The Invasion Begins Page 5

  “So you’re saying this is our fault?”

  “No one could have anticipated a problem like this one. But approval of the GFI proposal would help with future situations like this one once we get past this crisis.”

  “So what are you going to do to handle this crisis?”

  “We’re developing strategies to use in ending this second thrust into G.A. space. My real worry is for the next and the next after that. We thought that with the destruction of the invasion fleet, we had destroyed all of the Denubbewa ships in G.A. space. But what if we haven’t? What will happen if just one warship— just one— manages to get a Personnel CJ Gate down to an inhabited planet and they start sending a river of soldier cyborgs that will eventually subjugate the entire population? When the Tsgardi invaded Region Two, they began sending troops down to populated planets to enslave and control the people of the planet, and we had no way to combat the situation. Fortunately, we were able to defeat the Tsgardi in space, and as part of their surrender, they withdrew all forces from G.A. space and planets. That won’t work with the Denubbewa. It doesn’t appear we can completely defeat them in space. According to the defectors we now have working with us and teaching us about Gate technology, the Denubbewa have been at this for many centuries. Their resources might simply be too enormous for us— or anyone else— to overcome.”

  “So you’re saying our cause is lost? That we should simply surrender and be turned into cyborgs ourselves?”

  “No, never. All I’m saying is that we may not be able to defeat the Denubbewa. Perhaps the best we can hope for is a situation where taking the G.A. is so costly to them that they finally decide we’re not worth the effort and pass us by.”

  * * *

  Chapter Four

  ~ April 6th, 2292 ~

  “There’s no end to them!” Admiral Holt exclaimed loudly. “My ships now completely encircle the planet and the recycle debris, ready and able to destroy any cyborgs that stick their heads up out of the rubble, so you’d think they’d wise up and end their attack. But our guns are never inactive for more than a few minutes throughout the day. I have no idea how long the Denubbewa can keep this up.”

  “Indefinitely, I would say,” Admiral Bradlee mused. “They reportedly have sextillion cyborgs, after all. Eventually, we may find ourselves unable to even see Lorense-Four because of the dead cyborg bodies, or pieces of bodies.”

  “But they have to realize the cyborg deaths are accomplishing nothing,” Admiral Woo said.

  “They’re accomplishing one thing,” Jenetta said. “They’re keeping a good part of the Second Fleet tied up here when they should be out on patrol looking for other cyborg forays now that we know a new campaign has begun. How’s the morale among your crews, Brian?”

  “Our people are well protected from laser weapons while inside our DS ships or when wearing personal armor, so there’s no immediate concern for their safety. And I understand they’re treating the situation like some kind of shooting competition. I imagine there’s some gambling going on, but I suggested that my officers look the other way as long as it doesn’t appear openly. I wonder if the cyborgs have sent word back to their masters and informed them that they can’t make any headway here.”

  “If they have sextillion cyborgs, they can continue to waste them until they develop a new plan,” Admiral Ressler said, “if they even have a plan at present. Right now it seems like their cyborgs are just being used as cannon fodder to wear us down.”

  “So far we’ve been on the defensive,” Jenetta said. “We must go on the offensive.”

  “What do you have in mind, Jen?” Admiral Holt asked.

  “We need intelligence information, Brian. We believe they might be building something inside that mountain of trash, or perhaps I should say that ‘mountain of potentially valuable resources,’ and we need to know what it is.”

  “Valuable resources?” Admiral Ahmed said. “It’s trash.”

  “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure,” Jenetta replied. “That mountain of trash contains the remains of an estimated one thousand warships. If any of us were stuck on a deserted planet with such a pile of valuable materials all around us and we had an unlimited labor pool available, wouldn’t we be trying to cobble together a warship or two? In any event, we have to find out what they’re building.”

  “You really think they’re building something inside that scrap heap?” Admiral Hillaire said.

  “I do. Because that’s what I would be doing in their place. And I credit them with superior intelligence, even if they stole most of the technology they possess from the nations they’ve conquered.”

  “Then why are they sacrificing those cyborgs?”

  “As Shana said, they’re cannon fodder. They’re a diversion. It keeps us from burrowing into the piles to see what’s going on. I’m sure they don’t want us looking in there. If they hadn’t climbed out and begun sacrificing their drones, our yard people would eventually have begun investigating the strange movements of trash as the cyborgs collected what they needed and cleared an area in which to work.”

  “I’ll be damned, Jen,” Holt said. “I think you might be onto something. So how do we go about learning what they’re doing?”

  “We use our secret weapon.”

  “Um, which weapon is that?” Admiral Plimley asked. “Are you talking about using our cyborg scientists as agents?”

  “No, they’re far too valuable doing what you have them doing.”

  “You want me to have my people create another undercover cyborg? Or perhaps a team of cyborg agents?” Admiral Bradlee asked.

  “You’re all over-thinking the problem and the solution. All we do is send in a CPS-16 that’s enclosed in a double envelope. It flies around and takes images every place there seems to be activity. We can fly at any speed now within a double envelope, so the CPS-16 can stop if necessary to get better images.”

  “But the cyborgs might see it,” Admiral Plimley said. “To a Terran’s mind, it wouldn’t register because the ship is operating slightly out of phase. And it may only appear like a shadow to the cyborgs at first, but they’re machines and it might occasionally register as a clear image in their electronic memory that could be accessed later and examined closely. It could give away the existence of our secret weapon, even if they can’t harm it.”

  “I think we have to risk that. I certainly don’t want them to learn about it, but we absolutely must know what’s going on down there and what progress they’ve made.”

  ~ ~ ~

  “I’m becoming concerned,” Captain Gavin said. “As you know, after receiving the message from Christa about a serious condition here and her recommendation that I send Marines to all new space stations, I did as she suggested. I followed that up with messages to each of the other temporary administrators, informing them of the pending arrival of increased base security support and ordering them to acknowledge the message and then report the status of the base every day until ordered otherwise.

  “After arriving here and being fully briefed, I sent messages to each commander warning them of the potential danger and instructing them to employ the system in use here for monitoring the CJ Gate rooms. I also ordered them to always have a minimum of four armed Marines inside every Gate room.

  “All six stations reported receiving the initial messages, and four of the six have responded with two daily reports, but two have not. Those two are the farthest bases from this location, and the problem might simply be one of communication distance. I’ve also informed Quesann about everything I’ve learned since my arrival here. Admiral Holt must be prepared to deal with similar CJ Gate transfers to the destroyed ships being brought to Lorense-Four. Unfortunately, that special report won’t reach Quesann for another nineteen days.”

  The meeting, being held in Gavin’s private office in his quarters, was only attended by his XO, Eliza Carver, and Commander Christa Carver, captain of the Koshi. Christa would remain as administrator of the station unti
l the permanent administer arrived.

  “I understand your apprehension, sir,” Christa said. “But there are always two destroyers in orbit around Quesann for planetary protection, and when we’re not officially at war there’re almost always at least ten percent of the Second Fleet ships in the Fleet Harbor for downtime, making minor repairs, equipment upgrades, and restocking food and other supplies. They’re only four billion kilometers from Quesann so they can be in planetary orbit within minutes in the event of an attack. They should have adequate protection.”

  “It depends on how much the Denubbewa throw at them. I’m sure those cyborgs know that Quesann is home to the G.A. Senate.”

  “We might be getting upset over nothing, sir,” Eliza said. “The messages from the stations, as you said, might simply be tardy owing to the great distances that separate us. And I don’t know if the Denubbewa would be foolish enough to attack Quesann with their entire fleet of warships having been recently destroyed. They’d have no tactical support.”

  “I hope you’re right, Eliza. But these metal-headed monsters are damn unpredictable. They don’t value lives or fear for their own because most of them are just mindless drones, performing whatever task they’re assigned. If their masters tell them to perform some meaningless task that will result in certain death, they’ll do it without hesitation.”

  “I agree with their unpredictability,” Christa said. “The Denubbewa seem to be on a quest to control the universe. I doubt they’ll find any price too steep.”

  “Okay, if we don’t hear from Grumpy and Sneezy space stations by this time tomorrow, the Ares will depart for Grumpy to investigate.”

  “Would you like the Koshi to proceed to Sneezy, sir?” Christa asked.

  “No. The Koshi must remain here to safeguard this station until the first trio of destroyers arrives. And if the new administrator isn’t aboard, you’ll remain here until he or she arrives.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We still have a sizable force at the battle site protecting the rubble until the reclamation fleet can pick it up. I’ll send a ship from there to check on Sneezy.”

  “Um, those names sound like the names of the dwarfs in the tale of Snow White, sir,” Christa said, “Is that a coincidence?”

  Gavin chuckled before saying, “I never told you?”

  “Not that I recall, sir.”

  “Eliza came up with the names. They aren’t the official names, of course, but we needed to call them something until the G.A. Senate and the Admiralty Board announced the official designations at a big public ceremony. Right now, relatively few individuals are even aware of the existence of the new bases.”

  “I see,” Christa said, glancing over at Eliza, who seemed to be trying to suppress a laugh. “And what is the name of this station, sir?”

  “We’ve decided to call this station Doc.”

  “Doc? Well, that’s not bad. I was afraid you might have named it Dopey.”

  “I wanted to,” Eliza said with a smile as wide as her face, “just to see the expression on your face when you learned.”

  “And I said that I’d never name a base Dopey where a Carver was in command,” Gavin said. “Not even as a temporary code name.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Christa said with a smile that matched Eliza’s. “By the way, which station is named Dopey?”

  “None, actually. I thought it might follow an SC officer around as a nickname, and I didn’t want anyone to be saddled with that for the rest of their life. So we named it Friendly.”

  “So we have Doc, Grumpy, Sneezy, Happy, Sleepy, Bashful, and Friendly,” Christa said. “Who’s Snow White?”

  Gavin seemed at a loss for the moment so Eliza said, “That should probably be Quesann.”

  “They’d also make good code names in case the Denubbewa manage to break our encryption,” Gavin said. “I believe the leaders of the metal-heads are a lot more devious than some in Space Command give them credit for.”

  ~ ~ ~

  “We’ve now all seen the images produced by repeated flights of CPS-16s through the massive rubble piles around Lorense-Four,” Jenetta said as the enormous monitors in the Admiralty Hall darkened. The A.B. was in executive session, and only aides and clerks with a Most Secret clearance were in the large room. “So we must decide on a course of action. Any thoughts or questions?”

  “I sort of lost track as we were watching,” Admiral Woo said. “Exactly how many different locations in the rubble have the Denubbewa cleared so they can begin rebuilding ships?”

  “My SCI teams have identified thirty-eight locations where ship reconstruction efforts have begun in earnest,” Admiral Bradlee said. “We know they have all the resources they need to rebuild ships, and you can’t deny their apparent determination to get the job done. In addition to having all the ship components they need, we’re quite sure they have thousands or even tens of thousands of those missiles with the nuclear warheads. The undamaged ship that Commander Christa Carver located and brought here from Region Three had more than seven thousand missiles in its storage holds. I’m sure we can depend on there being such quantities buried in every damaged ship in that rubble pile.”

  “There’s only one thing we can do,” Admiral Holt said. “We drop a WOLaR bomb off at every one of those thirty-eight locations.”

  “Right now those rubbish piles are floating peacefully in orbit around Lorense-Four,” Admiral Plimley said. “But if we start bombing them, we’ll have trash flung out in every direction. We might also detonate some of those thousands of nukes. It’ll take years to collect it all and clean up the area around Lorense-Four.”

  “Better to spend years recollecting trash than have one dead member of the military because we waited too long to deal with these cyborgs,” Admiral Holt muttered.

  “Cyborgs. That’s it!” Jenetta said, then stared at the ceiling.

  When she didn’t say anything further for half a minute while all of the admirals stared in her direction, Admiral Yuthkotl said, “Do you have an idea, Jen?”

  “Yes. Sorry. I was lost in thought for a moment. Roger, I understand you had excellent success with reprogramming a cyborg to function as an undercover agent and attempt to kidnap a Denubbewa supervisor.”

  “Yes, my people were able to completely wipe the memories implanted by the Denubbewa, then replace them with a set of memories we created to make the cyborg loyal to the G.A. It would then perform undercover operations as our operative. It’s what they called ‘brainwashing’ centuries ago. Why?”

  “I recall Sywasock saying that the Denubbewa communicate exclusively by telecommunication.”

  “Yes, they have speech capability built into their chassis but only communicate vocally with species that require it.”

  “Can we access their programming via telecommunications?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll have to ask the people involved with the test subject. I know it’s not like programming a computer. The cyborg brain is biological, not a mass of electronic components. Are you thinking we might be able to issue orders for them to stop work on rebuilding warships?”

  “Something like that. When your experts were working with the cyborg, were they able to determine if the cyborg’s original memories were always destroyed? The scientist cyborgs working with us appear to have all of their original memories. Apparently, the Denubbewa couldn’t destroy memories of their pasts without destroying their training and therefore their ability to function as scientists.”

  “Again, I don’t know, but I can find out easily enough. I’ll have the team leader brought over here and we can have him brief us after lunch.”

  “In that case, I move that we adjourn for lunch.”

  ~ ~ ~

  “Commander Ellingford is in command of the section where the cyborg was reprogrammed,” Admiral Bradlee said following the resumption of the session.

  A senior Space Command officer, the only individual in the gallery seating area, rose from his front-row seat and moved t
o stand in the opening where the two ends of the horseshoe-shaped table came to within two meters of one another. He could be clearly observed by all seated members of the A.B.

  “Commander,” Admiral Bradlee said, “Admiral Carver has some questions to ask pertaining to your work with the cyborg.”

  “Yes, sir.” Looking at Jenetta, he said. “Ma’am?”

  “Commander,” Jenetta said, “I’m interested in learning if the cyborgs retain any memories of their lives before being— absorbed— into the Denubbewa collective. We know the Denubbewa don’t tamper with the memories of the ones they need for scientific work, but what about the others? I’m referring to the cyborgs we call drones, which are merely programmed to perform repetitious acts.”

  “I’m sure you appreciate, Admiral, that our knowledge so far is limited by the small number of living test subjects we’ve had for study. We have ascertained that the Denubbewa use the brains of numerous intelligent species they’ve conquered. That information comes from the biologists who’ve been able to examine dead cyborgs found after engagements with the enemy. As I’m sure you realize, the biological brains of different species are naturally quite different— incredibly different in some cases. The Denubbewa bodies may have a standard configuration, but the brains can be very unique.”

  “Yet you were able to reprogram one of the cyborgs.”

  “Yes, ma’am. We lucked out, so to speak. The brain of that cyborg was very similar to the brain of Arrosians and Selaxians. I believe you’re very familiar with those two species.”

  “Yes, I became very well acquainted with them when I commanded Stewart Space Command Base. Are you suggesting that our cyborg’s brain came from one of those sister planets?”

  “No, the cyborg’s brain didn’t come from either species. However, its physiology was close enough that we were able to use equipment developed on Arrosa for patients with cranial injuries to map the brain patterns of the cyborg used for this assignment. In most intelligent species we’re familiar with, the brain uses minute electrical signals and chemical reactions to process, store, and retrieve data while monitoring all bodily functions on a constant basis. The Denubbewa have developed an— interface box— that handles most functions of the body autonomously and only requires limited interaction on the part of the biological brain to perform such chores as walking. New memories are also stored and retrieved from a small device that’s part of the interface unit. The interface with the biological brain seems to be unique to each species, but we were able to make great headway in understanding its operation because of the brain-mapping work we performed. Since the cyborg’s brain has been freed from so much activity normally required of a host’s brain, only about ten percent of the cyborg’s brain is actually being used. The rest has been separated from normal activity. We believe the cyborg’s memories might still be in there, but they can no longer be accessed by the host brain. We liken the situation to what happened in the brains of Terrans suffering from Alzheimer’s disease before it was finally eradicated about two hundred years ago. With Alzheimer’s patients, the links between the different parts of the brain slowly disintegrated, first cutting off memories, then the ability of the patient to function in a normal environment, and finally the patient’s brain lost control of the bodily organs required to keep the patient alive. We believe that the Denubbewa found a similar way to disconnect the memory areas of the brain.”