We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

Book 2: Chapter 50: Second Expedition

Book 2: Chapter 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. ?????È?

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 hear 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.

* * *

It took a further eighteen hours to track down every fusion signature in the system. I took a video call from Elmer.

“Looks clear now. Anything still alive will have gone to ground. Time to implement phase three?”

“You bet, Elmer.” Again I switched to command channel. “Okay, everyone. Phase three. Surly, release the hunter-seekers.” I heard several snickers, hastily suppressed. Dune didn’t have a particularly good reputation among the Bobs.

The hunter-seekers were essentially drones optimized for long-distance searching. Their SUDDARs were able to reach to almost four light hours. By overlapping search fields, they could get increased definition of anything they ran across. It would take a week, but they would cover every inch of the star system, identify any refined metal up to a kilometer deep underground, and relay that information to busters for remedial action.

Meanwhile, we examined the battle records.

“That’s an Alpha Centauri Medeiros,” Hank said.

“You sure?”

“Absolutely.” Hank pulled up images of the 82 Eridani Medeiros group from our first battle, then images of the Alpha Centauri Medeiros group as recorded by Calvin and Goku.

The differences were subtle, but the two probes were definitely based on slightly different designs. It came as no surprise that the Brazilians would have worked on improvements even as they were building and launching probes. Apparently the first and second probes to leave Earth had been—Oh, hold on. That would require three different launches from Earth. One to Epsilon Eridani to fight Bob-1, one to Alpha Centauri, and one to 82 Eridani. Sure enough, my memory of Bob’s Medeiros was yet a third design variant.

That meant that we couldn’t depend on our estimates of the total Medeiri in the universe.

Life just sucked, sometimes.

I announced this information to the squad, and got the expected groans.

“Okay, guys. Looks like Medeiros will continue to be our Snidely Whiplash, showing up in every episode to set traps and twirl his mustache. But meanwhile, we have this system. Let’s split up and finish the survey. You know that there are colony ships on the way to Vulcan that can be redirected here with minimal delay. We want to get that word to them as soon as possible, if it’s warranted. And let’s keep in mind that Bill wants tech samples. We’re looking especially for cloaking technology and fission bomb designs.”

This was something all the Bobs could get behind enthusiastically. War was something we did reluctantly and only by necessity. Exploration, well… that was fun.

* * *

“Wow, Milo really did hit the jackpot.” Verne grinned from ear to ear as he popped up survey results.

The rest of us nodded, grunted, or muttered “hell yes” according to our temperaments. This was indeed a major find. Two habitable planets, one to the inside edge of the habitable zone, and one to the outside edge. The outer planet had two moons, one of which was also habitable, although barely. The air was very thin—it would be like living in the Andes. You’d need to acclimate over time.

Except that Bill had taken on terraforming as a hobby…

I grinned at the thought, producing quizzical looks from some of the others. The moon’s atmosphere would outgas over geological timescales, but we could replenish it over human timescales. It would require ongoing maintenance, but it had been a long time since humanity had just accepted the environment as we found it.

We bumped up the priority on biocompatibility analysis. If everything checked out, this could be worth redirecting in-flight colony ships for.