assistirfilmes Book 3: Chapter 33: Project
Book 3: Chapter 33: Project
Book 3: Chapter 33: Project
Herschel
October 2227
Delta Pavonis
Be careful what you wish for. Uh huh. I was visiting Neil, while we took a break. He’d draped himself across his chair sideways and was doing a good imitation of a boneless corpse. I could remember sitting like that when original Bob was a teenager. Neil had a couple of behaviors that seemed to hearken back to Bob’s adolescence.
“Friggin’ hell,” he finally moaned. “Can we go back to being pondscum? Life was so much easier!”
I laughed, and signaled Jeeves for a beer. Neil had a template for a particularly good ale, and I tried to make a point of having one when I was visiting. I sat down, took a drink, then called up the project plan. “Well, we’re a little ahead of schedule, buddy. You could afford to take a few milliseconds off.”
“Oh, hah hah. You are too funny.” Neil straightened up. “Well, at least we’ve finally finished cutting up Hulk-2. Loading it all into Hulk-1’s cargo bays is routine enough to be left to the AMIs. But building the mover plates...”
“Yeah, I know. We weren’t really anticipating having to deploy our printers when we came out here. It’s a pain...” We grinned at each other and said, in unison, “but it’s a good pain!”
“Anyway,” I continued. “Moot is in a half-hour. You might want to get organized.”
Neil scowled at me, then pulled up his files. He muttered something about slavery, but got to work.
* * *
The moot was crowded, but that was normal, these days. There had been a problem with despondency for a few months after the loss of Delta Pavonis 4, but we’d bounced back. Now the Bobs were more determined than ever to deal out some payback.
Neil and I picked a spot close to the podium. Normally, we’d be at the back, as befitted pondscum, but we were now Project Leaders. Of course, we were also project workers, project gophers, and project janitorial staff, but who’s counting? We would be expected to give a status report on the Derelicts Project.
Bill mounted the podium, held the air-horn above his head, and gave the traditional blaaat. The audience greeted him with the usual catcalls and boos. I stayed silent, and I noticed that Neil was more reticent than usual, as well. It was much harder to be an agitator when we were standing up front.
Bill looked around the audience, waiting for the commentary to die down. When he had quiet, he began to speak.
“I’m going to start off with a bombshell. Starting twenty days ago, a number of our monitoring drones around GL 877 were attacked. Per their standing instructions, they self-destructed immediately. In the last two instances, the drones weren’t attacked, but chased.”
This news was met with gasps from the audience. Neil and I stared at each other, bug-eyed with shock, and he mouthed, “They know.”
Bedlam erupted. Okay, really not bad.
Neil leaned closer to me. “Isn’t it nice to be important?”
“I’m having second thoughts, thanks.”
Bill pointed to someone, and the chaos quieted.
Thor stepped forward. “How confident are you of the alien power core?”
I opened my mouth to reply, but Neil jumped in. “It works fine. Just as dependable as one of our own. And a lot more powerful.”
I glared at him and whispered, “You lie like a log.”
“Shaddup, you.”
“How many pods do you think you can make?” Thor continued.
“We have enough material to build a pod for every human being alive,” Neil answered. “Just not enough time. In the 3.6 years subjective trip time, we figure we can make just over five million of them.”
Bill turned and spoke to someone. “Will, how many could you put together at your end?”
Riker stepped forward. “No more than a couple of million. We’re working in non-relativistic time, but on the other hand, we don’t have piles of refined metals just sitting there. We have to salvage every kilogram of metal, and the pickings are getting thinner. It’s starting to slow colony ship production, as a matter of fact.”
The conversation descended into comparisons of critical paths, differing ramp-up strategies, result domains, and other, even less interesting things. I eyed Neil, and he nodded. As casually as possible, we sidled away from the debate and toward the bar. No one noticed our departure.
I leaned against a rail with a beer in my hand, and grinned at Neil. “We’re important.”
“Yeah, when they notice we’re gone, I’ll concede. Meanwhile...” He raised his beer in a toast.
Gotta love moots.