We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

Book 2: Chapter 23: VEHEMENT

Book 2: Chapter 23: VEHEMENT

Riker

September 2175

Sol

Pieces of space station mingled with desiccated plants and the carcasses of livestock that had been unlucky enough to be living on that donut. The debris had scattered with the explosion, but orbital mechanics and mutual gravity were bringing everything back together.

Homer’s image floated in the video window. “We’d just brought this one on-line. Six months’ work, gone.”

I nodded silently. The donuts were Homer’s babies. He’d come up with the idea and head-manned it to completion. This couldn’t be easy for him. “Any announcements?”

“Yeah. VEHEMENT. The usual crazy-ass rant. Humanity is a cancer, the universe is better off without them, blah, blah.”

“I’m sorry, buddy. But we’ll get them, one way or another.”

Homer was silent. His expression said everything. Sadness, anger, confusion. He wouldn’t meet my eyes. I felt guilty about all the bad thoughts I’d had about him in the past. He was a fully contributing member of the team, and this was killing him.

I was concerned about Homer. He had pretty much stopped ribbing me. Hadn’t called me number two in months. In fact, he seemed to have turned all business. I wondered if someone had offended him, but on the one occasion I’d tried to talk to him about it, he just deflected the conversation.

“We’ve got enough redundancy now that this won’t leave us dead in the water,” I said. “But with the reduced planetside output, it’s going to mean short rations. Or more kudzu.” I smiled, trying to lighten the mood. Homer wasn’t having any. He shrugged, then ended the connection.

“Guppy, what have we got relating to Farm-6?”

[Querying AMI team. One moment]

After a short delay, Guppy continued.

[No related transmissions detected. No nearby activity except by Heaven vessels]

Crap. They were covering their tracks too well. “Something will break. Something has to.”

Guppy didn’t comment. He wasn’t much on encouragement. Huge fishy eyes blinked once.

* * *

Just to really make my week, there were several terrorist attacks on Florianópolis as well. I kept wondering if there was some anniversary coming up that was triggering all the activity. The terrorists were getting smarter, and hitting more critical targets. One of the attacks had taken out the power system. It would take a couple of days to fix.

It wasn’t the first time that the actions of VEHEMENT and the Brazilian attacks seemed to be coordinated. I wondered if there was some connection. It was almost certainly two different groups, but maybe they were talking to each other, sharing intelligence. That could actually be of benefit to me.

The old Earth, pre-war, had global technology and every form of communications you could imagine. This post-apocalyptic reality was far more limited. There were fewer methods of communication for collusion between the two groups, or even cross-talk between VEHEMENT cells.

But I’d been monitoring all channels. At least everything I could think of. So either I’d missed some form of communication; or they were using some kind of steganography, which would be almost impossible to recognize unless you knew what you were looking for; or they had gone low-tech.

Option three would be too slow, number one I couldn’t do anything about, so that left two. Steganography was by definition inefficient, since you had to spread the message out enough for it to be unnoticeable. Therefore the transmission medium would have to allow a high bandwidth, which would immediately rule out a lot of possibilities. And there were statistical methods that could ferret out steganographic messages.

I retired to my VR, to give this more thought.