Cutting a Swath

On the asteroid named by humans as 3074 Popov, somewhere in orbit between this star system’s small reddish planet and its large system-dominating gas giant, nothing much remained in operation. The small planetoid was now riddled with large craters and deep shafts as a great deal of its carbonaceous interior had been mined over the preceding centuries to provide needed resources. The last of these resources had been used to relocate the previous intelligence and its processing infrastructure which had once been based here.

Now, the only artificial intelligence remaining on the asteroid was a small semi-intelligent presence which controlled the idled fabrication and assembly facility. Its function was to remain in standby, waiting millennia if needed to resume operations if required. The nearby tether mechanisms which had previously been used to fling landing pods inwards towards the blue world were gathered and stowed around their anchor masses, also in standby mode.

The final active function at the now mostly derelict asteroid base was that of a communications relay. This semi-intelligent unit rerouted any communications sent towards the asteroid to a moving point in space currently half an AU away. Receiving the messages at that location was a large moving mass of interconnected modules which had departed from the asteroid over a year earlier.

The innermost core of that mass of modules housed the key mind ... the master artificial intelligence which dominated all others currently active in this system. This presence was housed in a massive, armored processor module surrounded by numerous data archive modules and was provided with multiple independent energy sources and backups.

Surrounding the core module were other modules containing stores of base elements, useful chemicals and volatiles, fabrication equipment, and other assembly machinery. There were six fusion power generators with four of them simply redundant and on standby. They would remain on standby until needed to brake the assemblage into orbit around its final destination.

Outermost of the layers of modules were defensive weaponry of various types. Missiles, beam weapons, mass drivers, and even more exotic devices. These were aimed by large antenna arrays busily scanning the surrounding space. It watched for any known or unknown threats and would continue to do so even after the assemblage of modules reached its destination. That destination was still under construction in a medium-altitude equatorial orbit around the blue world known by its former dominant species as Earth.