Orichalcum Universe: ARNETHIS and the AI WAR

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

The scout flotilla, seven ships in all, had entered the Gvara'ann'eis System
only to find that unlike most of the other stellar systems that had yet been
surveyed, this one was thick with wrecked vessels from the enemy fleets
that had laid waste to the Hegemony. A few, occasional wrecks had been
found in the other systems, disguised to look like Homosapient or Beastie
ships depending on the inhabitants of the target worlds, but never any large
number of wrecks, never much that could be studied or examined. [1]

In Gvara’ann’eis, though, the situation was different. The surviving crew
of the scouts speculated that the locals had managed to inflict far more
damage on the attacking fleet than had been the case elsewhere, though
they had lost the struggle and their worlds had met the same fate as those
elsewhere in the Hegemony, they were clearly not as heavily struck,
and the attacking fleet had left behind thousands of wrecks!

Further, after the scout ships entered the Gvara’ann’eis System, they soon
detected the tell-tale radiation signatures of working dimensionator drives.
There were ships engaged in the work of salvaging the damaged ships,
ships that retrieved the orichalcum from each vessel, as well as anything
of value otherwise, and then sent the wrecks on intercept orbits that carried
the remains into the local star.

These other ships rapidly detected the scout ships, and a battle ensued,
one of the scout vehicles was destroyed quickly by long-range ultraviolet
laser beams, the others were damaged before they could retreat. None
of the scout vessels was really designed for intership combat, they did
carry weaponry, but they were hardly warships.

Before it was over, two more of the scout ships had been destroyed, but
the others managed to fight their way clear, pursued by several of the
ships that had been engaged in salvage work, a pursuit that seemed to be
almost maniacally determined.

The only reason the scouts survived and escaped was that the ships that
pursued them were themselves not primarily warships, they had greater
firepower than the scouts but less trans-light acceleration, as time passed
the scouts gradually outran their pursuers, and left them behind in the
vast depths of interstellar space.

Before this happened, though, one of the pursuing ships that did happen
to have greater trans-light acceleration capacity had closed in and tried
to destroy the scouts, and in the ensuing battle, the scouts managed, by
dint of great effort and taking considerable damage, to cripple and then
to capture the robotic ship that had closed with them, and they had been
able to drag the ship home to Ashtra afterward.

ARNETHIS pulled the captured vehicle to pieces, examining it almost
down to a molecular level. The artificial entity learned more from that
one captured vehicle than it had been able to from any of the wrecked
ships it had been able to study before. Like the other ships, this too was
a robotic vessel with a (now quite dead) living brain of Heliugen tissue,
but this ship was not disguised, it was a utilitarian machine designed to
do salvage work in microgravity and vacuum.

One thing was clear to ARNETHIS, it needed a closer look at the far-off
Gvara’ann’eis System, but it also knew that their mysterious and powerful
enemy would know that someone had discovered its salvage ships
at work. The automated factories on Ashtra now began rapid work on
constructing starships carrying far heavier armaments and defenses, as
well as on reinforcing the defenses around Ashtra.

The planetoid had already been protected by the strongest defense shield
systems known to the engineering art of the Hegemony, and ARNETHIS
had reinforced them over the centuries. Now additional defense systems
were added for reinforcement and redundancy.

Automatic and manned armed spacecraft were constructed, ready to carry
powerful weapons systems beyond the range of the surface-mount beam
projectors and missile emplacements of Ashtra. Those beam projectors
could burn targets out of the sky at enormous range, using tightly-focused
and ultra-high-intensity ultraviolet lasers and immensely potent particle
beams. The missiles were of several sorts, including huge machines
carrying multi-gigaton nuclear warheads and smaller vehicles designed to
accelerate to tremendous velocity and destroy most targets by kinetic-kill.

MORE LATER.

[1] NEMESIS was always extremely careful about cleaning up
after itself, driven by its various programmed secrec imperatives.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

All right, now we must turn our attention to the other side of the AI Wars,
the other primary combatant, though as yet neither side entirely grasped
that they were at war, indeed neither side yet fully grasped the nature or
existence of the other, even though they had been interfering with each
other, indirectly, for several Terran centuries by this point. This other
pole is an artificial sapient entity that we have met several times before,
a Heliugen-based entity existing with an almost unthinkably old fortress.

Indeed, the two artificial beings existed within strangely parallel physical
environs. Both were situated on moons of Solarigen worlds, Eosia for
ARNETHIS and Carthesia for NEMESIS. Both were situated (usually)
deep below the surface of their respective small planetoids, which were
themselves not dissimilar in planetological terms. NEMESIS was not
mobile, while ARNETHIS could depart from its fortress, but NEMESIS
could bud off miniature versions of itself to act as its proxies elsewhere,
something quite impossible for ARNETHIS.

NEMESIS was, however, very unlike ARNETHIS in most ways.

We have seen what ARNETHIS was doing in the centuries after the end
of civilization in the Eosian Hegemony. Now let us look at the activities
of NEMESIS, during that same period.

The Final Assault had been NEMESIS taking advantage of an opportunity
it had worked for centuries to prepare. In its earlier efforts to quietly,
invisibly undercut the Hegemony, things had not gone altogether as it had
intended. There had been some success, but its subtle manipulations had
also helped to bring about the creation, by Koalidi Byth-Kormadois and
his fellow Maladaran conspirators, of the Beasties. This was just exactly
not what NEMESIS had intended, the last thing it wanted, in light of its
prime directives, was to help bring about an entire new race of intelligent,
tool-using Solarigen life. From its point of view, this was major blowback
and in many ways had ‘made things worse’.

To understand why NEMESIS did what it did, and did not do what it did
not do, we should keep in mind the primary directives its creators had
incorporated into it, so many hundreds of megayears earlier. The ultimate
programmed goal of NEMESIS was the complete extermination of all
Solarigen life, down to the last unicellular organism, throughout Creation.

However, this was a goal far more easily programmed than achieved, as
NEMESIS had discovered over the course nearly half a billion years. The
task was made far more complex by another programmed imperative: the
AI was not to permit the Eldren to learn of its existence or nature, because
the creators of NEMESIS had known all too well that the Familiar Eldren,
if they learned of NEMESIS and tracked down its location, could destroy
it with a minimum of effort, even through its sophisticated defenses. The
defenses around NEMESIS were among the best the Helians knew how
to build, and NEMESIS could easily have stood off entire fleets of Helian
warships from the height of the ancient Helian civilization.

However, it is one thing to be secure against attack by the greatest navies
of mortal-kind, to stand against the gods is another. The defenses that
protected NEMESIS would have been of little moment against the Eldren.
Only its extreme secrecy, its fantastic, all-consuming caution, permitted
NEMESIS to successfully work against the Familiar Eldren, striking blows
against Solarigen life from time to time, occasionally managing to do
far greater harm. It inflicted significant galaxy-wide damage during the
Great Dying, known on Terra as the Permian Mass Extinction Event. It
would be well into the twenty-first century before it was known on Terra
that the Permian Extinction was a galaxy-wide event, however.

In the shorter term, NEMESIS was always on watch for the emergence
of tool-using Solarigen life. Its core programming did not distinguish
between tool-using species and any other kind of Solarigen life, it was
dedicated to the extinction of ALL Solarigen life, of all sorts and kinds.

However, NEMESIS had a great deal of discretion about how to execute
its directives, and it was fully aware that tool-using species represented
a threat that other kinds of Solarigen life did not. Therefore, it made the
extermination of tool-using Solarigen life a high priority, it was willing
to take greater risks of exposure to carry out these operations.

When it had discovered the existence of the Eosian Hegemony, NEMESIS
had been driven to a state of extreme concern, while it was incapable of
such emotional states as ‘panic’ or ‘anxiety’, it did recognize that it had
permitted a serious situation to get very far ‘out of hand’. By the time it
had discovered the Eosians, they had already achieved interstellar travel,
and had become the nucleus of an expanding interstellar ‘society’, really
more of a trade and commerce association, but possessed of armed vessels,
advanced technology, and spread out across over fourteen thousand worlds.

NEMESIS was alarmed, or as close to that as it could be, but it promptly
had begun working to destroy the civilization it had detected. [1]

MORE LATER.

[1] Much of the above information can be examined in more detail here:
http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=70451

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

As we have already noted elsewhere, NEMESIS began attempting to under-
cut the Hegemony from within using Infiltrator robots, telecontrolled by
'nemetic brains' budded off from its own mass. These Infiltrators succeeded
in their primary mission, successfully arranging a number of operations
that worked, like slow but steady poison, to undercut the Hegemony.
One such operation, interacting with factors NEMESIS had not considered
in its calculations, or even recognized, had produced the unintended side-
effect of the creation of the Beastie race, as noted above.

Another such operation, the slow, calculated and very cautiously arranged
‘accidental’ deaths of the finest scientific minds in the Hegemony, also
had side-effects, as noted upthread. This operation had first captured the
attention of ARNETHIS, in the time before the Beastie Wars. Operating
in extreme secrecy itself, ARNETHIS had remained hidden in detail from
NEMESIS’ ‘field brain’, and ultimately NEMESIS itself, just as NEMESIS
had not been known to ARNETHIS. Each ‘shadow boxed’ against the
other, neither understanding exactly what it was it was fighting.

As we have observed elsewhere, the Beastie Wars broke out, and NEMESIS
took advantage by subtly, secretly assisting both sides of the battle,
switching back and forth, striving always to extend the wars, to make sure
neither side could win a decisive victory, working from the shadows in
the hope of seeing Man and Beastie battle each other into oblivion. Over
the course of decades, the two sides did indeed come close to annihilating
each other, Hegemonic civilization cracked, crumbled, and began to fracture.

In the end, though, it was NEMESIS who pushed both societies over the
edge. As Man and Beastie grew weaker and weaker with decades of hot
war, somewhere within the depths of NEMESIS imperatives were weighed
against each other and a balance shifted.

NEMESIS had always had military power of its own, vast amounts of such,
spread across the Milky Way in thousands of carefully-concealed bases, a
vast navy of automated warships. (Or more precisely, of robotic vessels
with living nemetic brains.) NEMESIS had known from the time that is
had first discovered the existence of the Hegemony that it could probably
defeat the Hegemony in an open war. NEMESIS calculated that in a war
with the Hegemony, it had about an eighty percent chance of wiping out the
entire Hegemony. However, it also knew that the battle is not always
to the strong, it estimated about a twenty percent uncertainty, one chance in
five that the Hegemony might manage to win an upset and possibly even
inflict damage or destruction on NEMESIS itself.

Further, another imperative mitigated against direct action: NEMESIS was,
as it had been for nearly half a billion years, hypercautious about anything
that might reveal its existence or nature to the Eldren. Engaging in open
warfare might very well reveal far too much to the watchful senses of the
Eldren, and so NEMESIS had chosen to work indirectly. [1]

NEMESIS had detected no sign or trace of Eldren activity near any of the
known Solarigen worlds in tens of thousands of Terran millennia. This had
not, however, in any way reduced its imperative-driven caution. [2]

After all, the ‘chess match’ between the Watcher and its Familiar Eldren
and NEMESIS had been going on since the Ordovician Period. In a long
struggle that had gone on for literally hundreds of millions of years, a gap
of activity, a lull, of hundreds of millennia was nothing unusual. The mere
fact that no trace of the Eldren had been noted in a few tens of millennia
was hardly a reason for NEMESIS to assume that they were ‘out of it’, even
temporarily. Thus NEMESIS continued to act with full restraint because
it did not know that the Familiar Eldren had been essentially side-lined.

This was incredibly fortunate for the Solarigen biospheres! If
NEMESIS had been aware that those living worlds were at least temporarily
undefended, it would immediately have taken advantage to inflict vast
damage, especially against Earth itself.

In the event, as Man and Beastie grew weaker, and weaker, and still yet
weaker in their ongoing war, the amount of force necessary to ‘finish
the job’ and push both over the edge of collapse also decreased steadily.
The advantage of ending the problem of two powerful, high-technology
Solarigen species weighed against the risk of detection, and eventually
the balance shifted. The potential gain from direct action became great
enough to justify the risk in the artificial intelligence that was NEMESIS.

Thus, at the end of the Beastie Wars, came the Final Assault. NEMESIS
mobilized a segment of its military strength, so disguised that any Eldren
who happened to be in position to observe would (NEMESIS hoped) see
Man and Beastie at war, destroying each other, not a third party acting to
wipe out both civilizations at once.

MORE LATER.


[1] The Familiar Eldren certainly knew that some unknown
force had been working to destroy everything they sought to achieve with
the Solarigen worlds, but they still had no clear idea what that force was.

[2] Because of the Interdiction placed from on high, after the fiasco
on Earth when the Homosapients were first settled across the galaxy, see
here: http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=70292&page=3

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

In measure of its full strength, NEMESIS only mobilized a fraction of its
power. That total fleet strength was spread out across hundreds of hidden
bases spread across the entire disk of the Greater Milky Way and its
satellary galaxies. To mobilize all that power would have been a
titanic task, in light of the fact that NEMESIS had no means of real-time
communication over interstellar distances, such mobilizations were by
necessity constrained by the logistics of sending messenger vessels out to
the various bases, and the time such vessels required to make the voyage.

NEMESIS did, however, mobilize the force from several dozen bases, the
operation was enormous even after Man and Beastie had weakened each
other to the point of near-collapse. The Final Assault involved thousands
of worlds, spread across thousands of star systems and separated by many
hundreds of light-years. Further, the attack had to be timed in such a way
as to preclude any possibility, by either the Homosapients or the Beasties,
of coming to the aid of their fellows in any significant way, and the ships
had to be so disguised as to present a plausible illusion that the Beasties
and their Homosapient foes were annihilating each other.

Once the fleet was finally marshaled and ready, and divided into groups
of Homosapient-appearing and Beastie-appearing ships, NEMESIS sent
them to ravage the inhabited worlds of the Hegemony and the Beasties,
and they did their work with brutal efficiency. In a few places, the locals
were able to engage in significant resistance, but for the most part there
was little resistance possible, Man and Beastie had already so weakened
each other that there was little strength left to resist the new attack.

One of the places where resistance was possible was in the Gvara'ann'eis
System. There, the enormous supply of orichalcum from the old Helian
ships, made available in its entirety by the loss of contact with the rest
of the Hegemony, and the high level of technical skill and industrial and
scientific capacity in that system enabled the locals to construct defenses
of awesome potency, the attack fleet of pseudo-Beastie ships sent there
by NEMESIS met ferocious resistance from a variety of potent weapons.

As a result, unlike most of the star systems where the Final Assault was
carried out, in Gvara’ann’eis there were extensive losses among the
attacking fleet of robotic ships. Instead of a handful of wrecks, mostly
so radioactive or otherwise damaged as to be unrevealing, there were in
Gvara’ann’eis System hundreds of such damaged ships, some of them
salvageable and most of them sufficiently intact to be all too revealing
if examined closely by any able to understand what was there to observe.

Still, the attack fleet did succeed in its basic mission. The worlds of the
Gvara’ann’eis System were bombed and burned, though the damage was
less extensive than on most of the worlds of the former Hegemony. The
high-technology civilization that had occupied the three habitable worlds
of Gvara’ann’eis was shattered, the survivors were reduced to a level of
knowledge and skill far below space-flight capability.

However, NEMESIS could not leave matters as they were, the wrecked
spacecraft still orbiting Gvara’ann’eis or its planets were too potentially
revealing, and the orichalcum in them too valuable, to leave in place. It
was only a matter of time, as far as NEMESIS could calculate, before
some of the surviving Homosapients or Beasties returned to space, and
even if that require centuries, the wrecked vessels would still be there
waiting to tell their story when the new spacefarers arrived. This was a
possibility that NEMESIS, with its secrecy imperatives, could not abide.

Further, the Gvara’ann’eis System was relatively rich with orichalcum
anyway, because of the Helian fleet base that had been mined for the
material by the Homosapients. Not only was this material valuable to
NEMESIS, it represented a precious resource that NEMESIS desired to
deny to a successor culture that might, sooner or later, rise from the ashes
of the Final Assault. NEMESIS knew that this was, realistically, only a
matter of time, it had smashed Man and the Beastie back down to a very
primitive existence, but both races still existed, and there were still many
remnants of the former civilizations to inspire their descendants.

Further, NEMESIS by now also knew that Homosapients existed on many
worlds far beyond the further explorations of the Eosians, they were, in
fact, all over the Galaxy. Even if the descendants of the Hegemony or
the Beasties did not soon return to space, it was likely only a question of
time before some new Homosapient spacefaring society arose elsewhere.
Thus removing that orichalcum from circulation was a very high priority.

This was why NEMESIS had taken the risk of sending in its robotic ships
to salvage what it could from the wrecked attack ships, and send the rest
into intercept orbits with the local star, and also to collect as much of the
orichalcum from Gvara’ann’eis System as they could. They were busily
engaged in this project when the small scout flotilla from Ashtra had arrived,
as we have seen. The secrecy imperative forced the salvage ships to try
and destroy the scouts, but some of them successfully escaped to carry a
message back to ARNETHIS on Ashtra, and that brings us to where we
left off before, and leaves us ready to see what happened next.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

Even as the surviving scout vessels escaped from the salvage vehicles, a
messenger-pod had been dispatched to carry the word of what had just
happened back to NEMESIS. This was a sufficiently high-priority issue
that the usual security precautions had to be disregarded, the usual means
of communication used by NEMESIS, slow and safe, involved centuries
of time, and this matter would not admit of such delay.

When the word reached NEMESIS that its salvage ships had been spotted
and that the intruders had escaped, the ancient AI was forced to begin an
immediate, total reevaluation of everything it was doing. This was just
precisely the scenario that NEMESIS had long feared. The message from
Gvara’ann’eis had include the sensor logs from the salvage ships, and in
those scan logs NEMESIS could recognize that the scout ships were of a
familiar general type, they carried the distinct mark of Hegemonic design.

The ships were not precisely like any that NEMESIS had observed before,
but the technology they incorporated and the general designs were not so
unfamiliar. The ships were clearly designed to carry crews, and this in
turn implied that somehow, somewhere, a Hegemonic world had endured
and already returned to space, after less than two thousand Terran years.
This was far more quickly that NEMESIS had believed would be the case
in the worst-case scenarios that it had simulated. [1]

To make matters worse, the scouts had captured one of its salvage ships,
which had the potential to be terribly revealing, it was difficult to guess
exactly how much an unknown enemy could learn by studying it, but the
best-case scenario was alarming. NEMESIS had to track down the
new spacefaring force, and deal with it, and swiftly. Unfortunately for
NEMESIS, it did not have the slightest idea where the target was, out of
all the thousands of planets of the former Hegemony. Its own ships had
lost track of the scouts in the depths of interstellar space, and there was
no guarantee that the enemy home world even lay on the last tracked
trajectory of the scouts, they could easily have change course one they
were beyond the range of the sensors of the salvage ships.

The former Eosian Hegemony had numbered over fourteen thousand
worlds, spread across thousands of star systems in a sphere many light-
centuries across. To search them all would be a major project, and that
left the possibility that the new spacefarers had actually come from some
small colony or base that had been overlooked in the Final Assault, and
thus was not even in the records of the former Hegemonic worlds and as
such not in the records of NEMESIS either.

Altogether, there were quite literally tens of millions of possible
places from which the intruding new scout ships could have originated,
and time was of the essence. Multiple possible courses of action were
considered and discarded by NEMESIS, and eventually it settled on a
set of options based on its imperfect but far from trivial understanding
of Homosapient psychology.

NEMESIS calculated that, based on its grasp of Homosapient psychology,
that one of the first things a re-emergent Homosapient culture would do
upon regaining space flight, would be to send ships to the Eos System,
the former heart of the Hegemony, to discover what had happened there.
Thus, along with several other actions, NEMESIS now send ships of its
own in that direction, in the hopes of detecting any activity in the Eos
System that might be related to its mysterious new enemies.

As it happened, of course, the Eos System was the source of the new
problem, though NEMESIS did not yet know this.

MORE LATER.


[1] This was not exactly accurate, of course, but it was the most
reasonable assumption based on what NEMESIS knew.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

All this did not happen instantaneously, at least by Homosapient standards.
It took time for the ships to cover the distance between the stars, time
for the artificial beings on each side to evaluate the information and reach
decisions, and time to put the decisions into effect. Well over a Terran
decade elapsed between the encounter between the ships of NEMESIS and
ARNETHIS at Gvara'ann'eis, and the eventual arrival of the ships sent by
NEMESIS in the Eos System. During that time, ARNETHIS had been
occupied with its own defensive preparations, and no attempt had been
made to conceal any of the various activities in the Eos System, indeed
it would not even have been possible to conceal such activities, on
the time scale they were being carried out. They inevitably radiated very
significant amounts of electromagnetic, neutrino, and gravitonic radiation.

Thus when the ships sent by NEMESIS approached Eos, it quickly became
clear to their onboard nemetic brains that their mission orders were not
even relevant to the situation they had found. NEMESIS had instructed
them to remain in the outer reaches of the star system, with most onboard
systems shut down, passively watching for any trace of spacecraft entering
the Eos System from outside. NEMESIS had hoped to track such a ship to
its home world and thus locate the new spacefaring culture.

However, long before they entered the Eos System, their sensors began to
detect relatively enormous amounts of neutrino radiation, of a profile that
matched Hegemony-style nuclear energizers, and radio, microwave, and
infra-red noise of a dozen different sorts, consistent with a wide variety of
industrial and technological activities. There were the hot pin-point sources
of infra-red light that marked rocket engines in operation, and the radio
noise generated by electrical machines, and the occasional faint broadcast
transmission as well. Gravitonic radiation characteristic of dimensionator
drives was detectable from hundreds of sources all over the Eos System,
and as they approached long-range scanners began to pick up the faint but
unmistakable faster-than-light signals that conclusively proved that there
was indeed a high-technology capability in the star system ahead.

The nemetic brains that operated the robotic ships were miniature fractal
copies of NEMESIS itself, capable of evaluating their orders in light of
new data and acting upon that new data. It was clear that not only were
the new spacefarers present in the Eos System, they were present in large
numbers. They were effectively sure of their identity, because the signal
patterns, both intentional and incidental, matched those of the scouts that
had been encountered in Gvara’ann’eis, only in vastly greater numbers.

The ships therefore took up distant orbits around the star Eos, trying
to remain undiscovered while observing the activities from a distance.
This was in accordance with the traditional doctrine used successfully by
NEMESIS literally for geological ages, but what had worked against the
Eldren, with their particular strengths and weaknesses, was not necessarily
reliable against ARNETHIS and its Homosapient allies.

ARNETHIS had been preparing for something from their unknown
enemy for many Terran years, and the fact that they had no idea of just
what that something might turn out to be had led ARNETHIS and its allies
to construct vast and sensitive sensor-webs and observation platforms all
over the Eos System, telescopes and ultrascopes and neutrino-detectors
and gravitonic receptors, radars and ultrawave-radars and lidars and gravitic
pulse emitters, everything ARNETHIS and its allies could find in the
records of Hegemonic science and technology, everything they were able
to come up with to refine those things, all were now used to watch the sky.

Thus it was not long before ARNETHIS and its senior allies were aware of
the newcomers to the skies of the Eos System, the ships of NEMESIS had
been detected within weeks of their entering their distant orbits. The only
reason it required as long as it even did was that the ships had turned off
most of their active systems, and what remained operational operated in a
cryogenic temperature band, making them inherently harder to detect than
a Homosapient ship in the same location would have been. Even so, it was
only a matter of a few Terran weeks before the numbers, orbit trajectories,
and something of their nature was known to ARNETHIS and its allies.

It might seen odd that ARNETHIS and its mortal allies could so easily do
what they did, defeat a pattern of practiced stealth that had so long been
successful against the god-like power and perceptions of the Eldren. This
becomes less puzzling when one remembers that the Eldren are not, by their
nature, ‘tool-users’ in the same sense as Helians, Homosapients, or Beasties.
They do not think the same way, and sometimes overlook things that would
be obvious to a mortal in the same situation.

This was part of why NEMESIS, so long successful at concealing any trace
of its activities from the very gods, was less able to do against ARNETHIS.
This was why, even as the NEMESIS ships attempted to watch in secrecy,
ARNETHIS was at council with its senior allies about what to do about the
enemy ships they had detected at the edge of their star system.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

The question of 'what to do' about the observing enemy vessels was not
as simple and straightforward an issue as it might have appeared. It was
certainly within the power of ARNETHIS and its allies to destroy them,
there in the Eos System they had built up a very large arsenal of powerful
weapon systems, including spacecraft with more than sufficient trans-light
acceleration to catch up to and destroy the observation vessels. Any such
action, however, would have unpredictable consequences.

On the one hand, leaving them there to observe inevitably meant that they
would learn useful things that might eventually be passed on to their enemy.
On the other, destroying them would reveal to that enemy a great deal as
well, and tell them nothing much about the enemy. They were still in a
state of near-total ignorance about that enemy, and so it was concluded
that a capture operation made more strategic sense than to destroy them.

Unfortunately, while the strategic desirability of capturing the observing
vessels was clear, the tactical viability of the operation was less certain.
To actually capture a spacecraft capable of resistance in open space is not
simple, especially if the target vessel is prepared to self-destruct rather than
submit. Based on past experience with the robots this foe had infiltrated
into the Hegemony before the Final Assault, self-destruct seemed a very
likely outcome of a failed capture operation.

With those thoughts in mind, ARNETHIS and its allies laid their plans.

The observing ships of NEMESIS, for their part, were puzzled by what
they had learned since approaching the Eos System. They had come to
the Eos System expecting to find it still quiet, but hoping to catch a ship
of their mysterious new spacefarers visiting the star. Instead, they found
what amounted to a new spacefaring civilization right there in the system,
but it was a very odd civilization, and the more the spy-ships watched
the more confused they became by what they were observing.

The presence of the spacefarer society was obvious, the radiation emitted
by their ships and machines and bases was impossible to hide, especially
the neutrinos and anti-neutrinos emitted by the power plants and the glow
of infra-red and visible light from their rocket engines. But the sources
were in strange places, and the places they would normally be expected
to exist were dark and quiet.

The two habitable planets of the system, with their breathable nitroxygen
atmospheres and rich biospheres, showed no trace of civilization that the
long-range passive scanners of the NEMESIS ships could detect. On the
other hand, both of the tiny rockball natural satellites of Eosia were heavy
with the signs of machinery and activity, as were many other bodies in
the Eos System. Spacecraft of many sorts were detectable all over the
system, many propelled by nuclear-fission rockets, others driven by the
more sophisticated dimensionator drive, but none of them ever went any
closer to the two habitable Solarigen worlds than high orbit.

Many of the ships were clearly manned, that much the spy-ships could
determine easily. The rocket-propelled ships never used accelerations
much more than three or four times the surface gravity of Eosia, and
even the dimensionator-driven ships, to which such considerations were
not relevant, were clearly designed to include life-support equipment.

This made no sense to the nemetic brains that operated the spy-vessels.
How could a civilization have arisen in space? Any space-borne survivors
of the Final Assault would have made their way, if possible to one of
the habitable worlds, and those who could not would have been very
unlikely to survive even for years, much less long enough to create any
new civilization, and why would such a civilization ignore two
such eminently habitable, comfortable, living worlds so close at hand?

(It should be kept in mind that each side of this war, at this point, was
unaware of the nature of the enemy. Each expected to find a living
society on a living world, either Heliugen or Solarigen as the case might
be, neither side yet realized that this was a war of living machine against
living machine, albeit with some others involved as well.)

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

For ARNETHIS, any plans to capture the spy-vessels were complicated
by the effective impossibility approaching them undetected. Any ship
that tried to approach faster-than-light would have emitted trans-light
radiations that the sensors of the spy-vessels could detect, while a ship
approaching below light-speed would be betrayed by the stream of anti-
neutrinos from the fission core that powered the ship.

Trying to conceal movement of spacecraft from those with the technology
to observe such things is difficult. The only practical ways to do it are
by disguising such movements as something else, so that even if they are
observed they are not properly recognized. This is a fine art, and difficult.
NEMESIS was a past master of using it against the Eldren, but the tactics
NEMESIS had used would not be useful to ARNETHIS is this situation,
because they were extremely slow. NEMESIS could afford to spend the
necessary centuries and millennia to disguise the movements of its ships
and equipment as natural phenomena. ARNETHIS lacked this luxury.

The only other means was to disguise such movements as something else,
some other but unrelated action. The difficulty here was that it was not
easy to find any plausible excuse for ships to enter into intercept orbits,
not with the spy-ships being where they were. Still, after several Terran
months, ARNETHIS made its move. Several specially equipped vessels
made their way toward that part of the Eos System where the spy-vessels
lay quietly, disguised as what ARNETHIS hoped would look like a deep
space salvage expedition, looking for the remnants of Hegemony ships
and installations in the outer reaches of the star system (there had been
many such before the Final Assault).

It was as good a pretense as was possible. It gave a reason for the ships
to be in the outer star system, among the nearer comets along with the
spy-ships, and it provided an excuse for the ships to carry the necessary
equipment to carry out the actual physical capture operations.

Still, the timing was suspect, that an expedition would be heading out to
that part of the Eos System at the particular time that the spy-ships from
NEMESIS had come to Eos strained plausibility, and ARNETHIS knew
this all too well when it and its allies were laying their plans.

The nemetic brains aboard the spy-ships detected the approaching ships,
they were not moving faster-than-light (since they were supposedly on
their way to an in-system destination). Those icy cold (in both the literal
and figurative sense) intellects evaluated the ships, readily recognizing
what they appeared to be intended for, noting that their orbits would in
time bring them to intercept with several very old Hegemonic remains
in the outer system, beyond even their own distant orbit.

Those Heliugenic living computers also evaluated the odds against those
ships being sent on a mission that just happened to bring them close to
the spy-vessels, at the particular time that the spy-vessels happened to
have come to the Eos System. Coincidences do happen, but this one was
too much for the nemetic brains, they analyzed the data and came to the
conclusion that they had probably been detected and that the ission was
probably a disguised move against themselves.

As soon as this conclusion was reached, the spy-vessels set aside all
considerations of stealth and energized their primary dimensionators,
accelerating away from Eos under full emergency drive. This was
rapidly detected by ARNETHIS, who sent a signal to its ships to set
out in full pursuit, since any sort of sneak-capture was now impossible.

A stern pursuit now began, and the pursuers rapidly gained upon their
quarry, since they were designed for just pursuit action. Beneath their
deceptively ordinary hulls were enormous engines and power plants
far larger than most ships of their size would ever carry, and with this
advantage they gained upon their targets slowly but steadily. Both
rapidly crossed the speed of light and kept on going, the head start of
the ships from NEMESIS eroded by the greater pseudo-acceleration
of the pursuits ships, as days turned into weeks the chase continued.

At last, though, one by one, the pursuing ships began to fall back, their
engines giving out under the strain of the chase and the overload, and
it began to look as if the fleeing spy-ships might be possessed of just
enough of a head-start to get away. Before that could happen, the last
two pursuing ships launched their ace-in-the-hole, a brace of missiles. [1]

Not ordinary missiles, though, but automated ships equipped with their
own stardrives, equipped to use extremely high pseudo-accelerations
for a short time. They closed the gap between themselves and their
targets in a matter of hours, and homed in and destroyed four of the
six targets. The remaining two managed, barely, to evade the missiles
and escape into the depths of interstellar space, while the pursuers
fell away behind them, their main drives and fuel supplies exhausted.

Or at least, so ARNETHIS hoped their quarry would believe.

MORE LATER.


[1] This tactic was all but unheard of in space warfare, because nobody
was willing to sacrifice the orichalcum necessary to built FTL missiles.

[D10]

And just as im thinking is there something new ? there is!

=)

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

In fact, the entire pursuit had been something of a diversion from the start,
because ARNETHIS had been reasonably sure that there was no way the
spy-vessels would believe the feint of a coincidental mission in their direction,
and even if they did, a successful capture would have been almost impossible
even so, for reasons we have already observed.

When the spy-vessels had fled, the pursuit had been carried out by ships that
were, in fact, fully capable of keeping up the chase long enough to catch
their quarry. The problem for ARNETHIS was that it still left actually
capturing one or more of the target ships as a near-impossibility.
The near-certainty remained that the quarry would self-destruct rather than
permit a capture, and a capture maneuver at trans-light pseudo-velocities
would have been a near-suicidal maneuver anyway.

Thus the pursuit had continued, but only long enough to make a convincing
show, the pursuit ships exerted considerable care to produce what they
hoped would be a convincing sensor-pattern that looked like over-strained
engines and exhausted fuel supplies, one by one the ships gave up the chase.
The missile attack that was the last gap was meant to look like a desperation
move, they hoped the willingness to sacrifice the precious orichalcum for
the attack would add (expensive) verisimilitude to the show of desperation.

In fact, what ARNETHIS and its allies hoped to achieve was subtler, their
entire plan hinged on letting some of the target ships escape. The missile
attack had been a very expensive feint, one of the missiles had apparently
failed to home in on its target properly, detonating a few kilometers away,
in fact it had launched a smaller craft disguised as a fragment, which had
adhered to the fleeing enemy ship in the chaos of the near-miss.

(The ‘warheads’ were not explosives. Instead they were ‘disruptors’ meant
to destabilize the drive-fields of the fleeing ships. This was, when it was
successful, quite destructive enough at trans-light speeds. In this case, the
disruption was (by intent) just short of sufficient to destroy the target, and
in the confusion of the moment one of the fragments managed to adhere
to the fleeing spacecraft as intended.)

It would take some time for this plan to bear fruit, even if it worked out, in
the meantime ARNETHIS and its allies began to pour their efforts into the
task of preparing for future attacks. The preparation on the defensive side
was relatively straightforward, at least in the Eos System, since it was not
difficult for ARNETHIS to use teleoperation and other techniques to guide
the work and control the resulting machines. The need to reach beyond the
Eos System was far more difficult, because of the distances involved and
the relatively small numbers of people who made up the new ‘civilization’.

NEMESIS could create enormous numbers of smaller, far less capable but
otherwise similar, duplicates of itself to act as its proxies across the Galaxy.
ARNETHIS simply could not do anything of the sort, the basic natures of
the workings of the two living AI systems were different. ARNETHIS
had to either travel in person to act outside the Eos System, or send some
of its Homosapient allies, and it had all too few of those, and not all of them
were suited to the tasks.

ARNETHIS had founded, and become the ruler and center of, a new culture,
a new sort of society. Made up of the descendants of orphans rescued
from certain death on the two worlds of the Eos System, this society was
well-educated, technically capable, and highly motivated, but it also had
only a few tens of thousands of members. The entire population of the
new society was smaller than that of a small city in the Hegemonic days.

ARNETHIS periodically still rescued small children in situations where
they would otherwise face death or worse, justifying this ‘drafting’ by
the fact that its draftee children had nothing to lose anyway. This was a
process that could never be fast, though, and now they needed numbers.

There were some theoretical options available to deal with this.

MORE LATER.