it with a warp core and she could vertically take off and land. And oh by the way, fly faster than the speed of light. 'After all,' I told them. 'It's bound to fly better than the Roswell facility and it flew pretty damn good!'
Upon delivery of the last spaceframe, the first two warpships were completely retrofitted and ready to fly. Tabitha, Jim, 'Becca, Anne Marie, Margie, and myself test drove one of them to the far side of the Moon. We picked out a nice spot for Moon Base 1 and marked it by using the spacecraft to dig a big X in the lunar surface.
Tabitha spent the trip back at a slower pace. It took a couple of hours. She used this pace to train each of us how to fly the little warpships. Then we each got a turn landing them at the Roswell facility. It turned out that Annie was a natural born pilot, go figure. That apple didn't fall far from the tree did it? By the end of the day we were all checked out and Tabitha gave each of us the go ahead to pilot the ships by ourselves. However, all flight plans had to be approved by her or Margie first. After all, they were the two most experienced pilots we had available. Tabitha had thousands of hours including in space and Margie was a test pilot instructor from the National Test Pilot School.
Jim, Al, and Margie spent the next couple of days digging holes and tunnels in the far side of the lunar surface. About six months later, the town was completed. All the construction was kept to simple slab and sticks with very comfortable interiors. The town had its own power plant of flubell ECCs, a power grid, and modifiable warp field generators. When it was complete, we simply ripped it out of the ground: houses, trailers, streets, trees, vegetable garden, lake and beach equipped with volleyball net, birds, bees, cats, post office, water tower and purification plant, waste recycling plant, air handlers and scrubbers, electric buggies, mountain bikes, food storage facility and country store (although Tabitha called it the PX), one beach bar and grill, and a shitload of other stuff. At the last minute we added a full court concrete slab with poured rubber surface basketball court. The court was flanked on each side with outdoor aluminum bleachers. We also added a martial arts school and fitness training center equipped with a full complement of machines and weights. There were picnic areas in the trees and near the beach. And we added a Gazebo here and there for aesthetics. We also made certain that there was enough room for a school building and football field. Sara named it 'Force Field.' With about a hundred employees planned, it is possible that we would have enough for two or three intramural teams. All of these people might have kids or need to do distance training. We added a library to the school and filled it with books, periodicals, and technical journals. It was one of the best technical libraries ever assembled. We would definitely use that. The library also had a full print shop and electronic database. Our goal was to do most stuff electronically so we wouldn't need much paper. But, I still like to print documents out to read them, though.
We were thinking way into the future when one day we might have a complete society living there. Nobody questioned our budget line so we spent as much money as we could on anything we could think of.
Then we warped all of it to the Moon. I flew the town while Jim and Al came in over the top and covered it up with lunar soil. I then oscillated the Town's outer warp field and hardened the dome around it. It took several more weeks to install all of the windows. We had to run flame pots and heaters and oscillate the warp field some to maintain temperature until the windows were in place. The next week or two involved moving the manufacturing facility and lab that had been constructed at other secret locations. They took a week or two to completely install at Moon Base 1 also. Then we installed the landing strip and docking facility. With all construction complete we did a lights-off lights-on maneuver to encompass the complete Moon Base in one warp bubble. Then we turned the periphery bubbles off.
Everything was finally complete and people began moving in. Jim and I had the idea of building a mountain bike trail around the Town, Lab, and Plant. We cut trails inside the domes on the outer circumference and then used a small warp bubble to cut switch back trails alongside and up and over (or down and under in some cases) the tunnels that connected the various domes. We added a couple of whoops and a few doos. We even stuck in a 'hellacious up hill' and a 'screaming elevator shaft down to hell.' We put up historical markers explaining that this was 'the first mountain bike trail in space don't ride when raining.' The trail was wide enough to ride two-up and was roughly two and three-quarter miles long. We put fluorescent lighting all through the trails that were in tunnels and we planted grass, weeds, and flowers. Since the trails were within the Moon Base warp field they were at one gee everywhere. We worked on the trail during our spare time and it only took us about a month to complete it.
We spent a month or two moving in and slowly developed a routine. Occasionally we would slip back to Earth to pick up more supplies and beer. But for the most part, we lived and worked at Moon Base 1 and seemed to always have to send someone back to Earth for beer and pretzels.
Our first technical priorities were to improve detection capabilities, invent new warp technologies that would enable new methods of warfare, develop new intelligence gathering abilities, and to develop transportation capabilities. It was a lot of fun. We spent a lot of time brainstorming and testing these new ideas. One of the ideas that I had was a bulletproof force field. If we could design an ECC and Van Den Broeck bubble generator that was light enough, foot soldiers could wear them as armor. Tabitha suggested that they could replace spacesuits also. We just needed to figure out how to replenish oxygen.
After brainstorming the personal warp field concept a while, I began to see many possibilities for it. A personal warp field could be used to enhance strength if the control system for the bubble was designed to react to movements inside the field. The personal warp system would also enable the individual to warp himself around or fly. This could be the first possible design for a Supersuit. We put this concept on the to-do list, even if it was five or more years off.
We had already developed warp cranes and float tables to enable us to move heavy stuff around. These would have been useful for the disaster relief if the public could have been told about them.
I was also thinking about a technique of using the warp field to create a giant gravitational lens that could be used as the primary objective for a telescope. If we could warp spacetime hard enough to create a short focal length lens that was kilometers in aperture diameter, we could see freckles on an ant's ass from the moon. Or we could image planets around other stars. This gave me an idea about the Solar Focus, but we can talk about it later.
And of course, there was always the original reason for my designing the warp drive. Interstellar space travel! I indeed planned to do this soon. In fact, Tabitha and I were planning a trip to Mars real soon to test out the speed of our little warpships. We had yet to prove that we could go superluminal. But there was no doubt in my mind it would soon be done.
By the way, I never really talked about the effect our Secret War had on Earth. With the wedding, our one-week honeymoon that we spent on my couch in Huntsville, and building and moving into Moon Base 1, I tried not to dwell on it. The last estimate of dead was somewhere around sixty-five million Americans, one hundred million Chinese, forty-seven million Russians, and two hundred thousand North Koreans. There were countless acres of forests and wildlife destroyed. Last count was three hundred or more species of animals and insects were now extinct. It was estimated that the damage was in the trillions of U.S. dollars. The three hypercanes caused by the Warp Weapon impacts pumped a tremendous amount of dust and moisture into the upper atmosphere. And there was talk of the subsequent moderate greenhouse effect causing higher coastal waters and much larger tropical regions for the next hundred or more years. Like Huntsville wasn't hot and humid enough already. Now it would be like beach weather without the beach. Oh, there was some talk about 'nuclear winter' kinds of nonsense and ice ages and other things, but none of that really panned out scientifically. Just our weather was a little more erratic is all.
