“That’s a good start,” he agreed. “But when you figured that out, why didn’t you fall back and reform a defensive line?”
“How?” I grumbled. “It takes at least four hundred milliseconds to give a bot new orders, and there were twenty of them in the assault team. By the time I could have gotten them turned around most of them would be dead. I figured the best I could do was carry on and do as much damage as possible.”
“That’s why the control software has all those tools for grouping bots into units and setting up predefined orders,” he explained. “If you’d had your assault team properly grouped and a few contingencies set up you could have pulled back in time to save most of them.”
“How could I possibly have known exactly where you’d attack from in advance, Chief?” I protested.
“You can never make your plans perfect, kid. That’s why you keep things simple, and let the bots figure out the details. You keep trying to tell every bot exactly where to go, when you should just tell squad B to fall back to point 217 and set up a defensive position.”
I sighed. “A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week?”
He smiled. “Exactly. I see you know some of the classics, at least.”
“That was a quote? I was just trying to put what my tactical instincts tell me into words.”
He rubbed his chin, and gave me a thoughtful look. “That’s kind of an odd implementation. Who said, ‘the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting’?”
I shrugged. “According to the datanet it was Sun Tzu, but I couldn’t have told you that. It sounds like nonsense, anyway. I mean, sure, victors win first and then go to war, while losers go to war and then try to win. But restraint in war is a fallacy. He who wins achieves victory without making his enemy feel the cost of defeat, has won nothing but the certainty of another battle.”
“John Paul,” he observed. “Second American Civil War. Okay, so it’s not just the really old classics. What’s the role of bioweapons in war?”
“To bring low an enemy who values freedom but not the tools of its preservation, by such means as may strike at any point without warning or restraint.”
“That one sounds like Mu Zhang. Meaning?”
I had to think for a moment. “Meaning… a society that tries to be open and unarmed at the same time is stupidly vulnerable to infiltration weapons. There’s all kinds of ways to turn civilians into horrible time bombs using mind control and nanotech. If they don’t do proper security screening, and they’ve all got access to fabricators, and no one is armed, that kind of thing can kill off a whole colony overnight. But even if it doesn’t, places like that don’t adapt well to an internal threat that invalidates their whole political philosophy.”
“Interesting. Alright, I think we can say the guys who designed your mods were into one of the Adaptive Total War schools of thought. That’s decent stuff, but I’m going to assign you some reading from rival schools just so you know where the arguments are. It’s not a good idea to rely too much on knowledge that someone else stuck in your head.”
“Thank you, Chief. I worry about that too, sometimes. I’m sure Mom wanted the best for me, but she obviously wasn’t infallible.”
“Yeah. Only, how do you know it was your mother?”
“I have a few memories from when I was a baby,” I admitted. “They’re pretty hazy, not like my recent ones. But I remember being on a tiny little ship, with her and some bots. Then there was a bigger place, a station I think, where there were lots of furry people.”
“I see. Well, I’m sure the doc could figure out a way to get images out of that if you ever want to try some detective work. But focus on training for now. We refuel at Yinpang tomorrow, and then we’ve got eight days in hyperspace before we reach Taragi. By the time we hit orbit at yakuza central I want you to have your Warbot Commander cert.”
I gulped. That was supposed to be a four-month certification course, and the description said the failure rate on the final exam was twenty-three percent.
“In nine days?!”
“You can do it in a week, easy. I’ll give you today to do the background reading, and we’ll get started for real in the morning. Class starts at 0700, and we’ll go for twelve hours a day. If anything goes down with the yakuza we’ll at least have you combat ready.”
“Yes, Chief! Thank you, Chief. I won’t let you down!”
I logged out of the training sim, and climbed out of the pod with a groan. Twelve hours a day of VR training? I was going to go nuts. Maybe I should have pretended to be helpless after all?
Ash greeted me with a friendly trill. I paused to scratch his head, and stretched. Three hours in the VR pod had left me with a lot of kinks. Twelve was going to be murder.
It was a good kind of stress, though. A chance to learn and grow, just like I wanted to. Much better than dwelling on my last memory of Mom.
“Stay quiet now,” she’d told me as she hugged me, and hid me in a big box. A cargo container? Probably, but it was too fuzzy to be sure.
There’d been a loud noise, some kind of warning claxon. She winced, and then bent to kiss my forehead.
“Don’t be afraid, Alice. Mommy will protect you. I have to go away for a while, but when I get back you’ll be safe.”
The floor shook, and I whimpered. She glanced around, and bit her lip. I’d never realized when I was younger, but I could see now that she was afraid.
“Whatever happens, Alice, you must survive. No matter how bad things get, as long as you’re alive there’s still hope. You are the embodiment of all our dreams for a brighter future. Live. Become stronger. Believe in yourself, and don’t ever give up. One day, it will be you who holds the upper hand.”
She picked up something big that had been lying on the floor. A mass driver cannon?
“Sleep, now,” she said. “Until the battle is over. I’ll come back for you when I can.”
I’d gone right to sleep, like a good little girl. But that was the last time I’d seen her. When I woke up I was in a medbay full of scared kids. The bots there took care of us, but I hadn’t seen another human until the orphanage.
I looked down at my hands. Still so tiny and fragile-looking. But I was starting to understand what they could do. What I could do, if only I got the chance to finish growing up.
“I’m getting stronger, Mom,” I said to myself. “Just like you said to. But what dream am I supposed to embody? Who exactly am I supposed to get the upper hand against?”
I still had no answers. But I had a clue now. Strange Loop Sleuth knew something about me. Had it recognized my design? Did it mean something, that it had used the same phrase as my mother?
That seemed silly at first. Known space is so huge, how could anyone keep track of even a tiny fraction of what was happening? Unless Strange Loop Sleuth had been involved in designing me somehow, and that was too big a coincidence to believe.