“I haven’t been ignoring you, Arott,” Jessica said as the man took a seat in her office.
Marcelle was already delivering freshly brewed coffee and all the fixings. She appraised Jessica’s expression, nodded with a wry smile, and departed.
Arott Whughy took a moment to run his left hand, the one not holding a mug, through his blond hair. It was too long, these days, but that was probably the effect of working too hard, and not some new personal look for the man. He was still too spit-and-polish to ever color that far outside the lines. At least not for long.
“I’m aware of that,” he replied after a sip. “And thank you for letting me dig in. What you handed me was a mess.”
“Yes,” Jessica agreed. “An administrative and tactical nightmare. With vague orders, impossible expectations, and concrete deadlines. I don’t know anybody else in the navy capable of knocking it into shape in time, either. So what do you have for me?”
He nodded at her, more as a placeholder than anything, although she caught the surprised grin at the compliment before it disappeared again.
“Nobody has ever done anything like this,” he replied, a grin growing as he spoke. “Our records go back to the Founding and before, easily. And I and my team have done research across all the major campaigns we could find reliable records for. I would say you are insane, but I’m pretty sure you are also right.”
Jessica grinned back at him. It had become something of a game with them, almost a sibling rivalry between two teenagers, like she used to have with Slava when they were young.
She would postulate something outrageous. He would try to prove her wrong, or, as in this case, show her how it could be done when she challenged the impossibility of a task.
Once upon a time, she had even resented the man, aware that Nils Kasum considered the two of them the best candidates to eventually succeed him as First Lord of the Fleet, one of these days. Now, Arott was welcome to the job.
Her life was going to go far beyond such a mundane task.
“And, you’ve managed to make obsolete everything I’ve just spent five years learning, after the last time you overturned everything, Jessica,” he continued, with a friendly, if exasperated sigh.
“Buran is alien, Arott,” she said simply. “Human, yes. But they fly and fight so strangely that they might as well be something else. I’ve studied their tactics and their strategies, especially all the top secret documents Emmerich Wachturm sent home with me. And I had long conversations with the only known friendly Sentience in surveyed space when we defended Ballard. The Last of the Immortals, if you will. Moirrey spent even more time around her. Those beings are another species.”
“And that’s what frightens me, Jessica,” he replied. “Buran seems to see itself as the benevolent overlord that should guide all of galactic humanity. And they are patient enough to try. How do we stop them?”
“According to my two experts, there is one thing that artificially-intelligent systems really don’t understand,” she said. “Don’t get at all. Art.”
“Art?”
She had him confused again. But that was good. Even Jessica was right at the edge of understanding it, herself. And she had two artists she could tap, in addition to all the warriors: Lady Casey and Lady Moirrey.
“For all their sophisticated programming, they are just machines, Arott,” Jessica continued. “Logical constructs. Patterns. Organization. Suvi claimed that she survived as long as she has because someone taught her to be human six millennia ago, when she was just a kitten, to use her words. All of her cousins weren’t human. Those that survived to this age tended to become afflicted with some manner of Deity Complex.”
“So we fight Buran with insanity?” Arott asked. She watched him grind his teeth rather than say anything more, as much as she knew he wanted to.
As commanders went, Arott Whughy was exceptionally logical. He would be the best candidate to poke holes in her theories. Disrupt her planning. Out-think her.
If he could.
“Crudely?” she asked. “Yes. We will do things that have surprisingly little tactical or strategic value, at least at the first level.”
“While you, Enej, and I play multi-dimensional chess,” he agreed.
She had known the two men played. Apparently, they played more than she had realized.
But even that was to her advantage, as it bound him closer to her team.
“Can you pull it off with the resources in hand?” Jessica asked simply. “Or do I need to get the Grand Admiral involved?”
“It will be touch-and-go,” he said. “You’ve given me the tools, but I will need time. Every day I have to work on the problem makes success that much more likely, and I don’t know how long they will give us.”
“Neither do I,” she said. “However, they aren’t going to see this coming. If I’m right, nobody will see this coming. So, if you would, describe what you do know.”
“I’ve got CT-9492, a tug hauling a Bastion unit, plus a second pod filled with every weird piece of gear zu Kermode, Ozolinsh, or I could think to bring, including the engines off of a monitor and enough spare metal and parts to do nearly anything,” Arott said, ticking fingers as he worked.
“In addition, we brought the Salvage Cruiser Bulldog along,” he continued. “That gives us the ability to do repairs almost as well as a dedicated drydock, and we’ll be mobile, to boot. With some time, I’ll be able to build a small flight platform and off-load all of Andorra’s fighters and pilots to help with defense. And Wombat will hopefully be laying mines like they are going out of style. I will absolutely require Fribourg to help with resupply there, but I can build an impregnable moat. Or could, against anybody else.”
Jessica nodded. Just about what her own analysis had shown. She waited a beat for the man to arrive at the core of his thought.
“What I don’t understand,” he said, as if reading her mind. “Why can’t we just drop the bastion in place and work to turn it into a full citadel? Why the effort to refit it with engines?”
“Buran can hop inside a gravity well, Arott,” she said, soothingly, a foil to the angry energy building in his voice. “I watched him drop out of a jump right on top of Fribourg’s primary fleet base and savage it like a polar bear on a wounded seal. And that was with a single cruiser. They’ll bring more to this dance. If the base can move on its own, however slowly, they have to adjust.”
“But building outside the normal defensive boundary of the gravity zone?” he pressed. “That’s been the bedrock of tactical planning forever.”
“And he can ignore it,” she said. “We can’t, unless we refit all of our vessels with JumpDrives instead of sails. But if we’re outside the well, we can play as well.”
“You want to bounce a bastion up into JumpSpace?”
She watched him take a breath and carefully set his coffee mug down, having nearly spilled the hot fluid into his lap.
“Are you insane?” he pursued.
“He can’t chase you into JumpSpace,” she replied simply.
He wanted to argue. It was there in his eyes, the knee-jerk opposition to everything she was asking him to do.
And then it passed. Like a squall line.
Like sun from behind a cloud, an evil glint suddenly appeared in his eyes.
“Could we hold a monitor or a bastion in JumpSpace permanently?” he asked suddenly. “Sail around in a circle? Hop back and forth as a defensive barrier outside the normal one, all set to pounce on some bastard coming to attack us?”
“You have several months to war-game that, Arott,” she smiled. “You and Yan and Moirrey tell me. Recruit Denis and Alber’ as well and get them thinking about it.”
“Crap, I hate it when you’re right,” he smiled back. “I’m never going to be able to sleep again.”
“Yes, you will,” she answered. “Anything else?”
“Negative,” Arott said, rising, but keeping the half-full mug. Marcelle’s coffee was nothing to waste or leave behind. “I’ll check in again at Waypoint 10 or 11 with what we know.”
“Good,” she said.
He departed with a jaunty stride that hadn’t been there before.
Now, she just had to hope that the whole idea was so insane that a bored Sentience had never calculated the math or energy costs. At least, not yet.
Because once she opened this can of worms, he would understand. And she would spend the rest of her life, perhaps, trying to outthink one of the smartest machines ever constructed.