[Replicant matrix is on a ballistic trajectory with two roamers attending. Four drones with SCUT comms have been located, attending the autofactories. One is on the way to retrieve the matrix. HIC71683-8 is in control. Eight more groups in the outer system are several days away at full acceleration.]
I smiled despite myself at Guppy’s response. For some reason, Guppy refused to identify any Bob by name. It was their serial number or nothing. I kept promising myself I’d look into it, someday, but I knew I wouldn’t.
This particular replicant, Isaac, was one of Bart’s early clones, senior even to Oliver. He had connected with one of the attendant drones and was racing to pick up Mack’s matrix, along with the two roamers.
Okay, everyone. I broadcast. Emergency moot in the pub. Video attendance for those of you currently controlling devices.
I popped over to the Moot VR and configured the pub. Within moments, a half-dozen video images and a dozen more Bobs had popped in.
I looked around, doing a quick evaluation from metadata. “Thanks for your quick response, guys. So, here’s what we have: a Brazilian vessel seems to have managed to sneak into 82 Eridani and take out Mack. Unfortunately, he’s the only Bob in-system, and he didn’t have any clones going.”
“Where’s he from, d’you think?” asked Oliver.
I shook my head. “I couldn’t get a good enough look—”
“I did,” Loki interjected. “I was in the group fighting out between the ships, and I got a better angle on the vessel. It’s the one from Alpha Centauri. Definitely a different series from the Medeiri that we took down in 82 Eridani.”
“Well, that’s interesting.” I rubbed my chin. “Is Calvin or Goku here?” I looked around for a moment, but no joy. “I guess not. Anyway, I remember that they were pretty sure the Medeiros they chased out of Alpha Centauri wasn’t complete.”
“Didn’t have his autofactory tech loaded, yet,” Oliver added.
“Right, which makes his strategy pretty obvious. Take out the resident Bob, then take over the autofactories.” I thought for a moment. “Can we protect the autofactories?”
“Not a chance.” Loki shrugged. “Four—well, three for now—drones and some miscellaneous roamers and mining equipment? Not much to work with. Mack had everything geared for a developing colony. He wasn’t even working on a cohort.”
“Should we just destroy them?” asked Isaac.
“I’d prefer not to. Otherwise they are dead in the water until another Bob gets there. And who is closest, anyway?”
I looked up in thought. “Hank’s at P Eridani, a little under eleven light years; Tau Ceti and Vulcan are about twelve; and of course Epsilon Eridani at twelve point five. At least a decade for any help, no matter how you look at it.”
“That’s way too long to have a Brazilian wandering around the system, making nasty.”
“But what’s he going to do?” Loki looked around, palms up in an imploring gesture. “He can’t make more of him, he can’t make movers to drop rocks on our colonies, he can’t make weapons…”
“I don’t want to find out,” I replied. “Maybe he has a printer in his cargo hold. Maybe he gets hold of one of ours. Maybe he has plenty, and he just wanted to get rid of Mack, and I’m wrong about the other stuff.”
“Well, that’s the interesting thing,” Isaac said. “The missile that finally took out Mack’s ship wasn’t military grade, not by a long shot. And if the first missile had been military grade, there wouldn’t have been anything left in the first place. I think Medeiros has, or had, some kind of factory set up somewhere, and made some home-brew explosive systems.”
I nodded in thought. “We keep dismissing him as not an engineer, but that’s probably facile. Brazil would have uploaded a lot of military knowledge, and improvising explosives is not a huge leap. He could have produced something like busters, but with a payload at the front end. It wouldn’t have to be terrifically efficient.”
“So we can’t say how many missiles or whatever that he has onboard.” Isaac rubbed his chin. “Although he’d have to go back to his factory to restock, assuming it’s in-system.”
“My feeling is that it’s not. Calvin and Goku took out Alpha Centauri back in 2163. That’s sixty years ago. It’s only nineteen lightyears from 82 Eridani, so where’s he been all this time? In-system, skulking around?”
“Nope,” Loki replied. “We took 82 Eridani in 2195. He’d have been here by then, and we did a thorough scan of the system.”
I sighed, and rubbed my forehead. “Okay, so it’s likely that he stopped at some other system for a couple of decades and built up some manufacturing capability. Probably not a lot, or he’d have proper missiles. He loaded up, then continued to here, which presumably he knew was a target system for Brazil.”
“That still doesn’t sound quite right, Bill.”
“I agree, Isaac. But there’s only so much we can deduce from what we know, and we’re probably over the line into speculation, now.” I looked around. “Who’s controlling the roamers that are with Mack?”
“Well, no one, now,” Oliver replied. “As soon as Medeiros blew up Mack’s vessel, we lost SCUT comms. Any surviving roamers will be operating autonomously on the last orders we gave them.”
“Can we link up to roamers through drone SCUT?” Loki asked.
“Sure,” Will responded. “We’ve been doing it for years in Sol, when dealing with things in the outer system. It’s too much trouble to set up a separate comms station.”
I turned to Will and grinned. “Glad to have you here. How much of this did you catch?” He hadn’t been here when we started, so I knew he was late to the party.
Will nodded to me. “I jacked and played back the session recording. I’m up to date.” Turning to Loki, he said, “It’s just a small software patch. I’ll post it for you.”
Loki nodded. “So, we have four drones, which means we have four loci of control in the system. Not that we have that much to control. The stuff in the outer system will take longer to get back, and I’m not sure if we should be bringing them in-system unless we have a plan.”
Oliver cut in. “Guys, I calculate that we have at most three hours before Medeiros gets to the nearest Lagrange factory. Can we deal with the printers first?”
There was silence all around, and I nodded. “Okay, separate the printers from the print heads. Send each item off in a separate trajectory, to eventually end up at one or the other colony. No beacons, we’ll have to find them by dead-reckoning, so make sure you have the orbital parameters carefully recorded.” I looked around at all the other Bobs. “Do we have anything explosive?”
I got several head shakes by way of response.
“We don’t like explodey stuff,” Oliver said.
“Yeah, and look where that’s gotten us.”
Will waved a hand to get us back on track. “Is there anything else we can do?”