Space Battleship Scharnhorst and the Library of Doom (An Old Guy/Cybertank Adventure) Read online

  Space Battleship Scharnhorst

  and the

  Library of Doom

  An “Old Guy”/Cybertank Adventure!

  by

  Timothy J. Gawne

  Copyright 2012 by Timothy J. Gawne. It may not be sold, included as part of another work or product for sale, or modified in any way (this includes removing the copyright statement), except with the express written permission of the author.

  Gawne, Timothy J. 1957-

  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, whether living, dead, undead or cyber is purely coincidental.

  For My Family

  The “Old Guy”/Cybertank Adventures

  1. The Chronicles of Old Guy

  2. Space Battleship Scharnhorst and the Library of Doom

  ISBN: 978-0-9852956-3-9 (print)

  ASIN: B00XXXXXX (ebook Amazon)

  BNIN: xxxxxxxxxxxx (ebook B&N)

  Published by: Ballacourage Books, Framingham, MA.

  www.Ballacouragebooks.com

  1. Grasshopper

  Master Po: Close your eyes. What do you hear?

  Young Caine: I hear the water, I hear the birds.

  Po: Do you hear your own heartbeat?

  Caine: No.

  Po: Do you hear the grasshopper which is at your feet?

  Caine: Old man, how is it that you hear these things?

  Po: Young man, how is it that you do not?

  (From the TV series “Kung Fu,” mid-20th century Earth)

  PULL!

  Originally the humans had used fragile clay disks as the targets for skeet shooting, but the sport had been vastly improved with the introduction of guided missiles and plasma cannons.

  The Odin-Class cybertank “Old Guy” and the mini-cybertank known as “Grasshopper” were out on a desolate wasteland thousands of kilometers from anything. From 100 kilometers away the rangemaster sent a subsonic drone flying towards them on a straight course. Old Guy nailed it at a distance of 20 kilometers with a railgun.

  “Nice shot!” said Grasshopper.

  Thank you. But I was about 10 cm above my aiming point. I’m getting sloppy. Your turn.

  “Pull!”

  The next drone was also subsonic, but this one flew a weaving course. Grasshopper used his main weapon – a 30 centimeter bore plasma cannon – and vaporized it at a range of 23 kilometers.

  Oh well shot. Some might say that using your main weapon on a minor target could be considered overkill. But I always liked overkill. Nicely done. PULL!

  The drone that followed was supersonic, strongly evasive, and broadcast low-level jamming signals. Old Guy killed it at about 13 kilometers range.

  The cybertanks were sentient weapons left over from when there had been humans around. Since the humans had mysteriously left, the cybertanks had taken over the running of civilization, but for all of their other various pursuits and duties they did like to keep themselves in tune, weapon-of-mass-destruction-wise.

  You can run simulations over and over, but nothing ever beats checking with reality. The cybertanks were continuously running war-games and strategic and tactical simulations, but sometimes you just had to go out into the field and blow something up. Imagine that you enter combat, you think you have it all figured out, but the people who made your lubricants didn’t notice the minor contaminants in the latest batch, and so your simulations missed that under high loads your bearings would seize, and you die. It never hurts to check your theory with practice, just to be sure.

  The 2000 metric ton Odin-class cybertank “Old Guy, “and the 200 metric ton Stilleto-class mini-cybertank “Grasshopper” were out on a barren plains shooting skeet (‘sporting clays’ might have been more accurate, but ‘skeet’ sounded better). By convention the rangemaster would send various drones and offensive systems at them, with each succeeding attack more capable than the last. The drones had only dummy warheads, so it wasn’t quite like a real combat, but still a good way to calibrate sensors and weapons and it was certainly a fun way to pass an afternoon.

  Old Guy was nominally a top-of-the line model, but old. He went back so far that he actually remembered working with the humans. His gravely voice came from an antiquated vocoder unit that he had never bothered to upgrade, it was arguably an affectation but it had become his signature. Grasshopper was newer tech but much smaller. He was an attempt to make a cybertank that had 20% of the capability of a full-scale version at only 10% of the cost. Instead he had about 10% of the capacity of a full version at 20% of the cost. Sometimes the economies of scale work out like that. So his model never got put into mass production, and he remained the only Stiletto-class mini-cybertank around.

  Old Guy had two full-size industrial-grade fusion reactors, but Grasshopper had a single miniaturized one that was not very efficient and tended to go offline at inconvenient moments. Old Guy had a main turreted plasma cannon with a bore of one meter that could shoot satellites out of high orbit, powerful secondary batteries and innumerable tertiary weapons, and the ability to multitask thousands of independent combat remotes. Grasshopper had a main weapon just slightly more powerful than one of Old Guy’s secondaries, a few smaller railguns and slugthrowers, and could control maybe three dozen standard remotes at any one time. Old Guy had integrated manufacturing facilities to rival a moderate industrial firm, several spacious internal hangars and cargo bays, and 50 repair drones that could travel through internal corridors so that he could repair himself while under fire. Grasshopper had a single cramped hangar with room for just a few scouts, a miniaturized machining center that was mostly only good for light work on small units, and four repair drones that when not in use fit into slots in the rear of his hull.

  And then there was his nickname, “Grasshopper.” It was a little insulting he supposed, as it emphasized his junior status. On the other hand, slightly insulting nicknames was a tradition amongst the cybertanks. It was also what the martial arts master Po called his student Caine in the 20 century television series “Kung Fu,” starring David Carradine, and Caine was cool, so perhaps the nickname was too.

  “Pull!”

  The next attack was four supersonic missiles that hugged the ground as they dodged and weaved, broadcasting mid-level jamming signals. Grasshopper got them all but the last one closed to within two kilometers before exploding and some of the wreckage landed just a hundred meters short.

  PULL!

  There was only one missile in the next volley but it was a really high-end model, hypersonic, extreme-level jamming and electronic countermeasures, a smart but not-quite-sentient computer core with its own slaved micro-missiles and thick ablative armor. It took Old Guy several shots to kill it, and the wreckage showered over their position like hail.

  “Pull!”

  There was a pause this time, and then Grasshopper started tracking dozens of independently maneuvering targets. Ack! The rangemaster had decided to mix things up by launching a massed attack without warning. It was well above Grasshopper’s ability to deal with this level of threat.

  Link up with me, let’s take them on together.

  “But don’t the rules say that only one person defends at a time?”

  But in a max fire skeet attack there are no rules. It’s in the rulebook, and I should know, I wrote it myself. Come on!

  Grasshopper initiated a high-bandwidth data linkup with Old Guy, and the two coordinated their strategies. With the advantage of Old Guy’s superior sensor suite and computational power Grasshoppe
r was much more effective. He powered forward towards the attacking drones; if the drones targeted him Old Guy could just sit back and pound on them while he sacrificed himself to save a major unit, which would be a tactical victory against a force of this size. The drones weren’t falling for it. They moved to bypass him and headed towards Old Guy. That was OK too; Grasshopper had clear shots at passing drones and scored numerous easy kills. Under Old Guy’s direction Grasshopper drove a course that looked random but that always managed to bring the maximum number of enemy units into easy firing solutions at just the right moments. Old Guy transmitted targeting data and sophisticated jamming algorithms, and together they beat back the attack. Two smallish drones managed to impact on Old Guy’s forward hull; even if they had had live warheads the damage would have been minimal.

  Not bad, Grasshopper. Given that we had no backup or distributed systems of our own, against an attack of this scale I would score us an 88% effectiveness rating. Not bad at all. Now let’s clean up.

  By convention the cybertanks participating in skeet shooting had to assist the rangemaster in picking up the scraps of the destroyed skeet drones. Several bulk haulers mounted on big knobby all-terrain tires drove out to the target range, and Old Guy and Grasshopper used their repair drones to pick up all the pieces of scattered wreckage and dump them in the hoppers. They found the metal bits using millimeter–band radar, and the plastic bits using visual and near-visual band spectroscopy. The work was dull but relaxing, and they chatted while they filled the various hoppers with sorted pieces of destroyed target drones.

  So, have you ever decided on going in for a rebuild? Chosen a class yet?

  “No, I’m still thinking it over. It would be a big step, and I’m told that the odds of a successful rebuild would be lower than usual for me because of my limited and non-standard computer cores. There are some specialists working on my case. But I’m thinking maybe a Raptor, or a Spirit.”

  Raptors are a sweet design: fast, powerful, tough, smart, ton-for-ton the best class out there. But if you are going to move to a heavy-weight, don’t waste your time on a Spirit. Go with the Horizon-class, much better. Or how about a mighty Odin-class?

  “Odin-class? Never heard of it. Let me do a database search. Oh here it is: Odin-Class cybertank, an archaic model that has been out of production for several millennia, only one example is still operational, and a significant minority of peers feel that it is borderline senile. No, I think that I will go with the Raptor.”

  Hah! Stick with me, Grasshopper, I’ll make a comedian out of you yet!

  Old Guy suddenly accelerated.

  “Race you back to the main road! Last one there is a neo-liberal economist!”

  Grasshopper was going to protest that that wasn’t fair, as Old Guy had taken a head start, but he decided that that would sound petulant, so he accelerated as well and joined in the race. Old Guy had a strong lead, but Grasshopper was faster and more nimble. On the other hand Old Guy could smash through boulders over a meter wide that Grasshopper had to swerve to avoid. On yet another hand, larger rock formations that Old Guy might have tried to crash through in real combat would damage him enough that he would avoid them now, yet the smaller cybertank could thread through some of the narrower openings between them. Grasshopper worked his optimization strategies: this looked to be an interesting race after all.

  “Why do people from your time always poke fun at the neo-liberals? Before the humans became sane they had developed any number of corrupt and vile philosophies. Nazism, Stalinism, Behaviorism, Social Darwinism, Islamofascism, the Spanish Inquisition, the North Korean hereditary monarchy, NIH study sections – why this obsession with neoliberalism?”

  Old Guy smashed through a boulder field that Grasshopper had to swerve to avoid, and the older cybertank extended his lead.

  A good question. Partly I think it is just that the neo-liberals had the bad luck to be the last vile ‘ism’ on record, and it’s always the last bogeyman that you remember. However, they truly were vile. They were the only ‘ism’ that conquered all of civilization, and the only ‘ism’ that came close to exterminating humankind. And I was there. And I saw what they did. And I hate them. My only regret at their passing is that I will not have the opportunity to kill them again.

  The racing cybertanks came to a more broken terrain that favored the smaller cybertank, and in an inspired bit of high-speed maneuvering, Grasshopper took the lead.

  “So what exactly was it about their philosophy that you find so repulsive?”

  Another good question. But it wasn’t really a coherent philosophy as such. It was more a way of thinking, a contempt for the truth and other people, the ultimate evolution of might makes right. Consider Nazism. Aryans are the master race, and all other races can be killed or enslaved as the Aryans see fit. Not a very nice philosophy, at least if you are not an Aryan. But with the Nazis you knew where you stood. The neoliberals were an entirely different order of evil.

  The two cybertanks had entered a clear zone, and Grasshopper was starting to leave Old Guy behind.

  I suppose the neo-liberal philosophy could best be summed up by their rallying cry: the freedom to choose to own slaves.

  “But that doesn’t make sense. Freedom to choose is logically incompatible with slavery. And they never said that.”

  Indeed. They would claim to be all for freedom, and against slavery. But if someone was profiting from owning slaves, they would fight tooth and nail to protect them, because any attempt at restricting the profits of slavery was seen as an intolerable corruption of the sacred free market. It was how they operated. Depending on what their rich patrons wanted at the time, sometimes they were all for free trade between the old nation states, and sometimes they demanded that the wealthy have the ‘freedom’ to restrict trade. It did not matter that what they said made no sense, or was logically incoherent, or at variance with reality. They never apologized, never explained, but only acted with total arrogance and self-confidence.

  So it was like George Orwell’s ‘Doublethink’ in his novel “1984?”

  Ah, I see that they still teach the classics in cybertank school. George Orwell was a great man: intelligent, skeptical, decent. But not even his imagination could encompass the full corruption of neoliberalism. In his novel Orwell imagined that when the elites wanted to change history, they would send armies of scribes into the libraries to re-write history overnight so that everything was consistent. The neoliberals were so much more efficient. They simply ignored the library records and proclaimed whatever nonsense was the word of the day with full authority. Do you know the fable of the Emperor’s New Clothes?

  At this point Grasshopper had developed an almost insurmountable lead in his race with Old Guy, but they still had a few dozen kilometers to go.

  “Yes, I know the fable of the Emperor’s New Clothes.”

  No you don’t.

  Once there was an Emperor whose advisors claimed to have sold him a suit of clothes so fine that they were invisible and untouchable.

  “I know this story.”

  Stop interrupting your elders. The Emperor paraded naked through the streets of his capital city and nobody was willing to tell him that, in fact, he had no clothes on.

  “This is boring.”

  No it’s not. A little girl remarked loudly and publicly “That man has no clothes on!” This made the Emperor very angry, and he executed the little girls’ entire family, and made her a slave who spent the rest of her short miserable life cleaning out latrines and regretting her folly before dying diseased and crippled and miserable. Others were encouraged by her example, and loudly proclaimed the wonder and beauty of the Emperor’s new clothes.

  “That’s not how the story goes!”

  You know the fairy tale. I know the real version. I was there. I saw it. And if I am not mistaken, you have now won our little race. You are truly a fast and wily cybertank.

  The two moved onto the main road, and headed back towards the city. Traffi
c was light, but then it usually was. A few automated heavy trucks, some couriers, that was about it.

  “Care to do some bowling with me?”

  Sorry, I’m about sported out for today, and I’ve got too much work piled up back in town. Next time. Pay my respects, though.

  The two cybertanks parted ways at the next intersection. Grasshopper had decided to go to his one and only folly, a bowling alley dedicated to the memory of the famous Mountain-Class cybertank “Serious Moss.”

  There is no cybertank graveyard. When cybertanks die, the dead hulk holds little sentimental value, and it is recycled. Even the humans rarely kept the dead remains of their ancestors hanging around (with notable exceptions such as the body of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, which amazingly enough was still in existence and preserved in a glass case). Besides, many cybertanks would have been rebuilt into new hulls, and driving past your own dead body would be just weird. But there were exceptions. In particular, if a cybertank died in an especially meritorious way, sometimes the remains would be made into a memorial of some type. “Serious Moss” was famous for his defensive action at the battle of Reacher’s Gulf. Only a single slightly dented and scorched road-wheel remained of him, and it had been placed on a marble pillar in a modest park outside of New Malden with a small engraved bronze plaque commemorating his actions.

  Grasshopper had always felt that the memorial was kind of cold and gloomy, so he had petitioned to create a newer and, he hoped, warmer and friendlier memorial.

  At any one time most mainline cybertanks are performing hundreds of tasks at once. They are involved in committee service, they are operating numerous industrial facilities, running simulations, exploring, inventing new technologies, and so on and so forth. And many of them build and maintain follies of various sorts. Bizarre forms of performance art, or parks where gravity was distorted and the land twisted back on itself in a Mobius strip, or operatic re-enactments of the Napoleonic Wars where the battle scenes were performed with real operating antique firearms. Grasshopper could do more than one thing at a time as well, but not on so vast a scale. So he had to set himself limits, and he had decided to allow himself only a single folly.