“Well, look,” Neil mused. “Sometimes, when you’re designing something, you make allowances for future expansion. As long as you have a good idea what the requirements will be, you can allow for it.”
“So it’s an expansion slot.”
“Yeah, thanks, Captain Sarcasm. Still, you’re probably not far wrong.”
“That’s wonderful, Neil. But are we any closer to being able to activate this flying island nation?”
“Let’s have a look, Hersch.” With that, Neil pulled up our working schematic. He quickly updated it with this latest information, then directed the simulation to power up.
We watched the simulation as telltales indicated virtual sections that were receiving power.
Eventually the simulation ended with the hulk in a stable state, and no issues that we could see. Neil and I looked at each other, smiled, and said in unison, “We’re good to go!”
Battle
Bill
June 2223
82 Eridani
Premier Campbell put her face in her hands and was silent for several seconds. President Ito attempted to remain stoic, but I could see that he was shaken.
Campbell looked up. “Mack? He’s…gone?”
“No, ma’am,” I replied. “We have his matrix. Or at least, it’s still in one piece and we know where it is. But he’s offline, for the moment. We’re trying to get it to a colony site for safekeeping.”
Campbell nodded, looking relieved.
“And how can we help, Mr. Johansson?”
I turned to President Ito’s video image. “We’re trying to inventory all our assets in this system. Anything that can be used as a weapon, anything that can be remote controlled, anything SCUT-enabled, anything that can get out of atmosphere…”
“How do the androids work? I believe there’s one at each colony site.”
I brightened. “Those are SCUT-controlled, so yes, we can use those. That’s one more, well, two more control loci for us. As soon as we can, we’ll send a couple of drones to pick them up. We can use them to relay orders to the non-SCUT mining drones.” I thought for a moment. “Plus, they’ll be useful to supplement the roamers for manipulation.”
Ito nodded, and silence descended.
Campbell finally broke the pause. “We are at war, essentially, right? Are the colonies in danger?”
I considered for a millisecond. “I don’t see how, at least on an immediate basis, ma’am. Medeiros doesn’t have anything that can bomb you from orbit. If we can keep the autofactories from him, or at least keep the printers away, that won’t change. If he gets a printer, or already has one, he still has to bootstrap up through all the automation needed for an autofactory, before he can start building something like an asteroid mover. And there’s no way he’ll be dumb enough to try to print anything explosive.”
“On the other hand…” Ito said in a slow drawl, inviting me to explain counterpoint.
I grinned. “On the other hand, we have no printer capability at the moment—although we are in possession of the actual printers, more or less—and we’d have to go through the same bootstrapping process. To a lesser extent, maybe, because we have roamers and drones and now the two androids.”
“So it’s détente.”
“I’m not sure it’s even at that level, ma’am. Right now it’s more like that Hugh Grant and Colin Firth fight scene in Bridget Jones’ Diary.”
She looked at me askance, then shook her head without asking. Apparently Mack already had a reputation.
“Look,” I continued, “If we can get one or more of the printers onto one of your worlds, and get enough raw elements down for it, and do all this without being intercepted by Medeiros, then we can maybe build busters or something.”
“That’s a lot of if’s,” Campbell replied.
“Well, it’ll depend on what Medeiros does next. I’m afraid we’re forced to react to his moves. Any attempt on our part to control the play will result in a missile down our throats.”
“How many missiles does he have?”
“Zero, we thought. So, unknown.”
Ito thought for a moment. “You have a number of mining drones, I understand. Can you use them to ram the Brazilian?”
It was a good try, and I nodded an acknowledgement. “Sorry, President Ito, but that would be like trying to ram a sports car with tractors. In principle, you could do damage, but first you have to catch him.”
Ito sighed and sat back. Again, there was a contemplative silence.
“Look,” I said, “If you think of anything, call, email, or text me. We’ll keep working on it from our end, and I’ll keep you updated.”
“Good enough.” Premier Campbell nodded and ended her connection. A moment later, Ito blinked out as well.
I sighed, sat back, and looked at the ceiling. Like the Others weren’t bad enough.
* * *
By the time Medeiros got to the nearest Lagrange autofactory location, we’d long since flung the printers and print heads well beyond his ability to detect them. The Bobs had also managed to hide, damage, or collect most of the autofactory automation, leaving nothing valuable except the actual metal ingots. We watched Medeiros from a non-SCUT drone, carefully disguised as flotsam, running on power cells so as not to show up on radiation detectors. It would run down soon, but if Medeiros didn’t pick up on it, we could collect it later. If he did, he would have gained only a regular mining drone, and one without a fusion reactor.
The Brazilian craft buzzed around, inspecting and searching, then settled on a single location and stopped moving. I half-expected some kind of raging and destroying things; but realistically, Medeiros was career military, and presumably well-disciplined. He wouldn’t waste missiles on petulance.
I hoped he would decide on a strategy before the drone gave out. We’d identified three possibilities: one, head for one of the colonies and set up a picket, on the presumption that we had sent at least one printer that way; two, head off and start scanning for printers and print heads on their lonely trajectories; or three, start looking for roamers and mining drones to either destroy or try to take over.
And finally, just when the drone was on its last few watts of stored power, Medeiros accelerated out of the area.
“Do we have an indication of where he’s going?”
I jerked in surprise. Too intent on watching Medeiros, I hadn’t realized that Will was visiting my VR. I turned to him. “I don’t think so. He’s just headed off in what appears to be some random direction. The power cells are about to give out, so we can’t track him by SUDDAR.”
Will muttered an expletive, a clear indication that the situation was getting to him. “We have to assume scenarios one or two, then, since they’re the worst cases. How many printers and heads have we rerouted to a colony?”
“Two of each going to each colony. Well spread out. Of course, he can spot them on approach with a SUDDAR sweep, but he’ll have to be close enough to physically intercept.”
“Then he’ll have to intercept without destroying them. Destruction is acceptable, from our point of view.”
I nodded. “This is going to be a long, drawn-out battle, Will.”
* * *
Garfield and I were sitting, drinking coffee, taking one of our increasingly rare breaks, when Guppy popped in.
[Printer convoy en route to Asgard has been hit with a SUDDAR sweep.]
Garfield and I looked at each other. “Crap”, he said. “That means he went for option one.”
“I guess it makes sense,” I replied. “For option two, he’d be scanning an increasingly large volume of space. This way, we are essentially coming to him.”
I turned to Guppy. “Were you able to triangulate?”
[Negative. Sweep was short range.]
“Smart,” Garfield said. “He doesn’t announce himself unless he makes contact, and if he does, he’s right on top of us.”
“Which means he’s right on top of us.” I smacked my forehead.
[Convoy has been disabled. Video feed cut off.]
Garfield and I exchanged a look. Had Medeiros simply blown up the convoy? Was his plan to deny us the printers?
Wordlessly, I called up the truncated video. Garfield watched the three-second sequence.
“Well, hell,” I said, when we were done. “It appears Medeiros can learn.”
“Mmm, hmm. He’s building busters. Or he built busters. Wait, when did he build busters?” Garfield frowned and continued, “If this is the Alpha Centauri Medeiros, then his first exposure to us was the day we razed their installation. He would have had to build busters after that. There was no indication that the Brazilians were building kinetic weapons before that point.”
I gave him a sickly grin. “Sorry, buddy, I guess you missed the conversation after the attack. We figure he has at least one printer of his own. So he learned from Alpha Centauri.”
“So why’s he doing what he’s doing?”
“Two-pronged strategy. Attempt to gather as many printers as he can, while denying them to us. Geometric progression means a small advantage up front can turn into an insurmountable lead, eventually.” I stared into space for a few milliseconds. “We have to take him out, now. If he gets ahead of us, the colonists are as good as dead.”
Garfield closed his eyes and shook his head slowly. “And we put them there.”
* * *
Captain Richards from the Asgard colony pressed his lips together and said nothing. He didn’t have to. On top of everything the colonists were dealing with, they now had Medeiros to worry about.
“Are you certain that he will attack the colony?”
“Not certain, captain. But he’s made it pretty clear on previous encounters that he is utterly loyal to Brazil, considers us to be at war, and isn’t interested in discussions. I’m also not entirely sure he’s sane at this point.” I looked over at Garfield, who rolled his eyes dramatically. “I’d hate to try communicating with him, only to find that we’d attracted his attention to the colonies.”
Richards nodded, and sat back with a huff. “And we have nothing.”
“Not that we’ve been able to find. We could ask Mack, if we could get him onto a cradle, but right now we can’t risk trying to fly his matrix in. We’re getting occasional glimpses of Medeiros, and he does his best to destroy anything he detects.”
“At both colonies? How many of him are there?” Richards frowned at me.
I thought for a second. “There’s no overlap in appearances, so there’s only one of him. But I think he’s programmed his busters to patrol and knock down anything they detect. Right now, he owns the high ground.”
General Kiroshi from the Japanese colony had been listening without comment in another video window. Now he spoke up. “We have only small printers, useful for quick manufacturing of minor items, but insufficient for anything like your busters. And it would take months to bootstrap up to real industrial printers.”
Richards nodded. “Same here. Ours are big enough to print more mosquito killers, but that’s—”
“Wait, what?” I sat up straight.
Richards raised an eyebrow. “Super vampire something something mosquitoes. Mack didn’t mention them?”
“Yes, I remember them.” I gave him a sideways glare. “I didn’t realize you were handling manufacturing yourselves.”
“Well, sure, because we needed thousands and Mack couldn’t be bothered. They’re about the size of a baseball, so not really useful for anything but mosquito patrol.”
“But…thousands?” I leaned forward, radiating interest.
Richards’ eyes started to grow rounder as he realized something was up. “Er, yes, most of them are on standby right now, since we seem to have beaten back the scourge. We were going to return them to raw materials eventually. But I think we had three or four thousand running around at one point.”
I let a slow smile grow on my face. “They may be small, but a few hundred hitting a buster at the same time will still have an effect. We may be able to clear the sky around Asgard long enough to get the printers to ground.”
“Can they even fly outside of atmosphere?”
“Not a problem, captain. It’s actually more trouble building them to fly in atmosphere.”
“Excellent,” the captain said. “Let’s get this operation going.”
* * *
The mosquito killers were too small to carry SCUT comms, so we had to give the AMIs complete enough instructions to handle any situation we could think of. One in each hundred was designated as an observer, ordered to send a video record back to the colony, if possible, or to record and return otherwise.
We sent off two thousand killers in five squads, hoping to catch as many busters as possible by surprise. A couple of killers were programmed to leak radio telemetry, which hopefully would attract some of Medeiros’ devices.
Captain Richards was mirroring everything to Kiroshi and myself. I watched the numerous video windows as the observers delivered status and telemetry.
“Got a blip,” Captain Richards announced.
I’d seen the change in the video window several milliseconds before, of course, but there was no good reason to remind him of my true nature.
The telemetry from the observer indicated two bogeys approaching the group. Per their orders, the killers changed course to intercept. We hoped that Medeiros hadn’t programmed caution into his busters. A bunch of baseball-sized objects hopefully wouldn’t trigger the default danger-avoidance routines.
The busters zeroed in on the noisy killers, seemingly ignoring the cloud of attendants. At the last possible moment, every single mosquito killer altered course to aim directly at the two busters. The change apparently registered with the dim AMI brains, because both busters went into hard turns. Too little, too late, though. The smaller and more maneuverable killers easily kept up with the change in vectors.
Contact wasn’t the dramatic flash we were used to seeing as two heavy devices collided at interplanetary speeds. The killers avoided the large steel ball up front and went for reactor cooling radiators, SURGE emitters, and other obvious signs of technology.
It was like being pelted in a hailstorm. The first couple dozen impacts had no real effect; then dents started to appear, followed by seams popping, then parts flying off. In less than thirty seconds, the busters were drifting aimlessly, and we still had more than a hundred killers left.
“See if you can get them to shepherd the parts into low orbit,” Richards suggested. “If we can rescue the material, great. Otherwise, we push it into atmosphere and deny it to Medeiros.”
I nodded. A good strategy. I wasn’t sure how we’d get that much mass down to ground level—other that the obvious way—but I’d worry about that once we had rescued some drones.
“Two down…” Richards grinned at me, then turned in his video window to face Kiroshi. “General, once we’ve cleared the Asgard environs, I’ll send a squad of mosquito killers your way.”
General Kiroshi nodded. “Thank you. Even if we are not ultimately successful, the process of attrition should keep Medeiros busy.”
“Yes,” I added. “We just need to knock off busters faster than he can make them. And if he’s making busters, he’s not making more printers.”
“We’ll keep at this, Bill.” Captain Richards nodded to me. “I’ll keep you up to date.”
Good enough. I still had a war with the Others to prepare for.
Cities in Fight
Marcus
September 2215
Poseidon
I watched the long-range image, which showed the expanding cloud of debris that used to be my Heaven vessel decoy. I’d been lying about my location for several months now, and the Council seemed to have bought it. Three Council security vessels left the area at far too high an acceleration for the cargo vessels they appea
red to be. It would seem the Council could be sneaky as well.
I fired off a report to Riker, cc’d to Bill, and saved a backup to my Fortress of Solitude, circling Eta Cassiopeia B. If the Council ever found that, I’d be thoroughly hooped. Fortunately, that was unlikely. The Council still had fewer than a dozen ships, and the companion star simply hadn’t come up in discussions for a long time.
Of course, the Council had obviously been engaging in covert preparations as well, as evinced by the three souped-up and armed cargo ships. Now that they believed me dead, I hoped that they would openly play their hand.
I returned my presence to my android, which was standing at parade rest. As I moved my arms into a more relaxed position, everyone turned to me.
“Well?” Kal said.
I grinned at him. “Three very non-standard cargo vessels just took out my decoy vessel. It would have attempted evasive tactics consistent with its published specs. I’m sure the security personnel are very proud of themselves.”
“What about the cargo vessels?”
“I’ve got some stealth busters following them right now. But we don’t know what the Council’s total strength is, or where they’ve placed it. I have to assume that my estimate of a dozen ships is incorrect. We’ll have to take a wait-and-see stance until they show their hand. And remember, officially, I’m dead.”
Gina looked up from her phone and cut into the conversation. “They’ve moved on four cities: Lothar, Morbus, Xanator, and Gathol. Attempted to board and take over—you were right, they were trying to avoid damaging the cities.”
“Status?” I asked.
“Repelled with significant losses. They didn’t expect resistance.”
“They also didn’t expect,” Gina replied, “weapon systems that weren’t on the blueprints.”
I grinned. “My fault. I forgot to file the changes with the Permits department.”
Kal waved his phone. “They’ve made an announcement.”
We all turned to him, eager to hear what the Council had come up with. Kal read through the text, deliberately injecting a pompous tone into the pronouncement. When he was done, we all sat in a semi-circle, ready for a council of war.
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