Elmer was silent for a moment, and sympathy and sadness washed over me. He was screwed, and we both knew it.
“I’ve updated a differential to Bill, so to quote the Celine Dion song—”
“Oh, please don’t, Elmer.”
He laughed. “Gotcha. So you turn off your SUDDAR jamming and run silent out of here. I’ll keep blinding everyone until the last moment. Give Bill my regards.”
“Will do, buddy. Sayonara.”
“Hasta la vista, baby.”
I did as he said. Once my SUDDAR emitter went silent, the Brazilian units locked onto the only bright source of SUDDAR in the area. As I ran from the area, Elmer’s relayed telemetry showed close to fifty units converging. Then he was gone.
***
I coasted for two weeks to get far enough away from 82 Eridani before I reactivated all systems. I had given a full report to Bill, and I spent the time doing more thorough repairs. The last thing I needed was equipment failure halfway between stars.
Of the eight Bobs that went to 82 Eridani, I was the only one left. I think we took the Medeiri out, so I guess it was a success from that point of view. But I couldn’t convince myself that the whuppin’ had all been one-way.
I popped into Bill’s VR. “Hey, Bill.”
“Hi, Khan.” Bill gave a flash of a smile. “I still can’t say that without wanting to yell it.”
We shared the standard laugh. Good names were getting a little scarce, and I was glad to have picked one that had some nerd lore behind it.
“Did we get all the backups?”
Bill shook his head, looking unhappy. “Three didn’t complete. SCUT bandwidth just isn’t dependable enough. Lots of dropped packets and re-sends. I’ve added them to the In Memorium list.”
“Elmer?”
Bill smiled, a small sad smile. “He made it. Guess he surprised all of us, right?”
I nodded, and let the silence extend for a few milliseconds.
“We’re going to have to go back, you know.”
Bill nodded. “We don’t know for sure that we got all the Medeiri, even if we got all the active ones. And those AMI units will still be wandering around, looking for things to blow up.” Bill waved a hand. “And, not to put too fine a point on it, I have to find out how he’s doing that cloaking. That’s a real danger to us.”
I rubbed my chin in thought for a second, then looked at my hand in amusement. We Bobs were so used to VR now that we felt fully human most of the time. But once in a while the incongruousness of an action would jerk one of us back to reality.
“Bill, I want to be in on the next wave. I owe that to the guys we lost. It will take me thirteen years to get back, so load my backup into one of the new ships. I’ll send you a full, and let me know if it comes through, okay?”
Bill nodded.
I gave him a salute and disappeared from his VR.
Medeiros, I’m coming back for you.
Howard – September 2188 – Omicron2 Eridani
We’d arrived.
I can’t even begin to describe the feelings of joy and relief as I passed the Kuiper belt and officially entered the Omicron2 Eridani system. No Vulcan cruisers flew up to intercept us, so I added a few to my VR. Just because.
I did a quick scan of the system to confirm Milo’s survey results and verify our orientation to the ecliptic plane. The two colony ships, Bert and Ernie—yeah, they named themselves that, yes, voluntarily—came into the system at a much more sedate 1 g deceleration. They would arrive at Vulcan and Romulus a week or two behind me.
I’d been thinking off and on about what it would be like to be a colony ship. The guys would be essentially running a shuttle service for up to a couple of centuries. Fly to Earth, fly to Vulcan. Fly to Earth, fly somewhere else. Rinse, repeat. On the other hand, they were doing a very valuable service for humanity. Any Bob could appreciate that.
And with our arrival, humanity now officially no longer had all its eggs in one basket. Now perhaps we could start to think about breathing a little easier. But just a little.
I dropped into the L4 point between Vulcan and Romulus and dropped a beacon. We would set up there to do initial recon and to give Colonel Butterworth and his people a chance to make a decision. Since I had ten days or so to kill, I send some exploration drones to each planet to expand on Milo’s survey information. Then I settled back with a cup of coffee to relax.
Milo had left a couple of AMIs and a bunch of autofactory drones behind to continue mining the system. The drones put the refined metals into bundles of ingots and set beacons on them. With a couple of decades of peace and quiet, the automation had accumulated several hundred thousand tons of ready-to-use material, all in orbit inside the asteroid belt. Riker had started the AMI on building a farming donut a decade ago, to provide a backup food source. It would need only to be seeded from the stocks we’d brought with us. I hoped we wouldn’t need it. Of course, I didn’t hope that anything like as strongly as the colonists would. Kudzu was apparently not the food of the gods, although deities were often invoked when describing it.
I had quick conversations with Bill and Riker, just to let them know we’d made it. Full reports would follow. Riker gave me a list of colony ships that were already launched and on their way.
Hmm, but no pressure, right?
***
Exodus-1 and Exodus-2 settled into orbit without a hitch. We had a brief flurry of SCUT exchanges, then Bert and Ernie shut down the drives and went to station-keeping.
“Welcome to the home of Spock, boys.” I popped into the common VR and grinned at them. They were grinning back, of course. After all, Bob. Bert and Ernie had adopted Battlestar Galactica-style uniforms and command deck VRs. I was a little surprised by that, as it hadn’t been one of my favorite shows. Although the Cylons were definitely bad-ass.
“I was seriously considering putting up a couple of Vulcan cruisers to escort us in,” Ernie said.
I felt my face turn red, and Bert started laughing so hard he almost lost his seat.
We took a minute to enjoy the joke—belly laughs are one of the best things about being sentient, and you should never miss a chance for one. We wiped the tears from our eyes, and I pulled up a holo of the system, with Vulcan and Romulus showing in an inset window.
“We’ll want to push Butterworth to make a decision as quickly as possible. I want the colonists offloaded at the earliest possible date, and you guys on your way back to Earth.” I gestured toward the holo. “Butterworth already has Milo’s survey results, and I’ve been adding to the data. This isn’t going to be a negotiation. He picks A or B, and we move.”
Ernie nodded. “Guppy advises me that Butterworth has come out of stasis, and he’ll be ready to talk within an hour. I’ll package it up for him, let him have some quiet time to study it. Meeting in, say, three hours?”
Bert and I nodded, and we moved on to the next item.