“Well, that's just peachy. And they just attacked without warn…” I stopped, as I had a thought. Guppy had a bad tendency to not volunteer information. Attempts to change his behavior had just resulted in huge dumps of irrelevant data. I still wasn't convinced that wasn't passive aggressively intentional.
“Guppy did the attackers do anything besides ping us with radar?”
“Affirmative. There were several radio transmissions.”
Probably challenges, either to determine friend-or-foe. Or even if the scouts were something other than flotsam. And I didn't know the proper response, so no real help there. In fact, if we'd responded, it would've alerted whoever that there was someone else in the system, which might also be a bad thing, just ask Hal.
So, caution was still indicated.
I invited Bill over to take a look at the video records. He tapped a spot on the video window. “That's interesting. You see that?”
“Hmm, yeah. Fusion torch. Great for acceleration and maneuverability, but hard on fuel.”
“Over the short haul they could probably out-pace you, Bob. Best be careful.”
“Hmmph.” I sat back in my La-Z-Boy. “Not that I'm planning on going in and introducing myself. That's two encounters, two attacks, and one lost replicant.”
“Some assumptions in there.”
“Reasonable ones. Enough that I'd need some evidence to the contrary, before I’d change my mind.” I reached over and scrolled the window forward a fraction. “No SUDDAR, no SURGE, no SCUT. They, whoever they are, haven't discovered subspace theory. On the other hand, their fusion drive tech is impressive, and if I'm right about them having used lasers, so is there weapons tech. That's a lot of wattage out of a drone that small. Which means their fusion reactor tech is probably better than ours.”
Bill grinned and shrugged. “Not surprising. No one uses fusion reactors anymore.”
“True. We’d long since switched to the Casimir power source that we've gotten from the Others. It was far superior to any kind of fusion reactor, for reasons including but not limited to a complete lack of detectable emissions. Naturally, work on fusion technology had subsequently stagnated, but no one cared. “So,” I tapped my chin and thought, “these, uh, whoevers, have perhaps continued development in more traditional directions and may have surpassed us in some other technologies as well, while being totally deficient in others. Their drone designs reflect that.”
“Fair summary. How about Boogens, for their drones?”
“Sure, why not.”
“So what's the plan?”
“Plan? We don't need no stinking plan.” We both grinned. “Seriously, at this point, I'm only up to ‘don't get caught’. It's a little nebulous after that.
“We have designs in the archives for evading radar detection, you know.”
I stared at Bill for a moment. “Geeze, I must be getting old. Okay, so some kind of radar proofing carbon black exteriors to foil visual, low power electronics combined with a super-cooled heatsink to counter infrared detection…” I sat forward as my enthusiasm mounted. “We can coast in. We don’t need to use cloaking since they don't appear to have SUDDAR, so we can use long-range SUDDAR to watch for patrols… yeah, this is good!”
“Now you’re cooking. Do you have enough trajectory data to apply Bender's probable location?”
“Within a huge margin of error, yes. I’ll send some more scouts the long way around to look for where he might be by now. Or his remains.” We were both silent for a moment as we process this thought in parallel
“Sounds like you got some work to do, Bob,” Bill said. “I'll leave you to it.”
‘Some work to do’ meant some engineering design work to get the combination of attributes that I wanted based on plans and notes on BobNet. Whatever else the wars with the Others and Medeiros may have done, they greatly accelerated battle-related technologies. But hasn’t war always done that?
The engineering was no big deal. I am, after all, a computer - even if I don't acknowledge it most of the time. The actual construction work, well, that was going to take longer. I still had to do everything out in the Kuiper-Oort interface, and there was still no miraculous cache of handy elements to make my life easier.
The one new piece of tech I added was a core of ice at a couple of degrees Kelvin. The scouts were designed to be ultra-low power, which meant very little heat generation. But I didn't even want that to show. Waste heat would be transferred to the ice core which would gradually warm up. I’d calculated the heat transfer rate and I was pretty sure the scouts could make it through the system before their heatsinks gave out and they started to radiate significant infrared.
On the downside, to keep within the heat budget, they wouldn't be able to maintain continuous contact. That meant I could conceivably lose them and not know it until they failed to report in. Well, life isn’t perfect. I calculated trajectories and times, and launched the scouts myself via railgun. Ballistic all the way, baby. If they had to maneuver, that would be the end of the heatsink. If all went well, it would be months before they sailed out the other side.
By the time I’d done this, the other scouts had made it all the way around the system and were running a search pattern on Bender's expected location. I told Bill the margins of error were huge, which meant a large volume to search, but I was still disappointed by every day that went by without result. For no other reason than to have something to do, I set myself a course to the other side of the Boogen system. The long way around, though. I still wasn't prepared to fly through the system, even a little bit. I had no idea
