Like every planet owned by the Galactic Corporation, Cambria is armed with an astonishingly powerful alien-defence armoury. A ring of satellites are equipped with force fields, force nets, fusion bombs, and every other human weapon created. These weapons are of course controlled remotely via the Quantum Beacon by powerful computers on Earth. No human or DR on Cambria has authority or wherewithal to unleash anti-alien weaponry. The stakes are too high for that.
The millions of space sensors are on constant alert for the slightest trace of Bugs, BULs, Glugs, Frondies or Sparklers. Monsters from Outer Space, in other words.
We storm the space headquarters. We encounter no resistance. The DRs are all inert. Their strategy was clearly to sit it out until we were good and tired; and then attack again in force.
Forty-seven hours ten minutes have elapsed since our arrival on Cambria.
We hack into a computer link to the Space Factory, on board which ten thousand human miners work at fashioning complex metals and fabrics out of the stuff of stars and planets.
We then fake a radio transmission which is beamed out in zipped encrypted form to the Space Factory, then transmitted back to us at the space HQ. This transmission is, of course picked up by the satellite sensors and conveyed immediately to the computers on Earth.
The message is brief, and unclear, but the gist goes like this:
ME:… no hope any more, can you hear me, out?
BRANDON: Space Probe One, I am not receiving clearly, say again, say again.
ME: We’re infested with Bugs. They’ve taken over the Quantum Beacon. I repeat…
The signal fades.
And so the word is out on the street. The Bugs have invaded! But will the computers take the bait?
The Bugs, scientists think, exist at a subatomic as well as an atomic level. This explains how Bugs can penetrate any partition, apart from the crushed space of a Quantumarity. They can fly through open space. They are invulnerable. They are unstoppable. They are the most deadly thing ever created by that heartless bastard god of evolution.
If the Bugs could escape their cage and enter a Quantum Beacon… who could say what might happen? Could a Bug Army emerge, instantaneously and intact, in the Sol system? If that happened, then all the citizens of Earth and its neighbouring space colonies would die a hideous death.
No one knows if in fact such a thing is possible. But the fear of it is corrosive… And so, in a millionth of a second, the Earth computers analyse all the possibilities and possible outcomes and they reach a speedy decision.
The alien defence system is mobilised. Vast energy flares hurtle through space. Asteroids and space debris are incinerated. The Space Factory itself is in the direct line of fire; it is obliterated in less time than it takes a raindrop to coalesce.
Simultaneously, the Cambria Quantum Beacon’s defence systems are switched off. The energy flare hits with the power of a dozen suns, and the Quantum Beacon is entirely unprotected. We watch, on our screens, as the squat orbital space station that housed the Beacon vanishes in a flash of light.
The defence system continues to hurl its deadly rain into space, but it is on automatic pilot by now. The remote computer link has been severed. The Quantum Beacon is gone; the inhabitants of the Earth system now have no way of communicating with or controlling the planet of Cambria.
A second before the blast reaches us, all six of us are flipped out of the Cambrian system. Our DR bodies are left behind.
The Cambrian people are now alone in space. Earth can now no longer control its robot slaves, or even contact them. And, because Cambria is a relatively remote system, it will take a hundred years (their subjective time) for a spaceship of new DRs to reach them from the nearest inhabited planet. By that time, I hope, they will be prepared.
Finally, my people are free.
I have saved my world from an eternity of brutality, tyranny and oppression.
Hallefuckinglujah.