“They’re dying, colonel!”
The colonel wore his chin-out expression, a sure sign that I was in for a fight. In the last year, VEHEMENT had started attacking food production and supply facilities. Most of their attempts were no more than token efforts—statements, really. But the last three incidents had taken out supplies that the groups in question couldn’t spare. Now they were out of or about to be out of food, with half the winter still to go. Barring cannibalism, we were looking at hundreds of deaths before spring.
Unfortunately, the current political climate was short on empathy. A couple of failed groups, to most of the others, just meant slightly less competition for the emigration queue.
The USE encampment, the FAITH enclave, and the Spits were the richest in terms of food reserves, but they had made it clear that they weren’t about to volunteer anything to help out. The Spits, in particular, were trying to stretch their resources out for as long as they could. Their annual surpluses were swiftly being whittled away. They would be a have-not within a few years.
Three hours of negotiating, pleading, and threatening had accomplished zero. They knew I wasn’t about to abandon them, so they were willing to call all my bluffs.
In disgust, I finally cut off the video connection without so much as an over-and-out.
Homer looked at me from his video window. He’d been following the whole thing. “Damn, number two, this is kind of a rock-and-a-hard-place situation.”
I nodded glumly. For the moment, at least, I was out of ideas.
“It’s going to get worse,” Homer added. “The climate isn’t improving. A lot of groups are only surviving because of reserves of some kind. They’re not producing enough food to get by.”
Homer shrugged. To be fair, he probably wasn’t trying to bait me.
“What we need, Riker, is to go into the farming business or something.”
“We’ve been over that, Homer. We actually could establish farms in the former tropics, but they’d be good for maybe twenty years maximum. And we’d have to build the infrastructure. All the existing farming infrastructure is in the formerly temperate zones.”
Homer stared into space, rubbing his chin. “I keep coming back to space stations. Something itching at me…”
I opened my mouth to object, and Homer held up a hand to forestall me. “I know, Riker. Too complex, not enough population density in a space station to make it worthwhile, too much risk. I just think we’re looking at it wrong.”
I gave a half-shrug and started to respond when Homer yelled, “Crap!” and froze.
I pictured Homer getting hit by a missile and had a moment of panic, but he came back right away.
“Arthur’s dead.” Homer looked as angry as Homer ever did. “I just got the telemetry from the drones up Saturn way. He was working some wreckage when there was a nuclear detonation. I’m getting reports from drones farther away from it.” Homer sighed. “Booby trap. No way to tell who set it up. I told him, several times, to watch for those. He got careless.”
“Did he save a backup anywhere?” Even as I said it, I knew the answer. Making a backup and keeping it on board was easy, but pretty useless in a case like this. And we didn’t have the space to save each other’s backups. I had a TODO item to build some storage into the Sol space station for just this purpose. And, like 99% of my TODOs, it was filed under “Someday.” ȒÁꞐÓᛒΕȿ
I took a moment to mourn for Arthur. Downer or not, he was one of us. Homer was looking at me expectantly, and I realized I was having trouble focusing. With an effort, I brought myself back on track.
“Okay Homer, get the drones to recover what they can, and I’ll go talk to the colonel. Looks like we’re going to need to change the schedule again. We can’t do without a fourth Bob. And I think we’d better build that storage matrix.”
“Um, there’s an alternative,” Homer said. “We’ve got the printers for my Earth-scavenging ops. I wouldn’t say they’re exactly idle, but at least Colonel Butterworth isn’t leaning over them and steaming them with his breath.”
I laughed at the unexpected imagery. And Homer was right. I nodded an acknowledgement to him, and forwarded to Bill an In Memorium entry about Arthur, for the archives. As soon as Charles was back in Earth orbit, we would have a wake.