We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

Book 3: Chapter 63: Well, Hold On

Book 3: Chapter 63: Well, Hold On

Herschel

April 2257

Sol

Neil and Will popped into my VR together. Neil threw himself down on his favorite bean-bag chair. “The pods are in and connected up. Eight million pods, and it only fills up about two percent of the ship. I forget sometimes how big this sucker is.” He waved a report window open.

Will pulled the window over and began swiping through the report. “Everything looks good. Any issues?”

“Nope. Ours were already set up, of course. Your pods went in without a hitch, and passed all diagnostics. We have just a bit under eight million working stasis pods, waiting for passengers.” I gave Will a Spock eyebrow. “Are you okay, Will? How’d the thing go with the selection?”

“Um, well, about that…” He responded with a sickly grin. “I haven’t actually discussed that particular issue in public. I had a private conversation with a few representatives. We agreed that there is no scenario that doesn’t end with a lot of fear and anger, so we’re putting that off as long as possible.”

I groaned. When this was over, and I had some spare time, there would be a good cry in my future.

“We could hold off the Others, right? It could happen.” Neil looked at each of us.

“With no collateral damage at all?” Will shook his head. “I suppose it’s possible, in principle. But even so, we’ll have made the decision. We’ll have publicly abandoned six million people. I don’t think an apology will be enough, you know?”

I nodded slowly. This conversation was seriously bumming me out. Time to change the subject.

I pulled up my checklist and started ticking off items. “Transports will come in the front, out the back. Offload to the rearmost bays first, working forward. We’ll sit in low orbit to minimize travel time. How low can we safely go?” I looked over at Neil. “Did Bill say?”

“I asked that question specifically. Bill was surprised that we’d added the eight plates, and he said that with those additional plates, we could practically land.”

I laughed. “Now that would be a sight.”

“Maybe we should try it,” Neil said, grinning back at me.

I stopped laughing. “Wait, how serious was Bill?” Without waiting for an answer from Neil, I sent off a text to Bill.

The response came back in milliseconds. Thirty-two plates are sufficient to hold against anything short of ground contact. Why?

I stared into space. Neil kept saying something, but I wasn’t listening. Finally, he planted himself right in front of me. “Dude, are you okay?”

I focused on his face. “I might know how to save everyone.”

* * *

Will stared at me. “You’ve popped a transistor.” He turned to Bill. “He’s nuts, right?”

We all looked at Bill. I wasn’t entirely sure Will was wrong. Bill stared into space for a full five milliseconds. “Actually, it’s not that far-fetched. I’ve seen the blueprints you guys put together on the structure of the Bellerophon. I think it’s designed to hold atmosphere. They may have been built to double as personnel transport. It would certainly explain some of the design decisions.”

I nodded. “Like the over-engineered cargo bay doors.”

“And the power connections in every bay,” Neil added. “And the configurable walls.”

“Well, hell,” Will muttered. “So, do we just announce it, or do we ask the UN?”

“Do we have time to ask?” Neil added.

“Absolutely!” Will said. “We just don’t have time to wait for them to decide.” He smirked, then grew sober. “I think we have to make the decision, and now.” ?????È?

“Emergency Bob-moot?”

“There isn’t even time for that, Bill. We’re down to the wire. We’ve been shaving everything as much as possible, trying to get it all done. We’re out of slack.”

“Vote?”

“If you want, but honestly, if you think it’s doable, and if it can save six million people, I say go for it.”

Bill looked around the room. Will, Neil, and I looked back at him. This was it. Four Bobs, deciding the fate of the balance of humanity. But no pressure.

* * *

“Slowly, dammit. You want to tear us apart?”

“Neil, please shut the hell up. Please and thanks.”

I could feel Neil’s glare, but I couldn’t spare the time to return it in kind. I was engaged in lowering a ten-kilometer-long, hundred-million-ton alien cargo vessel into Earth’s atmosphere, without destroying the vessel or part of the planet. Thirty-two mover plates surrounded the Bellerophon, the only thing between us and a very large crater.

“Two thousand meters,” Bill’s voice came from nowhere.

Nodding, I stopped my descent. I looked at the view from one of the attendant drones. The image was like a scene straight out of a movie. The ship pushed aside cumulus clouds as it settled through the atmosphere. As we came to a standstill, eddies and whirlpools of air created complex whorls and patterns.

“Station keeping, location one.”

“This will be the hardest one, because this is where you capture your atmosphere.”

I nodded. “If we survive this, everything else should be routine.”

“Nothing about this will ever be routine.” Neil grinned at me, and I took the time to grin back.

Neil controlled the cargo doors and directed the transports. A thousand transport vessels hovered off our bow, ready to begin collecting humanity as soon as we indicated readiness. Neil began, ever so slowly, to open the front and rear main doors. Air began to rush in, trying to fill a vacuum seventy-eight million cubic meters in size. The Bellerophon shook under the hurricane onslaught. Neil watched indicators, adjusting the door openings as large as he could safely allow. It still took thirty minutes to equalize pressure.

A quick status check, and Neil began opening cargo bay doors. We didn’t need to fill every bay—just enough bays to hold six million people.

I nodded to Will without comment. He returned a quick smile before pulling up his video connection to the transports. I noted in passing that he looked considerably less stressed. While we still weren’t exactly on summer break, the elimination of the need to decide who lived and who died couldn’t help but lift a huge burden off his shoulders.

Will gave the order to the squad leader, and the transports scattered to pick up every single human being on this part of the planet. The Bellerophon would have to make stops in ten different locations to get everyone.

It’s funny, though. Even with the hounds of hell almost literally baying at their heels, people still had to make a fuss. I remember being to concerts and sports events back in the day, and they were able to get tens of thousands of people into and out of stadiums quickly and with minimal hassle. In this case, they only had to get a thousand passengers at a time into each transport. Easy, right?

We lost sixteen people. Ten were trampled, four died from medical issues, and two were shot in confrontations with law enforcement. Wow.

“Sixteen people out of a million or so isn’t bad, Herschel,” Will said to me. “I’ve updated the other groups, so they’ll be ready to react better. But don’t let it rattle you, dude. You’re Top Gun, at the moment. Right Stuff. All that crap.” He grinned at me, and somehow I felt better. Or not as bad, anyway.

The real problems would come at the end. The first eight million would go into stasis pods, which made them very low-maintenance. But once the pods were full, people would be unloaded into the cargo bays in a zero-G environment, with no training and no preparation. Also no sanitary facilities. We’d found netting in the Bellerophon’s supplies, and we’d reconfigured the bays so that people weren’t just released into a huge cavern. But still, we expected interesting times.

The problem, of course, was that this was a last-minute decision. We had made no allowance for transporting active passengers. The plan mostly consisted of get them in, then bug out. After that, it got a bit vague. The goal was to get them out of range of the Others’ zappers. If we won, we could drop off our passengers at their homes. If we lost…well, no one really wanted to talk about that.

But for now, we would just worry about getting them loaded.

One small helpful detail was that the enclaves had been consolidating over the decades as they were moved closer to the equator. We no longer had to worry about the small, under-ten-thousand-population groups that abounded when Will first came back to Sol.

We had decided we would simply load each enclave into their own cargo bay. No point in subjecting people to multiple shake-ups. And tensions were high enough that violence between different groups wasn’t out of the question.

Although a fist fight in free-fall might be more amusing than anything.

A status window popped up, catching my attention. The transports had all cleared the entrance and were inside the axial corridor. Neil wordlessly gave me a thumbs-up and closed the main doors. They could unload the refugees into a bay while we moved to the next pickup location.

Twenty-one enclaves. Nine more stops, and we would have collected the entire human race, at least in Sol system, into one ship.

I directed the Bellerophon upwards. One down…