Sarah stepped back and watched the mighty erection whirr to life, ready to bring forth hot, ready metal for the creation of yet more buildings.
“Almost sexual, isn’t it?” she whispered.
“What was that?” Tex asked.
“Nothing!” Sarah squeaked. But in the corner of her eye, she saw her metal had gone from +0 to +1. She beamed, then walked over to the next metal deposit. She aimed her nanolathe at it. This time, though, the nano paused halfway through the construction. But then a blur of motion shot by her head and Sarah yelped as her whole body rocked. She swung her head around and saw a disk shaped drone, flying using an ionic impeller drive, was whisking back to the metal extractor. She looked down at the nanolathe and saw that the metal packet loaded into it had been refilled. Tex was right. It really was all automatic. She sprayed down the rest of the extractor, then paused to point to three drones. “You three! Uh, hunt for more metal sites! And you!” She pointed to a fourth. “Make another hatchery.”
The drones chirruped and got to work.
Over the course of the next hour, she constructed four more metal extractors – but by then, her energy reserves had begun to go down. Each extractor, after all, used energy. Each time she used her nanolathe, she used energy. So, next, she began to build some pyramidal shaped solar collector, which bumped her energy reserves upwards. Once she was fairly comfortable with the amount of metal and energy she was getting, she began to lathe together a factory for combots and tanks and whatever else she needed. Meanwhile, her second hatchery had spawned and she was beginning to see bladelings burrowing out of the ground – scampering around on the silty surface of the planet, hissing and clawing at one another happily.
Sarah grinned – then stepped away from the factory once it had finished glowing green. She bit her lip. “Let’s see if this works,” She said, then focused – and the factory menu bloomed in her mind, showing her everything it could produce. She lifted her finger, the hazy, half-real image of the menu dimpling as she drew her finger across it. She flicked her finger against the Construction Bot three times, then punched down her finger on the anti-aircraft bots several dozen times. She beamed as the factory slowly unfolded – extending out nanolathes that swung around and began to spray their nanotech paste into the center of the factory. “Ahhhh!” Sarah squealed. “This is so frigging cool!”
“And yet, the spaceship was scary,” Tex said.
“Yeah, but...shut up!” Sarah said.
The first construction bot emerged from the factory line a few minutes later, stomping onto the silty dirt. It’s top was flat and shiny, and it had digitigrade legs, like a chicken walker. It had no arms, no manipulators. It was just a pair of legs and the broad, almost hat-like top. A drone whirred up and brushed past its legs and Sarah rubbed her chin, eyeing the bot with a jaundiced eye.
“You...” She said. “Are adorable. I shall name you Sir Hattington.”
“It’s a construction robot!” Tex shouted over the coms.
“Build, Sir Hattington! Buuuuuuuuuild!” Sarah thrust her finger at the horizon. She laughed. “God, you know, back when I worked with NovaDyne, saying this kind of thing would get me fined and given demerits. Now? Now I can say whatever I want!” She beamed as Sir Hattington began to unfold his hat, revealing his nanolathe. The construction of the first light laser tower she had ever asked for her in her life swept upwards, green nanites shrouding the vacuum. Sarah spared a glance for her metal and energy reserves and, pursing her lips, tooled off Sir Hattington and Miss Hattington – as she mentally named the other bots – to begin building her more factories and more solar extractors.
The difference between the two economies felt very stark, and it took Sarah a bit to really wrap her head around it. The Claw half of her army required the same kind of growth and stabilization of an ecology – if there was any lack in the lower parts of the chain, the entire thing suffered: Not enough plant-matter for the carbon cows to eat? Well, then the carbon cows didn’t grow big enough for the biopits to make enough carbon for her to make bladelings and the entire system seized up. However, so long as they kept the number of flower collectors and plant-matter producers running apace, the ecology could spread with almost viral efficiency.
Meanwhile, the opposite was true of what she was thinking of as her Hardtech half. There, if a resource ran dry, the work continued – they would simply leave gaps in their construction and move on to the next project, or begin to adjust production. There was a way to turn raw energy into metal via colliding particles together using a miniaturized atom smasher. It was hugely energy inefficient, but it worked. However, there was an upper limit to how much it could grow, and it would have to grow in a linear fashion: First this, then that, then the next thing.
The hard limit was just where the metal extraction points were. DisneyPlanet was a silicate rich planet, meaning actual heavy metals and industrial metals were rare. Relatively speaking. Like, even on a planet where only 2% of it was useful metal, that was still way more metal than anyone would ever use at any one time. But the issue was the amount by which the metal could be extracted: If it was extracted slower than her factories were producing, then she ran into problems.
Sarah found balancing both types of economy hugely fascinating.
That was what almost got her killed.
“Sarah,” Tex said, his voice clipped.
“One second!” Sarah said, frowning as she stood on the very top of one of the light laser towers she had slapped down for defense. It also gave her a perfect view of the surrounding area – she frowned as her eyes shifted to show her the underground structures she had been building. Huge caves, each containing their own enclosed ecologies, spread underneath her base, and from those caves came a new clutch of bladelings every few seconds. Her main factories were mostly working on building construction aircraft, which took considerably more time than building construction robots. Aircraft were tricky, on a world without air, after all.
She was trying to figure out where she could put in another metal maker. She was pretty sure there was space right there, between two of her flower units.
“Sarah!” Tex shouted this time.
“What? Tex? I’m busy ! I’m nearly at the 1.2K limit on metal, which means I’ll be able to-”
“There’s fifteen thousand airplanes cresting the horizon of the planet loaded with tac bombs!” Tex snapped. “They just popped up on the scope.”
Sarah turned around.
The airplane cloud was not visible, not from this distance. But her eyes somehow still picked them out – focusing and twisting light to make the impossible distance seem close. She saw, first, the way the stars winked and went out, then winked back on again as the frames of the combat craft placed themselves between the stars. She could hear their low droning now – the sound of their ionic engines and the clattering of their armor. She knew the audio was an impossibility. A trick, created by her enhanced senses to help give her a better understanding of the battle field.
“Gulp,” she whispered.
“What are you going to do?” Tex asked.
She could hear the tension in that sentence. And for a moment, Sarah froze. She wasn’t a Commander. She was a biologist . She might have gotten her head around building bases, she might adore watching her drones and her bots doing her bidding. But that wasn’t the same as being a Commander . As knowing what to do when fifteen thousand airplanes crested the horizon, with murder on the mind.
Give up and die? She thought.
“No,” Sarah said.
“No isn’t an option!” Tex said. “You can’t just-”
Sarah shook her head. “No. I know exactly what to do.”
And to her shock...she actually did .
Chapter Five: Sarah versus Kellen Grant
Sarah had thought she knew what war looked like. She had seen it when her army had gone up against Texas Dallas. But that had been more of a double rush. Her rush against his rush.
This?
The front wave of Grant’s incoming airforce broke off into dozens of squadrons, each one moving with the eerie precision of artificial intelligence. Three bombers and a single support fighter, each one darting towards a different part of her base. She saw that they formed into groups that grew wider and wider and wider – first one group, then two, then three, then four, creating massed ‘daggers’ of airplanes. She saw why as they came within range of her laser turrets.
Lasers, in a vacuum didn’t worry about bullet drop or tracking or movement. They simply began to burn when the inverse square law said they wouldn’t be wasting power – and the front rows of the incoming plane formations began to come apart, melting into slag, their wings sliced off, their hulks crashing into the surface and peppering the ground with shrapnel. This was still at an immense distance, and for a moment, Sarah thought her madcap plan wouldn’t even need to be brought into effect.
She was proved wrong: The planes had formed up into increasingly large groups, and there was a limit to how fast lasers could cycle their firing. She saw her towers beginning to overheat, the emitters glowing first dull, then cherry red as they tried to bring down more and more of the incoming fighters. But since the fighters were in larger and larger groups, more were getting closer – and she saw them breaking off. Fifteen bombers darted down and released their payloads at nearly ground level, firing their wing thrusters at the last second to send them whipping back upwards. Those bombs struck her most distant extractors and solar plants – and she lifted her hand to block the blinding flashes.
When she lowered it, her forward bases were so many smoldering craters, and she saw a single massive chunk of one of her extractors winging in a smooth parabola nearly two kilometers before impacting into the silty earth. By then, the bombers were swinging upwards and the main bulk of Sarah’s base was coming under the direct assault of the survivors. The fighters, she saw, remained higher up, circling overhead, waiting for some kind of an air force to oppose them. The bombers flew in straight trajectories. By now, the laser turrets were nearly all and one trying to dump their waste heat into space.
Sarah lifted her hand.
“Now!” She shouted.
The seemingly unmarked ground in-front of her erupted.
Her entire economic force of drones shot into the air – their agrav emitters glowing brilliantly as they flung themselves upwards. Without air resistance and with only light gravity to deal with, the manta-ray bulk of the drones was able to reach the same height as the planes. Sarah winced, inwardly, as the planes and the drones met. The drones lacked weapons. Save their own bulk. A plane, at the end of the day, was fairly light and flimsy – and it was not made to withstand impact with a hefty construction drone. Bombers crumpled and drones exploded into black paste and the entire front line of the aerial formation staggered as if it had hit a wall. The remaining bombers pulled up, their bombs released erratically and too early.
Several buildings exploded and a shrapnel fragment whipped past Sarah’s ear so fast she barely perceived it. Flowers had been turned into bleeding stumps by the shockwaves, while three of her solar power plants were so much shattered glass. But the bomber wave began to circle around, trying to reorganize themselves. By now, the laser turrets were coming to life and Sarah directed not only the efforts of the turrets – focusing on the mostly intact formations with quick ‘twitches’ of her attention – but she also directed the surviving drones, the hatcheries, and the factories. Construction bots stomped off the lines to begin building heavy missile emplacements in camouflaged bunkers, while others started to build more factories. Factories specially built to construct her own aircraft.
Bladelings started to emerge en mass from the ground, chattering and squeaking with excitement.
Sarah grinned. “Let’s see how you like it, Grant,” she said, then sprang off the laser tower. She landed and started to use her nanolathe to help as well. When two nanolathes worked on the same project, it completed infinitely faster – and she was able to spot problems in her ecosystem and her ecology. Drones burrowed into the ground and grew protective, chitinous shields that the construction bots could build laser turrets behind, for extra defense. Bladelings spawned in huge clutches, clawing their way from their eggs and scrambling to the surface, fanning outwards so they could be bathed in radiation and cough up rad crystals onto conveyor belts she had – constructed by C-bots and delivering the radioactives straight to the hatchery.
By the time the second air wave came, she was ready for them: Thirty thousand airplanes, including heavy VTOL brawlers that were designed to hang in the air and pound bases into crap with plasma emitters. Missiles hacked them from the air, while lasers scythed out from behind bone shields. Her own fighters – the same make and model as the kind that had battled her while she was on the surface of Trappist-1a – zipped up to duel the more needle-like planes of Grant. The sky was lit with tracers, chaff-flares, and missile streaks. Sarah got used to ignoring the cataclysm going on overhead as she used her lathe and her own directives to shore up this or that part of her base.
Catching a break in the relentless assault, Sarah hurried to the main hatchery area. The constant pressure of growing buildings had forced the small craves she had used to conceal her first hatchery open wide. Now she could look down at the vast array of hanging egg-sacks that the bladelings came crawling out of. They slipped past her like a constant stream of eager puppies and Sarah took a moment to pet a few, then beamed as she saw the first of the big eggs hatching. The first of her bombardiers emerged from the eggs, wriggling and squirming, drones flitting around them to collect up the scraps of their cocoons for reprocessing.
“Yesss, my pretties!” Sarah crooned, rubbing her palms together.
“You sure you’re not going mad with power?”
Sarah screamed, then spun and saw Aiden standing behind her, his hands on his hips. Behind her, the first of the bombardiers came wallowing out of the hatcheries. Behind Aiden, she could see one of Grant’s airplanes spinning wildly before smashing into the ground beyond the base and dragging a furrow almost five kilometers long before coming to a stop. “Aiden!” Sarah said. “You can’t be out here, it’s dangerous! You should be in the ship.”
Aiden grinned at her. “I’m not. Look down.”
Sarah looked down – and saw that Aiden wasn’t there. He was being projected by a small, spider-limbed holobot. The bot bobbed.
“Tasha slapped it together when we noticed you going mad with power,” he said.
“I’m not going mad with power !” Sarah said – Aiden’s entire body flickering and turning to a cloud of static as the first bombardier opened fire. A heaving mass of plasma roiled into the air, rushing up towards the horizon, then cresting, and then cascading downwards, trailing blue flame like a comet from a spec-fic movie that had no idea how comets worked. When it slammed into the ground, the roiling explosion that bloomed in the distance didn’t form a mushroom cloud, as there was no atmosphere to support it. Instead, it looked more like a dome of pure fire. Sarah clasped her hands together. “Only...reasonably excited with...normal...stuff.”
Aiden, once his holographic figure had reconstituted enough for him to do so, pursed his lips at her.
“Okay, maybe it’s a teeny bit mad with power,” Sarah whispered, holding her finger up to indicate just how teeny bit it was. Aiden snorted, then reached down and swept his hand through her green rump. The haze of static that indicated where his holographic fingers met her skin, where the projection broke apart into a chaos of random impulses and sparkles, hung around her butt for long enough to let her stuck her tongue out of him. Then one of her bladelings whacked her butt with his head. “Hey!”
“I didn’t tell him to do that,” Aiden said, casually.
“Grumble grumble,” Sarah muttered. Her HUD chirruped and she lifted her head, focusing on the augmented reality illusion. It was a picture in picture display, showing that her first flight of transpor
ts were rolling off the production line. They were as simple as humans could make them: A column of cheap composites to serve as a spine, with a quarter of ionic VTOL engines on the sides, making it look a bit like an oversized mosquito, balanced on the tips of its four spindly legs. Normally, the transports were crafted with large gripper arms that could close around the bodies of tanks. Now, they were being webbed up with construction drone bioplast, create goopy sacks that bladelings began to squirm into with all the eager delight of self-canning sardines.
“Hailee,” Sarah said. “Do you have an appropriate song for this moment? It looks like something we should have a song for.”
“I believe I do,” Hailee said.
***
The first transport that took to the heavens did so with Sarah standing on the angular ‘cockpit’ that served as the home for the cloned, omega level intellect that powered the flight computers. It was several dozen steps below the gamma intellect that served as the basis for Synth, but Sarah still felt a tiny twinge of guilt – was she just crafting mentally handicapped child soldiers, then sending them into war? But she tried to pack that worry away as the VTOL engines roared to life and the transport took to skies on a quartet of blue thrust plumes. She bracer her legs and whooped, looking down over the lip of the transport at her base as it spread beneath her.
There was no air on DisneyPlanet, so she wasn’t buffeted by winds – and some trick in her body kept her glued to the metal of the cockpit. She felt almost no vertigo as she admired her own handiwork. Her base looked like a messy hodgepodge of buildings. No, scratch that. It looked like a messy hodgepodge of buildings that had been infected with the world’s worst skin condition and some kind of expensive omnicancer. Each of the sleek, rectangular structures she had built with her nanolathe – the factories, the airports, the solar power collectors, the metal extractors – shared space with the glistening purple fungus that served as the basis for her ecosystem, while glistening piles of muscle and organs that were the biological buildings of the Claw thrust into the air around and sometimes on top of the mechanical human structures.
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