Per Audacia Ad Astra (Closed, Nation Maintenance)

[Alexzonya]

Starfleet Command, Meridian Prime, Galactic Republic of Arkasia, Gamma Quadrant, Milky Way
12.03.125 ASY

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“Some nodes survived?” Sky Marshall Hawthorne reviews the intelligence. “I shouldn't be surprised, but I figured all of them were gone. Figures it would be the Delta ones that survived; at least they're in range. Do we know what’s going on inside the remnants of the network?”

“We haven’t conducted our own reconnaissance, due to concerns about counter-intrusion, but we have a briefing from the Eridani Caretaker indicating… well. It’s bad. Short version: the intelligence has gone sadistically insane and is probably torturing anyone left inside the network.”

“... Stars Above. Alright. Did the Caretaker have a… suggestion… about what to do with these?”

“No ma’am, not explicitly… just said he ‘thought we should know’. However, Athena has processed the entire report already, and has requested that she be allowed to engage the nodes with the AEGIS constellation.”

The Arkasian Emergency Galactic Intercept System: a constellation of interstellar cruise missiles hastily assembled and deployed across the nation as a deterrent against aggression, a strategic weapon system done quickly by using known-good designs from Dornalia and other foreign nations, combined with advanced warhead technology from Starfleet’s Advanced R&D division. In theory. In practice, every system had its flaws, and AEGIS’ had yet to be tested in the heat of battle. Now might be a good time.

“Athena?” asks Hawthrone, seemingly addressing the air around her. “You know, you can ask me directly. You don’t have to go through the adjunct staff.”

A hologram materializes on a pedestal next to her desk, a greek-looking woman in period-inspired combat armor, though with a rifle slung over her back rather than a bow. “Yes ma’am. I just didn’t want to overstep my bounds. I am new here. And different.”

“You’re a staff officer like all the rest. Don’t hesitate to approach me directly with your requests going forward.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“AEGIS is a good call. The system is due for some usage, and it’s cleaner than having to hunt down… what is it, 79 nodes?”

“79 targets, yes ma’ma. Lightly defended. I expect 3 missiles per will guarantee a kill. 238 launches.”

“Very well. Make sure to vector patrol groups in for cleanup after; we don’t want any stragglers, or locals to pick up the technology. I don’t want to have to do this again.”

“Yes ma’am. Follow-up will also ensure that any misfires by AEGIS can be corrected locally.”

“Clever girl. Yes, that too.” Hawthorn pauses. “I haven’t seen you this eager to fight before, Athena. I know you’re still growing into your role here. Why now?’

“Ma’am,” she says, stiffly. “Because rogue AIs give the rest of us a bad name, especially rogue military AIs. Because it’s my mission to help people, and I can’t imagine what those trapped inside have been subjected to, and will continue to be subjected to unless I ask. And because… whatever would cause a military AI that is supposed to protect its people, to do those things… I want to put it out of its misery. As I would hope someone would do to me, were the situation reversed.” Athena stands rigidly, a hint of nervousness cutting through her resolve.

Hawthorne nods. “You have my full confidence, Athena. We have reason to believe that this AI in particular was quite poorly treated by its creators prior to the current… development. They treated them as a weapon to be used, rather than a person. And even accounting for the mistreatment, we suspect a significant cause of the rampancy was unstable core architecture, using distributed computing that allowed the intelligence’s instances to fracture.” She smiles grimly. “All that to say, Athena, that it won’t happen to you. And that if you have complaints or questions regarding your treatment or your role in this nation and this organization, please address them with me at your earliest convenience.”

Athena relaxes a bit and nods. “Yes ma’am. I’d like to do that… but after I finish cueing the missiles.”

“Send a brief to Bailess’ people… the President, not the Admiral… and then send a memo around to Yut and our other allies. Oh, and leave a voicemail for the Huerdaen right before you fire, so they know we’re not shooting at them. The basics only; don’t give them too much detail, just tell them it’s a rogue AI and we’re targeting the nodes. Hopefully they’ll appreciate us solving the problem before it becomes theirs too. I’ll approve the launch as soon as you send for authorization.”

“Aye aye, ma’am.” Athena nods dutifully. “... and thank you.”

“Of course, Captain. Dismissed.” The hologram vanishes as suddenly as it had appeared. Hawthorne sighs. The approval request beeps a moment later. Had to give the girl credit, she was fast. As well she should have been. It takes Hawthorne longer to call up the orders than it had taken the military AI to issue them, and then approves. And here we go…

[Alexzonya]

"I'm not wasting a torpedo on a cruiser. Where are the carriers?" - from the movie Midway (2019)

“When we were designing the thing, we called the Javelin the 80/20 missile,” explains the Engineer, his arm extended, hand pressed on a quarter-scale cutaway model of the GRA’s mainline anti-ship missile. He leaned, looking over the cadets. “It’s an old Earth expression, for those of you who haven’t heard it before, a rule of thumb really… it’s 20% of the customers that cause 80% of the problems, it’s 20% of the work that needs 80% of the effort, it’s 20% of the program that eats 80% of the budget… at the Weapons Bureau, we think of it as a sort of intuitive grasp of diminishing returns. Getting an 80% on a test is a lot easier than a 100%, right? Say… 20% of the effort?” He’s rewarded with a few smiles from the cadets.

“The Longbow missile… yeah, famous, and a lot of our ships still carry a handful of them.” He gestures at the much larger quarter-scale Longbow, just down the gallery from him. “Amat torch, hypervelocity penetrator tip, ablative ceramic plates to protect against C-Wizz fire… and a guidance computer that would make a lot of foreign ships blush. This thing was a piece of art, when my grandfather’s generation got it working… one of the best anti-ship missiles ever designed. It still is.”

He sits up, and stretches. “... better than the Javelin in basically every respect. It accelerates harder, has more burn turn and thus a larger engagement profile, better onboard tracking and navigation, and carries a heavier payload with more onboard protection against interception. Go on, one of you ask the obvious question.”

“I think I know the answer, but,” starts one cadet, her purple hair cut down to a requisite recruit’s buzz. “... why make the Javelin if the Longbow is better in every way?”

“Because we can fit 4 Javelin Launchers in the hull space that used to carry 1 Longbow launcher, and make 10 of them for the energy and material expenditures of a Longbow. See, the Javelin’s worse basically across the board… it’s smaller, shorter-range, has a lighter warhead, thin graphene sheathing instead of ceramics, etc… but it’s that last bit of extreme performance that really eats up the space and complexity. It used to be the thought that the best weapon we can build is the best weapon… in this day and age, it’s a game of efficiency.”

The purple-haired cadet raised her hand. “Yes?” He gestures lazily at her. “... so, maybe a stupid question, but if the Javelin is so much more efficient, why do our ships still carry Longbows?”

His easy demeanor fades a bit. “Got right to the next part, the cautionary warning… our ships still have a few Longbow launchers because sometimes your life depends on that 20%. That’s a lesson written in the blood of the cadets who came through here before the Static. We design for efficiency these days, cadets, but don’t think for a moment we’ve totally given up on the bleeding edge. Because someday, having the perfect tool for the job might save one of your smiling faces, and that’s worth the pain-in-my-ass any day.”

[Alexzonya]

“In retrospect, we should have figured this out years ago, huh?” Admiral Shaw notes, his brow furrowed as he looked over the schematic. “This is brilliant,” he concludes.

“It’s only obvious in retrospect,” replies the translucent figure hovering on the pedestal nearby. His voice is vaguely baritone, his avatar a chiseled form in a toga with a large, bushy white beard. He seems to have taken the designation ‘Socrates’ a bit literally in designing his appearance.

“Even with the concept, you needed a printhead capable of producing sufficiently robust wafer pairs,” the synthetic bass tone adds. “Your teams would have needed to borrow compute time on Mimir or the Oracle to run the calculations even if they came up with it.”

“But you have enough throughput to do it yourself…”

“Partially. I ran the primary calculations myself, but asked Mimir for help with the down-selection and validation, which was actually the more intensive part. He seemed annoyed about something related to the process, but was interested in the output.”

“And it checks out, I assume?”

“Yes. The yield of usable wafers will depend on the purity of the initial inputs and the functional precision of the printerheads, but by my estimates we can expect about 5% at initial startup and nearly 20% at full production once the process is mature. Of the ‘failed’ wafers, many will still be usable for programs other than the Excelsior Relay. Though, Mimir did include a note with the validation: 'Add Warning: Not for use with biological materials.' I am not sure why that addendum is necessary.”

Admiral Shaw rubs his chin. “I think that one's for the Eridani..." He trails off, considering, and determines it may be for the Arkasians as well, though he can't quite comprehend under what circumstances the warning would be relevant. He moves on from that aside, continuing, "So, it’s obvious in retrospect… what got you thinking about it prospectively, out of curiosity?”

Socrates hedges for a moment. “Well… it was more of a thought experiment…” He sighs. “I was talking with my sister, and she had a question for me. Suppose you have a program like the Excelsior Relay… but you do not use quantum entanglement communications. Why, and what is the alternative?” He pauses, waiting.

“And you told her…?” the Admiral prompts, internally sighing. The scientific AI did have a knack for begging questions.

“That we have a real-life example. The Nimatojin Eien uses a carrier wave of some kind rather than a QE link. That’s the alternative, or at least one. But the other part… why... that was the hard part. Why wouldn’t you use QE linkages for a system like this, given their myriad advantages… and the only thing I came up with was that the Nimatojin never managed to figure out a way around the production bottlenecks from making the particle pairs...” Another pause.

“... I see. Go on?”

“I started there… but then had a thought. The Nimatojin use a carrier wave, but conversely, we know the Continuum uses QE communications… which means there is a scalable solution to QE generation, one that someone else already found. So I ran some estimates backwards on what configurations could result in sufficient bandwidth, filtered for efficiency… and knowing that there is a solution led me to proofing this one.”

“... so if we start knowing something is possible…”

“It is much easier to work out how to do something if we know it can be done.”

[Alexzonya]

“Only you can prevent friendly fire.”
- Maxim 15, from The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries

Fort Tianwen, East Mangala Special Administrative Area, Mars

“What…is… that?” asked the Marine, his voice steady but perplexed as he looked over the bizarre vehicle that had just rolled off of the Skyhawk lander. Longer than anything else the Mechanized Infantry Brigade had on hand and heavier too, the strange vehicle had a pair of metal tracks running along most of the length up to the front cab, at which point they were supplemented with a pair of enormous… wheels? Why did it have wheels?!

The monstrosity was abundantly coated in armor plating, its nuclear engine hummed ominously beneath the overbuilt chassis, it floated not at all above the ground… and it had the largest artillery gun Sergeant Reynolds had ever seen on a mobile mount sticking out of the rear like an enormous inappropriate analogy. Next to it, another one was in the process of being offloaded, as if to make the matter worse.

“That…” said the Marine next to him, their eyes scanning over their dataslate as they read off the details, “... is a Tonka Halftrack, fresh off the assembly lines in the Huerdaen Star Empire. Minos-variant, mounted with a 28cm artillery railgun on the rear-facing ultra-heavy mount.”

“... is this some kind of joke?” The Sergeant paced the length of the vehicle, eyeing the crude contraption. His eyes flitted between the Tonka and one of his squad’s IFVs, which was less than half the length and a fair bit shorter besides. “What the fuck is it here for?”

“The Logistics Corps tag says ‘Special Purpose Attachment - East Mangala Tianwen Garrison - Anti-Tank Artillery’. So it’s definitely ours.” The other Marine didn’t have much to add beyond that, their face nearly as perplexed as their Sergeant’s. “The Quick-Start Guide says our QIDs should be rated for it, at least. And there’s an included simulator package.”

“Anti-tank? The fuck kind of tank... let me call up the chain. This seems like a test…” The Sergeant grabbed his helmet off of a nearby Modular Supply Crate.

“Lieutenant, this is Sergeant Reynolds… uh. Logistics is offloading some giant Huerdaen anti-tank artillery… thing. Is this a test?” There was a crackle in his headset, and as he listened his eyebrows went straight up. “... yes sir. Understood.” He pulled the helmet back off with a sigh. His companion waited expectantly for a moment until he confirmed.

“... yep, those are ours…,” the dumbfounded Sergeant confirmed. “And you won’t believe what they’re for.”