We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

Book 3: Chapter 24: Explorations

Book 3: Chapter 24: Explorations

Herschel

April 2227

Kuiper belt, Delta Pavonis

Ants must feel like this.

The Others’ carrier, which we’d named Hulk-1, was massive. A ten-kilometer-long cylinder, one kilometer in diameter, it dwarfed even our Version-5 Heaven hulls. At the moment, I was slowly drifting down the central access shaft, while roamers painted numbers on each cargo door. I wasn’t just being anal—we’d discovered that we needed to refer to specific locations by something more helpful than grunting and pointing.

SUDDAR scans had revealed a lot of details about the ship and its contents, but sooner or later we would have to try powering it up. Those massive cargo segment doors wouldn’t be opening manually, never mind the one-hundred-meter-diameter hatches at each end.

“How’s it going, Herschel?”

“Fine,” I replied. “Almost done. 864 cargo bays. That number mean anything to you?”

There was a moment of silence before Neil replied, “It’s 600 base 12. And, come to think of it, the Others image that Bill retrieved had six feeding fingers on each side of its maw.”

“Nope. There’s another universal, I think. Your number base will depend on your number of digits. The Pav were base 10.”

“Are base 10, Neil. They’re not all gone.”

There was a sigh. ‘Yeah…”

Well, there was a mood killer. “Anyway,” I said, perhaps too brightly, “As soon as I’m done here, we can get onto the job of figuring out the power system. I’m anxious to see what some of the stuff in those bays actually is.”

“As long as we don’t activate some of the stuff in the process.”

“Yeah, I hear ya. Maybe we’ll have a nuke in place, just in case we need to terminate with prejudice.”

“I have a concern about that, Herschel. I’d rather avoid any action that results in destroying Hulk-1.”

“Well, um…hold on.” I took a moment to load my roamers and the attendant drones, and admire the last numbered bay: 864. “I don’t see how we can do this without some risk, buddy.”

“How about we cut into one of the bays?”

Well, that was certainly an option. The bay partitions were stupid thick, but we weren’t on a schedule.

“Okay. Let’s do that.”

* * *

We cut into bay #1, simply because SUDDAR scans showed a lot of unidentifiable stuff in it. The roamers had to cut trenches in the wall, and keep widening them. But eventually, they were able to pull a plug of metal away from the surrounding wall. ?Á???Ê?

We left it floating in the central corridor, and sent in a half-dozen roamers.

It looked like this carrier hadn’t disgorged all its fighting units before we’d taken it out. The bay contained several dozen drones, each slightly bigger than a Heaven-1 vessel. They were in cradles, with umbilicals connecting them to the ship. Probably control and power feeds. Of course, there was no power, and we’d taken out the ship AI, so no control.

Neil poked a finger at a close-up image of an umbilical connection. “If we unhook that, do you think the drone will come to life?”

“Don’t know, Neil.” I rubbed my forehead—a delaying tactic, and we both knew it. “Ultimately, do we really have an alternative?”

Neil stared at the video window for a full two seconds, before turning to me. “Okay, how about this—take one apart, piece by piece. Analyze as we go. Eventually, we should be able to figure out what their readiness state is.”

“That is the least-bad idea I’ve ever heard.” I grinned back at him. “Let’s do it.”

* * *

It took more than a week to strip the drone down, piece by piece. In the end, we were forced to conclude that activation was probably done from the carrier AI’s end, not at the drone’s end. In any case, the one we’d disassembled had been inert. No power, and no way to power up without power.

Just the same, paranoia was the watchword. We picked a random drone, and placed roamers inside it, ready to begin breaking things if the drone got uppity.

“Ready?” I said to Neil.

“Ready!” he replied.

Neil was in charge of destruction, and I was in charge of unplugging. Without giving myself any more opportunity for second-guessing, I instructed the roamer to eject the umbilical from the drone.

We waited…5 seconds…10 seconds…

“Enough of this,” Neil grumbled. “It’s scanning time.” Matching actions to words, he instructed one of our drones to give the subject a good once-over.

The scan came up in my holotank within milliseconds.

“Nothing. Inert.” I looked at Neil. “Satisfied?”

“Me? Since when am I the bad guy?”

“Since always. I’m always reassuring you.”

“Oh, bite me. You are so full of it.” Neil shook his head in sorrow. “So, next question. Do we cut into every cargo bay with something in it and start unhooking stuff?”

“That’ll take years. What’s our alternative?”

“I’m starting to like the nuke idea.” Neil gave me a crooked grin.

“Okay,” I replied. “We’re going to have to trace all the wiring, to find out if we can leave the bays unpowered if we start up the reactor. And, sorry to say, we’re also going to have to place a nuke in here in case we wake something up that we shouldn’t have. Let’s just hope it doesn’t come to that.”

Neil sighed. “This is beginning to sound too much like real work.”

* * *

‘Real work’ described it very well. Some of the Others’ design decisions were, well, suboptimal. At least as far as we could tell. In several cases, power conduits split, went around a large patch of nothing in particular, then reconnected on the far side. We scanned the section of nothing twice, but found, um, nothing.

“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!”