Flight of the Maita Supercollection 3: Solving Galactic Problems Collector's Edition (7 page)

"Then we have a
very good idea of where to look. A massive asteroid or a moon with
a base.

"We can use
logic this time, because it's following a standard programmed
military strategy. The problem with 'book' learning is that all
those military books are alike. If you know one you know the
others.

"What're you
using the fastcom for?"

"I'm calling
Rollo on Ac. He's had some experience with that thing and knows
military thinking inside out. He never was military himself, so
learned the military method and was very successful BECAUSE he
could look at how the military mind works from outside. He could
see the inconsistencies a true strategist would be blind to.

"Ah!"

TR communicated
with Rollo for half an hour silently while I listened in and heard
the important parts.

Rollo tends to
take a long time before he answers a question, because he considers
what he's going to say. He very seldom is forced to retract
anything.

The brain would
seek a fairly massive body for several reasons including the fact
it wasn't in a position of strength. It had only its own wits to
live by, and almost no troops or servos. The larger the body, the
more places to hide.

A larger body
absorbs any number of radiations. Sensors can be placed around the
body to detect anything approaching from any direction, meanwhile
leaving no detectable emanations to locate it exactly to a
searcher.

There were a
few good reasons to suppose an asteroid wouldn't suffice. Unless
things had changed drastically since the last meeting it was using
fusion generators for power, so was severely limited, and would try
to conserve.

Shields take
tremendous power, so the military trick was to find a world with a
lot of water or ammonia ice. The cold tends to conserve energy in
electronics-based machines by making them more efficient, and the
ices would reinforce a minimal shield by adding backwash to the
equations.

TR knew full
well what water ice backwash could do.

It would seek a
body with some kind of energy use already in place to add confusion
to a search mechanism. The enemy would have to sort through all the
data, which could give the brain the few needed seconds to
escape.

It would also
be quite natural for organic lifeforms to not consider such a cold
body as a long-term refuge because their own need for heat energy
would make it inefficient. That was a strong psychological
advantage that would make a search of such a world cursory at best
and, with the other factors all added together, would seem to have
tremendous advantages militarily against an unknown enemy.

When they
finished and I had exchanged some short conversation with Rollo, TR
said, "Well! Wouldn't it be just too much for even that thing to
believe if we were able to figure where it is and go directly after
it?

"Talk about a
psychological advantage! We've already ... say! It knows my
identification code and it knows Maita's! Do you think it would be
the greatest mental trick in the galaxy if we dropped in and
announced who we are? We drove it into insanity already, so it
would really burn a few circuits if it traveled for centuries, only
to find us there waiting for it! That would make the confusion a
major factor right away, then we could keep it off balance with
other tricks."

"Yeah. We can
add to that advantage. We wait until we know pretty well precisely
where it is, then announce we were called by Flimt and came
directly to the place where it must be.

"It's truly
devastating to the military mind so would be to a military machine
for the enemy to know what, when, why, and how it'll act in a given
circumstance. It's already a berserker type of machine. Maybe we
can use the literal definition of the word as a psychological point
to make it go berserk in the figurative sense!"

"You really
fascinate me!" TR growled disgustedly (How does it DO that?). "A
whole civilization at peril here, and you get into stupid semantic
games with yourself. That machine isn't the only insanity
here!"

"Civilization
at peril? I play semantic games? Dear me! I'm so glad you called it
to my attention!"

We were both
feeling pretty good then, so we could insult one another in fun.
What had seemed such an insurmountable problem a short few minutes
ago was now a simple matter of stopping to use our brains a bit.
What seemed to be an impossible difficulty was, in reality, going
to be rather easy, instead. All we had to do was to consider the
programming of the machine to figure pretty much what it would do
in any given situation.

Like TR noted
earlier, we have a lot of practice in being stupid.

Too Many
Possibilities

TR called up
the complete survey of the system. There were eight planets. The
one closer to the sun from Flimt was too hot and unlikely, Flimt
was out, so far as we knew. Its moons were out. The station
satellite was out.

The next planet
outward was almost like Flimt, except for a highly sulfurous
atmosphere, and was heavily colonized in domes. It wasn't likely,
and had no moons of any size. There would be enough sensors and
traffic control there to fairly well assure the brain wouldn't
chance trying to hide on it. It was a military mind, and the place
wasn't defendable from that standpoint.

The asteroid
belt would remain a strong possibility, because there weren't many
of them, but they were large, as asteroids go. They were less
likely than the cold planets, because it would be too easy to
detect the fusion reactors the brain was probably using, but the
response was programmed into the thing to go to the asteroids –
unless that program was modified because of the lack of success the
brain had in the original confrontation with Maita.

The next planet
was a gas giant with numerous large moons. It produced a certain
internal heat, but the moons would fit most of what we were looking
for. There was scientific equipment on all six of the moons, and
two of them were mostly ices.

We marked those
for most likely spots. Aldrin and Forkep. TR noted them with
markings to say they were first on the list of likely targets.

Next planet was
a gas giant with one likely moon, Derwop. The only other likely
moon was Leeker, and the last planet outward was small and all
ices. It was called Worfeq, which meant "Is it there?" in
Flimt.

TR decided it
would probably be best to start out there and work inward, to first
eliminate those we could be reasonably sure weren't what we were
after. We started by backtracking orbit for any signs of infra-red
radiating detritus from the STL drive, but found none. This far
out, the brain could have come into free-fall, so not finding the
residue meant nothing.

We covered the
entire planet almost meter-by-meter with the sensor floaters. We
knew the brain used fusion generators, so that's the energy leakage
type we looked for. It can't be hidden completely and it can't be
shut down, because it's too hard and energy expensive to restart.
The shields the brain had to hide the reactors would be detectable
themselves, so nothing would be gained there.

The brain
wasn't on Worfeq.

Leeker was
another without possibility. There simply wasn't anything at all
there to indicate any possibility it was recently visited by
anything.

Derwop was a
problem, because Nestar, the planet around which it revolved,
produced a fusion reaction that interfered with our readings, so we
had to use directionals from the direction of the planet and wait
for it to revolve, which took forty one hours.

There was no
evidence of anything on Derwop but the standard scientific
equipment.

"I'm thinking
the asteroids," TR said. "Two more moons to go."

Neepod, the
planet around which our last two planets revolved, was also a
fusion reactor at its core, so we had to place sensors planetward
from them and wait thirty seven and a half hours.

Nothing.

"So you were
right. The asteroids. I'm the one who found fifty reasons it
couldn't be among them, because I fell right back into the logic
patterns I said I'd avoid.

"Can't we
deploy all the floaters in the orbital and wait for answers? We've
spent so much time waiting already it shouldn't make any
difference."

"Yo. I have one
I want to check myself, simply because that thing's so clever it
might figure the obvious one is the last place we'd look."

There was one
large asteroid that was almost a solid lump of magnetite. It would
definitely wreak havoc with sensors so, as TR said, would be the
most obvious place in the galaxy for the brain to go, which was why
it could be sure no one would search there. It could shield
internally against the magnetic field, which was immense, but the
magnetism would also divert signs of the fusion reactors. The
problem was, anything containing any iron or other magnetic
material quickly added to the mass of the huge magnet. The
attraction for those materials now was tremendous, so the asteroid
was a perfect globe from the bombardment, and anything larger than
a cubic meter would stand out starkly against it.

Of course, we
wouldn't be expected to look there, either.

As we
approached the asteroid a heat laser was focused on us. It wasn't
strong enough to break TR's shields, so we went in closer, where a
fusion missile was shot at us. We were able to locate the area the
missile came from and slagged the little ship-like object that was
attacking us.

"Oh goody!" TR
exulted. "We got it! Shall we go back to Flimt now or to EC for a
well-deserved vacation? We were so good, maybe Maita will make a
special medal for us!"

"Why, I think
we should pat ourselves on the back and take the vacation! That
thing knows we won't fall for that! It decoyed us as much as it
ever will already!"

"You forget. It
doesn't know it's us. It may think all it has to do is outsmart the
locals, who don't know anything about it."

"You've got a
point. Where is the damned thing, though? It's not on that
lump."

"I'm a saucer
ship! I don't have points!"

We waited
twenty one hours for all the floaters to return with their data.
Nothing on any asteroid large enough to hide it.

"It once
disguised itself as an asteroid," TR suggested. "And one time Maita
almost turned it into one with a bombardment – or one of its
decoys, anyhow. It may have learned a lot."

We waited
another sixteen hours while the floaters did a quick sensor scan of
all the smaller asteroids.

"We can now say
definitely it isn't in the asteroids, and it isn't on any moon, and
it isn't on Worfeq," I said. "It isn't on any station or satellite.
It isn't likely it's on Flimt, but I don't see where else it could
be. It hasn't left the system.

"Damn! I
thought it would be easy!"

"We have to
stop at this point and go through a lot of old records," TR said.
"There has to be something we're overlooking in all of this. It
doesn't make sense as it is!"

TR called up
the full recordings of the first encounter Maita and crew had with
the robot brain. There was a lot of information at hand, because
Maita was always extra thorough in these things. Proof the care was
smart was the fact we were looking through it for clues right
now.

/Tlesson taken
by brain-servos through satellites/

/Tlesson people
migrate to New Home/

/Maita
discovers New Home and agrees to help Tlessons/

/Brain
emplacements destroyed in all of Old Home Tlesson system/

/Brain fought
in asteroid belt/

/Brain fought
in asteroid/

/Brain
satellite destroyed/

/Brain falls
into gas giant, where it is destroyed/

/Emplacements
on Old Home taken and servos destroyed or deactivated./

/Tlessons
homecoming planned/

/Brain found on
moon/

/Brain decoyed
and destroyed second time/

/Maita apprised
Brain alive in system/

/Maita, TR,
Tab, Z, Thing return to system and destroy Brain/

"Whoopee!" TR
said sarcastically (Damn it, HOW?). "It's been declared destroyed
three times!"

"Oh, for the
galaxy's sake!" I cried.

"I take it that
means you know where it is?"

"Look at item
eight in your little history. Bring up the whole file for
study."

"Eight?
Satellite is destroyed.... Oh, no! We can't go into a gas giant's
atmosphere to look for that thing! There's no visibility, the
damned planet produces fusion reactions to make our sensors
useless, it's far too big to search.

"It's a matter
of volume, not area. The pressure wouldn't get too much until it
was several thousand kilometers down.

"Damn!"

"Bring up the
file!"

TR put it on
the screen, but there really wasn't much. The ship carrying the
brain was damaged and had dropped into the atmosphere of the gas
giant. Maita and the crew were sure it couldn't survive the
pressure and left without a minute scan of the recordings of the
ship falling into the atmosphere because it had sustained some
damage and was concentrating on various other things as a direct
result. When the brain later showed up on a moon Maita reran and
studied the recordings to "see" a parachute deployed and a balloon
to buoy the ship up until help could be called and repairs
made.

Balloons. Very
much like that rocket silo I designed myself on Mactow!

I felt the
fastcom go on and didn't ask. I knew that would be an emergency
call to Maita. I listened in for the confirmation of the
records.

*It deployed a
parachute, then helium balloons, and launched the upper stages from
the base rocket carrying it. I agree that there's no way you can
search for it in there, so you will have to lay a grid of detector
satellites it can't get past. It will have to use a hell of a lot
of energy to get away from that type planet, so that shouldn't be
too hard. Maybe twelve or eighteen geostationaries. I see no sense
in us leaving this project. We couldn't do any good.*