“Moo,” I replied.
“Yeah, like that.”
Monty groaned. “I’m not thrilled either. It means I’m stuck here for another six months.”
“Suck it up. You’re immortal.”
“Bite me.”
We all grinned at each other. The routine exchange of insults felt sort of reassuring.
“Well,” Marcus finally said. “Guess we’d better go break the news.”
“What do you mean, ‘we’, Kemo Sabe?”
Marcus laughed and popped out.
50. Second Expedition
Loki
November 2195
82 Eridani
We flew straight into the 82 Eridani system without attempting any finesse. We were here to kick some ass and, more importantly, to finish the job that Khan and his group had started.
Twelve Bobs, with Version-4 vessels featuring even more heavily shielded reactors than the threes, and total radio silence. Special carbon-black exteriors ensured an almost-zero albedo, and we had borrowed from the military to arrive at profiles that were virtually invisible to radar. The only place we were vulnerable was SUDDAR detection, and as far as we knew we had the range advantage in that area.
There was no point in being subtle. But being tricky was definitely on the menu. We spread a net of observation drones in front of us, coasting with minimal systems. Interspersed with them were ship-busters and decoy drones. SCUT connections with every drone and buster guaranteed instant communications. Whether the enemy detected our outriders first or us first, we could still throw a surprise at them.
We didn’t know, of course, whether there were any Medeiri left from the first expedition. Or, for that matter, whether the Medeiros that escaped at Alpha Centauri might have made his way here. Best case, there would be nothing but the Brazilian AMIs, still patrolling the system looking for things to blow up. We’d brought plenty of decoys to cover that eventuality as well.
Yep, we were loaded for bear. We just had to hope that Medeiros hadn’t invented a bigger, better bear.
Ultra-low intensity version-4 SUDDAR wouldn’t even be detectable to traditional SUDDAR receivers unless the listener was specifically looking for it. We came into the system like a person in a pitch-black room, carefully feeling our way forward and ready to pull in our toes at the slightest sign of an obstacle.
We needn’t have bothered. Medeiros might not have a bigger bear, but he definitely had some kind of passive early warning system that we couldn’t detect. We were met by a solid wall of oncoming ordnance. The first engagement looked like a republic-vs-empire Star Wars shoot-em-up. And again Medeiros was using cloaking technology. But this time, we were ready for that.
It looked like Medeiros continued to depend on nukes as his main weapon. Four enemy drones detonated simultaneously as soon as they were within range of our defenders.
Nothing was going to survive being up close and personal with an exploding fission bomb, but in space the shock wave was a strictly short-range issue. At any distance, the main force of destruction would be the EMP. And we’d engineered for that, this time. It took Medeiros a dozen ineffective nukes before he caught on to the fact that we weren’t affected. At that point, flying nukes started trying to get in closer. We spiked them, we busterized them, we confused them with our own set of decoys. And we watched and listened for the source of the commands.
Then Medeiros showed that he had learned from our last encounter.
A wave of attack drones came at us that were completely different from the traditional flying nukes. Our attempts to spike them just bounced off.
“Oh, this is bad. What’s spike-proof?”
“Possibly something with a defensive magnetic field,” Elmer replied. “We’ll need to use busters on these guys.”
“Good call, Elmer. Okay, everyone, deploy half your busters forward. Any enemy drone that survives a spiking gets busterized.”
A flood of busters accelerated toward the oncoming ordnance. We carefully staggered them so that Medeiros couldn’t catch multiple busters with one nuke. The first contact produced so much carnage, between detonations and debris, that we couldn’t resolve the battlefield for several precious seconds.
Then I remembered reading the report on Riker’s first battle in Sol. “Scatter! Watch for passive incoming!” I sent a SUDDAR pulse ahead as I turned and accelerated at ninety degrees. Sure enough, the ping showed a massive number of dense objects hurtling towards us.
It was too late for three of us, though. Jeffrey, Milton, and Zeke disappeared from the status board as their signals cut off.
The only good thing about this attack strategy, if something could be considered good, was that the passive ordnance couldn’t chase us. With the field now clearing, we could verify that there wasn’t another wave on the way. At least, not yet. I wasn’t going to make any assumptions.
Our second wave of busters now engaged the remaining enemy drones. Up close the busters had an advantage, and we recorded almost 100% kills.
A momentary lull in encounters allowed me to scan the battlefield. For the moment, there was no movement. The question now was: did Medeiros have more in reserve?
A second SUDDAR sweep showed another wave of enemy ordnance coming in. We weren’t anywhere near done, yet. A quick count showed Medeiros had more drones than we had busters. This put us at a definite disadvantage. Plasma spikes helped to even things out with unprotected drones, though, and since building nukes was expensive of time and resources, I had to hope some of that incoming consisted of decoys.
“Has anyone picked up any transmissions from Medeiros, yet?”
A chorus of nos came back to me.
Damn. One of our planned strategies was to triangulate on the Brazilian craft’s transmissions. Our last battle with him had shown the wisdom of cutting off the head. But Medeiros seemed to have learned from last time in that area, as well.
I accepted a call from one of the crew.
“Hey, Loki?”
“What’s up, Verne?”
“I’ve been doing an analysis of Medeiros’ attack strategy. I don’t think he’s actively controlling the battle.”
“Pre-programmed decision trees? If so, those are very smart AMIs. We saw them running through some sophisticated strategies.”
“I think it’s a bit of both.”
“Oh, great. That’s helpful.”
I could hear the smile in Verne’s voice. “Well, it is, kind of. He’s probably set up a number of different battle scenarios and canned responses with different goal weightings. He changes response trees with a very short command sequence, maybe a couple of bytes and a checksum, too short to triangulate on. Then the AMIs are on their own.”
Now that was interesting. “In that case, he can only have one response tree going at a time, right?”