Extinction

-5-

I walked into the steel building, leaving Robinson in the Hummer. He could follow me, or not. I was through trying to convince him, it was time he convinced himself—one way or the other.

There was an operator inside the shed, a marine who slouched in his chair and tapped at a tablet computer.

“Those are forbidden now, marine,” I barked at him.

“Sir?”

“The tablet. What are you doing with that thing?”

He looked baffled and guilty all at once. “Um, I’m reading a book, sir.”

I snatched it away from him. There were cartoon plants on the screen. A little farmer icon plowed a virtual field. I snorted. “I can see you are an avid reader.”

He reached for the tablet and I slapped his hand away. I didn’t want anyone emailing the outside world, or phoning in. I needed time.

“This computer is contraband now, until further notice. Now, go report to Sergeant Kwon for patrol duty.”

He stared at me, eyeing his tablet in dismay.

“Well?” I roared. “That was an order, marine! Move out! I’ll watch the duplication machine. I have work to do.”

He exited in a hurry. I turned back to the tablet, rubbing at the screen. These things always needed a cleaning. It looked like I’d cracked the screen when I snatched it away from him. Too bad.

I looked around the room. There were pallets of supplies. Fortunately, I’d insisted we maintain a stockpile of raw materials to keep the machines busy. Without the Nano ships as transports, I’d have to make do with what I had on hand.

The factory was a bit bigger than the ones the Nano ships had aboard for system repairs. There was a central spheroid about twelve feet in diameter that sat in the middle of the shed. To me, it had always resembled an old-fashioned steel kettle, but with humps and curves to it that hinted the machine was full of unimaginable components. The strangely twisting internals made me think of a man’s guts pressing out against a thin, metal skin. Tubes ran upward from the top of the spheroid to the roof of the shed where the materials intakes were. An output port was on the side, which could yawn open or squeeze closed like a metal orifice.

Currently, the machine was making more reactor packs for infantry use. We had enough of those, so I stopped the machine. Before I started reprogramming it, I took stock of the supplies. I sighed, figuring out how to get the most out of the materials I had was going to take a while.

The door creaked and slammed behind me. I listened to the tread, and it didn’t sound like the marine who I’d chased out. The footsteps weren’t heavy enough. Nanotized troops weighed more and carried a very heavy set of gear. You could actually hear the flooring groan beneath their feet.

“Robinson?” I asked without turning around, “what do you want?”

He stopped and stood there for a few seconds. I turned and looked at him. His mouth opened, closed, then opened again. I lost interest and went back to counting titanium ingots. We had less than six hundred of them. I sighed. It would have to do.

“Colonel?” said Robinson, clearly distraught.

I didn’t even bother to look at him. His voice changed suddenly. There was new steel in it. Sometimes, getting ignored stiffened a man’s spine.

“Sir, please look at me.”

“Sir, is it?” I asked, turning to face him.

“Yes. I’ve thought about what you said. I’ve been working here for months, and I know you might be right. I—I want to rejoin Star Force, sir. I’ll take the nanite injections. I’ll sign on as a Major.”

I smiled. It was a small thing, just a tweak of the lips, but it was there. I walked to him and looked him in the eye. I held out my hand and we shook. I was careful not to crush his hand.

“I knew you would make the right choice, Robinson,” I lied. “Now, walk two doors down. They have a chair in there. I’ll send a man to—to help you strap in.”

He went pale, but he nodded and left with a confident stride. I hoped he wasn’t a screamer, that would be distracting and I needed to think in order to reprogram these machines. I also hoped he wasn’t the kind who would dig at his face. That would be worse. I needed him fully functional and every hour counted.

“Robinson?” I called after him.

“Sir?”

“It’s like a bad trip to the dentist. Just keep thinking that it will all be over in a few minutes.”

“Yes sir,” he said.

As he left I thought he looked a little green. Maybe he didn’t like dentists.

I went back to my inventory. I wasn’t sure, but I figured I had enough rare metals and trace elements to do what I wanted. The common, easy stuff like nickel, boron, silicon lubricants and the like I wasn’t worried about. We had warehouses of that junk. It was the rare earths like strontium, palladium, samarium and thallium that worried me. Even our plutonium stocks, although adequate, were smaller than I had hoped.

I brought up a spreadsheet on the tablet and did some quick numbers, tapping on the screen. This was going to take some thinking. I needed a new kind of ship, and I had to have it on the cheap. It had to be effective, impressive and easy to build. I rubbed my face and nodded to myself. I thought I had it.

“Duplication unit,” I said, addressing the machine that sat silently before me. “Respond.”

“Unit Fourteen responding.”

I’d taught them to do that. It was too hard to give them all names, so they had numbers. I’d set them up with standing orders to respond to a general name, and their specific number. “Okay Fourteen. Engage group-link.”

“Group-link engaged.”

“Halt all production and preprocessing steps. If possible, recycle base materials.”

“Transmitting. Units responding. Units Six, Seventeen and Thirty-Five are unable to comply with the shutdown order.”

“That’s okay. Any unit that can’t complete the orders I’m giving yet should queue them up until such a time as they can be followed.”

Right now, as I watched, the thrumming stopped on Unit Fourteen. Across the camp, all these little factories were shutting down and switching into idle mode. Those that were in the midst of processing a subcomponent would break it down and eject the raw materials. It was wasteful, but I didn’t need any more heavy beamers right now. What I needed were ships, and fast.

“New program workspace,” I said, telling it to prepare for a new program. “Initiate.”

“Initiated,” said Fourteen. “Units responding. Units Six, Thirty-Five—”

“I know, I know, they are unable to comply. Halt report,” I said. I rubbed my temples. Dealing with the factories was considerably less fun than dealing with the Alamo had been. They had less capacity for cognition, and they didn’t know much beyond how to perform innate operations. You couldn’t get an answer out of them about the Nanos, or their creators, or anything off-topic like that. I supposed they had fewer nanites chaining-up to form their neural nets. They knew what they knew, and that was it.

“Fourteen, for this group-link session, do not report back to me of processing errors among the units. Only report to me acknowledgements and critical malfunctions. Have the other units queue the processing orders I give. They don’t have to perform them until they are able to comply.”

“Acknowledged. Relayed.”

“Okay, we need to build a large structure. How many units could optimally be applied to creating a single ship’s weapon?”

Hesitation. “An infinite number of—”

“No, hold on. If I gave you all the materials and gave one unit the task of building a single ship’s weapon, how many hours would it take to complete the construction?”

“Twenty-one point six hours.”

I nodded, tapping the result into my tablet. “And if I had two Units share the task?”

“Sixteen point three hours.”

I worked on the calculation. There was about a fifty percent reduction in efficiency. In other words, I could use more machines to produce a part faster, but it would be the most effective use of their time to use one machine alone on any one project. The trick was to get the machines to produce a ship as fast as possible, without wasting any unit’s time. I proceeded to work with Fourteen, asking it a battery of questions about each major component of a Nano ship. Many of them I didn’t need. I decided to forgo the usual medical room, for example. It was nice to have, but if my pilots were nanotized, they could self-repair. I also dropped the biggest time and materials user, the onboard repair unit—essentially another duplication factory. Without this, and with only one engine and one weapon system, the ship could be produced in a drastically reduced timeframe. We had more alien factories now, and working together, the output was surprising. As I worked it out, a slower, lightly-armed ship could be produced in about… thirty hours.

I worked to reduce the production time further. The biggest optional equipment item I had left in was the snake-arm component. Without it, many capabilities of the Nano-ship would be lost. Smaller ships without an arm component wouldn’t be able to airlift troops, for example. But the arm component would cost me about seven hours per ship. Without it, I could produce a new ship in about twenty-three hours.

Looking at the numbers, hull-size was cheap. I decided to make these new ships deceptively large. Way bigger than they needed to be. In fact, they would be mostly empty—a metallic balloon of nanites. That was the one thing I had plenty of—nanites. They could be produced with common elements and they came out fast. They poured out of the factories like a dribbling faucet. We had barrels of them lying around dormant, ready to be chained into a swarm and applied to a task. Thinking about nanites gave me an idea.

“Fourteen, have all non-engaged Units produce raw nanites. I want them without specialization, just common builders.”

“Options set. Option settings relayed.”

I winced, but Fourteen didn’t tell me about units Six and Thirty-Five. It was a relief. Immediately, the machine began that quiet, almost subliminal hum. About a minute later, a silvery pool of nanites dribbled out of the finishing box. I put a bucket under there to catch them. I called Kwon then, asking him to report to Fourteen’s shed.

There was an immediate knock at the door. I smiled, Kwon had been outside, probably hopping from one huge foot to the other.

“Come in!” I shouted.

Kwon swung the door open and stuck in his head. “Sorry sir.”

“Don’t be. I called you.”

“I know. I mean—never mind.”

“You mean because you were standing out there waiting for me to come outside? Like this was some kind of gas station bathroom?”

He gave me a tentative smile. “Yes sir. Are you finished yet? I really have to go.”

I raised my eyebrows and smiled back. Had Kwon just told a joke? That wasn’t his usual style. I chuckled to reward him. I figured after I let him in on how things were, after he really learned the score, he wasn’t going to be telling any new jokes for quite a while.

“Staff Sergeant Kwon, it’s great to see you. Now, we have problems, lots of them.”

“May I ask something first, sir?”

“Yes.”

“Ah, do you know anything about the guy in the nanite-hut, sir? He’s screaming pretty hard. He’s locked the door, and the med-tech is considering breaking it down.”

“That’s Major Robinson,” I said. I thought about it. If he’d locked the door, then he didn’t want any witnesses to his raving. He probably hadn’t even strapped in properly. That was fine with me. If the man wanted to whizz his pants in private, that was his business. “Just leave him alone. He’s fine.”

“Did you say, Major Robinson?”

“He used to be General Robinson.”

Kwon blinked at me. Slowly, he nodded. He didn’t ask any more questions about the subject. That’s what I liked about Kwon. You could throw him a surprise and he would go with it.

“Now listen to me, First Sergeant. First, I want you to send a marine to every shed—”

“Oh yeah, about that, sir. I’m getting reports from all the operators. They say something’s wrong with the machines.”

“There’s nothing wrong with them. I’ve just changed their orders, that’s all.”

“You have?”

“Oh,” I said, finally getting it. “That’s why you came over here, isn’t it? You came to figure out what the hell I’m doing in here with the machines.”

“Well, we had a strict schedule to meet and—”

“Schedule? Who set it?”

“General Sokolov, sir.”

“Sokolov is—not here. I’m in command now. Here’s the new schedule: Send a man out to every shed have him catch the nanites coming out of the units.”

“I’m sure the operators know to do that, sir.”

“Not all of them have operators sitting around. In fact, most don’t. Put out the order.”

Kwon was slow sometimes, but he finally caught the note of urgency in my voice. “Yes sir,” he said, relaying the order over his headset.

I turned back to Fourteen and went over my calculations again. I wanted my first ship done in less than twenty-three hours. I’d forgo the arm unit for the first ship. Maybe, if the Earth governments gave me the time and materials, I could retrofit them with arms.

“Sir?” said Kwon.

I turned around, surprised he was still there. I snapped my fingers at him. “There’s something else,” I said. “How is the quarantine going? I want this base sealed tight. No one gets in or out for now.”

“About that, sir—”

“Kwon, I need a man who can get things done without hand-holding.”

“Of course, but there’s someone here. A chopper just landed at the southern end of the base.”

I paused and blinked. I’d heard a chopper earlier, but since there wasn’t anyone shooting at it, I figured it was ours. “Who?”

“General Kerr, sir.”