Life was hell, but we tried to bear up under the burden.
Vinnie threw himself down on the grass and tossed his phone onto a nearby side table. “The Council has declared us deserters and forbidden any contact. They’re confiscating any assets owned by any city resident that they can get their hands on, and issued warrants for our arrest.”
This wasn’t really unexpected. In fact, it had taken a month longer than the date I’d originally estimated. If the Council had any brains at all, they’d be trying to pull the teeth of the biggest single threat to their rule—me—right about now. I checked my feeds and, sure enough, I’d been locked out of colony patrol, monitoring, defense, and infrastructure channels.
Damn. That meant I would no longer be able to spend my time monitoring things for them, fixing things for them, running things for them…boo hoo. I grinned, and Kal looked at me quizzically.
“I think I’ve just been fired.” I shrugged at him. “Spares me the trouble of quitting, I guess.”
“What are we going to do?” asked one of the planning techs, a blonde woman named Freida.
“Nothing,” I replied. “I’ve exchanged words with the Council the last couple of months. I’ve made it clear to them that we, and especially I, won’t fire the first shot. But that if they try to get their way by violence or war, they’d have the entire Bobiverse to deal with. So I don’t actually expect any shooting. Just legal maneuvering and threats.”
“And economic sanctions. They’ve cut off all trade, all contact.” Kal shrugged at me.
“What exactly are they cutting us off from, Kal?” Denu leaned back on an elbow and glared at Kal with an eyebrow arched. “We have a third of the planet’s population, but we produce half the food calories. Most of the technical people transferred to the cities in the first month. Manufacturing is off-planet, so we have as good access to it as they do—”
“That may not be entirely true,” I said. Everyone looked at me.
I shrugged. “I’ve been checking statuses as we’ve been talking. The Council seems to have managed to garrison all the materials stocks in the Lagrange points.” I tried to wave up an image, then remembered that I wasn’t in VR. Instead, I sent a feed to any tablets in our group. “I guess it explains why they were so slow to act—they were taking the extra time to get into position. My drones are showing Council security forces occupying strategic locations around the stockpiles. And,” I added, shaking my head, “looks like they’ve laid claim to the Lagrange autofactories as well.”
“Are the Bobs going to take that lying down?” Kal glared at me.
I chuckled in response. “Well, the Bobs consists of me, in this system, so not very much of a threat. I have ship busters, but they’re only useful in a full-scale engagement. I’ve got some roamers, but I wouldn’t want to sacrifice them in a guerilla war. I have my printers, but it would take time to set up a full autofactory, and more time to get mining going again.”
“So we’re dead in the water?”
“For the moment, as far as they know,” I responded. “But they also know we’ll rebuild our own resources in short order. They have to bring us to our knees before we can do so.”
“How?”
I shrugged. “Resource interdiction, which they’ve already done; denial of food sources, which they incorrectly think they can do; and cutting us off from any space assets, which I’m surprised to say they haven’t—”
At that moment, the signal from my decoy cut off. “Son of a bitch. They did it.”
All heads turned to stare at me. I shrugged and gave them a twisted grin. “They just blew me up!”
Life
Howard
June 2219
HIP 14101
Finally.
The drone flew through Odin’s upper-middle cloud layer, casual as you please, as if umpty-ump of its ancestors hadn’t gone down in screaming flames trying to achieve this milestone. Odin was slightly smaller than Saturn, but far more meteorologically active, due to being closer to its primary.
All of which made a difficult environment for adapting a SURGE-powered drone.
I watched readings carefully as the drone cruised through the atmosphere. While the chemistry wasn’t actually corrosive as such, it was definitely chemically active. The multiple possibilities for exothermic reactions made me hopeful that I would find something that I might be able to call life.
I had no idea if all this work would ultimately pay off, but it was certainly interesting. The view from the drone was incomparable. I could see hundreds of kilometers down through clear patches of atmosphere into the depths, where colored masses of organics formed massive floating clouds. The layering was pretty obvious—Odin’s atmosphere was heavily stratified both latitudinally and vertically.
Then I saw it—a group of dots, far ahead, seemingly flying in formation. I aimed the drone toward them. By the time I got to within a couple of kilometers, I was able to resolve the targets—giant blimps, with tentacles spread round them.
There was no question they were alive. They didn’t quite resemble zeppelins, and they didn’t quite resemble jellyfish, and they didn’t quite resemble squid. They were some weird mashup of all three. Perhaps fifty meters long, with tentacles—the exact number varied between individuals. They moved as a flock.
The flock didn’t react defensively to the drone, which was probably far too small to present as a threat. I circled them a dozen times, each individual following my trajectory with something that might have been an eye on a stalk.
The drone’s readings finally moved far enough into the red, and I had to stop and bring it back—post-mortem examinations were still a large part of my development effort, and this one had been wildly successful. As the drone flew up to my location in orbit, I played the video records again and again.
Finally, I turned off the playback and stared into space, a smile forming on my face. Bridget would love this. No biologist could possibly resist.
*
“But, that’s—incredible!” Bridget seemed to have become permanently bug-eyed as she scanned through the videos. “They are absolutely alive. Are they carbon-based? DNA-based?”
“Probably, and who knows?” I grinned at her from an inset window on her tablet. I hadn’t wanted to take the time to deploy Manny, so I’d just phoned.
“My God, Howard. And you have forever to study them…”
“You could, too, Bridget.”
“Howard…” Bridget gave me the stink-eye.
“Sorry Bridge. I know, I promised. It just slipped out.”
She responded with one of her patented nuclear smiles, then turned back to the videos. “I would love to see them.”
“Wish granted. I’ll be right over.”
Bridget raised an eyebrow. “Howard, you are oddly well-prepared. Am I being set up?”
I grinned and winked at her as I disconnected.
*