We Are Legion (We Are Bob) (Bobiverse Book 1) (27 page)
Read We Are Legion (We Are Bob) (Bobiverse Book 1) Online
Authors: Dennis E. Taylor
In retrospect, I guess we should have expected it. There had to be a reason why the Deltans had abandoned this side of the divide, despite the better locations and resources. And there was, in the form of gorilloids.
The Deltan migration was large, noisy, and spread out. Like a travelling smorgasbord, they proved an irresistible attractant.
The gorilloid raid struck early in the morning, after first light, when the drone IR sensors had become useless. Of course, the gorilloids neither knew nor cared about that. They simply moved when they had enough light to see.
The Deltans were half asleep, half organized, and totally unprepared. The number of attackers totally overwhelmed any defenses and even took Marvin and me by surprise.
They attacked on several fronts at once in classic pack hunting style. They cut off individuals from the main group, while keeping the defenders busy with feints. A dozen Deltans, females and juveniles, had already been grabbed.
Fortunately, we had the busters on standby as a matter of policy. It took less than ten seconds to bring them in. A dozen gorilloids disintegrated in claps of thunder. We had to select targets that weren’t too close to Deltans, so this did nothing to save the abductees. That posed a separate problem.
“Guppy! Put a drone on each Deltan abductee. Stay with them, no matter what.”
[Aye]
The buster attack froze the gorilloids and rallied the Deltans. With the flint-tipped spears, the defenders had the upper hand in close-quarters fighting.
“There are too many. We just don’t have enough busters.” Marvin looked to me with panic on his face.
I turned to Guppy. “The busters at the autofactory…”
[Are on their way. However, transit time will be almost a day at maximum acceleration]
We had started with twenty-five busters. We’d used up half of them in the first rally, and almost fifty gorilloids remained. I found myself frozen for several milliseconds.
Marvin snapped his fingers. “Let’s not use them all destructively. Hit the gorilloids at the speed of a thrown rock. A forty-pound steel ball will still slow them down, then the Deltans can finish the job.”
“Do it.”
We began hitting the gorilloids at low speed. Gorilloids were amazingly tough—a strike from a buster at that speed would kill a human outright, but the gorilloids were only stunned for a moment. In several cases I found myself bludgeoning the same gorilloids multiple times.
We were still losing busters. A unit could handle up to a dozen strikes before something malfunctioned. I made a mental note that we would have to figure out a way to collect the busters for repair. And quickly.
“Guppy, start the autofactory on building more busters, top priority. And send a couple of transport drones to the migration location.”
[Aye]
Eventually, the Deltans’ defense gained the upper hand. The females and juveniles had packed into a dense mass in the middle, and the gorilloids couldn’t get close enough to break off any stragglers. The defenders moved in organized groups, and covered each other’s backs. We were down to six busters and had to be very careful about conserving them.
“Okay, Marvin, it’s time to go after the abductees. Guppy, give us a rundown on locations and status.”
Guppy popped up a relief map of the area with locations of Deltan victims and a tooltip beside each. It didn’t look good. Over half of them were already being eaten.
We each took two busters and went after the gorilloid groups. We’d smack the gorilloids in the back of the head until they either gave up and ran away, or the victim got loose during the distraction. In the end, we saved maybe a third of the abductees.
I flew a drone over to Arnold. “There are people who are injured and can’t make their way back to the tribe. You’ll need to organize retrieval parties.”
Arnold gazed at the drone for a few moments, then started pointing to individual Deltans and giving orders. I had to hand it to the Deltans, they were a decisive race. When action was required, there was no backtalk. In moments, they had organized rescue parties, who jogged off, following the drones.
I expected all but one of the surviving abductees to pull through, although some of them would have permanent disabilities.
I sighed and looked at Guppy. “How many TO-DOs do I have concerning teaching the Deltans some basic medical procedures?”
[twenty-six]
“That’s what I thought.” I was scared to ask how many total TO-DOs I had stacked up. Not for the first time, I considered building a couple dozen Bobs and attacking the list until it was under control. And as usual, I couldn’t think of any items on the autofactory list that I could bump to make room.
I’m sick of this.
“Guppy, I want the buster count up to fifty, then I want you to pull one printer group and set it to building more printers. It’s time to bootstrap.”
[Printer group duplication is time and resource intensive and will impact operations over and above the immediate loss of manufacturing output]
“I know. Short term pain, long term gain. If we’d done this in the first place, we’d be breaking even now. It’s time to get ahead of things.”
I turned to Marvin. “I’m seriously considering constructing explosive armaments.”
His eyes went wide. “Wow. That’s a helluva concession. We
hate
explosives.”
“I know. Plus there’s a risk of blowing up the printer with each unit built. I’m thinking of building them the old-fashioned way. I’ll build a chemistry lab, assign some roamers to it, and use industrial methods to build warheads.”
“You’re talking about significant lead time.” Marvin shook his head, doubt written all over his face.
“Yeah, but I have a bad feeling that we’re going to be facing gorilloids for a long time. Run the numbers and calculate what the average population density has to be in order for them to be able to gather that many gorilloids together in so short a time. I think this side of the pass is gorilloid central.”
Marvin stared into space for a millisecond or so, then nodded. “I see what you mean. This is going to be a war of extermination.”
***
“After coming all this way, you want us to stop here?” The elder’s ears were sticking straight down in the Deltan equivalent of an incredulous stare. I looked around the tribal circle and saw the same expression on most of the faces.
I sighed. The drone was not a great way to have a conversation. It might be impressive to a primitive people, but the lack of body language was really hampering me.
I tried again. “It’s only temporary. I destroyed most of my busters”—the translation program rendered that as
flying rocks
—“in that attack. I need to build more. At least here, we’ve thinned out the gorilloids, and put a scare into the surviving ones.”
Arnold, who was now a member of the circle, nodded in agreement.
“It is true. The beasts will not attack again soon. They lost three for every person they took, and we got most of those back.”
Sadly, although the gorilloids hadn’t done well in terms of stealing a meal, they had managed to kill almost twenty Deltans during the attack. That was an unsupportable level of attrition. A few more attacks, and we’d be back down below the numbers at the start of the migration.
“How long?” The elder wasn’t conceding, he was asking for clarification. I wasn’t anywhere near done here, yet.
“Five days. I have more busters on their way, and I want another set on hand before taking on more risk. After that, I’ll be bringing in more as fast as I can make them.”
Arnold stepped in again. “This is not going to be over in a hand or two of days. For this many gorilloids to have shown up so fast, there must be many of them.”
I spared a moment to be impressed by this observation. I looked at Marvin, whose eyebrows were climbing his forehead. “I guess that’s a reminder,” I said to him, “that big doesn’t mean stupid. This guy is sharp!”
I returned my attention to the drone. “Correct. I’m running my flying rocks through the forests, counting up the gorilloids. Then we’ll have a better idea of what we’re up against. And maybe we can avoid the biggest concentrations.”
“Can you not just kill them before we get to them?”
It was a reasonable question. “I would be using up my busters killing gorilloids that might never bother us. Better to concentrate our energies on those who show up. I will, however, give more warning in the future.”
The elders nodded. They understood scarcity of resources.
Orders were given, and people started to set up a more long-term camp. Arnold organized hunting parties. And I went looking for Archimedes to talk about tent poles.
***
“It seems like a lot of work for not much benefit.” Archimedes examined his first attempt at a tent. Really, it was barely a lean-to.
“Your blanket isn’t big enough to supply much coverage. With a larger blanket, you could make it tall enough to walk in and out, and you’d have sides to keep the rain and wind out.”
Archimedes walked around it. “Hard to pack and carry. Hard to set up. It seems like something that would be more useful in a permanent camp.”
Marvin laughed at the look on my face. “Take that, oh great sky god!”
“Shaddap.”
I set aside the tent project and changed the subject to straightening spears. This was something that both Archimedes and Arnold were both enthusiastic about. They’d seen the difference that simply picking straighter spear shafts could make. The idea of taking almost any shaft and straightening it was a revelation to them.
We talked for a while about how to steam the crooked piece of wood and how to build bending jigs. Arnold and Archimedes left to look for construction materials, the axe hanging casually across Arnold’s shoulder.
I rotated the drone to look over the camp. So many things to do. I might have forever, but these people, not so much.
[Message received from Milo]
I looked up, momentarily irritated by the interruption. I’d been going over growth projections for the mosses, lichens, and grasses that I was cultivating. I’d built one of Homer’s farm donuts to grow as much base stock as I could manage before introducing it to the surface of Ragnarök.
“He went to… 82 Eridani, right?”
[Correct]
“So…”
[Message contains a description of a very positive potential colonization destination. Message also contains a record of the destruction of the Heaven vessel]
“What?!”
I filed my work, cleared my desk, and pulled up the message from the in-queue. I could hear Milo’s enthusiasm as he described the early survey of the system. And his fear as he relayed the information about the approaching missiles. There was a differential backup attached, but I had a bad feeling…
“Guppy, any chance on that backup?”
[Negative. The transmitted backup was cut off before completion]
“Damn.” There was a lot of information on this in the libraries. If I attempted to kludge something anyway—to forcibly restore him, basically—there was a very good chance that the result would be insane or simply non-viable. As sad as I was to lose one of us, I had no desire to see myself in that condition.
“Okay, Guppy. Archive the backup, mark it
In Memorium
. We’ve got four version-3 Bobs being built right now, correct?” At Guppy’s nod, I continued. “Start another four as soon as physically possible. Give all of them extra busters. We’re going to extract payment for Milo.”
[Aye]
This Medeiros character was really turning into a thorn. First Epsilon Eridani, then Alpha Centauri, now this. Time to take out the trash.
I popped into Homer’s VR. “Hey, number three.”
Homer grinned back at me. “You know that’ll never be as funny as number two, right?”
“Meh.” I shrugged. “Now that you’ve gone all establishment, you need a nickname.” I popped up the list he’d sent me earlier. “You’re really going for this ranch donut, aren’t you?”
“Why not? We
way
over-engineered Farm-1, to the point of embarrassment, honestly. We’ve learned enough that I think we can give a half-gee at the rim without coming anywhere close to failure. And now that we’ve figured out atmosphere controls…” He raised his eyebrows knowingly at me.
In fact, the first couple of months of Farm-1 had been a nightmare. Every aspect of the environment kept going into positive feedback loops. We’d ended up putting four full-time AMIs on the job until we were able to figure out how to dampen the resonances.
“Okay, General Bullmoose. Just remember the little people, okay?”
Homer laughed, and I called up a coffee. Things were looking up.
The donuts, as we’d taken to calling them, looked like fat bicycle wheels. Carbon-fiber cables ran from the hub to the rim, providing most of the structural support. Three thicker spokes provided elevator access from rim to hub. The donut was oriented perpendicular to the sun, and mirrors between the rim and hub reflected sunlight into the interior through the transparent roof of the rim. Everything was designed as simply as possible, to minimize construction time and material requirements.
I sipped my coffee in silence for a few moments. “What I’m really liking is that VEHEMENT can’t get at these things. Sabotage-proof.”
“Unless they develop ground-to-space capability,” Homer replied in an off-hand tone.
I glanced at him, but I don’t think he was suggesting it as a serious possibility. There had been more attacks on food supplies Earthside, and we’d been shifting supply schedules to compensate. The new farm would hopefully take the pressure off.
Farm-1 was delivering raw kudzu on a regular basis, allocated by population and by need. I had been assured by Julia that no amount of inventive spicing could make kudzu anything other than, well, kudzu. Plus it had digestive consequences similar to beans. Hmm. Good time to be a replicant. Homer had come up with endless variations on the
Beans, Beans
song, some of which had caught on Earthside.
The second space farm would be going into production in a week, and my calculations indicated that it would bring us into a comfortable food surplus situation for the next three years. After that, falling Earthside production would again become a significant issue.
The third station, which was still about half finished, would be a mix of crops, both for dietary variety and nutritional health. Homer was talking about establishing ranching on the fourth one—cattle, pigs, and chickens. Sheep, if the New Zealanders didn’t eat all the stock first. There was genetic material in the Svalbard vault, but we would have to build the artificial wombs if we wanted to use that.
Homer had turned into an industrial tycoon. He was understandably proud that his idea had worked, and so well, and it had become an all-consuming pet project for him.
I finished my coffee and stood up. “Back to the salt mines, I guess. Try not to blow anything up, okay?”
Homer saluted me with one finger as I popped out.
