All These Worlds (Bobiverse Book 3)

by Dennis E. Taylor

  February 2244

  Epsilon Eridani

  “Honey, I’m home!”

  Bridget turned to me as I closed the apartment door. “And that never gets old.”

  “Nope. Never will.” I grinned and gave her a hug and a kiss. “Where’s my martini?”

  “It’s in the liquor bottles. Some assembly required. Make me one, too.” She smiled at me and turned back to the computer’s Canvas.

  I sighed with contentment and went over to put together some actual drinks. Sadly, in real life, you couldn’t just materialize a martini. On the other hand, no matter how much I tweaked the VR, they still tasted better in Real than in Virt.

  I handed Bridget her drink. She barely looked up from the Canvas but grunted thanks. I peeked over her shoulder. It looked like a species tree for some segment of native life on Quilt. Something with wings and a stinger. Which, some to think of it, didn’t narrow it down much.

  The diagram took up the entire Canvas, except for the inset in the corner showing a picture of Howie, Angeline, and their three children. Bridget was a grandmother, and her complaints about how old it made her feel didn’t fool anyone. We visited regularly, using the Vulcan androids, and nana was a huge favorite.

  I wandered over to the picture window and looked down on the city of Tantor. Yes, that’s right. Tantor. Some twit wanted a literary reference when naming the city and left out a letter. So now we lived in an elephant. Amateurs.

  I snorted in derision and turned away. Bridget said, “Are you grousing about the city’s name again?”

  “You read minds now?”

  “There’s a tone in your snort that says morons. You were looking out the window. It’s not much of a stretch.”

  I laughed and raised my glass in salute. We’d grown together over the years, and we knew each other as well as any married couple with decades under their belt. Bridget spared a moment to smile at me, then went back to grumbling and poking at the Canvas in the air before her.

  In the distance, the city dome separated us from the atmosphere of Big Top. KKP had finally gotten officially changed to Quilt, but the Jovian primary had kept its original moniker. No one seemed to mind.

  Blimps, or the local equivalent, floated past outside the dome, with the inevitable retinue of predators. We were beginning to realize that life on gas giants was as ubiquitous, plentiful, and thematically consistent as that on terrestrial planets. There was a mounting chorus of demands that we check out other types of environments as well. Good time to be a biologist.

  Tantor’s population—I gritted my teeth as I had the thought—was up around a million, now. We’d expected some reluctance from the population of Quilt when we started building cities in the clouds of Big Top; but it turned out most people were quite happy to leave behind the overwhelming ecological maelstrom of the planet.

  I sidled around to get in Bridget’s peripheral vision. “Any new nasties?”

  “Hah!” She turned to me. “Honestly, Howard, I think the planet actually evolves new species as fast as we get rid of the old ones. Humans are an unexploited niche, I guess. I’m sure some of these beasties didn’t exist at all ten years ago.”

  I grunted. So far, nothing had evolved a taste for android, so I was good.

  I raised my martini to my lips, and Bridget said, “Howard, have you ever considered adopting?”

  * * *

  Alcohol is surprisingly difficult to get out of clothing and carpets. You’d think it would evaporate quickly, but the odor remains. It took several minutes of cleaning before discussion could continue.

  “What?” Not my best response ever.

  “There was that shuttle disaster a while ago. A lot of children left parentless. Things happen. People die. More so than in a truly settled, tamed society, in fact. There are similar issues on Vulcan, Romulus, and the other colonies. Adults have risky jobs. Governments are actually having to create departments to deal with it.”

  “Bridget, we’re, uh, well, to put it indelicately, we’re machines.”

  “This from the man who lectures me regularly about how I’m Original Me? Who once spent a half hour going on about Chinese Rooms? Grrrr. We’re officially citizens. We have friends. We belong to clubs. Hell, Howard, we pay taxes.”

  I stared at her for several moments. “I actually do not have a coherent objection. Which is weird, because my immediate reaction is oh, hell, no.”

  Bridget cocked her head and smiled. “You don’t have to decide right away. We have forever, right?”

  I knew Bridget. This could have only one outcome. I was going to be a daddy.

  Well, Hold On

  Herschel

  April 2257

  Sol

  Neil and Will popped into my VR together. Neil threw himself down on his favorite bean-bag chair. “The pods are in and connected up. Eight million pods, and it only fills up about two percent of the ship. I forget sometimes how big this sucker is.” He waved a report window open.

  Will pulled the window over and began swiping through the report. “Everything looks good. Any issues?”

  “Nope. Ours were already set up, of course. Your pods went in without a hitch, and passed all diagnostics. We have just a bit under eight million working stasis pods, waiting for passengers.” I gave Will a Spock eyebrow. “Are you okay, Will? How’d the thing go with the selection?”

  “Um, well, about that…” He responded with a sickly grin. “I haven’t actually discussed that particular issue in public. I had a private conversation with a few representatives. We agreed that there is no scenario that doesn’t end with a lot of fear and anger, so we’re putting that off as long as possible.”

  I groaned. When this was over, and I had some spare time, there would be a good cry in my future.

  “We could hold off the Others, right? It could happen.” Neil looked at each of us.

  “With no collateral damage at all?” Will shook his head. “I suppose it’s possible, in principle. But even so, we’ll have made the decision. We’ll have publicly abandoned six million people. I don’t think an apology will be enough, you know?”

  I nodded slowly. This conversation was seriously bumming me out. Time to change the subject.

  I pulled up my checklist and started ticking off items. “Transports will come in the front, out the back. Offload to the rearmost bays first, working forward. We’ll sit in low orbit to minimize travel time. How low can we safely go?” I looked over at Neil. “Did Bill say?”

  “I asked that question specifically. Bill was surprised that we’d added the eight plates, and he said that with those additional plates, we could practically land.”

  I laughed. “Now that would be a sight.”

  “Maybe we should try it,” Neil said, grinning back at me.

  I stopped laughing. “Wait, how serious was Bill?” Without waiting for an answer from Neil, I sent off a text to Bill.

  The response came back in milliseconds. Thirty-two plates are sufficient to hold against anything short of ground contact. Why?

  I stared into space. Neil kept saying something, but I wasn’t listening. Finally, he planted himself right in front of me. “Dude, are you okay?”

  I focused on his face. “I might know how to save everyone.”

  * * *

  Will stared at me. “You’ve popped a transistor.” He turned to Bill. “He’s nuts, right?”

  We all looked at Bill. I wasn’t entirely sure Will was wrong. Bill stared into space for a full five milliseconds. “Actually, it’s not that far-fetched. I’ve seen the blueprints you guys put together on the structure of the Bellerophon. I think it’s designed to hold atmosphere. They may have been built to double as personnel transport. It would certainly explain some of the design decisions.”

  I nodded. “Like the over-engineered cargo bay doors.”

  “And the power connections in every bay,” Neil added. “And the configurable walls.”

  “Well, hell,” Will muttered. “So, do we just a
nnounce it, or do we ask the UN?”

  “Do we have time to ask?” Neil added.

  “Absolutely!” Will said. “We just don’t have time to wait for them to decide.” He smirked, then grew sober. “I think we have to make the decision, and now.”

  “Emergency Bob-moot?”

  “There isn’t even time for that, Bill. We’re down to the wire. We’ve been shaving everything as much as possible, trying to get it all done. We’re out of slack.”

  “Vote?”

  “If you want, but honestly, if you think it’s doable, and if it can save six million people, I say go for it.”

  Bill looked around the room. Will, Neil, and I looked back at him. This was it. Four Bobs, deciding the fate of the balance of humanity. But no pressure.

  * * *

  “Slowly, dammit. You want to tear us apart?”

  “Neil, please shut the hell up. Please and thanks.”

  I could feel Neil’s glare, but I couldn’t spare the time to return it in kind. I was engaged in lowering a ten-kilometer-long, hundred-million-ton alien cargo vessel into Earth’s atmosphere, without destroying the vessel or part of the planet. Thirty-two mover plates surrounded the Bellerophon, the only thing between us and a very large crater.

  “Two thousand meters,” Bill’s voice came from nowhere.

  Nodding, I stopped my descent. I looked at the view from one of the attendant drones. The image was like a scene straight out of a movie. The ship pushed aside cumulus clouds as it settled through the atmosphere. As we came to a standstill, eddies and whirlpools of air created complex whorls and patterns.

  “Station keeping, location one.”

  “This will be the hardest one, because this is where you capture your atmosphere.”

  I nodded. “If we survive this, everything else should be routine.”

  “Nothing about this will ever be routine.” Neil grinned at me, and I took the time to grin back.

  Neil controlled the cargo doors and directed the transports. A thousand transport vessels hovered off our bow, ready to begin collecting humanity as soon as we indicated readiness. Neil began, ever so slowly, to open the front and rear main doors. Air began to rush in, trying to fill a vacuum seventy-eight million cubic meters in size. The Bellerophon shook under the hurricane onslaught. Neil watched indicators, adjusting the door openings as large as he could safely allow. It still took thirty minutes to equalize pressure.

  A quick status check, and Neil began opening cargo bay doors. We didn’t need to fill every bay—just enough bays to hold six million people.

  I nodded to Will without comment. He returned a quick smile before pulling up his video connection to the transports. I noted in passing that he looked considerably less stressed. While we still weren’t exactly on summer break, the elimination of the need to decide who lived and who died couldn’t help but lift a huge burden off his shoulders.

  Will gave the order to the squad leader, and the transports scattered to pick up every single human being on this part of the planet. The Bellerophon would have to make stops in ten different locations to get everyone.

  It’s funny, though. Even with the hounds of hell almost literally baying at their heels, people still had to make a fuss. I remember being to concerts and sports events back in the day, and they were able to get tens of thousands of people into and out of stadiums quickly and with minimal hassle. In this case, they only had to get a thousand passengers at a time into each transport. Easy, right?

  We lost sixteen people. Ten were trampled, four died from medical issues, and two were shot in confrontations with law enforcement. Wow.

  “Sixteen people out of a million or so isn’t bad, Herschel,” Will said to me. “I’ve updated the other groups, so they’ll be ready to react better. But don’t let it rattle you, dude. You’re Top Gun, at the moment. Right Stuff. All that crap.” He grinned at me, and somehow I felt better. Or not as bad, anyway.

  The real problems would come at the end. The first eight million would go into stasis pods, which made them very low-maintenance. But once the pods were full, people would be unloaded into the cargo bays in a zero-G environment, with no training and no preparation. Also no sanitary facilities. We’d found netting in the Bellerophon’s supplies, and we’d reconfigured the bays so that people weren’t just released into a huge cavern. But still, we expected interesting times.

  The problem, of course, was that this was a last-minute decision. We had made no allowance for transporting active passengers. The plan mostly consisted of get them in, then bug out. After that, it got a bit vague. The goal was to get them out of range of the Others’ zappers. If we won, we could drop off our passengers at their homes. If we lost…well, no one really wanted to talk about that.

  But for now, we would just worry about getting them loaded.

  One small helpful detail was that the enclaves had been consolidating over the decades as they were moved closer to the equator. We no longer had to worry about the small, under-ten-thousand-population groups that abounded when Will first came back to Sol.

  We had decided we would simply load each enclave into their own cargo bay. No point in subjecting people to multiple shake-ups. And tensions were high enough that violence between different groups wasn’t out of the question.

  Although a fist fight in free-fall might be more amusing than anything.

  A status window popped up, catching my attention. The transports had all cleared the entrance and were inside the axial corridor. Neil wordlessly gave me a thumbs-up and closed the main doors. They could unload the refugees into a bay while we moved to the next pickup location.

  Twenty-one enclaves. Nine more stops, and we would have collected the entire human race, at least in Sol system, into one ship.

  I directed the Bellerophon upwards. One down…

  Battle Begins

  Riker

  April 2257

  Sol

  Bill looked in my direction. “Okay, they’ve shot their wad with the pulse. Activate the Jokers.”

  I nodded, then sent an email to Hannibal, leader of the Jokers. The idea was simple. They started out several days away, accelerating toward the anticipated area of first contact. We’d tried to time it so that they would be out of range of the super-pulse, and therefore would be a total surprise when they came in. The downside was that they would have to be five light-hours away when the pulse was used.

  As it happened, we’d timed it pretty close. They were slightly under five light-hours away, travelling at about 95% of C. So in just over five hours, the Others would be getting a large surprise.

  A few seconds later, I received an acknowledgement and a strike time. We would all have to be out of the area for that. I set up an alarm to remind me.

  Meanwhile, the first attack group had engaged the Others. Coming in at thirty degrees, just like last time, they sprayed the area with lasers, plasma spikes, particle weapons, busters, and bombs.

  Bill looked over at me again. “Bomb group.”

  The super-ping would have picked up a large number of dreadnaughts forward of the Others armada. What it wouldn’t pick up was the large number of cloaked fusion bombs in their holds. The dreadnaughts now started firing the nukes forward, using their rail guns. Cloaked, running silent, the fusion bombs would only be detectable if the Others sent another super-ping.

  As the first attack group sliced through the Others’ formation, they scattered. As expected, the Others launched the insanely fast torpedoes in pursuit. Plasma spikes and rail-gun fire took a lot of them out, but we lost about half of the Bobs from that squad. I hoped their backups were up to date.

  Immediately, several of the cargo vessels opened their doors and defensive forces poured out. No question, the battle was on.

  Bill sat down and blew out a breath. “The attack groups have their orders. They’ll try to vary things from last time, of course, and we’ll be avoiding any pattern that’s even close to the Magic Ratio.”

  Then, another sup
er-pulse. Bill and I turned to stare at each other, eyes wide.

  Bill was the first to speak. “That was unexpected. Our models indicated they’d have to recharge for at least a couple of hours, based on the output of the Casimir generator in the Bellerophon.”

  “If our models are wrong,” Thor said, “then all of our plans could be suspect.”

  Garfield came over. “I don’t think that’s the issue. Have you noticed that the defensive forces they’ve ejected are smaller than expected? I think they may have installed extra power cores in the cargo ships.”

  “Less room for drones, more capacity to recharge.” Thor nodded. “Makes sense, and not a bad strategy, overall.”

  “Can we use it?”

  “Only in the most basic way,” Bill replied. “Less defenders means we might be able to get closer to the big ships before detonating. Let’s hope.”

  With a shiver, I realized the Jokers might have been blown. I pinged Hannibal, leader of the group. It was the worst possible news.

  “Sorry, Will. We were within range on that one. We picked up the ping cleanly, which means they know we’re here.”

  I turned to look at Bill, who was looking as gray as I felt. The Jokers were a linchpin of our plan. If they were compromised, our chances of pulling this off would plummet.

  “Shit.” Bill scrubbed his face with his hands. “Hannibal, we don’t really have a Plan B on this. Make sure your backups are up to date, and just continue with the plan. Maybe you will be able to get some bombs through. Maybe we’ll have them pared down enough by then.”

  “Got it. Hannibal out.”

  I looked at Bill with one eyebrow up. “And maybe pigs will grow wings and join the resistance.”

  “What choice do we have?” Bill shrugged. “All we can do is what we can do, Will.”

  Thor cut into the conversation. “Look, the Others know everything we have, now. But they don’t know if it’s everything. We could have other surprises for them. So let’s not panic. Make it look like we still have a battle plan, and maybe they’ll be distracted looking for what else is coming.