Beta Hydri was 23.4 light years from Sol. Rather than argue and compete with the other new Bobs for the closer candidate stars, I had decided to head for the far reaches. “I love to sail forbidden seas,” and all that lvillish stuff. By the ti everyone else worked their way out to this point, I hoped to have a working space station declaring, “Mario was here.”
And let’s face it, I really didn’t want to be around the other Bobs. It still amazed how oblivious they were to the differences between each clone. It was creepy—Not enough variation to make them separate people, but enough to give them different opinions. It was like seeing myself with brain damage. And yeah, Bob-1 had set the rule about senior Bob being in charge, but I didn’t see that holding for long. Original Bob had never been much of a follower.
Well, whatever. I was here, they were there, and I liked it that way. Ti to explore my domain.
I dropped into the system, decelerating at a leisurely 2 g. I could have co in a lot hotter, but on the off-chance that there was a deiros here, I didn’t want him to know what I had under my hood. He’d see the 2 g, a fraction of the output of my heavily shielded reactor, and he’d get cocky. I hoped. I really wanted a chance to et up and hand him another ass-whupping. I had a couple of busters with his na on them. No, really. There wasn’t a lot to do between systems, so I’d had the roars stencil his na on a couple of busters.
So far, though, there didn’t seem to be anything Brazilian in the neighborhood. Actually, there didn’t seem to be much of anything. It was a large, well-filled-out system, but so far, I’d found no tal ore. Seriously, nothing. This star’s spectral lines showed about two-thirds Sol’s tallicity. Generally, the composition of the system would follow the composition of the parent star.
Hands behind my back, I walked around the balcony of my tree house, enjoying the view and the thousand-ter drop to the forest floor. This forest had never existed except in literature, and even there, it was an amalgam of a lot of different books. Mostly it was from Foster’s Midworld, but I’d thinned things out so there were good lines-of-sight. I’d added lots of earth-birds and deleted any large, hungry, dragony things.
I raised an eyebrow at Guppy. “Got an opinion?”
[Above my pay grade]
I chuckled. The version-2 Heavens had more core and mory space than Bob-1 had started out with. Guppy had a lot of room to expand in the standard design, and I’d given him even more. He was becoming a person in his own right. He was acerbic and flip, just this side of insolent. I loved it. And, of course, he wasn’t a Bob clone.
“Okay, wise guy. Got an analysis?”
[Those I have. Analysis: there’s no tal]
“Thank you, Captain Obvious. Any idea why?”
[No, but I note that all of the other elents are within expected ratios. Only tals are missing. And completely so]
And that was just not possible, not by any known theory of stellar or planetary formation. Guppy blinked once and turned to face . I knew what was coming.
[Soone else was here first]
“Dammit. deiros. But shouldn’t there still be an autofactory around?”
I cut off what I was about to say and thought for a few seconds. Sothing was fishy with that theory, beside the originator.
“Hold on. How much ore are we talking about? Based on how much we think this system should have, how long would it take deiros to turn it all into cute little deiri?”
Guppy thought for a mont. Or calculated. Whatever.
[1,732 years. Give or take]
“So we can rule that out. We’ve only co twenty-odd light years. And he would have had to travel for the sa amount of ti.” I was belaboring the obvious, and I knew it, but I’d always found that talking sothing out helped to work through it in my mind.
[That does represent a flaw in the theory]
“Ya think?” I pointed to the inner planets on the system schematic. “We may end up having to do so planetary mining. Let’s go take a look at so of the rocky planets and see what’s available.”
[Your wish is my command]
We took a few days to get to the fourth planet—I still didn’t want to show all my cards in case soone was watching. GL19-4 was a brown ball of mud with gray oceans and a thick, murky atmosphere. It looked like the result of a lot of volcanic activity, but I didn’t see any imdiate candidates in the way of rings or chains of volcanoes.
I inserted myself into a polar orbit and began deep scans for, well, anything, really. tal deposits, of course, but also volcanic activity, and anything else interesting.
It was one of those good news, bad news situations. Good news, I found lots that was interesting. Bad news, no tals. None. Not within reach of anything in my arsenal, anyway. The planet had a magnetic field, so it obviously had a tallic core. But next to nothing in the crust. Oh, a patch here and a patch there, but not worth grubbing for. Ŗ𝔞N𝐎𝖇ЕS
[Anomaly detected]
“And this isn’t anomalous enough already?”
[Double-plus anomaly detected. Better?]
Not loving it quite so much. For a fleeting mont, I thought of reinitializing Guppy. Only for a mont.
Not that I needed to worry. One of our redesign items was to not allow GUPPI to read our thoughts. That was just too creepy. He now required voice commands, however you define voice in a computer system that talks to itself.
“Okay, Guppy, what is it?”
[Accumulation of refined tal detected. An artifact]
“Holy crap.” I thought for a mont. “Deploy three of our exploration drones. Send them down to the location of the anomaly. Have them carry a couple of roars too. Set one of the drones to spiral outward from the site, while the other two and the roars investigate the site in detail.”
[Aye]
Guppy was all business now. This was serious. Had deiros crashed? Was it a probe from one of the other nations?
The drones got there in record ti—I think Guppy might have driven them a little aggressively—and settled around the anomaly. One started to circle, gradually getting farther from the center, while the other two landed and spit out twenty-centiter roars. The drones lifted off and started on close-up visual scans.
One thing was obvious right away: this wasn’t one of the probes. In fact, this wasn’t from Earth at all. I couldn’t describe exactly what about it scread alien, but no human mind designed that. The best taphor I could co up with was the alien ship in Protheus. It just didn’t make sense.
I took a mont to savor the thought. I had just found the first intelligent life outside of Earth. Well, okay, looking at the wreck, I might have just found the corpses of the first intelligent life. But still…
It was obvious that this had been so kind of cargo carrier. The thing had crashed and split open. It had spilled out part of its contents, which seed to consist of stacks and stacks of large tal ingots of various types. Each ingot was pure, all one elent. Iron, titanium, copper, nickel, tons of the stuff. The carrier looked like it had only been a quarter full, though, unless so had been taken.
It appeared we had found our tal thieves. Well, one of them. And thief was probably too strong a word. But still…
[Anomaly]
“Oh, for—what now?”
[See for yourself]
I picked up the video that Guppy offered to . And my jaw dropped. This planet wasn’t lifeless. Well, it was now, but it hadn’t been at so point in the past.
I was looking at a dead ecosystem, what you’d get if everything in the Amazon basin died all at once. It was dry, it was weathered, it was corroded. But it was trees, and bushes, and the occasional animal. And it went on forever.
***
I sent down so biological analysis drones to do so necropsies and try to figure out what had happened here. That wasn’t quite what they were designed for, but I had all the accumulated biological and dical knowledge from Earth, and a very advanced piece of technology designed by, uh, .
They poked and prodded and cut, and they got so suitable specins. They had their orders, and the AMIs were entirely competent within the paraters they’d been assigned. I just had to stay out of the way and not joggle their chanical elbows.
The drones and roars continued to examine the wreckage. Without being able to say why, I sent a couple of busters down to hover nacingly. Things looked deader than dead, but I just had a spooky feeling.
The report from the biological drones arrived on my desktop with a ding. I hurried over and opened the file.
Oh, wow.
Based on cellular damage, everything had been killed by sothing along the lines of a gamma ray burst. Basically a huge surge of radiation, more than enough to kill instantly. I knew that because not only had the animals been killed but their intestinal flora (or the local equivalent) had been killed at the sa ti. There was no bloating, no rotting from the inside out. I had to make so assumptions, using terrestrial analogies, but I was pretty confident that they would be close enough.
I also noted how few carcasses we’d found. The specins were all small, in odd, inconvenient places, or in poor condition, even for dead bodies. I was pretty sure that 99% of the fauna were unaccounted for.
Without decomposition to provide a clue, I couldn’t imdiately tell how long ago this had happened. But wear and erosion on the carcasses and dead trees gave so indications, as did an analysis of the number of forest fire tracks with no new growth. I estimated sowhere between fifty and a hundred years ago.
I sent the biological drones off to check another couple of points on the planet, especially a point as close to antipodal to this location as possible.
[Ergency! Hostile activity!]
“What? What’s happening?”
[One of the roars is under attack]
“Get the drones to do point-focused SUDDAR pings. I want as much detail as you can get.”
[Done]
I dissolved my VR and cranked up to maximum fra rate. The video feed was real-ti. It showed a window from the perspective of the roar that was under attack, and another from the perspective of the second roar. The first roar seed to be infested with chanical ants. As I watched, the roar was being eaten—tal parts thinning and dissolving.
“Guppy! Blow both roars. Self-destructs, now!”
Guppy didn’t argue or question. The video feeds disappeared.
“And firewall our device comms. I doubt those things had ti to finagle the encryption keys from the roars, but why take chances?”
I turned to the SUDDAR analysis, which was just assembling over the desk. To one side, Guppy had brought up the video record received from the roars.
I played back the video record first. The first roar had opened a container or locker or sothing. It appeared to have activated the ants. Whether that was a defensive reaction, or the ants just considered the roar to be a resource to be acquired, was anyone’s guess. I doubted there was really much practical difference. Either way, the ants had started to disassemble the roar. The SUDDAR point-scan showed that they were separating it by elent. They didn’t seem interested in the plastic and ceramic components.
I didn’t regret blowing up the roars. I certainly couldn’t have brought them back with the possibility of one of those ants coming along for the ride. And, silly as it was, I’d read and seen enough science fiction in my day about advanced technologies taking over the communication system and getting into the computer. That’s we’re talking about, after all.
I can build more roars.
Where did the ants get their power from? I scanned the ship again and found that about half of the ants that had survived the roar suicides were now still. I didn’t know if they were dead or just on standby.
I decided to scan at five-second intervals to see what they were up to. Strangely, every ti I scanned, more ants beca active. The hell? I cut off the SUDDAR scans for a full minute. When I did another scan, about a quarter of the ants were inactive. Oh, hell. I stopped scanning for five minutes, then did a quick scan, with as low power as I could manage. Sure enough, most of the ants were inactive.
Dammit! They’re powered by the SUDDAR beam. It was my scans that reactivated them.
Well, that was a fine pickle. Any attempt to find out what they were doing would power them up. But that ant that the aliens had found so way to beam power through subspace and use it at the receiving end. I needed to examine those ants.
I waited an hour, then sent a single one-centiter roar in. No way an ant could piggy-back undetected on a roar only slightly bigger than itself. The roar picked up a couple of ants and brought them out of the hulk. I had prepared a couple of small coffins for the ants, filled with a plastic goop. The roar stuffed the ants into the goop, then added the hardener. I now had ants under glass, more or less. While they might be able to cut their way out of those, I hoped they couldn’t do it before I completed a scan.
I brought my two drones in close, and they did the most intense and high-precision close-in scans of which they were capable. That would produce almost a molecular-level map of the ants. I watched in fascination as the ants both powered up and produced little cutters from their front appendages. Fortunately they couldn’t move, so all they did was drill a couple of holes in the plastic. Good to know.
I detonated the roar–can’t be too careful–and retired to my treehouse to ruminate.
***
I had completed my survey. There was no sign of a civilization on this planet, so the wreck was definitely alien. The aliens had co in, presumably killed all life with so kind of radiation weapon, mined the star system, collected the carcasses, then left. There were a lot of assumptions in there, but it fit the evidence.
The scan of the ants had shown so interesting technology. I was already setting up simulations to test so of it.
The scans of the hulk didn’t have any huge surprises. It appeared to be run by an A.I. or AMI of so kind. It had a fusion reactor. It had a SURGE drive. It had a SUDDAR transmitter. However, the SUDDAR unit seed designed to transmit power to a tuned receiver as well as using the SUDDAR as radar. I’d taken detailed scans of that for further study.
Maybe the aliens had co and rescued the crew and left the hulk. I doubted that. There didn’t really seem to be any accommodation for anything biological. It was probable that the ship was completely A.I. Was this civilization biological at all? The fact that they’d collected all the carcasses hinted at an answer, and not one that I liked at all. I could only think of one reason to bother collecting all that protein.
And was this a one-ti event? Or were they raiding systems on an ongoing basis? If so, which way were they heading? I certainly wouldn’t want this fate to befall the Solar System, even if there weren’t any humans left. The dolphins and chimps still deserved their chance.
I felt a pang of disappointnt as visions of eting Vulcans or Asgardians evaporated. This was more like an Alien scenario. As first contact situations went, this one sucked.
Like it or not, I had to bring the other Bobs into this. Which brought up another problem. At this distance, I couldn’t send a ssage back to Bill. I would need the space station for a transmission, and I would need the raw materials in order to build one. The ore contained in the hulk, even adding in the hulk itself, wasn’t enough.
I would have to leave.
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