We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

Book 3: Chapter 31: Cleanup

Book 3: Chapter 31: Cleanup

Marcus

September 2215

Poseidon

The loss of their main fleet was a blow to the Council, but not a fatal one, as it turned out. Maybe I’d been underestimating the Council, or maybe they had someone who was a terrific strategist. Whatever the reason, the Council kept coming up with surprises.

The first surprise, although I’d suspected as much, was that they didn’t have just the dozen cargo ships. Our first inkling of that came the day after our takeover of strategic ‘ground’ assets.

“We’ve got several cities under attack!” Gina announced, sitting up abruptly.

Kal opened one eye—he was lying on a blanket, getting some sun—and said, “With what?”

“See for yourselves.” Gina held her tablet up. On it was shown a grainy, obviously blown-up image of a vessel. It appeared to my eye to be a variation on a version-3 Heaven vessel.

“Interesting. Looks like they’ve been reading BobNet,” I said. “I don’t know why that didn’t occur to me. I wouldn’t normally think of it as strategic information.”

“And yet the improvements the Bobs have been making in the Heaven design have been primarily for military purposes,” Kal responded.

“Plus,” Denu added, “if they’ve been perusing BobNet, wouldn’t they have found out about the cloaking?”

I raised an eyebrow at Denu, then exited the android and frame-jacked. A quick scan of recent BobNet blogs reassured me on that front.

Returning to normal time, and to the android, I responded, “There’s nothing but general descriptions, Denu. With all the crap happening, Bill’s just been transmitting plans directly to other Bobs. A bit of serendipity, there.” I didn’t add that I’d just sent off a description of this situation to Bill. Hopefully, he would scan the blogs for any other potentially damaging information and remove it. Great. We’d just re-invented military secrecy.

Gina, who had continued monitoring the situation, announced, “Aanthor, Kaol, and Ptarth are fending off missiles. It looks like whoever is still fighting has decided to go for a scorched earth policy. They’re not even trying to board, just trying to knock the cities out of the sky.” She looked over at me.

I nodded. Reluctant as I was to get directly involved, in this case, hundreds of lives were at stake. I ordered several squads of busters down from their hiding place on Pelias, the inner moon.

“It’ll take a few minutes for them to get there,” I said to Gina. “Can you tell the cities that help is coming?”

Gina nodded and typed furiously for a few moments. “Done.”

“This is unbelievable.” Denu shook his head. “They’re just trying to kill people.”

“It’s war, Denu,” Gina replied. “It’s not what we wanted, but apparently it’s what the Council finds preferable to losing. Although I don’t think they expected it to go this far, either. Most of their recent moves look more like ad libs than strategies.” She looked at me. “Three Council members still outstanding. This could be orders from any or all of them.”

“My money’s on Brennan, though.” Kal glanced at each of us. “Some of the others at least seemed to be misguided but well-intentioned. He was all about the power.”

“Maybe. Let’s get this done, then we can worry about assigning blame.” I looked up as my heads-up display showed the busters coming up on the fields of battle. I ordered them to take out the attackers—if possible, by taking out critical systems, but otherwise by whatever worked.

In seconds, the reports came back. Four ships downed by clean reactor strikes, three more totally destroyed. The two remaining ships turned tail and fled.

I took a moment to mourn the people I’d just killed. Very probably they were just following orders. But those orders had meant knocking a city containing several hundred civilians out of the sky. There was a point where following orders didn’t cut it.

I put a couple of cloaked drones on the tail of the escaping ships, and recalled my surviving busters. If there had been any doubt in the Council’s teeny minds that the cursed replicant was still extant, this engagement had removed it. The Council forces would be moving much more cautiously in the future.

“Tell the city defenders not to shoot down the surviving ships,” I said to Gina. “They might lead us back to the leadership.”

Gina nodded, and we settled back onto the grass. It was an odd juxtaposition—revolutionary leaders, in the middle of a shooting war, directing operations while lounging on a manicured lawn. ?à????s

* * *

I tracked the fleeing ships to a relatively small mat in the northern current, earmarked as an automated farming platform. Video images from the drones showed it to be anything but. A small but well-stocked airbase was probably the home of the Council fleet.

“Well, that’s not good.” Kal shook his head. “We’ll have to check absolutely every mat on inventory, now.”

I grinned at him. “Seems the Council has been planning for this for a long time.”

“Or at least, planning for something,” he replied. “I can’t see how they could have predicted your flying cities.”

I nodded at that. “This doesn’t really look military, though. Security forces, maybe. Let’s send in the roamers and a mop-up squad.”

Kal nodded. He and Gina started typing furiously, while I worked on loading up the roamer squad into cargo drones.

* * *

It took longer than expected to prepare for our assault. I was surprised to discover that, with all the buzzing around and knocking out enemy ships and missiles, I was down to the dregs with busters and roamers. And without the system printers under my command, I couldn’t immediately print more. In the end, Gina rounded up a squad of security people, and we stormed the defenders the old-fashioned way.

Sort of. I was still far happier with sacrificing an AMI than a human.

Gina led the charge herself. The busters couldn’t smash the buildings at speed—I didn’t want to kill anyone—but they could smack gun emplacements hard enough to force defenders back.

“Concentrate on all defenders on the west walls,” Gina’s voice ordered over the comm system. Our security people set up a blistering fire which kept the defenders down.

“Marcus, there’s a weak spot on the wall at the southwest side. Can you get an explosive into there?”

“Uh, no, no explosives, Gina. Still too dangerous to print. But…”

A weak spot was easy to target. A ship buster came in at about a hundred klicks and rammed the corner of the wall. Five hundred kilograms of steel completely did a number on it. Maybe a little too well. As usual, I seemed to be a little more enthusiastic with the ramming than was really required.

“Thanks, Captain Crash. All units, enter with caution.”

I sent in some roamers as well, although all I had left were the little guys. The video feed showed a stunned, dust-covered group with no fight left in them.

“I think they’re done, Gina. It’s all mop-up.”

* * *

Gina, normally a somewhat dour, brooding person, was grinning unabashedly. “We got Brennan. No question that he ordered the attacks. We’ll be debriefing the security people we captured, but I’ll bet none of the other Council members were involved in this.”

“Still, they’ll all have to be dealt with. There will be trials. There will likely be convictions. Then there will be the question of what to do with them.” Kal shrugged. “My money’s on menial labor.”

Gina blew out a noisy breath. “Yeah, let’s not count our chickens just yet. We don’t know if there are any more loci of resistance. We may get individuals who keep fighting back, but hopefully we can contain the damage from that. As long as there are no more Council members in the wind, though, I think that’s it for anything organized.”

“The biggest thing will be accounting for all the remaining Council members, then.” Kal looked at me.

“Sorry buddy, I don’t have any special tricks for finding individuals on an entire planet.” I gave him a crooked smile. “Or off-planet, which is also a possibility.”

“Oy.” Kal rubbed the bridge of his nose with two fingers. “This really came down to the wire. If we’d had to fight just one more battle, we probably would have run out of assets. Do you have the printers back?”

I nodded. “And I’ve already started replacement construction, but it’ll be a few days before anything pops out the other end. If we do find ourselves another fight—” I looked pointedly at Gina. “—we’d probably better go for containment rather than a punch-up.”

Kal nodded. “Meanwhile, we also have a whole society to put back together. I hope you guys are okay with overtime.”

We all grinned back at him.