Book 2: Chapter 53: Testing
Hal
April 2196
GL 877
I wasn’t really what you’d call “happy” to be back. Last time I was here, I had died. Hopefully things would go better this time.
I did a quick status check on my cloud of attendants. I was surrounded by just under a hundred drones and one AMI-driven Heaven decoy vessel.
The decoy obediently matched my actions as I decelerated. The drones scattered to preassigned positions around the periphery of the star system. They would serve as an early-warning system for any comings and goings by the Others. They were designed to give as little evidence of their presence as possible. Low profile, no albedo to speak of, total radio silence, and heavily shielded reactors meant they showed very little footprint to the universe at large. And booby-trapped, of course. If the Others ever got hold of SCUT tech, we would be royally hooped.
The decoy had been constructed with all the improvements suggested by Thor: two layers of depleted uranium alternating with two layers of electrostatic shielding. We’d added redundancies for every major control system, with automatic failovers. It also had multiple independent self-destruct mechanisms and the usual booby-traps.
My new body had some improvements as well. I’d sacrificed buster storage in favor of a larger reactor and SURGE drive. At 15 G capability I could now outrun the Others, assuming that I’d seen their “A” game last time out.
Today’s entertainment was in aid of testing our mods against the death asteroid. If Decoy-1 could survive a zapping, we were golden. If it couldn’t… well, no one really wanted to ask that question.