Old Guy and the Planet of Eternal Night

By Timothy Gawne

One moment Old Guy - everyone's favorite self aware weapon of mass destruction! - was traveling through deep space with his buddies, minding his own business, armed with enough firepower to destabilize the crust of your average terrestrial planet (never leave home without it), when suddenly he was left heavily damaged, marooned and under constant attack on a planet of eternal night. His original creator, Giuseppe Vargas, had warned him that there would be days like this. Fortunately there was still bowling.

A thousand years earlier, a young biological human lieutenant in the combined Earth Army was assigned to the enormous arkship The City of San Luis Obispo, and help to found a colony in another star system. He was to learn firsthand the wisdom of the advice, that when founding a colony on an alien world, you should always take out the extra coverage on your health insurance plan for attacks by alien creatures.

Eventually, the cybertank civilization itself comes under attack by a nameless evil of immense power. The cybertanks did not know its name (hence the 'nameless' part), and indeed, knew basically nothing about it except that it was extremely powerful, and evil (hence the 'evil' part). It is left to Old Guy, though long past his best-used-to-blow-things-up-by date, to ride into battle one last time before he finally gets off his lazy hyperalloy butt and upgrades to something modern. And Highland Brand tapered roller bearings are the best tapered roller bearings in the galaxy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ballacourage Books
• Release date: Jul 14, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370746552

Book preview

Table of Contents

1. The Fortress on the Planet of Eternal Night

2. The Journal of Lysis Trellen Part I: Awakening

3. I Did Not See That Coming

4. The Journal of Lysis Trellen Part II: Arrival

5. The Lesser Redoubt

6. The Journal of Lysis Trellen Part III: Meeting Engagement

7. Meanwhile Back at the Ranch

8. The Journal of Lysis Trellen Part IV: A Small Kinetic Action

9. Oh, It’s You.

10. The Journal of Lysis Trellen Part V: Revolution

11. This Means War

12. The Journal of Lysis Trellen Part VI: First Steps

13. Medusa

14. The Journal of Lysis Trellen Part VII: Debt of Honor

15. The Quest for the Holy Grail

16. The Journal of Lysis Trellen Part VIII: Holocaust

17. Old Guy Rides Again

Military Powered Armor – Practical or Absurd?

OLD GUY AND THE PLANET OF ETERNAL NIGHT

Copyright 2017

Timothy J. Gawne

Ballacourage Books

Published by Smashwords

1. The Fortress on the Planet of Eternal Night

Where there is traction, there is hope. Old Guy, cybertank, contemporary.

My human creator often warned me that being too cocky could jinx things. With hindsight I should have indulged that superstition.

I was traveling in interstellar space with two of my peers – the 18,000 ton Bear Class cybertank Splot and the 8,000 ton Horizon Class Cheetoh. Our main hulls were spaced about 100,000 kilometers apart – close enough to chat in near real-time and provide mutual support, far enough to offer some tactical depth. We were enveloped in a screening cloud of scouts, escorts, missile pods, and other useful things out to nearly 5% of a light year. Between us we had enough firepower to conquer an entire technologically advanced star system.

I was therefore feeling quite self-satisfied, and confident in our ability to, if not quite able to defeat all comers, at least put up a decent fight.

There was perhaps a microsecond worth of warning – a few sensors started to give anomalous readings. Then we and all of our distributed weapons systems were swatted out of space like bugs.

My systems crashed, and when they finally rebooted I was on a direct collision course for a rocky terrestrial planet in a region of space that, apparently, had no stars. I was about a million kilometers away, which sounds like a pretty fair distance, unless you are closing at a relative velocity of over 100,000 kilometers per hour, and your primary interstellar drives are missing. Then it seems a lot closer.

I have inbuilt anti-gravitic suspensors, but they are twitchy, and limited in capacity. They are not going to be able to slow me down in time. When I was in transit my main hull was attached to a cluster of drives and fuel tanks – those are all gone. Every millisecond I draw nearer to a collision that, at a projected terminal velocity of over 10,000 kilometers per hour, not even a cybertank could survive.

The planet seems strange. It is dark, but reads as surprisingly warm, and has a decent atmosphere. I see neither sun nor stars. I must be in the middle of a vast dust cloud, and this is a live rogue planet in interstellar space. I try scanning the surface: there are hot spots here and there, doubtless residual volcanism. The planet is dark in the radio and microwave bands as well, except for two distinct regions, one significantly more active than the other. They only hint of electromagnetic backwash. It could be natural, or from any of a hundred known and who knows how many unknown other civilizations.

I call out to my colleagues, Splot and Cheetoh, but there are no replies – not even a single sub-mind. For that matter, I get no acknowledgments from any surviving non-sentient drones or missiles. I am truly alone.

I simulate a million possible strategies, and I calculate a chance. I salvage some thrusters from the few remotes that had been stored in my internal bays, and use precious fuel reserves to execute a burn. I change my angle of approach so that I just barely skim the atmosphere, my treads facing down. At first there are just the faint flickers of glow across my hull, then it becomes an inferno, and then a searing white-hot hell. My main hull is made of an incredibly tough hyper-alloy but everything in this universe has a breaking point, and I am cutting this very close.

I bounce off of the atmosphere back into space, but I have killed a lot of my velocity. My hull cools off, and I repair what internal damage I can, and then I head back down towards the planet. The second time I also skip off the atmosphere, but now I am below orbital velocity. I’m heading down a third time, and this time will be the last.

Once again I heat up. I am enveloped in a ball of plasma a hundred meters across. I’m moving slower than I was during the previous two entries, but I’m entering denser air, and this time I’m not going to be able to jump back into space to cool down.

My velocity is down to 5,000 kilometers per hour – not that fast really – but I am rapidly running out of kilometers and it’s still fast enough to pancake me all over the landscape. I power up my suspensors, and … miracle of miracles! The damned things actually work. I slow down even further. The plasma ball dissipates, and I can see clearly around me. The ground is a featureless expanse of rock and dirt, lit only by my own brightly glowing self. I try and steer myself away from the rocks and towards a place that appears a bit sandier.

Impact. I smash into the ground and leave a crater in it. My systems are flooded with failure alerts. Whole banks of me power off, and for a couple of milliseconds I don’t think that I’m going to make it.

But I do. I am a mess, but still functional. I have sustained almost total damage to my weaponry, very little of my primary sensory systems are operational, and my internals are leaking and sparking. However, both of my fusion reactors are intact, and, to my relief, my drive motors and suspension are over 90% functional. I can move, and as I always say, where there is traction, there is hope.

This will be the ninth time that I have crash-landed on a terrestrial world (not including 23 heavy landings, and the time with the Demi-Iguanas and the spin-bots doesn’t count). You would think that I would be getting better at it. Perhaps I am, but you wouldn’t know it from my current state. I slowly drive my way out of the mess of my own impact crater.

I stop at the lip of the crater. Sand cascades off my hull and treads. Internally my maintenance drones are frantically working on the most damaged pipes and conduits. Externally, I take the time to finally look at the place that I have crash-landed on. It’s not impressive.

I have been on rogue planets before – terrestrial worlds flung into the gaps between the stars by the vagaries of orbital dynamics. You might think such places dark and dingy, but you would be wrong. They are some of the most beautiful places in this universe. The skies glow with the light of a billion stars, and the land is washed with color.

Not this place. It’s dark – dark even to my enhanced senses. The air is nominally breathable for a biological human, though a little thin, and cold – about minus 10 Celsius – but still not cryogenic. There must be a significant amount of residual and radioactive-generated heat coming up from the planet itself.

I have thermal vision, but that’s only really good for detecting hot targets against a cold background. Close to my main hull I can use electromagnetic near-field monitoring, and sense the acoustic echoes of my suspension noise. At maximum gain there are always a few stray photons here and there, but past a range of a hundred meters out I am nearly blind.

I am tempted to switch on my active senses – radar, lidar, sonar, spotlights – which would be standard tactical doctrine. A cybertank all by its lonesome is not very good at hiding, so if everyone else is going to see you, you might as well make sure that you see everyone else right back. But somehow I’m not sure. This place is spooky and I am feeling very cautious.

Through my treads I can sense vibrations from all around me. There are multiple sources of various types – some are little skitterings, like rats, others more ponderous thuds, like elephants or larger. I strain through the gloom but can’t resolve anything more than a few tantalizing glimmers of motion.

Then the variety of different vibrations all fade out, and they are replaced with a single large acoustic source. It registers as massive – at least as large as myself – but it has an odd signature, as it were moving on a dozen differently sized legs.

The signal is coming closer, and I can start to make out the faint outlines of a shape. I try a series of hails on all the standard frequencies. I get no coherent reply but only a kind of scream like metal spikes gouging down a slate blackboard.

I light up my active sensors and get a good look at what is bearing down on me. In a long and distinguished career of exploring I have never seen anything so utterly hideous. An Amok Happy Leech is a Spring Lilly in comparison. I estimate its mass at 3,000 tons – about fifty percent more than my own. It’s vaguely like a gigantic human meibomian gland (the kind that spread oil under the eyelids), but slimy and oil-slick black. It has multiple eyes, but they are not faceted like an insect’s, they are smooth and bleed dark ooze. Each misshapen leg ends in three-meter long talons that gouge the rocks as they are dragged along. The mouthparts consist of multiple overlapping sucker mouths all rimmed with blunt inwards-facing teeth. I decide to call it a Meibomian.

I shift into reverse and try to back away, but the thing speeds up. Despite its ponderous appearance it’s faster than I am and it continues to close the distance. I try communicating again, and as before, get no coherent response.

I have precious little weaponry left, but I have to try. I cut loose with my surviving secondary and point-defense weapons They light up the sky all around and tear great rents in the oncoming monster, but it only accelerates further. It leaps onto my hull and hacks at me with its talons. I am damaged! Whatever this thing is made of it’s not conventional flesh and blood – my hull is dented and I lose a secondary battery.

It engages its mouthpieces and begins to drill into my hull. I lose another secondary – I am almost without offensive weaponry.

In desperation I accelerate forward and knock the creature onto its back. I drive on top of it and pin it. It is out of position, but with its greater mass it is only a matter of time before it wriggles free. I send full power to my treads, but I have them operating in opposite directions. That is, my leftmost forwards tread goes forwards, the next one over goes backwards, and so on. Thus I stay in place, but grind my enemy down. It screams loud enough to damage some of my minor systems, but it does not have much leverage on its back and can’t get away in time. My counter-rotating treads dig deeper into it like the gears of a garbage disposal. Thick viscous black gouts of ropy intestines and pus-filled glands are scattered onto the ground to my fore and aft. I am slowly sinking deeper into this disgusting creature, and it’s finally starting to lose strength. It bats at me with its surviving legs but the blows lack power and coordination.

Eventually it twitches and collapses. Just to be sure, I drive back and forth over it several times, grinding it flat. When I am done it is little more than a stain on the ground. Some creatures and devices have remarkable regenerative properties, but this one is not, I think, coming back.

I trundle off at a dead slow pace, and my treads slowly clear of ichor. I sense the return of the smaller presences, but they keep their distance. Possibly I have killed a major predator here, and the smaller creatures are now more wary of me. Still, I detect seismic evidence of even larger mobile contacts in the far distance. I might still want to avoid attracting attention, so I switch off my active senses, and plunge back into darkness.

I drive along about as quietly as a 2,000 ton cybertank can manage. I pass a few kilometers away from a thermal vent; the heat from it illuminates the surrounding area. Thermal vision is low resolution (all the hot objects tend to blur together), but I detect many slowly moving shapes clustered around the vent. Some sort of thermally-powered life? That would explain how creatures could exist with no sunlight.

I launch a micro-scout, it gets about 10 kilometers away before contact is suddenly lost. Damn but this is a hostile place.

I decide to head towards the largest location where I had previously detected the faint trace of a modulated electromagnetic signal. It might be an enemy, but it might not, and I cannot ignore any chance of finding new resources. I drive along and internally make progress repairing myself. I am back up to four secondary plasma cannons, and my internals are in better shape, but it’s going to take a long time to get my main weapon operational (if I even can with the materials available to me here). I had also expended all of my internally carried combat remotes in my effort to land on this planet. I am very much in trouble.

Then I receive a transmission – it’s faint, but appears to be a cry for help from a young human female, unencrypted, on a megahertz frequency band. I’ve had aliens send me so many false messages during combat that I am instantly skeptical, but a signal is a signal and I have no other leads to investigate. Localizing it is hard, as if the source was jumping around or distributed, but it reads as roughly ten kilometers to my port. I alter course and cautiously sidle my way towards it.

I’m about two kilometers from the projected source of the transmission, and travelling across a large patch of sandy ground. My seismic sensors give me two seconds warning – there is something big hiding under the sand. I gun my engines, but before I can clear the area long thin black tentacles that are more like steel cables snap out of the sand and wrap themselves around my hull. I strain against the cables – they are strong but I’m no lightweight myself. For a moment I am held motionless, but I manage to bring a couple of my secondary armaments to bear and burn off some of the cables. The rest stretch and then suddenly snap, and I accelerate forward. My rear cameras see a hint of something large and cylindrical poking out of the sand before I leave it behind.

The transmission of the young human female fades away, with nothing to betray where it had come from.

I cannot remember ever being so isolated, so damaged, and also lacking in any sort of operational intelligence. I consider burying myself and trying to conduct more thorough repairs in peace, but the constant level of distant sensor contacts circling around me suggests that this would be a bad idea: nothing draws predators so much as a wounded animal that stops moving. I roll on through the night.

I start to detect the faint trace of the larger electromagnetic signal source that I had detected from space. It’s still too weak to decode, but the frequency spectra does suggest human technology. As I progress further, I see a faint glow of light over the horizon. I’m getting closer to something, that much is certain.

I come to a small ridge. I consider crossing it, but caution stops me. I have one functioning sensor-mast left. I extrude it to its full 40-meter height, and advance just far enough for the small optical scope at the tip of the mast to clear the ridgeline.

I am treated to a sight so glorious that I temporarily forget my troubles. I am overlooking a wide flat valley – it must be 20 kilometers across and two deep. In the middle of this valley is a massive black cube, five kilometers on a side.

As I look closer I realize that it’s only a cube in outline. It’s upper half is covered with innumerable black vanes and fins, looking like a heat sink for an electronic part, only vastly scaled up in size. The fins are dull black in visible light but glow brightly in the infrared: this must be the upper end of a massive geothermal energy plant.

In between the fins, starting 500 meters up from the bottom and then continuing almost all the way to the top, are thousands upon thousands of tiny lights. They spread a soft glow over the valley. I sharpen the image, and can resolve that these lights are individual windows. Each window is about a meter square, and I can barely see shapes moving behind a few of them.

I consider hailing the giant cube, but decide to wait. I’m going to continue to work on my self-repairs before possibly inviting another attack. I decide to hold my position – I don’t detect anything large lurking around, and being stable will make the repairs go faster.

A chronological day passes, although the sky remains totally black. I detect more stray electromagnetic transmissions from the large cube. They tantalize me with their familiarity but I don’t have enough data to be able to decode them. There are strong low-frequency vibrations coming from the massive structure, probably due to the machinery operating the geothermal energy plant. Thankfully the native fauna has decided to leave me alone, and I am content to watch and fix myself.

I’m not transmitting, but my passive sensors are all on full gain. Mostly I just hear the backwash of electromagnetic noise from the giant cube, and fainter static from the upper atmosphere, but sometimes something creepier turns up. Some signals are raw binary, clearly of artificial origin but inscrutable and uninterpretable. Others seem to be of human voices – screaming, pleading, or just babbling. The signals come infrequently, often hours apart, and on random frequencies and bandwidths. Cybertanks are basically never afraid of the dark, but this planet is becoming an exception. There are bad things out there, and they’re playing games with me…

Then I feel a seismic disturbance off in the distance over to my right flank, and heading towards the giant cube. I start to detect the acoustic signatures of systems with legs, some match the Meibomian, others I can’t identify. I hear the distant crack of railgun and plasma cannon fire. I can begin to observe visual signs of the firefight, and then a dozen humans in archaic powered armor spill over the rim of the valley and begin to run towards the giant cube.

For a moment I am nearly dumbfounded. The ancient biological humans briefly dabbled with powered armor for their troops, but quickly abandoned the approach as unworkable. All those joints and motors, all that complexity, the heavy life support systems needed to keep a delicate biological creature alive in combat – pure robotic systems are so much more effective as weapons.

But there is no denying that this is what I appear to be seeing. They match an obsolete mark that is in my databases, and even if they did not, the style of the joints is a dead giveaway. If these were just anthropoid robots, they would have simple hinges at the knees and elbows. However, they have the multi-level sliding joints that you would need if there were a human inside and you didn’t want to pinch them as they moved. Nobody would make such elaborate joints for any other reason, at least not that I can think of.

Additionally, these armored suits are communicating with each other and with sources in the giant cube using standard human telemetry protocols! Archaic, to be sure, but definitely human.

The armored humans (or whatever they really are) race down the canyon walls, and sprint towards the giant cube. That’s when I see four of the Meibomians like the one that I had fought earlier pass over the valley rim walls, and chase after them. The Meibomians are fast. They will catch up with the armored humans before they have made it half-way to the giant cube.

Now the first rule when dealing with aliens, is to not trust your instincts. If you see a bunch of cute aliens fighting a bunch of disgusting-looking aliens, well, they are both aliens, and who knows what they are up to: just let them have at it. Not our problem. Then there is the possibility that an alien faction might have decided to pretend to be human, and when dealing with technologically advanced civilizations it can be hard to separate reality from deception.

However. I am desperately in need of allies here, and am willing to gamble. I accelerate up over the ridge and drive down the canyon walls. Charging into a battle without a proper introduction is always hazardous. This time I decide to combine words with actions. I transmit in English on the old human frequency bands.

Attention human defenders. This is Odin-Class Ground-Based Cyber Defensive Unit CRL345BY-44. I am going to engage the enemy in their left rear flank. Suggest your forces lay down supporting fire. Over.

When addressing biological humans for the first time it’s always good to play up the logical loyal robot angle. If our relationship works out, they can get to know my fun side later.

I have still not gotten my primary armament working. Pity, or this would be a much shorter battle, but I do have half of my secondaries back up and running. And more than that, I am ready for this enemy.

It’s one thing to beat a cybertank once, but beating it a second time? That’s a lot tougher. I haven’t just been repairing myself the last day, I’ve also been running countless simulations and developing new tactics.

I target precise locations in the left leg joints of the Meibomian closest to me with all of my surviving secondaries. Its legs give way and it rolls over on its side crippled. Effective but it could have been even better if I had aimed 20 centimeters higher. I update my internal model of the Meibomian skeletal structure and continue the attack.

The three remaining Meibomians react to my presence, and wheel around surprisingly quickly for such large creatures. The closest one charges straight at me. I blast what I have judged to be its main sensory cluster with all of my weaponry, blinding it. The creature screams and continues its charge. I take advantage of its blindness to swerve at the last minute and give it a vicious clip. The edge of my hull slices open its flank as we pass. It’s still on its feet but wounded, and backs off to regroup.

Now at this point I expected the armored humans to have either continued running towards the safety of their fortress, or to have opened fire on me as well. Instead they have turned around and are blasting away at the Meibomians. They are armed with railguns and plasma cannons – small by my standards, but still larger and more powerful than anything that could be carried by an unaugmented human being. The Meibomians are strong but thin-skinned for such large targets. The armored humans concentrate their fire on one target, and take it down.

There is one undamaged creature left, but not for long. Between my own fire and that of the armored humans, it is shortly blasted to fragments.

The two crippled creatures are trying to crawl up out of the valley to escape, but the armored humans make no move to fire on them. Standard cybertank tactical doctrine is to never give up an easy kill, but then this place is hardly standard. I decide to address my new allies.

Human defenders. Query: should we allow the surviving creatures to retreat, or finish them off?

The armored humans seemed to look at each other before one of them responded. No, save your energy. In their weakened state they will be consumed by others of their kind out there in the dark. In any event this planet has an unlimited supply of monsters. It matters little if these two survive to attack us again or another two in their place.

Negative firing on retreating targets, confirmed.

I am burning with curiosity, but I decide to remain silent and unmoving. That old ‘loyal logical robot’ routine always used to go down well with biological humans.

The armored humans confer with each other. Eventually one of them heads in my direction. His heavy armor is a brilliantly polished chrome, plated like a late medieval knight with a variety of medals welded onto his left upper chest. His faceplate is anonymous steel studded with lenses and other sensors – I cannot see the face of the human underneath. In addition to his weapons, he carries a banner with the symbol of a chess rook on it.

The figure marches up until it is about 100 meters away from me, and plants his standard in the ground. His comrades spread out in a semi-circle 100 meters farther back, covering him.

Hail, visitor. I am General Lysis Trellen, commander of this fortress. I respectfully ask that you identify yourself.

Even through the weight of 300 kilograms of powered armor, I can read the body language. It speaks of confidence, and maturity.

Hello General Lysis Trellen. I thank you for your welcome. I am an Odin-Class Ground-Based Cyber Defensive Unit CRL345BY-44, but my nickname is Old Guy. I am a cybertank from the Human Civilization. I am marooned here under circumstances that, frankly, I do not fully understand.

General Trellen cocked his armored helm to one side. "May I speak with the commander of this cybertank?"

Sorry, there is no commander. I am completely cybernetic, on my own, nobody else in here but us quail. Currently I am at a loss as to where I am. One moment I was travelling between the stars with my comrades, and then we were suddenly wiped out of the sky, and I crashed alone on this quite remarkably hostile world. I encountered this giant cube structure and I saw you being attacked by four large creatures. And here we are. That is all that I know.

Trellen stroked his armored chin with his right gauntlet, and though his visor was impenetrable I nonetheless could read his body language. Damn but this has to be a human being.

"Completely cybernetic? Then how