We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

Book 2: Chapter 19: Prey

Book 2: Chapter 19: Prey

Bob

June 2172

Delta Eridani

Archimedes patiently tied two strands of vine together while the cub watched. I smiled, observing the tableau in the video window. His mate, Diana, kept one eye on the drone. She had never liked the drones, or me, and still tensed up when one was around. Having a child to protect just made her that much touchier.

Archimedes was oblivious. He was too busy teaching his cub basic skills. The cub took the vines and, tongue sticking out of a corner of his mouth, tied a perfect granny knot. Archimedes sighed and corrected it into a square knot. The cub smiled up at his father and I experienced a jolt of—well, something. Pride? Envy? Wistfulness? Maybe all of the above. It was hard to sort out. My eyes were watering, and I had to suppress a strong urge to re-watch one of the recordings of Riker’s chats with our family.

I minimized the window and turned to see Marvin watching me. He said nothing, and after a moment he dropped his eyes and went back to what he was working on.

I took a few deep breaths and brought the window back up. The cub had successfully executed a square knot, although he still didn’t seem to be clear on the difference. I chuckled. I’d given Archimedes some sailing knots over the last while, and he was learning them, one at a time. It looked like he was trying to pass that knowledge on to his cub.

The boy would be given a Naming Ceremony as soon as he said his first word. Both Archimedes and I expected that to happen earlier than average. The Deltans quite reasonably considered language to be the difference between them and animals, and the first use of language was the proof that the child had, for want of a better word, a soul. The Deltan word didn’t quite mean the same thing, but it was close enough.

Diana was still eyeing me, so I decided to give her a break. I told Archimedes that I was going to go for a cruise around, then took off.

I brought the drone up to a kilometer altitude and rotated slowly. It was still early in a beautiful spring day, and dew sparkled on the trees and grass. This part of Eden was mostly forest, but there were enough meadows and open areas to allow grazing animals to make a living. I was making a point of recording panoramas like this whenever I could. Someday, maybe ten thousand years in the future, the Deltans would be civilized, and would probably have done something to Eden similar to what humans had done to Earth in the twentieth century. It would be nice to be able to show them what their world had once been like. I wondered if I would still be hanging around here by then.

Wow, I needed to shake off this melancholy mood. I enjoyed hanging with Archimedes, but once in a while it triggered images of my parents and sisters. When that happened, a change of scenery was in order.

I instructed the drone to fly back to Camelot and take up station-keeping, and I switched to a drone stationed at one of the Lagrange autofactories.

The armaments project was overdue for inspection, anyway. I had a section, carefully separated from everything else, where I was experimenting with explosives and munitions manufacture. I was playing with the idea of a shell powered by plastics instead of gunpowder. A primer triggered by an electrical current would remove the need for a hammer. Using ethylene glycol as the binder would result in a compound that was usable under all environmental conditions, including extreme cold. And the stuff didn’t become unstable with age. Oh, and it was easier to work with safely than gunpowder.

I moved on to the main autofactory area. Four replicant matrices were currently nearing completion, to give life to the version-3 Heaven vessels lined up nearby. I hadn’t decided yet if I wanted to upgrade myself as well. Granted, the threes were significantly faster than my version-2 hull; but I had no immediate need for speed. Everything in the Delta Eridani system was accessible by drone. I seldom had any need to fire up my SURGE drive. Come to think of it, I hadn’t left orbit around Eden in years.

Despite my ongoing reluctance to replicate, I felt a moral obligation to get more of me out into the universe. Besides the simple fact that more Bobs exploring meant more interesting revelations, there was the implied promise to Dr. Landers to perform the task that he’d resurrected me for. By extension, I had a responsibility to what was left of the human race. Riker was doing a magnificent job of getting them off-planet. It was up to the rest of us to find places for them to go.

My brooding was interrupted by a text from Marvin. There’s been an attack.

I sent the drone back to station-keeping and re-entered my VR. Marvin was waiting.

“Gorilloids?” I asked, sitting down.

“No, I think it might be our Giant Claw. A foraging party was out gathering food when one of them was grabbed. They say they couldn’t really see it, except they got the impression it was really big. It flew away with the victim, and everyone else high-tailed it back to Camelot.”

“What do you mean, they couldn’t really see it? Did it jump out of a tree?”

“Um, no, that’s the thing. They were looking right at it but couldn’t make it out. The Deltans didn’t really have a word for it, and the translation routine was having fits, then finally settled on invisible.”

“Ah, jeez. So a giant flying thing that can become fully or partly invisible, or maybe blend in…” I trailed off as I watched Marvin’s eyes get bigger. “Umm…?”

He flipped through the archives and pulled up a video segment from my early investigation of Eden, back before I’d even found the Deltans. The video depicted what I’d named a hippogriff. About the size of a robin, this little critter had four legs and a set of wings. It was predatory, and it could hide in plain sight because it could…

… change its coloration to match the environment. Oh, crap.

“They’d be a lot bigger than this little guy, but what the Deltans sort of saw would fit the bill.” I nodded at Marvin. “Good catch. But we still don’t know where it comes from, right?” ?????È?

Marvin shook his head. “I’m still searching outward from Camelot. I’ve reached the ocean in one direction, but still lots of land left at the other compass points. I’m biasing it towards the original Deltan territory, although that’s not a sure thing either.”

“The big question,” I said slowly, “is whether any of our drones saw it.”

“I already checked. There weren’t any in the area. Everything we could spare is out searching. Somehow this thing snuck inside our perimeter.”

“Wonderful. Wonder-freaking-ful. I haven’t just brought the Deltans back to the fire, I’ve put them back in the frying pan. Some sky god!”

* * *

I watched from a distance as the tribal elders gathered to discuss the recent death. I wasn’t invited to attend, since I was probably the subject under discussion, and I didn’t feel like forcing the issue. Archimedes was told to be there, and he looked nervous enough for both of us. He and Diana exchanged frightened looks before he left.

The meeting went on for quite a while, and there was a lot of gesticulating and yelling. I’d probably never mentioned directional microphones to the Deltans, so I guess I couldn’t blame them for not realizing that I could hear everything.

Archimedes passed on my theories, which in retrospect probably made things worse. But it would have come out sooner or later. The central theme of the meeting, though, revolved around whether I was malicious or just an idiot. Either way, a lot of people believed that they’d been safer back at the old site.

Objectively, that wasn’t true. They’d been slowly going extinct, and wouldn’t have lasted more than another generation or so. But explaining population trends to essentially innumerate people was a losing game. They understood death when it happened in front of them, far better than they understood attrition.

The meeting took about two hours. When Archimedes came back to his spot, he looked very hangdog. He sat down and accepted a piece of jerky from Diana.

“They’re about evenly split,” he explained. “Half think you’ve led us here to be food for the flying things. The other half ask how you could have known about these things if we didn’t know. And we’re from here.”

I thought about that and sighed. If the Deltans had been human, those would have been the two camps, but the split wouldn’t have been fifty-fifty. Deltans were surprisingly rational.

“You’re not in trouble, are you?”

“Not really.” Archimedes glanced at Diana and smiled ruefully. “But my, uh, stock is down. I think that’s how you say it.”

“Don’t worry about it, Archimedes. You’re still the best damned weapon-maker in, well, anywhere. If you need to distance yourself from me for a while, that’s fine. But either way, Marvin and I will continue to look for the hippogriffs.”

Archimedes nodded. His cub toddled up and dropped into his lap. Head-first.

* * *

“Well, that explains it,” Marvin said. “I stopped at the shoreline and I shouldn’t have. The things seem to be centered on a rookery out on this island…” Marvin pointed to a large island a kilometer or two offshore. Obviously volcanic in origin, it was steep, deeply folded, and very probably had a lot of lava tubes that would make perfect homes for large flying things.

“How many of them are there?”

“Can’t tell for sure.” Marvin shrugged. “They’re always coming and going during the day, but unless I start tagging them, I don’t know how many nests or dens or whatever are in those caves. But certainly scores of adults, at minimum.”

I frowned. “That’s a significant population of predators. So what do they eat when they can’t get Deltan?”

Marvin waved up a picture. “Seals. Well, seal-equivalents. Or maybe closer to walruses. They seem to fill the same niche. They spend most of their down-time basking on the beach, and they hunt in the water. They’re a little more mobile than seals or sea-lions, but still basically sitting ducks on land. Although I’d imagine they could do some damage with those tusks.”

I stared at the picture for a few milliseconds, rubbing my chin. I turned to the globe and expanded it until it showed just the island and the Deltans’ past and current range. “So the hippogriffs discovered the Deltans, who were probably easier prey, chased them out of their original territory…”

Marvin continued the thought. “Then eventually caught up with them after they moved into gorilloid territory. The Deltans could handle the gorilloids, with flint weapons to help, but they couldn’t handle both predators. They retreated over the mountain range…”

“…which put them out of range of the hippogriffs, but lost them the flint resource. Without that, they couldn’t quite hold their own against the gorilloids,” I finished.

“And then we, and by we I mean you, led them back to the flint site. Where they are, once again, on the menu.” Marvin gazed at me with one eyebrow raised. “So what now?”

I sat down, called up coffee, and leaned back in thought. “I think we can agree that just doing nothing is off the table?” Marvin nodded and I continued, “Likewise, asking the Deltans to move again is probably a non-starter. I doubt they’d do it even if I had a good, safe destination in mind.”

“Plus, the flint site really is their best long-term bet, generally speaking.”

[Approaching predator detected]

We both looked up at Guppy’s announcement. We’d used all available drones to set up a tighter perimeter around Camelot, and set them to looking specifically for anything large and airborne. It appeared we had a bite.

I pulled up the video that Guppy offered. The hippogriff was hard to make out. On a clear day, it would have been almost impossible to see, the blue of its hide matched the sky so well. But today there were too many scattered clouds for the animal to camouflage itself from all angles. It was heading directly for Camelot. There was no doubt in my mind of its intentions. And this was almost certainly the one that had taken the Deltan two weeks ago.

“Right, let’s busterize it.” I called up a buster and set it to full acceleration. It shot towards the hippogriff.

At the very last moment, though, the hippogriff dodged the bullet. Literally. The thing’s speed and aerial agility was unbelievable.

We both stared for a few milliseconds, then I called up more busters.

“Don’t overdo it,” Marvin cautioned. “Let’s find out what the animal is capable of. We know we can get it if we throw enough busters at it. Let’s find out what ‘enough’ means.”

I nodded at him, and ordered most of my second wave to stand down. Instead, I sent in two busters in the fore/aft formation that Riker had used so successfully in the Battle of Sol.

Again, the hippogriff dodged the first buster. The speed of the animal was really impressive. But it was unable to correct for the second one. The splat created a cloud of fine red mist, which settled slowly to the forest below.

“I didn’t like that,” Marvin said. “We got it with the second one, but it was close. I think if we want to take them out dependably, we should go with an encirclement using three or more busters.”

“The question is whether this was a one-off or whether they fly some kind of patrol pattern. Maybe there won’t be any more coming this way.”

Marvin didn’t look convinced. “Predators almost always have a patrol pattern of some kind, if only to protect their territory from competitors. I doubt we’ve seen the last of them.”

* * *

It took less than a day to prove Marvin right.

[Multiple incoming detected]

Oh, God, this just keeps getting worse. I pulled up the window and leaned forward. It was hard to tell from the returns, but it looked like about a dozen hippogriffs, give or take a few, were bearing down on Camelot.

“What the hell?” Marvin said, popping in. “What’s attracting them?”

“Just a guess, but I’d say the blood in the air yesterday from the busterized hippogriff. I’m sure a predator would be able to smell the spoor for miles. Maybe it draws them like sharks.”

“Oh for— okay, a dozen of them will require thirty-six busters. We don’t have that available.”

“We’re going to have to wing it, Marv. They’re in a fairly tight group. Maybe we can thin them out some of the first pass.”

Marvin nodded, and we called up the twenty busters that we had available. I ordered Guppy to fly in reinforcements from orbit, and we set the ones we had on a direct line of attack with maximum acceleration. By the time they neared the flock of hippogriffs, they were doing about Mach 1.5.

The first pass took about five hippogriffs, and allowed us to see that there had been fourteen total. Now, we had fifteen busters left for nine attackers. There was a good possibility one or two might reach Camelot.

While the busters were coming around for another pass, I activated one of the drones in Camelot. I flew towards the first recognizable face I saw, which was Arnold.

Everyone was looking in the direction of the sonic booms, staring at the red clouds that had appeared. I shouted at Arnold, “Hippogriffs coming. Get everyone under cover!”

I shifted back to my VR without waiting to see if Arnold reacted. The busters were just coming in for the second pass, and Marvin had stacked them two-deep. The leftover buster trailed the group, ready to take out a target of opportunity.

The second pass took out three hippogriffs, and injured the wing of a fourth. The clouds of red were now making it hard to see. SUDDAR was not particularly effective with biomass—bodies showed up as dim ghosts—and infra-red was having a lot of trouble with all the fresh blood floating around.

The injured hippogriff lost altitude quickly, but it was a controlled descent. We probably couldn’t depend on the impact killing it. We now had eleven busters—no, nine. Two busters had collided and taken each other out—and five attackers left. It was going to be tight, unless they turned around and retreated. If they were anything like sharks with blood-spoor, though, that wasn’t going to happen.

The busters came around for a third pass. There were fewer hippogriffs now, though, and they were spreading out. And the damned things really had quick reflexes. Despite buster pairing, we only took out three of the attackers. We were down to six busters, and had two healthy and one injured hippogriff to deal with. Still reasonable odds, except that they were now close enough to Camelot to present a real danger. And we didn’t have the uninterrupted line anymore for a supersonic approach.

“Switch to bludgeoning and harassment. Guppy, where are the reinforcements?”

[Five minutes out]

Not good enough. I checked the action in Camelot. The mesa didn’t have much in the way of caves or any other kind of overhead protection. It was ideal for protection from a ground assault, not an air attack. The Deltans were streaming out of the village, down the two available paths. But with the bottleneck, they couldn’t get the whole tribe evacuated in time, and they would be sitting ducks until they reached the trees.

We commenced low-speed bludgeoning of the hippogriffs. They were even better at dodging at this speed, but they couldn’t really do anything else at the same time.

We finally managed to bounce one off the head of a hippogriff. It went down immediately. The other hippogriff ignored the byplay and tried to take a pass at the Deltans on one of the paths. But the busters kept it too distracted and it passed overhead without completing the attack. Unfortunately, a couple of Deltans panicked and fell or leaped off the path. I could see them tumbling down the steep scree.

The Deltan hunters laid into the unconscious hippogriff. It was my first opportunity to get a good feel for relative scale. If the Deltans were human-sized, then the hippogriffs were about the size of a Clydesdale, with bat-like wings. The animals looked more reptilian than anything. Teeth and claws were disproportionately large, resulting in an impression of something built for nothing but killing.

It took only a few seconds for the Deltan hunters to ensure that the animal wouldn’t be waking up. The live hippogriff, though, was still a major threat, and I had no idea where the injured one had gotten to.

The busters continued to harass the healthy hippogriff, and it apparently decided to reduce the defensive zone by landing. Well, not a bad strategy, really. Now the busters could only buzz it from above.

As it landed, the hippogriff changed its coloration to match the ground and rocks, but no one was going to be fooled at this stage. The animal snapped at the busters as they came within range, and it managed to snag one. It looked as though this would turn into a process of attrition, until the Deltans brought in their “A” game. Twenty to thirty spears flew at the animal in a solid cloud. Fast or not, the hippogriff simply couldn’t dodge that amount of incoming. Within moments, it resembled a pincushion. The hippogriff screeched and snapped at the spears sticking out of it. Arnold grabbed another spear from someone, ran straight toward the hippogriff, and made an Olympic-caliber throw from point-blank range. The spear went right through the animal’s neck and it dropped instantly.

There were cheers from the hunters. The jubilation lasted only a moment, however. Screams from the retreating tribespeople brought our attention back to the paths out of Camelot. The injured hippogriff had made its way to the base of the scree, found one of the people who had fallen, and was eating him.

I sent all my remaining busters straight at it, with no allowance for pulling up if they missed. Two impacted with enough force to kill the last animal. It was too late for the Deltan, though.

* * *

The good news, if it could be called good, was that we’d only lost three Deltans. A fourth had a broken leg, and I was going to have a confrontation with the medicine woman if she didn’t listen to me this time. I’d lost eighteen of my twenty busters. Twenty more made it down from orbit, too late to do any good. And once again I was pulling all my printers off of their assigned duties to make more busters.

The Deltans had called another tribal council. For them, two councils in a month was akin to panic. This time, I was invited, or maybe summoned. I doubted it was to give me a medal.

I had noticed that some people were giving Archimedes a bit of cold shoulder. They couldn’t overdo it, of course. He and Moses were still the only source of shaped flint, and Moses wasn’t moving around much these days. If I was to describe the attitude in human terms, it would be “coldly formal.” Since Archimedes hadn’t done anything to deserve it, I had to conclude that it was guilt by association.

Arnold was sitting in council now. After that display with the hippogriff, he was man of the hour. Hopefully that would mean at least one sympathetic voice.

There was some discussion among themselves, then they called me over. I floated down to head height and waited.

“Are there any other surprises that you have for us?” Hoffa said without preamble.

“That was a surprise to me, too. You’ll remember that I asked why you’d left Camelot. Only Axler had an inkling, and he didn’t remember enough to warn us.”

“Just the same, by following your advice, we seem to get deeper and deeper into trouble.”

“By following my advice, you’ve retaken a location that you can defend against gorilloids and that has flint for weapons. I know a lot of you have trouble following my explanation, but I maintain that in the old camp, your children would have been the last of the Deltans.”

I paused for dramatic effect before continuing. “As for the hippogriffs, they’re a problem because they’re a surprise. I’m going to find out more about them, then I’m going to remove them.”

“I’ve noticed,” Hoffa said, “that despite your talk, it’s still we who do most of the fighting.”

“Really? When was the last time a group of your hunters had to beat off a gorilloid attack? Did you hear the sonic booms? Two hands and four hippogriffs approached Camelot, but only three arrived.”

Hoffa’s ears were straight back and his eyes were narrowed to slits. I was mishandling this, but I couldn’t stop myself. I’d never been able to handle shortsighted stupidity.

“That’s three more than would have arrived at our old camp.”

In VR, Marvin and I rolled our eyes in sync.

“I’ve already talked about that.”

“Perhaps next time, we should leave your Archimedes out as an offering for them.”

I sent the drone straight up ten feet. “Don’t. Ever. Threaten. My. Family. Not ever.” As I finished saying the words, I realized that I’d turned the volume up. It had probably been painful to sensitive Deltan ears. The entire council was cringing, and possibly not just from the volume.

I slowly lowered the drone back to head-height. “I mean it, Hoffa. I’ll take care of the hippogriffs. And thanks to you, I’ve figured out how.”

Hoffa looked confused and somewhat concerned. I noticed that Arnold looked at Hoffa and smiled.

* * *

“Okay, I’ll bite.” Marvin was grinning at me. “How? And how did Hoffa help with it?”

I glared at him. “I’m going to drop a rock on the island. Which is what I wanted to do to Hoffa.”

“Jeez, Bob, here you go again. You’re going to perform planetary ecological surgery just because it’s convenient.”

“No, Marvin.” I jumped to my feet. “I’m going to do it because those things threaten my family. And you can analyze that all you want. I don’t give a damn.” I closed down his VR connection and he disappeared, effectively kicked out. Pretty rude, and I’d be apologizing later. But for the moment, I was too steamed to care.

* * *

I had a far more immediate problem, though. Assuming I was right about the hippogriffs smelling blood, then today’s battle would bring yet another wave tomorrow—maybe much larger. It would take time to find a large enough mass to destroy the island. I calculated an initial size of a hundred tons would about do it. We had identified a number of nickel-iron asteroids in the system, some of which would be about the right size.

I received a ping from Marvin. It was time to eat crow. I invited him in, and we looked at each other warily.

He broke the silence first. “You know we’re no good with this crap, right?”

It was enough. I broke down laughing, and we nodded at each other. Done. Possibly identical twins could come close to understanding, but certainly no one else.

We sat down and I described my thoughts on the impactor.

“Huh,” he replied. “So, a couple of months to build Bill’s asteroid mover, a couple more weeks to move the asteroid into place. You think the hippogriffs will just wait around?”

“I’m open to suggestions.”

“I understand you’re angry, Bob, and you want to smash the island to smithereens. But all you need to do is hammer it enough to take out the hippogriff population. You don’t need a Yucatan-level event to do that.”

I nodded. “So, a bunch of small impactors?”

“A thousand-pound steel ball will do a lot of damage.”

“Ohhhhhh…” I nodded. “Ship busters. Yeah, I’ve still got four in inventory.”

“The thing is, though, Bob, you don’t want too big of a bang. Tsunamis, ground shocks, flying debris could do more damage to the Deltans than a bunch of hippogriffs. Get this wrong, and you could be directly responsible for the extinction of the Deltan species.”

I nodded, shocked. Time to get my temper under control.

* * *

We decided to use the ship-busters one at a time and gauge the results after each strike. I sent the first ship-buster in at what I hoped was a reasonably sedate velocity.

The results were slightly more, um, spectacular than expected.

In retrospect, maybe I didn’t allow for the amount of material that would normally be shed by a meteor on the way down. Or I forgot to carry the two. Whatever the reason, the impact produced a mushroom cloud that would have done a fission bomb proud. As the smoke and dust cleared, it was obvious that the island, and the hippogriffs, were gone.

Well, that was the good news.

The bad news was that this was definitely going to produce ground shocks all the way to Camelot. And at least some debris. I flew several drones over to the camp, to find everyone already awake, staring at the bright cloud to the southwest.

Archimedes looked up at the drone as I arrived. “Did you do that?” he said in a hushed voice.

I wasn’t sure of the expression on his face. Awe, certainly, but I thought maybe a bit of fear. I hoped not. That wasn’t the legacy I wanted to leave.

“Yeah, Archimedes. That’s the hippogriff island being obliterated.”

Archimedes’ eyes grew wider and his ears went down. He took a half-step back from me.

Damn.

At that moment, the ground shock arrived. It wasn’t the worst earthquake I’d ever seen, but was probably the first in the Deltans’ experience. They hugged the ground, and there were many screams.

The shaking was brief. It was followed a few minutes later by the sound of the explosion. The crack and roar seemed to go on forever, but couldn’t have been a minute in all. The Deltans continued to huddle until it let up.

But now came the hard part. I went to the elders. “There may be some burning rocks falling from the sky, in about a hundred heartbeats or so. You should get everyone into the lee side of the bluff.”

There were wide eyes and flattened ears, but no one was going to argue with me. In short order, every Deltan was huddled behind the central bluff.

The debris arrived right on time. Drones hadn’t been able to detect anything big. I hoped that would hold, as I wasn’t really sure I could intercept incoming debris with a buster. Or if it would do any good.

The pelting lasted several minutes. It was impressive, and there was some minor damage to the village, but no one was hurt. The Deltans huddled for the rest of the night, unwilling to leave the sanctuary of the rock.

* * *

When morning finally came, people spread back out to their normal locations. A few of them had to do some cleanup, but their neighbors pitched in. Overall, the amount of actual damage was minor.

The council was having yet another session. Again, though, I wasn’t expecting a medal.

When they were done, they motioned to the drone. I flew it over, and Hoffa stepped forward. “We understand what you’ve done. We understand your explanations. But everything you ask, everything you do, seems to come with a larger and larger cost. We’re not sure if we’re better off now or not. There’s a lot of argument about that.”

He paused for a moment, a determined look on his face, then faced me squarely. “We’d like you to go away. We’ll face our fate ourselves. If you want to kill us, we can’t stop you. If you want to kill me, I can’t do anything about it. But you’re not welcome here anymore.”

I stared at him, through the drone, for what seemed like forever. I was frozen. Numb. It was too much to process. The emotional circuit breaker had tripped. I’d lost a family already, now I was losing a second one.

I backed out of the drone, and turned to Marvin. His face was grey. I was sure I didn’t look any better. “I guess I screwed up,” I said.

“Look, let’s just clear out for now,” he replied. “Give things time to cool off. You can talk to Archimedes later.”

I nodded, and re-entered the drone. I floated over to Archimedes, who was not looking well. Deltans didn’t display shock the same as humans. His facial fur was lying in disorganized mats. But the wide eyes and flat ears were probably universal. A disconnected part of me started theorizing about why that might be, and I squashed it.

“Archimedes, I’m going to take off until things cool down. I’ll talk to you later.”

He nodded. I noted that Diana had a look on her face of either satisfaction or triumph. I’d never hated anyone as much as I despised her at that moment.