“Cut the excuses and give me some numbers,” I said.
“All right. On the top floor, we have nine ships here. All the ships are on the first floor. Easier to fly out, you understand. The factories are building another squadron like this one.”
“Makes sense. What about the factories you spoke of?”
“On the floor below, we have twenty-one more factories. This one is special,” he said, walking over to the unit I’d seen first. “It’s the first one, but that’s not why it’s special. It’s my preprocessor. It takes in raw materials, refines them a bit, then distributes the partly digested product down these tubes to the factories below. That speeds up overall production, you see.”
I walked around the unit, inspecting his setup. In spite of myself, I was very impressed. “You aren’t a computer architecture expert, Crow,” I said. “Who helped you with this design?”
He cleared his throat. “I had a little help. Yeah, sure. I worked with General Kerr. He has a thousand computer geeks like you to back him up.”
I looked at him sharply. “Pentagon people?”
“Further out than that.”
“Langley?”
Crow shrugged. “Spooks come in many flavors.”
“Do they know about this installation?”
Crow smiled. “No. But they know something like it must exist.”
“How the hell did you get them to help you? Without them knowing what was really up?”
Crow looked modest. It was an odd look for him. “It was nothing, really. Just a bit of deception. They think I’m programming your machines at your base. I traded them some components for weapons and guidance systems. Brainboxes, sensors. But never a factory of their own. They are still dependent on us for any real production of Nanotech.”
I frowned, disturbed. Crow had been busy. But I supposed I should have expected that. He was a proactive person with ambitions that bordered on the delusional. In my long absence, I should have realized he’d try something like this.
“What were you doing with all these ships?” I asked. “Building them up in secret? Why?”
“I wanted Fleet to be strong. I’ve always said that.”
“Yes, you have.”
“I know him,” Sandra said. “He intended to take over the world when no one was looking.”
I glanced quickly at Crow. He appeared slightly embarrassed. If I had to guess, I’d say that Sandra had hit the nail on the head. I shook my head and walked back toward Socorro. Crow and Sandra followed, keeping a wary distance apart.
“Admiral, I demand that you put these nine destroyers under regular Fleet command,” I said, standing on the ramp. “Move them to Fort Pierre and get them crewed up and ready to fight. In addition, bring home any other ships you might be hiding and not telling me about.
“There may be a few more…” Crow admitted. “But once I show my hand, the eyes in the sky will know about this base. The secret will be out forever.”
I nodded. The governments of the world had slowly built up dozens of satellites that just happened to pass by our latitude on a regular basis. Supposedly, they were for communications and the like. But we knew better. They were spying eyes, and they were tolerated for now. One thing was for certain, there was no way we could field nine new, large ships out of a pond without someone noticing. The reason why all that mattered is they had once tried to take our island away from us, to gain control of Star Force and our Nano technology. I didn’t think we could afford to worry about that now, however.
“We have to commit now, Jack,” I told him. “All the chips are on the table this time. If the Macros get to Earth, you’ll be as dead as the rest of us and your glory days will never come.”
“Agreed,” Crow said. “What do you think we should do with the rest of the factories while we wait for the Macros to make their next move?”
“Keep building destroyers,” I said. “As fast as you can.”
— 9
I flew Socorro to my own secret base full of factories. Like Crow’s base, it wasn’t such a secret anymore. Before I got out of my ship, I dressed myself in one of the surviving battle suits I’d designed and utilized to great effect during our recent return journey to Earth.
We put down in one of three circular landing pits set up outside the base. There were thirty laser turrets ringing the base perimeter now, many of them squatting atop a shed with a factory inside. Every one of those thirty projectors tracked Socorro as we made our final approach. I’d set these turrets to ‘extra-paranoid’ due to the strategic importance of the factories they were protecting. It was unnerving to have them aim at me, but I felt it was necessary. Even though they recognized my ship and who was in it, I knew they were thinking hard, trying to determine any excuse they could to burn me out of the sky.
We walked from the landing pits to the base gates. We were challenged at the gates by my marines. Most were American, but there was a number of Indian Ghatak troops mixed in. I’d hand-picked these men for loyalty and their suspicious natures. The guards at the gate opened a dissolving curtain of nanites and waved us inside after a few terse questions.
“We aren’t going to fight someone today, are we Kyle?” Sandra asked warily. She watched the marines who stared back in stony silence.
“Not today,” I said. “Unless the Macros make a move, I’m going to spend the day programming.”
“Oh,” she said, sounding disappointed. “Will there be any time for a break, later?”
I smiled at her. “We’ll meet up for dinner, I promise. In the meantime, you don’t have to sit around with me while I talk to the factories.”
Sandra twisted her lips. “I know you too well. You don’t want me distracting you while you are trying to program.”
I shrugged. “Sadly, programming is best done in solitary confinement.”
“If we weren’t all about to die, I would complain-but instead I’m going to let you work in peace.”
“Great. I’m sure you’ll find something to do.”
“Yeah, maybe I’ll take up bird-watching.”
I could tell she would be boredly twitching her tail all day. Like all commanders, I hated to see talent sit around idle. I had a sudden thought.
“How about I have you work the com-links and monitor communications for me? Tell me what’s happening. Relay to Major Barrera a report about Crow’s stash of ships. Tell him he’s bringing them in to Fort Pierre. Let him know what to expect.”
She agreed and walked away happily toward the communications shed. I watched her go, my eyes lingering on her shapely form. Had the microbiotics somehow perfected the musculature of her body? I wasn’t sure, but I thought she might have lost five pounds of fluff and had it turned into muscle. It didn’t seem to matter anymore what she ate, her metabolism had been heavily redesigned. If I ever ran into that race of microbes again, I figured I owed them one.
At the base of every laser turret was a shed, and inside every shed was a factory. These were identical in size and function to the ones Crow had built and secreted away on his own. I looked at the laser turret with my hands on my hips, reflecting on the two very different approaches Crow and I had taken concerning the protection of our most precious commodity. Overall, I had to give Crow the blue ribbon. Deception provided better security than armed defense-as long as one kept the secret.
There was no one in Shed Six when I entered. I looked around the room. There were pallets of supplies. I’d always insisted we maintain a stockpile of raw materials to keep the machines busy. These days with Fleet being strong again, Nano ships made regular deliveries, pouring the raw materials into the maws up on the roof. Tubes ran upward from the top of the factories central spheroid to the roof of the shed where the materials intakes were. An output port was on the side of every laser turret, built to yawn open or squeeze closed like a metal
