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 no s 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?”
“Correct, unless he’s giving separate orders to different squads. And in that case, I think we’d have picked up on multiple transmissions.”
“Excellent.” I considered for a millisecond. “Attention everyone. We are going to split into groups, by the numbers, and execute strategies one through four. Let’s see how well the AMI pilots handle too many different scenarios.
Verne and Surly, activate the radio jammers.”
Everyone acknowledged, and we split off in various directions, each vessel accompanied by its personal cloud of drones and busters.
For a wonder, it appeared to work. Some of the Brazilian AMIs seemed to be coping, but more of them became confused. There was a small group that would rush towards a Heaven contingent, stop, rush towards another one, then reverse and repeat. Gotta love AMIs.
And then Medeiros panicked. Unable to regain control of his drones, he cranked up his radio transmission power and attempted to outshout the jammer. He might as well have put on a hat with a flashing red light. Verne and Surly immediately released the death squad—a batch of busters specifically programmed to latch onto the Medeiri with SUDDAR and not to let go until they were space junk. The death squad shot forward at close to forty G, and I imagined them yelling “Wheee!” in high-pitched minion voices.
In next to no time the death squad surrounded the Medeiri—there were two Brazilian vessels—and destroyed them. However, this time we were going to be thorough. As soon as they got the recall order, the busters took off after the Brazilian drones. There would be no peace until every piece of Brazilian equipment in the system was obliterated.
* * *
It took a further eighteen hours to track down every fusion signature in the system. I took a video call from Elmer.
“Looks clear now. Anything still alive will have gone to ground. Time to implement phase three?”
“You bet, Elmer.” Again I switched to command channel. “Okay, everyone. Phase three. Surly, release the hunter-seekers.” I heard several snickers, hastily suppressed. Dune didn’t have a particularly good reputation among the Bobs.
The hunter-seekers were essentially drones optimized for long-distance searching. Their SUDDARs were able to reach to almost four light hours. By overlapping search fields, they could get increased definition of anything they ran across. It would take a week, but they would cover every inch of the star system, identify any refined metal up to a kilometer deep underground, and relay that information to busters for remedial action.
Meanwhile, we examined the battle records.
“That’s an Alpha Centauri Medeiros,” Hank said.
“You sure?”
“Absolutely.” Hank pulled up images of the 82 Eridani Medeiros group from our first battle, then images of the Alpha Centauri Medeiros group as recorded by Calvin and Goku.
The differences were subtle, but the two probes were definitely based on slightly different designs. It came as no surprise that the Brazilians would have worked on improvements even as they were building and launching probes. Apparently the first and second probes to leave Earth had been—Oh, hold on. That would require three different launches from Earth. One to Epsilon Eridani to fight Bob-1, one to Alpha Centauri, and one to 82 Eridani.