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I flicked up the hologram. I figured this particular battle problem might be beyond the capacities of General Lee, General Rommel and Osceola. So I called up Admiral Ruger Seagrave, one of the finest military minds of the mid-22nd century. He appeared in his black uniform with the silver badges of merit and bravery. He was a tall man, about six-five, with steel-gray eye and a distinctive baritone. You could look at him and tell he had fought his fair share of aliens.
“Admiral Seagrave. How are you?”
“Doing well. Still fighting the good fight, Logan.”
“You might say so. You have analyzed our current situation?”
“I have. You keep finding yourself in unique and dangerous situations, major.”
“Yes, I’m going to try to work on that. I might consider retirement again. I’ll work on my golf swing. But first I have to take care of this little situation.”
“Which may be difficult. I’m not sure this point deals with the specific of the upcoming battle, but one of your problems, major, is you still don’t know who your real enemy is.”
“Well, I figured the gold guys aren’t my friends.”
Seagrave chuckled. He did have a dry sense of humor. “No, they’re not. But looking at the little information I have, it seems to be the gold men would not have created themselves. For all the facts we have, they seem to have been issued orders and then they followed them. From what you tell me they are not one of the advanced AI species. That’s assuming they are AI. They could be highly refined robots without any AI abilities.”
“That’s true. They are good at taking orders. But in our limited time observing them before blowing them up, they don’t seem to show any signs of artificial intelligence. They are, for the lack of a better term, soldier drones, like soldier ants. They have limited, very limited, flexibility on the battle field, but nothing like our MITTs have.”
“So you agree that some other race, human, alien, metal or whatever, must have created them?”
“I would lean toward that conclusion, admiral.”
“Then we need to figure out who that other race is,” he said. “Although I realize that’s not the immediate problem, it has to filter into our calculations. Let’s take the worst case scenario.”
“Why can’t we ever take the best case scenario?” I said.
“That is rarely an option in the military. When have you ever said, ‘Boy, the most wonderful thing just happened. I never would have guessed it in a hundred years. What a delightful surprise. All our enemies just turned around and started running away.’? Never said anything like it in my life.”
I nodded. “I see your point.”
“So, we always have to consider the worst case scenario. Here that means that even if humans, someone managed to annihilate all the gold robots, we’d still have to worry about who created them. If they built one race of gold guys, they can build another and maybe be a little more creative this time. The second time around they might have more information and knowledge about the human race, thus their invasion force will be more effective. Have you thought about that?”
“No, I hadn’t. And I still don’t want to think about it. One thing at a time.”
“Granted, your most immediate problem is the attack on the robot home planet. But after that, human scientists will have to find the masters of the gold robots and kill them. This problem is exceedingly difficult because we have no clue who they are or why they dislike us. The only link we have, it seems to be, is to capture one of the more intelligent gold robots and run his memory banks through that computer that processes such information. That might yield a clue. But right now, although we hope they have not established any type of a defensive perimeter, we don’t know that for a fact. Our knowledge of our enemy is extremely limited.”
“Yes, it is. I need some type of advantage,” I said.
Seagrave nodded. “Yes, you do. But Logan, I have no idea what that might be.”