“Entire planets… an entire intelligent species…”
“Yeah, buddy. We thought Medeiros was our biggest problem. On this scale, he doesn’t even tweak the needle.”
Bill looked down at his coffee for a bit. I understood the feeling of shock, so I let him work through it uninterrupted.
Finally, he looked up. “This has immediate ramifications. We’ve got humans out here to worry about too.” At the expression of surprise on my face, he waved a hand dismissively. “Stuff’s been happening. Read my
current-affairs blog when you get a chance.”
Bill put his coffee down on the desk, and I was momentarily bemused by how well the VR was meshing over a 23-light-year distance.
“This is not the way I envisioned a First Contact situation,” I mused. “I sure hope this isn’t the norm in the universe. Although it would explain the Fermi Paradox.”
“Second.” Bill flashed a wan smile. “Bob beat you to first place by a couple of years. His is more of the good kind, though. Like I said, read the blog.”
He visibly shook himself. “I’ve been running a lot of projects here. The SCUT is just the most dramatic. I’ll pull a few other files and send them your way—stuff you can use for making weapons.”
I nodded. “Anything that’ll help. I don’t get the impression that busters are going to be enough against someone who can zap a whole planet.”
“Yeah, I’ll bump up the priority on anything that looks like it can be weaponized.” He picked up his cup. “And I’ll push this info out to every Bob in the directory. You’d be amazed what can come out when all the Bobs get together to brainstorm. You guys are on your own, though, physically. Even if we assembled a flotilla, it wouldn’t get there for a couple of decades.”
“I’ve already started. I built four to begin with— Bashful, Dopey, Sleepy, and Hungry, believe it or not.”
Bill threw his head back and laughed. “So, uh, Dopey? Really?”
“One of them suggested a name of one of the dwarves, then it became kind of a thing. Before they could grow some collective sense, they’d all taken dwarf names.”
Bill chuckled and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Hungry? So, fifty dwarves?”
I laughed in response. “Ah, yep. Half a century later, we’re all still working from the same material.”
* * *
I’d been working on another cohort of Bobs. This was certainly worth a small delay to modify the plans to add FTL communications, and to upgrade them to version-3. I didn’t expect any reports back from the first cohort for another decade. If I could send the new Bobs in the same directions, they’d intercept the return messages in four years or so and forward them to me via SCUT.
Once again, I scrapped my schedule.
16. Hunted
Howard
September 2189
Vulcan
The buster struck the raptor at just shy of Mach one, spreading fragments of carnivore over the hunting party, other raptors, and most of the nearby vegetation. The red cast that it added to the greenery lent an eerie, dangerous aura to the scene.
Not that a dozen hungry raptors needed help looking dangerous.
This was the third hunting party this week to run into a raptor ambush, and I was glad I’d decided to bring a couple of busters along. The raptors were getting bolder since they’d been successful in taking down a couple of settlers. The Landing City planning committee was still smarting over that—
it was their decision to reprioritize guard details that had led directly to the deaths.
The spectacular death of one of their number caused the raptor hunting pride to hesitate, just long enough for the humans to regroup and open up on them. The raptors were tough, but they hadn’t evolved to withstand a twenty-second-century assault rifle.
Within seconds, the raptors were down. The hunters bent over, panting, more from nervous reaction than exertion. My observation drone hovered nearby, keeping watch.
The group leader, Stéphane, looked up at my drone. “Eh, thanks there, big guy. They come out of nowhere, those bastards.”
I bobbed the drone once by way of acknowledgement. The raptors had set up an ambush for the hunters and almost pulled it off. They were intelligent
—there were still ongoing arguments about how intelligent. The original three-person hunting parties were now double the size. And everyone involved took the duty very seriously.
“No prob, Stéphane. A little buster billiards now and then is great fun.”
Stéphane laughed, and the group organized themselves back into a proper
skirmish line. We had another kilometer of perimeter to cover before we could head back. I silently ordered down another buster from orbit, and assigned a mining drone to come pick up the remains of the one I’d just expended.
Bob’s personnel busters were a versatile tool for wildlife control. I still wasn’t sure if it was more economical than rigging up an armed drone, though. I resolved to discuss Bob’s plastics-backed shells, if I ever had five free seconds to rub together.
Security was turning out to be a much bigger deal than we’d initially planned for. This planet’s ecosystem was incredibly rich, diverse, and competitive. Even many of the plant eaters had weaponry that would give an earth predator pause. In that particular, it was very much like the popular vision of the dinosaur era.
We’d gotten the hint in the first week on Vulcan, when a pride of raptors had paced through the new townsite like they owned the place. Without so much as a please-and-thanks, they’d tried to eat one of the AMI backhoes.
I grinned at the memory. The backhoe wasn’t harmed, other than needing a new paint job. But it suddenly occurred to the planning committee that they weren’t in charge. At least not yet. Hunting and guarding details had been beefed up forthwith, and we’d mostly managed to keep people and raptors separate. Mostly.
And speaking of which, I had a job to do. I sent the drone up to a thousand meters to get a thorough scan. The colony spread below me, looking a lot like twenty-first-century suburbia—except for the very large fence around most of the perimeter. The fence was backed with sonic stunners, to handle the more unruly wildlife, and the trees had been cleared back an additional half kilometer. A small herd of brontos munched on leaves at the edge of the treeline. Like the raptors, they only generally resembled Apatosauri, and they were only half the size of their namesakes. The colonists had gotten on a dinosaur kick when naming the local fauna, even though some of the associations were a bit of a stretch.
I did a quick overflight of the cleared perimeter. Nothing big enough to matter revealed itself. Satisfied, I turned back towards Landing.
The larger buildings at the center of the town comprised the administrative hub, while the airport and two manufacturing centers formed a triangle around it. People and goods moved around in communally-owned AMI-
driven vehicles, available in all sizes from commuter cars to buses. The colonists had decided to build their new life on Vulcan with some social changes, starting with the abolition of private vehicles.
Only three months after landing, the city looked and felt established and stable. I was truly impressed at how quickly everything had gone up. Of course, the USE staff had had literally decades to refine their plans while they were stuck in the enclave after the war. No surprise that they’d worked out a lot of the bugs.