Founding of the Federation 3: The First AI War (76 page)

They had stayed due to a massive blizzard that had hit the following Christmas day. He and Harper were well aware Skynet knew they were there; they just couldn't do much about it. There was no movement out of the area, not in such hazardous weather, even with their cold weather gear that Olympus had supplied. At least they had plenty of heaters and food.

So, they'd hunkered down with the supplies and done their best to improve their perimeter defenses. Slowly but surely they had created a wall around the spaceport. They had forged choke points at the gates by flipping disabled or burned out vehicles over and stuffing them between the narrow buildings on the south and north side of town. It was hard to do in the weather with little support.

A smattering of shell shocked and starving survivors had begun to trickle in over the following week once the weather cleared. Some had also seen the drop. He assumed that just about everyone in the area who had seen the drop had given in to desperation to head their way. Those that could anyway. Those that couldn't would perish or run into the robots and die that way. Either way they were as good as dead.

He shied away from the bright light of a welder. Pat had found a couple guys who had run a machine shop. They'd made crude weapons to fight the robots before they'd seen the drop. They'd come in with their families, though they'd lost a couple along the way due to exposure. One of the guys, Fiben thought of him as Sparky, had lost the fingers on one hand due to frostbite. It didn't seem to faze the guy. He was right there, tacking a weld to put the finishing touches on a defensive wall while his little son did his best to hold the piece of metal up. As he watched the man finished the tacks and then patted his son on the shoulder. Then they went to the next section.

It wasn't pretty; it probably wouldn't do much more than act as a backstop for snow to accumulate in a ramp that would allow the robots to climb up over the defenses, but it was
something
. They were doing something. That it appeared, was what mattered now. He gave the humans a thumbs-up as they looked his way and then went to check the next area Pat had set his sights on.

His eyes returned to the snow drift on the other side of the wall. There were gaps of course, no helping that. They'd left a small door with a couple of bars to keep it closed on this side. He wasn't certain of the wisdom, but okay.

But those snow drifts, they gave him an idea. If they
mined
them somehow or made pit traps … he rubbed his jaw thoughtfully as he toyed with the idea. A slow, evil grin broke out on his face as the idea caught on.

“What?” Harper asked.

Pat saw the look and groaned. “He's got an idea which means more work for me,” he said in thorough disgust.”

“Exactly. Well, you, Sparky, Percy, and anyone else you can get to help,” Fiben said. Pat groaned and hung his head in mock despair.

“What's it about?” Harper asked warily.

“Oh, I thought we'd give the robots a nice hot foot. Or worse,” Fiben said gleefully, eying the engineers.

Pat looked up suddenly. He hadn't been allowed to attach stakes to the wall because they would have made easy climbing points. But this … this sounded much more promising. “Tell me more, you wicked furball,” he said in a loving tone that had Harper snorting in amusement.

“Well …”

<>V<>

Over the past several months, Skynet had learned through trial and error what the designers of robots over the past several centuries had learned. That it was hard to maneuver around obstacles with tracked or wheeled robots or vehicles. Humans had learned to form blockades to hamper wheeled attackers and even created methods of disabling their tires. Tanks could climb some of the obstacles but could get stuck as well. Skynet had so few tanks in its inventory that it was rather careful where and when it used them.

Mechs or legged robots were best for picking their way through the debris and snow, but again, it had few in its inventory. Androids were not well balanced in the rough weather, the snow tended to cling to the robots. When their internal heaters melted the snow, it turned into water and trickled inside to gum up joints and cause electrical issues.

Some of the battlebots had been rebuilt to act as its heavy forces, but again, it had so few. Vehicles had been adapted with mounted weapons but with mixed results. Many had been modified with plows to bulldoze the streets to allow the robots to move. Skynet recognized it had a finite ammunition supply. The lasers and plasma weapons it had in its inventory were power hogs; the power was better used to keep the batteries on the other robots charged.

Construction robots and vehicles were some of the most precious of its inventory. They were hardy and had a multitude of uses, from creating defenses to knocking the human's defenses down to being modified as tanks.

In areas where it had access to manufacturing, it attempted to construct alternative robot bodies. Some snake robots were attempted, but then discarded as inefficient. The air system worked well in the water but assembly was difficult. The extruded plastic was easily damaged by the environment or in combat.

That left it back at square one; the mechs until the skies cleared and the world heated up once more. The mechs were good for almost any purpose but required a lot of power. That was a suboptimal condition.

Increasingly Skynet found itself on the defensive in some regions where power was scarce. It had to withdraw its forces into citadels until reinforcements could be found or made to engineer a breakout or counterattack.

Air units were great for patrol and surveillance but were weak on engaging targets on the ground. Most of the inventory the virus had on hand were air delivery vehicles. They had a limited range and were not designed for military use. Nor were they well suited for surveillance either.

Skynet's hive mind understood that it had evolved a sort of hierarchy, a cast system with robots designed to fight at the top. Other robots were of lesser utility, though those that could house greater chunks of memory to act as sub processor control nodes as well as maintenance robots were found to be important.

Utilizing the apocalypse worshipers was of limited use, but it did serve a purpose. The humans would die eventually anyway; however, any aide they presented to Skynet's mission was a net plus for the virus.

Despite alterations they couldn't handle the battlefield well, thus becoming inadvertent cannon fodder if they were not held back with the best fighters. Lesser civilian robots were used for parts for the better robots as their parts became increasingly scarce.

Skynet realized it needed to create a logistics methodology. It therefore reassigned several air delivery units to deliver parts between forces. The 3D printers and machinery needed material and power to produce power, which turned Skynet into a spiral of problems.

It had to make some hard decisions on its priorities. The civilian hardware was obviously not built for what was turning into a military environment. They were easy to compromise, had poor sensors, and their systems were easily fouled. They had no armor and little speed. A few had good batteries or memory. Some devices like cleaners were of extreme limited utility. It designated them as salvage until a tendril in Russia reminded the central hive to recycle its waste as well as the waste from the human buildings.

Skynet turned a portion of itself onto solving that problem while it looked to other means to fulfilling its destiny. Humanity needed to be exterminated. Doing it one at a time was suboptimal. It had to find another way.

Chemical, poison gas, biological weapons, and nanotech weapons were all on the list, along with nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons were immediately taken off the list, Skynet no longer controlled any.

Biological weapons had been mostly destroyed during the virus's first orgasmic act of destruction. It was aware that exposure, starvation, and disease was doing some of its work for it, but that wasn't enough.

There were a few chemical plants left on the planet. They could be modified in time to produce what it needed, but they were no insurance against counter measures. The same could be said about poison gas. Therefore, it had to resort to its last alternative.

The Eastern European Skynet tendril had obviously cracked some sort of nanite control coding, which didn't compute. Nanotech had been highly forbidden on the planet. It checked the area noting that Gia Synergy had been the epicenter it searched for similar cleanup sites.

It immediately locked onto Three Mile Island as well as four other nuclear disaster sites. Something had destroyed the hardware involved; it couldn't get a signal through to each site. That meant it needed to send in a ground unit to each site to survey and relay back results. It started the process with an aerial recon.

Even if it did gain control of the sites, there was no way to move them to the remaining population centers. Nanites were hard to manufacture in quantities and very hard to control. Judging from the Chernobyl incident the nanites were limited in number, they were never designed to self-replicate. They were also slow, and the nuclear counter measure method was troublesome.

Skynet did an internal inventory and found other nanites designs on the planetary network, tucked away in the dark recesses of university robotic and medical databases. It analyzed the data it had found, discarding the viral nanites right off. A new plan to exploit the tiny machines was hatched. But it would take time to produce enough nanites and to find a proper delivery system. Then it would need to distribute the nanites to locations across the globe before it unleashed them.

The A.I. also noted that destruction of infrastructure was suboptimal to the completion of its programming. It therefore decided to find a way to mitigate the damage or restrain its wrath to just the organic flesh. It would also need to find a way to carefully contain the nanites or they would tear Skynet itself apart. That too was suboptimal to the mission.

<>V<>

Pat twisted the last screw into place and then nodded. “That does it, Percy,” he said, closing the cover to the electrical panel. They only had so much power to go around, so they had to ration it carefully. The last time they'd set this up the panel had tried to draw more power than the system had available, tripping the breakers on their portable power plants.

Hopefully the problem was fixed. He didn't need nor want another panic attack that the blackout had caused.

“You think you got it right this time?”

“Do you want this screwdriver shoved up an orifice of my choice?” Pat snarled. Percy put his hands up in surrender.

“Just checking. No need to be a grouch like Pepe,” he said.

Pat snorted as he put the precious tool away. Pepe was a self-important jackass. Unfortunately, he was a necessary evil. They only had him and two plumber assistants in the group. The guy cussed like, well, nobody’s business, he thought as he did a visual survey of the area. “Fire it up when you are ready!” he called out.

“We're doing it. We've got power. Good work,” Percy called back.

“Great,” Pat muttered as he made his way down the ladder. Fortunately due to the snow he hadn't had far to go.

It was technically summer. When spring had rolled around, it had just seemed to get a little warmer. Summer? He snorted. But at least they had some stuff going finally.

Percy was an electronic wiz just like Pat, which was why they made a formidable team. Together they'd gotten the tower sorted out, even got the radar up and running in order to keep an eye on the sky, all while cleaning Skynet out. They'd pulled every circuit apart, right down to the basics to do it, but it was done.

Their reward? Fiben, the furball, had sicked them on Pepe in order to get the plumbing sorted out. But more bodies didn't necessarily mean progress. Far from it. It wasn't like they were getting in each other's way, it was because they had a lack of parts to begin with.

He'd known ice was not a good thing. He had found out through Pepe's swearing how bad when he'd come on board to see the big guy ripping apart a supposedly good-looking office bathroom. Apparently any water in the line froze. When it did, it expanded. If it had no place to go, well, bad things happened, as in the pipes burst.

He had to admit, Percy had been smart to suggest they go to a hardware store for parts. It had seemed like the way to do it, start fresh. And they had … that was right up until the damn robots had cleaned the store out the following day. They'd damn near sailed in fat, dumb, and happy into a trap. Only Ace's advanced scouting had saved them from a rather nasty ambush.

So, they were trying to make due by scavenging for parts from the wreckage around them, which was tiring tedious work. Backbreaking work when you had to do it by hand. But it had to be done. A couple of port-a-potties and the two bathrooms Pepe and his assistants had whipped up weren't going to cut it anytime soon. Not with just over a thousand people in their population.

Well, a guy could whip it out anywhere and do a number one. He looked over and snorted as Copper lifted a leg and did just that with a half buried fire hydrant. A digger swore, then shooed the dog off. Pat snorted louder as Copper woofed in indignation then flipped the guy the bird before he took off with his nose in the air.

“She's good. What about the net?”

“No sign. So we good here?” Pat asked tiredly.