evacuated less than ten thousand people to hand over an empty jungle paradise. Before it was ours, it had belonged to the Bahamas. I don’t even know what they traded them for it. I didn’t want to ask. Maybe they didn’t have any choice in the matter. Facing global extermination had made the superpowers harsh in their diplomacy.
Once we took ownership, we moved down there in a hurry. We had a dozen of our floating black ships work their long arms for the first day to rip out trees. We plucked thousands of them and stacked them up to form huge walls of logs around the edge of the compound. It wasn’t eco-friendly, but it went quickly.
When we had enough cleared land, we used the ships to carry pre-fabricated steel buildings down from Florida, where we’d had them built to order. We had permanent concrete buildings slated for eventual construction, but for now there wasn’t time for anything fancy. Steel shells with hastily-poured concrete pads underneath, that’s all we had time to put down. The U.S. Army Engineers helped us with the rest, building a pier with amazing speed. Freighters came in night and day once it was up with fantastic amounts of supplies. We had so much material of every kind, we had to expand the compound several times. The Earth governments, once they believed we were in this to help them, dumped supplies on us in hopes it could help the war effort. I imagined that similar depots were stacking up somewhere on the coast of Brazil. They might be losing to the Macros down there, but it wasn’t for lack of supply.
Most of the steel buildings we air-lifted down from the states were used as warehouses, but some were quarters for contractors and other staff we brought in from all over the world. I was sure many of these ‘contractors’ were spies, so I set up another base, deep in the interior of the island. The second base, the secret one, had two dozen steel buildings on another stretch of land plucked clean of trees. Inside each of these buildings, I set up one of the machines I’d been slowly constructing along with rows of generators to power it and a team of Nano ships to supply it with raw materials. The maw for each factory stuck up through the top of its shed like a chimney-but these chimneys consumed rather than exhaled. Using their long, black arms, the ships fed each maw materials, like a dozen mothers spoon-feeding a throng of fusion-powered babies.
The Alamo had been right when she said building one of the fabricators was difficult. What she meant was they required a lot of radioactives. The list of special isotopes and compound metals was long and exotic. The nanites did the magic part of machine intelligence, fortunately, and were adept at reproducing themselves. The computer parts suppliers were surprised we didn’t want much of their stuff. We had better.
A few weeks passed while we built as fast as we could. I worked sixteen hours at a stretch and ended each day exhausted. I spent most of the time programming the machines and working on the logistics behind keeping the factories fed. Thorium and palladium were harder to find than they should have been, and I suspected someone on the mainland had slowed down my shipments. I’d also had an increasing number of arguments with Crow about my plans along the way.
“I don’t understand your reasoning here, Riggs.”
“I want independent factories on Earth-”
“That’s it! That’s the bad word, right there,” said Crow, interrupting. “ Independent. That’s a bad word, Riggs. I don’t like it. Let’s build everything aboard our ships. If we put factories on Earth that can build anything our ships can, then they could take them from us someday. If they did that, they wouldn’t need our annoying little squad of pirates anymore.”
Crow had become somewhat more controlling as time went on. He had more people to worry about now, and with each new subordinate who signed onto his fleet, he became more short-tempered. Star Force had grown to about four hundred ships now. Many of the new recruits were fighters, people who sought out the ships, sometimes going as far as to follow a roving ship with a car or helicopter to place themselves enticingly nearby. Armed to the teeth, they either died or became one of us.
“I understand what you’re saying, sir,” I said as evenly as I could manage, “but the Macros can’t be allowed to win this war.”
“Of course not. How is that related? We can build plenty of weapons for dirtsider armies without leaving factories lying around for them to take.”
Dirtsiders, I thought. We were all ready calling each other names. I’d heard the term used with growing regularity among the fleet people I talked to. I preferred the term planetsider, which I had come to use freely. It was far more congenial than the term dirtsider or earther, both of which indicated disdain and were, unfortunately, more common. I also doubted my preferences were going to stop people from using derogatory terms. I had to wonder what great names the dirtsiders had come up with for us. Probably something along the lines of ‘murdering, thieving, space pirates’.
“What if a Macro fleet shows up?” I asked, continuing the argument. “Our ships will all fly up to meet it. We could lose most or even all of our ships. We could be wiped out. That would mean no more laser rifles.”
“If our fleet gets destroyed Earth is dead anyway.”
“You’re not thinking big enough, Jack.”
Crow roared with laughter. “That’s the first time anyone’s ever made that claim, mate.”
“We need the factories to free up our ships. They can produce anything we want-they can produce more factories. They can even produce more ships.”
That stopped him for a minute.
“You think so?”
“Yes, piece by piece, we can produce all the macro components. Then we have the nanites reproduce themselves enough to form the shell of the ship. Zap, a new ship.”
“Zap? How fast?”
“Well,” I said, “I estimate it would take a group of ten factories-perfectly supplied with everything they needed and all the power they wanted-about a month to build a new ship.”
He snorted.
“Think big, Jack. What if we had fifty factories? That would be more than a ship a week.”
He fell silent for several seconds. “Okay, mate. Do it. But put guardian ships up. Don’t lose any of those factories. And make sure the dirtsiders know they are not to come within fifty miles of that base of yours.”
After we had working bases, my biggest effort turned to cranking out small arms. With a whole lot of help from the guys at the Pentagon and various industrial contractors, we put together a laser system that a trooper could carry. The laser units themselves weren’t the only pieces my factories had to produce. In fact, the biggest piece was the power supply, which fit into a backpack each man would have to carry. It amounted to a small fusion reactor, with a specially-built black cable running from it to a trigger mechanism and polymer grip. The laser unit was placed inside this grip and the weapon was complete. Earth factories produced the harness and pack to carry the reactor, along with the polymer rifle-grip that provided the trigger mechanism. My machines built the laser tubes, the reactors, and the black cables. The cables had to be able to carry an incredible amount of power, and they looked suspiciously like the small, black snake-arms my ship produced whenever they were needed.
It took weeks to put our first division of U. S. Marines into the field armed with the new weapons. Elite forces all over the world were training with them, but we hadn’t produced enough yet to arm everyone. I had dedicated all my land factories to building more factories, which would grow our production exponentially over time. Our ships that weren’t on some other mission dedicated themselves to floating around Andros Island producing laser rifles by the hundreds.
In spite of how fast we’d worked, the enemy seemed to move faster. Their troops never got tired. They fought night and day until destroyed. By the time we were ready to take the field, the enemy had reached the Amazon River Basin and nearly half the continent had been lost to the enemy. Fortunately, the terrain had slowed them somewhat. They had taken Sau Paulo, Rio and much of the rest of the eastern coast of Brazil, but the jungles, rivers and especially the mountains had slowed them down.
Sandra didn’t like it, and neither did Crow, but I insisted on going down there to the front lines with our newly-armed troops. If the Airborne guys all shot me in the back, well, I figured I was dead. And the universe would have proof, once and for all, that our race was too stupid to survive anyway. I went because I wanted to see what we were up against. I wanted to see how the weapons worked, and what adjustments I could make to the design to make them more effective. No one else in the fleet had yet gotten the hang of programming the fabricators to create new things, and we had not allowed earthers to experiment with the machines. To make good design changes, I had to see firsthand how these units performed.
