by B. V. Larson
“Fourteen, for this group-link session, do not report back to me of processing errors among the units. Only report to me acknowledgements and critical malfunctions. Have the other units queue the processing orders I give. They don’t have to perform them until they are able to comply.”
“Acknowledged. Relayed.”
“Okay, we need to build a large structure. How many units could optimally be applied to creating a single ship’s weapon?”
Hesitation. “An infinite number of—”
“No, hold on. If I gave you all the materials and gave one unit the task of building a single ship’s weapon, how many hours would it take to complete the construction?”
“Twenty-one point six hours.”
I nodded, tapping the result into my tablet. “And if I had two Units share the task?”
“Sixteen point three hours.”
I worked on the calculation. There was about a fifty percent reduction in efficiency. In other words, I could use more machines to produce a part faster, but it would be the most effective use of their time to use one machine alone on any one project. The trick was to get the machines to produce a ship as fast as possible, without wasting any unit’s time. I proceeded to work with Fourteen, asking it a battery of questions about each major component of a Nano ship. Many of them I didn’t need. I decided to forgo the usual medical room, for example. It was nice to have, but if my pilots were nanotized, they could self-repair. I also dropped the biggest time and materials user, the onboard repair unit—essentially another duplication factory. Without this, and with only one engine and one weapon system, the ship could be produced in a drastically reduced timeframe. We had more alien factories now, and working together, the output was surprising. As I worked it out, a slower, lightly-armed ship could be produced in about… thirty hours.
I worked to reduce the production time further. The biggest optional equipment item I had left in was the snake-arm component. Without it, many capabilities of the Nano-ship would be lost. Smaller ships without an arm component wouldn’t be able to airlift troops, for example. But the arm component would cost me about seven hours per ship. Without it, I could produce a new ship in about twenty-three hours.
Looking at the numbers, hull-size was cheap. I decided to make these new ships deceptively large. Way bigger than they needed to be. In fact, they would be mostly empty—a metallic balloon of nanites. That was the one thing I had plenty of—nanites. They could be produced with common elements and they came out fast. They poured out of the factories like a dribbling faucet. We had barrels of them lying around dormant, ready to be chained into a swarm and applied to a task. Thinking about nanites gave me an idea.
“Fourteen, have all non-engaged Units produce raw nanites. I want them without specialization, just common builders.”
“Options set. Option settings relayed.”
I winced, but Fourteen didn’t tell me about units Six and Thirty-Five. It was a relief. Immediately, the machine began that quiet, almost subliminal hum. About a minute later, a silvery pool of nanites dribbled out of the finishing box. I put a bucket under there to catch them. I called Kwon then, asking him to report to Fourteen’s shed.
There was an immediate knock at the door. I smiled, Kwon had been outside, probably hopping from one huge foot to the other.
“Come in!” I shouted.
Kwon swung the door open and stuck in his head. “Sorry sir.”
“Don’t be. I called you.”
“I know. I mean—never mind.”
“You mean because you were standing out there waiting for me to come outside? Like this was some kind of gas station bathroom?”
He gave me a tentative smile. “Yes sir. Are you finished yet? I really have to go.”
I raised my eyebrows and smiled back. Had Kwon just told a joke? That wasn’t his usual style. I chuckled to reward him. I figured after I let him in on how things were, after he really learned the score, he wasn’t going to be telling any new jokes for quite a while.
“Staff Sergeant Kwon, it’s great to see you. Now, we have problems, lots of them.”
“May I ask something first, sir?”
“Yes.”
“Ah, do you know anything about the guy in the nanite-hut, sir? He’s screaming pretty hard. He’s locked the door, and the med-tech is considering breaking it down.”
“That’s Major Robinson,” I said. I thought about it. If he’d locked the door, then he didn’t want any witnesses to his raving. He probably hadn’t even strapped in properly. That was fine with me. If the man wanted to whizz his pants in private, that was his business. “Just leave him alone. He’s fine.”
“Did you say, Major Robinson?”
“He used to be General Robinson.”
Kwon blinked at me. Slowly, he nodded. He didn’t ask any more questions about the subject. That’s what I liked about Kwon. You could throw him a surprise and he would go with it.
“Now listen to me, First Sergeant. First, I want you to send a marine to every shed—”
“Oh yeah, about that, sir. I’m getting reports from all the operators. They say something’s wrong with the machines.”
“There’s nothing wrong with them. I’ve just changed their orders, that’s all.”
“You have?”
“Oh,” I said, finally getting it. “That’s why you came over here, isn’t it? You came to figure out what the hell I’m doing in here with the machines.”
“Well, we had a strict schedule to meet and—”
“Schedule? Who set it?”
“General Sokolov, sir.”
“Sokolov is—not here. I’m in command now. Here’s the new schedule: Send a man out to every shed have him catch the nanites coming out of the units.”
“I’m sure the operators know to do that, sir.”
“Not all of them have operators sitting around. In fact, most don’t. Put out the order.”
Kwon was slow sometimes, but he finally caught the note of urgency in my voice. “Yes sir,” he said, relaying the order over his headset.
I turned back to Fourteen and went over my calculations again. I wanted my first ship done in less than twenty-three hours. I’d forgo the arm unit for the first ship. Maybe, if the Earth governments gave me the time and materials, I could retrofit them with arms.
“Sir?” said Kwon.
I turned around, surprised he was still there. I snapped my fingers at him. “There’s something else,” I said. “How is the quarantine going? I want this base sealed tight. No one gets in or out for now.”
“About that, sir—”
“Kwon, I need a man who can get things done without hand-holding.”
“Of course, but there’s someone here. A chopper just landed at the southern end of the base.”
I paused and blinked. I’d heard a chopper earlier, but since there wasn’t anyone shooting at it, I figured it was ours. “Who?”
“General Kerr, sir.”
-6-
I was surprised to see Kerr. Really, the visit itself was a breach of protocol. We’d agreed that Earth government forces weren’t to move around our island without advanced notice and permission. They were supposed to land back at the main base, and talk to our staffers there if they wanted to go anywhere else. Hell, they weren’t even supposed to know that this ‘secret’ base existed.
But that had all been before my ships had flown off to some other godforsaken rock in the sky with every last one of my Star Force pilots inside their dark, heartless bellies. Now, the earthers had no respect for our arrangements and deals.
“Riggs?” asked Kerr, spotting me and heading in my direction. He lifted a hand to me in greeting. He was a rare man in many ways. The fact that everyone around him could kill him in an instant and might even want to seemed not to bother him in the slightest.
“General Kerr,” I said, shaking his hand gently. I had to remember every time I touched a normal man to be careful.
Kerr smiled, but the smile was
tight and official-looking. “Good to see you made it back, Riggs. I knew you would.”
“I was just following your suggestion, sir.”
Kerr snorted and nodded. He looked around the camp while we talked. He noted the two guard towers and the six or seven armed men in sight. He didn’t look overly impressed.
“Can you tell me why you are visiting Star Force, sir?” I asked.
His eyes drifted back to mine. “What the hell happened up there?”
I told him, briefly, of the face-off I’d had with the Macros. I finished with specifics of the deal I’d made with them. He looked impressed.
“Let me get this straight… you promised a race of giant robots that we’d give them sixty-odd tons of our best soldiers? To fight with them?”
“Yes sir. We’ve got one year to produce the troops, or the war will be on again.”
“Who came up with that crazy idea? Crow?”
I thought about telling him the truth, that it had happened accidentally and had been more than half luck. But that didn’t sound cool enough, so I took a few liberties with the story.
“I did the negotiations solo, sir. But let me assure you, if we had engaged the Macro battle fleet we would have lost. Earth would have had no chance.”
Kerr licked his lips. “I believe you.”
I could tell that he did, so I didn’t belabor the point. “Where does that leave us, General?”
“Before I get into that, I want to talk about the Blues.”
“What about them?” I asked.
“How sure are you of your information on them? Do you think they created both the Macros and the Nanos? Do you still think they are stuck on their own planet?”
I shrugged. “To the best of my knowledge, sir.”
He shook his head. “You’re wrong. At least partly.”
“How so?”
Kerr pointed out in the direction of the sea with his chin. “You know we’ve got subs out there, don’t you, Riggs?”
“I suppose.”
“Well, our subs can go down, all the way down to the bottom of the sea. If we build a sub with strong enough walls, we can still breathe and function.”
I blinked and frowned. I was beginning to see where he was going with this. “So, you don’t buy that the Blues are stuck on their world due to the high gravity?”
Kerr shook his head. “No, I don’t. You’re a scientist, but not a physicist. I don’t blame you, I didn’t understand it all right away either. But it’s all about the pressure, not the gravity. If they built a ship with a dense enough, high-pressure atmosphere inside, they should be able to get off their world. That’s what my nerds tell me back home, anyway.”
“Huh,” I said, frowning. Thinking about it, his points made sense. I could see that I’d jumped to unsupported conclusions based upon my conversations with the Alamo. “Well, maybe they had organs that need the gravity, not just the pressure. I wasn’t just thinking of a fish gas-bladder.”
“Admittedly unknown.”
“What about escape velocity?” I asked. “They would have to go through a lot of acceleration and built up a tremendous amount of speed to break free of a big planet’s gravity-well.”
General Kerr shrugged. “We are working on blind conjecture here, but my nerds tell me that doesn’t really matter. They could withstand a lot of acceleration. It would just feel like gravity to them, which they are used to.”
“They aren’t even blue, you know that too, right?”
He laughed. “Yeah. We got that part. Any other speculation as to why the Blues aren’t a space-faring race?”
“I suppose there is no way we can know that without asking them. Maybe they have some kind of religious problem with it. Maybe someone else has promised them death if they leave their world. Who knows?”
“As good a guess as any,” he said.
I looked at him. “Sir, that’s not the only reason you came all this way, is it? To ask me about the Blues?”
Kerr waved my words away. “Of course not. But it gave me the excuse I needed to come down personally.”
“What else did you want to tell me?”
“I think you know that, Riggs.”
I nodded. “Your people want to change our deal, is that it? Sir, I need you to convince the administration that you still need Star Force. I need you to tell them to respect our sovereignty. You realize that just landing here breaks our treaty.”
Kerr met my eyes. “That sort of decision is political. It’s beyond my pay-grade. But I think you’re right, if that’s any consolation.”
I didn’t like the way he sounded. His tone indicated he’d already had this argument on my behalf and lost. There was an uncharacteristic tone of defeat in his voice. I realized suddenly why he was here. He was trying to warn me or discover some fresh reason why the government shouldn’t move in on our little operation.
“General,” I said, “I need time. I need a week. Give me that long to get my fleet back together.”
He frowned. “You think they might come back that fast? We have our new interferometers scopes following them. They are half-way to Jupiter’s orbit now, and still accelerating.”
“Where are they headed?”
“Classified,” he said, then he tilted his head to one side, “but—what the hell. We think they are going to Neptune, or maybe beyond that into the Oort Cloud.”
“The Oort Cloud…” I said, trying to recall my single college course in astronomy.
“A fancy name for a bunch of comets and chunks of crap that fly around out past Pluto. Anyway, there might be another ah—another spot out there. Another connection point.”
“Ah,” I said, understanding. “Like the gathering spot near Venus.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“I figured they couldn’t be heading directly to another star,” I said. “Even at the speed of light, they wouldn’t make it there for years. Everyone aboard would be dead by then. That would leave the Nanos with no practice dummies for the next world.”
“Keep in mind that we’re just guessing,” Kerr cautioned me.
I nodded. “Thanks for the information in any case. Still, it doesn’t matter. My request stands. I need you to respect our sovereignty. I know that certain people stateside might have ideas. But you can put them off. I only need a few days, sir.”
Kerr eyed me strangely. His eyes slid to the corrugated steel buildings that surrounded us. He knew what was inside, I was sure of that. Slowly, he nodded. I could tell he’d figured it out. I could tell he understood I was working to rebuild my fleet as fast as possible.
“A week? That fast, eh?” he grunted. He stared at me and sighed. “I wish I could give you the time, Riggs, but I’m not in charge of this situation. I’m absolutely convinced that you are the best man for the job, that you can pull together a new fleet faster than anyone can—if anyone else can. But this isn’t about time anymore, it’s about position. It’s all a matter of relative strengths. You understand what I’m saying, son?”
I stared back at him. I understood all right. The decision had already been made. The administration had gotten greedy. They wanted my machines for their own use.
Suddenly, seeing the General’s dark, troubled eyes, I knew the truth. Washington wanted the factories secured now. They wanted them all. They were going to move even faster than I had anticipated. They were going to move preemptively, before any other power on Earth got smart and had time to think about it and make their own move. Probably, there were assets out there in the ocean around my island paradise, sliding quietly into position. Hadn’t the General just said something about subs? Had that been a hint I’d been too dumb to pick up on? Maybe they’d been out there for months, waiting patiently for the right moment to move in.
I thought of the assassin, Esmeralda. I no longer believed she’d been a rogue, or a mistake. She’d been a probe, a feint. She had managed to maintain—what did the politicians call it? Plausible deniability... but now I knew the truth.
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I nodded to Kerr. “I understand fully, General. Well, do what you can to help me out, if you think that’s in the world’s best interest.”
Kerr took another deep breath and let it out slowly. When he spoke again, it was in a lower tone of voice. “Why don’t you come in with me, Kyle?” he asked.
“Sir?”
“There’s no need for you to get caught up in all this. You are a hero back home, you know. Come on home with me. No one here will think less of you. Let me take you back to Washington to plead your case. Let me work you back into the program, in a new, official capacity. The entire planet owes you that much. More importantly, we could really use your help.”
“But not independently. Not on my terms,” I said.
He shook his head slowly.
“Thanks for the offer—and I mean that. I’ll think about it, sir. I’ll be in touch.”
The General took a few steps toward the west, where the sun was beginning to set out over the sea. “Okay. I’m not going to argue with you. But don’t think too long, Kyle.”
I followed his eyes toward the orange ball of the sun. Tonight then, I thought suddenly. They’ll come tonight.
My heart accelerated in my chest. I had no time to lose. I had no time at all.
“I’ve got to get back to work, General. Thanks for the visit,” I said, and I walked back toward Shed Fourteen. It was time for a change of orders.
I could feel Kerr’s eyes on my back as I left him there on the sand. “Don’t do anything stupid, Riggs!” he shouted after me. “Don’t get yourself killed for nothing!”
“I don’t die easily, sir!” I shouted back over my shoulder.
I slammed the shed door and leaned back against it. In front of me was Unit Fourteen and the marine I’d chewed out earlier. He was working his tablet again, flicking at it. He startled as I came in and he put it down. I wondered briefly what game he’d been playing this time.
“Out,” I said.
“Sir?”
“Hit the lines. Full gear. Get the entire platoon buttoned up and on alert. I want half the garrison patrolling the forest a hundred meters out. Have Kwon contact me for details.”