We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

Book 4: Chapter 11: Breaking In

Book 4: Chapter 11: Breaking In

Bob

October 2333

Outskirts, Eta Leporis

No plan ever survives contact with the enemy.

Okay, the Snarks weren’t the enemy as such, but they were the opponent in the scenario we were executing. And the viewer count on our remote feed probably included half the Bobiverse currently in range of BobNet.

“There’s a gaggle of Boojums heading for the entrance,” Bill said.

“Should it be gaggle?” someone asked over the intercom channel. “How about murder?”

“How is that better? Crows or geese. Either way—”

The argument went viral, and soon there was an actual discussion channel dedicated to the question of what unit would be used to describe a gathering of Boojums. Or maybe Booja. The question of plurals had a side discussion of its own going. I shook my head in disbelief and chuckled. Replicative drift or not, Original Bob was still very much alive in this gaggle of post-singularity replicants. Or maybe herd. Or pack.

While the name-obsessed discussion spiraled into ever more esoteric suggestions, Bill announced into the intercom, “Ballistic trajectory set. We should be able to drift right in and settle on a couple of them with minimal vector adjustment.”

“Assuming they don’t pick today to change things up, just for fun.”

“I’m pretty sure those are some equivalent of AMIs,” Bill replied. “They’ve shown no variability at all. Strictly script-driven.”

There was a moment of silence as the cloaked drones approached within a dozen yards of the Boojums. Even the name-obsession discussion petered out.

The drones drifted in the last few yards, made a minute adjustment, and … contact. The non-streamlined design of the Boojums allowed the much smaller drones to settle inside the Boojums’ skeletal frames so that they didn’t stick out. If there was some kind of automated security, it was highly likely that silhouette matching would form part of the strategy.

“Well, we appear to have been successful,” Bill said.

“Any traffic?” Will asked. I turned at the voice—I hadn’t sensed Will’s arrival. Then I remembered I was in the moot VR, and didn’t own the monitoring channel.

“Just radio.” I pointed at the section of the data window that indicated radio traffic. “Packetized, and either compressed or encrypted or both. We’ve tentatively identified envelope and control fields, but we don’t have enough context yet to spoof them. Even assuming we could come up with a legitimate-looking addressing and data payload.”

“But no SCUT?”

“Nada.” I shook my head. “We’ve gotten used to—okay, we had gotten used to everyone on Earth having the same technology, but who knows how much of that was caused by the fact that everyone was sharing knowledge—”

“Or stealing it.”

I smiled and nodded to acknowledge the point. “Sure. VEHEMENT and all that. But the Others had stuff we didn’t, and vice versa.”

“And even with the Brazilians, that was true. They had the cloaking thing.”

I shrugged and let the silence hang for a moment. “Yes, and to my point. The Boojums seem to be following the same pattern—more advanced in some ways, less in others. I guess in isolation, the tech tree development path isn’t an inevitable march.”

“They’re going in,” Garfield said, interrupting our conversation. Sure enough, I’d gotten wrapped up in the discussion with Will and lost track of the main event. Wow, senior moment.

Given that it was a cylinder with a fifty-six-mile radius, from close up the outer shell had the appearance of a flat wall. Directly ahead of the Boojums, a huge space dock stood open. Massive reinforced doors seemed to be there only for emergencies; we’d never seen them move since we began surveillance. The Boojums drifted in, small attitude jets giving occasional puffs as they corrected their individual vectors. Eventually the crafts drifted into docking bays designed specifically for them. An army of small service bots stood ready to receive the arrivals.

After much discussion and argument, we’d settled on winging it as a strategy. Not our finest moment, I felt. The best suggestion had been to bail the moment the Boojums docked, before any detailed examination could start.

We had a good idea of what we could expect from SUDDAR scans, but there was still a large amount of risk. In these close quarters, the drones were visible—as in eyeball-visible—even with the camouflage technology to make them appear to be part of the larger structure of the Boojums. If some kind of maintenance bot decided to take a detailed look, our geese might be cooked.

The space dock was long but didn’t penetrate deeply into the outer shell. It contained a large number of Boojum docking bays, about a third of which appeared to be occupied. Other vessels of uncertain function filled differently configured bays.

And in the middle of it all, small bots zipped along on unknown errands, mounted on some kind of track system attached to all available surfaces. The overall effect was of a kind of organized chaos.

There were indications that this area was originally configured to support Snarks as well. We could see sealed, windowed areas that were probably control centers for some kind of operational staff. And a couple of the unidentified vessel types appeared to have hatches and viewports. Scans, however, had not shown one single trace of life. This whole operation was running on automatic.

The nonrotating outer shell was a hundred yards thick, consisting mostly of some kind of friable material. It wasn’t structural; it was intended to absorb meteor impacts and block radiation. But it had many embedded design details, like a rigid support frame and the docking bay for the Boojums. And the item we were most interested in: the vector-matching system for getting from the nonrotating outer shell to the swiftly rotating inner shell without being ground up like seeds in a pepper mill. Getting access to what we were calling the Spin Transfer system was our ultimate goal.

It must have been an interesting engineering challenge for the builders. And the solution, based on our SUDDAR scans, was genius. An elevator shaft ran through the outer shell from the cargo bay to the inner surface. Maybe elevator wasn’t the right word, since with no rotation, there was no artificial gravity to worry about. But it was as good a label as any.

Embedded in the inner surface of the outer shell was a magnetic rail system circling the gap between the inner and outer shell, with components attached to each shell. A container would run along the transport rail from the cargo bay, then transfer to the vector-matching system, and accelerate to match velocity with the rotating inner shell. At that point the container would be “handed off” from the outer shell to the inner, after which it would dock at one of four stations spaced equidistantly around the circumference of the inner shell.

Well, that was the theory. We hadn’t seen a single container actually make the trip on any of the entrance assemblies that we’d been surveilling. As near as we could tell, the containers were all docked at the base of the transport rail. The Boojums didn’t need to go inside, and apparently nothing inside needed to come out.

The Boojums settled onto their assigned racks, and maintenance bots moved forward to perform oil changes or whatever they did. Our drones detached from the Boojums, staying as close as possible to avoid becoming free-floating silhouettes, and floated slowly along the length of the vessel. They had orders to transfer to a wall before they got to the nose area, just in case sensors were still active. We thought the Boojums were probably in maintenance mode at this point, but best not to tempt fate. In the end, we were depending on the complete lack of curiosity and total single-minded focus on the task at hand that typified every AMI in existence. As far as we knew.

The Gamers in charge of flying the drones were frame-jacked high enough to be able to take the time to consider their actions and the possible consequences. But that also meant I’d have to jack if I wanted to communicate with them. Constant disassembly and reassembly of my VR would be too disconcerting; I decided to just remain a spectator. We could compare notes later.

Soon the drones were positioned in a small alcove created by the intersection of an airlock area and two support columns. SUDDAR scans had indicated that this would be out of line-of-sight for most of the bay. There were a number of cameras and sensors in evidence, but without tracing the circuitry there was no way to know which ones might be surveillance of some kind and which ones were strictly operational. We had already decided not to worry about it. There was no way to make this op completely safe, so we would learn from our failures and try again, if necessary.

The drones waited for a break in activity, then scooted to the next rally point, a dead area between two different types of docking racks. They whipped around the last corner into the alcove, and almost ran right smack into a maintenance bot.

“What the hell?” Bill exclaimed.

I jacked immediately, VR be damned. “Anyone have any idea what that thing is doing here?” I said to the drone operators in general. At this clock speed, they were represented only by their metadata tags, hanging in a virtual void.

One of the tags, labelled Randall, replied, “No, and it wasn’t on the planning scans. There’s nothing here. It’s just a gap in the—oh.” A window popped up and spun around for all to see. “Looks like a bulkhead repair in progress.”

“Friggin’ hell,” I muttered. “It’s times like this that I’m glad I don’t have an actual heart to have a heart attack with.”

I returned to regular Bob-time, reassembled my VR, and turned to Bill, who was just moving his lips to begin whatever next sentence he had in mind. I cut in before he could get properly going. “It’s doing bulkhead repairs. Complete coincidence. And we’re above its sensor area, so it probably hasn’t noticed us.”

“Peachy,” Bill replied. “No alarms so far, anyway. We might just pull this off.”

It took several more hops by the drones, but there were no more coronary-inducing events. The drones found themselves in front of an access panel. According to our scans, this would lead to what some wit had called a Jeffries Tube. In theory, it should get us to the acceleration track used by the mechanism that connected the nonrotating outer shell to the rotating inner shell of the megastructure. But from that point on, there would be more “winging it” involved, as not all the engineering control systems could be resolved in detail.

One of the drones released some roamers, which popped out customized screwdrivers and attacked the attachment points on the panel. I had a moment of, I don’t know, déjà vu? Nostalgia? Something like that, as I noted that the Snarks used a screw head virtually identical to a Robertson. I guess some geometry problems are universal.

The roamers couldn’t reseal the hatch properly from the inside, so once all our units had entered, the roamers pulled the hatch closed and performed a small spot-weld. It wouldn’t hold against any kind of assault, but the point was for things to appear normal, not for us to fortify our rear. Job complete, the roamers climbed back into the drone and we continued on.

We couldn’t wait around to catch a ride on the rail system, since there seemed to be no rides to catch. We certainly couldn’t activate the system on our own—and even if we could figure out how to do that, it would probably attract unwelcome attention. That seemed like the kind of system that would require some high-level management involvement, if only for approvals and scheduling.

That left us with the strategy of scurrying around the innards like rodents, trying to make our way to the inside of the megastructure. Which was easier than you’d think. Rodents had been finding pathways through everything humans had built for millennia.

One advantage of the containers all being parked was that the ring was empty, like an elevator shaft with no elevator. And the drones had sufficient acceleration to be able to match up with the inner shell while following a circular path. So we would be able to dock on the inner shell receiving station.

It took several hours of preparation, mapping out small spaces and dodging maintenance bots, but we eventually found ourselves ready for the big step—flying from the stationary outer shell to the rotating inner shell. We decided to try out the strategy with one single drone before risking the entire squadron. There was some initial wobbling until Gandalf got the hang of it, then the drone’s path smoothed out.

The drone landed on a small maintenance platform in what I suppose I’d call the station or terminal on the inner shell that was supposed to give the inhabitants of the topopolis access to the elevator system. I could see where the elevator containers would mate up with a pressure door, allowing passengers to go from a pressurized elevator cabin to a pressurized megastructure interior.

Up to this point, we’d been operating in vacuum. Now we’d have to figure out how to get into a shirtsleeve environment—again, without setting off any alarms.

Once the entire squadron arrived, the next step was intelligence gathering. A couple of drones ejected roamers, which swarmed over the hatch system. In about ten minutes, we had a report.

“Well, the good news is that the systems are well-designed,” Gandalf said. “That means they have manual overrides in case something goes wrong.”

“And the bad news?” I asked.

“The manual overrides have what I expect are alarm sensors, so as soon as we use them, management will know.”

“So …”

“We’ll gimmick the sensors. If the ‘door opened’ sensor doesn’t trip, no one will be the wiser.”

“That could take a while.”

“Yep. And some of those sensors are on the other side of bulkheads, so we have to drill through to get to them. We’ll send in the two-millimeter roamers.”

“And this won’t set off any alarms?”

Gandalf shook his head. “This isn’t a top secret military base. They wouldn’t expect anyone to be trying to break in like this, so why would they engineer for it?”

That seemed like dubious logic. Or wishful thinking. “Confidence level?”

“We scanned it, Bob. There’s just the one level of sensor security.”

I nodded, satisfied for the moment. But if alarms went off, heads would be slapped.

“Think about the scale, Bob,” Bill added, sidling up to me. “A billion miles of megastructure with doors, airlocks, passageways, restricted areas … How would you police that? You have to set up automated processes, and trust those processes to bump alerts upstream. You want to avoid redundant signals as well, to keep the overall processing down.”

“So kill the alerts at source, and nothing happens.”

“Yup,” Gandalf said, looking up from his monitor.

I’ll give the Gamers their due, they were careful and methodical. It took almost half a day to defang the airlock to the point where it could be used without bringing Armageddon down on us. Finally, Gandalf gave the thumbs-up, and we began manually cycling our devices through.

At one point I had a thought and snorted. “It would be a helluva thing if you got this far only to discover that the drones couldn’t fit through the airlock.”

“It would indeed,” Gandalf replied with a smirk. “Which is why we checked for that during the planning stages. That is why you pay us the big bucks.”

“Assuming I paid you any bucks.”

“A valid point.” He grinned at me, then turned back to his monitor. “And this is the last load. Next stop, megastructure interior.”

Once past the airlock, our drones found themselves in a corridor leading from the Spin Transfer system into presumably the main part of the station. I spent some time examining the corridor. There wasn’t much to see—low-level lighting illuminated the area, and I could see what appeared to be traditional elevator doors at the other end. Unless you were shaped like a Krell, there were only so many ways to design corridors and doors, so it wouldn’t have looked out of place in a human-based installation. Even the writing. Apparently, the need to label every damned thing was another universal. Although I couldn’t read any of it, I amused myself for a few moments by imagining Snark exhortations to not injure one’s limbs by sticking them in the crushy-grindy place, and other legally mandated warnings for idiots.

The elevators were reminiscent of any random office building on Earth. There was also, because the Snarks had some version of building codes, a set of emergency stairs. The stairs might or might not be alarmed, and the elevators might or might not alert someone when used. I hoped the Gamers had taken those possibilities into account.

“Elevators aren’t alarmed?”

“Don’t know,” Gandalf replied. “Same problem as with the inter-shell rail system; we can’t tell where the signals go. But the stairs don’t have door sensors.”

I grunted but otherwise didn’t respond. It wasn’t me climbing the stairs after all.

This part of the operation turned out to be fairly tedious, like trekking through a dungeon that was all corridor. Of course, something could always jump out of a hidden alcove, which made for a strange combination of stress and boredom.

We passed doors to several other levels on the way up, but finally all the drones were at the top of the stairs. As Gandalf described it, the door opened into the foyer of the transit station on the inside surface of the megastructure. In better times, this was where the inhabitants would have come to travel to the outer shell and then outside the topopolis. There was some indication in the scans that this was also a transit stop for some kind of internal transit system. Unfortunately there were only so many milliseconds in a day, and that investigation had been back-burnered.

“So here’s where it gets complicated,” Gandalf said.

“And what have we been doing up till now?” I asked.

“Two problems.” Gandalf brought up some subsidiary windows to illustrate. “First, the foyer has cameras. Second, there are sensors on the external doors. Third, if management wanted to keep the natives out of the station, this is where the security would be concentrated, both inside and outside. So we can’t use the front door.”

“I assume you have an alternative.”

He grinned at me. “Big bucks, remember? We’re going to tunnel out.”

“Tunnel? Like The Great Escape?”

“Well, it’s not like we haven’t been cutting into things right and left. And the Snarks use that weird ceramic carbon-fiber material everywhere that we’d use concrete on Earth. Which works out for us, since it yields to a plasma cutter with very little argument.”

“So after all this high-tech spy stuff, we’re going to dig our way out like rats.”

“Ya gotta know when to go low-tech, Bob.”

Garfield pulled up a schematic of the station and pointed to a spot. “Here. This will come out just under ground level, so we can cover it up once we’re through.”

“Outside surveillance?”

“That’s not a problem. There are cameras covering the entrance, but not so much the back and sides.”

“Then let’s do this.”

Cutting through the wall, then digging up to ground level was tedious but mostly uneventful. We surprised a representative of the local wildlife when the roamer popped out of the ground. The animal, some kind of deer-analogue, I think, jumped straight back about ten feet, then bounded away with a panicked bleating.

“Time to start spying,” Gandalf said. He sent a command to the drones and several of them popped open their cargo doors. Out came little spy drones, a combination of tech from my spying on the Deltans and Jacques’s spying on the Pav. Improvements in technology, including but not limited to the Casimir power sources, meant that the modern version of the spy drone was no bigger than a sparrow. Add in the camouflage system, and we were confident we’d avoid discovery by the natives. These drones would, among other tasks, try to supplement the Skippies’ scans with some good old-fashioned eavesdropping.

Discovery by the mysterious topopolis controller was another thing to consider. It was a safe bet that the habitat included surveillance of some kind, if only to watch for maintenance issues. Add to that the fact that the natives were actively kept to a largely pre-industrial level, which could necessitate some kind of surveillance system anyway. How the technology limits would be enforced was an important question. We didn’t want to accidentally get caught in a purge of some kind.

“Spy drones are on their way,” Garfield commented. “Now, we wait.”