“This advances our schedule. How are you doing with the printers?”
“We’ve got a half-dozen.” Richards grimaced. “One is working on a cradle for Mack, three are working on drones and roamers, and two are producing small busters, per your plans.” He shook his head. “What’s with twenty-kilogram busters, anyway?”
I gave him a weak smile. “Something Bob has been using as anti-personnel weapons. But our experience with the mosquito killers shows that more small attackers can be as effective as a few large attackers—and more flexible. Medeiros will probably be putting more armor on his busters by now, so the killers are going to be less effective. So these will up the ante.”
“So do we switch to nothing but busters?”
“Not just yet, Captain. We can do without Mack for now, but we need drones and roamers, for assembly if nothing else. I’ll run a min-max analysis to figure out what mix of construction will get us the best return. I’ll let you know.”
We nodded and disconnected at the same time. I turned to Garfield, who had been listening to the whole exchange.
“He’s planning on just smashing things, isn’t he?” Garfield looked gray with worry.
“It seems to be a theme with the Brazilian probes, Gar. I don’t know if that’s a cultural thing, or military conditioning, or something that Brazilian scientists installed as imperatives when they were building the replicants.”
“Or they’re all insane.”
I shrugged. “Doesn’t matter, in the end. We have to react to the threat. And I don’t see any reason to change the no-quarter policy on Medeiros.”
Garfield’s only reply was a snort of agreement.
*
“He’s started moving the ingot.” Richards glared at me out of the video window.
“How did he manage that?” I asked. “He was nowhere near having enough busters, just yesterday.”
Richards shrugged. “He still doesn’t, really. I think he’s starting before he’s really ready. The acceleration is vanishingly small.”
“But he can add more in-flight, as he makes them.”
Richards nodded. “Unfortunately, it’s too soon to tell which colony he’s aiming for. He may not even have decided yet. It’ll be another twenty-four hours before he has to commit.”
“We have printers on both colonies, now, right?” I started to run my hand through my hair, then caught myself. “So there’s no advantage to him one way or the other. My money’s on Asgard, simply because he can get it there sooner.”
“We have to move on him now.” Richards set his jaw. “I’ll contact General Kiroshi, see what he can put in the air.”
“Do that, Captain. Call me back.”
*
“It’s not enough,” Kiroshi said. “We are two busters short of a one-on-one matchup, and that’s without dealing with Medeiros himself. We can’t win this.”
“And that’s assuming we have eyes on all his devices. If he’s carrying a couple in his hold, it will put us even farther behind.”
“I don’t see it,” I replied, looking at Richards. “If he had more, they’d be pulling the ingot as well.”
“Do we have a choice?”
I sighed. “Not really, Captain. The longer we wait, the harder it will be to redirect the ingot. And by the time it actually gets here, we’ll have built two more busters at the most.”
There were a few more comments, but we all knew we really had no choice. These busters would have to be preprogrammed, as we couldn’t afford the time to add SCUT comms. We sent them out from both colonies, timed to arrive simultaneously.
I was about to disconnect, when I had a thought. “Gentlemen, how many mosquito killers do we have left? And where are they?”
Kiroshi answered. “A little over two hundred. They’re all in orbit around Takama. We haven’t had any close-in encounters at either colony for a few days. Why?”
“Let’s throw them into the mix, . I’ll do some calculations, and give you the times and vectors.”
*
Our busters arrived at the expected time and place. Because they were operating without SCUTs, we were getting the video play-by-play several minutes after the fact. Whatever was going to happen had already happened.
There could be no finesse on this operation. Each one of our busters could take out one of Medeiros’ busters. We would aim several busters at Medeiros himself, but he would use his busters to intercept. Barring a miracle and him missing one, we’d be left with Medeiros and two busters to deal with.
We watched as fourteen video images closed in on fourteen targets, then fourteen video images disappeared.
“Well, that was textbook,” Richards said.
I smiled tightly. “And right about now, Medeiros should be feeling pretty smug.”
Two new video windows popped up as the incoming mosquito killers zeroed in on Medeiros. We knew we would leave two of Medeiros’ busters, but we made sure those busters were tethered to the ingot and unavailable for defense.
Medeiros detected the incoming killers and turned tail, but he was far too late. Unlike the busters, which had decelerated to arrive at the battleground at a controllable velocity, the killers had continued to accelerate all the way from Takama. They arrived with a considerable momentum; fewer than half struck the Brazilian ship, but a hundred small impacts were still sufficient to open up the side of his vessel. Medeiros lost his line and began to drift.
“He’s down,” Richards said. “Not sure if he’s dead, but propulsion is offline.”
“Do we have any more busters? Any more killers?” Kiroshi looked from one to the other of us.
I shook my head. “Busters are all expended. There are lots of killers, but they’re travelling away from Medeiros at high speed. They’ll take as long to decelerate as they took to accelerate to that velocity, then they have to accelerate back.”
“He might still be out by the time they get back. We don’t know how many roamers he has left after the space battle over Mack.”
That was true. It was certainly worth a shot, anyway. “Okay, General. I’m sending orders to the killers now. Light speed delay will add to the total turnaround time. I think we’re looking at twenty-two hours before they get back.”
Richards frowned. “Hell, we could get a couple of drones there in less time than that.”
“To do what? Even at full acceleration, they’re unlikely to do much damage.”
“I was thinking more along the lines of grabbing Medeiros himself.”
I stared at Richards. That hadn’t occurred to me. Stick some roamers in the drones’ holds, and they could enter the Brazilian ship and extract the replicant matrix. I felt a twinge of nausea at what we were not-quite planning. Memories of Homer, of the five cubes back on Earth during Bob-1’s training, swirled with images from my imagination of Mack under Medeiros’ thumb. But we were dealing with someone who was about to drop a metal meteor on a colony. Squeamishness was inappropriate.