We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

The two colony ships were impressive, even in their half-built state. They would feature two drive rings and a massive reactor cooling section, all necessary to move the huge central cargo section. Since the cargo would be ten thousand human beings in stasis, a significant proportion of the mass of the vessel consisted of shielding. Overall, the colony ship would have looked like a military vessel to a science fiction fan of my day, but without the phaser banks or frag cannons, of course.

One of the ships was farther along than the other—the concession to the Spits resulted in some shifting of manufacturing capability. The third ship would be ready only four months after the first two. Now we were trying to even out the construction of One and Two so that they would be ready together.

I snorted with amusement, thinking of the last couple of UN sessions. Now that the yelling was over, this was more like a project from my former life. Technical challenges and engineering issues. With the manufacturing AMIs doing all the work, I didn’t even have to worry about labor issues.

Negotiations still continued, of course, back on Earth. No one was willing to quietly go along with being scheduled “somewhere down the road.” We still had the fifteen-hundred-trip issue to deal with. We didn’t know for sure that it would be a death sentence, but there was general agreement that the climate on Earth was getting worse. If it got bad enough, starvation was a real possibility, despite all our efforts.

Homer and his crew continued to scour the system. They’d also implemented some techniques for bringing metal up from planetside. That was slow and laborious, especially given the scale of our requirements. I’d allocated a half-dozen printers to Homer—Colonel Butterworth, predictably, had screamed like a stuck pig—with instructions to bootstrap themselves up to a viable operation. So far, Homer was doing better than expected. The amount of refined metal on Earth was considerable, even after the war and subsequent bombardment. He’d already returned the printers to regular ship production, after printing up new ones.

Homer had calculated the possibilities, and gone into his “good news, bad news” comedy routine. The good news was that we could eventually build a lot more colony ships from what he estimated we could haul up from Earth. The bad news was that everyone would be long since dead.

You would think that 3D printers would have solved the scarcity problem. In fact, the technology had just moved the bottleneck. We could build more drones to extract and haul the metal out of Earth’s gravity well, or we could build colony ships, or we could build more printers in order to produce more drones and colony ships during which time we would be producing neither. The calculations to determine the optimum path were finicky and had large error bars. Even thinking about them made me grit my teeth.

The drone had reached its destination. I ordered it to establish a sideways vector, then watched the video as the colony ship’s exterior drifted by. Unfinished sections allowed drones and construction roamers access to the interior. A steady stream of laden drones entering the hull was matched by a stream of empty-clawed drones exiting. The status window revealed no current issues. The printers were keeping up with parts demand, Homer’s supply crew was keeping up with raw materials demand, and the construction crew was kept busy twenty-four-seven.

I shook my head and closed the video windows. Inspection done.