I materialized a deck chair of my own at sat down. “Been following the Others, Claude?”
“Yeah, I was at the moot. And I heard about NN 4285.”
“Okay, so here’s the thing. With the Others taking out GL 54, there’s no Bob-controlled system anywhere close to you. When you get to Gamma Pavonis, you have to assume you only have a couple of decades at most before the Others come visiting. You’re going to have to mobilize for war, essentially.”
Claude frowned. “A lot of assumptions in there.”
“Not as many as you’d think, and the assumptions are high probability.”
Claude sighed and resettled himself in his chair to face me squarely.
“Look, Bill. I get the whole thing about the Others, and they’re evil, blah blah. But why here, and why now? Why this particular line in the sand?”
“I’ll grant you there’s nothing unique about Gamma Pavonis to the limit of our current knowledge. But we have to start somewhere. Maybe we won’t be ready for them in time. Maybe they’ll swoop down on you in a decade and you’ll have to flee like Mario did. But at some point, we have to try. Why not here, and why not now?”
Claude gave me a wry smile. “Because here and now puts me in the crosshairs, thank you very much.”
I laughed. “Well, that’s why God invented backups.”
* * *
I popped back to my own VR, after extracting a promise from Claude that he’d get the system report on Gamma Pavonis to me on a priority basis. I checked Jacque’s tau, but he was still way up there. A conversation would take days, even if he frame-jacked.
I quickly went down my list of known manufacturing centers. There weren’t a lot. Most Bobs didn’t bother in most systems, other than building a space station. I remembered Bart, who was the last Bob that I’d talked to in Alpha Centauri.
I sent a quick ping to him, but it looked like he was between systems.
Bart’s acknowledgement indicated a ridiculous tau. I’d be a few days even waiting for a response, never mind a conversation.
I queried the Alpha Centauri space station directly. The status report appeared in front of me in a window. Garfield came around and looked over
my shoulder.
“No one there right now,” he said. “Looks like the last group left it uninhabited.”
“Well, we can’t force anyone to stay and play caretaker. It’s a free galaxy.” I ran a hand through my hair, then stopped and looked at my hand.
That was Riker’s tic. I didn’t need to start that. “It looks like a full-power AMI, though. If I can get it to build a replicant matrix, I can load my backup and the new me can bootstrap up from there.”
“You’re going to load a backup across interstellar distances, with no Bob overseeing? Wow, dude.”
I shrugged. “No difference in principle. I’ll checksum the hell out of it before approving it for load.” I thought for another millisecond, then nodded.
“I don’t have a choice, anyway. We can’t afford to ignore any potential source of Bobs. I’m afraid, like it or not, we’re going to war.”
60. Arrival
Claude
May 2205
Gamma Pavonis
Gamma Pavonis was an F8V class of star, which made it slightly bigger and barely hotter than Sol. The effect was a system with a comfort zone slightly farther out, but a sun that would look virtually indistinguishable from ours.
I paradoxically found myself hoping that I wouldn’t find anything in the comfort zone. The whole dialog with Bill had left me freaked out and ambivalent about what I might find. I would actually feel better if there was nothing in this system worth defending.
Well, you have to know that Murphy is listening for just exactly that kind of wish, so he can give you the shaft.
The planet sat at just over a hundred million miles out. A gorgeous, shining, blue and green marble with bands and swirls of white, orbited by one larger moon and three smaller ones. Damn.
I went immediately into orbit to determine if it included intelligent life.
That would be a real kick in the pants. Fortunately, the planet failed—or passed, depending on attitude—the first, obvious tests. There was no radio traffic, no web of exhaust trails in the atmosphere, no satellites, and no sprinkle of lights on the night side.
That still left pre-industrial civilization, of course, but that would require a closer look. I sent a quick email off to Bill with results so far, then deployed the exploration drones. Mario had decided that the latest-version Heaven vessels would come with enough on-board assets so that we could investigate a system quickly. This meant mining and manufacturing operations could wait for later.
The drones took up polar orbits for a couple of passes, then swooped into atmosphere to check out interesting items.
I spent five days on observation and exploration. I didn’t want to screw this up. But finally, I felt confident enough to report my findings.
No intelligence. Thank God. But the ecosystem was as rich and varied as anything in Earth’s history. This was a planet with everything stacked in its favor. The right size, the right distance from a sun with good solar output but relatively low UV, good-sized moons, plate tectonics active enough to ensure consistent surface recycling—the list went on and on. This was an ideal colony target, except for the part where it was on the Others’ front porch.
Now I would have to move to phase 2. This system actually had a relatively low metallicity, at least according to the star’s spectral lines.
Perhaps that was why the Others had rejected it in favor of the slightly more distant NN 4285. But the next star out, GL 902, was over two light-years farther than this one. I doubted the Others would bypass it again.
Well, low metallicity was a relative term. I was sure I’d still find more than enough resources for my purposes, even if it took a bit of work to find.
There was a ping from Bill, then he popped in.
“Hey Claude. I’ve been looking over your report. Sounds like a great planet.”
“And that’s the problem. It is a great planet. Great system. And if you’re right, due to be ‘harvested’ sometime in the next, what, hundred years?”
Bill looked down for a moment. “Mario has been getting reports back from Bobs hitting surrounding systems. Combined with his own observations in Zeta Tucanae and Beta Hydri, we’re able to make a rough estimate of a system every ten to twenty years.”
“So they’ve only been at this maybe a hundred years?”
“We don’t know how long they were working only within their system. It might have taken them a hundred years to get started. Maybe the first out-system harvest taught them a lot. Anyway, the point is, there are a lot of unknowns before they started regularly harvesting.”
Bill had popped up a star chart while he was talking, the various star systems flashing a tooltip as he mentioned them.
“Jacques will be arriving at Delta Pavonis in eighteen months. The positions of Delta Pavonis and GL 877 are about the same distance from you, so if we see the Others head your way, anything he launches from Delta will arrive here at the same time. So hopefully you’ll have reinforcements.”
I nodded. That was something, anyway.
61. Starting Over
Oliver
September 2205
Alpha Centauri
HIC71683-14. Damn. I’m not Bill anymore. Now I need a new name.