Luddites' targets

Usage examples of machines.

machines on the surface dug what looked to Jory like simple trenches, and unwound spools of the equivalent of barbed wire, long strands of polyphase matter, each displaying a quasi intelligence on the level of that of an ant or bee, programmed to entrap or at least delay berserker landing machines when they appeared.

This massive effort resulted in ever more interceptions of enemy messages, fodder for the massive optelectronic brains, perhaps the largest and fastest machines of their kind ever assembled, which were engaged in cryptanalysis.

Of course the enemy, in its relentless quest for knowledge of the badlife and their ways, might possibly have dispatched small fighting machines to close with the Solarian ship and board it, and against those small machines the carbine would probably be effective.

Ships and machines passing within range were probed, scanned by quantum devices.

By such means, machines long separated from one another, or even models of different generations, built according to divergent plans, could always communicate with each other.

Gift had also heard rumors that the power station had been integrated into the defensive network, where it played the role of a kind of trap or sink, into which attacking machines were to be decoyed or pushed.

There, arranged in revetments, ready presumably for a fast liftoff, were dozens, no, scores of the livecrewed fighting machines that would form an important part of the defense when the attack came.

In fact everyone said that Colonel Shanga, who was commanding ground troops and machines on the atoll, was more than willing to have Nash performing the job of live observer when the attack came.

While he listened, his mouth gradually falling open, Flower gently but firmly expressed her doubt that those machines really wanted to kill anybody.

Gift and Flower in their tourist travels also heard one whispered rumor to the effect that some actual berserker machines, imported along devious trade routes from who knows where, by unknown means, had been and were still being brought into close contact with Solarian society.

Not only by people who were goodlife in the traditional sense, but by some well-meaning people who considered such machines ambassadors for peace.

The other side of the coin of human involvement with berserkers was that some people regarded the death machines with a hatred so intense as to close their eyes and ears to argument or demonstration of any kind.

She gestured to where some large machines were busy digging, scraping, remolding the peculiar stuff of the atoll.

Jory realized that she would have to rely on her machines to see anything at all.

Mostly these were small devices, no bigger than human heads or hands, and were triggered by the passage of probability waves cast out by machines or ships moving in nearby flight-space.