We Are Legion (We Are Bob)
Book 4: Chapter 6: The War Heats Up

Bill

July 2334

Virt

“Things are getting a lot more interesting,” Garfield said without preamble as he popped in.

I turned and gave him the side-eye. Gar was turning this unexpected-popping-in thing into a habit. Maybe it was the stress. I hoped so. I didn’t want to have to make a big deal out of it. “How so?”

“I don’t think Starfleet took into account the reaction of humanity in general. I think humans are looking at it like being snubbed, because there’s a whole I got’cher no contact with humans right here vibe going on. Any assets that any member of Starfleet might have had are being frozen, agreements are being cancelled, their access is being removed for everything, and even in systems that weren’t affected by the network attack, they’re being denied access. Basically the entire infrastructure of human space is now being closed off to them.”

I thought about that for a second, then laughed. “Their mission statement is to end contact with bios in general, but I think maybe they were planning on doing it on their schedule. Like when you give your employer two weeks’ notice and they say, ‘No, that’s okay, leave now.’”

“Yup. And several systems have kludged together temporary comms stations, then immediately gone and taken down the originals until they can clean them out. Bandwidth suffers, of course, but for Starfleet it drops to a big zero. As the number of available routes shrinks, we’re able to come closer to pinpointing Starfleet’s center of operations.”

“They have an actual center?”

“Well, they’re pretty distributed, but the individual subgroups aren’t very effective once they’ve been cut off from the collective. Most of Starfleet activity does appear to be coming from comm nodes in the direction of the Perseus Transit, which jibes with my original estimate.”

“But they’ll rebuild their comms stations as well. Eventually we’ll end up with two independent but overlapping networks.”

“If they don’t have a physical presence, they won’t be able to,” Garfield argued. “How’re they going to rebuild? No one’s going to rent printer time to them. They’d have to fly someone in, and then trust that whatever they build won’t get shot out of the sky.”

He had a point. “Yeah, I don’t think there will be a lot of tolerance for Starfleet equipment.”

Garfield nodded. “And assuming we are reduced to physical violence, we can expect a lot of hit-and-run. One thing we Bobs proved is that you can’t maintain physical border security in interstellar space. Notwithstanding the Battle of Sol, which only worked out because we knew the Others were coming.”

“That may not be viable in the long-term, Gar. Imagine years and years of a running guerilla war. We may have to clean house.”

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