by B. V. Larson
“You cocked-up everything, that’s what you did.”
I gave a small shrug. “Like what?”
“Like what?” he screamed suddenly, disbelievingly. “Kyle, I flew seven hundred ships at the Macros. I left this world behind with thousands of followers and billions in cash. We met the enemy, ran them off, and somehow a few hours later I found my fleet disbanded. I couldn’t even talk to them. I finally talked the Snapper into returning, and what do I find? You had dismantled my organization, pissed off every power on the planet and setup for a last stand out here in the woods.”
I took a deep breath. I straightened up. “You’ve got a point there,” I said.
“Oh, so you admit it?”
“Yeah. I can see it from your point of view. Too bad it has to end like this, though. We had a great partnership.”
He looked troubled at that. He nodded. “You were my best man. But I was almost an Emperor. Do you realize that?”
I blinked at him. At this point, we’d stopped circling and stood a safe distance from each other, watching one another warily. “Is that what you wanted? Really?”
“I don’t know,” he said. He rubbed his chin. “That uppercut hurt.”
“Tell me about it,” I said, taking a second to run my fingers gingerly over my own face. There were new lumps and the skin had split at the seams.
He heaved a sigh. “Okay. Okay, I’m the bigger man here. I’m going to say it first.”
I looked at him expectantly.
“I’m sorry for hitting you. I just lost my cool. I’ve been losing it ever since I got my ship to unload me here and then she took off.”
“How’d you manage to get back to Earth?” I asked.
“Are we talking or fighting?” he asked.
We stared at each other appraisingly for a few seconds. I decided to take a chance. “How about I buy you a drink and explain everything, Emperor?”
Slowly, with half his mouth, he smiled at me. The other half didn’t work right yet. He nodded slowly. “Right. Let’s do it.”
Crow dropped two round stones. He’d had one in each hand. They thumped loudly on the floor and rolled away. No wonder those fists had hurt so much. He stepped to the wall and rapped out a series of raps. It was my code. I wasn’t surprised he’d memorized it. The door dilated open and he waved for me to step ahead of him into the blinding sunlight.
“As an Emperor, you rank me,” I said. “You first.”
Crow grinned with the working half of his face and blood ran down his purpling chin. Metal gleamed inside, where the bone should have been.
Crow stepped out into the open and I followed him. I didn’t intend to let him get behind me again.
-12-
When I asked Kwon for booze, he looked at each of us. His big, black eyes flicked back and forth. Those eyes got wider with each flick as he took in the extent of our injuries. Then without a word he produced a flask. I took it and thanked him. I twisted off the top and sniffed it. Whatever it was, it was warm and smelled like kerosene.
“We might need a mixer for this,” I said, handing it over to Crow.
He sniffed it, winced, and nodded. Every marine in the compound watched us. I knew they wanted to see how their leaders were getting along. I hid the truth by acting cool and calm. There was no sense making a big deal about our differences. I knew that the men had to have heard the fight. The walls on these sheds weren’t thick. But no one had tried to come in and check on us. If only one man had made it out alive, I supposed he’d have been crowned king. I had to wonder if that had been Crow’s plan all along.
Together, but with me walking about a foot behind him, Crow and I headed for what served the base as a mess hall. It was really just another shed, but without a factory inside. Instead, it had a few folding tables, chairs and crates of food. A marine was eating a can of something brown when we came in. He left in a hurry without having to be told.
I smiled after him. “I wonder if they think we are about to have round two in here.”
Crow chuckled. “I think I’ve had enough. Will these nanites really fix my ripped-up skin?”
“A few scars look good on a man. Sandra says they give my face character.”
He snorted, but looked less than happy with my response. I poured the coffee and then laced it with Kwon’s rot-gut. The combination made quite an impact on our stomachs, but we kept it down. A few minutes later, we were smiling, despite everything.
“We have some catching up to do,” I said. I told him briefly about the deal with Macros, but he’d already heard it from Barrera. Apparently, from his earlier reaction, he didn’t approve.
I took a drink of the laced coffee. My lips tasted salty, like blood. The booze made them burn with each sip. “Tell me how you talked your ship into bringing you home,” I said.
Crow shrugged. “It was easy enough. I pointed out I am the commander of this entire force. The loss of my leadership would cripple Earth’s forces after the Nanos spent all this time and effort to build them up.”
“They bought that?” I asked, smiling.
“In any case, I managed to convince the Snapper I was indispensible down here.”
“What about the injections?”
Crow tilted his head. “That was part of the deal. The ship was to leave me behind as the commander of all Earth. Command personnel have to undergo the injections to get out of the ship, remember?”
“So, all this time you’ve never taken the injections? You never left your ship?”
Crow grinned. “I was pretty comfortable aboard her.”
“Ah. Your companions. I’d forgotten about them. What happened to the girls?”
Crow frowned and shook his head. It was a good act, but I didn’t really buy it.
“They stayed aboard. I suspect the ship has plans for them.”
I gave him a flat, disapproving stare. He avoided my gaze. He’d left those girls aboard to serve as punching bags in some alien star system. Maybe he’d tried to help them and couldn’t, but that wasn’t my guess. With Crow… well, he was always thinking about number one. Everyone else came second—or possibly third. Crow was nothing if not a survivor. If he had been a member of the Donner Party, he would have been the first one to cook his own uncle’s foot.
“So, are we working together again?” I asked, taking another sip of my booze-laced coffee. It was awful.
“What choice do we have? What’s our defensive status?”
“It’s a lot better today than yesterday,” I said. “You just brought in a lot of fresh troops. We’ve got three laser turrets operating now. That reminds me, I need to get the factories working on a new project. Right now they are all making extra nanites by default.”
I stood up to leave.
He raised his hand. “Hold on. We have to work out the command structure here.”
“You mean: am I still going to call you Admiral in front of the troops?”
Crow stabbed the folding table with his finger. It dented in and shook. I suspected the dent was permanent. “I insist on it. We’ll keep our ranks. That will give the men a feeling of stability. They might desert otherwise.”
“The command structure is the same as it always was. I’m in charge of the ground-pounders. You command our space fleet.”
He stared at me. “I haven’t got any bloody ships, mate!”
“I know. I’ll build you some new ones, if we live for a few more days.”
“That fast?”
I drew my plans for a simple, fast-building Nano ship on a brown napkin. He stared at it intently. I could see the gears working inside his head. That’s what I wanted. Crow needed a ship to be happy. As a happy man, he would be much safer to work with. Just like everyone else, he needed hope.
“We could rebuild in less than a year,” he said, his eyes wide and distant.
“Yeah, if they let us.”
Crow looked up at me with new respect. He shook his head. “Even when everything looks broken, you keep surprisin
g me. How many more rabbits have you got left in that hat of yours?”
“Plenty,” I said, “but you won’t get your ships right away. I have to make something else, something even easier and faster to build. Something to let us kick the earthers off of our island.”
Crow crossed his arms and leaned back. The chair creaked as if it was about to collapse. “Build me my fleet, I’ll chase them off.”
“Did you see those APCs we knocked out along the road?”
He nodded.
“They gave me an idea.”
“Ships could do the same thing.”
“Yeah, but they are much harder to build. A ship’s engine takes days. A tank is just like one of these turrets, but with a bigger power supply and a set of tracks.”
“A tank? You want to build our own armor?”
I shrugged. “Think of them as mobile laser turrets, like the ones I’ve already constructed. They won’t have to generate lift to fly. They will be able to carry our men safely inside.”
“How many do you think you’ll need?”
“Less than a hundred.”
“A hundred?” he shouted, standing up and making a choking sound.
“Yeah.”
Crow stared at me as if I was mad for several seconds. “No. No way, mate. You think I’m some sort of wally, don’t you?”
I stared back. “We need mobile, powerful forces. We need them now.”
“Then build me my ships! That’s an order, Colonel!” shouted Crow. His face was red and his eyes were bugging again. It occurred to me that giving Crow cheap booze might not have been my best move.
“Listen—”
“No. All you want to do is build up your ground forces. I see through your plan, Riggs. With no fleet, you are the real leader here by default. No, I’m not going to listen to any more of your silver-tongued crap.”
“Then we are going to have to have round two, right here,” I said calmly. I figured I could take him if he didn’t get to open up with a half-dozen blows to the back of my head.
Crow stared at me, breathing hard. I could smell that varnish we’d been drinking on his breath. It washed over me like swamp gas.
With a mighty effort of self-control, he sat down again. Maybe he’d done the math and had figured his odds the same way I had. Or maybe he was being cagey. The folding chair groaned, but didn’t collapse as he sank his new, nanite-laden weight onto it. I thought of a few quick jokes, but managed to stop them before they came out of my mouth.
“You know, mate,” he said. “Where I come from, without your nanites you wouldn’t last two minutes.”
“Where do you come from?” I asked.
We stared at each other.
“The Australian Navy,” he said, looking down.
“Bullshit.”
Crow looked annoyed. “I did my stint.”
“What year was that?”
“Never mind, you,” he said. He finished his drink and poured another. He seemed troubled.
“It can’t be that bad,” I said. “Your past, I mean.”
Crow snorted. “All right. A bit of truth then—but don’t tell the men. It won’t do them any good to know who they’ve been dying for.”
I smiled. “Deal.”
“I was a groundskeeper.”
“A groundskeeper?”
“Right. As in, I mowed lawns for a shitty wage.”
“I see. Honest work, at least.”
He shook his head and took another swig. “Usually,” he said. “But if things went wrong on a bad year, I knew how to work a jimmy.”
“A what?” I asked. “You mean a crowbar?”
Crow shrugged. “I don’t like that name for the tool.”
I shook my head and laughed. “I can see why. So here we are, an ex-teacher and an ex-burglar, deciding the fate of the world.”
Crow nodded and crossed his gorilla arms over his gorilla belly. “You get one minute. Talk me into building ground forces.”
I leaned forward. “It’s about supplies. We have a limited store here. There’s about double the amount of rare earths and the like at the main base. That’s where the port is, where the ships came in. Our Nano flyers used to bring the materials here with daily deliveries, but we’re not going to get anymore shipments.”
“The earthers took the main base,” he said. “I told you that.”
“Right. So we have use what we have here as efficiently as possible. We have to build the most cost-effective force we can as fast as we can, and take back the main base. We need those supplies to build the fleet.”
“We could do it with flying ships.”
“Yeah. Probably. But it would take longer. Every hour, the U.S. Navy will be steaming down here with more troops. They might be landing them at the north end of the island now, getting ready for another push. We haven’t seen their infantry yet, nor much in the way of air, just one mechanized column that failed.”
Crow rubbed at his cheek. The nanites itched abominably when they healed a face wound. I knew the sensation well, but I couldn’t drum up much sympathy for him.
“I’m trying to think clearly now,” he said, his voice quieter.
“I’m not skipping your ships to keep you grounded, Jack. I’m trying to build maximum firepower to retake the island now. Then we can rebuild your fleet. At that point, they won’t be able to take us out without damaging the factories. We’ll build a strong defense and negotiate a new peace.”
Crow slitted his eyes and stared at me with new suspicion. “Why don’t we just give them the factories?”
I frowned at him. He had some other devilish thought in his head, I could see it, but I couldn’t fathom it. “What are you getting at?”
He shrugged. “Just what I said. We could sell them, or at least make sure they aren’t damaged. You know, if we just threatened to damage them, they would cave pretty fast.”
I thought about that. He might be right. But I didn’t want to raise the stakes any higher. I didn’t want them to think we’d gone totally rogue, that we no longer cared about the planet’s security. “How could we ever forge an alliance with them if we did that? We’d be the pirates they’ve always said we were, selling out all of Earth for our own gain.”
Crow pursed his lips. “So, we have to fight? How much faster can you build tanks compared to spacecraft? How much less materials are involved in producing one mobile gun?”
“Now you are getting down to the numbers that matter. We have supplies enough to build a hundred tanks in less than a week. We would only have a dozen ships by then.”
“Why such a difference?”
“The engines, mostly. They need to fly, not just roll along the ground. That requires much more power, specialized gravity-resistors, lots of stuff that’s hard to make.”
“We have to wait a whole week? They will have six divisions and three carrier groups down here by then. Not to mention hundreds of aircraft.”
“Yeah. We will have to attack when we have the first batch of tanks ready.”
“How many? How long?”
“In about twenty-four hours, I should have ten tanks, maybe a few more.”
He leaned back sighing, thinking. Finally, he nodded. “Well then, you’d better get cracking, Colonel.”
I smiled. “Yes sir.”
I backed out of the building and closed the door behind me. At no point did I take my eyes off Crow or turn my back to him. Once I was out in the sunlight again, Kwon appeared out of nowhere.
“You are the sneakiest giant I know,” I told him.
“What’s the deal, sir?”
I handed back his flask. He shook it and put it away, disappointed. It was empty.
“The deal is we are working together again. We’re going to build something new.”
“What sir?”
“Tanks, Sergeant. A lot of them.”
-13-
Sandra caught up with me about an hour later. She came in quietly, but this time I turned to the door and bounc
ed to my feet. I relaxed when I saw it was her.
She raised her eyebrows at me. “Jumpy?”
“Let’s just say I’m looking over my shoulder from now on.”
Sandra took two bounding steps, then flung herself into the air. She knew I’d catch her. She wrapped her legs around my waist and went to work on my face with her lips. Fortunately, my face was healing fast.
“Crow did this, didn’t he? He’s such an ass.”
“He’s got a temper, that’s all.”
“I saw his face. He looked worse.”
“A man can’t help being born ugly.”
She laughed and went back to kissing me, working over the rough spots tenderly. “I’d be super-pissed if I didn’t know these would heal-up by morning.”
“So would I. Look, love, I need to go back to designing the second step with these new tanks.”
“You need a break.”
She was right, in the end. I did need a break. We made love on a plastic chair in the darkest corner. It was just what I needed, and I think she needed it to. I expected Crow or Robinson or even more likely, Kwon, to rap on the door and interrupt us with some new disaster. But they didn’t.
At the end, she slapped me again. I looked at her questioningly. “That’s for nearly getting yourself killed on a daily basis,” she said. “Being in love with you is nerve-wracking.”
I smiled. “I’ve been thinking along similar lines.”
“Now,” she said, “quit screwing around and get your go-carts built. I bet they will attack again tonight.”
“Maybe.”
“Will these new toys of yours be ready by then?”
“Probably not, but with three beam turrets and about two hundred marines, I’m not worried.”
“Liar,” she said, and flounced outside again.
I watched her leave and hoped she would come back again soon. I turned back to that steel bastard known lovingly as Unit Fourteen. I had all the factories churning by now, or I wouldn’t have taken the time off with Sandra. Most were building heavy reactors, brain-boxes, lasers, sensors and turrets. Essentially, all the components that made the stationary turrets operate. But I needed a few new pieces. I needed engines with driveshafts, locomotion systems and treads. Thinking about these elements, I got an idea. Why use treads?
