

Eventually he made his way back up to the bridge and watched as the supersized shuttle slid gently outward, pulled clear by magnetics until it had drifted far enough to use its thrusters and then its fusion engines.

Soon it began its weeklong journey to the planet. It would fly at noncombat accelerations of only a dozen Gs or so, Absen knew, stresses perfectly counterbalanced by the gravplates distributed throughout the ship. It bemused him to think that, once a TacDrive system similar to
Desolator
’s was installed on
Conquest
, she would be able to make that run in less than an hour in realtime, a few moments of relativistic time within.

He imagined this was the same feeling a man born at the end of the nineteenth century, before powered flight, must have felt watching a Saturn V Apollo mission claw its way to the moon on a pillar of fire: total amazement at what technology could accomplish, moving faster and faster.

But was lightspeed the limit? Absen wondered. Would man ever break through that barrier as he had broken one mile a minute, then Mach one, then escape velocity from Earth?

Einstein had declared that barrier absolute, full stop, as did all of the physicists after him, except for a few cranks, or perhaps visionaries, that proposed theoretical ways around it. Wormholes, perhaps? Extradimensional shifts? The hyperspace or subspace of science fiction?

Science fiction is merely the future that hasn’t arrived
, he remembered reading somewhere.

Finally the Hippo ship was out of sight, and Absen returned to his quarters. A shower, shave and fresh uniform later he stood at the enormous open port connecting
Conquest
to
Desolator
.

Spidery machines already scurried about, heading deep into the ship –
his ship
– on unknown errands. Most carried cases or naked pieces of equipment, and their numbers increased even as he watched.

A vaguely manlike telefactor stopped in front of him and extended one of its four arms to wave him forward. “Greetings, Admiral Absen, Chief Steward Tobias,” it said in a reduced facsimile of Desolator’s voice. “Please come with me. I will show you to your new quarters.”

“I would prefer to stay in my own, aboard my ship,” Absen replied. In truth, it did not matter terribly to him, but he still did not entirely trust the AI, and watched closely to see what his reaction to even this small opposition would be.

“As you wish, Admiral. However, eventually the work in that area will make residing there quite unpleasant, and your presence will reduce the efficiency of the refitting. I can rework the schedule to reduce your need for absence from those spaces to approximately one week without significant delay.”

Absen nodded. “Never mind. I’ll start packing up my stuff.”

“Just instruct me, Admiral, and I will have your ‘stuff’ transferred to your temporary quarters aboard
Desolator
.”

“How long will that take?”

The machine in front of him seemed somehow to display amusement, despite the lack of mobile features. “Approximately fourteen minutes, once you approve.”

Absen coughed in suppressed amazement, thinking about the efficiency of AI machines. “Well, go ahead, then.”

“It shall be done. Will you come to the command chamber?”

“Lead on, Macduff,” he misquoted.

Inside
Desolator
a small electric car waited with seating enough for several humans or Ryss, or even one or two of the half-ton Hippos. They rode less than a kilometer, just the distance from the dock to a point near the center of the vast vessel. On the way Absen lost count of the machines that walked, crawled, rolled, perambulated, treaded and even flew past. There seemed millions, and a rough calculation showed this was easily possible. A dozen Manhattans could fit inside
Desolator
; over fifty cubic kilometers of interior volume.

No wonder the Ryss had needed an AI. That or a million crew.

Everything was shiny, everything new, except for the odd undamaged deck plate or bulkhead not replaced. Humans would have redone everything, made it all symmetrical, but to a machine, or a warship, if it still met specs there was no need.

And, as they had recently found out, no one knew when more enemy would show. The last seven years had been stressful, even frantic. Absen had lain awake many a night, sweating the possibility that a Meme task force would show before
Desolator
regained his former strength.

Now, no single thing except the Pseudo-Von-Neumann complex on Afrana’s moon Enoi rivalled
Desolator
’s production capability, and his computing power. Those capabilities would now be used to turn
Conquest
into a similar warship, multiplying its combat capacity by at least a factor of ten. Absen suspected that, properly handled, it would be much higher. After all, she was still his ship, even with new teeth. He knew her inside and out, and he knew Meme, how they thought, how they fought, how they never forgot.

He knew how to kill them.

Because they learned slow. Nothing was ever lost to Meme memory molecules, save by annihilation, but they were not flexible of mind. The shorter-lived races supplied that spark, which was, Absen supposed, one reason the blobbos enslaved them.

The electric vehicle rolled to a smooth stop in front of an enormous opening it could have easily passed through. There was no door.

“The control chamber,” the minion said, pointing.

“Thank you,” Absen replied. The cart and creature rolled away, leaving him among the machines. Far fewer were visible, just a handful on their ways about inscrutable tasks. He entered the control chamber.

Seated on a large chair, a technological throne, really, sat a majestic old Ryss, his mane graying but his eyes clear and bright. “Abssssen!” the big cat hissed, standing to stride over. “Admiral on the bridge!”

The crew present stood, until Absen waved them back to their seats with a smile. “At ease. Carry on.” Absen shifted to passable Ryssan. He’d finally accepted a cybernetic implant, which included the ability to download his allies’ languages. The formal phrasings and overtones, the feeling of gravity in the words, actually made it a pleasure to speak, even though his mouth undoubtedly could not do it full justice. “Captain Chirom, it is good to see you.”

“And you.” The Ryss towered over the human, putting out his paw-like hand to be clasped, man-style.

“It was well done, the killing of the Destroyer.” Absen raised his voice to encompass the dozen beings scattered about the scores of control stations, a bare skeleton crew, drawing pleased smiles. “I commend you, Captain and crew.”

Chirom ruffled his mane in a Ryss shrug, and lowered his voice. “I am a figurehead, no more.
Desolator
doesn’t need me, and barely has a use for organic crew. Now that he is building a twin, I wonder whether we organics have become obsolete.”

Absen returned the shrug. “I learned long ago that all we can do is trust people, whatever their flaws. Is
Desolator
a person?”

“Undoubtedly.”

“Is he trustworthy?”

Chirom turned toward the opening where the door used to be. “As much as anyone is.”

“We humans have a saying:
Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely
.”

“It is a wise saying. We Ryss also have a saying:
Trust with one eye open
.”

Absen chuckled as Chirom walked slowly out of the chamber, leaning slightly on a heavy walking stick. “Yes, we have similar maxims. That’s one reason for the crew, I believe: as fail-safes and reminders to the AIs that they no more built themselves than organics did.”

“Yet they are building themselves now. And organics are rebuilding themselves with microbes and machines.”

“True, but reproduction is reproduction. Only a fool believes he owes nothing to those who came before. I hope Desolator and his kin will not be fools.”

Chirom looked sidelong at Absen. “I believe he is saner than most of us, as long as he is not damaged. And I believe he has learned from this incident, and has taken steps to guard his mind better than before.”

Absen sighed. “I’ve been thinking about that for some time. Once we returned control of his own body, his machines and his factories, we gave up any chance of controlling him. There’s no point in trying. We have to trust
him
…and I try to. I’m not so sure about any new AIs he spawns.”

“Why not?”

“Organics go through a stage of helplessness and then growth. If raised properly, they learn their limitations and their society’s rules before they gain enough power to do too much damage. When they are eventually given freedom and responsibility, we hope they have learned the wisdom and restraint to handle it all.”