We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

We’d arrived.

I can’t even begin to describe the feelings of joy and relief as I passed the Kuiper belt and officially entered the Omicron2 Eridani system. No Vulcan cruisers flew up to intercept us, so I added a few to my VR. Just because.

I did a quick scan of the system to confirm Milo’s survey results and verify our orientation to the ecliptic plane. The two colony ships, Bert and Ernie—yeah, they named themselves that, yes, voluntarily—came into the system at a much more sedate 1 g deceleration. They would arrive at Vulcan and Romulus a week or two behind me.

I’d been thinking off and on about what it would be like to be a colony ship. The guys would be essentially running a shuttle service for up to a couple of centuries. Fly to Earth, fly to Vulcan. Fly to Earth, fly somewhere else. Rinse, repeat. On the other hand, they were doing a very valuable service for humanity. Any Bob could appreciate that.

And with our arrival, humanity now officially no longer had all its eggs in one basket. Now perhaps we could start to think about breathing a little easier. But just a little.

I dropped into the L4 point between Vulcan and Romulus and dropped a beacon. We would set up there to do initial recon and to give Colonel Butterworth and his people a chance to make a decision. Since I had ten days or so to kill, I send some exploration drones to each planet to expand on Milo’s survey information. Then I settled back with a cup of coffee to relax.

Milo had left a couple of AMIs and a bunch of autofactory drones behind to continue mining the system. The drones put the refined metals into bundles of ingots and set beacons on them. With a couple of decades of peace and quiet, the automation had accumulated several hundred thousand tons of ready-to-use material, all in orbit inside the asteroid belt. Riker had started the AMI on building a farming donut a decade ago, to provide a backup food source. It would need only to be seeded from the stocks we’d brought with us. I hoped we wouldn’t need it. Of course, I didn’t hope that anything like as strongly as the colonists would. Kudzu was apparently not the food of the gods, although deities were often invoked when describing it.

I had quick conversations with Bill and Riker, just to let them know we’d made it. Full reports would follow. Riker gave me a list of colony ships that were already launched and on their way.

Hmm, but no pressure, right?