I ordered the roamer to hop aboard, spent 10 minutes or so putting some distance between myself and the radio, then dug into a corner by a rock outcrop and sent the roamer back out on sentry duty. A few broken off bushes placed around me, and the roamer confirmed that I was well camouflaged.
I lay back, closed my eyes, and return to my VR library.
Jeeves - my Jeeves, that is - showed up with a coffee and a snack. Spike followed immediately to check out the snack. I patted the cat, while shooing her away from the little sandwiches.
And realized I was stalling. Without being sure why. Maybe there was enough going on without this extra complication.
I sent out a connection request to Bill, Garfield, Bridget, Will, and Hugh. Bill and Will replied that they were busy, but Garfield would fill them in. Garfield and Bridget accepted the connection right away, but with Hugh, I got voicemail. Yes, actual voicemail.
“I'm not available for the next week or so, please leave a message. If it's urgent, please contact-”
Now that was weird. But I would pursue it later. For now, I had Garfield and Bridget on the line.
“So, I guess you're wondering-”
“-why you've gathered us here,” Garfield cut me off. Funny thing: turns out it does get old after a while.
Bridget added her full-throated laugh. “Finally, someone agrees with me.”
“I am maligned,” I said. “I have news, but my feelings are hurt.”
“Hanging up now.”
I laughed. “Alright guys. So, short version: I found Bender.”
This produce the expected explosion of questions. I waited for it to die down, then said, “I’ll give you all the audio record. I’m also going to blog it. But first, I have to mirror my blog over to your side of BobNet. My bandwidth is bad enough without half the Bobiverse trying to cram through my temporary relay.”
“I’ll take care of that for you, Bob. I can mirror it easily enough.”
“Thanks, Gar. One less thing to worry about. So now, there is bad news.”
“Isn't there always?”
“Yep. I lost contact with Bender soon after I found him. I think his captors cut off communications. But before that happened, we narrowed his location down to a stretch of Heaven's River within about 5000 miles of me either way. We could eventually get enough drones with SUDDAR scanning into the area, but between the resource scarcity and the necessity of sneaking them and maintaining a heatsink, in might take literally years to find him.”
“But you can run that in parallel while you continue to search, so I presume you have a point?” Bridget said.
“Uh, yeah. We don’t know when we’ll get back full control of BobNet. I don't even know if I'll be successful in getting my relay station back. If that fails, it will be years before I can put another one in place. I need at least one other person on this side working with me, and I was hoping one of you might volunteer to clone. Or Bill, when he has time to think about it. Otherwise, I'll do it myself, but I’d, uh…”
“You clone reluctantly,” Garfield said. “Yes, you are famous for that.”
“It's the most efficient way to go, though, Bob. Getting a backup across your temporary relay will take a week, whereas you could have a backup done locally in no time.”
“Yeah, I get that, Gar. But if I clone, they’d have to use your Mannies. I just wanted you to have first dibs.”
“I've already made my feelings clear on the subject,” Bridget said. “If your descendant wants to be a female Quinlan, go for it. Although I hope you'll choose one of the other ones. Eventually we’ll get comms back, and I still want to explore.”
“Uh, speaking of bandwidth,” Garfield said, “I’ve just started doing prelims on the mirroring, and your bandwidth sucks. I mean even worse than you'd expect. Are you running a file transfer right now?”
“Not that I know of. I’ll look into it when we’re done here. So let me know when you've got the mirror done in the name services redirected. I’ll put up a blog post with all my audio and video files. Maybe I'll give Starfleet a collective coronary.”
Garfield snorted. “If only.”
As soon as we all disconnected, I called up Guppy.
“Do we have some large bandwidth-sucking operation going on our connection to BobNet?”
“Transfer of backup image in progress.”
“What? Who’s?” On the one hand, that might mean I wouldn’t have to clone. On the other hand, it might mean someone was trying to sneak in.
“Expedition member colloquially known as ‘Hugh’, has requested that we receive his backup. He also redirected printer operations to complete a single matrix on a priority basis.”
Well that was mighty presumptuous of him. Then again, I had given expedition members the run of the place.
“He could have told me.”
“You were in remote operations. He left an email.”
I resisted the urge to slap my forehead. Instead, I checked my inbox - something I hadn't gotten around to yet. Yep, message from Hugh. With a sigh a shake of the head at my own stupidity, I opened the missive.
“Hey Bob. It occurs to me that you need help, and your reluctance to clone is well-known, so I've taken it upon myself to transport to Eta Leporos to help you out. The transfer will take a few days to a week, depending on other traffic, and I've instructed Guppy to concentrate on a single matrix to speed it along. I'll be offline until you bring me back up. I've attached a contact ID for one of my coworkers, in case of problems. Hugh.”
Huh. Odd phrasing. And why would he be offline? Whatever. I had bigger things to deal with.
“Guppy, how many scanner drones can we get close to this segment of the megastructure?” I inserted coordinates. “Without revealing our presence, and how fast?”
Guppy took several mils to answer, which surprised me. Normally, even I didn’t notice his processing time, but this
