Surface Detail

the rapidly approaching object blotting out more and more of the other light-points until its blackness appeared to fill the screen and it seemed they were about to collide with it. He felt an instinctive desire to push himself back into his seat. For all the good that would do, he told himself. He stared at the darkness enveloping the screen as though trying to fend off the manufactory’s implied bulk by force of will alone.

A sudden jolt of deceleration and a longer tug of calibrated slowing pulled them up short, close enough to see hints of detail on the dark satellite’s surface. The screen was still superimposing a false view; the faint wash of radiation coming off the thing was in wavelengths way below what pan-human eyes could register. It was hard to estimate size, though Veppers knew that the average manufactory was a fat disk about a couple of kilometre across and a third of that in height. They varied a little in size, though generally only by a factor of two. This one looked pretty average-sized though it was less synthetic-looking, more natural in appearance than was the norm.

Its surface looked smoothly lumpy enough to be a very old and worn comet nucleus; only a few too-straight lines and near-flat surfaces hinted at its artificiality. The shuttle flew slowly into what looked like a deep dark crater. The screen went perfectly black. Then light filtered back; a faint but slowly increasing yellow-white luminescence began to seep in all around, then flooded the screen.

The interior of the manufactory was a web-laced space over a kilometre across, the massed, silvery, criss- crossing filaments studded with hundreds upon hundreds of darkly gleaming machines like giant pieces of clockwork; all disks and gears, shafts and plates, cylinders, spindles, looms and nozzles.

The shuttle came to a halt, perhaps a hundred metres in towards the centre of the satellite.

“May I show you how this will look when and if we go ahead?” Bettlescroy said.

“Please do,” Veppers said.

The screen went into what was obviously a simulation mode, overlaying what the fabricary’s interior would look like when it was operating. The many great clockwork machines ran up and down the network of silvery lines, most retreating to the outskirt walls of the manufactory while about a twentieth of their number clumped in the very centre of the space, like a nucleus.

The machines flicked this way and that, some light flickered, and dark lumps of matter rained down from the machines set around the perimeter, falling into the central nexus to disappear. Gradually the nucleus of machines expanded and other machines slid in from the outside to join those working in the centre. Whatever they were working on, it grew, taking on a succession of fairly simple shapes, though all implied something roughly twice as long as it was wide, and approximately cylindrical.

As the shape grew — its surface only rarely visible, and never quite looking like what might be a hull — more and more of the clockwork-looking machines joined in the act of creation taking place; meanwhile the network of silvery filaments was bowing out like an expanding lens made of wires, accommodating the roughly ellipsoid shape growing in the centre. All the time, greater and greater quantities of matter in increasingly varied shapes and sizes were falling in from those machines still stationed on the outside and from holes and nozzles dotted around the interior wall of the satellite itself.

A couple of minutes after the production process had begun, the filaments had shrunk back almost to the interior walls of the fabricary and the great clockwork machines had gone with them and become still. No parcels of matter issued from the machines or from the nozzles, slots and pits on the walls.

Sitting in the middle of the space now, there was a ship.

It was still very approximately ellipsoidal in shape; maybe six hundred metres long, two hundred across and one hundred in height. Its hull shimmered in the light, seemingly unable to decide whether it was pitch black or hazy silver. Rashed all over its shifting, uncertain surface were round black blisters of various sizes and sets of shallow, perfectly elliptical craters.

“Ta-ra!” Bettlescroy said, with a shy giggle, then glanced at Veppers and blushed. “One space warship,” it said.

“How fast can it go?”

“Maximum velocity two point four kilolights.”

“And it’s fully working?” Veppers asked, sceptical.

“Fully,” Bettlescroy said. “It would be no match for the vessel we have constructed for you, of course, but it contains a real-time grown medium-level AI substrate already running all relevant internal systems maintenance functions, full-spectrum radiative and skein sensory systems, a primer fusion power unit ready to start manufacturing anti-matter for its pre-functional warp drive and a variety of weapon systems including thermonuclear warhead missiles and thermonuclear plasma generators. All that would be necessary to activate it would be to transmit the relevant run-protocols into its processing substrate. A trivial task taking minutes at most. It would then be immediately ready for space-flight and battle, though obviously giving it a few days to produce its own AM would increase its utility and power vastly. Equip it with prefabricated AM for its power units and missiles and it would be even more powerful even more quickly.”

“How long does it all take?” Veppers asked.

“For this size, the whole process to the stage you see here takes between nine and fifteen days, according to the exact specification. Sufficient raw material being present, obviously.”

“That’s just the surface layers of the fabricary itself, isn’t it?” Veppers asked. Again, he wasn’t going to show what he was feeling here; he’d had no idea the fabricaria could spin a full-size working ship — especially a full- size tooled-up working warship — so quickly. He’d always known that the fabricaria the Veprine Corporation was allowed to use had been reduced in operational effectiveness before they’d been allowed to get their hands on them but he’d had no inkling by how much; he’d asked, naturally, but everybody involved had been professionally vague.

The Veprine Corp fabricaria could also produce a ship ready for fitting out in a matter of days — albeit a much smaller, much less sophisticated ship — but the devil was in the fitting-out bit; that was where most of the hard work lay. Even disregarding the processing substrates concerned — you always brought them in from other specialist subsidiaries anyway — the sensory, power and engine components were what took all the time to make, not to mention all the other bewilderingly many and arcanely diverse sub-systems a working spacecraft seemed to require. Just making the relevant components took months of expensive, high complexity work, and then fitting them all in place and getting them all working together took almost as long again. Getting all of that done in a week or two was almost preposterous.

“The outer surfaces of the fabricaria traditionally provide the semi-processed raw material initially,” Bettlescroy confirmed. “For longer-term sequential manufacturing there are shuttle-tugs ready to bring in further truly raw material from other parts of the system, though that would not be an issue here. The point of the exercise is to manufacture a fleet of ships very quickly for effectively instant deployment rather than to set up a sustainable production process.”

“How many ships are we talking about?” Veppers asked.

Bettlescroy made a whistling noise. “Potentially, anything up to approximately two hundred and thirty million.”

Veppers stared at the alien.

“How many?” It was hard not to show his astonishment. He’d thought only a few of the fabricaria would be able, or properly primed, to build ships. This implied that almost all of them would be able to produce a ship each.

“Approximately two hundred and thirty million,” the alien repeated. “At most. Fabricaria are capable of being brought together to create larger units themselves subsequently capable of constructing larger and/or more complicated vessels. Probably to a point where the numbers of individual craft involved would be reduced by a factor of thirty or forty. No one knows; these are guesstimates. Plus, it is not impossible that slightly greater numbers of the fabricaria than we are assuming have been corrupted or disabled by the pre-existing smatter infection, or by the measures taken to deal with the infection.”

“But, still, up to two hundred and thirty million?”

“Approximately.”

“And all ready at once?”

“Better than ninety-nine point five per cent would be; with numbers on that scale, especially as we are envisaging using such ancient facilities, there are bound to be delays, stragglers, failures and incompletes. Possibly even calamities; apparently fabricaria have been known to blow up or aggressively dismantle themselves. Or —