Old Guy and the Planet of Eternal Night (An Old Guy/Cybertank Adventure Book 6) Read online

  Table of Contents

  1. The Fortress on the Planet of Eternal Night

  2. The Journal of Lysis Trellen Part I: Awakening

  3. I Did Not See That Coming

  4. The Journal of Lysis Trellen Part II: Arrival

  5. The Lesser Redoubt

  6. The Journal of Lysis Trellen Part III: Meeting Engagement

  7. Meanwhile Back at the Ranch

  8. The Journal of Lysis Trellen Part IV: A Small Kinetic Action

  9. Oh, It’s You.

  10. The Journal of Lysis Trellen Part V: Revolution

  11. This Means War

  12. The Journal of Lysis Trellen Part VI: First Steps

  13. Medusa

  14. The Journal of Lysis Trellen Part VII: Debt of Honor

  15. The Quest for the Holy Grail

  16. The Journal of Lysis Trellen Part VIII: Holocaust

  17. Old Guy Rides Again

  Military Powered Armor – Practical or Absurd?

  OLD GUY AND THE PLANET OF ETERNAL NIGHT

  Copyright 2017

  Timothy J. Gawne

  Ballacourage Books

  ASIN: B0738RV4LJ

  1. The Fortress on the Planet of Eternal Night

  “Where there is traction, there is hope.” Old Guy, cybertank, contemporary.

  My human creator often warned me that being too cocky could jinx things. With hindsight I should have indulged that superstition.

  I was traveling in interstellar space with two of my peers – the 18,000 ton Bear Class cybertank “Splot” and the 8,000 ton Horizon Class “Cheetoh.” Our main hulls were spaced about 100,000 kilometers apart – close enough to chat in near real-time and provide mutual support, far enough to offer some tactical depth. We were enveloped in a screening cloud of scouts, escorts, missile pods, and other useful things out to nearly 5% of a light year. Between us we had enough firepower to conquer an entire technologically advanced star system.

  I was therefore feeling quite self-satisfied, and confident in our ability to, if not quite able to defeat all comers, at least put up a decent fight.

  There was perhaps a microsecond worth of warning – a few sensors started to give anomalous readings. Then we and all of our distributed weapons systems were swatted out of space like bugs.

  My systems crashed, and when they finally rebooted I was on a direct collision course for a rocky terrestrial planet in a region of space that, apparently, had no stars. I was about a million kilometers away, which sounds like a pretty fair distance, unless you are closing at a relative velocity of over 100,000 kilometers per hour, and your primary interstellar drives are missing. Then it seems a lot closer.

  I have inbuilt anti-gravitic suspensors, but they are twitchy, and limited in capacity. They are not going to be able to slow me down in time. When I was in transit my main hull was attached to a cluster of drives and fuel tanks – those are all gone. Every millisecond I draw nearer to a collision that, at a projected terminal velocity of over 10,000 kilometers per hour, not even a cybertank could survive.

  The planet seems strange. It is dark, but reads as surprisingly warm, and has a decent atmosphere. I see neither sun nor stars. I must be in the middle of a vast dust cloud, and this is a live rogue planet in interstellar space. I try scanning the surface: there are hot spots here and there, doubtless residual volcanism. The planet is dark in the radio and microwave bands as well, except for two distinct regions, one significantly more active than the other. They only hint of electromagnetic backwash. It could be natural, or from any of a hundred known and who knows how many unknown other civilizations.

  I call out to my colleagues, Splot and Cheetoh, but there are no replies – not even a single sub-mind. For that matter, I get no acknowledgments from any surviving non-sentient drones or missiles. I am truly alone.

  I simulate a million possible strategies, and I calculate a chance. I salvage some thrusters from the few remotes that had been stored in my internal bays, and use precious fuel reserves to execute a burn. I change my angle of approach so that I just barely skim the atmosphere, my treads facing down. At first there are just the faint flickers of glow across my hull, then it becomes an inferno, and then a searing white-hot hell. My main hull is made of an incredibly tough hyper-alloy but everything in this universe has a breaking point, and I am cutting this very close.

  I bounce off of the atmosphere back into space, but I have killed a lot of my velocity. My hull cools off, and I repair what internal damage I can, and then I head back down towards the planet. The second time I also skip off the atmosphere, but now I am below orbital velocity. I’m heading down a third time, and this time will be the last.

  Once again I heat up. I am enveloped in a ball of plasma a hundred meters across. I’m moving slower than I was during the previous two entries, but I’m entering denser air, and this time I’m not going to be able to jump back into space to cool down.

  My velocity is down to 5,000 kilometers per hour – not that fast really – but I am rapidly running out of kilometers and it’s still fast enough to pancake me all over the landscape. I power up my suspensors, and … miracle of miracles! The damned things actually work. I slow down even further. The plasma ball dissipates, and I can see clearly around me. The ground is a featureless expanse of rock and dirt, lit only by my own brightly glowing self. I try and steer myself away from the rocks and towards a place that appears a bit sandier.

  Impact. I smash into the ground and leave a crater in it. My systems are flooded with failure alerts. Whole banks of me power off, and for a couple of milliseconds I don’t think that I’m going to make it.

  But I do. I am a mess, but still functional. I have sustained almost total damage to my weaponry, very little of my primary sensory systems are operational, and my internals are leaking and sparking. However, both of my fusion reactors are intact, and, to my relief, my drive motors and suspension are over 90% functional. I can move, and as I always say, where there is traction, there is hope.

  This will be the ninth time that I have crash-landed on a terrestrial world (not including 23 heavy landings, and the time with the Demi-Iguanas and the spin-bots doesn’t count). You would think that I would be getting better at it. Perhaps I am, but you wouldn’t know it from my current state. I slowly drive my way out of the mess of my own impact crater.

  I stop at the lip of the crater. Sand cascades off my hull and treads. Internally my maintenance drones are frantically working on the most damaged pipes and conduits. Externally, I take the time to finally look at the place that I have crash-landed on. It’s not impressive.

  I have been on rogue planets before – terrestrial worlds flung into the gaps between the stars by the vagaries of orbital dynamics. You might think such places dark and dingy, but you would be wrong. They are some of the most beautiful places in this universe. The skies glow with the light of a billion stars, and the land is washed with color.

  Not this place. It’s dark – dark even to my enhanced senses. The air is nominally breathable for a biological human, though a little thin, and cold – about minus 10 Celsius – but still not cryogenic. There must be a significant amount of residual and radioactive-generated heat coming up from the planet itself.

  I have thermal vision, but that’s only really good for detecting hot targets against a cold background. Close to my main hull I can use electromagnetic near-field monitoring, and sense the acoustic echoes of my suspension noise. At maximum gain there are always a few stray photons here and there, but past a range of a hundred met
ers out I am nearly blind.

  I am tempted to switch on my active senses – radar, lidar, sonar, spotlights – which would be standard tactical doctrine. A cybertank all by its lonesome is not very good at hiding, so if everyone else is going to see you, you might as well make sure that you see everyone else right back. But somehow I’m not sure. This place is spooky and I am feeling very cautious.

  Through my treads I can sense vibrations from all around me. There are multiple sources of various types – some are little skitterings, like rats, others more ponderous thuds, like elephants or larger. I strain through the gloom but can’t resolve anything more than a few tantalizing glimmers of motion.

  Then the variety of different vibrations all fade out, and they are replaced with a single large acoustic source. It registers as massive – at least as large as myself – but it has an odd signature, as it were moving on a dozen differently sized legs.

  The signal is coming closer, and I can start to make out the faint outlines of a shape. I try a series of hails on all the standard frequencies. I get no coherent reply but only a kind of scream like metal spikes gouging down a slate blackboard.

  I light up my active sensors and get a good look at what is bearing down on me. In a long and distinguished career of exploring I have never seen anything so utterly hideous. An Amok Happy Leech is a Spring Lilly in comparison. I estimate its mass at 3,000 tons – about fifty percent more than my own. It’s vaguely like a gigantic human meibomian gland (the kind that spread oil under the eyelids), but slimy and oil-slick black. It has multiple eyes, but they are not faceted like an insect’s, they are smooth and bleed dark ooze. Each misshapen leg ends in three-meter long talons that gouge the rocks as they are dragged along. The mouthparts consist of multiple overlapping sucker mouths all rimmed with blunt inwards-facing teeth. I decide to call it a Meibomian.

  I shift into reverse and try to back away, but the thing speeds up. Despite its ponderous appearance it’s faster than I am and it continues to close the distance. I try communicating again, and as before, get no coherent response.

  I have precious little weaponry left, but I have to try. I cut loose with my surviving secondary and point-defense weapons They light up the sky all around and tear great rents in the oncoming monster, but it only accelerates further. It leaps onto my hull and hacks at me with its talons. I am damaged! Whatever this thing is made of it’s not conventional flesh and blood – my hull is dented and I lose a secondary battery.

  It engages its mouthpieces and begins to drill into my hull. I lose another secondary – I am almost without offensive weaponry.

  In desperation I accelerate forward and knock the creature onto its back. I drive on top of it and pin it. It is out of position, but with its greater mass it is only a matter of time before it wriggles free. I send full power to my treads, but I have them operating in opposite directions. That is, my leftmost forwards tread goes forwards, the next one over goes backwards, and so on. Thus I stay in place, but grind my enemy down. It screams loud enough to damage some of my minor systems, but it does not have much leverage on its back and can’t get away in time. My counter-rotating treads dig deeper into it like the gears of a garbage disposal. Thick viscous black gouts of ropy intestines and pus-filled glands are scattered onto the ground to my fore and aft. I am slowly sinking deeper into this disgusting creature, and it’s finally starting to lose strength. It bats at me with its surviving legs but the blows lack power and coordination.

  Eventually it twitches and collapses. Just to be sure, I drive back and forth over it several times, grinding it flat. When I am done it is little more than a stain on the ground. Some creatures and devices have remarkable regenerative properties, but this one is not, I think, coming back.

  I trundle off at a dead slow pace, and my treads slowly clear of ichor. I sense the return of the smaller presences, but they keep their distance. Possibly I have killed a major predator here, and the smaller creatures are now more wary of me. Still, I detect seismic evidence of even larger mobile contacts in the far distance. I might still want to avoid attracting attention, so I switch off my active senses, and plunge back into darkness.

  I drive along about as quietly as a 2,000 ton cybertank can manage. I pass a few kilometers away from a thermal vent; the heat from it illuminates the surrounding area. Thermal vision is low resolution (all the hot objects tend to blur together), but I detect many slowly moving shapes clustered around the vent. Some sort of thermally-powered life? That would explain how creatures could exist with no sunlight.

  I launch a micro-scout, it gets about 10 kilometers away before contact is suddenly lost. Damn but this is a hostile place.

  I decide to head towards the largest location where I had previously detected the faint trace of a modulated electromagnetic signal. It might be an enemy, but it might not, and I cannot ignore any chance of finding new resources. I drive along and internally make progress repairing myself. I am back up to four secondary plasma cannons, and my internals are in better shape, but it’s going to take a long time to get my main weapon operational (if I even can with the materials available to me here). I had also expended all of my internally carried combat remotes in my effort to land on this planet. I am very much in trouble.

  Then I receive a transmission – it’s faint, but appears to be a cry for help from a young human female, unencrypted, on a megahertz frequency band. I’ve had aliens send me so many false messages during combat that I am instantly skeptical, but a signal is a signal and I have no other leads to investigate. Localizing it is hard, as if the source was jumping around or distributed, but it reads as roughly ten kilometers to my port. I alter course and cautiously sidle my way towards it.

  I’m about two kilometers from the projected source of the transmission, and travelling across a large patch of sandy ground. My seismic sensors give me two seconds warning – there is something big hiding under the sand. I gun my engines, but before I can clear the area long thin black tentacles that are more like steel cables snap out of the sand and wrap themselves around my hull. I strain against the cables – they are strong but I’m no lightweight myself. For a moment I am held motionless, but I manage to bring a couple of my secondary armaments to bear and burn off some of the cables. The rest stretch and then suddenly snap, and I accelerate forward. My rear cameras see a hint of something large and cylindrical poking out of the sand before I leave it behind.

  The transmission of the young human female fades away, with nothing to betray where it had come from.

  I cannot remember ever being so isolated, so damaged, and also lacking in any sort of operational intelligence. I consider burying myself and trying to conduct more thorough repairs in peace, but the constant level of distant sensor contacts circling around me suggests that this would be a bad idea: nothing draws predators so much as a wounded animal that stops moving. I roll on through the night.

  I start to detect the faint trace of the larger electromagnetic signal source that I had detected from space. It’s still too weak to decode, but the frequency spectra does suggest human technology. As I progress further, I see a faint glow of light over the horizon. I’m getting closer to something, that much is certain.

  I come to a small ridge. I consider crossing it, but caution stops me. I have one functioning sensor-mast left. I extrude it to its full 40-meter height, and advance just far enough for the small optical scope at the tip of the mast to clear the ridgeline.

  I am treated to a sight so glorious that I temporarily forget my troubles. I am overlooking a wide flat valley – it must be 20 kilometers across and two deep. In the middle of this valley is a massive black cube, five kilometers on a side.

  As I look closer I realize that it’s only a cube in outline. It’s upper half is covered with innumerable black vanes and fins, looking like a heat sink for an electronic part, only vastly scaled up in size. The fins are dull black in visible light but glow brightly in the infrared: this must be the upper end of a massive geothermal en
ergy plant.

  In between the fins, starting 500 meters up from the bottom and then continuing almost all the way to the top, are thousands upon thousands of tiny lights. They spread a soft glow over the valley. I sharpen the image, and can resolve that these lights are individual windows. Each window is about a meter square, and I can barely see shapes moving behind a few of them.

  I consider hailing the giant cube, but decide to wait. I’m going to continue to work on my self-repairs before possibly inviting another attack. I decide to hold my position – I don’t detect anything large lurking around, and being stable will make the repairs go faster.

  A chronological day passes, although the sky remains totally black. I detect more stray electromagnetic transmissions from the large cube. They tantalize me with their familiarity but I don’t have enough data to be able to decode them. There are strong low-frequency vibrations coming from the massive structure, probably due to the machinery operating the geothermal energy plant. Thankfully the native fauna has decided to leave me alone, and I am content to watch and fix myself.

  I’m not transmitting, but my passive sensors are all on full gain. Mostly I just hear the backwash of electromagnetic noise from the giant cube, and fainter static from the upper atmosphere, but sometimes something creepier turns up. Some signals are raw binary, clearly of artificial origin but inscrutable and uninterpretable. Others seem to be of human voices – screaming, pleading, or just babbling. The signals come infrequently, often hours apart, and on random frequencies and bandwidths. Cybertanks are basically never afraid of the dark, but this planet is becoming an exception. There are bad things out there, and they’re playing games with me…

  Then I feel a seismic disturbance off in the distance over to my right flank, and heading towards the giant cube. I start to detect the acoustic signatures of systems with legs, some match the Meibomian, others I can’t identify. I hear the distant crack of railgun and plasma cannon fire. I can begin to observe visual signs of the firefight, and then a dozen humans in archaic powered armor spill over the rim of the valley and begin to run towards the giant cube.