We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

Book 3: Chapter 57: Detection

Book 3: Chapter 57: Detection

Riker

April 2257

Sol

Eighty thousand observation drones generated a lot of false positives. Even with the filtering algorithms I’d worked out, I still had to check a significant number of flagged items every day. After all, false positives were tedious. Skipping a real positive would be disastrous.

Just the same, the process had become a humdrum routine, to the point where I almost went right past the first significant signal in twenty-seven years of monitoring.

I jerked in my seat as the details registered. Far too regular to be background noise, too persistent to be an instrumentation glitch. The readings were barely detectable, but they still screamed danger. I skipped forward through several hours of log entries, and finally had to accept that I wasn’t going to be able to explain this away.

With a feeling of dread, I sent a text to Bill. Positive detection.

Within moments, Bill popped in. “Way to ruin my day, Will. Okay, let’s see it.”

Wordlessly, I gestured to the monitor window. Bill sat down, pulled the window around so it faced him squarely, and began to scan. I could see his eyes moving as he went over the readings, his expression turning into a frown.

He finally pushed the window away and sat back with a huff. “Well, that’s it. We’re being invaded. I notice that the incoming is well off a direct line from here to GL 877. They expected us to be watching for them.”

I nodded. “Or at least allowed for it. Too soon to get a good picture of numbers, but I think we’ll have that by the end of the day. Do we wait to make an announcement?”

“I don’t think so.” Bill scrubbed his face with his hands, then looked at me with a weary expression. “There’ll be a moot. We want to give people time to get organized. I’ll send something out, with a promise of more information in, what, three hours?”

I nodded, and Bill stood up. “Okay, I’ll get it started. Keep the drones well outside the Others’ detection range. No sense in letting them know we’ve seen them. And forward me the update as soon as you have it.” With that, he disappeared.

* * *

As it turned out, we didn’t get as far as the moot. The readings resolved into individual signals in less than an hour. I guess we’d all forgotten just how big the Others’ ships were. Fifty smaller objects, which were probably death asteroids, and one hundred larger objects, cargo carriers, most likely filled with fighter units of one kind or another.

I sent a text off to Bill, and received a response immediately. Organizing something.

Ten milliseconds later, Bill, Oliver, Jacques, Garfield, Thor, and Claude popped into my VR. I noted the complaint from Guppy as the VR memory usage ballooned, and turned off Spike and Jeeves to compensate.

“Well, that sucks,” Bill said as he looked at the display wall I’d put up. “I think they’ve probably sent everything they have at us.”

“Except the Delta Pavonis expedition, which arrived back at GL 877 well after this bunch likely launched.” Jacques looked around at us, his arms crossed. None of us were fans of the Others, of course, but Jacques seemed to have internalized a really visceral hate. Couldn’t blame him, really. I had a similar attitude toward the memory of VEHEMENT.

“Thor, you have an analysis of the cargo carriers’ probable contents?”

Thor nodded an acknowledgement to Bill. “Sure, but you have to remember, at Delta Pavonis the Others were provisioned for the possibility of a local planetary defense. This time, they’ll be provisioned for the virtual certainty of a defensive force that’s space-based, has had decades to prepare, and knows what the Others bring to the table. They’ll have loaded everything they can.” ???????

“Everything they had ready, you mean,” Claude replied. “The timing of the drone destruction back at GL 877 limits how long they could have taken to prepare.”

Garfield shook his head. “Sure, but they could have just loaded a bunch of raw material into the carriers, and built stuff during the trip. It’s not like they have a shortage of resources.”

“Damn.” Claude rubbed his head. “So, how much subjective time did they have to build up a fighting force?”

“Hmm…” Bill thought for a moment. “Twenty-eight point one light-years. The cargo carriers aren’t capable of more than five G, and they wouldn’t be here yet if they’d been pulling much less. So I expect they went for minimum travel time instead of trying to extend their personal time during the trip. That puts it just a shade under two years subjective.” He looked around the group. “That’s a lot of time, but I think if they had loaded the cargo vessels to capacity, they’d have extended the trip. Thor, can you work with that?”

Thor nodded, then his avatar froze as he frame-jacked to work the models.

He was back in moments. “It’s still not good. I figure they can put at least twenty thousand fighters and flying bombs, maybe closer to thirty.”

“Oh my God,” Claude said. “And we have what?”

“Five hundred Bobs, a thousand AMI-crewed dreadnaughts, three thousand nukes, and five thousand busters.”

“Plus plasma spikes and lasers, not that those will be hugely useful, with light lag.”

“Well, hold on,” Garfield said. “Light-speed limitations work against them, but we could make it work for us.”

We all turned to him, and he continued, “If we can get some cloaked observation drones in close enough, we can track their location real-time and fire the lasers and spikes to intercept them.”

“Sure, but if they do that mega-ping thing, they’ll see the drones and know we’re on to them.”

Garfield shrugged at Thor. “But if they do the mega-ping, they’ll be announcing their presence. They might be reluctant to do that until the last second.”

I rubbed my eyes with thumb and forefinger. “Damn, I wish Butterworth was still around.”

Bill grinned at me. “I don’t think I’ve ever actually heard you say that before.”

“I didn’t dislike him, Bill. We just always seemed to be at loggerheads.” I shrugged. “Anyway, this kind of reading-the-other-guy’s-mind tactical stuff is what he was good at. Original Bob, not so much.”

There were quiet nods around the table. “Yeah,” Garfield said, “we really weren’t good at things like chess, for just that reason.”

The moment of contemplative silence was broken by Thor. “Yeah, whatever. Look, we can calculate when they’ll probably consider it too late for us to do anything. That’s when they’ll ping. We just have to make our move sooner.”

“Okay, Thor, you’ll handle that?” At Thor’s nod, Bill looked around at us. “Let’s try to get stealth drones out there. Let’s also send a salvo of stealth nukes as well. Anything that we can take out early will be one less item to worry about later. And send out the Jokers. Have them get into position early.”

I jerked as I received a ping, and Bill looked at me with an eyebrow raised.

“Seems Herschel and Neil are here.” I grinned at the others. “So at least we might be able to get the humans out of the way.”

Bill nodded, and swept his gaze around the table. “Right, we all have our tasks. Moot’s in two hours, let’s be ready for that.” He popped out, followed in moments by the others.