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few puzzled heads nodded. "But there really isn't anything especially
significant about the drones," be told them. "They just represent a situation
in which the System has greater control over resources and over itself than
anything we've seen with TITAN. In years to come there will be lots of other
things around besides drones. The question is, if we ever gave a system
autonomy comparable to this on a global scale, how far could it go in using it
in ways that we never intended it to? That's what we want to find out."
"Is there any chance that these things could end up being used as weapons if
the System turned nasty?" one of the CIM people asked.
"It's a possibility that we have to allow for," Dyer replied. "Fred and his
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crew have been working with the Japanese on developing some specially modified
versions that use a number of methods to deactivate or destroy other drones.
They can be operated independently of the System if need be, for example via
lasers or wires as well as by radio. So if it does turn nasty, we can send in
our own antidrone drones after its troops anywhere they can go. I
think that when you've had a chance to see what we've got and play with them,
you'll find we're in pretty good shape.
"You all know that the Janus System will be a step ahead of TITAN in terms of
managing a whole planet. It will have control over the life-support, power
distribution, transportation and all that kind of thing, so obviously it could
play a lot of unfriendly tricks if it ever recognized us as adversaries and
discovered our weaknesses. Well, we've put a lot of work into analyzing the
kinds of thing it might possibly do, and we've built in all kinds of safety
overrides to make sure we always have ultimate control over it. You'll be
seeing more of those over the next few weeks and until then don't worry too
much about it. Janus will be full of things that we'll know about because we
put them there, but the System won't."
A chorus of mixed murmurings broke out on all sides as he finished speaking.
In the middle of it.
"You're telling us the dumb bastard isn't going to outsmart us, right?"
Frank called out.
"Right!" Dyer told him and grinned. Everybody laughed and the atmosphere at
once became more cheerful.
Later on, when some of them were having a nightcap in the Officer's
Mess, Ron turned to Chris. "What if Fred's antidrone menagerie isn't up to it?
D'you figure an M25 could stop one of those things?"
"No problem," Chris told him. "It'd drill straight through one of those tin
cans." Somehow his tone failed to echo the confidence of his words. He sat
back and rubbed his chin thoughtfully, then added, "Although to be honest, I
wouldn't mind having a Gremlin handy as well...just in case."
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Up on Janus, work had been racing ahead at full speed ever since ISA obtained
the official go-ahead to begin their program of special modifications. The
early days of the project saw numerous clashes between the ISA technical teams
who produced the plans and some of the senior military officers responsible
for carrying them out. The military were daunted by the extent of the work
called for and protested that the timetable set was impossible. The ISA people
maintained that these fears were without foundation. It all stemmed, they
said, from the military's failure to appreciate fully some of the fundamentals
of large-scale structural engineering in space as opposed to on a planetary
surface, and to recognize the advances that had been made in automatic-
fabrication technology over the previous decade. Everything would smooth
itself out once the crash training program organized by ISA started yielding
results and the first batch of army engineers came to grips with the real
situation on Janus instead of imaginary ones in places like the Pentagon.
And it turned out that ISA was right. Most of the problems associated with
putting up something like the Tokyo Bay Bridge or the mile-high tower cities
in Europe resulted from maneuvering structural units into position against
their own weight and holding them there until enough other units had been
anchored in place to secure them. In space there were no such problems.
Immensity could be bought very cheaply and concepts of scale that would have
staggered the imagination of many architects at the close of the twentieth
century were becoming commonplace. Lattice frameworks of aluminum and steel
were assembled by automatic welding and riveting robots that worked nonstop
for weeks at a time, slowly crawling out into space at the ends of the metal
skeletons growing behind them. Shell sections to cover in the skeletons were
formed by spraying successive layers of aluminum vapor onto enormous inflated
balloons of the correct shapes. Huge as it was, the basic structure of Janus
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had taken shape in less than six months from the date Detroit was completed.
That had been in the early 2020s. It was fitting out the inside that had
occupied the years since then.
They built Pittsburgh first, to receive and process the raw material coming up
from the Moon. Then they extended the main axis to form the Spindle and built
Detroit around it, thus equipping the growing station to transform the ingots,
girders, sheet and strip coming out of Pittsburgh into the tens of thousands
of different types of parts that would be needed for the rest of the
structure. Except for its prototype on Icarus B. Detroit without a doubt
represented the most advanced concentration of mixed automatic manufacturing
technologies that mankind had assembled in one place. The loads of gray and
brown powder unloaded by the catcher ships flowed into Pittsburgh, through to
Detroit, and emerged as everything imaginable from ceilings cast out of air-
blown foundry slag and glittering draperies spun from tinted translucent
fiberglass to plates of reactor shielding and liquid-cooled power
transformers. The Spindle grew onward from Detroit and sprouted the Hub, after
which came the spokes and finally the Rim. The solar collector and Earthward
microwave transmitter originally planned for Icarus C were supposed to be
constructed at the other end of the Main Spindle, below Pittsburgh, but this
phase of construction had been aborted before it began, when the decision to
use the station as Janus was made.
The comprehensive and efficient manufacturing capacity available in
Detroit made possible the supply of parts needed for the Janus modifications,
for which the military had failed to make adequate allowance On top of this,
they had based their calculations on the assumption that the labor would have
to be carried out solely by the pilot teams of ISA and service engineers sent
up to Janus, plus the reinforcements that would arrive in successive waves as
the project gathered momentum. What they didn't take into account were the
drones, which was understandable because at that stage they hadn't known very
much about them.
The Japanese consortium responsible for developing the drones had been less
than forthcoming on the subject of progress, mainly for reasons of commercial
security. The potential value of the drones in situations where manpower came
at a high premium had been recognized at an early stage, however, and a few
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