“I can answer that,” Royleen spoke. He was getting used to the ability to interrupt outside of the caste system. These humans seemed to have a system based on roles, but when it came to conversations it was appropriate to add and interject as necessary without being considered rude. Rude, Royleen found out, was a type of hierarchy filter in conversations. “Nickel-iron is hard. However, the Yollins have been working in outer space for many of your centuries and have methods to drill into the asteroid and produce valuable products at the same time as we hollow out the inside.”
“It isn’t quite like slicing through butter with a hot knife,” Marcus admitted, “but it’s very fast. It’s approximately like us drilling through coal. The difference is that their mechanicals will eat into the asteroid, and then send it through a processing core that will separate a lot of the metals for us. It helps to move the production forward. We can, of course, turn that piece of the machine off and it will create stackable bricks for speed.”
“So,” Bethany Anne said. “It drills and separates the metals into the constituent ores, and prepares them for final smelting, do I understand this correctly?”
“Yes,” Marcus agreed.
“And you have one of these?” she asked.
“Oh no,” Royleen said. “We do not. However, we do have the schematics for three different sizes of the machines in our databases.”
“How fast can this machine be built and tested?” she asked.
“Probably about six months, boss,” William answered her. “I’ve gone shopping on the best machining and fabrication machines the Japanese have, and if we get the right stuff, we can start by getting some of the components created on Earth in different countries. But some of the stuff is advanced tech we need to do ourselves out in the belt.”
Bethany Anne thought about it for a second. “How many of these machines are you looking to build?”
“At least four,” Bobcat answered. “Always running two, one for immediate backup and a third for separate operations outside of the inside core. Then, we’ll create self-replicating machines to start the second stages of the building of parts. Using an M-Class asteroid, we would have a lot of the basic material, but we’ll need to add in the more complicated items as required. They, in turn, continue mining as we expand.”
“Separate operations?”
“Sure,” Bobcat answered. “We’ll want dock areas. Somewhere ships can connect with us and have interactions, but easily separated from our inside area and safe. Probably two, actually. One for our own ships to dock if we want to keep it separate and far apart. No need for anyone to easily attack our own ships as well and try to gain entrance inside.”
“Okay,” Bethany Anne agreed. “What about light?”
“We’re good there,” Marcus answered. “We have enough energy through the Etheric to power what is effectively a large incandescent using a version of a Yollin heat source. The light it usually produces is in the red spectrum, but we can tune it to something closer to our yellow and tweak for heat output. We’ll have about four different breaks to make sure it doesn’t supernova inside the base…”
“A bad result for everyone inside, I’m sure,” Bethany Anne interrupted.
“Yes, it would be,” Marcus admitted. “If they didn’t fry immediately, the cold might get them soon after.
“So, how safe is this going to be?” she pressed, “I don’t want to be worried about a fake sun going supernova inside my peoples’ base.”
Marcus hummed a bit before answering. “Honestly, I think we wouldn’t need but one cutout. I’ve worked four various safety breaks to continue the heat and light, each one progressively separating the power into smaller and smaller sources. That way, at the end we have twenty-seven small heat sources and if any of them malfunction, they just go dead. The chance of a catastrophic failure after level four is less than our own sun dying soon.”
Bethany Anne thought about it. “Okay, but triple check those numbers, please.” Marcus nodded. Bethany Anne pursed her lips. “Right. We have food, shelter, power and water covered at the moment. I’ve seen the plans to have the rails and regions broken out like a city. Confirm we have protection capability and plan how we’re going to deal with attacks from the outside. I have reviewed the idea of making it large enough for ships to pass into, but I’m not sure about that idea, yet. Let’s discuss the ships, the warriors, and the new toys Jean Dukes wants to play with…”
CHAPTER NINE
Las Vegas, Nevada, USA
Nathan nudged Darryl. They had moved the car to a spot outside of the neighborhood because they had been passed during a patrol sweep by the local police. They decided that not getting asked questions was better than sticking closer. With ArchAngel overhead, they hoped to get some advance warning, and it looked like they had it.
There was a black van pulling into the subdivision. Darryl started the car. In seconds, he had pulled into the main street and was quickly catching up to the van, which was keeping to a sedate pace inside the neighborhood. As the vehicle made its third turn, traveling deeper into the community, it was evident this wasn’t a false alarm.
They passed the main entrance to the subdivision and turned down a side street that paralleled the neighborhood itself. Down at the end, the guys pulled off the road. They jumped out and ran, easily vaulting the six-foot fence, to dodge through the children’s toys strewn about the backyard and vaulted the fence one more time. This brought them out on the street across from the Switzers’ house. Nathan and Darryl quickly backtracked into the bushes beside the neighbor’s house and watched as the headlights from the dark van pulled onto the street.
“Looks like we get to play tonight, after all,” Nathan murmured.
Darryl looked over at his friend. “You sound like a man that’s been cooped up inside too long.”
“That’s because I’m a man who has been cooped up inside too long. I know Ecaterina tries her best to understand, but even with the workouts with the other guys, it isn’t the same as going against someone who really doesn’t mean you well.”
“Yeah,” Darryl agreed. “I get that. She tell you anything important before you left?”
Nathan smiled in the dark. “Yeah, she won’t forgive me for getting killed, leaving her to raise our baby all by herself. Apparently, that wasn’t enough of a warning, so she told me that she would raise the little lady up to be a Steelers fan.”
Darryl whistled. “Damn, went right for the nuclear option, didn’t she.”
“Yeah, can’t let little Christina grow up a to be a Steelers fan. Or, even worse, a Coke fan too,” Darryl smiled.
“God no!” Nathan spat. “A Coca-Cola drinking, terrible towel waving female? Hell, I’d be prouder if she danced on a pole.”
“No!” Darryl laughed.
“Well, not really but it was funny, right?” Nathan grinned. “Looks like our fun has arrived.”
“Let them go in?”
“Yeah, that’s part of the agreement,” Nathan said. “When the first set goes in, we need to hit any left in the van.”
“Modified BA blood for the win,” Darryl said as he checked the gun, confirming the sleepy darts were locked and loaded waiting for a trigger pull.
“Works better than the name-brand sleepy darts,” Nathan replied. “Looks like we have three… no, four leaving the back of the van. Nicely outfitted in all black with head cover. Seems like they got their gear from the same store.”
“What, terrorists-r-us?” Darryl asked.
“Well, I’m not sure you could call them terrorists so much as black-ops-r-us.” The guys could see, on their protective glasses, the inputs from ArchAngel’s drones. Two split off and were heading around the back of the house. The Switzers had a dog that got off one bark before it was silenced.
Permanently.
“Okay, that’s good enough for me,” Nathan’s eyes went yellow as he started running but found he was already late to the game as Darryl had bolted across the street and flung ope
n the van door. Nathan heard two ‘pffts’ from the pistol as he passed the van, running all out on his way to the backyard.
Those two assholes were going to be his to play with.
Nathan could see the two enter the back door, setting off the internal alarm the guys had set to help hide any noise as they came into the house behind the attackers. ArchAngel would immediately shut down any communications coming out of this group to their home base once the alarm went off.
Nathan had always been someone seeking to overcome, to be better, to find new ways to accomplish goals and with Bethany Anne’s tutelage and tweaks with the Pod-doc, Nathan had accomplished his own version of enhancements and upgrades.
He could mutate just parts of his body. Like, for instance, his chest and arms and his oh so gloriously destructive hands and nails.
The two jerk-offs had just entered the downstairs hallway, heading quickly to the main floor bedroom. That’s where the adults would have been if they hadn’t been warned by Mason and Sheila.
Now, there were a couple of mannequins under the sheets. Nathan had just arrived at the master suite door when the two he was following unloaded three taps to each body in the bed.
—
Jack Caton didn’t like his orders, but he had decided years ago that the group’s best protection was secrecy, and he and his teams knew silencing those who had a life outside of the project was a possibility.
Silencing those who had needed a normal life. Wife, kids, soccer games on the outside. Basically, crutches and millstones around their necks.
Risks.
He hated the damned alarm, shrieking and forcing him and his team to do this without the professionalism he would have preferred.
Jack raised his suppressed Beretta M9A3 and fired a three shot burst into his targets. He wasn’t sure if Switzer was sleeping on the left or the right when he shot. He started to move forward, to check his kill. Alarm or no, something didn’t seem right. Then he heard a scream from right behind him.
—
Nathan, his right hand sprouting five-inch claws rammed his arm like a jackhammer through the first guy he came to. He got off a scream as Nathan’s arm lifted him into the air, flinging him sideways, blood spraying the walls in an arc as the body slammed into the wall.
—
Jack turned to his right, bringing his Beretta around as he watched Kolman’s dead body being flung easily into the wall.
SHIT! He tried to get his gun on point, but his hand was caught in a crushing grip as the half-man, half beast smiled at him. “I don’t like those that kill animals indiscriminately,” the thing spoke to him, his yellow eyes penetrating the gloom.
Jack’s arm was caught in a vice-like grip as his own pistol was turned and he felt the barrel placed under his own jaw. “Life for a life,” the guttural voice said, and he felt a furry hand push his trigger finger back.
The blood splatter hit the ceiling and Nathan dropped the second commando. He could smell Darryl and turned around.
Darryl was looking around the room. “Damn, you Wechselbalg are so fucking messy.”
“Incoming, contact in seventy-two seconds,” both men heard from their implants.
“Time to skedaddle,” Darryl said and turned around. Nathan started running, knowing he wasn’t going to catch up with the man, but then he would be there by the time Darryl tossed him a body as he passed by the van.
They easily carried the two from the van as they jumped over the fence to get back to the car.
“Sure wouldn’t have been able to pack these assholes in the F12,” Darryl agreed as they tossed the sleeping bodies into the car and pulled back on the road, beating the arrival of the first responders by thirty seconds.
Berlin, Germany
Terry nodded to the taxi driver and stepped out of the cab. He had been on a small bender for the last week. Melissa had slapped him one last time. Then she left him in New York after the American government brought them back from the aircraft carrier where TQB had dropped them off.
Apparently, his military mindset, which he wasn’t changing, still concerned her deeply. She fanned the flames of a small argument into a raging inferno and left town, going back, he supposed, to her university.
Never calling him back.
Still, he couldn’t drink her kisses away, or her eyes, or her smell.
Damn. He had tried, oh lordy how he had tried.
He sighed and walked towards the hotel, on another mission to retrieve something no one should probably be trying to attain. He sure hoped it wasn’t back to the sandpit again. That sand always gets in the wrong crevice and there isn’t any polite way to get it out in mixed company.
The first call came in, warning him about a second call and suggesting he would want to drink some coffee. The second opportunity was the same as last time.
He had exactly forty-six minutes to wake up and slug through two cups of the nectar from the god of life and goodwill before the second call came in. The voice had a German accent, and it promised an interview, all expenses paid to get him to Germany and back if it didn’t work out.
He sighed, told them he could be at the airport within four hours.
That was yesterday morning. Now, Terry was here in Germany looking at a hotel that was probably built two hundred years ago and would be here two hundred years after he died.
Sliding through the front doors, he made his way to the front desk and received instructions how to get to the conference room. He was surprised when the door was guarded by a pair of men who were competent, brisk and experienced. The hard kind of experience.
These guys were either still in the military and on loan for this or recently retired. His ID was checked, and then he was allowed inside.
Good thing he left his weapons back in his hotel room.
This room was arranged a little differently than his last job. There were people sitting up at the front behind a table, and about twelve people sitting in the first two rows of chairs. He was the first to sit in the third row, with two empty rows behind him. There were five seats on each side, the main aisle down the middle splitting them.
Most of those here seemed to have tasks, so he pulled out a tablet and started to see if he could figure out who these characters were.
By the time the meeting started, another four people had entered.
There was some rustling of papers, and Terry put down his tablet to give them his attention.
There was a woman in red on the left, an older gentleman in the middle and another on the right. Both of them in suits. The gentleman in the center stood up. “My name is Dr. Schäuble, and I appreciate all of you joining us on such short notice. We seem to be missing two people, so either they have decided not to join us, or perhaps traffic has not worked in their favor. Either way, we will not hold you up because they have been rude.”
He took a drink of his water and then sat the glass back down. “This expedition, and trust me, it will be an expedition, is a research effort comprised of private companies in concert with support from the German government. The support is not as overt as perhaps we would like, but we do have deeper pockets and access to information we might not have had otherwise.”
To Terry’s right in the corner was a screen and Dr. Schäuble pointed to it and pressed a small button. A slide came up, and Terry’s blood went cold.
The title was Operation Highjump.
“We are looking to sail a ship to a particular location in Antarctica where it is rumored, and backed up by information the German government has shared, to be a base started by those from here in Germany in the 1930s. There were many in…” Dr. Schäuble’s voice droned on about the location, but Terry was already tuning him out.
If there was anywhere he hated going more than the sandpit, it was into the cold. They could take this operation and shove it up their asses as far as he was concerned.
The Kurtherian Gambit Omnibus 05 - The Fans Version: My Ride is a Bitch - Don't Cross This Line - Never Submit Page 10