Bobiverse 2: For We Are Many

by Dennis E. Taylor

  Okay, that stung. Well, not really, but point taken. I took a deep breath and attempted to relax.

  Bridget’s surgery was already running overtime. There was no scenario in which that was a good thing. I’d tried distracting myself with a few of the many projects I had on the go, but I couldn’t maintain concentration.

  In desperation I checked in on Bill. Guppy indicated that he was running Bullwinkle, so wouldn’t be responding except in an emergency. I doubted that me freaking out really qualified, so I didn’t bother leaving a message. I had a quick peek at his terraforming blog, but there was nothing new.

  I was seriously considering just frame-jacking down, when Stéphane called me.

  “Hi Howard. You can stop with the worrying now. She’s out of surgery, and the doctors say it looks positive. The tumor was a little more spread than they expected, so it took longer to excise. But all good.”

  I thanked Stéphane, traded some meaningless comments, then hung up. I sat back, took several deep breaths, until I thought that I had it under control. And without so much as a by-the-way, I leaned forward and started to sob.

  Just friends.

  * * *

  There had been a lot of improvements in medicine since the days of Original Bob, but some things hadn’t changed all that much. Cancer could be nipped in the bud if caught early, but there was no vaccination yet. And the knife was still often the only effective treatment.

  This was unacceptable. What the hell had they been doing for a hundred years? I resolved to look into it when I had a chance.

  Meanwhile, Stéphane sat at her bedside. He’d dialed me in through the room phone. While I waited, I sent a quick email to Bill to hurry the hell up with the androids. I knew it wouldn’t help, but it was action of a sort.

  Stéphane and I traded an occasional desultory comment, but neither of us was in the mood for more. Finally, he turned to me. “I’m going to stretch and refuel. Some of us still have to eat. I’ll tell them not to come in and hang up the phone on you.” With a nod, he got up, leaving me to watch over Bridget.

  If you’ve ever watched someone come out of anesthesia, it’s not like waking up. That can be sexy, under the right circumstances. Bridget looked more like a drowned rat that had just been given CPR. I made a note to myself to keep that observation private.

  She finally opened one eye, looked around, and spotted me peering at her from the phone. She squinted, grimaced at me, and said, “Jeez, what do I need to do to get a day off?”

  I laughed, then had to override the video image to keep from embarrassing myself. My image froze for a couple of milliseconds—not nearly long enough for her to notice. When I’d recovered control, I grinned at her. “Not to worry, sales are good. This year you can take Christmas off, and even use up some extra coal.”

  I was considering what I would say next, when Stéphane walked back in, coffee in hand. Bridget’s face lit up, and Stéphane smiled when he saw she was awake. He exclaimed, “Ma minette!” and pulled up a chair as close to the bed as he could manage. He took her hand, and I ceased to exist for any practical purpose.

  How did I miss this?

  We made small talk. I don’t remember it. I’m sure I could play back my logs, but why? I made my excuses as soon as I could without appearing to be acting odd, then retreated to my VR.

  Right, well, what did I expect? Bridget was a human. An ephemeral. Her plans would include a home, a family, a place in society. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I’d been very carefully avoiding thinking about certain issues.

  And one of the issues that had just come into focus was that I was an outsider. I saw the world through video calls and chat windows and drone cameras. I really shouldn’t have been surprised that something could develop right under my nose.

  I materialized a bucket and kicked it as hard as I could. Strangely, it helped.

  49. Arrival

  Mulder

  March 2195

  Poseidon (Eta Cassiopeiae)

  “Poseidon. Good name.” Marcus shook his head in mock amazement, then took a sip of his coke. “I’ve had a look at your summary and notes. Pretty cool. I really want to see a kraken.”

  I smiled in response. “You won’t be disappointed. I promise. Anyway, right now, you’re…”

  “I’m just settling into a polar orbit. Monty is about a week away, and should be down to VR tau by now. I’ll ping him.”

  Marcus settled more comfortably into his seat and sipped thoughtfully on his straw. For some reason, Marcus had never taken to coffee. He preferred his virtual caffeine in carbonated form. Well, whatever.

  At that moment, Monty popped in and materialized another chair for himself. He accepted a coffee from Jeeves and looked around.

  My VR wasn’t particularly inspired, as such things go. I’d never felt the need to come up with something new and imaginative. I had a variation on Bob-1’s library, but with high windows for more sunlight, and more casual furniture.

  “So, anyway, things grow big in the water, in direct proportion to the available space. A global ocean, eight hundred kilometers deep, makes for some very large nasties.”

  Monty looked concerned. “They couldn’t take down a mat, could they?”

  “Oh, hell no. Nothing’s that big. But on this planet, a day at the beach is likely to be fatal even if you don’t get wet. The kraken in particular has tentacles, and one of its feeding strategies is to grab animals off the edges of mats.”

  “Right.” Monty nodded. “Well, the mats are a short-term solution, anyway. The colonists will be building floating cities for the long term. We’ll just need tough enough perimeter defenses to keep them out.”

  “So,” I looked at him, changing the subject. “When are you going to decant the colonists?”

  “I’m waking the Setup Management team right now. Couple of hours, they’ll be ready to start.” Unlike the land-based colonies in other systems, the teams here would be working from the colony transport—Monty—for a considerable time, and the civilian population likely wouldn’t start to emerge for a good six months. Future shipments would have it a little easier.

  We had a number of variations on floating city plans on file. Free-floating cities had been a bit of a thing for a while in the twenty-second century. Of course, they had access to land-based support, and they didn’t have to deal with predators up to a hundred meters long, with tentacles.

  * * *

  Discussions with the Prep team hadn’t taken as long as I expected. I guess there’d been a lot of planning before they’d launched from Earth system, and there hadn’t been any surprises at this end. Yet.

  I had tagged all the biggest mats with beacons, so we knew what was available. The Prep team picked a couple of large mats that were drifting in the north tropical current. They were both well over a hundred square km in area, complete with commensal ecosystems. Within a day, we were ferrying down supplies and equipment.

  The colonists, a conglomerate of enclaves from Micronesia, the Maldives, Vanuatu, and Saint Lucia, would have to be awoken in small groups as living space was constructed on the mats. It would be about a year before Monty would be able to leave.

  Marcus would be staying here to help with the colony setup after Monty headed back to Earth. He would build a fleet of human-crewed spaceships so that the colonists wouldn’t be dependent on us. With no land on Poseidon, all industry would have to be space-based, and Marcus didn’t want to play permanent taxi-to-the-world.

  * * *

  Marcus popped in without warning. “We just lost another settler.”

  “Kraken?”

  Marcus nodded and sat down. He took a moment to give Spike a chin-scritch, then materialized a Coke.

  “I’m sure Chief Draper is pissed,” Monty said. “We have to come up with some better defense. We could go through the entire setup team pretty fast.”

  “Or we could reconsider flying cities.” Marcus grinned
at me.

  “Oh for Pete’s sake, Marcus. There are no plans in the libraries for flying cities.”

  “Yeah, but you could start with Bill’s asteroid mover and I bet you could end up with something that would hold a city in the air.”

  “Let us know when you have a design, there, Marcus.”

  Marcus made a dismissive gesture and changed the subject. “Well, we can’t stick to the status quo. The krakens will just keep getting bolder. But building floating cities without an established land base of some kind is going to require some inventive re-thinking.”

  “Can we beef up the protection around the floating mats?” Monty asked.

  In response, Marcus popped up a schematic view of the island. “Here’s the problem. The Kraken are able to wriggle a tentacle through the mat and grab inland prey. Native life has figured out how to tread lightly, but humans have two left feet, so to speak.”

  “Plus,” I added, “all the equipment makes a racket.”

  Monty rubbed his forehead, looking disgusted. “Um. Any ideas? Serious ones, I mean.”

  “Actually, yes.” Marcus nodded. “I can adapt some library plans to construct an electrified net that discharges on contact. A million volts or so should provide some negative reinforcement.”

  “Or a watery grave. Either is good.” I nodded. Nice.

  Marcus grinned at me. “Now the bad news. To build the net, and to build the equipment necessary to deploy it, will add six months to our schedule. Draper will take that about as well as Butterworth would.”

  “Moo,” I replied.

  “Yeah, like that.”

  Monty groaned. “I’m not thrilled either. It means I’m stuck here for another six months.”

  “Suck it up. You’re immortal.”

  “Bite me.”

  We all grinned at each other. The routine exchange of insults felt sort of reassuring.

  “Well,” Marcus finally said. “Guess we’d better go break the news.”

  “What do you mean, ‘we’, Kemo Sabe?”

  Marcus laughed and popped out.

  50. Second Expedition

  Loki

  November 2195

  82 Eridani

  We flew straight into the 82 Eridani system without attempting any finesse. We were here to kick some ass and, more importantly, to finish the job that Khan and his group had started.

  Twelve Bobs, with Version-4 vessels featuring even more heavily shielded reactors than the threes, and total radio silence. Special carbon-black exteriors ensured an almost-zero albedo, and we had borrowed from the military to arrive at profiles that were virtually invisible to radar. The only place we were vulnerable was SUDDAR detection, and as far as we knew we had the range advantage in that area.

  There was no point in being subtle. But being tricky was definitely on the menu. We spread a net of observation drones in front of us, coasting with minimal systems. Interspersed with them were ship-busters and decoy drones. SCUT connections with every drone and buster guaranteed instant communications. Whether the enemy detected our outriders first or us first, we could still throw a surprise at them.

  We didn’t know, of course, whether there were any Medeiri left from the first expedition. Or, for that matter, whether the Medeiros that escaped at Alpha Centauri might have made his way here. Best case, there would be nothing but the Brazilian AMIs, still patrolling the system looking for things to blow up. We’d brought plenty of decoys to cover that eventuality as well.

  Yep, we were loaded for bear. We just had to hope that Medeiros hadn’t invented a bigger, better bear.

  Ultra-low intensity version-4 SUDDAR wouldn’t even be detectable to traditional SUDDAR receivers unless the listener was specifically looking for it. We came into the system like a person in a pitch-black room, carefully feeling our way forward and ready to pull in our toes at the slightest sign of an obstacle.

  We needn’t have bothered. Medeiros might not have a bigger bear, but he definitely had some kind of passive early warning system that we couldn’t detect. We were met by a solid wall of oncoming ordnance. The first engagement looked like a republic-vs-empire Star Wars shoot-em-up. And again Medeiros was using cloaking technology. But this time, we were ready for that.

  It looked like Medeiros continued to depend on nukes as his main weapon. Four enemy drones detonated simultaneously as soon as they were within range of our defenders.

  Nothing was going to survive being up close and personal with an exploding fission bomb, but in space the shock wave was a strictly short-range issue. At any distance, the main force of destruction would be the EMP. And we’d engineered for that, this time. It took Medeiros a dozen ineffective nukes before he caught on to the fact that we weren’t affected. At that point, flying nukes started trying to get in closer. We spiked them, we busterized them, we confused them with our own set of decoys. And we watched and listened for the source of the commands.

  Then Medeiros showed that he had learned from our last encounter.

  A wave of attack drones came at us that were completely different from the traditional flying nukes. Our attempts to spike them just bounced off.

  “Oh, this is bad. What’s spike-proof?”

  “Possibly something with a defensive magnetic field,” Elmer replied. “We’ll need to use busters on these guys.”

  “Good call, Elmer. Okay, everyone, deploy half your busters forward. Any enemy drone that survives a spiking gets busterized.”

  A flood of busters accelerated toward the oncoming ordnance. We carefully staggered them so that Medeiros couldn’t catch multiple busters with one nuke. The first contact produced so much carnage, between detonations and debris, that we couldn’t resolve the battlefield for several precious seconds.

  Then I remembered reading the report on Riker’s first battle in Sol. “Scatter! Watch for passive incoming!” I sent a SUDDAR pulse ahead as I turned and accelerated at ninety degrees. Sure enough, the ping showed a massive number of dense objects hurtling towards us.

  It was too late for three of us, though. Jeffrey, Milton, and Zeke disappeared from the status board as their signals cut off.

  The only good thing about this attack strategy, if something could be considered good, was that the passive ordnance couldn’t chase us. With the field now clearing, we could verify that there wasn’t another wave on the way. At least, not yet. I wasn’t going to make any assumptions.

  Our second wave of busters now engaged the remaining enemy drones. Up close the busters had an advantage, and we recorded almost 100% kills.

  A momentary lull in encounters allowed me to scan the battlefield. For the moment, there was no movement. The question now was: did Medeiros have more in reserve?

  A second SUDDAR sweep showed another wave of enemy ordnance coming in. We weren’t anywhere near done, yet. A quick count showed Medeiros had more drones than we had busters. This put us at a definite disadvantage. Plasma spikes helped to even things out with unprotected drones, though, and since building nukes was expensive of time and resources, I had to hope some of that incoming consisted of decoys.

  “Has anyone picked up any transmissions from Medeiros, yet?”

  A chorus of nos came back to me.

  Damn. One of our planned strategies was to triangulate on the Brazilian craft’s transmissions. Our last battle with him had shown the wisdom of cutting off the head. But Medeiros seemed to have learned from last time in that area, as well.

  I accepted a call from one of the crew.

  “Hey, Loki?”

  “What’s up, Verne?”

  “I’ve been doing an analysis of Medeiros’ attack strategy. I don’t think he’s actively controlling the battle.”

  “Pre-programmed decision trees? If so, those are very smart AMIs. We saw them running through some sophisticated strategies.”

  “I think it’s a bit of both.”

  “Oh, great. That’s helpful.”

  I could h
ear the smile in Verne’s voice. “Well, it is, kind of. He’s probably set up a number of different battle scenarios and canned responses with different goal weightings. He changes response trees with a very short command sequence, maybe a couple of bytes and a checksum, too short to triangulate on. Then the AMIs are on their own.”

  Now that was interesting. “In that case, he can only have one response tree going at a time, right?”

  “Correct, unless he’s giving separate orders to different squads. And in that case, I think we’d have picked up on multiple transmissions.”

  “Excellent.” I considered for a millisecond. “Attention everyone. We are going to split into groups, by the numbers, and execute strategies one through four. Let’s see how well the AMI pilots handle too many different scenarios. Verne and Surly, activate the radio jammers.”

  Everyone acknowledged, and we split off in various directions, each vessel accompanied by its personal cloud of drones and busters.

  For a wonder, it appeared to work. Some of the Brazilian AMIs seemed to be coping, but more of them became confused. There was a small group that would rush towards a Heaven contingent, stop, rush towards another one, then reverse and repeat. Gotta love AMIs.

  And then Medeiros panicked. Unable to regain control of his drones, he cranked up his radio transmission power and attempted to outshout the jammer. He might as well have put on a hat with a flashing red light. Verne and Surly immediately released the death squad—a batch of busters specifically programmed to latch onto the Medeiri with SUDDAR and not to let go until they were space junk. The death squad shot forward at close to forty G, and I imagined them yelling “Wheee!” in high-pitched minion voices.

  In next to no time the death squad surrounded the Medeiri—there were two Brazilian vessels—and destroyed them. However, this time we were going to be thorough. As soon as they got the recall order, the busters took off after the Brazilian drones. There would be no peace until every piece of Brazilian equipment in the system was obliterated.