“If they don't have subspace and SURGE drives, it seems unlikely,” he replied. “But that's another question in abeyance until we have more information. So what's our next step?”
“Good question,” I said. “This shoots down my earlier plan to just scan the Boogen’s home base for Bender’s matrix. We can't scan over a billion miles of complex structure looking for one individual cube of optoelectronics while dodging Boogen attacks. Especially if the Boogen makers use optoelectronics for their own stuff. It'd be like looking for a specific needle in a haystack, where the haystack is all needles.”
“Yep. Okay, we’ll have to be a little more deliberate with our approach. First, we need to gather information.” I ticked off items on my fingers. “We want a close-up look at the planet. We want a close-up look at the megastructure overall. And we want a scan of the interior detail. And we want to not get blown up.”
“That too,” Bill snapped his fingers. “Speaking of military technology…”
“Which we weren't.”
Bill glared at me. “I've been working on a variant of something I got from the USC. It's a fractal surface that absorbs 99% of radiation that hits it and re-radiates it as infrared.”
“Great for radar, not so good for infrared.”
“But we have your heatsink idea. Get rid of the heat that way instead.”
“Hmm,” I nodded. “Under power, we'd have a limited time before the heatsink failed, we’d have to choreograph this very tightly. Yep, so, dress up a cargo drone in this fractal surface, complete with heatsink. Fly to planet Boogen, drop off some planetary exploration drones, accelerate for the outer system, and hope to make it out before the heatsink is saturated. Do the same with some high-res drones and drop them off near the structure.”
I glanced around the room. No argument was forthcoming.
“One last thing. We need more information on topopolises. Uh, topopoli? Topopoleise? Maybe there’s a human expert on the subject of megastructures, can someone look into that?”
“I can do that,” said Will, and he popped out.
Bill stood. “I'll get the fractal surface details to you.” He popped out.
“I’ll work out the drone design,” said Garfield, and he popped out as well.
“I'll have another coffee,” I said to the empty room.
The autofactory drones have been locating and retrieving raw materials from the Kuiper belt and Oort cloud for a couple of years now, so logistics were no longer quite as much of a limiting factor. Bill and Garfield had their info to me within hours, and soon I had my auto factory churning out modified drones at full speed. Still, there were some significant mods, and the fractal camouflage was a pain to get right, but a week later I had all my spy devices ready. I double checked the calculations, sacrificed a coffee and let fly.
“Now we wait,” said Bill.
“Like we haven't been doing that for the last forever or so,” Garfield grumbled.
7. Looking Forward
Will
June 2333
Virt
The search for information on topopolees turned out to be one of those good-news bad-news things. Good news: I’d found an expert. Bad news: he was dead. Good news: he’d arranged to be replicated. Bad news: he’d gone right back to work and was really hard to get hold of.
The whole Keystone Cops act would be giving me a headache if I were still subject to such things, so I decided to take a break and do some work on the personal side project I had going. I pinged Conan and popped over as soon as I received a response. Conan was the current Bob rep in the Omicron2 Eridani system. It hadn't been a heavy labor position for a long time - Vulcan and Romulus having long ago become independent of our help. But we always maintained a physical presence, for our family’s sake if nothing else.
I looked around as I settled in. Conan appeared to have replicated the Vulcan jungle with his home in a tree house. I smiled to myself. I knew enough about Vulcan's wildlife to realize this was completely unworkable in real life. Even without the now extinct Cupid bugs, there was still more than enough variety of the bad kind in the wild to kill any human dumb enough to be out without an exosuit.
Conan saluted me with a can of Coke. I sat in the nearest chair and, there being no Jeeves in view, invoked my own can.
“What can I do for you, oh great ancestor?” Conan said.
“Are you one of mine?” I replied, and he nodded. Ancestry had never been a big deal in the Bobiverse, but with all the fragmenting lately, people were starting to pay more attention to chains of instantiation, with an eye to cataloging behavioral DNA. As with a lot of Bob projects, it was ad hoc and casual.
“I’m concerned about the family, Conan. FAITH has been getting more influential on Romulus the last couple of decades, and that can't be anything but bad news.”
“I get it, Will, but a lot of people like the sense of certainty that religion gives them, and faith is all about nice easily packaged black and white answers, even if they're factually wrong.”
I waved a hand in dismissal. “I frankly don't care what the justification is. I want our family out from under. We’ve seen the rise of the far right too many times in the last half millennium to not recognize the signs.”
“Okay. And?”
“I the small side project going on. I want to set up a society with an innocuous name like Outward Bound or something, for people who want to emigrate from this system. If you have the time, I'm hoping you'll take care the set up and admin.”
Conan grinned. “This hasn't exactly been a pressure cooker job. Howard started divesting us of responsibility as soon as he could, and we’ve continued with that tradition. I'm more like a local ambassador than anything.”
“How’s that working out lately?”
“Yeeeaahh, I'm curtailing my appearances these days.” Conan made a deprecating
