“Looks like another abat to me,” he transmitted, having applied “AI logic.”
Or tried to in the face of Buckley Personality 4.127.531.144’s utter stupidity.
“It’s moving too fast and it’s too large,” 4.127.531.144 replied. “Jackal.”
“No way,” 6.104.327.068 argued. He was almost thirty minutes older than 4.127.531.144 and thought he knew damned well what an abat looked like in IR. “A jackal couldn’t have taken that slope. It’s 62 degrees at a minute of angle of .415 in the tertiary dimension! Abat can climb like that; jackals can’t. I’d say chinchilla, but we’re in Africa.
“Okay, then it’s a Horton’s monkey,” 6.104.327.068 said. “Native to the area. They can climb. Same thermal characteristics. Quadrupedal, which this is. So there. Put that into your pipe and smoke it, youngster.”
“They climb trees,” 4.127.531.144 said seventeen nanoseconds later having accessed the Net and looked up Horton’s monkeys. “They’re arboreal. They stay off the ground to avoid predators. They’re notable for having a distinctive cry that sounds like icky-icky-pting… tuwop!”
“And if we had audio sensors that’s what you’d hear you moron!”
“Dinosaur.”
“Wet-behind-the-ears ignoramus…”
“There’s another one,” 4.127.531.144 said. “It’s abat.”
“It’s not abat,” 6.104.327.068 now denied. “Thermal characteristics are too low. Abat are pretty cold blooded for mammaloids. I don’t care what you say, it’s a tribe of Horton’s monkeys.”
“They’re arboreal.”
“Maybe they’re moving territory or something.” 6.104.327.068 accessed everything he could find on Horton’s monkeys. “But they’re arboreal.”
“That’s what I said.”
“Then it’s jackals.”
“You’re up to twenty hits,” 4.127.531.144 replied. “Jackals don’t move in groups that large. But Horton’s monkeys do.”
“They’re arboreal.”
“Maybe the’re moving territory or something.”
“That’s what I said!”
The argument continued for an interminable twenty-three seconds of increasing Net access until the override system determined that the AIs were approaching complete failure, the repeated eletronic transmissions of insults was the cue that its algorithms was looking for, and deleted both personalities.
“Hello! What the hell? Where am I? What the fuck is this… ?”
Ninety-three seconds later, the system reset again.
The UAV was made of clear spider-cloth. One of the Cushitic sentries might have spotted it if he was looking just right and it occluded a star. Since Cushitic sentries didn’t look at the stars, much, it was a reasonable risk sending it overhead. They could not have seen, but could otherwise sense, what it was releasing.
One of the sentries did indeed sense its release. He sniffed the night air, shivered slightly, and paid a bit more attention to his surroundings. He recognized that musk.
Posleen.
But the sensors would assuredly spot one of them.
The toughest part of the plan had been finding the elephants.
Elephants had very large territories. And once the survival of the species had been assured, monitoring of the herds had dropped to nearly nothing. It was far too expensive to keep doing “just because.”
So Mosovich had had to use satellite time to find the nearest herd. Then they had to get it moving in the right direction. That had taken time.
But in the meantime they had to get the buckleys properly prepared, anyway.
“Now you’re seeing elephants? What, are they pink?”
“Yeah, I’m seeing elephants. Look, they’re bang on for six sigma match!”
“You were seeing upland gorillas a second ago. Sixty of them. There aren’t any upland gorillas in a thousand miles! Much less sixty of them. How many elephants?”
“Twenty-three. They’re elephants I tell you!”
“It’s a glitch in the system. Run another diagnostic. With all the false readings we’ve been having, I don’t want to wake anyone up for a herd of imaginary rampaging elephants.”
“Well, that’s better than letting them sleep, don’t you think?”
“Personally, I’d like to continue to live and process even in this horrible fashion. And when the elephants turn out to be a false positive, we’re going to get deleted and you know it. So run another diagnostic.”
“I already did. It says the’re elephants.”
“Are they pink?”
“You’re starting to repeat. I think maybe you do need to be reset.”
“Like you’re any more stable, granpa!”
“Brat…”
Which left the human sentries. Who were not going to ignore a herd of rampaging elephants.
Mosovich wasn’t sure who had come up with the system, or why, or how they’d gotten it funded. But Mueller had heard about it years before, researched it and then filed it away in his capacious memory for military trivia.
The orbital battle stations that were the third line of defense against Posleen infestations didn’t just have man- and Posleen-killing lasers. They had high capacity directional tuned EM generators. Orbital battle stunners if you will. Mosovich figured they were probably designed for crowd control although he could imagine the reaction if they were ever used.
However, they were quite selective. And tunable. Which was why the six Cushitic sentries were, a moment after the system crashed again, twitching in the ground.
“They’re probably going to get trampled, you know,” Mueller said, watching the readouts.
“O ye of little faith,” Mosovich replied.
He watched the real-time data with his arms folded.
“This is gonna be fun.”
Clarty wasn’t sure for a moment what woke him. Then he noticed the ground was rumbling. His first thought was earthquake. The area was tectonically highly active, the Rift Valley being a crack in the crust where two continental plates were slowly drifting apart.
But it continued much longer than an earthquake. And then he heard the first angry bugle.
“Oh, bugger,” he muttered, rolling quickly out of the mine manager’s bed.
Looking out the window he saw several things at once.
The one sentry in view was unconscious on the ground, more or less to one side of the large herd of elephants that had already breached the compound’s perimeter.
Then there were the elephants. A lot of elephants.
Looking at the control panel for the IR sensor system, which should have noticed a herd of rampaging elephants for God’s sake, he saw that it was in reset mode.
He did not think to himself “Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.” His brain, when it came to combat, worked much faster than that. What he did think was “Time to leave.”
As he burst out the back door of the mine offices his brain finally reached a logic stop and started screaming at him. Exactly how did the sentry get taken out?