Chapter 21: Meeting the Allies

After some discussion with Admiral Felicia Macdonald and General Celia Ford, they allowed both university groups to sit at tables in the planning room if they remained silent. Basil joined them.

At dinner Razza indicated that she had some intelligence that could be of value from her own sources: “The military cockroaches have been secretly assembling very large battleships and carriers in one of the adjacent galaxies, to avoid surveillance. Two of these were used in the prior attack on the Empire. They have ten more of these of which my sources are aware.

“They have been preparing to fight the octopi, and have developed a new generation of submarine and amphibious warfare craft that is intended primarily for submarine warfare, but it may be used to land troops from the sea and from rivers. They have new generations of planet killer weapons that they can use, if they cannot win a planet. They have developed countermeasures against the dogs in space and on the ships, and the boars on land. My contacts are still attempting to obtain more details.”

“Felicia you and Celia carry on with the planning. I am not sure that we can contribute a lot in the room at present. We have plenty of brainpower that is being unused in these two groups. I am taking them with Basil after dinner to go and have a chat with the engineers and with the cyber warfare groups, probably both together to see if we can brainstorm a few ideas,” said Jason. “Porquenta, Sheila, and I have had the discussion about what we would do when the roles of both the dogs and the boars become more limited. What I want to explore is how we can still use the dogs as part of our tactics by countering their probable countermeasures. We have already discussed shield disruption of the dogs’ energy, and I believe that we have some solutions. The bugs have developed ship boarding countermeasures as a general precaution, though this did not seem to be a significant part of prior warfare. In most wars ships were forced to slug it out at a distance.

“The countermeasures on our ships identify us by our implants. Sensors pick up any life-form and assess if it has proper identification. If not, it flags its position and fires upon it. Let us assume that the bugs do the same. The question that I would like to consider is that we either reprogram our own system to identify a querying signal and create an identification that we pick up from any native to the ship life-form. Before we enter the ship, the system identifies the transponder equivalent on the lifeforms by analyzing communication between lifeforms and the ship system. It then creates a valid identification to fool the ship. It would be important to do this for both the dogs and the Marines. It would also be important that our implants do not transmit and identify us to the ship. There may well be other ideas that the group may have to solve these problems,” said Jason. “Sheila, I would very much appreciate you coming along with us.”

Both the engineers and the cyber warfare group were very happy to meet to discuss the issues as perceived by Jason.

“I asked Porquenta if he could think of a way to prevent the dogs getting into a ship. He began looking at how the shield would need to perform, to delay a dog at the shield, or block it at the shield. Short-range missile defenses could then target and terminate them. Weapons fire would not do it, they would need to use some form of electrical defense. He could create a shield that would delay the dog at the shield so that it could be targeted. In so solving that problem, it allowed the blockage of trans-dimensional projectiles or missiles, which we have implemented. The second defense would be potentially creating an electrical field at the hull to disable the dogs. This was not so simply done. It could be done, but was prohibitive in terms of energy consumption. It was more efficient to create an internal defensive system that would identify and shock the dogs. Dogs appear as an electronic body. To not disable their own AIs and electronic devices they would need to all be identified to the system. We do not want dogs to get into the ships with Marines, and simply have them disabled. I want us to consider a way for us to create electronic identities prior to boarding the ship that makes our Marines, Marine AIs and dogs appear to be natural residents of the ship.

“To get through the shields and to disable any potential hull protection, Porquenta has created a new generation of shield killer. We need to identify their shield composition or it will take a series of strikes to get it right. Once we get it right, we will have cracked their system, unless their system is continuously variable. This is possible but is very difficult to achieve. There are a limited number of effective shield configurations that will work. Rotating through these creates a vulnerability when switching occurs. What thoughts do you have, ladies and gentlemen?” Jason asked with interest.

The chief engineer on the Battleship, Jacobo Lengling spoke, “The Cockroaches have a passive transponder and communication system that waits to be queried. We know this because we captured them, and their systems. You may not be aware, Jason, that we have been working on this area and believe that we may have solved the problems for you. Some of the ships did have the systems but they were simply not switched on. It is one of those if you don’t use it you can forget about it type of system. We were lucky with our first two encounters with them. The possibilities for disabling the systems include hacking the system to switch it off, becoming an identified part of the system, overloading and burning out the system, or switching it off at an enabled terminal. Cyber warfare has a variety of electronics damaging weapons. The ships themselves have, as you know, weapons deliberately designed to knockout ship electronics. The bugs have developed techniques to harden the ships against these techniques, and they’ve told us that the roaches also have done so. They have given us the next generation of weapons to kill the roach electronics.

“As instructed by you we have created a new generation of mines. They have the latest cloaking and can slowly burrow through shields. We do target them to the shield generators as a matter of course. They can be flexibly configured to explode through a hull, damage the whole ship electronically, and block communication, or target engines, shields or weapons. You can predetermine what they do and what order they do it in. We have also made some mines for the bigger ships. They are no bigger but they gather together in a group at, or very close to the hull, to produce a monumental explosion.

“Porquenta suggested to the Charassa admirals that they look at the holo-recordings of your use of mines. They took the opportunity to look at your use of the communications drones to take out a pirate ship. That went viral amongst the weapons research community. They have been greatly interested in the mines. There is a competition between Porquenta, Charassa and the collective, the Empire, and us, to produce the most innovative mine applications. The pressure is well and truly upon us to continue to perform. Practically, we do work with Porquenta as do the others, but Porquenta keeps the ideas separate if we ask him to do so. Any ideas that you have discussed with him come to us. He said that you discussed with him a plain old railgun. He suggested from that idea that we build one as a mine variant. He said that it was likely it could severely damage either shield generators or weapons ports. The advantage of using such a primitive weapon is that it will not be picked up by a sensor. They are tuned to more distant points for potential meteor strikes. It’s too small to be considered a fighter. It’s also too small to be considered a missile. We can make the projectiles explosive if the concept works.

“We do not need to switch off our implants. The sensors they use on their ships pick up lifeforms. They query their own equivalent of our implant. How about we develop a method to query their implants, we then hijack their identities. Enoch,” Jacobo asked of the most senior engineer in the cyber warfare group, “can we then target their implants, somehow, to make them identified as foreign? If you’re interested in physically examining some of their implants, I have several them for you to look at.”

“Our own implants are readily programmable with different identities, if you know the system. I will give them to a number of our group to see what ideas we can produce and perhaps you give some to some of your engineers and you look at what can be done with their different perspective. Ideally, before we enter the ship, it would be a great idea to collect a series of their identities for our use. We’d reprogram them so that their own system identifies them as hostiles. I would love to do that simultaneously with multiple ships so that by the time they realized what’s happening several ships would be disabled. The question that I think we must address,” said Enoch pensively, “is how much we can achieve in twenty-four hours, forty-eight hours, and so on. In twenty-four hours, we can capture identities and use them effectively. How much more we can do effectively, I’m not sure. It appears that we have somewhere between thirty-six and sixty hours conservatively with the most optimistic timeframe being ninety hours before the attack. I also don’t want to exhaust my people. We must consider that it is often a good idea not to do too much too quickly. Whatever we do, they will find a counter, so it is sometimes helpful just to do one step at a time. We use the first method. They create a counter, and we move to the next step.”

Jason explained to Rover the problems that he thought were going to be faced. He showed the dog and marine being slowed by the shield becoming visible and being fired upon. He showed an image of a weapon destroying the shield, a mine destroying the shield, a missile destroying the shield; and that enabled the dogs and all Marines to get into the ship. He showed the electrical defense system in the ship and how they were intending to hijack it. The dogs and Marines would not have to do anything other than receive the transmission from the battle AI that would provide the identity or this could be done via the marine battle AI. Rover indicated that they had previously encountered such systems. A technique that he had seen used by cyber warfare groups for sabotage included micro bots that were introduced into the ships in a variety of ways. They hijacked the available power to broadcast it, to power other bots. Vulnerable points included hatches and fighter launch areas, which are protected by shields. When opened, and at times when ships were communicating with each other and were waiting in orbit; bots were able to undertake many nefarious tasks.

Jason explained all of this to the engineers who clearly grasped the possibilities for ship infiltration. The bugs used micro bots extensively in every sphere of their lives. Applications for them were ubiquitous. The concept may well have been considered by them previously, when considering boarding strategies.

Most of the people in both groups were wide-awake and highly stimulated. They elected to join and help both groups of engineers, and continue to work with them for the duration ... in shifts, if necessary.

Jason, by this time, was feeling completely exhausted. He returned to his stateroom and fell into a deep sleep. Jason began to have vivid dreams. He saw an army of orcs coming towards him, and he was unable to move. The army was huge. He could see himself standing looking over a battlefield. The orcs moved towards him in formation. He saw them carrying heavy weapons. Behind them, he could see tanks and gunships. In front of him they assembled and stopped. He could see a solitary massively built orc walking up a gradual incline towards him. His sword was sheathed. His arms were bare. He appeared to be wearing a leather tunic, with thick leather sandals. His hands were gnarled and calloused as were his feet. He had two very large tusks growing upwards from his bottom jaw. On his muscles were more muscles. As he drew nearer, Jason could see his black eyes. He had a helmet that reminded Jason of that of a Viking, but it looked more modern, and Jason could see a visor that looked like it was transparent. He carried a modern rifle like weapon that Jason did not recognize. He was at least eight feet tall. Jason felt his own power growing and with that he recognized that he was growing physically to tower over the orc. He could feel that he carried his hammer. Its weight seemed trivial. He looked down and he was dressed similarly to the orc. His tunic was stained, and his feet were dirty.