We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

Book 3: Chapter 38: Travelling

Book 3: Chapter 38: Travelling

Herschel

September 2236

Interstellar Space

“I’m serious, Herschel, it’s not coming back up.” Neil’s voice took on a little bit of a whine when he got really frustrated. The sound set my teeth on edge, and it was one of the only times I didn’t want to be around him.

“Have you jim-jammed the frammistan?”

“Oh, funny guy. How about you hang up the comedy act for a second and give me a hand. And if you start clapping, I will busterize you.”

I chuckled and activated one of my inside drones. We kept a set of spares in bay 446, which was about as central as you could get in the Bellerophon. The drone flew out the open bay doors, into the ship’s main axial corridor. Five klicks of straight flight took less than a minute, then a right turn, and I was in the power room. “Room” was a funny word to use for an open area a quarter kilometer on a side, but we’d gotten used to thinking of the ship as normal sized and ourselves as bugs.

Neil had three drones and a dozen roamers swarming the power core’s control area. For some reason, when Neil got frustrated, he made the roamers tap their feet. I’d never asked if it was on purpose. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

“I’ve done everything!” he exclaimed as soon as he saw my drone. “It’s dead. Inert.”

“Fine, Herschel. Get it out of your system. Make fun. Then, when you’re done, maybe we can work on fixing this friggin’ thing!”

I considered milking it for a few more moments, but why get greedy? As sure as entropy, I’d have another chance sooner or later. “Neil, I can see from here that the anodes are saturated. You can do a bleed, which will take about an hour, or you can do a full restart in twenty minutes.”

“Oh, God, no.”

“I’ll help, okay? We can’t afford to be down like this all the time.”

I called up some more drones and roamers, and we started the long and finicky restart process. A bleed would take longer, but didn’t require a lot of effort, so it was Neil’s go-to response.

Once we had the roamers and drones set up, I turned to Neil. “Why don’t you have an AMI set up to monitor this stuff? It’s a freakin’ rote task, dude!”

“I know, I keep meaning to…”

“So, you’re doing things the hard way, because you’re too lazy to figure out how to do them the easy way? Neil, you are truly a putz.”

Neil grinned at me, unoffended. “A lazy putz, thank you very much. Okay, Hersch, point taken. I’ll get on it.”

I smiled, leaned back, and stretched. Just another damned day at the office.

* * *

The cargo vessels weren’t just big empty barns. In some ways, that would have been convenient, but it would have required us to build something to anchor our various projects. I imagined the Others went though some vaguely similar logic. The vessels were large cylinders, organized radially—a central corridor a hundred meters in diameter stretched from the nose to the tail of the ship. A huge cargo door at either end allowed entry and egress. Storage bays were arranged internally in rings around the central corridor, eight bays per ring by default, and each bay sported a massive double door. The A.I. controller and drive system were located in the middle ring, and the power core was at the rear of the craft.

Neil and I spent many hours touring the inside of the Bellerophon, trying to figure out the reasoning behind some of the design choices. In particular, Neil didn’t see why they needed bays at all.

“Look, Hersch, we’ve got the video from Mario’s discovery on Beta Hydri. The ingots they were producing weren’t that big. Like the size of a car. Why not just stack them in a big central area?”

“You just answered your own question, Neil. You really want ingots the size of Chevies banging around inside a spaceship?”

“Chrissake, dude, they tie them down…”

“To what? Now you need stanchions of some kind, at least. You can’t tie it down to one single connection point, either, because that’s a disaster waiting to happen. Besides, who says metal harvesting is the only thing they used these ships for?”

“Hmm, good point. They do have power connections in every bay. That would make sense if they used them for other stuff, like maybe manufacturing areas.”

“Yeah, uh…” I hesitated, and Neil looked over at me, curious. “Well, I have a theory, based on this ship…”

Neil made a rolling motion with his hand for me to continue.

“Look, Neil, we do our manufacturing out in space, because we don’t give a crap and it’s convenient. But given what we know of the Others and the way they huddle in their death asteroids—well, what if they’re an underground species? Maybe they’re deeply agoraphobic. Maybe they do all their manufacturing inside one of these things because if they had to supervise something outside, it would scare the crap out of them.”

Neil bobbed his head back and forth. “Not unreasonable. Total speculation, of course. Hey, you could always go ask them.” He grinned at me.

25

“The hell?” We both looked up at Guppy. “What happened?” I asked.

25

Neil looked at me. “Third time this month. About ready to concede yet?”

“Crud.” I rubbed the bridge of my nose. “Okay, I give. Guppy, take them through restart, let me know when the drive is up again. And we’re going to make eight more plates and try to even out the field.”

The problem wasn’t really too few plates. Bill’s calculations had been right—24 plates would fly the Bellerophon, all things being equal. But all things were not equal. We had a couple of Bobs—us—constantly flying around in the ship under our own SURGE fields, moving and shifting mass around in the ship, and restarting the power core a couple of times a month. We were our own worst enemy. We needed some wiggle room, in the form of a little extra field strength to absorb the glitches.

I watched Neil do the I told you so dance for a few moments. “When you’re done being an ass, let’s see where we can set this up. Maybe a free bay toward the front.”

Neil grunted. “You know, there was a time, when we were pondscum, and we just flew around a lot and minded our own business.”

“Ah, the good old days,” I replied. “When things were simpler, kids were more respectful, and we had to walk to school through six feet of snow.”

“Barefoot.”

“Uphill.”

“Both ways.”