“How about we cut into one of the bays?”
Well, that was certainly an option. The bay partitions were stupid thick, but we weren’t on a schedule.
“Okay. Let’s do that.”
*
We cut into bay #1, simply because SUDDAR scans showed a lot of unidentifiable stuff in it. The roamers had to cut trenches in the wall, and keep widening them. But eventually, they were able to pull a plug of metal away from the surrounding wall.
We left it floating in the central corridor, and sent in a half-dozen roamers.
It looked like this carrier hadn’t disgorged all its fighting units before we’d taken it out. The bay contained several dozen drones, each slightly bigger than a Heaven-1 vessel. They were in cradles, with umbilicals connecting them to the ship. Probably control and power feeds. Of course, there was no power, and we’d taken out the ship AI, so no control.
Neil poked a finger at a close-up image of an umbilical connection. “If we unhook that, do you think the drone will come to life?”
“Don’t know, Neil.” I rubbed my forehead—a delaying tactic, and we both knew it. “Ultimately, do we really have an alternative?”
Neil stared at the video window for a full two seconds, before turning to me. “Okay, how about this—take one apart, piece by piece. Analyze as we go. Eventually, we should be able to figure out what their readiness state is.”
“That is the least-bad idea I’ve ever heard.” I grinned back at him. “Let’s do it.”
*
It took more than a week to strip the drone down, piece by piece. In the end, we were forced to conclude that activation was probably done from the carrier AI’s end, not at the drone’s end. In any case, the one we’d disassembled had been inert. No power, and no way to power up without power.
Just the same, paranoia was the watchword. We picked a random drone, and placed roamers inside it, ready to begin breaking things if the drone got uppity.
“Ready?” I said to Neil.
“Ready!” he replied.
Neil was in charge of destruction, and I was in charge of unplugging. Without giving myself any more opportunity for second-guessing, I instructed the roamer to eject the umbilical from the drone.
We waited…5 seconds…10 seconds…
“Enough of this,” Neil grumbled. “It’s scanning time.” Matching actions to words, he instructed one of our drones to give the subject a good once-over.
The scan came up in my holotank within milliseconds.
“Nothing. Inert.” I looked at Neil. “Satisfied?”
“Me? Since when am I the bad guy?”
“Since always. I’m always reassuring you.”
“Oh, bite me. You are so full of it.” Neil shook his head in sorrow. “So, next question. Do we cut into every cargo bay with something in it and start unhooking stuff?”
“That’ll take years. What’s our alternative?”
“I’m starting to like the nuke idea.” Neil gave me a crooked grin.
“Okay,” I replied. “We’re going to have to trace all the wiring, to find out if we can leave the bays unpowered if we start up the reactor. And, sorry to say, we’re also going to have to place a nuke in here in case we wake something up that we shouldn’t have. Let’s just hope it doesn’t come to that.”
Neil sighed. “This is beginning to sound too much like real work.”
*
‘Real work’ described it very well. Some of the Others’ design decisions were, well, suboptimal. At least as far as we could tell. In several cases, power conduits split, went around a large patch of nothing in particular, then reconnected on the far side. We scanned the section of nothing twice, but found, um, nothing.
“Well, look,” Neil mused. “Sometimes, when you’re designing something, you make allowances for future expansion. As long as you have a good idea what the requirements will be, you can allow for it.”
“So it’s an expansion slot.”
“Yeah, thanks, Captain Sarcasm. Still, you’re probably not far wrong.”
“That’s wonderful, Neil. But are we any closer to being able to activate this flying island nation?”
“Let’s have a look, Hersch.” With that, Neil pulled up our working schematic. He quickly updated it with this latest information, then directed the simulation to power up.
We watched the simulation as telltales indicated virtual sections that were receiving power.
Eventually the simulation ended with the hulk in a stable state, and no issues that we could see. Neil and I looked at each other, smiled, and said in unison, “We’re good to go!”
Battle
Bill
June 2223
82 Eridani
Premier Campbell put her face in her hands and was silent for several seconds. President Ito attempted to remain stoic, but I could see that he was shaken.
Campbell looked up. “Mack? He’s…gone?”
“No, ma’am,” I replied. “We have his matrix. Or at least, it’s still in one piece and we know where it is. But he’s offline, for the moment. We’re trying to get it to a colony site for safekeeping.”
Campbell nodded, looking relieved.
“And how can we help, Mr. Johansson?”
I turned to President Ito’s video image. “We’re trying to inventory all our assets in this system. Anything that can be used as a weapon, anything that can be remote controlled, anything SCUT-enabled, anything that can get out of atmosphere…”
“How do the androids work? I believe there’s one at each colony site.”
I brightened. “Those are SCUT-controlled, so yes, we can use those. That’s one more, well, two more control loci for us. As soon as we can, we’ll send a couple of drones to pick them up. We can use them to relay orders to the non-SCUT mining drones.” I thought for a moment. “Plus, they’ll be useful to supplement the roamers for manipulation.”
Ito nodded, and silence descended.
Campbell finally broke the pause. “We are at war, essentially, right? Are the colonies in danger?”
I considered for a millisecond. “I don’t see how, at least on an immediate basis, ma’am. Medeiros doesn’t have anything that can bomb you from orbit. If we can keep the autofactories from him, or at least keep the printers away, that won’t change. If he gets a printer, or already has one, he still has to bootstrap up through all the automation needed for an autofactory, before he can start building something like an asteroid mover. And there’s no way he’ll be dumb enough to try to print anything explosive.”
“On the other hand…” Ito said in a slow drawl, inviting me to explain counterpoint.
I grinned. “On the other hand, we have no printer capability at the moment—although we are in possession of the actual printers, more or less—and we’d have to go through the same bootstrapping process. To a lesser extent, maybe, because we have roamers and drones and now the two androids.”
“So it’s détente.”
“I’m not sure it’s even at that level, ma’am. Right now it’s more like that Hugh Grant and Colin Firth fight scene in Bridget Jones’ Diary.”