For We Are Many [calibre 4.99.5]

Meanwhile, she’d come up with a name for the thing—Cupid Bug.

Because, as she explained, it went for the heart. I had to admit, I appreciated Bridget’s sense of humor.

I also had several small batches aging of something that might turn out to be a replacement for Jameson. Or for paint thinner. Time would tell.

The colonel and I discussed a few miscellaneous items, but nothing really pressing. The council, as expected, had caved without a fight on the subject of bronto burgers. Let’s face it, one of the damned things would keep the entire colony in steaks for a couple of weeks. We wouldn’t need to kill many.

And the alternative was still kudzu.

I said goodbye to the colonel and popped out. On a whim, I activated one of the surveillance drones. I took it up a couple of kilometers and did a slow pan. The sun was going down in the west, and it was a magnificent sight.

From the surface of Vulcan, Omicron2 Eridani appeared almost a third bigger than Earth’s sun. As a K-type star, it had a slightly more orange cast, although you stopped noticing it after a day or so. But the additional output in the red end of the spectrum meant that even the most run-of-the-mill sunsets were spectacular by Earth standards. And today wasn’t run-of-the-mill.

Scattered clouds were all that were left of the recent thunderstorms, but those

clouds glowed in the sky like individual wildfires.

The forest-slash-jungle stretched horizon to horizon, hugging the hills and only reluctantly leaving the occasional rocky crag uncovered. Something like birds swooped and twirled in flocks that wouldn’t have been seen on Earth since the days of the passenger pigeon. If you could ignore all the things with big shark teeth, and the other things that could accidentally squish you between their toes, it was a kind of paradise. Oh, yeah, and the things that laid eggs in you. Eww.

30. Found Something

Bashful

November 2187

Gliese 877

We’d all taken off in different directions, per Mario’s orders. I picked GL-877, a nondescript star in a forgettable patch of sky. For all we knew, these Others might not be planet-based, or even system-based. But we had to start somewhere. At minimum, we’d be mapping their path of destruction.

[We have radio traffic]

Guppy pushed a window toward me. As I examined the readings, my eyebrows climbed up my forehead. The radio noise coming from this system was clearly artificial. One way or the other, something intelligent lived here.

Something noisy.

“Every possible caution, Guppy. Let’s take it slow. I don’t want to attract attention.”

[Understood]

“And prep the stealth probes.”

I’d have been cautious anyway, but given the possibility that this was the Others, I was going to give paranoia a brand-new level of definition. I had spent my time during transit building a couple of stealth probes. I’d had to sacrifice some busters and some roamers, but the result was a couple of probes that would be almost undetectable unless they cranked up to full power. I had constructed them out of carbon-fiber-matrix ceramic and non-ferrous metal wherever possible. The Others would have to be specifically looking for one of these in order to detect it. I’d already squirted the plans back to Mario as part of my continuous reporting.

I was still going about 5% of light speed, so I lined up just below the ecliptic and released one probe. I altered my line slightly, then released the other. It would take just under two weeks for the probes to free-fall through the system. Meanwhile, I would take a powered flight path, which would take me to the rendezvous point on the other side without my going anywhere near

the inner system. Unless the residents had far better detection systems than we did, they’d never know I was here.

I had carefully laid out parameters in which the probes would run for it and conditions in which they’d self-destruct. There would be no chances taken. In either case, once discovered, a probe would abandon attempts at stealth and squirt all telemetry to my calculated position.

With my powered flight plan, I arrived at the rendezvous several days before the probes, on a vector straight outward from the system. The probes hit the brakes and activated their beacons as they came within range.

I downloaded their data and transmitted the whole bundle in Mario’s direction before beginning my own analysis. It took about two days to build a coherent picture of the inner system. There were two lonely inner rocky planets and a single small Jovian farther out. The inner of the two rocky planets appeared to have an atmosphere. The other had been too far away from either probe to get details, but it appeared to have a surprisingly high albedo.