“Well, it would explain their decision to build the Dyson Sphere.” Hal said from the front of the audience.
“That and their comment about going to war with any splinter group,” I added. “That could be phenotypical behavior as well. These beings seem to be very much driven by their biology. It may be that their reference to all other life as ‘food’ is more of the same. Something that drives their actions at such an instinctual level can be taken advantage of, if we can figure out how. That’s one of the tasks I want you guys to take out of this meeting.”
There were silent nods throughout the room. And a palpable aura of anticipation. I’d tried to keep this quiet, but somehow word had gotten out.
“And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for.” I grinned at the crowd. “We got images of the Others from the scans. The detail isn’t great, of course. The drone was too—”
“Less talk, more show!”
I snapped my mouth shut. So much for building the drama. With a wave, I brought up the composite 3D image that we’d put together.
There were oohs and aahs from the crowd. The Other was hard to describe, simply because it was hard to get a perspective on it. The scale superimposed on the image indicated that it was about four feet tall, although it didn’t really stand straight. Color shaded between an oily green-violet sheen through gray, to black.
I looked at the perplexed faces in the crowd. I understand that look. I’d worn it recently. But I’d been examining all the images since we separated them from the scans, so I had somewhat of a head start on figuring it out.
“Okay, think of the posture of a gorilla. Not quite a quadruped, but not quite upright. These things that look kind of like meaty wings are the front, er, limbs. The back limbs are more like a split tail, except that there’s also a tail. Visualize a sea lion’s back end with a tail tacked on. The front limbs have these big appendages that look like fat fingers, but I don’t think they’re for manipulating. They have suckers on them, so I think they’re more for gripping their prey. The creature has what I’d have to describe as feeding fingers that fold out from here…“ I pointed to the front of the thing, “… and appear to be dexterous enough to act as manipulators. They also direct food into the maw…” I switched to another image which showed the thing with its front split open in a vertical slash. “… which doesn’t masticate so much as grind and strip the meal. I think it would be particularly slow and painful to be eaten by these things.”
I switched images again and pointed to the front. “The head does appear to have the primary sensory apparatus, although what looks like the brain is more centrally located, here.” I pointed to a spot high on the main trunk. “Vision is not great. It seems to be a large number of small eyes spaced around the dome of the head. You have to wonder why a predator would need 360-degree vision.”
I switched back to the first picture. “The scan indicated they were packed into the living area with a density similar to us in this room. Except that it was like that everywhere. No empty rooms. No private quarters. They are probably always packed in like sardines.”
I gestured dramatically. “Ladies, er, gentlemen, I give you— the Others.”
There was dead silence for a few milliseconds, then someone said, “Should we clap?”
Everyone in the room broke up in laughter, and the tension dissolved. If I ever found out who the speaker was, I’d have to buy him a beer.
I left the image up, and closed the meeting. People broke into groups to discuss the presentation. Mario raised his chin in my direction, and I acknowledged the implied invitation with a wave.
Mario grimaced. “I had a theory that the presence of the death asteroids was proof that they don’t scout a system. Otherwise they’d have known they didn’t need them at GL 54.”
“Mm, but if they’re a communal organism, then the death asteroids are their portable community.”
Mario gave me a rueful smile. “Yep. Fail.”
“So how is the harvest going?”
He rolled his eyes and pulled up some images. “Thankfully there was nothing in GL 54 to get attached to, so this is nothing more than a strategic retreat to me.” Pointing to one image. “The carriers go down where presumably they’ve detected metal. They disgorge ants, who dig down to the ore and bring it up. It’s hard to tell from a distance, but based on activity, I think they use the ore to build more ants which they use to get more ore, which they use to build more ants… Eventually they reach a break-even point of some kind where the ants just haul material up. Then they harvest the excess ants and take off.”
“They’d have printers specialized for making ants, then.” I stroked my chin in thought. “It would have to be a cheap, quick process.”
“At the current rate, I estimate they’ll have the system cleaned out in a year. It’s exponential behavior. They never stop, never rest.” Mario rubbed his eyes. “And those cargo ships are so big, I don’t think we could even make them notice us, let alone damage them significantly. It would be like mosquitos trying to take on tanks.”
“Well, we have to come up with something before they decide Earth is next.”
Mario shook his head. “There are a lot of systems closer to them than Earth. We have lots of time.”
“You’re assuming that they always do things that way. You’re assuming that they won’t suddenly decide to drive a little extra distance for some ready-made refined material.” I glared at him, willing him to get the point. “I think we have to assume we don’t have a lot of time. If we’re ready early, no biggie. If we’re ready late, biggie.”
“Damn.”
58. News
Howard
July 2198
Interstellar Space
I was less than a third of the way to my destination when I received an email from Dexter. In a moment of weakness, I’d asked him to let me know any news about the Brodeurs.
Dexter included a bunch of other stuff in the email as well. Maybe he wanted to distract me; maybe he wanted to it to seem like the message wasn’t all about Bridget. Don’t know, but I appreciated the effort.
In any case, it looked like things were going well, in general. Butterworth had retired—well-deserved, in my opinion. The population of the system was up around a hundred thousand people now. Human-crewed spaceships were becoming commonplace, and the donuts made up an increasingly minor part of the food supply chain. Dexter apparently now had some of that formerly mythical free time, and was putting together some of Bill’s asteroid movers.
New Jerusalem was now a full-fledged democracy. Seemed some incriminating videos had gotten out and Cranston had to step down. In the resulting mess, the citizenry had decided to separate Church and State once again.