Chapter 14: Best Laid Plans

Our nosecone returned on the 29^th of November just as we hoped and planned. Late the next day after being refurbished, it was sent up with the next cargo launch. This would be our last ‘normal’ launch, and it contained the cargo the master A.I. was expecting along with our final batch of spy devices.

It also contained the first of the sabotage devices we hoped to slip into the station. These were small and specialized. They would wait until the following week to deploy, hopefully just as the Phoenix arrived to begin its mission of mayhem.

Friday, December 1^st, one day after the final cargo launch, Naomi gave me the final briefing on our attack plan. The recent data returned with the nosecone had confirmed enough of her deductions that she felt we should proceed as planned. The briefing would be for me to learn the basic strategy and goals of the attack, the risks we faced, where Naomi could still be wrong, and where our plans could fail.

I was heartened to learn that our odds were now about thirty percent. 30.6 percent to be precise. As a comparison, her adjusted odds on us abandoning the attempt and fleeing quickly in nautilus now had a 22.3 percent chance that I would evade death for a year or more. With those numbers, I did not even need to rely on the new data.

“We will go for it! Continue with the attack as planned.”

The briefing continued. I learned the launch yesterday had released a minimum amount of small low orbit relay satellites to enable Naomi a good chance of remaining in contact with the attack once it reached the space station. More would be seeded when Phoenix launched next week, which would raise those chances even higher.

Our Frankenstein monster infiltration troops were nearly done growing in their hybrid medical crèche replicator units. There were forty-five of the creatures ... or devices. I was finally allowed to see a picture of one of them.

Each was black as night and resembled a squishy puffy starfish. With their five arms spread out, each had a span of over three meters, so they were fairly large. When I asked more questions about them, I referred to them as space-fish. The name stuck.

It got worse from there. When I asked how the space-fish breathed I learned they didn’t. The living parts of them were kept alive by an oxygenated circulating fluid similar to blood but able to carry even more oxygen. This fluid was oxygenated and pumped through the creatures by an external pumping machine remaining on the Phoenix module.

Once the module arrived and the creatures were sent on their mission they relied on the oxygen stored in their systems. This would last for roughly eleven minutes, then the living parts of them died.

Next, I asked why they had living parts to begin with. Here the answer got technical and Naomi said more details on that would come later in the briefing. But, for now, parts of their expected mission would expose them to several concentrated electromagnetic bursts.

These would scramble any electronic brains on board the space-fish. Heck, I learned they would scramble the biological brains some also, but the bio-brains were being designed to recover ‘somewhat.’ I did not ask further about the ‘somewhat.’

To help keep them on mission, the space-fish would be attached to a trailing auxiliary brain by unspooling optical fiber. The auxiliary brain would also connect each of the individual space-fish brains together into some kind of communal hive mind.

I learned that there were three of these auxiliary brains and that they had each used Ohmu’s artificial intelligence as a template. Ohmu had arrived back in my quarters just before I heard this, so I gave her a thumbs up. She grinned back.

Next, I asked why the space-fish was a cyborg and what the need was for the synthetic machine parts. Propulsion in the vacuum of space was the main reason. Multiple types of sensors on the fish were also synthetic because eyeballs would be useless in the dark and vacuum environment inside the enemy station.

Once the mechanical propulsion system got the fish to the surface of the target, they were able to use their flexible squishy arms to walk and ooze their way further. They were covered with nanofilaments that enabled them to stick to or grip, sort of like a gecko, onto most metals or even frictionless surfaces. Even more, the arms were detachable if needed and a fish could detach an arm to enter a smaller crevasse or conduit. Or the arm could be sacrificed to destroy or cut through an obstacle.

Like the bat forces from our Baltra island mission, the space-fish were loaded with tools for both fighting and entering the protected data modules they were expected to encounter. These tools included powerful explosives and shaped charges.

Naomi went on to discuss how the space-fish would be delivered from the Phoenix module to where the weak point of the enemy’s main data processor was located. This involved being fired at a very high speed and then using ultra-strong cables or tethers to be whipped around parts of the enemy station so that the fish ended up in the general vicinity of their target.

Supposedly the fish were tough enough to survive the hundreds of Gs they would need to endure for that procedure. A hard egg-shaped exploding casing was used to contain the fish for that procedure. I began to realize any fantasy I had once had for going up there myself and fighting was just that, a fantasy. This fight would be even faster than the one on Baltra island had been. The environment was even more hazardous.

Naomi got to the part of the briefing where she was discussing the things we needed to prevent the master A.I. from doing once it became aware of the attack. I was surprised to find that preventing the A.I. from destroying its own station was not one of them. Naomi said she had a good understanding of the master A.I.’s operating parameters.

It was the ultimate authority in this system, and it would not give that up easily. For it to destroy itself would mean that there was a second authority in the system as a reserve. Naomi was almost certain that the master A.I. would not permit this. So, a massive fusion self-destruct charge was a very, very low probability.

She did admit that smaller scuttling charges might come into play, though. The cargo servicing area might be one part of the space station that the enemy A.I. considered expendable. Some of its weapons emplacement might also fire on itself if the function of the target was not critical. So, the goal was to spread chaos as widely as possible while delivering our main force directly to the most vulnerable areas.

Parts of this chaos I had already known about. These were the preparations that Naomi had been working on for over a decade back at Kings Bay. This was also one of the reasons we needed our own secure satellite net. The Kings Bay production facility had been making nukes. I tried to refer to them as ICBM’s, but Naomi pointed out that they would never land on another Earthly target. The better term was SSM or surface-to-space missiles.

When she revealed diagrams of them I thought they looked just like the old submarine-launched Trident ballistic missiles. I found that these were bigger as the delta-v needed for them to reach middle Earth orbit was much higher. Naomi had the Kings Bay facility construct six of them. I figured they were stored in silos around that area but only one was and that was just a decoy rocket loaded with radar reflectors and chaff.

The rest were located out in the ocean. Naomi had spent the past three years before we arrived at the Galapagos towing these missiles out to sea and staging them at various locations around the Atlantic Ocean near the equator. Each was housed in a long pressure cylinder and once they were in place and firmly tethered to the sea floor they would wait just below the surface. Each had a floating satellite receiver and would listen for our new satellite constellation to order them to launch.

There was also a backup extremely low frequency receiver in each, and an ELF transmitter had been recently built on Baltra Island. Naomi did not want to use that as it would be detected and lead to that island being attacked much sooner than we preferred. The second critical function of the Kings Bay facility was that Naomi was going to launch a viral attack on the enemy space station from there.

“I thought the enemy A.I. was immune to viral attacks ... especially of the transmitted nature?” I asked when I heard that part of the plan.

“Normally, yes. But this viral attack was not started by us. It is already deeply embedded into the master A.I.’s data archives,” Naomi explained.

“What? When were we able to do that?” I asked, and why was I only hearing about it now? It sounded risky.

“The viral attack was able to infect the master A.I. sometime in the year 1619 of the Gregorian calendar, John. It has lain dormant ever since.”

“What! Who and how?”

“The original Hemru viral transmission that was sent to this system from their home world. Remember I mentioned that in addition to unknowingly causing the master A.I. to launch corrupted operatives to the Earth who later landed in Sri Lanka? That virus also implanted hidden instructions deep inside the enemy’s data archives.”

Naomi paused, giving me time to recall the conversation we had had back when I first woke up in Nautilus. “Yeah, I remember something about that,” I said.

“The encrypted data modules from the Sri Lankan bunker also included detailed instructions on how to activate this virus. I am not certain what this will cause but I am confident that it will interrupt the enemy A.I.’s processor chains for a certain number of seconds. Hopefully, if activated at the right time, this ‘interference’ will provide just the help we need to allow our space-fish to succeed in reaching the enemy’s main processor.

“I will send this activation sequence from the Kings Bay base. The transmission will not be by radio or some other EM band signal. Instead, it will be a pattern recognition code sent by a very high-powered laser. The enemy A.I. will conclude the laser is some form of attack and not realize that it is being painted by certain algorithms which will hopefully trigger the embedded virus.”

Wow. If it worked it would be an impressive feat. It would also add to the obligation humanity owed to the far off Hemru. Hopefully, some of them still survived.

“Won’t transmitting the message laser from there put the Kings Bay facility at risk?” I asked.

Naomi just replied with a, “Yes.”

Well, pity the residents of Georgia and northeastern Florida.

Next, Naomi moved the briefing on to what the supposedly vulnerable point of the armored space station was. An image of the entire space station appeared on the viewscreen. It was quickly replaced with a new image. This one had a few differences. I noticed that cargo modules had been moved between the images. Some of the tracking antennas had also swiveled.

The image zoomed in, and through gaps in armor plating bands I could see another module that had shifted. Naomi caused that module to illuminate and resumed her briefing.

“This module is where I believe the master A.I. keeps its main processor and critical memory arrays,”

She paused a moment to allow me to approach the screen and more closely study the module. What was visible was in shadow and the image had clearly been enhanced for that. I was able to see enough of the module to get a general sense of its shape. It looked a lot like the old Hubble space telescope but without the solar panel wings. Basically, a large cylinder topped with a smaller, but longer cylinder.

“How big is it?” I asked.

“The larger cylindrical base segment is approximately forty-two meters in diameter by thirty-one meters long. The smaller cylindrical segment attached to the larger is nine meters in diameter by seventy-two meters long. I do not know the module’s precise mass, but spectral analysis combined with thermal fluctuation readings show that it is constructed of a quite thick nickel-iron casing.

“There are also visible signs of superconducting webbing completely surrounding the outer surfaces of the module. Both the thick physical armor and the thermal protection of the superconductors would make the module impervious to most damage for a reasonable amount of time,” Naomi explained.

“So, what makes you think that this is the master A.I.’s lair? Why not bury it even deeper in armor and why leave parts of it exposed?” I asked.

“Notice these two tracking dish antennas I mentioned earlier. Each track one of the L4 or L5 Lagrange points depending upon which of those points is currently visible to the space station as it orbits the Earth.”

The image changed and showed a split screen of both antennas. For roughly two and a half hours, one would track some distant object while the other remained stationary for much of that time. Then, for the next two and a half hours, the other antenna would begin tracking another distant object while the first became static for an hour and a half. There was some overlap where both were actively tracking.

It made sense. The station’s orbital period around the Earth was near four hours. As it circled the Earth, it would only have line of sight to only one of the Lagrange points for much of that time. There would clearly be some overlap due to the station’s altitude which explained the extra half hour of tracking by both antennas.