“Damn.” Claude rubbed his head. “So, how much subjective time did they have to build up a fighting force?”
“Hmm…” Bill thought for a moment. “Twenty-eight point one light-years. The cargo carriers aren’t capable of more than five G, and they wouldn’t be here yet if they’d been pulling much less. So I expect they went for minimum travel time instead of trying to extend their personal time during the trip. That puts it just a shade under two years subjective.” He looked around the group. “That’s a lot of time, but I think if they had loaded the cargo vessels to capacity, they’d have extended the trip. Thor, can you work with that?”
Thor nodded, then his avatar froze as he frame-jacked to work the models.
He was back in moments. “It’s still not good. I figure they can put at least twenty thousand fighters and flying bombs, maybe closer to thirty.”
“Oh my God,” Claude said. “And we have what?”
“Five hundred Bobs, a thousand AMI-crewed dreadnaughts, three thousand nukes, and five thousand busters.”
“Plus plasma spikes and lasers, not that those will be hugely useful, with light lag.”
“Well, hold on,” Garfield said. “Light-speed limitations work against them, but we could make it work for us.”
We all turned to him, and he continued, “If we can get some cloaked observation drones in close enough, we can track their location real-time and fire the lasers and spikes to intercept them.”
“Sure, but if they do that mega-ping thing, they’ll see the drones and know we’re on to them.”
Garfield shrugged at Thor. “But if they do the mega-ping, they’ll be announcing their presence. They might be reluctant to do that until the last second.”
I rubbed my eyes with thumb and forefinger. “Damn, I wish Butterworth was still around.”
Bill grinned at me. “I don’t think I’ve ever actually heard you say that before.”
“I didn’t dislike him, Bill. We just always seemed to be at loggerheads.” I shrugged. “Anyway, this kind of reading-the-other-guy’s-mind tactical stuff is what he was good at. Original Bob, not so much.”
There were quiet nods around the table. “Yeah,” Garfield said, “we really weren’t good at things like chess, for just that reason.”
The moment of contemplative silence was broken by Thor. “Yeah, whatever. Look, we can calculate when they’ll probably consider it too late for us to do anything. That’s when they’ll ping. We just have to make our move sooner.”
“Okay, Thor, you’ll handle that?” At Thor’s nod, Bill looked around at us. “Let’s try to get stealth drones out there. Let’s also send a salvo of stealth nukes as well. Anything that we can take out early will be one less item to worry about later. And send out the Jokers. Have them get into position early.”
I jerked as I received a ping, and Bill looked at me with an eyebrow raised.
“Seems Herschel and Neil are here.” I grinned at the others. “So at least we might be able to get the humans out of the way.”
Bill nodded, and swept his gaze around the table. “Right, we all have our tasks. Moot’s in two hours, let’s be ready for that.” He popped out, followed in moments by the others.
Arrival
Herschel
April 2257
Sol
I was jittery with excitement. In a few more minutes, we’d have decelerated enough to be able to VR-sync with stationary Bobs. We were never really out of touch, of course, but email was such a dry method of communications. No one used it for anything but reports and updates.
Finally, my latest ping gave a positive return. With a whoop, we threw our VRs open and sent a sync request to Riker.
[Connection refused.]
“What?” I looked at Neil. “Are we in the dog house?”
He shrugged, plainly as perplexed as me. “I hope not. If I’m going to be in trouble, I want to have earned it.”
[Recipient indicates he is at max capacity.]
“Oh.” Well, that made more sense. There was a limit to how many people you could host in your ship VR. We must have just caught him at a bad time. I sat back, ordered a coffee, and tried to relax.
Finally, Riker popped into our VR. Usually, it would be the other way around, but today didn’t seem to be running per usual so far, so I didn’t comment.
“Hi guys. I’m glad to see you’re finally here.”
“What’s going on, Riker?”
“It’s Will, now, Herschel. I’m trying to leave the Star Trek thing behind me.”
I nodded, and waved at a seat.
Will sat down, accepted a coffee from Jeeves, and took a moment. “Guys, remember when the Others started blowing up surveillance drones around GL 877, then stopped? And Neil…” Will inclined his head in an acknowledgement to him. “…pointed out that they might have launched something while we had a temporary blind spot?”
We nodded, silently. Will was doing a lot of summarization. Probably not just to shoot the breeze. Something was definitely up.
“We’ve detected their fleet.” Will put the cup down and turned to face us squarely. “It’s big. I mean really big. I’m not sure we can beat them. I am sure we can’t beat them before they get close enough to Earth to start zapping. And we have to assume that’s what they’re going to try to do.”
“Holy…” Neil’s eyes were like saucers. “How many people left? How many stasis pods do you have?”
“We managed to build three million. And lucky to have managed that many. Your report says you have five. Unfortunately, we still have a little under fourteen million people on Earth.”
I groaned. “Six million short. Can we double them up?” It was a stupid comment, and I knew it. The pods were engineered for one person each. It wasn’t just a matter of jamming bodies in. Luckily, Will recognized it as a rhetorical comment and didn’t reply.
“How much time do we have?” Neil asked. “Could we build bigger stasis rooms?”
“No time for anything like that,” Will answered. “And you still need the same amount of equipment for each person.”
Neil nodded. “What are we going to do, Will?”
Will looked at us, shook his head, then rubbed his face with his hands. “I don’t know, Neil. The meeting I just got out of was to discuss that very thing. Right now, it looks like we take as many as we can off-planet, and just hope that we can hold off the Others well enough to spare the rest.”
“Shuttles?” I asked.
“That, at least, isn’t a problem. We’ve been considering the transportation issue for a lot of years. We can move a million people at a time. Mind you, it makes a third-world airline feel like First Class, but if your life is at stake, you’ll put up with a chicken in your lap.”
Neil and I exchanged a glance. Things were getting scary.
“Will you guys be ready to load?”
“We’re all set up with our pods,” Neil replied. “We’ve prepped several bays for your pods. We prepared for a full fourteen million, so overkill, a bit.”
I shrugged at Will. “We’ve been considering issues for several years as well. I think we’re ready for whatever you throw at us.”
Will nodded. “Let’s hope we’re as ready for the Others.”