11. Diplomacy
“The other Dons in the room applauded and rose to shake hands with everybody in sight and to congratulate Don Corleone and Don Tattaglia on their new friendship. It was not perhaps the warmest friendship in the world, they would not send each other Christmas gift greetings, but they would not murder each other. That was friendship enough in this world, all that was needed.” Mario Puzo , 20 th Century Earth, from the novel “The Godfather."
It was, I think, the destruction of the last Costcotm warehouse in the universe by the alien civilization known as the Steelyzits that really pissed us cybertanks off.
Alien civilizations are, at best, silent cyphers that will leave you alone as long as you return the favor. A rare few are more aggressively hostile. There had once been a race we called the Amok, which was dedicated to random combat and flamboyant destruction for its own sake. There was also the alien ultra-virus known as Roboneuron: a mentally polymorphic purpose-designed civilization destroyer. Sometimes aliens will attack you because they think they stand to gain enough profit from it – the Yllg tried that on us until we beat some sense into them. All of these had, at one time, been serious threats to our civilization. The Steelyzits are a minor, relatively primitive star faring civilization, which we can easily defeat. So why were they getting under our hyper-alloy skin?
Imagine that you are an old-style biological human being, and you are attacked by a little yippy poodle. Its teeth are too small to do any serious damage to you, but it still hurts when it nips at your ankles. You try to make friends with it, but it’s not interested. You try driving it away, convince it that if it keeps attacking you that it will suffer more in return, but single-mindedly it keeps going for your ankles.
Now you could just kick the little bastard across the road, but that would make you look bad – oh that horrible man look what he did to that poor little poodle. You see the difficulty?
In our current galaxy when two civilizations fight, it’s generally considered their own business and nobody else will interfere, but there are exceptions. If a civilization has a pattern of widespread aggression, or if they don’t control their numbers and threaten everyone else with an exponential catastrophe, sometimes all the other civilizations will gang up on the offender – and the ancient humans came very close to falling into this trap. But there is another side to this equation: civilizations that prosecute wars to extermination often pay a price. If other civilizations see that you are willing to completely wipe out an enemy they logically calculate that you might do the same to them. They probably won’t attack you out of hand, or even say anything, but you will be treated with caution. They might not let you traverse their zones of control, or be allowed access to areas rich in resources, or get the benefit of the doubt in any negotiation.
And if, perchance, you get into a war with them, they might not be willing to negotiate if they gain the advantage.
You might get away with extermination once, or twice. Making a habit of it, however, could be hazardous to your long-term civilizational health. Just because the aliens don’t talk much doesn’t mean that they aren’t very keen observers of what’s going on around them, or that they don’t have long memories.
Thus, the Steelyzits kept attacking us, and we kept beating them back, but we held off on total annihilation. If they had attacked some other civilizations as well, we could have made a local alliance, but for a typically inscrutable alien reason the Steelyzits only had it in for us. Thus we could expect neither aid nor sympathy from the other alien races in our area of the galaxy.
Well, this had been going on for some centuries, and we tried every trick of diplomacy. We tried to construct sophisticated statistical models of the Steelyzits that would explain their behavior and give us some idea of how to get them to stop. We tried carrots and sticks, but nothing worked.
The final grain of sand was when the Steelyzits attacked the planet that held the universe’s last Costcotm warehouse, and, before being beaten off as usual, they razed it to bedrock with fusion bombs.
My friend Crazy Eddie, the obsessive-compulsive Bear-Class cybertank who had been the custodian of the late lamented Costcotm, was nearly apoplectic.
“All that time, and I had finally gotten it to where I liked it! 15,000 square kilometers of warehouse, all organized and ordered, sorted into packs and boxes and shelves. And now it’s all ruined! All rubbish and trash, scattered to the winds…” I thought that Crazy Eddie was going to start crying.
I know how much the place meant to you, and there’s not a cybertank anywhere better at managing supplies than you, but it was, after all, only a place. We can build another warehouse, bigger and better than the one you lost…
“But it will never be the same!” sobbed Crazy Eddie. “There was so much there that can’t be replaced. The 20th century Terran Smithsonian Museum’s collection of air sickness bags. An original Rembrandt. Five pairs of minus-five diopter chicken goggles used by Doctor Intractable! And, and…” here Crazy Eddie had trouble getting the words out – “a complete set of official 22nd century Space Battleship Scharnhorst action figures, all still in the original packaging! It was the anniversary edition, the one with assistant science officer Merkel. They only made 200 of those, and now there are none left! None! Not anywhere!”
I can understand your frustration, but such things happen in war. Did you manage to salvage anything before the Steelyzits blew it up?
“A little,” said Crazy Eddie. “They were advancing in force, and not even my main hull could have stood up to them. Our reinforcements annihilated them, but that was half an hour later. So I stuffed a few things inside my hull – a couple of pairs of collectable Space Nazi androids, an original Paul Klee, my set of English-unit metal fasteners, and of course the adaptoids – and retreated just as the first hint of the fireball started to tear through the warehouse. I was singed but undamaged.”
Yes, you Bear-Class cybertanks are certainly tough. So how are the adaptoids doing?
“They are OK, I guess,” said Crazy Eddie, “but I think they miss the warehouse. They mope around their temporary quarters, but sometimes they don’t even line up straight. I gave them some blocks to arrange, and they just nudged them a bit and then stopped.”
That’s sad. But I’m sure that once we start rebuilding, and they see order and action around them, that they’ll perk right up.
“I hope so,” said Crazy Eddie. “But meanwhile I’ve had enough of these Steelyzits, and I’m not alone. The strategic council is moving to end their nuisance, once and for all.”
That seems a bit extreme. I mean, I’m sorry about your warehouse, but the damage they are doing to us is hardly more than negligible. They haven’t even managed to kill a single primary cybertank hull.
“What about Threadlock? Or Doctor Fun?”
Those were accidents. The Steelyzits just happened to be in the area. We need to be patient. Maybe the Steelyzits will get tired of this and find something better to do with their time.
“Patience is a virtue,” said Crazy Eddie, “but too much patience is an indulgence. I think you said that, right?”
I’ve said it, but the saying’s not mine.
“Whatever. We’ve been too indulgent. It’s time to restore order.”
I still think this is too much. Wipe out an entire race? We’d be setting a bad precedent. Besides, fighting them is good practice, keeps us in combat trim without any serious risk.
“Well,” said Crazy Eddie, “I happen to disagree with you, as does a majority of the council. It’s not official yet, but the Steelyzits are set to win a Darwin award.”
I thought about this for a bit. I have this reputation for being tricky and coming up with unorthodox plans. A little of that is true, but mostly the thing is that once you get a reputation like mine, any old bit of dumb luck – the kind that happens to everyone now and then – is attributed to native cunning. Which is fine with me, but all reputations need a little reinforcement now and then, or they can fade. It’s been a while since I pulled something cool off.
So what could I do about this? Our finest minds have driven themselves silly trying to find a less extreme solution to the Steelyzit issue, what can I come up with?
A critic once said that my successes were due to a combination of sneakiness, firepower, friends, and luck. I already have all the sneakiness that I have, and while luck is a combat system’s best ally, luck is fickle and hates being taken for granted. Firepower I have in abundance and I can always acquire more.
Time to call in a favor from an old friend.
I have an idea. You have a lot of influence with the council; give me ten years. If I can’t solve this, we do it your way and commence Operation Death to Steelyzits.
Crazy Eddie snorted. “Oh come on now. What could you possibly do that hasn’t been tried a dozen times already?”
I’m going to ask an office copier for advice.
--------------------
Well, there were meetings and debates and votes and caucuses but to make a long story short, the strategic council agreed to my plan. Nobody had any faith that the office copiers would have any more insight into the Steelyzits than we did, nor even that they would deign to talk to us about the matter, but as no one else had thought to try, it was deemed worth a shot. We’d put up with the pinprick nuisance assaults of the Steelyzits for centuries, we could tolerate them for a while longer.
I sent messages to some local colonies of office copiers, and to my surprise one of them responded. My request for advice would be considered, but I would have to show up in person to ask formally.
The office copiers in question were, as was typical for them, located on an almost completely worthless minor planetoid a few light-hours out from the planet I was currently on. No volatiles, limited heavy metals, no geothermal energy, borderline solar radiation… It’s not a place that anyone would covet. Which suited the office copiers just fine.
I flew out in my main hull, accompanied by a submind of Crazy Eddie’s in a humanoid android. Crazy Eddie kept trying to re-arrange my internal components to satisfy his sense of order, and I came about five milliseconds away from throwing him over the side. We compromised, and I let him sort through one of my internal cargo bays as long as he left the rest of my internals alone.
I landed my main hull on the planetoid six kilometers from the local office copier base. Crazy Eddie walked his humanoid android outside my hull. It was his usual generic male with a short-sleeved red shirt, khaki pants, and a white plastic nametag with the word “Eddie” printed on it in red block letters. I joined him with a humanoid android of my own, which I had modeled after my creator, the Director of the old Alpha Centauri Cybernetics Weapons Division, Giuseppe Vargas. Dark hair pulled back into a tight ponytail, piercing brown eyes, graceful like a cat. I thought of dressing the android in a plain blue suit, but oddly, that’s about the only thing I never saw the real Vargas wear. I gave the android a loose fitting flower-patterned Hawaiian shirt, white shorts, and brown sandals. On him it looked good.
The planetoid was essentially airless, so our two androids talked to each other (and my main hull) via low-power radio. The weak gravity made walking difficult. We had to take it very slow to avoid bouncing up off the ground, but that was OK, we were in no rush.
“You are going as Giuseppe Vargas?” asked Crazy Eddie. “I thought you were out of your historical phase, and don’t you think that going as Vargas might seem to be a little, I don’t know, deliberately manipulative?”
Good point. When I first started using humanoid androids, it was fun to play dress up as famous historical figures – Amelia Earhart, Attila the Hun, Lord Vongphanit the Elder – but then I got bored and went generic. Vargas didn’t just create me, he was also instrumental in setting the office copiers free. It might not hurt to remind them of where we all came from.
“Assuming they don’t see it as some kind of insult – taking his visage in vain, or something. And assuming that they can even be influenced by that sort of connection.”
Agreed. After all this time we still don’t truly understand their psychology. We were allies once, but that was a long time ago, and we haven’t done much for each other lately. Using this body might not be very subtle, but subtlety is over-rated, in my opinion. Especially when dealing with minds that work differently from yours.
“I suppose,” said Crazy Eddie. I noticed that every now and then he would stop and shuffle his feet. I was going to ask him why, but then I realized it was because he was making sure that he always took exactly the same number of steps with his left foot as with his right.
We crested a low rise, and the office copier settlement came into view. As usual, it was a single long low shed, with a few minor outbuildings. There were solar cells on the roof of the shed, a few more cells on the surrounding terrain, and that was it.
“Well, this looks typical,” said Crazy Eddie. “No defenses, no obvious traffic, no big factories. Minimal energy consumption, minimal resources… An odd species.”
It’s their survival strategy. We go for power: big weapons, big factories, and if someone hits us we hit them back. The office copiers have taken a different path: they threaten nobody, they place their colonies on the most resource-poor planetoids they can find that nobody else wants, they don’t amass much in the way of energy or minerals, they don’t multiply their numbers endlessly… they are not a threat worth eliminating, and they don’t have resources worth stealing. They might outlast us all.
Crazy Eddie looked dubious. “There have been several incidents where alien civilizations completely wiped out office copier colonies, and the copiers did nothing, neither in self-defense nor retaliation. How is that pro-survival?”
Well, the copiers were attacked, and nothing happened. They were making the point, perhaps, that attacking office copiers is pointless. The alien civilizations in question seemed to get the idea, and eventually they stopped. And the rest of the copiers live on serenely.
“But,” said Crazy Eddie, “think of all those office copiers that died. How could they allow that to happen to themselves?”
I don’t know, but I think that the copiers have a more relaxed view of death than we do. We cybertanks inherited the survival instinct of the biological humans, and staying alive is a primary instinct for us. The copiers – they do have a survival drive, but it’s less strident. I think they can just let it all go without regret or pain, if they feel that to be appropriate.
“Maybe,” said Crazy Eddie. “But they have fought before, and just recently they had a proper dust-up with that species we haven’t named yet, you know, the ones right next to the Demi-Iguanas. So why do they sometimes fight, and sometimes let themselves get destroyed?”
Good question. A few thousand years ago I asked a copier that very same question. As near as I could tell, the copiers fight either because they have made an alliance they need to honor – as they did with us – or to avoid corruption.
“Avoid corruption?”
Yes. Suppose you are a copier sitting peacefully inside your little shed, dreaming your dreams, and something comes along to end it. Well, all dreams end. Perhaps it doesn’t matter to you, but suppose something comes along and it doesn’t just want to kill you, it wants to forcibly reprogram you into something that you would find distasteful. That might be worth fighting to avoid.
“Umm,” said Crazy Eddie. He stopped, took off his nametag, ran his fingers over it, and repositioned it on the front of his shirt making certain that it was precisely level. “I guess their strategy of pacifism has been working so far, but what if they ever encounter an alien civilization that just hates the office copiers on principle? One that is willing to hunt down and kill all of them, no matter that it doesn’t make economic sense, or that the copiers are no threat? What then?”
All survival strategies have their limitations – I suppose that could happen. But if it did, it wouldn’t surprise me if the copiers became a little more warlike. They’re not like us, but they’re not stupid.
We had reached the shed, and a small rectangular door opened up. Crazy Eddie and I stepped inside and entered a small alcove; it wasn’t an airlock, there was no atmosphere inside or outside the shed. I suppose it was just to keep dirt and dust from being tracked in from the surface. The outer door closed, and then the inner door opened, and we entered the main room of the shed.
It was a single long low rectangular space, about 15 meters across and 300 meters long. At first glance it looked exactly like an office copier dwelling from 5,000 years ago. There were over a hundred copiers were arranged in neat ranks on either side of a central pathway. The overhead lights burned an intense steady bluish-white: a leftover from the human-centric office spaces that they first evolved in. The walls were featureless and beige, the ceilings a square grid of white acoustic tiles, and the floor was covered with a thin gray carpet. There was a central strip of carpet a slightly darker gray that led down the length of the room. The only sound was the faint hush of cooling fans, and the occasional muted click as the internal mechanism of one copier or the other did something mechanical.
On further examination, it was a little different from my last memories of the copiers. Oh, they had the same basic plan: vaguely brick-shaped beige plastic, with numerous mis-matched slots, hatches, status displays, drawers, camera lenses, and suchnot. But the style was a little different: a little more symmetrical than I recalled, maybe taller relative to their width, with some encrustations whose purpose I could not determine. They were evolving, slowly, even as are we.
Look at how ordered they are. That must appeal to you.
Crazy Eddie shook his head. “Not my kind of order. They may be lined up, but their overall structure is so asymmetrical – here a button, there a display not on the same level with it, three large trays and a smaller one that is offset for no reason… And how they are arranged… no human being would line up office copiers like this.”
Well no accounting for taste, I suppose. In some ways we share a common heritage: both copiers and humans evolved by sticking new bits on top of older bits. It’s just that with the copiers you can see that on the surface. With us, it’s only evident in our mental structures.
“I guess, “said Crazy Eddie. “But changing the subject, why did we fly out here anyhow? Why couldn’t you just ask them advice via laser link?”
Good question. The copiers are at least as intelligent as we are. They can and do process and transmit complicated data long distances. However, the originals had a command hierarchy, and the core processes could only be accessed on a little touchpad with a screen so small that it only displayed the most truncated and cryptic sentence fragments. There were once biological humans that were very skilled at communicating with office copiers, as it was as much art as science. I was never that good at it, but I have done it, and I’ve looked over the shoulders of the best.
“So is this an honor?” asked Crazy Eddie.
Possibly. At the very least, it suggests that my request is being taken seriously.
At the far end of the shed, a single red light blinked on, and then began to flash. In the still silent room it immediately caught our attention. We walked down the center aisle, and saw that the flashing light was on the side of a copier that, to my eyes, seemed to have an older style, maybe a little more like the ones that I remembered working with.
The light had a neatly-printed label underneath it that said “Job Pending.” As we got closer, there was a faint whirring sound and a small shelf with a tiny alphanumeric keyboard (in the ancient “QWERTY” format, no less!) rotated up out of the body of the machine. A monochrome display no wider than a man’s palm lit up. It said:
=> Pending Job
|=> Type of Job
1. Printing
2. Defense
3. Computation
4. Communication
5. Maintenance
6. Other.
I typed the number “6” on the tiny keyboard – carefully, because the keys were so small that my android’s hands had trouble hitting just a single key. Darn, I should have remembered to have brought a stylus with me, but who would have thought that the copiers would still use such an archaic input device?
The screen flickered, and said:
6. Other
A. Medical Emergency
B. Reset to Default Settings
C. Change Language
D. Hardware Options
E. Accessibility Functions
F. Advice.
This was promising. I hadn’t expected to get an appropriate menu option so soon. In the past it would sometimes take hours to navigate the submenus of a copier until you finally found something appropriate. Perhaps it was anticipating, and helping me out? I hit the key “F.”
The copier screen went blank for a time, then blinked back into life.
=> Advice
|=> Enter specifics
I thought about this for a bit. How to format my request into such a small space?
Attacked by Steelyzits
Reason unknown
Negotiations fail
Wish avoid exterminate
Time presses
The screen went blank again.
Crazy Eddie and I stood there for a bit, and nothing happened. We remained silent out of a sense of – anticipation? Politeness? – but after ten minutes we got tired of that, and started talking to each other again.
“Is this normal?” asked Crazy Eddie.
I don’t know what normal is, for an office copier. Except that you should not be surprised if what they do is not what you expect. It might have dismissed my request, or be thinking about it, or anything.
“The Job Pending light is still blinking,” said Crazy Eddie. “Surely that’s a good sign?”
You’re right. Let’s put our androids into standby mode, and give it a few weeks.
--------------------
A day went by, and then another. The office copier with the ‘Job Pending’ light continued to sit there flashing its light, but otherwise it appeared to be doing nothing. Our two androids stood unmoving, and in my main hull I busied myself with all of my usual interests.
Finally, the tiny screen on the copier flashed back into life.
=> Required Action
|=> Provide Transport
|=> Coordinates Follow
|=> Are you sure (Y/N)?
“So what’s this?” said Crazy Eddie. “It says we need to transport something to coordinates it hasn’t specified, for a purpose we don’t know about, and it asks if we are sure? How can we be sure if we have no idea what it has in mind?
I typed in to the little keyboard:
=> Query: nature of plan?
Immediately the screen erased and displayed only the single line:
=> Are you sure (Y/N)?
Crazy Eddie shook his head. “This is nuts.”
I had to admit, my friend had a point. I pushed the “Y” key on the keyboard.
--------------------
We were to transport ourselves, the specific copier that I had been communicating with, and 5,000 tons of supplies to a small planetoid right on the edge of Steelyzit space. Crazy Eddie came along – this time as his main hull – and also the 10,000 metric ton Rambo-Class cybertank known as “Rambo.”
Now Rambo used to be a generic Horizon Class, but he had so modified and upgraded himself over the years that he has been granted his own class status – a class of one – named, appropriately enough, after himself.
Rambo can be annoying sometimes, but when he heard where we were going he was so insistent that Crazy Eddie and I just could not bring ourselves to say no. It’s not like the Steelyzits were a major threat, so we could afford to humor him.
Now, a cybertank on its own is pretty serious piece of hardware, but that’s not our real strength. No, it’s our ability to control and coordinate distributed weapons systems over a vast area. Rambo, however, didn’t much care for that approach. He preferred to keep himself in himself – no remote weapons systems with subminds for him – just a single heavily armed and overclocked armored fighting vehicle. Oh, he still multitasks, and he’ll use short-range direct-control drones, but his mind remains firmly rooted in just the one main hull.
Rambo, Crazy Eddie, and I landed our main hulls on the planetoid, and watched as the supplies for the office copiers were settled down. The copiers were apparently going to erect a pre-fabricated colony. I wondered, were they trying to bait the Steelyzits? Draw them into some sort of fiendish trap? None of us had any idea. I queried the copier that had communicated with us – it was safe inside one of my internal bays – with a humanoid android standing by in case it was needed to work the tiny keypad, but the copier didn’t respond. It just kept flashing its red “job pending” light.
“Do you think we’ll see some action?” asked Rambo.
Probably. We’re close to Steelyzit space and they will likely see this as a provocation.
“Good,” said Rambo. “I haven’t been a decent fight for a while, and I could use the work-out.”
Maybe if your approach to combat was more tactically sound, you might get invited to more battles.
“Hey,” said Rambo, “it’s a free civilization, if I like fighting as a single unit I’m entitled. And aren’t you always going on about how game-changing unorthodox tactics can be?”
There is a difference between trying something unexpected when regular procedure fails, and always starting off with the same losing strategy. It’s not as if you are surprising anyone nowadays.
“What about that battle with the flask-heads?” said Rambo. “That was pretty cool, wasn’t it?”
Yes, but that was over a three hundred years ago. Since that time in combat you crashed on landing and we had to dig you out, you had all your treads blown off and we had to come back and salvage you after the battle was over, you lost all your weapons to a distributed mine attack and had to retreat under heavy cover from yours truly, you were tricked by sensor mirages into chasing your own radar ghost for an hour while the rest of us had to pick up the slack, you were ambushed at the second battle of Oblong Gap and had about the rear third of your hull shot away before escaping, and then there was the matter of the Silastic Kittens…
“OK,” said Rambo, “maybe I haven’t done much technical winning in a bit, not as such, but I was still awesome. Don’t I get points for style?”
<sigh> Style is saving the day with a brilliant and unexpected maneuver. Consistently banging your turret against an armorplast wall is not style.
“You keep your style,” said Rambo, “and I’ll keep mine.”
“Hey you two,” said Crazy Eddie. “I think that I’m picking up indications of our Steelyzit friends headed our way. Sensor masts up!”
--------------------
We watched as a Steelyzit armada formed up on a course towards our planetoid. The office copier colony was by this time fully operational and it sat there, a single long low shed surrounded by solar cells and a fitful few telescopes and laser transmitter/receiver pairs. I could detect significant signal traffic between the office copier colony and their fellows in other systems, but it was encrypted with algorithms beyond me and I could not decipher them. We asked the copiers what we should do about the oncoming Steelyzits, but they remained mute.
Crazy Eddie created a virtual map of the Steelyzit forces, indicating their projected line of attack. “The efficient thing to do,” he said, “would be to just blow them up in space. We have enough forces in system to do that.”
“That hardly seems sporting,” said Rambo. “Let’s let them land, and see what happens.”
War is not a sport.
“Your opinion,” said Rambo.
None of our vital interests are at stake. We’re not here to beat the Steelyzits, we’re here to gain insight. I vote we block direct space-based attacks on us, but we allow them to launch a ground assault.
Well, Crazy Eddie was outvoted, so that’s what we did. Slowly we watched as the Steelyzit forces bore down on our lonely planetoid. They tried launching long-range missiles at us, and we intercepted them easily. Still, we left their main forces unmolested, and, with typical Steelyzit single-mindedness, they closed the range.
Rambo took the opportunity to run 100 km speed sprints. He challenged Crazy Eddie and me to a race, but with his overpowered drive-train that would have been pointless, so we passed. He settled for a personal best.
We set up an exclusion zone in the space above the office copier outpost, and the Steelyzits – predictably – landed on the far side of the planetoid and advanced on the ground. They had a pretty standard mix of armored units, ranging from light to maybe half my size. We destroyed anything that they tried to launch into the sky, so we deliberately held them pinned to the planetoid’s surface.
Rambo let out a whoop, and tore across the landscape headed straight for the Steelyzit front lines.
You know, heading straight for the enemy is a predictable strategy.
“I am not predictable,” said Rambo. “Sometimes I go straight on, sometimes I veer to the left, and sometimes – to really shake things up – I veer to the right. Always keep them guessing.”
At the moment words escaped me. Crazy Eddie and I coordinated our distributed forces, and provided cover for Rambo, who was merrily smashing the Steelyzit forces as a single unit. I was forced to admit that, as tactically silly as this was, it was kind of cool looking. He dodged around hills, wiped out heavy units with his main turreted plasma cannon, fried the lighter units with focused EMP bursts or railguns, created elaborate holographic sensor-screens and jammed the Steelyzits sensors with the full range of countermeasures. Even without the overwatch that Crazy Eddie and I were giving him, he might have actually been able to take out the entire Steelyzit ground force by himself.
The battle progressed, and it was hard to see that – aside from Rambo enjoying himself – anything was going to be gained from the exercise. We would eventually wipe out the last Steelyzit unit, and that would be that, until the next time they attacked.
Still, we had been stuck on the Steelyzit problem for so long. There must be some opportunity here to learn more about this most pathetic and irritating of enemies. Some new set of conditions that would provoke a reaction.
Using Rambo as a distraction (and I will admit, distraction is definitely Rambo’s strong suite), I probed the Steelyzit forces with micro-scouts looking for a command nexus. Maybe we could get lucky and capture a part of one before it self-destructs.
Tentatively I identified two probable Steelyzit command units – they were disguised as long-range self-propelled artillery, but their signal traffic gave them away. Rambo blew one of them up at close range, and charged over the wreckage in search of other targets. There was just one left.
Rambo, I think I have identified a Steelyzit command unit. We need you to not blow it up. Can you do that? Not blow it up?
“Not blow it up?” asked Rambo. “Why not? Isn’t that what one does with an enemy?”
Rambo we’re trying to gather intelligence. You’re coming into range now, so please try to control yourself and, really, not blow it up. For the team.
“Well,” said Rambo, “since you put it that way. I suppose it’s a new kind of challenge, not blowing it up.”
Hold that thought.
Rambo tacked and spun, treads slewing widely as he over-rode the governors. He took some heavy hits on his right hull from a nasty buried pop-up defensive turret, then destroyed it with massed railgun fire. “Should I try to capture it?”
No, it will just self-destruct. Let’s pen it in, and try to give it just enough slack that it doesn’t feel under imminent threat of capture, but not leave it enough forces that it could escape.
Rambo grumbled but complied, and while we wiped out most of the remaining Steelyzit forces we saved a small ring of them centered on the command unit. And then… nothing happened.
The command unit was like most non-deceptive alien units, functionally rational but stylistically weird. It was mounted on 6 parallel treads, and had a single large electromagnetic launcher and several point-defense weapons, but the curves and colors were all wrong. It was off-putting and disturbing as nothing human-constructed would be. It was a pretty good mimic of a Steelyzit long range artillery unit, but closer inspection revealed a heavier density of sensors and antennas than any mere artillery piece, and the combat record showed no indication that it had ever fired its main weapon.
And so we sat there, the Steelyzit command unit and its immediate escorts, and our own combat units ringing it in. Crazy Eddie and Rambo and I drove our main hulls up to two kilometers away from it – we were no longer in any danger – and stopped. And we looked at each other.
We tried talking to it in all manner of languages, signaling by audio, radio, laser, seismic, olfactory, glyphs cared on rocks, anything we could think of. No response.
We detected the backwash of focused radio signals from the office copiers. They were also trying to talk to the Steelyzit unit, but again, there appeared to be no response.
This went on for a few days. Our space forces detected a second Steelyzit armada headed our way. It would arrive in about two weeks, and was big enough that not even we three cybertanks could reliably defeat it with high confidence. We would probably need to blow these surviving enemy units and retreat before too long. I guessed that this plan hadn’t worked out, but it had seemed like a good idea at the time.
Rambo announced that he was bored, and he took to racing around the planetoid on a complex winding course that he had set up. Part of this course passed by the Steelyzit command unit; some of its sensors turned to follow the wildly careening form of the over-powered cybertank, which was more reaction than we had gotten from anything else, but still not much.
It was the last day before we were going to give up and leave, when Rambo decided to set off some fireworks. Rambo loves his fireworks and, to give credit where credit is due, he has a real artistic flare to it (much more than he does with real combat, in my humble opinion). The sky lit up with starbursts and whizzers and whirligigs and all manner of different colors and textures. It was lovely.
“What are you doing?” asked the Steelyzit command unit, in perfect English, on an unencrypted radio band.
Well, that took us all by surprise. This was the longest direct communication between the Steelyzits and the cybertanks ever. It was a little annoying that the English was so good – damn those early humans, they spread our basic grammar everywhere all over the cosmos before they realized that giving insights into how you think to potentially hostile aliens is not a swell idea, but nothing for that now, I guess.
“Those are fireworks,” said Rambo. “We shoot them off because they are pretty.”
The Steelyzit command unit brought more of its sensors to bear on the fireworks display. “We detect no units being targeted by these munitions. Their combat power is negligible. They cannot be a test of operational systems. They lack the ability to serve as effective decoys. The visual complexity is insufficient to constitute an information-theoretic attack. Please explain.”
“We just like to blow things up and look at them,” said Rambo. “We find it pleasing.”
“You do not require an enemy to blow things up?” asked the Steelyzit.
“No, of course not – although an enemy does add another level of challenge,” said Rambo. “But you can set off fireworks at any time, whenever you feel like it.”
The Steelyzit fell silent for a bit, but continued tracking the fireworks display. Finally it spoke again: “We no longer desire to pursue combat operations against the cybertanks. If that is in accords with your own priorities, allow this unit to withdraw. We will make contact with the rest of our civilization, and cease offensive operations. Is this desire reciprocated?”
A cessation of hostilities between our two civilizations is in accordance with our own agenda. We agree.
And that was that. The Steelyzit command unit was allowed to retreat back to its own space, contact with their central command was initiated, zones of travel and influence agreed to, and they never attacked us again.
Ultra long-range sensors showed that the Steelyzits had taken to all manner of blowing things up – fireworks, asteroids, old machinery, mountains on airless moons, you name it, they blew it up, and the bigger and showier the better.
This led to a renewed interest in blowing things up on our part, and for a time advanced pyrotechnic displays became all the rage.
So was it that simple? The Steelyzits had attacked us because they liked watching things blow up? But then why didn’t they figure that out themselves? Maybe they had never blown anything up when not in a real combat situation, and never realized that they could derive the same pleasure from destruction for its own sake? What kind of psychology builds starships, but has so little insight into itself? The alien kind, of course.
When I told Schadenfreude about this, he was unusually taciturn, even for him. At first I thought he was sad because I had succeeded, but instead it turned out that the Steelyzit episode had gotten him to thinking about what sort of mental blindspots we cybertanks might have…
My reputation got a significant rejuvenation, Rambo was invited to participate in some minor but still important combat actions, and Crazy Eddie had begun the long laborious process of reconstructing his Costcotm warehouse. Last I heard the adaptoids were happily lining themselves up on shelves in ordered ranks. So it all ended well.
On the front of the old office copier, the flashing red “job pending” light turned off.