Swarm (20 page)

“Are you sure you want that, Senator?”

“I’m old-fashioned. It’s hard for me to deal with someone whose eyes I can’t see.”

Sandra laughed at that. Senator Bager flashed her an odd look, then went back to staring at me.

I sighed quietly and removed my sunglasses. Part of my eyelid had regrown, and I was able to close that bizarre left eye. Not completely, however. It still showed a very odd slit of silvery-purple madness.

The Senator sucked in her breath. “Did our agent do that?”

“Yes,” I said, replacing my sunglasses. “I’m afraid so.”

“I would like to personally apologize for that ugly incident, Commander. Let me assure you, there won’t be any repeat of that sort of action.”

“That’s good to hear, Senator.”

“Please, call me Kim. And let me reassure you, that I had nothing to do with that misguided decision.”

“I understand you, Senator,” I said. And I did understand her. But I didn’t believe her.

“Is there anything else besides this artifact you’d like to show or tell me?”

“Yes,” I said, “I want you to study that thing. Tell me what kind of power it requires, what voltage, amperage, etc. I want to create a portable power supply for it. Then I want to manufacture thousands of these weapons. An army equipped with these units can fight the Macros on much better terms.”

She tilted her head, as if in disbelief. “How can you make thousands?”

“Each of our ships has self-repair and fabrication capabilities. Given enough of the right raw materials, every one of the Nano ships can produce those weapons, quickly.”

“What do you want from us in return?”

“Besides a treaty outlining an alliance, we want peace and respect. And one more big thing.”

“Name it.”

“A base of operations. A home for supply, personnel recruitment, etc. And a budget, of course, to purchase our requirements. We have to end our raiding. It’s not good for PR.”

Senator Bager looked down at the tabletop computer, eyeing the laser unit, which still sat there untouched. She was thinking hard.

“A sovereign territory? Where?”

I threw up my hands. “Legally, I think it would be something like an embassy or the UN building. As far as where to put it, how about on a tract of Federal land in the Midwest? Or probably better, an island base no one really needs?”

She nodded. “If we need to bring you mass supplies, an island with a port would work best. I’ll look into it. You realize, I don’t have the authority to grant you any of this. I have to talk to the administration.”

“Of course.”

“One more question from my side. Why did you choose me? Why did you insist that I come here?”

“We know you. It would be hard to send a double who was really an assassin. Also, because I wanted to change your mind about us. I wanted you to see you made a mistake, that you need to work with us, not try to coerce us.”

She nodded slowly. “Okay Commander. Do you have any more questions from your side?”

“Yes. You are on the Foreign Relations Committee. I want to know the inside story on the ground war in Argentina. I’ve seen the propaganda, and hysterical internet claims. Both contradict one another. How is the war really going down there?”

She licked her lips. “We’re losing. Every day, we lose more land. There are more of the machines coming out of those domes every day as well.”

“Tactical nuclear weapons?”

“We killed a few dozen, but then they put up some kind of field or something. They shoot down everything we throw at them now, sometimes even artillery shells. We are building nuclear mines, but...”

“How fast are they advancing?”

There was a long silence. She stared at the laser on the tabletop. It was still giving off glowing blue waves. She never even looked up as she answered.

“They will be in Brazil in three weeks. They will take all of South America in three months, maybe less.”

I nodded. No wonder the Macros hadn’t come back with more ships. As far as they were concerned, they’d already won.

-22-

Less than ten days after my conversation with Senator Kim Bager, Star Force had an official home base on Earth. I’d kind of expected to end up in some desert... out in New Mexico, maybe. But it didn’t turn out that way. They gave us Andros Island. It was a beautiful, tropical, relatively unpopulated place in the Caribbean. It was plenty big enough, over two thousand square miles—a little bigger than Delaware. I think they gave it to us because it was located right between the marching Macros and Florida. Also, it was surprisingly unpopulated. They 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.