Flight of the Maita Supercollection 3: Solving Galactic Problems Collector's Edition (10 page)

I watched as
two floaters with some very complicated coils and equipment aboard
moved exactly across the diameter of the field around the brain's
ship, then moved close. Less than a quarter of a minute later they
both exploded.

"They were
supposed to," TR explained, before I began ranting. "They operated
by absorbing the energy of the fields in a spot. We got a bunch of
HF gas and acid liquid inside of there I think. I'm trying to
figure the concentrations and how long they'll take to ruin the
antennae and sensors.

"A lot of those
sensors have glass lenses I think, so the HF should blind them by
frosting a layer across each one.

"Maybe it'll
figure what's going on, but maybe I can keep it occupied for long
enough that the stuff'll work. Give it half an hour for sensor
damage, and the metal deterioration should be enough by then, too.
Hydrofluoric's pretty fast. It's about as active an acid as we
have."

We waited,
keeping up a random barrage for awhile, then I told TR to stop and
move off a bit.

"We watched the
shield for a predicted time. We should have some results by now," I
complained. "Either we didn't get enough gas in or it's protected
against it somehow."

"It may have
been able to neutralize ... no! It won't attack the antennae while
they're on! It'll collect around the bases of them from the ionic
field, but won't react until the fields are shut down. It may get
the glass lenses, but it won't get the antennae while they're
on."

I thought for a
minute longer, then said, "Start lowering the intensity of your
beams a little at the time. That thing doesn't have any idea of how
much power we carry onboard or how much we can generate. If it
thinks we're weakening it might lower the shields to fire at
us."

"I'll weaken
the blasts, then we'll stand farther and farther off. It'll be the
standard recharge mode as far as that thing is concerned. It'll
run.

"I still think
it'll try to hide on Derwop because of the ice backwash. We
wouldn't dare to fire directly down onto the ice. The melting ice
would form its own parabola, and the backwash would do us more
damage than we could hope to do to anything down there. We have an
added advantage or two it may not know about, too!"

"Such as?"

"At that
temperature the HF will remain liquid. As a gas it wouldn't do much
damage with the shield dropped. Nice little puddles of Hydrofluoric
acid eating away at the base of the antennae. The ionic effect
should be strongest around the energy shield projectors, so we
should be able to overload them pretty fast if we have the
time.

"I'm switching
to projectile attack now, so it'll drop the energy shield, but will
keep the matter shields in place as it runs. I'd hate for it to let
the gas dissipate now. I'll have to be clever, too! It's not the
only one who can play that game!"

I wasn't going
to give TR the satisfaction of asking how it was planning to be
clever. I waited to see what it would do.

The energy
shield dropped around the brain's ship and TR fired a quick blast
at it, but without the intensity to do much damage. TR increased
the projectile attack, let our own shields begin to flicker a bit
and retreated out of range of energy weapons while keeping the
projectiles firing.

The brain's
ship began moving around Derwop and dove as soon as it was out of
direct line of sight. We watched it go aground and bury itself in a
snowbank through a sensor satellite TR had launched along with the
missiles. We wanted to know exactly where it went, so we were
prepared. ONE thing worked like we planned! Maybe the HF would
work, too.

"It'll depend
on us taking hours to recharge and will use the time to recharge
itself," TR said. "It's been very careful with its energy use, so
far, so will plan to recharge, then to move before we could build
enough energy to fight it.

"I estimate the
acid will do a total job in three to four hours under these
conditions. It would do it in fifteen minutes in warmer
circumstances.

"You lays your
bet and you takes your chances.

"It'll make a
careful estimate that'll show it we couldn't possibly recharge
sufficiently in less than six hours. That'll be based on an
assumption we have fifty percent better facilities than it
does.

"See? I can be
clever, too!"

I used the
waiting time to call the fleet and to talk with Ander, the Acnian
commander, and Gohn, the Feach strategist. We decided to take scan
patterns from as far as the ships could've traveled on their STL
drives in the directions of computed paths for the nearest thirty
six stars of a type that could appeal to the military mind of the
machine. There were four stars besides this system that would've
already been reached. TR and I would start inward on those while
the fleet would work from the outside of the sphere inward. The
systems they may have reached at that point had all been explored,
and only one system had an emerging society, so we would go there
first.

The ships would
be easy enough to find and identify in space because of the large
fusion generators that would necessarily be working to keep the ion
drives going.

The reason I
settled on thirty six was we had that many ships in the fleet out
there. It was my hope there were nowhere nearly that many brain
ships to be found.

The strategy
would be to locate the ships, report exactly where they were, and
try to destroy them before they knew they were under attack. No
chances were to be taken. Period.

We went over
all of the plans so Ander could deploy each ship to its target area
and Gohn could discuss what we were doing with this one. We
explained the whole process, and Maita, who had been listening in
all along, suggested we do NOT believe for one tiny part of a
second we had actually gotten the brain here until we had ten years
proof.

We were to
leave those detector satellites in orbit around Neepod and Nestar.
They weren't interfering with anything and would show we
accomplished our purpose, at worst.

Thing said we
were right to try to get our hands on one of the brain's programs,
but it doubted such a thing was even remotely possible. That thing
was designed to make very damned sure it would never be read.

Z suggested we
may be able to get a small floater close enough to attach and send
us something in pulse/burst before the brain destroyed it.

We spent quite
a while trying to think of a way to access the program from the
brain. If we could do that we could find with fair accuracy where
other copies were sent, but we didn't come up with very much. Even
the robots were programmed to self-destruct if captured, so the
brain would certainly have taken care of that problem before it
ever arose.

T6 made its
first big contribution to our plans. "Why not, if Ander can find
one of them really far enough away from harming anything, get six
fleet ships to surround it with a stasis field, move in with an
energy barrier generator riding the stasis field as it collapses
slowly and have a man inside of the brain's ship when the stasis is
broken?" it suggested. "It'll be very chancy, because the brain may
self-destruct and kill the man, but there's a good chance there
won't be any defenses inside of the ship, and the energy barrier,
once installed, will let you dismantle the thing at your
leisure."

Gohn said he
thought the ships would be carrying programmed circuits in some
kind of safe-box to be put together when the whole program was
completed. Ander suggested the original brain was probably in
pieces aboard the various ships in that fashion.

Maita and TR
worked for awhile with the deployment theory for T6's suggestion
while Thing did the math.

A stasis field
with six points would work! It would be big enough to hold the
brain ship and it might hand us a brain intact that we could read
to find where all the ships were headed. The adventure offered
would give us any number of volunteers to ride the field collapse.
It would be another first for the history books.

Gohn would work
out the details and, should a ship be found in the right area (It
can't be close to any star for the field to be stable), it would be
tried. Every least detail would be explained carefully to all
involved with the extreme danger being stressed. Only volunteers
would be considered.

TR and I had
this one here, then we would be off to the inner worlds.

"Shall we see
what we've accomplished here?" TR asked. "Other than seeing if we
can be as clever as that thing, of course.

"I guess we'll
have to figure about twenty tricks and check 'em all out or we'll
get a nasty surprise again in a few years.

"Think we'll be
able to handle this little job?"

I grinned and
said, "Yo!"

Too
Easy

The acid
should've had time to do enough damage to where the shields would
fail in short order. The special metals used in the antennae of
those force fields won't stand up to an acid like Hydrofluoric or
even some much less active acids. TR has a layer of what amounts to
a specialized organic wax the caustics can't attack, but it must be
renewed each time the shields are used, as the antennae tend to
heat from the energy being broadcast and received through them and
the wax slowly vaporizes off.

That's not
really a problem, as the rewaxing system is automatic. The platinum
coating can't cover the antennae. It would ground the electrical
part of the field.

A force shield
works on the order of magnetism and such EMF forces. It isn't
monopolar like gravity so if you've ever done the iron filings on
paper with a magnet underneath bit you can see how the so-called
"lines of force" will shield what's below (Those "lines" don't
exist, in reality. They're the result of the "eddy fields" set up
in the iron filings themselves. That's why there's never been a
vehicle invented that will "move along the lines of force." Z
claims he once heard of someone who claimed they'd invented a
machine that could "climb" the lines like a ladder. It would be a
ladder without rungs! The weight of the thing, which would be there
in a magnetic field, would mean there would be no way to generate
enough power to use such an effect if there were actual lines of
force).

I get off on
tangents now and then. (Oh? you noticed?)

What I'm saying
is we felt time enough had passed to put the brain's shields to the
test. If it had something to protect the antennae, as TR did, we
were back to the starting line. We would neither one be in the
least surprised whether it worked OR didn't have any effect. If you
don't expect anything it's hard to be disappointed.

We moved above
the brain's ship fully shielded and fired a short blast from a
floater. We knew the backwash could damage us, but wanted to get
the ship out in the open. The initial blast would remove the carbon
dioxide "snow" from covering the ship.

There was a
flicker and a flash, a lot of smoke, and that ship came out of
there as if it'd been fired with a nuclear blast.

I thought it
had no idea of what had happened, except that its shields had
suddenly collapsed completely. It was able to think fast enough to
try to get away under full drive.

"You're
defenseless!" TR broadcast. "Surrender now. There's no place to go.
You're defeated."

The ship was
perhaps two thousand kilometers away when it backshunted through
the fusion generator and disappeared in a flash of vapors.

"Now THAT was a
complete self-destruct!" TR said. "We aren't going to read that
computer!"

We'd been
sending the whole operation on the unbreachable channel to Maita,
who sent, *Go back to Derwop and try to locate the brain. It will
be under the ice and will have no defense. You can probably read it
if it doesn't have a self-destruct mechanism in the circuits
themselves. It's very possible there's an automatic erase, so try
to work it so that doesn't happen. Access the thing carefully. It's
down there waiting. Finish there as quickly as you can and help
with the search for the rest of them.*

I could feel
TR's chuckle.

"Too easy?" it
asked Maita.

*You got that,
Charlie! That thing used acid on me a hundred years ago, so you can
be sure it would have a way to detect acid being used on IT. It may
not have had any way to counteract the stuff, but it would know
enough to see its shields were down. You monitor your own every few
seconds, as I do mine. It's automatic. Add to that, the thing would
have tried to damage you with its own self-destruct on general
principles and you'll see the brain wasn't aboard. All of that was
programmed.*

"I'd say the
brain was housed in an escape pod sort of thing," TR agreed. "It's
burrowed deeper and away so we won't detect it. It'll have turned
power to sustain-only and it might not be where we can find it at
all. We can't hope to detect one volt at one amp through a shielded
cable under a hundred feet of ice – or more."

"So we'll put
our satellites around Derwop," I said. "Whenever it decides to come
out we'll know and be waiting."

*You don't know
the size or shape of it, so you don't know what it may carry. Send
a floater to where the ship was and try to find the remains of the
tunnel, at least. If it isn't large enough for a sustainable drive
then you can leave the satellites and go to other planets where
there may be some of those clones. Ander's troops have found and
destroyed one of them about three and a quarter travel years from
Glormidge.*

We made a few
plans while the floater searched for the tunnel. We didn't find it,
but it couldn't have been very large for that very reason, so we
set the satellites and headed toward Old Home and Tlesson. We would
search the three worlds without evolving intelligences first and
then go to Killit, which had an emerging civilization. The people
were partially reptilian and partly mammalian and were at a stage
where they had a lot of sea travel, but not yet across the wider
oceans. They stayed within a few kilometers of the shoreline, so
probably thought they'd fall off the edges or something like that.
TR could modify me if necessary so I could go among them.