The signal was audio only, and very weak. “Unknown ship, do you copy?”
I looked at Hor and raised one eyebrow. He shrugged. “As good a place to start as any.”
Activating my transmitter, I responded, “This is the starship Heaven-2 of the United Federation of Planets. Commander Riker speaking.”
There were several seconds of silence. “Uh-huh. Listen, I don’t know who you are, but you’ve just apparently averted a global catastrophe, so I guess I’m willing to give you the benefit of the doubt. Our teletry is not up to military snuff, but our systems tentatively identify you as similar to the Heaven-series interstellar probe that FAITH launched a couple or three decades back.”
“Guilty as charged. And to whom am I speaking?”
“I am Colonel George Butterworth of the United States of Eurasia Army Corps. Rest assured, commander, that our true position is obfuscated. If you attempt to destroy the source of this transmission, you will achieve nothing.”
The colonel’s accent was definitely British, and far too close to the cliché’d pronunciation portrayed in many Arican TV shows. I would have to be careful not to let Hor talk to him. I doubted Hor would be able to resist the urge toward mimicry. “Colonel, let’s not get off on the wrong foot, okay? We have no intention of blowing anyone up. We had a little disagreent with what appears to have been the last of the Brazilian Empire space navy. Now, I think it’s ti to start fixing things.”
***
We had been in discussions with the USE military for three weeks now. I was faithfully forwarding recordings of everything to Bill. Negotiations were slow and cautious, mostly on the part of Colonel Butterworth. He had been very slow to accept the idea that Hor and I weren’t dyed-in-the-wool FAITH theologues. It took a very frank discussion in which I explained in detail the reasons for my atheism before the colonel really began to believe .
The USE refugee camp that Colonel Butterworth had under his care consisted of about twenty thousand people, mostly civilians, who had been collected into an underground military installation when the space bombardnts had started. The colonel guessed the global human population at less than twenty million at this point, although he admitted the uncertainty on that estimate was huge.
So of the refugees were scientific personnel who had been working on a USE colony ship back before the war. In the 22nd century, things were constructed in virtual space first. Once complete, the plans were uploaded to an autofactory, which built the entire item using 3D printers, roars, and nanites.
The colony ship plans were ready, needing only a space-based construction yard. And a destination. The colonel inford us that the Chinese and USE probes had launched shortly after Bob-1, but the USE probe had never been heard from again.
The colonel and I were conversing via video link, as usual. He knew that the Heaven vessels were staffed by replicants, as were the USE and Brazilian probes. However, we were the first to have a full-on VR avatar that looked and behaved like a human being. The colonel was having a little trouble accepting at a visceral level that I wasn’t ‘real’. I’d toned down the Enterprise the and stopped making Star Trek references, out of courtesy. It blew away that almost two hundred years after Shatner first famously didn’t actually say, “Beam up, Scotty,” people still knew Star Trek. Now that’s a franchise.
At the mont, the colonel was bringing up to date on recent history. If we were going to make an attempt to save the human race, I wanted to have the whole picture.
“There was never actually a point where you could say now, we’re at war,” the colonel explained. “International tensions had been high for quite a number of years. The confrontation over the attempted destruction of Heaven-1 was simply the tipping point. Each act prompted a reaction, each reaction a retaliation. The other governnts got dragged in one at a ti, and eventually it beca system-wide. Stations and colonies were abandoned, personnel were recalled. So of the transports were destroyed, despite having no military value. Of course, that just escalated things.”
The colonel got up and began to pace around his office. The cara at his end kept him perfectly frad. “At first, the conflict was primarily spaceside. Annexation of strategic locations and orbits, denial of assets, that kind of thing. Then the first nuke was used planetside, and after that, all bets were off.”
Colonel Butterworth sat down at his desk and massaged his forehead for a few monts. He reached into a drawer and pulled out what looked very much like a bottle of Jason. Hmm. Funny what survives the end of the world.
After pouring a glass and taking a sip, he continued, “It beca a war of attrition. Each side tried to neutralize the other’s military capability. Then soone nuked most of the Brazilian Empire—your theory that it was the Chinese is reasonable—and civilian targets beca fair ga. The ships you took out were the last n standing. taphorically speaking, of course—they were only replicants.”
The colonel blushed slightly. “Er, no offence ant. In any case, they wouldn’t have lasted five minutes at the height of the war, when everyone still had equipnt. But here at the end, we had no way to stop them. They just started slowly pounding away at everyone. Call it a scorched-earth policy, call it revenge, whatever. It was genocide. They probably took out a couple of billion people on their own.”
I felt ill. I had waited an additional six months while Hor and the decoy were assembled. How many people had died for that delay?
The colonel had reached the end of his spiel, and was concentrating on the glass of Jason.
“So what can we do, colonel? Help rebuild? Relocate people?”
“I think that ship has sailed, Commander. The Earth will recover eventually. It’s tough that way. But not in ti for humanity. My ta scientists say it will be minimum five to ten thousand years before things recover to any degree. We won’t last that long.” ʀåΝổ𝐛È𝐬
Colonel Butterworth touched a control, and a schematic popped up in the video link. “This is the colony ship we designed and started to build in hopes that our probes would report back with sothing worth shipping out to. One of the first casualties of the war, I’m afraid. You have on-board autofactories that can bootstrap up to a full shipyard. With your help, we’d like to build a couple of these and leave the solar system.”
“And go where, specifically?”
The colonel sighed. “I’m actually hoping you’ll suggest a destination. It’s not like FAITH is going to be sending any ships. And you gave to believe that you have no particular loyalty there.”
“And that’s true, colonel. I’m just making sure we’re all on the sa wavelength.” I popped up a star chart of everything within twenty light-years of Earth. “You can see the stars rated for likelihood of a habitable planet. Unfortunately, Epsilon Eridani was a failure, unless you want to live under a do. By now, Bill may have received reports back from a couple of our ships, but we won’t find out for a few more years. Can you last that long?”
“We have to. It’ll take most of a decade to go from a standing start to two colony ships.”
I nodded. “Okay, then, let’s get this show on the road.”
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