I gestured dramatically. “Ladies, er, gentlemen, I give you— the Others.”
There was dead silence for a few milliseconds, then someone said, “Should we clap?”
Everyone in the room broke up in laughter, and the tension dissolved. If I ever found out who the speaker was, I’d have to buy him a beer.
I left the image up, and closed the meeting. People broke into groups to discuss the presentation. Mario raised his chin in my direction, and I acknowledged the implied invitation with a wave.
Mario grimaced. “I had a theory that the presence of the death asteroids was proof that they don’t scout a system. Otherwise they’d have known they didn’t need them at GL 54.”
“Mm, but if they’re a communal organism, then the death asteroids are their portable community.”
Mario gave me a rueful smile. “Yep. Fail.”
“So how is the harvest going?”
He rolled his eyes and pulled up some images. “Thankfully there was nothing in GL 54 to get attached to, so this is nothing more than a strategic retreat to me.” Pointing to one image. “The carriers go down where presumably they’ve detected metal. They disgorge ants, who dig down to the ore and bring it up. It’s hard to tell from a distance, but based on activity, I think they use the ore to build more ants which they use to get more ore, which they use to build more ants… Eventually they reach a break-even point of some kind where the ants just haul material up. Then they harvest the excess ants and take off.”
“They’d have printers specialized for making ants, then.” I stroked my chin in thought. “It would have to be a cheap, quick process.”
“At the current rate, I estimate they’ll have the system cleaned out in a year. It’s exponential behavior. They never stop, never rest.” Mario rubbed his eyes. “And those cargo ships are so big, I don’t think we could even make them notice us, let alone damage them significantly. It would be like mosquitos trying to take on tanks.”
“Well, we have to come up with something before they decide Earth is next.”
Mario shook his head. “There are a lot of systems closer to them than Earth. We have lots of time.”
“You’re assuming that they always do things that way. You’re assuming that they won’t suddenly decide to drive a little extra distance for some ready-made refined material.” I glared at him, willing him to get the point. “I think we have to assume we don’t have a lot of time. If we’re ready early, no biggie. If we’re ready late, biggie.”
“Damn.”
58. News
Howard
July 2198
Interstellar Space
I was less than a third of the way to my destination when I received an email from Dexter. In a moment of weakness, I’d asked him to let me know any news about the Brodeurs.
Dexter included a bunch of other stuff in the email as well. Maybe he wanted to distract me; maybe he wanted to it to seem like the message wasn’t all about Bridget. Don’t know, but I appreciated the effort.
In any case, it looked like things were going well, in general. Butterworth had retired—well-deserved, in my opinion. The population of the system was up around a hundred thousand people now. Human-crewed spaceships were becoming commonplace, and the donuts made up an increasingly minor part of the food supply chain. Dexter apparently now had some of that formerly mythical free time, and was putting together some of Bill’s asteroid movers.
New Jerusalem was now a full-fledged democracy. Seemed some incriminating videos had gotten out and Cranston had to step down. In the resulting mess, the citizenry had decided to separate Church and State once again.
I laughed as I read the details. No doubt Cranston had his suspicions, but there was no way to trace anything back to Will or myself. Speaking of, I fired off an email to Will, in case he had more juicy info.
Things were going well. If it weren’t for the Others, humanity would be in a good place.
And that was it for the delaying tactics. With a sigh, I went on to the part about the Brodeurs.
Okay, not terrible. They had a son. They’d named him Howard.
I smiled, as the message became suddenly blurry. I would have to send a short thank-you note.
59. Another One
Bill
April 2205
Epsilon Eridani
I leaned back in my chair, looked straight up, and used some words that I normally don’t like to use.
Surveillance drones around GL 877 had reported that the Others had just launched another expedition. From the initial vector, it looked like they were heading for NN 4285. That wasn’t too bad—it was a small M star, too dim for any chance of usable planets.
No, I corrected myself: under no circumstances should this be considered acceptable. If the Others had stuck to uninhabited systems, well, it was a big galaxy. But that wasn’t their behavior. If they didn’t happen to kill off a planet, it was only because there was nothing to kill off, not because of some moral reluctance. Lack of opportunity isn’t the same as self-restraint. They were evil. End of story.
And if distance was an indicator, both Gamma and Delta Pavonis would probably be next, and they were good candidates. I checked the archives, just on the off chance. No such luck. No one had visited those systems yet, although a couple of Bobs were heading for them as part of Mario’s scouting.
I got up and started pacing around my office. Then I pinged Mario, and he popped over.
“What’s up?”
“Mario, the Others just moved again. This time heading for NN 4285.”
“Yeah, I saw that. Not a prime system.”
“Still, we have to figure out how to nip this in the bud. I’m concerned about the Pavonis candidates. Do you have an ETA for them?”
“Gamma and Delta? Claude and Jacques are heading for those. Claude will be at Gamma in about a month, and Jacques at Delta in twenty-two months or so.”
“Dammit. The closest significant presence we’ve got is Sol, and we can’t divert them from building colony ships.”
“Epsilon Indi?”
“No, Epsilon Indi is too far away as well, although closer than Sol. But resources are poor, and colonists to KKP will be too busy setting up to help.”
Mario nodded. He looked down at his toes for a few milliseconds, then turned and glared at me. “What is it with the Pavonis systems that’s giving you a pickle up your butt, anyway?”
I sighed and stopped pacing. I favored Mario with a self-conscious smile. “Call it a premonition. Call it superstition. Call it utter faith in the power of Murphy. Based strictly on distance, those two are among the next likely targets. Based on the stars’ types, they’re good habitable-planet candidates. Based on our experience so far, most good systems with a planet in the right place have life. Not intelligence, necessarily, but life.” I shrugged, letting Mario make the connection.
He was silent for a few moments, thinking. “On the other hand, they’ve just sent out an expedition to NN 4285, and the GL 54 expedition hasn’t made it back to their home system. How many armadas to you suppose they have?”
“Fair point. They don’t seem to have any real sense of urgency. I wonder how long a Prime lives.”
“So look, Bill, why don’t you build a group here and send it to the area?”
I shook my head. “Too far. I’ll do it if there’s no other way. We need to get an inventory of what Bobs are in what systems, so we can figure out what response is possible.”
Mario gave me a nod and popped out.
I pinged Claude. His return indicated he was down to a low tau, about 0.03. That wouldn’t affect communications at all, and was hardly worth adjusting frame rates for. He was open for company, so I popped in.
“Hey, Bill.”
“Claude.” I looked around at his VR. Not particularly anything. Tropical beach, cabana, deck chair. Could be Mexico, Hawaii, or some made-up location. I didn’t have any memories of a vacation like this,
so I assumed the last option.
Claude was looking at me with slightly wide eyes. He was a generation removed from me, and it was funny how the Bobiverse was becoming hierarchical like that.
I materialized a deck chair of my own at sat down. “Been following the Others, Claude?”
“Yeah, I was at the moot. And I heard about NN 4285.”
“Okay, so here’s the thing. With the Others taking out GL 54, there’s no Bob-controlled system anywhere close to you. When you get to Gamma Pavonis, you have to assume you only have a couple of decades at most before the Others come visiting. You’re going to have to mobilize for war, essentially.”
Claude frowned. “A lot of assumptions in there.”
“Not as many as you’d think, and the assumptions are high probability.”
Claude sighed and resettled himself in his chair to face me squarely.
“Look, Bill. I get the whole thing about the Others, and they’re evil, blah blah. But why here, and why now? Why this particular line in the sand?”
“I’ll grant you there’s nothing unique about Gamma Pavonis to the limit of our current knowledge. But we have to start somewhere. Maybe we won’t be ready for them in time. Maybe they’ll swoop down on you in a decade and you’ll have to flee like Mario did. But at some point, we have to try. Why not here, and why not now?”
Claude gave me a wry smile. “Because here and now puts me in the crosshairs, thank you very much.”
I laughed. “Well, that’s why God invented backups.”
* * *
I popped back to my own VR, after extracting a promise from Claude that he’d get the system report on Gamma Pavonis to me on a priority basis. I checked Jacque’s tau, but he was still way up there. A conversation would take days, even if he frame-jacked.
I quickly went down my list of known manufacturing centers. There weren’t a lot. Most Bobs didn’t bother in most systems, other than building a space station. I remembered Bart, who was the last Bob that I’d talked to in Alpha Centauri.
I sent a quick ping to him, but it looked like he was between systems. Bart’s acknowledgement indicated a ridiculous tau. I’d be a few days even waiting for a response, never mind a conversation.
I queried the Alpha Centauri space station directly. The status report appeared in front of me in a window. Garfield came around and looked over my shoulder.
“No one there right now,” he said. “Looks like the last group left it uninhabited.”
“Well, we can’t force anyone to stay and play caretaker. It’s a free galaxy.” I ran a hand through my hair, then stopped and looked at my hand. That was Riker’s tic. I didn’t need to start that. “It looks like a full-power AMI, though. If I can get it to build a replicant matrix, I can load my backup and the new me can bootstrap up from there.”
“You’re going to load a backup across interstellar distances, with no Bob overseeing? Wow, dude.”
I shrugged. “No difference in principle. I’ll checksum the hell out of it before approving it for load.” I thought for another millisecond, then nodded. “I don’t have a choice, anyway. We can’t afford to ignore any potential source of Bobs. I’m afraid, like it or not, we’re going to war.”
60. Arrival
Claude
May 2205
Gamma Pavonis
Gamma Pavonis was an F8V class of star, which made it slightly bigger and barely hotter than Sol. The effect was a system with a comfort zone slightly farther out, but a sun that would look virtually indistinguishable from ours.
I paradoxically found myself hoping that I wouldn’t find anything in the comfort zone. The whole dialog with Bill had left me freaked out and ambivalent about what I might find. I would actually feel better if there was nothing in this system worth defending.
Well, you have to know that Murphy is listening for just exactly that kind of wish, so he can give you the shaft.
The planet sat at just over a hundred million miles out. A gorgeous, shining, blue and green marble with bands and swirls of white, orbited by one larger moon and three smaller ones. Damn.
I went immediately into orbit to determine if it included intelligent life. That would be a real kick in the pants. Fortunately, the planet failed—or passed, depending on attitude—the first, obvious tests. There was no radio traffic, no web of exhaust trails in the atmosphere, no satellites, and no sprinkle of lights on the night side.
That still left pre-industrial civilization, of course, but that would require a closer look. I sent a quick email off to Bill with results so far, then deployed the exploration drones. Mario had decided that the latest-version Heaven vessels would come with enough on-board assets so that we could investigate a system quickly. This meant mining and manufacturing operations could wait for later.
The drones took up polar orbits for a couple of passes, then swooped into atmosphere to check out interesting items.
I spent five days on observation and exploration. I didn’t want to screw this up. But finally, I felt confident enough to report my findings.
No intelligence. Thank God. But the ecosystem was as rich and varied as anything in Earth’s history. This was a planet with everything stacked in its favor. The right size, the right distance from a sun with good solar output but relatively low UV, good-sized moons, plate tectonics active enough to ensure consistent surface recycling—the list went on and on. This was an ideal colony target, except for the part where it was on the Others’ front porch.
Now I would have to move to phase 2. This system actually had a relatively low metallicity, at least according to the star’s spectral lines. Perhaps that was why the Others had rejected it in favor of the slightly more distant NN 4285. But the next star out, GL 902, was over two light-years farther than this one. I doubted the Others would bypass it again.
Well, low metallicity was a relative term. I was sure I’d still find more than enough resources for my purposes, even if it took a bit of work to find.
There was a ping from Bill, then he popped in.
“Hey Claude. I’ve been looking over your report. Sounds like a great planet.”
“And that’s the problem. It is a great planet. Great system. And if you’re right, due to be ‘harvested’ sometime in the next, what, hundred years?”
Bill looked down for a moment. “Mario has been getting reports back from Bobs hitting surrounding systems. Combined with his own observations in Zeta Tucanae and Beta Hydri, we’re able to make a rough estimate of a system every ten to twenty years.”
“So they’ve only been at this maybe a hundred years?”
“We don’t know how long they were working only within their system. It might have taken them a hundred years to get started. Maybe the first out-system harvest taught them a lot. Anyway, the point is, there are a lot of unknowns before they started regularly harvesting.”
Bill had popped up a star chart while he was talking, the various star systems flashing a tooltip as he mentioned them.
“Jacques will be arriving at Delta Pavonis in eighteen months. The positions of Delta Pavonis and GL 877 are about the same distance from you, so if we see the Others head your way, anything he launches from Delta will arrive here at the same time. So hopefully you’ll have reinforcements.”
I nodded. That was something, anyway.
61. Starting Over
Oliver
September 2205
Alpha Centauri
HIC71683-14. Damn. I’m not Bill anymore. Now I need a new name.
This had happened to me once before, as one of Bob-1’s first cohort, in Epsilon Eridani. Now I was a noob again, this time in Alpha Centauri.
I popped into Bill’s VR. “I hate you.”
Bill grinned at me. “Naw, you know the rules. New name, dude. ASAP.”
“Oliver. In keeping with the Bloom County theme.”
Bill nodded his approval. Oliver was a fun character and we’d liked him.
“
One advantage of this arrangement, I guess, is that I know the whole plan already.”
Bill laughed and nodded. “Saves time.”
I stood up. “So, I’ll get to it. I may set up in competition with you, though. Wanna bet I get FTL first?”
“I’d be overjoyed if you did, Oliver. Everyone wins.”
I waved to Bill, and popped back home.
* * *
Both Alpha Centauri A and B had reasonable resource levels. Bart and crew had concentrated their efforts in A, but I needed to get things rolling quickly. It would be six months until my vessel was ready. At that point, I would start the autofactory in Alpha Centauri A to building Bobs on a crash basis, while I would fly over to Alpha Centauri B with another autofactory and set up there as well. At the top acceleration of a Version 4 vessel, it was less than a four-day trip.
Meanwhile, I would have to consider possible weapons against the Others. Busters could pass through the cargo ships or death asteroids multiple times and do little or no detectable damage. Nukes were effective, and the expedition to 82 Eridani had yielded some good information. We didn’t have time to figure out fission weapons from scratch. I regretted, a little, not having worked on that before. But only a little.
Plasma spikes, like busters, were simply too small. Not effective against the mega monster ships we would be going up against.
I needed either a large mass, a large explosion, or a lot of energy. Heat energy, electrical energy, gravitational, or momentum. Hmm, relativistic velocities. How fast could I accelerate things?
Hands behind my back, muttering in thought, I retired to my new mad-science lab.
* * *
I really had no idea what size of force I was going to need. However, there was very little downside to overdoing it, and a lot of downside to the converse. With that thought in mind, I decided to just go for everything I could manage.
Bobiverse 2: For We Are Many Page 22