Treaty of Orion


    The Treaty of Orion, signed after the third succession war in 3022, explicitly defines an “AI Based Weapon System” as any weapon that can take independent action without human interaction and explicitly bans all such weapons.  As a signatory of the Treaty of Orion, the Guild works actively to ensure that any IP infringing on these treaty definitions is banned.  This also means that any ships, polity or other organization trading in systems so defined will also be banned.  All Guild members are required to read the treaty and sign an affidavit that they understand and will comply with the treaty’s requirements.


    Excerpted With Permission


    Data Trader’s Handbook


    Copyright 3250, Interstellar Data Trader Guild


    Craig seemed to take to running a large company like a fish to water.  Within two weeks he had hired an entire operations team and had delegated the vast majority of the day to day tasks to the new employees on Bohemia.  He had also moved into sumptuous quarters on the station and hadn’t been off station since that first day in the offices.  Leo, Ramona and Ollu were feeling a bit at lost ends and didn’t really have much to do.  They were all sitting over coffee in Café 1 onboard the Theo, just trying to decide what to do next.


    Leo wasn’t sure how to proceed.  “I’m not really sure what happens next.  We could just stay here and run QFeed with Craig.”


    Ramona shook her head in disgust.  “That sounds insanely boring.  I’d rather go back to Raeburn and live with my father.”


    “I thought you couldn’t stand your father?”


    “Well, he’s not that bad, but ya.  You get the idea.”


    Ollu leaned back in her chair.  “We could just take off and start trading.”


    “You mean regular cargo?”


    “Yep.”


    “We would need a different ship.  I don’t know much about normal cargo operations but the ship’s I’ve seen seem very different than Guild Data Arcs.”


    Ollu nodded.  “I don’t think that would be a major problem.  There are several ships for sale right here in UI at the moment that I wouldn’t mind captaining.”


    Ramona nodded.  “Ya, I can see you being captain of a cargo ship.  A little boring, but you belong in command of a ship.”


    Ollu looked at her.  “Thanks, I think.  What about you?”


    “Well, to be honest, being in the military is the only thing I’m really qualified to do. I can’t go back to the Guild now that we’re banned.  I guess I could become an apprentice again.”


    Ollu laughed.  “You could just come with me.  Maybe we’ll get lucky and pirates will attack.”


    “Don’t tease me like that.”


    Ollu sobered.  “You could easily buy your own ship, run your own wildcat trading operation.  Wouldn’t be hard, Craig would fund you if you wanted.”


    Leo put his coffee down with a thump.  “I just can’t make any plans until I know what the Guild will do.  The waiting is driving me crazy.”


    Ramona patted his arm.  “Waiting is always the hard part.  It’s not the danger or the risk to your life that gets you in the military, it’s always the waiting.  Once combat starts you’re usually too busy to be scared.”


    Leo smiled at her.  “Thanks, I….”


    He was interrupted by a loud klaxon and an announcement over the PA system.  “General Quarters, General Quarters!!  Captain to the bridge, immediate!”


    Ollu was moving before the announcement finished; she was up and out the door before Leo and Ramona had time to react.  Looking at each other, they both shrugged and Leo gestured to the door.  By the time they made it to the bridge, it was a scene of controlled chaos, every station manned and multiple people talking at the same time.  Ollu was sitting in the captain’s chair, a concerned look on her face.


    Leo studied the large navigational map displayed on the main viewer.  It showed what looked like hundreds of red icons entering the system from the 9 o’clock direction.  “It’s the Guild.”


    Ollu nodded.  “They came packing heat.  Those are not the same types of ships that came to Raeburn.”


    Ramona moved over to a sensor console, relieving the watch stander there.  “We have much better sensors than we had in Raeburn because of the defense constellation.  At least one hundred of the installations have them on sensors so we are getting a fused picture, super accurate.”


    Leo was still surprised at the sheer numbers involved.  “How many platforms are there now?”


    “About a hundred thousand.”


    “That seems like an insane number.  Surely the Guild can’t get through that.”


    Ramona just shook her head.  “A solar system is a very big place.  Depending on how smart they are, they could pick a vector into the inner system that only exposes them to a couple dozen platforms.  These things are very powerful, but there are practical limits, you really can’t engage something more than ten light minutes away or so, just too much latency to control the weapon.”  Ramona started fiddling with the display controls and suddenly, the map was overlaid with red shading representing ten light minutes from each defense platform.  “We need them to enter into these shaded areas.”  Ten light minutes is about 180 million KM, so the engagement spheres were quite large and had significant overlap but they didn’t cover the entire solar system.  Especially outside of the ecliptic.  The stations were all built on top of asteroids so they were all organized along the plane of the elliptic.  Like most solar systems, UI was basically elliptical since that’s the shape of an orbit of a body around a larger body like a planet around a sun.  UI actually had three different asteroid belts due to the way the solar system was formed millions of years prior.  This was unusual, but not completely unheard of.  Humans tended to settle in systems that had asteroid belts simply because it was more economical to mine them than to build mines on planets with significant gravity wells.  Getting all that metal up and out of a gravity well was expensive even for a post-scarcity society.


    Looking at the display, Leo noticed that the Guild vessels were coming down from “above” the elliptic.  “It looks like they suspect we may have armed the asteroids like your father did, they are approaching from a pretty steep angle.”  It was true. On their current course, the Guild vessels would avoid the majority of the weapons stations simply because they had chosen to come “down” into the system from a steep angle instead of cutting across the elliptic like a data ark would normally do.  “What do we do?”


    Ramona was working on astrogation.  “We give them a target.”


    Leo was afraid he knew what that meant.  “You mean us, right?”


    Ollu was watching from her chair.  “Yep.”  She turned to the navigator.  “Helm, get us moving.  Take the mains to 100% as soon as we are clear of the station.  Let’s move down into belt 2, I want belt one to be BETWEEN us and the incoming ships.  Got it?”


    The navigator was working furiously on their console.  “Yes, captain.  Coming about, down 10, port 20.  Engaging.”


    Ramona continued to work at her console.  “All Guild vessels have been tagged hostile by the defense platforms.  It will take a while for the instructions to populate all the stations, but it should be done well before they get into range.”


    Ollu turned to a different crewman.  “Launch the BR’s.  Keep them within one light second of us in a defensive formation.”


    Ramona was looking at her instruments again.  “Looks like the UI military is not going on alert.  No movements to intercept.”


    After a short period of time, it was obvious that the Guild ships knew or at least strongly suspected that UI’s asteroid belt held defensive platforms.  They were taking courses that ships would normally not take in order to avoid engagement ranges to the installations on the belt.  As they passed “above” the orbit of Fluffy, the tactical display seemed to develop static.


    Leo wasn’t sure what he was looking at.  “What the hell is that?”


    Ramona knew exactly what she was looking at.  “Weapons release.  Thousands of them.”


    Leo was still puzzled.  “From that range?  What are they, like a light hour out?”


    Ramona consulted the sensor display.  “Yeah, about that.”  She fiddled with the controls a bit more and projected courses were superimposed on the view.  Very quickly it became clear why the missiles had been fired from so far away.  “Planets can’t dodge.”


    Of course, all of this had happened more than an hour ago.  What they were seeing was sensor feeds transmitted to them via tight beam laser comms at the speed of light.  Because of speed of light delays, all this information was at least an hour old.  Of course, as the missiles got closer that information would be more current.  However, because of where the originating ships were in the system, that meant that they could only react to very old information.  In effect, that made it basically impossible to engage a mobile target like a ship from those kinds of ranges.  It was simply too easy for the targeted ship to make direction changes well beyond the ability of a missile to match.  At closer ranges, that delay went away and thus missile attacks were more effective.


    “OK, we are getting good tracks.  There are about a thousand missiles headed to each of the three populated planets.”


    “Shit, can we warn them?”


    Ramona had never stopped working at the console.  “Already have.  Two of them are pretty close but the third is almost forty light minutes away so they won’t have much warning.”


    “Can we use the defensive systems to help protect the planet?”


    Ramona was working even more intently on the console.  “We can help some, but at those ranges there is no way we can take them all out.  I’ve tagged them all as high priority hostile so the system will attempt to attack at extreme range.”


    After that, it was a waiting game.  The tracks of the missiles continued their remorseless march towards the planets.  Finally, after what seemed like ages, the UI government started to respond.  “UI military units going on alert.  Looks like two destroyers and a couple of frigates orbiting the inner planet, a destroyer on the second and two frigates at the third.  Yes, their sensors just went to full power.  They are maneuvering.  Marking UI units as blue force.”


    Slowly, so slowly, the weapons entered extreme range of the asteroid based defensive systems.   “Our units are firing kinetic rounds.  Good track, on intercept.”


    Suddenly, the incoming missile tracks that had been straight lines for so long stared to kink and turned into squiggles.  “What the hell!  Those missiles are dodging the kinetic rounds!”


    Leo sighed.  “Well, it was worth a try.”


    Ramona was shocked enough to look up from her console.  “What?  How did they get the command to dodge?  They were at least twenty light minutes from any Guild ship!”


    Leo thought about that for a moment.  “Perhaps it was a pre-programmed maneuver?”


    “Perhaps.”


    At this point, the UI ships started to maneuver aggressively, placing themselves between the three inhabited planets and the incoming weapons.  “They are retargeting!!  Those are AI based weapons!”


    If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.


    Leo just put his head into his hands.  When he looked up, Ramona was staring at him.  “No, I’m not going to say it.  I know that the Guild is capable of breaking any law, including their own.  Why should I be surprised that they’re willing to violate Treaty of Orion?”  Despite what he said aloud, he was still shocked to his core.  The treaty had saved the early Earth colonies from endless destructive wars.  AI based weapons had nearly ended human civilization hundreds of years ago and the ban had held for all the time since it was originally ratified.


    Ollu had been watching the entire battle silently.  Now she spoke for the first time.  “We need to have absolute proof of our suspicions.  If we can take that evidence to other star systems, the Guild will be done.”


    Ramona shook her head.  “I’m convinced now.  No way all that was pre-programmed.  They must have some sort of discretionary logic built into the weapons.”


    Ollu tapped her index finger on the console in front of her.  “We need to be sure.  What can an AI based weapon do that a pre-programmed homing weapon cannot?”


    “Extrapolate.”  Leo didn’t realize he had spoken aloud until he noticed that everyone on the bridge was looking at him.  “An AI system can derive and extrapolate but algorithmic software cannot.  Present them with new data and see if the extrapolate a course of action.  That would clearly violate the treaty by any standard.”


    Ramona nodded.  “But what new data can we present?”


    “It would have to be something related to their mission parameters.  The AI would have been given broad mission parameters to drive their decision-making.”


    “And what would those be?”


    Ollu smacked her hand down on the table.  “Q-Feed.”


    Leo was confused for a moment, then he nodded.  “Right, the Guild’s primary mission here is to eliminate the threat of Q-Feed.  The AI’s would need to know that.”


    Leo looked at Ramona.  “Do you think they’re listening to our comms?”


    She smiled.  “I would.  That’s why we are using laser comms only.”


    “And what if we made a mistake?”


    “Like what?”


    “What if we needed to warn the UI ships about our cargo?”


    “Cargo?”


    “Yes, about all the new Q-Feed bouys we were taking out system to safeguard them?”


    Ollu laughed.  “Yep, that would do it.”


    Now it was Leo’s turn to work on a console.  Very quickly he sketched out what he wanted to see, then he picked up a handset.  Making sure he was using RF rather than laser, he began to transmit.  “Theo to Alfa Bravo, be advised that we are proceeding with transport of the reserve Q-Feed satellite group to a secure star system as agreed.  We will check in upon arrival.  Advise further instructions, if any.”


    Leo looked at Ramona.  “Ya, that would do it.”


    Ollu began issuing orders to the bridge crew.  The ship began to accelerate.  “Captain, we are at 100% on the mains.”


    “Thank you, carry on.”


    Ten more minutes until the weapons could intercept the radio message.  Ten minutes after that, they would see their reaction, if any.  The twenty minutes crawled by.  Then twenty one.  “Shit.”


    “Well, we were just guessing as to their mission brief.  Perhaps they didn’t program them to seek out any Q-Feed related activity.”


    “Wait!”  Twenty missiles at the extreme edge of the formation were turning.  “All the missiles had to get the message and then they had to take a vote on what to do.”


    “What?”


    “If you have a large number of AI based systems, it’s just like having people.  The normal thing was to hold elections to evaluate new data.  It just took a couple of minutes because of propagation delay.”


    “So, what?”


    “So, there is no way that was a legal weapon.  They are taking action based on an intercepted message that they COULD NOT have predicted in advance.  The response was also WAY too fast to have been approved by the humans on the launch vehicles, they are more than 40 light minutes out.  That decision was taken only about a minute after they intercepted the radio message.”


    Leo was watching the tactical display closely.  “Uh, so the good news is that we have 20 missiles bearing down on us?”


    Ollu grinned.  “Check our new course.”


    Leo looked more carefully, the ship’s current course was also superimposed on the tactical display.  A bright green dotted line showed a graceful curve as the ship’s course changed to point directly to…


    “the asteroid belt?”


    Ollu’s grin got wider.  “Ya, you got anyplace else you need to be?”


    “Uh, no.”


    Leo started to relax once they were inside of the engagement envelope of two defense platforms.  They should be pretty safe here.


    Ramona stiffened at her console.  “Oh shit!”


    Leo raced over and looked over her shoulder.  “What is it?”


    “A bunch more missiles have decided to change course, towards us!”


    “What?”


    “We now have over two thousand inbound to our location.”


    “Shit!”


    Leo looked up at the tactical screen.  It was a pretty depressing sight.  Even though he had great faith in the platforms and even more in Ramona, it seemed hopeless.  “Do you think we can engage that many?”


    Ramona looked resigned.  “No.”  She sighed.  “A couple hundred and I would feel pretty confident.  Over two thousand?  No.  I don’t see how we defeat that.”


    Leo looked over to Ollu who shook her head sadly.


    Leo sat down.  Rather, he fell into a nearby chair.  He wasn’t thinking too clearly.  Absently, he toyed with the red data card in his shirt pocket.  It took him a full minute to realize what he had in his hand.  He turned back to Ollu.  “How close are we to the 9 o’clock bouy?”


    Ollu consulted a screen.  “About five light minutes.  Why, you want to send a goodbye message?”


    Leo smiled grimly.  “Something like that.”


    Feeling steady again, he walked over to a console and started removing the interlocks on the guild trading systems.  Ramona noticed what he was doing and gave him a confused look.  “What the hell are you doing?”


    “If we are going down, we are going to have company.”  He held the card high enough so she could see it.


    Ollu got out of her captain’s chair and walked over to where Leo was working.  “What the hell is that?”


    Leo just looked at her.  “Epsilon.”


    “Epsilon?”


    “Ya.”


    “The Brigadier gave that to you?”


    “Yes.”


    “And now you’re willing to destroy the guild.”


    “Yes.”


    Ollu looked over at Ramona, who shrugged.  Ollu looked up to the overhead for a moment, then back to Leo.  “OK.  It’s over either way, fast or slow.”


    Leo nodded grimly and issued the command to release the interlocks.  The ship automatically locked on to the 9 o’clock bouy and stared to send bursts of laser communications to it.  Within ten minutes, they would have handshake.  Leo paused for a moment.  You sure you want to do this?  Then, with a determined grimace, he shoved the red data card into the console’s data slot.  He wasn’t sure what to expect, exploding consoles like in the vids or just a silent virus attack.  What he actually got was completely unexpected.


    “A menu!?!?”


    Ramona walked over and looked at the screen.  “It’s a weapon Leo.  Designed by the military.  That means it has to be easy to use and easy to control.”


    The screen was pretty easy to understand.  It said, “Choose Attack Profile” and listed a variety of options from a single ship all the way up to total system corruption.  Leo chose the top option, “Phased Invasive Viral Spread with Destructive Overwrite.”  He wasn’t exactly sure what that meant, but he was pretty sure the Guild trading systems wouldn’t survive it.


    Ramona was reading more carefully.  “OK, phased means that it will propagate a bit before acting.  If it just wiped the first ship it came across, the virus wouldn’t spread.  This means that the virus will spread to a specified number of nodes and then begin to corrupt the local database.  That pretty much guarantees that most active nodes will be infected.  Wow, they seemed to have a pretty good model of Guild propagation delay in here.  I think this thing will work.”


    Leo hit the execute button.  The screen went black and then returned to it’s previous normal view.  He wasn’t sure what was happening but the show was over.  “I hope that works.”


    Ramona just shook her head.  “We may never know.”


    While Ramona and Leo had been working on the virus, Ollu had been working on their course.  With the mains still at 100%, the ship was quickly gaining velocity.  Not as fast as a warship, but still a respectable amount of acceleration.  She was shaking her head.  “If we had even an hour’s more notice, I think we could have made it to the e-limit before they could close the distance.  Those missiles are insanely fast, but we had a good head start.  As it is, we’ll pass down through the belt, out the other side and make it within a few light minutes of the e-limit.  After that, I have no idea what happens.”


    Time dragged on.  Unlike in the vids, space combat wasn’t very exciting.  The distances involved meant that things took a LONG LONG time to happen.  They knew WHAT was going to happen, it was just math.  The Theo had a certain ability to accelerate, the missiles had a significantly higher ability.  So, it was just distance, speed and acceleration.  There was no point in dodging or weaving around as that would simply result in less acceleration away from the missiles.


    After half an hour, the missiles started to enter the engagement envelope of the defense platforms.  As they started to engage, the incoming missile count started to drop, rapidly.  It quickly went from over two thousand, down to fifteen hundred, then down to eleven hundred.  As the missiles raced on, they left the envelope and the numbers steadied.  “One thousand and fifty three, exactly.”


    Leo looked at Ramona who just shook her head.  “I will program the BR’s to engage, but that’s just too many.  Even one or two hits on the Theo will be terminal.  This isn’t a warship, it’s not designed to take that kind of damage.”


    Leo patted her on the back.  “Nothing you can do.”  He thought about it a moment.  On impulse, he gently pulled her head around and gave her a kiss on the lips.  “Sorry it took me so long.”


    Ramona’s face was still for a moment, then she smiled.  “I’m sorry too.”


    Leo’s console started beeping.  He walked back over.  “Handshake.  We have a good handshake with the buoy.  Initiating a full sync.”


    Ramona was still locked on her console.  “Pushing the BR’s out to a full light second.  Orienting them for optimum intercept.”  A few minutes passed.  “Engaging.  Twenty.  A hundred.  Three hundred down!”  She became very still.  “BR’s offline.    Six hundred inbound.”


    “That’s it then.”


    Suddenly a shrill klaxon began to ring out on the bridge.  Then an automated voice.  “Collision alarm!  Collision alarm!”


    Ollu stalked over to the navigation station.  “Will you turn that damned thing off?  I already know what’s coming!”


    The watch stander looked at her with huge eyes.  “That’s in front of us, not behind us.”


    “What the hell!?!”


    Leo turned back to the main tactical screen.  Directly in front the Theo was a massive wave of inbound missiles.   Thousands of them.  “How did they get in front of us?”


    “Does it matter?”


    The communications offer suddenly stood up and began screaming.  “CAPTAIN!!  CAPTAIN!!”


    “Everyone calm down.  If this is the end, we go out as professionals.  Stay at your posts.”


    The watch stander just shook his head and pushed a button on his console.  A familiar voice boomed out of the speakers on the bulkhead.  “….  United Earth Task Force Zebra.   Repeat, all ships in the U-I sector are directed to stand down.  Under the provisions of the Treaty of Orion, we are undertaking punitive enforcement actions against all Guild vessels.  All Guild vessels will stand to and prepare to be boarded.  Non-compliance with this order will be grounds for immediate destruction.    This is Brigadier Vishnu Newman, commanding officer, United Earth Task Force Zebra.”


    Leo just looked at Ollu and Ramona, not really sure what to think.  Had he gone insane?  Or was the Brigadier about to save their asses?


    Ramona looked down at her console.  “Holy shit, those missiles are going to be CLOSE.”


    Of course, in space they could neither hear nor feel the missiles passing by.  But Leo could FEEL them.  “Closest approach one kilometer!”


    “Holy fuck!”


    For a spacecraft, passing within one kilometer of something was basically kissing distance.  No sane person would ever pass that close to another vessel on purpose.  At closing speeds approaching a significant percentage of light speed, relativistic effects made navigation extremely difficult.


    “Passing now!  They’re gone!”  Ramona continued to stare intently.  “They’re engaging the trailing missiles!  There they GO!  Jesus Christ!  They got them all!”


    Finally, the Earth ships started to appear on their sensors.  And they were CLOSE.  “Those ships must be stealthed.  We didn’t detect them until we were well within a light second.”


    “Theo, this is the Brigadier.  Put Craig on the line, please.”


    Leo took a handset to reply.  “Brigadier, this is Leo.  Craig is on Bohemia.”


    “Bohemia?”


    “It’s the Hab orbiting Fluffy, the gas giant.  We started a company to run QFeed and Craig is the CEO.  That hab is our corporate HQ.”


    “Pull the other one.”


    “No, really.  He’s running a major business there.”


    “Right.  I believe that he’s making money, it’s the running the business that has me gob smacked.”


    “Understood, but that’s where he is.”


    “Very well.  Stay clear and keep heading to the e-limit.   Safer for you out here.  We have some work to do in system.”


    Nobody on the Theo was about to argue with that.  The further from the combat currently going on in the system they could get, the better.  Most of them, including Leo, were just in shock.  He had been pretty convinced he was going to die, and his brain was not really functioning at full speed as a result.  He stared at the main display for at least ten minutes before he noticed a change.


    “Uh, are they targeting the buoys now?”


    Ramona had been focused on the battle over the planets, not looking at the outer system.  Now she shifted her focus to the four Guild buoys.  Each one of them now had a pair of missiles aimed at it.  “Why destroy their own buoys?”


    Ollu was nodding.  “They’re going to ban UI and try to contain the damage here.”


    “But QFeed makes that impossible.”


    Leo was watching more closely.  “Not if they take out our buoys also.”  He started looking more closely.  None of their buoys looked like they had been targeted.  Yet.


    Ramona was also investigating.  “Those things are really far out and very hard to see if they’re not transmitting.  Even if they are, you would have to walk across the laser to notice them.  Even if they know they’re out there, it’s a tough mission to track them.”


    Ollu was also investigating.  “The weak link is the repeater buoy in the inner system.  They need to register with the local network.  All the Guild would have to do is interrogate the local network and they will find them.”


    Leo typed a command into the build system.  “We have enough raw materials to print about a thousand of them.  Why not just keep printing them out?  If they destroy one, we just print out another.”


    Ramona was nodding.  “Yes.  And if we put them close to the asteroid belt, we can cover them pretty closely with automated defenses.  Wait a minute.”  After a few minutes, the main screen updated again with new flashing green icons.  “Twenty of them, spread out across the system.  Each one is inside the engagement envelope of at least three defensive platforms.  They could take them out, but it would be insanely expensive in terms of the number of missiles involved.  I think we can scale our production of satellites way faster than they can scale missile production.”


    Ollu was checking the plan.  “Let’s do it.”  She turned to the navigator.  “New course, let’s head for the first location and shape an elliptical course to hit each one of these locations.”


    The navigator got busy.  After a moment, he looked up.  “Aye aye captain.  Least time course three days.”


    “Course approved, execute.”


    Leo suddenly realized what they just did.  “Uh, is it a good idea to fly back into a combat zone we just recently escaped from?”


    Ramona shrugged.  “Hard to tell what will happen next, but those Earth ships are pretty tough.  It looks like the Guild forces are withdrawing to the far side of the system.  I think that we are OK at least for the first two waypoints.  Then we can make the call if things aren’t going well.”


    Leo looked at Ollu who nodded.  “OK, let me know if things change.”  He looked at the main viewer again.  “So, do we go ahead and send out the announcement to the system?  Let them know what’s happening?”


    Ollu shook her head.  “No, let’s wait until we have some redundancy.   So, deploy three and then send the announcement.”   She looked down at the course plot.  “That will be in about 23 hours.”


    Leo nodded.  “Right.”  Suddenly he felt amazingly tired.   “I’m going to bed.  Wake me if anything serious happens.”