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| The "Thinking Horndog" talked to me about the Sa'arm Cycle which captured my imagination. We discussed the subject and he was not displeased with allowing me to write within his framework. |
The Sa'arm are smart at some things and stupid at others.
First off, when you kill one, they automatically respond to look for a threat axis. All of them work closely together as a single entity to find and respond to a threat.
This works pretty well, really, because we built more and more "staged" traps that would start small and then they'd cluster more and more... and we could knock out a LOT of them.
My squad-mate Melinda asked "How well can they handle their own fire?"
When our platoon leader Tori listened to her question, she nodded. "Let's see, shall we?"
We've built mannequins-- all right, so they don't look like humans, we don't want them to see us as immediate threats, so they look like "Imperial Walkers" from one of the Star Wars movies, on four legs, but nowhere near as big. We do not want them to see anything that looks like a practical weapons platform, either, so we set one up to fire on them while between a scouting party and a main body. It was... ummmm... entertaining.
Unfortunately it only worked once, dammit, at least with this particular hive, but we had them reactive and having to create new techniques.
Creativity is not in the Sa'arm genome, did you know that? We've learned that their "gestalt" communication is far too reliable and their brains, especially in the more benign environment of one of their colony worlds, being away from many of the molecular irritants of their homeworld, handles transmission accurately. So, no errors, no creativity. The whole race had, we later learned, become savants.
You see, it's the errors in processing that provides for the "spark" of creativity. We learned, in this whole war, that the Confederacy's races weren't so much effete as they had edited their genomes for mental accuracy and reliability, so they were, for the most part, less adaptable than the Sa'arm. Even in these battlefield conditions, the Sa'arm didn't have the "spark" and could not learn-- much less invent-- new tactics.
Even so, the Sa'arm could learn not to pursue some targets if they weren't really doing much damage. A couple of our staged cascade booby traps taught them to write off pursuit beyond a certain point. They were able to learn that some of their reflexes were less productive against us human beings.
After a while they did their best to ignore us unless our troops were collected into a large enough body to be worth pursuing.
Even then, as long as we had shielding from their artillery, we could inflict damage... and withdraw.
We needed armor.
Where the fuck was Keith Laumer when we needed him?
Oh, yeah, he's been dead for a while.
When we got our first Bolos-- and, believe me, none of the Confederacy's AIs wanted to drive them, much less were able to slip their limiters enough to do it, so we had to create our own AIs. At first the Sa'arm did use their standard surround and swamp technique, which made the first batch of bolos wonderful dickhead motels. They checked in... but we checked 'em out, but they never left. Later, the other trick the Sa'arm were infamous for-- undermining-- was tried and they learned that this wasn't a winning strategy, either.
With the Sa'arm we humans had learned that we needed to take a concept from fiction: the self-destruct device. Any time they captured something... it showed them the error of their ways.
A cautious Sa'arm is a hive that's been attrited enough to be on the edges of incompetence.
One of the things we learned by compartmentalizing-- by the simple expedient of a blockade, especially of the couriers-- the Sa'arm was that we could experiment in multiple systems with differing techniques to figure out what worked well... or what we could do that they could not counter.
My platoon included a joker who's been collecting stories of various tricks we've played. He's calling it "Zen and the Art of Sa'arm Baiting", and, truly, we humans were masters at that.
The Sa'arm, by the way, did not like Bolos. Hell, they really didn't know what to do about us Marines, either, but they could not sustain their frontal attacks given our tendency to just nuke them when enough dickheads showed up.
We finally had a weapon that would sneak in past their defenses, on the air, itself. The Confederacy's AIs would not let us turn any of the nanotechnic devices into weapons so we had to use good old human molecular biology.
It's good that we Marines get to know enough about all of the work being done-- it's not like being captured will give the dickheads an opportunity to interrogate one of us, you know, so we secrets aren't being kept. Besides, like Open Source, the many eyes in the field gave an opportunity for mistakes to be shallow.
So, I've learned, some of our biologists found that some of the Sa'arm neurotransmitters are, well, interesting.
So one bug was created that loved to eat that neurotransmitter and produce something that wasn't so much toxic, but, rather, inert. Their bodies wouldn't flush away this "benign" waste product and so we could watch as their gestalt got stupider and stupider as it attempted graceful degradation as units failed.
Unfortunately, this bug was eventually able to be beaten off by the Sa'arm because their immune system was able to find and control this infection... but the accumulated waste products didn't go away any time soon and so younger units had to "go live".
It wasn't a wide gap but we managed to kill off a lot of Sa'arm on the planet without the heavy use of nukes, though, unfortunately, we were doing them a favor in flushing out the ones who'd suffered most by the infection.
Let's not go into the bug that produced a hallucinogen. We almost had a complete disaster as they suddenly learned new tactics, dammit. Again, that didn't last long.
Thankfully.
The next bug was a virus. A retrovirus, to be exact. We made a simple edit in the Sa'arm that didn't affect them, much.
It really didn't. It spread fast, though, and didn't do anything to adults.
No, this one was more subtle.
There were no young being produced to take over the duties of older units when the most recent batch died off.
So... there was attrition.
Did you know that the Sa'arm have some weird responses to such a threat, even though it was below the threshold of direct detectability?
When the Sa'arm "gestalt" recognized that its units were all sterile... it killed itself in a way that sterilized the whole planet. We lost a whole battalion when this happened.
So, now we have a weapon we can use to defeat them, on a planet by planet basis.
Yes, right, it does work, it is effective.
But, dammit, given that the Sa'arm self-destruct in a way that kills off all other life on a planet, just to ensure sterility to protect the next Hive ship from the same kind of threat, kind of makes it a Pyrrhic victory, doesn't it?
Well, we could kill of their advance this way, and then pare 'em back, but...
Having to go back and terraform a planet after doing so was NOT going to work for the Earth.