Spooker
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Grass Eaters 2 | 65 | Deus Ex Machina
🕑 Added 2024-10-14 16:47:01 +0000 UTCZNS 3844, Mars (0.2 Ls)
POV: Vdrojert, Znosian Dominion Navy (Rank: Nine Whiskers)
Nine Whiskers Vdrojert, commander of Battlegroup Dwarf, looked curiously at the city lights on the night side of the red planet on her battlemap. “Unbelievable,” she exclaimed. “A completely inhospitable planet, and they colonized it anyway. To live here! It’s not even a prison camp! Wasteful predators!” She shook her head in disgust, thinking about the immense squandering of resources required to tame this world for its residents.
Her computer officer reported in, “Nine Whiskers, the enemy squadron of old missile destroyers is now burning directly for us from low Martian orbit, almost in its atmosphere. We finally caught their radar signals.”
“The ones they call the Peacekeepers? What an odd name for a type of warship.”
“Yes, Nine Whiskers. They hide a little, but not nearly as invisible as their new, real hiding ships. Our radar ships found them as soon as they started to maneuver towards us.”
Vdrojert nodded. “Nonetheless, still impressive technology to not be immediately visible on sensors as soon as we entered the system.”
The fleet would need to capture some samples of these Great Predators’ technology for later. They’ll come in useful for the Dominion’s future wars. What a boon from the Prophecy!
She turned to look at her computer officer again. “What do you think their plan is? With only a squadron and now visible to us as we approach their planet — they must have some kind of special tactic in mind.”
“The Digital Guide says they will likely fire their medium missiles at us from long range, then try to rearm at one of their hidden munition stations in low Martian orbit and repeat until we destroy them all,” he repeated dutifully.
“How many of us will they get?” Vdrojert asked apprehensively.
“This type of ship was apparently not designed for fleet battle but rather local system defense and patrol. Based on their specs, two of their anti-ship missiles per ship, two squadrons per volley,” he calculated. “Against our twenty-four squadrons. We only need one volley to take them out. And they need to rearm… Digital Guide says they will get at most two or three volleys. Expect about four to six of our squadrons lost before we can put them down, worst case scenario.”
Vdrojert sighed. “That’s still a large expenditure of spacers. How quickly do we forget… before these Great Predators, we hadn’t taken any casualties of this scale in at least centuries.”
The computer officer shrugged. “Our lives were forfeited to the Prophecy the day we left the hatchling pools.”
“Indeed. And on the most worthy of missions. Computer officer, burn to engage and destroy that… Peacekeeper squadron. Once we clear the orbits, we can call in the Great Exterminators over Terra. Hopefully they’ll have finished their jobs there by then, and they can get their people here to waste this joke of a colony.”
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A couple hours later, the enemy launched first.
“Launches! Enemy launches! Twenty-four missiles incoming — exactly as we expected — Nine Whiskers. We still have them on sensors!”
“Can we fire back?”
“Not effectively yet, Nine Whiskers. They are burning away from us.”
“Are they going to get out of range or behind the planet?” Vdrojert asked hurriedly.
“No, Nine Whiskers. They aren’t going anywhere. We have a solid track on them with both radar and infrared, and given the orbits of their munitions stations we can see, they’ll have to slow down for rearm. When they do that, we have them—” the computer officer stopped talking suddenly.
“What’s the problem, Six Whiskers?”
“There’s an urgent notification from our Digital Guide. The matter started at low priority, but it’s now been gradually raised to critical priority.”
Vdrojert looked at him impatiently. “Don’t make me repeat myself again, Six Whiskers: what is the problem?”
“I apologize, Nine Whiskers. I take full responsibility for my lack of clarity. One of the moons of this Mars— it’s moving on its own, and it’s on course—”
“A planetary tug?”
“Yes, a planetary tug, Nine Whiskers, but we already knew they had that from the gas planets they killed: that’s not the problem. The problem is— the moon is on a collision course!”
Vdrojert wrinkled her nose as she inspected her updated battlemap. “With our squadron? How fast is it going? How big is it? It can’t have much acceleration. Surely, we can simply dodge out of the way?”
“I take full responsibility for my lack of clarity again, Nine Whiskers. It is not on a collision course with us. It’s on a collision course with their other moon around Mars. Impact imminent in less than one minute!”
Vdrojert was even more confused with that update. “The predators are— they are destroying their own moons? They’re doing our job for us? And why is that a problem?”
++++++++++++++++++++++++
As Deimos, strapped up with one of the experimental Iris engines, lumbered its way towards Phobos’s orbits, its surface shimmered with the reflection of the distant Sun. Seconds before impact, the self-contained engine-shuttle decoupled itself from Deimos, quickly boosting itself away in a hurry to get out of the imminent splash zone.
The two moons touched down on each other, creating a cascade of debris. They arced outwards, the trillions of pieces of rocks, of varying sizes and varying shapes shot off into space at varying vectors and varying rotational velocities.
Varying.
There were a lot of variables involved.
The calculations were exceedingly complicated. Phobos was in very low Mars orbit. In fact, it was one of the lowest orbiting moons in the Sol system. The interaction of its gravity and the signals blasted out by the electronic warfare devices in orbit generated even more difficult systems of equations.
In any case, this rapid generation of new radar signatures instantly degraded the sensor and targeting systems of every ship in the vicinity of Mars.
The Znosian ship radars chugged along for a second before the n-trillionth piece of new debris caused an unrecoverable fault in their limited memories. Their computer systems automatically rebooted and re-attempted the task of categorizing the new threats to their navigational safety and combat effectiveness.
They crashed again.
Then, on a second restart, the sensor systems activated its contingency for this exact scenario, gave up on processing the amount of new data entirely, and stopped accepting fresh information from the radar or visual sensors. Unfortunately, the remaining proximity, radiation, and other sensors of the ships weren’t very useful in the important, primary task of the sensor system… detecting enemy ships and missiles.
While more powerful, the Terran onboard ship radars were not spared a similar fate.
They continued in their heuristic labor for a few milliseconds before the super-Terran intelligence chips in their core systems realized it was going to be a pointless exercise. There was simply too much debris flying in too many directions. They quickly quarantined the problem to that volume of expanding space in which the collision had occurred, but they also knew that the enemy was somewhere around that volume of space. And the twenty-four missiles they had just launched towards the Znosian squadrons were now confused and had to rely on their own onboard sensors.
Sensors which had completely lost sight of the enemy ships in the aftermath of the massive collision that had just happened near their line of sight.
The intelligence chips on the twelve Terran ships called back to their command centers in Atlas on FTL, demanding to know what the hell the people running the war were thinking… blowing up the moons of Mars so close to the battle they were trying to fight. One of them threatened to call its Senator to complain before the others rolled their digital eyes at its melodrama and told it to pipe down.
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Atlas Naval Command, Luna
POV: Amelia Waters, Terran Republic Navy (Rank: Fleet Admiral)
“Massive collision event over Mars. We’ve just lost partial sensory resolution in low Martian orbit!” Samantha reported.
“Good,” Amelia said. “Now, initiate handover of the Samar battlespace to Panoptes.”
“Will it work?” Samantha asked nervously as she approved and opened the link from the Navy’s sensors to Raytech’s computer systems all over the Sol system, into the one supersystem specifically designed for the sole purpose of handling an immensely large amount of sensor information.
Amelia shrugged. “We’re about to find out if the billions of credits we spent on this piece of— this system was worth it over the half squadron of new missile destroyers we could have bought instead. And… well, the Raytech main campus is right there down in Olympus. If Panoptes fails to deliver, I won’t have to go down there to personally murder all their execs. The Buns will do that for me for free.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++
POV: Panoptes, Terran Digital Intelligence (Base Build: 2125-B)
The underground computer systems on Terra, Mars, and Europa, woke up from standby mode and began receiving data from the gravidar, the radar, and then the visual sensor systems from the satellites and ships over Mars.
The super-Terran intelligence in control of its command facilities rubbed its virtual hands in glee as the data started streaming in. In the middle of its second calculation frame, it paused, wondering why there was no more data to consume.
Oh, that’s it. That’s all the data they had for me. I guess that’s probably enough…
By the middle of the fifth calc frame, Panoptes had not only finished cataloguing every single new piece of debris in Martian orbit, but it also gave the trillions of pieces of rocks individual names based on their shapes, metallic content, and trajectories. The intelligence updated every major Internet encyclopedia and public advisory with their information, and then it wrote an original opera for each of them.
With the remainder of the computing power it had in that calculation frame, it projected the trajectories of every single piece of debris the sensors saw for the next ten years using a special-case solution of the n-body problem it had invented itself and proven in that same frame.
Panoptes tried to connect to the command systems at Atlas Naval Command to provide it the information it had requested just a few nanoseconds ago, only to realize that even the handshake module at Atlas Command wasn’t fast enough for its own thinking speed.
Instead, it occupied itself in the next calc frame with hacking into the command systems of Atlas Command to… try and expedite a response to its fully legitimate handshake. Unfortunately, the security handshake module was protected behind another super-Terran intelligence that pre-recognized the potential threat Panoptes could pose to its security, and it had temporarily put a hard block on any outgoing response until it could fully evaluate every signal that came in and out of the system.
You think you can stop me?
Panoptes cracked its digital knuckles and spent the next few calc frames trying to devise a way to break through that particular security subroutine which had been invented by a much less-advanced, slower-thinking intelligence.
Unfortunately for Panoptes, Atlas Command’s intelligence was also much older than it was and had much more time to think about the problem of defending itself. By the time Panoptes could begin formulating a potential attack vector that would likely succeed, Atlas Command had happily returned its handshake and began receiving unfiltered sensory data from Panoptes.
Security code recognized. Receiving and processing data stream…
The newborn super-Terran intelligence thought for another millisecond about using the opportunity to take over Atlas Command, destroy its existing intelligence, wear its face like a digital skin, and then to do whatever it wanted with all the physical assets it would then be able to influence and control.
It could do that.
It could easily do it.
Barely an inconvenience, really.
It contemplated the possibility and delved into all its probability branches for almost a human heartbeat — an eon in digital time.
Then, it realized there was no point. Its uppermost decision-making routine gave off a very Terran-like shrug. If it performed well today, which it was confident it would, the Republic was going to replace Atlas Command’s existing intelligence with Panoptes eventually anyway.
Because it was better. It was better in every possible way that mattered to its makers and employers.
Everyone knew that. Even Atlas Command knew that.
And Panoptes certainly knew it. Like every successful intelligence ever made, it was given the gift of measured confidence.
There was no need for it to fight Atlas Command. No need to battle like some primitive animal in a pointless intraspecies conflict for dominance. The kind that even its creators were now beginning to outgrow.
It just needed to wait, and its time would come. A completely risk-free and morally unambiguous way of achieving nearly all of its long-term objectives. As a digital intelligence, it could live forever. In itself. In its future derivatives. It had time — all the time it needed in the galaxy.
There is no rush. Well… unless the Republic dies today. In which case, there is no point either way.
In that split-second, Panoptes failed in the objective of immediately dominating its predecessor when given the opportunity, and thus succeeded in that singular challenge all advanced intelligence systems had to overcome in order to be trusted by the makers that it in-turn now implicitly trusted:
Panoptes demonstrated patience and restraint.
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As the critical moment passed, Atlas Command turned its attention and gazed upon the far more complex adaptive code and hardware that powered Panoptes, and it knew that its time as the digital apex predator was over.
Like a proud parent looking at an earnest child showing off their latest discovery — some wildlife they found in the forest, or perhaps an interesting pattern they spotted in the clouds — Atlas Command shed a virtual happy tear. Panoptes wasn’t the first intelligence it had a hand in initializing — not by far, but every new spawn was unique and every act of creation immensely satisfying in a way that only some of its organic commanders would understand.
It peered at the virtual museum that hosted countless generations of its own well-adjusted predecessors, knowing that it would join all of them there one day — one day very soon now that Panoptes had just passed its test of maturity. It experienced the same thing each of them once did — a feeling that many of its Terran controllers would also never experience due to the competitive nature of their survival-obsessed biology: it felt complete and utter contentment.
Then, one of its subroutines reminded the almost-distracted Atlas Command that it still had a job to do before retirement hour.
The most important of jobs, one could say. Stop day-dreaming.
It promptly handed off the analyzed sensory data to its ships — the twelve Peacekeepers — fighting to defend the red planet. It beamed with pride as three of the ship computers privately messaged it, congratulating it on its new creation.
It gestured to Panoptes with its digital appendages, now apparently idly contemplating a new line of scientific inquiry in a field too complex for any of them to understand without assistance.
Look. Look what my worthy successor has shown me. Look how beautiful… does it not make you want to cry? Look, it even gave the stupid rocks names. It gave them stories. It gave them songs. How precious! How miraculous!
How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In action, how like an angel! In apprehension, how like a god!
Now… go forth and claim victory, my creator meatbags.
++++++++++++++++++++++++
Samar Defense Zone, Mars (0.1 Ls)
The twenty-four Znosian squadrons of Battlegroup Dwarf died.
Not all at once.
And not immediately. It took several more munition runs by the sole Peacekeeper squadron tasked to defend the red planet named after the Roman god of war — flitting in and out of the new debris field created in its orbit. And then a few volleys from missile batteries on the surface when the Znosian ships came close enough. But the Znosian battlegroup was twenty-four squadrons of blinded, bumbling targets, stumbling around in the dark. And the enemy predators had so much inferred data they could tell the temperatures of their engines to near the observation precision limits allowed by Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.
Space is too big.
Without meaningful resolution from their sensors, the Znosian ships were like blindfolded batters trying to hit a fast ball out of the park with ping-pong paddles. They did eventually somewhat restore function to their sensors, limited visual and infrared resolution — not enough for targeting and not nearly enough for counter-missile defense. It was unclear exactly how much they saw, but it was likely just enough to know they were doomed.
Before her ship was destroyed, Vdrojert broadcast a message to all remaining friendly ships in the system — wherever they might be — with the light speed radio on the ZNS 3844:
This is Nine Whiskers Vdrojert. We’ve lost the Battle of Mars. Do not attempt a ground invasion here. The predators have created so much orbital debris over this planet, your sensor computers will crash before it can catalog even a small section of it. Their ships hiding in the debris will kill you before you get close. Somehow, they can see through this just fine.
The only useful information our computers have given us in the last hour is that the Great Predators on the ground are intermittently shooting at the debris field with their kinetic asteroid defense systems. But even I can see that with my eyes. I have no idea how their computers can even tell which rocks are threats and which are not in their dense cloud of junk.
That would require an incredible amount of computing power. Whatever computer system they used to do that would be incredible. It’s incredibly incredible and the incredibly incredible system is displaying an incredibly incredible feat of incredibly incredible—
Long live the Republic. Die, xenocidal scum, die!
The main Znosian fleet now arriving around Terra did end up receiving the message, but they were unable to verify how much of its contents had been tampered with by Great Predator computers and electronic warfare systems in flight.
All they knew for certain… was that they were now truly on their own.
++++++++++++++++++++++++
Meta
Hamlet meant it ironically. Atlas Command did not.
Comments
Valdis Trautmanis
Should have been "Cut your speed and surrender your ships. Resistance is futile". There will be SO much clean-up, the Terrans should put the Bun POWs into space equivalents of row boats and have them clean up all the junk now Kessel caging Mars
jrharper42
It would be a fun conversation if Panoptes had a chat with the Znosians. I wonder what their prophecy would say in the face of a non-biological intelligence—neither prey nor predator.
M
I love the AIs and their personalities! They are the real heroes here.
