“Sorry Bob, out here in real, we prepare our coffee the old-fashioned way.”
I smiled back at him. “In ‘real’?”
“Language marches on,” Will said. “Nowadays it's ‘real’ and ‘virt’.”
“Huh. Noted.” It took only a few seconds to get my own coffee, then I raised the cup in salute. “You've changed your look a little.”
“I felt the need to distance myself from the old Riker persona for a lot of reasons. One of which is that I have a hard time getting people to stop coming to me with colony related problems. They couldn’t accept the idea that I had retired. Once I adopted the mountain man look, I think they got the message.”
“So how is the retired life?”
“Retired just means I don’t have a job description. And I can work on what I want now. I’ve been spending most of my time on the terraforming of Valhalla and some personal projects. It helps that I live here. I can see the results of changes right away.
“And how’s that going?”
Will waved a hand in a self-deprecating gesture. “Bill did a lot of the pioneering work on Ragnarök, of course, cleaning up the air, adding water, adjusting the biosphere. Valhalla actually has a native ecosystem. Bill made most of the mistakes, I just avoid those.”
“Are you losing much in the way of native stock?”
“Surprisingly, no. It was a fairly hostile environment when we started, kind of like being up the side of a mountain in the high latitudes. What we’re doing to the moon is making life easier. Warmer, more oxygen, more water, and so on. Our challenge is to introduce Earth stock slowly enough that the native stuff doesn't get outcompeted before it adapts.”
I nodded, took a sip of coffee, and flinched. In the still-too-thin atmosphere, water boiled at a lower temperature, so coffee prep was negatively affected. The coffee was lukewarm and thin, but that was the price you paid for running a Manny in, uh… real.
I looked at Will over the rim of my cup and changed the subject. “Listen, I already talked to Bill about this, but I wanted to get your perspective on things about the moot the other day.”
Will grimaced. “I wasn't there, we were having a problem with one of the fractionaters, but yeah, I heard about your face off with Morlock.”
“Morlock? He named himself Morlock?”
“Nah, he named himself Jeremy, which might be coincidence or might be a subtle nod to that Time Machine remake, but he goes by Morlock these days.”
Will raised an eyebrow at me, inviting comment. I gave him a small head shake, and he continued. “Replicative drift is turning out to be a real thing. Bobs are recognizably one of us until about 15 generation or so, then the drift begins to accelerate. We haven't had any out-and-out psycho yet, but we've definitely got some assholes.”
“Well, so much for visions of a galaxy wide race of Bobs. Still, diversity might be a good thing. After all, the human race consisted of billions of individuals and had still managed to… almost obliterate themselves… crap.”
This was a problem. A big problem. Original Bob's hands-off approach might not cut, it in this case. I opened my mouth to reply just as a message from Guppy imposed itself on my field of view.
“In-system scouts have been attacked. 100% casualties.”
I barked “Gotta go!” at Will, and popped back into ‘virt’. I quickly texted him an apology for not re-racking the Manny, and promised to explain later.
“What's going on?” I said to Guppy.
“Telemetry is queued up for inspection.”
I grabbed a few video windows and started playback. The drones were coasting along Bender's trail SUDDAR ensuring that they didn't lose it, when the transmission from one of them abruptly disappeared. The second one cut off a millisecond later, before even the AMIs could react in any meaningful way. The third though, took a glancing blow or near miss or something - it was disabled, but managed to reconfigure SUDDAR and get a low-res scan before that signal also disappeared.
The fourth window contained the results of that scan. Two craft had approached unnoticed from the scouts 5 o'clock and unleashed some kind of attack. They were about 20 feet long, most likely automated, and clearly not intended for atmosphere. A skeletal structure composed of girders or beams formed the base shape onto which were bolted various pieces of equipment with no concession to style. What had to be beam weapons were bolted onto opposite corners, and communication dishes took up the space at 90° to the weapons.
I took a look through the logs and couldn't find any indication of approaching missiles. There was, however, a brief temperature spike just before the signals cut off, which confirmed the beam weapon hypothesis.
“Lasers. Interesting choice. Not generally a good combat weapon.” I stared at the window for a moment longer, then closed it. “Guppy, why didn’t the scouts detect their approach?”
“SUDDAR was concentrated forward in order to resolve the Bussard trail which had been defused by in the system gravitational effects.”
“Okay, fair enough. In interstellar space, the trail would be virtually undisturbed for centuries. Not so much once he got inside the heliopause. We didn't get a SUDDAR pulse from them?”
“Negative. Telemetry from the last scout detected radar pulses.”
“Radar? They used radar? Who uses radar these days?”
“Apparently, they do.”
I glared at Guppy, and not for the first time made a note to do some black box testing on him. Sarcasm required self-awareness, and not one had a buster drone ever given me this backtalk. Still, the basic facts remained, and shone a light on something
