Bridget stood to one side, watching the monitor, hands balled into fists, willing the city to behave.
And well she should. This was actually Rivendell mark 2. The first iteration lay somewhere far below in the murky depths, probably melted into slag by now. Forgot to carry the two again.
“At depth,” I said. “Guppy, release the plates. Slowly.”
Guppy nodded without comment. The plates disengaged, and after a small bobble, Rivendell settled into equilibrium.
[Pressure is stable. Stress sensors well within limits.]
“Thanks, Guppy. We’ll take it from here.”
Guppy nodded and vanished.
“I always used to wonder, when you mentioned Guppy.” Bridget smiled at me, shaking her head. “I sometimes thought maybe you had a screw loose.”
“Confirmed!” I yelled, giving a fist pump.
“Oh, yes. And so much worse than I could have imagined.”
“I’m glad I can still surprise you,” I said, giving her a peck on the cheek. I waved a hand and the control panels for our androids appeared. “Shall we?”
Bridget took my hand, and we connected…
*
I undraped myself from the cradle and looked to my left where Bridget’s android was just doing the same. A quick glance around didn’t reveal any obvious problems. Bridget took a few moments to get used to the android form—walking around in circles, clenching and unclenching her hands. Then she looked at me and gave me a wide smile. Wordlessly, I grinned back and her and nodded toward the door.
We exited to a grassy field surrounded by low buildings on three sides. In front of us, the clear curve of the city dome rose from ground level, curving up and over us to cover and contain Rivendell.
Without a word, Bridget and I hurried to the edge of the dome. Placing our hands on the transparent fibrex, we gazed in awe out at Odin. Flocks of krill wafted by, blown about by atmospheric currents. Small predators chased the krill, larger predators chased the smaller. A pod of blimps floated by in the distance, shadowed by the usual mantas, hoping for an incautious juvenile to stray. For layer upon layer, above and below, different ecosystems dominated, shading from one to the next.
We watched this panorama, totally entranced, until we were startled by a thump, accompanied by a slight shaking. I looked around in surprise. About two thirds of the way up the dome, a blimp had attached itself to the city. It appeared determined to hold on, and…
“Uh, it’s…” I pointed, at a loss for words.
“I’d say it’s definitely a he,” Bridget replied, chortling.
“So he’s... It looks like he…um…”
“He likes us.” Bridget bent over and began to laugh, full belly laughs, arms wrapped around herself.
“Not a single one of my engineering courses covered this,” I said.
Bridget fell over onto the grass.
Up above, the blimp continued to prove its love.
Detection
Riker
April 2257
Sol
Eighty thousand observation drones generated a lot of false positives. Even with the filtering algorithms I’d worked out, I still had to check a significant number of flagged items every day. After all, false positives were tedious. Skipping a real positive would be disastrous.
Just the same, the process had become a humdrum routine, to the point where I almost went right past the first significant signal in twenty-seven years of monitoring.
I jerked in my seat as the details registered. Far too regular to be background noise, too persistent to be an instrumentation glitch. The readings were barely detectable, but they still screamed danger. I skipped forward through several hours of log entries, and finally had to accept that I wasn’t going to be able to explain this away.
With a feeling of dread, I sent a text to Bill. Positive detection.
Within moments, Bill popped in. “Way to ruin my day, Will. Okay, let’s see it.”
Wordlessly, I gestured to the monitor window. Bill sat down, pulled the window around so it faced him squarely, and began to scan. I could see his eyes moving as he went over the readings, his expression turning into a frown.
He finally pushed the window away and sat back with a huff. “Well, that’s it. We’re being invaded. I notice that the incoming is well off a direct line from here to GL 877. They expected us to be watching for them.”
I nodded. “Or at least allowed for it. Too soon to get a good picture of numbers, but I think we’ll have that by the end of the day. Do we wait to make an announcement?”
“I don’t think so.” Bill scrubbed his face with his hands, then looked at me with a weary expression. “There’ll be a moot. We want to give people time to get organized. I’ll send something out, with a promise of more information in, what, three hours?”
I nodded, and Bill stood up. “Okay, I’ll get it started. Keep the drones well outside the Others’ detection range. No sense in letting them know we’ve seen them. And forward me the update as soon as you have it.” With that, he disappeared.
*
As it turned out, we didn’t get as far as the moot. The readings resolved into individual signals in less than an hour. I guess we’d all forgotten just how big the Others’ ships were. Fifty smaller objects, which were probably death asteroids, and one hundred larger objects, cargo carriers, most likely filled with fighter units of one kind or another.
I sent a text off to Bill, and received a response immediately. Organizing something.
Ten milliseconds later, Bill, Oliver, Jacques, Garfield, Thor, and Claude popped into my VR. I noted the complaint from Guppy as the VR memory usage ballooned, and turned off Spike and Jeeves to compensate.
“Well, that sucks,” Bill said as he looked at the display wall I’d put up. “I think they’ve probably sent everything they have at us.”
“Except the Delta Pavonis expedition, which arrived back at GL 877 well after this bunch likely launched.” Jacques looked around at us, his arms crossed. None of us were fans of the Others, of course, but Jacques seemed to have internalized a really visceral hate. Couldn’t blame him, really. I had a similar attitude toward the memory of VEHEMENT.
“Thor, you have an analysis of the cargo carriers’ probable contents?”
Thor nodded an acknowledgement to Bill. “Sure, but you have to remember, at Delta Pavonis the Others were provisioned for the possibility of a local planetary defense. This time, they’ll be provisioned for the virtual certainty of a defensive force that’s space-based, has had decades to prepare, and knows what the Others bring to the table. They’ll have loaded everything they can.”
“Everything they had ready, you mean,” Claude replied. “The timing of the drone destruction back at GL 877 limits how long they could have taken to prepare.”
Garfield shook his head. “Sure, but they could have just loaded a bunch of raw material into the carriers, and built stuff during the trip. It’s not like they have a shortage of resources.”