I froze for almost half a second. “As in, leaving Delta Eridani?”
“Yeah. Bob, you’ve done a lot with the Deltans, but I think it’s past the point where it needs two of us. This is a caretaker situation, now.” He made a gesture at the video window I’d been watching. “Truthfully, the council kicking you out was probably a good thing for them. They go back to deciding their own destiny. You can still tweak things here and there, but the sky god business really wasn’t healthy. For you or for them.”
I thought about being offended, getting mad, but the truth was that I’d been having very similar thoughts. I dropped my eyes and nodded. “Still, it won’t be the same without you around to give Guppy bad greeting lines.”
“Hell, Bob, with SCUT we’re never really out of touch. If I keep my speed below .75 C, my tau won’t go high enough to preclude VR. I might just seem a little groggy to you.”
“Funny, it still doesn’t feel the same.” I shrugged and paced back and forth a few times in silence. “I guess I understand, though, Marv. It’s always been my project. Luke and Bender knew that.”
“Sure wish they’d intercept the SCUT plans transmission,” Marvin commented, changing the subject. “It would be nice to know if they’re okay.”
I nodded and sat down. What a crap year this was turning into.
On the other hand, SCUT did make things a little easier. There were things to do, and Bobs to talk to.
I shook my head and sighed. The moping was pointless. I would always be able to find a laundry list of things to be depressed about, if I worked at it. The Deltans were still there, even if they weren’t talking to me at the moment.
23. VEHEMENT
Riker
September 2175
Sol
Pieces of space station mingled with desiccated plants and the carcasses of livestock that had been unlucky enough to be living on that donut. The debris had scattered with the explosion, but orbital mechanics and mutual gravity were bringing everything back together.
Homer’s image floated in the video window. “We’d just brought this one on-line. Six months’ work, gone.”
I nodded silently. The donuts were Homer’s babies. He’d come up with the idea and head-manned it to completion. This couldn’t be easy for him. “Any announcements?”
“Yeah. VEHEMENT. The usual crazy-ass rant. Humanity is a cancer, the universe is better off without them, blah, blah.”
“I’m sorry, buddy. But we’ll get them, one way or another.”
Homer was silent. His expression said everything. Sadness, anger, confusion. He wouldn’t meet my eyes. I felt guilty about all the bad thoughts I’d had about him in the past. He was a fully contributing member of the team, and this was killing him.
I was concerned about Homer. He had pretty much stopped ribbing me. Hadn’t called me number two in months. In fact, he seemed to have turned all business. I wondered if someone had offended him, but on the one occasion I’d tried to talk to him about it, he just deflected the conversation.
“We’ve got enough redundancy now that this won’t leave us dead in the water,” I said. “But with the reduced planetside output, it’s going to mean short rations. Or more kudzu.” I smiled, trying to lighten the mood. Homer wasn’t having any. He shrugged, then ended the connection.
“Guppy, what have we got relating to Farm-6?”
[Querying AMI team. One moment]
After a short delay, Guppy continued.
[No related transmissions detected. No nearby activity except by Heaven vessels]
Crap. They were covering their tracks too well. “Something will break. Something has to.”
Guppy didn’t comment. He wasn’t much on encouragement. Huge fishy eyes blinked once.
*
Just to really make my week, there were several terrorist attacks on Florianópolis as well. I kept wondering if there was some anniversary coming up that was triggering all the activity. The terrorists were getting smarter, and hitting more critical targets. One of the attacks had taken out the power system. It would take a couple of days to fix.
It wasn’t the first time that the actions of VEHEMENT and the Brazilian attacks seemed to be coordinated. I wondered if there was some connection. It was almost certainly two different groups, but maybe they were talking to each other, sharing intelligence. That could actually be of benefit to me.
The old Earth, pre-war, had global technology and every form of communications you could imagine. This post-apocalyptic reality was far more limited. There were fewer methods of communication for collusion between the two groups, or even cross-talk between VEHEMENT cells.
But I’d been monitoring all channels. At least everything I could think of. So either I’d missed some form of communication; or they were using some kind of steganography, which would be almost impossible to recognize unless you knew what you were looking for; or they had gone low-tech.
Option three would be too slow, number one I couldn’t do anything about, so that left two. Steganography was by definition inefficient, since you had to spread the message out enough for it to be unnoticeable. Therefore the transmission medium would have to allow a high bandwidth, which would immediately rule out a lot of possibilities. And there were statistical methods that could ferret out steganographic messages.
I retired to my VR, to give this more thought.
24. Visiting Marvin
Bob
March 2174
Delta Eridani
I hadn’t had to kill a hippogriff in months. It wasn’t clear if they’d learned to avoid the territory, or if there simply weren’t any left that were close enough to bother the Deltans. Since Marvin’s departure, I was handling all the drones myself. I could automate a certain amount of the tasks, but I still eventually had to review the mission recordings. Honestly, I couldn’t be bothered.
I kept my eye on Archimedes and his family, probably a little more than I should. I had occasional flashes of myself as the overbearing grandparent who kept wanting to visit. It was an embarrassing image, and I resolved to contact Archimedes a little less often.
Marvin was long gone, heading for Pi3 Orionis. I think he was hoping for an intelligent species that he could be in charge of. It seemed we actually had a paternal streak. Or maybe maternal. He was, as promised, keeping his top speed low enough so that he could still interface via SCUT connection. We’d found a balance, where he frame-jacked up a bit and I slowed my time-sense some, and we could then interact at the same time-rate. It worked.