“How long did we take to get here from where we latched onto the runner?” eThorpe asked.
“I’m guessing—a few microseconds, maybe.”
“So, this runner thing—whatever the hell it is—gets an emergency call, and runs down here and shoots the critter. How the hell does that work?” eThorpe sounded genuinely perplexed. “Let’s keep things simple for the moment. Something down here is observing. That cannon, and every one like it we aren’t considering right now, has an observer. Somehow, that observer gets the word to Central, wherever the hell that is, and Central dispatches the runner.
“Now let’s get complicated. Say the cannon range is two hundred meters. I don’t know how large the occupied simian region is, but by any measure, that’s a lot of cannons, a lot of observers. Now take it to the nex
