Baby drifts toward oscar-5 at a speed that is a small, but still significant fraction of the speed of light. The light of three suns is joined by the distant and fading glimmer of twelve small stars that once were populous worlds, and more recently targets of fleet RKVs. Here in the dim reaches of the Proxima's Kuiper Belt, that amounts to one small notch above total darkness.
Sensor take from the hk's ansibles back and forth, and Baby's dense processor matrix distills the raw data into a cetacean-amenable worldview. Light and heat, gravity and neutrinos are to her as sound once was, the window through which the world impinges on her consciousness. That the senses are different means little, nor the fact that they are filtered first through vastly more computing power than the entire world possessed when first man flew in space.
Now that she is closer, she again begins to see emissions from oscar. Two orders of magnitude lower than before, but at this range easily detectable to baby's exquisitely tuned senses. No heavy neutrino pulses that would indicate large power sources. No evidence of ultradense matter. No sign at all that the target is anything other than a hapless slowmover. Baby is by nature cautious, no matter what the walking squids in tacops feel. Caution, then application of extreme firepower. It is a lesson that many human warriors have learned, and one that baby learned from her mother's milk. Of course, she used different weapons, then.
Within herself, some of her new weapons are waking. Fleet tacops wants a softkill. Hunting is joyful, always, but Baby has come to relish the bright glorious release of the hardkill. The masked actinic glare of antimatter penetrators detonating from within a target, the subtleties of targeting a spread kinetic lances, maneuver for gravity gauge, or an artfully laid killgrid of megaton class self-imploding singularities.
None of this. Along her ventral surface, just forward of her drive shield, a small bay door snaps open and a fraction of second later snaps closed. In that fraction, a small bag is propelled on jet of nitrogen as cold (precisely as cold) as the ambient vacuum. The bag opens, and almost magically continues to open, each fold seeming to occur naturally, until in moments the small bag is a transparent film over a click in diameter.
The film seems to pause, and then stretches as if being tugged on the edge. At the point of maximum tension, the film snaps dissolves utterly. And where the film was, is now a flat cloud of fog that for a moment glints in the dim weapon light. Baby chirps her drive, giving her a minutely different course from the now invisible foglet. A while later the process repeats, and then again. Baby waits, and for every second she waits, her trajectory departs more and more from the three spreading clouds.
Baby waits, and finally spins; she points her tail directly toward the target and lets loose a long burst from her drive. In exactly 46 seconds, oscar-5 will know exactly where she was. But she won't be there.
message-id: [42f0f069b.d752d0d7db110e-A5d0ddd194d4d.004564E].
date: 21 apr 2105 23:22:35 -5461 - [relative].
from: hk-55 [abdelwahab].
to: unif/ussconstitution/tacops/weps [mother].
subject: hey...
content-type: text/plain.
content-transfer-encoding: 2048bit.
authenticator: 53d.b1f0.69e.0a11/word of the day is bitches.
message reads:
weapons away.
range 18.8mclicks/0.75min.
commencing evasive.
Taskgroup 14.9/55 target box patt 5/2
[attachment: tg sensor take mission time 28:27:79]
baby not sure about this one.
[attachment: extract fleet a-2 subagency concl #14-17 report slowmovers]
***
At a minimum, just over ninety-two seconds will elapse before the earliest possible response from oscar could arrive - assuming millisecond reflexes and light speed weapons, which is not an unreasonable assumption at all. Activating her drive again would only create a glowing "you are here" for oscar to vector violent traffic towards her. And given the size of oscar – a small asteroid's worth of mass – molecular assemblers can convert that amount of matter into a truly frightening quantity of weaponry, even in the amount of time that oscar may, or may not have been aware of her and (possibly) the balance of her taskgroup.
True surprise in the strategic sense is difficult to impossible to achieve when war is fought in a completely transparent medium. Given sufficient processing capacity – a fungible commodity even if when strong AI is impossible - and enough eyes, nothing is undetectable. Mass, heat and power all conspire against those who would like to be invisible. Strategic surprise can only be achieved at speeds crowding very close to C.
At such colossal velocities, intelligence of an attacker's existence only just outpaces the attacker itself. That knowledge is necessarily, and drastically, outdated. By the time even an alert defender sees the enemy there, they are already nearly here.
The less energetic the speed, the more difficult it is to gain surprise. However, tactical surprise can be achieved by a clever attacker. Light speed delay provides a lever for wedging the way inside an opponent's decision loop. What the invaders failed to do, and what the fleet had done only weeks before in return was one way to exploit the (mostly) iron laws of causality and observation imposed by the speed of light. Non-relativistic combat required the opposite. By presenting a bewilderingly large array of choices for the enemy to chew on, the gap between action and observation built into the very fabric of spacetime makes it possible to lock an opponent into constantly reorienting to a new conception of the conflict, and never taking effective action.
As baby's drive stabs into the darkness, her fifteen shadows burn to life. Though she didn't feel it, baby's consciousness spread over hundreds of thousands of kilometers.
Ansible links connected her mind with the minds of her drones. Instantaneous (albeit low bandwidth) communication made these far distant parts of her mind effectively closer than parts of her own body. She experienced herself as one, though she and her fifteen skittle drones are farther apart than earth from the rubble of earth's moon. She felt no more spread out than a human feels spread apart by looking out though two eyes or hearing through two ears.
The tiny drones are small versions of the hunter killer whose mind they shared. Narrow, lethal shapes clothed in deepest black. Where the hunter's skin enveloped many complex engines of war, and the capacity to radically alter its form, the drone was relatively simple - a capsule of fuel, a drive made to appear (at a long enough remove) just like an hk's, and everything needful to give the appearance of a much larger warship. The sensors on the skin of the drones were in every respect similar to those on the skin of its parent, and contributed to baby's growing sense of the battlespace.
Sixteen targets might have been a challenge for a mid-twentieth century wet navy warship. But no ship since. Baby's constellation of iridescent commas still shine as she endeavors to be somewhere else.
***
on
| § 6
