At that moment, Monty popped in and materialized another chair for himself. He accepted a coffee from Jeeves and looked around.
My VR wasn’t particularly inspired, as such things go. I’d never felt the need to come up with something new and imaginative. I had a variation on Bob-1’s library, but with high windows for more sunlight, and more casual furniture.
“So, anyway, things grow big in the water, in direct proportion to the available space. A global ocean, eight hundred kilometers deep, makes for some very large nasties.”
Monty looked concerned. “They couldn’t take down a mat, could they?”
“Oh, hell no. Nothing’s that big. But on this planet, a day at the beach is likely to be fatal even if you don’t get wet. The kraken in particular has tentacles, and one of its feeding strategies is to grab animals off the edges of mats.”
“Right.” Monty nodded. “Well, the mats are a short-term solution, anyway. The colonists will be building floating cities for the long term. We’ll just need tough enough perimeter defenses to keep them out.”
“So,” I looked at him, changing the subject. “When are you going to decant the colonists?”
“I’m waking the Setup Management team right now. Couple of hours, they’ll be ready to start.” Unlike the land-based colonies in other systems, the teams here would be working from the colony transport—Monty—for a considerable time, and the civilian population likely wouldn’t start to emerge for a good six months. Future shipments would have it a little easier.
We had a number of variations on floating city plans on file. Free-floating cities had been a bit of a thing for a while in the twenty-second century. Of course, they had access to land-based support, and they didn’t have to deal with predators up to a hundred meters long, with tentacles.
* * *
Discussions with the Prep team hadn’t taken as long as I expected. I guess there’d been a lot of planning before they’d launched from Earth system, and there hadn’t been any surprises at this end. Yet.
I had tagged all the biggest mats with beacons, so we knew what was available. The Prep team picked a couple of large mats that were drifting in the north tropical current. They were both well over a hundred square km in area, complete with commensal ecosystems. Within a day, we were ferrying down supplies and equipment.
The colonists, a conglomerate of enclaves from Micronesia, the Maldives, Vanuatu, and Saint Lucia, would have to be awoken in small groups as living space was constructed on the mats. It would be about a year before Monty would be able to leave.
Marcus would be staying here to help with the colony setup after Monty headed back to Earth. He would build a fleet of human-crewed spaceships so that the colonists wouldn’t be dependent on us. With no land on Poseidon, all industry would have to be space-based, and Marcus didn’t want to play permanent taxi-to-the-world.
* * *
Marcus popped in without warning. “We just lost another settler.”
“Kraken?”
Marcus nodded and sat down. He took a moment to give Spike a chin-scritch, then materialized a Coke.
“I’m sure Chief Draper is pissed,” Monty said. “We have to come up with some better defense. We could go through the entire setup team pretty fast.”
“Or we could reconsider flying cities.” Marcus grinned at me.
“Oh for Pete’s sake, Marcus. There are no plans in the libraries for flying cities.”
“Yeah, but you could start with Bill’s asteroid mover and I bet you could end up with something that would hold a city in the air.”
“Let us know when you have a design, there, Marcus.”
Marcus made a dismissive gesture and changed the subject. “Well, we can’t stick to the status quo. The krakens will just keep getting bolder. But building floating cities without an established land base of some kind is going to require some inventive re-thinking.”
“Can we beef up the protection around the floating mats?” Monty asked.
In response, Marcus popped up a schematic view of the island. “Here’s the problem. The Kraken are able to wriggle a tentacle through the mat and grab inland prey. Native life has figured out how to tread lightly, but humans have two left feet, so to speak.”
“Plus,” I added, “all the equipment makes a racket.”
Monty rubbed his forehead, looking disgusted. “Um. Any ideas? Serious ones, I mean.”
“Actually, yes.” Marcus nodded. “I can adapt some library plans to construct an electrified net that discharges on contact. A million volts or so should provide some negative reinforcement.”
“Or a watery grave. Either is good.” I nodded. Nice.
Marcus grinned at me. “Now the bad news. To build the net, and to build the equipment necessary to deploy it, will add six months to our schedule.
Draper will take that about as well as Butterworth would.”
“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.