“Okay,” she said, being agreeable for once. “From now, they are the Blues. And I’ve thought of something else. I bet the Blues have been studying Earth for years.”
“How do you know that?”
“Haven’t you ever seen one of those bullshit shows about alien abductions and stuff? What would you call what happened to us, other than an alien abduction?”
“That doesn’t prove the Blues have been here very long, but I think you are right in any case.”
She smiled and crawled onto the couch with me. She liked being told she was right.
“Go on,” she said.
I smiled back. “You’re right, because the Blues couldn’t have learned so much about us if this was their first visit. I mean, the Alamo can speak English. Assumedly, it can speak a dozen other languages as well. And it knows enough about our anatomy to repair our flesh and inject nanites that fix us, not kill us. All of that knowledge doesn’t develop overnight. They must have been here for years, just as you say.”
“I like when you do smart things,” she told me. She was even closer now.
“You are a thinker too. I like that about you.”
“Now you’re flattering me.”
“Is it working?”
“Yes,” she admitted.
We began kissing. I half-expected Crow to call and announce he had elevated himself to the rank of Grand Marshal, or perhaps even Prime Minister. But he didn’t.
28
After relaying everything I had gotten from the Alamo about the Blues to the Pentagon people, I thought for a second and sent an email to the UN Secretary as well. Maybe I’m paranoid, but the point of critical information was, in my mind, to share it. I wasn’t completely certain the US military would do so.
Next came my biggest task. I’d promised to create a force that could stand up to the Macros. That took all my time. As it turned out, the injections were the easiest part to supply. All the Nanos had to do was reproduce themselves in quantity. They were good at this and were able to do it quickly. The hard part was developing a new, more powerful reactor and hand-held laser rifle. In Nano-speak, these were macro pieces of equipment and took much longer and more specialized materials to fabricate.
I went down to Andros Island to do the design work. The first thing I had to figure out was how big of a reactor and projector unit a nanite-enhanced man like myself could handle. The climate was similar enough to the Amazon jungle. The guys from the Pentagon were footing the bill for this whole thing, so they sent down a lot of spooks, medical people and uniforms to ‘help’ me. I was startled to see they had a full platoon of each variety of these ‘helpers’. There was a full company from the Army Corps of Engineers as well. This last group didn’t smile much, but they were the most useful. They got things done. I couldn’t very well say no to the rest of them, as I needed government resources.
We used my body as a model for our future super-soldier. How much could I carry and still run quickly? It turned out to be a surprising amount. First, the engineers harnessed me up with a huge, double-thick backpack. Made of their very ugliest, camo-green fabric, it had leather straps sewn around it for support and heavy stitching over every inch. They filled it to the brim with wet sand, a load of well over three hundred kilos.
I could lift it-barely. I found the bulk of it staggering. With that much weight on my back, I had to lean forward in an awkward crouch. I couldn’t stand erect. It pained my knees too, in particular. The Nanos worked to repair a muscle rip or a splitting joint with every step. I felt the nanites swarming overtime on my joints, making them tingle and itch, as if I were being constantly bitten by pissed-off ants. It got worse when I took off in a shambling run. I ran in a thundering, off-balanced fashion carrying the load a hundred yards or so down the beach and then brought it back to the team, sweating. My time was just over fifteen seconds, three times as long as I had run the same distance unloaded.
“Too much,” I told them.
Barely nodding, but impressed despite their cool exteriors, they shoveled out half the load. I smiled. I realized then they hadn’t expected me to be able to move. They had overloaded me right off, just to put me in my place. I’d still managed to run with the gear, however. With about eight hundred pounds of dripping sand on my back, I’d run up and down a beach in the tropical heat.
While they shoveled, I looked back at my tracks. They were six inches deep in places. The prints had darkened and filled with water. Each print was a small, reflective pool. They looked like hoof prints. Prints from a horse that needed to go on a diet.
I tried about a hundred and fifty kilos next. That was about three hundred and fifty pounds. The difference was dramatic. My joints creaked a bit, but they didn’t feel like they were snapping. The biggest improvement was in the area of weight-distribution. I didn’t feel as grossly off-balance. I had to lean forward to run, way forward, but it was doable. I could still outrun an Olympic sprinter, and I could do it without tearing myself apart. I trotted back to them.
“That’s good. I can handle that much. I bet a bigger, younger man with better muscle tone could do more. But this is about triple the weight of the original gear. That should be enough firepower for a soldier to take out a Macro belly-turret single-handedly.”
I was already forming dinner plans, and they involved Sandra. But the spooks weren’t finished with me yet. They had only just begun with their tests. They didn’t take my word for my physical status, either. They had doctors checking my pulse, blood-pressure, etc. after every lap. I had an EKG monitor strapped to my chest. They wanted to put a temperature probe up my tail-pipe, but I drew the line there, telling them I wasn’t a pack animal. They taped it into my armpit instead with sour expressions.
They dressed up and redistributed my load. They added belts, circling my waist with diving weights. They gave me a smaller front pack to improve my balance. They kept hosing down the big load of sand, too, making sure it stayed close to the desired weight. I groaned and ran the beach lap for them about twenty more times.
After the ordeal, they tested my eyesight, blood, reflexes and even swabbed my throat. I had no idea what they thought they would get out of all of that, but I didn’t argue as long as they didn’t irritate me too much. This team had to be sold. I needed them to convince the higher-ups the project was worth every resource they had. There couldn’t be any reluctance when it came to parting with supplies of titanium, plutonium and other critical components. If I didn’t succeed, they were going to have to nuke the Macros-and one of our continents with them-back into primordial ooze. We would only have six continents left after that. And we weren’t even sure the nukes would stop the enemy entirely.
After a break that consisted of a lobster dinner in the officers’ mess with Sandra, and two beers each to keep us company, I headed out to the secret base I’d built in the jungle. My Nano factories hummed there night and day. Our ships hung all around it, like big, black shadows. Half were on guard duty, while half were ferrying whatever materials the factories needed to them. I had about ten percent of the factories working on making more factories now. That way, our production was always increasing.
The factories had already produced enough nanite injections for thousands of troops. I set one quarter of them working on constructing heavier laser rifles. The rest I had making new reactors. The new units were over three hundred pounds each, about three times the weight of the reactors I’d had men carry into battle back in Brazil. Only men who had undergone the nanite injections could carry these new units. Ordering the factories to produce the weapons systems was a moment of commitment that felt drastic, but I felt I had to do it. What was the point of getting our best troops chewed up a second time around? This time, I’d go down with a force that might have a chance. And I’d take more of them along, too.
The new recruits arrived the next morning. In the first wave there were about three hundred of them. Many more were coming tomorrow, according to the reports. Thousands more.
I had my first batch of recruits fall out and form up ten ranks deep on the parade grounds in the center of my camp. They were all male, and they were a grim-faced lot. They averaged twenty-eight years old, and they were combat veterans, every last one of them. I’d demanded that much. I didn’t want green troops. I didn’t have
