The foundational principle on Gault was supposed to be Radical Liberty and Self Reliance, which in practice meant that none of the hundred and twenty colonists who made landfall there had the least interest in contributing anything whatsoever to the common good. They immediately broke into twenty-odd family groups, set up their own little fiefdoms, and tried to make do on their own. They’d all been pretty well resourced at the outset, and Gault was, all things considered, a pretty hospitable place, so most of them actually managed to establish themselves. The ones who had problems, though, didn’t get any help from their neighbors. Apparently the Radical Liberty answer to, Help, I’m dying, is, Well, you should have packed better.
The upshot of all of this was that when Manikova arrived, he found a fragmented society of about ten thousand people, most of whom were reasonably well settled and not in immediate danger of starving to death, but none of whom were doing particularly well. At first he was greeted as a bit of a savior. He’d brought a lot of stuff with him, stuff that none of the individual groups on Gault had yet gotten around to being able to produce for themselves. He ingratiated himself with one of the smaller clans, gave them food and seeds and some shiny new tech that had been developed on Eden in the two hundred years or so since they’d boosted out. They gave him a place to live and a base of operations.
Once he was safely established, he set himself single-mindedly to making more Alan Manikovas.
As Marshall has emphasized to me more than once, building a human being from scratch takes a lot of resources. In particular, you need a lot of calcium and a lot of protein, but there are a bunch of other things that go into the mix as well. You can feed the hopper of a bio-printer with basic elements, but it takes a huge pile of wheat and beef and oranges to get everything you need for the job, and the process produces an ungodly amount of waste if you’re not interested in churning the leftovers into food for a starving colony.
The ideal source of raw materials, obviously, is an already-existing human body.
It took Manikova about nine months to run through the supply of feedstock he’d brought with him to Gault. By that time he had close to a hundred copies of himself running around, and had built two additional replication units. It was another few months after that before anyone noticed that people were going missing. He’d begun the project by snatching up indigents and loners, of which Gault, by its nature, had a ton, but eventually he ran out of those and had to start grabbing people who had family and friends to miss them. Suspicion, as it always does, fell immediately on the new guy in town. The clan that had been hosting him sent Security forces to his compound to bring him in for some polite questioning.
This is when they learned that, while Manikova had been generous with seeds and trinkets, he hadn’t shared the advanced military tech that he’d brought along.
On a more reasonable world—not even one with a single unified government, necessarily, but maybe one where the different polities at least talked to one another occasionally—Manikova might have been stopped. When it became apparent what he was up to, he was still outnumbered on the planet by a factor of twenty-to-one. Gault, unfortunately, was not a reasonable world. Manikova shoved every citizen of his host clan into the hopper, cranked them back out as copies of himself, armed them, and then launched an assault on his nearest neighbor. It was nearly a year before the surviving clans even considered mounting a unified response to him. By then, Manikova was an absolute majority of the humans on the planet. The last few clans did eventually pull together, but it was much too late by then. The only useful thing they really accomplished was to get a last, desperate message back to Eden, describing what had happened to them and begging for help from the home world.
Help wasn’t coming anytime soon, of course. It took seven years for their message to reach Eden, and once it did, it took the authorities there almost two years to decide what, if anything, to do about it. The folks who had left to found Gault had not been particularly well thought-of on Eden when they boosted out, and the ensuing years hadn’t improved their reputation. Public sentiment tended pretty heavily toward not our problem and serves them right. In the end, though, Eden’s parliament decided that Manikova might at some point actually pose a threat to other worlds, and so would need to be dealt with.
This was the origin of the Union’s first, and so far only, interstellar military expedition.
A lot of thought went into what, exactly, an invasion across seven light-years ought to look like. The idea of ground forces was obviously absurd. Eden was an immensely rich world, but its budget would be stretched close to breaking just putting together and fueling something similar to a colony ship. They didn’t need to worry about carrying terraforming equipment or fetuses, obviously, but military equipment is heavy too. In the end, they settled on a slightly up-armored colony ship that they called Eden’s Justice. It boosted out of Eden’s system four years after Gault’s message arrived, carrying a crew of two hundred, a half dozen orbital bombardment craft, and an enormous number of fusion bombs. The thought was that they would settle into orbit around Gault, make contact with Manikova, determine what his intentions were vis-à-vis the rest of the Union in general and Eden in particular, and then, if necessary, glass the planet over.
You’re probably already seeing the flaws here.
First, by the time they got to Gault, Manikova had had almost eighteen years to consolidate his hold on the system, create ever more copies of himself, and dig himself in.
Second, stealth was simply not an option for Eden’s Justice. A starship’s deceleration torch is visible from a light-year out, and there’s not really a way to disguise it.
Third, and probably most importantly, Alan Manikova was not the sort of person who was inclined to wait for the fight to come to him.
The upshot of all this was that the Battle of Gault lasted something on the order of twelve seconds. Eden’s Justice was still decelerating, blinded by her own torch to what was coming, when a dozen or so nuclear-tipped missiles slammed into her from a base Manikova had built on Gault’s second moon. Her commander never even managed to get off a retaliatory shot.
Unfortunately for Alan Manikova, but probably fortunately for the rest of the Union, Eden wasn’t the only world that had received Gault’s last messages. They were also picked up by Gault’s next-closest neighbor, a much younger, poorer, second-gen colony called Farhome. The government there was, if anything, more alarmed than the one on Eden. They didn’t have either the ambition or the resources to mount the sort of expedition that Eden had attempted, though.