over a thousand years ago. I was impressed by the old man to say the least. Everyone rose silently—other than 'Becca, who was cursing in pain—but they all watched as Dr. Daniels's chest closed up around my hand and the surface of his abdomen grew fuzzy.
We stood around and watched Daniels quietly, and then his heart monitor went from the flatlining screech to a normal beeping heartbeat. Then he opened his eyes and reflexively breathed as deep as he could.
'Behave yourself, Rebecca.' Dr. Clemons let her go and she rushed to Daniels's side, hugging and kissing him all over and crying.
'Oh, Jim, I thought you were going to die on me!' Tears rolled down 'Becca's face.
Jim looked around the room and saw Tatiana and me standing at the foot of his stretcher and he jumped violently. Dr. Clemons and 'Becca grabbed him and held him down.
'Take it easy, Jim. They saved you,' Dr. Clemons said.
'They're the ones that put me in this shape!' Jim cursed.
'Dr. Daniels, I apologize deeply and sincerely, but we never meant any harm. It was all a misunderstanding,' I assured him.
'Yeah, a misunderstanding and a bit of paranoia on your part,' Tatiana added smugly and 'Becca gave her an evil look.
'Dr. Daniels, you'll be fine,' I told everyone in the room. Then I thought about the massive damage and Lieutenant Ames being injured. 'Tatiana, let's get to the other wounded, now!' We zipped from table to table and from room to room in the hospital. I just happened to be the one who fixed Lieutenant Ames. General and Dr. Clemons stood over my shoulder the entire time—they were both concerned from a parenting point of view, and I could tell they were very curious about the technology.
'Then it is you, Mr. Montana?' Lieutenant Ames asked me as the last few lacerations on her face and stomach vanished away.
'Yes, and it's Steven, Lieutenant,' I told her.
'Then it's Annie, or Anne Marie, if we are on a first-name basis.' She held her hand out for me to shake it. She was amazed that it was no longer broken.
'Sorry for all this. I didn't mean for any—'
'Forget it. We were just as much to blame, Steven. That damned Rebecca never follows orders. Civilians!' She shook her head and harumphed.
Then we went out into the city and used the sensors from the
CHAPTER 16
It took us a good couple of weeks to get the little town on the Moon back in order. Apparently the kids in town were glad that school was canceled while we rebuilt. Thankfully, it was fall break and the kids had not been in school at the time or the incident could have been far more tragic than it was. A few trips to Earth in the little warp ships were made for various materials until I set up a materials generation and replication area with a downloaded version of Mike controlling it. Basically, any computer-drawn model of an object would enable it to be constructed from the rubble and lunar materials available. The nanomachines in the facility Tatiana and I put together would take the material and convert it into whatever piece of equipment, construction material, or whatever else was needed. If precious or exotic elements were required that weren't available, then we sent the warp ships to Earth. The nanomachines could only manipulate atoms, so if you needed a gold atom in something you had to have a pile of gold atoms to begin with.
On the other hand, we increased the budget capability of the little lunar town tremendously because there is plenty of carbon on the Moon. Diamonds are made of carbon and the lunar base became one of the Earth's small suppliers of diamonds—unbeknownst to the general public of course. General Clemons had the CIA acquire a South African diamond company to fence the lunar diamonds through—of course, the CIA got a big cut for its troubles. We allowed just enough of the lunar diamonds to flow into the market as not to cause suspicion or to flood the market and drive down the revenues. The diamond market was about a thirty-billion-dollar business each year and we planned to take in about a third of a percent of that and thus keep a low profile in the business. We also set up similar markets for the billion-dollar-a-year silicon wafer market, the two-billion-dollar-a-year flat glass (mirrors and such) market, the multibillion-dollar fiber optic market. Remember there are a lot of silicates on the lunar surface. The CIA called this contingent the 'diamond factory,' which was along the same lines as the old 'fly by night industries' business they often used. We continued to branch out into as many business areas as we could but never took more than a fraction of a percent of the business so we didn't attract any unwanted attention.
Another aspect of the business was so highly classified that only a few folks on Earth knew the intricacies of it. We set up a manufacturing facility that could rapidly prototype highly technical instrumentation for classified programs.
Say there was a need for a new fourteen-billion-dollar Top Secret communications satellite; our nanomachine system could build it from specs in a hundreth of the time and for practically no cost. It cost more money to set up the cover facilities and for the overhead than for the actual device. We spun off two companies that could produce the rapid prototypes and then the CIA arranged for Boeing to buy one of them and Lockheed Martin to buy the other. The two companies would never know that they both would get these classified products from the same plant on the Moon. And we made almost eighty percent profit from these products, after the big industry, CIA, and cover companies raked off their share. We made a lot of money through this program.
There were two other programs that were classified even more deeply and I won't talk about them here. All I can say is that one had to do with using SuperAgents to understand, predict, and drive various economic engines.
