Invardii Box Set 2

by Warwick Gibson

  “One of my people has a population estimate for us,” said Dante McGorant, breaking into Cordez’ reverie. The Regent brought his attention back to the meeting with the Board of Regents.

  “She used the new satellites to scan for population densities with some sort of high brow stats – at least we haven’t lost those sorts of skills.

  “There’s a total of 417 million as best she can make out.”

  Cordez’ eyebrows shot up. “417? That’s 63 million short!”

  “Yes,” said McGorant. “We lost quite a few when the shelters were damaged by the groundships, and during the evacuation of the cities.

  “On top of that, conditions were cramped inside the shelters, which led to deaths from existing medical conditions. It was just old age, and too much excitement, in many cases.”

  “But so many!” exploded Cordez.

  Asura Ming and Victor Emens looked at each other, then looked away.

  “Out with it!” said Cordez. “What aren’t you telling me?”

  “Not everybody went to the shelters,” said Asura. “We told the whole planet what was happening, and we broadcast the same messages for over twenty hours, but some people preferred to take their chances in their own homes.”

  Cordez was silent. In a way he had to allow any human being that right. It was democracy at work. But part of him was wondering what else could have been done to make the situation clearer to the population.

  “Why wasn’t I told?” he said at length.

  Asura looked uncomfortable. “We tried everything to fix the problem, and we didn’t think there was much else we could do. We didn’t want to bother you when you already had so much on your plate.”

  Then she lifted her chin defiantly. “Don’t you always say a leader should know how to delegate?”

  Cordez had to smile. She was right, of course, and he was pleased she had made the decision for him. He would talk to her about it later.

  A month after that a new sort of story started to come in over the news feed. They were stories that showed the depth of Human problem-solving, and illustrated the way people everywhere could work together. Cordez found comfort in them. They kept him going when everything was in transition and there seemed to be nothing but set-backs.

  He had asked for one of these stories to be researched more fully for him, and now it lay on his desk. He would read it when he needed his spirits lifted. It went like this.

  On the plains at the foot of the Canadian Rockies stood a small town. It had come into being at the crossroads of the A19 where it snaked across the Canadian wheat fields, and the M5 where it headed for the United States border. On the outskirts of town, right next to the A19, stood a substantial engineering workshop with a large sign that read ‘Joe’s Garage’.

  The name had been one of Joe’s retro ideas. A man with a love of history, he liked to think of his workshop as just him and some of his mates ‘tinkering with a few tools, out the back’. In fact, the workshop had once had the ability to maintain the massive machines that flew and crawled across the Canadian wheat fields.

  But all that was gone now. The wheat fields hadn’t quite been thrown back to horse and cart days, but they weren’t far off.

  Joe scratched at a three-day beard and surveyed his racks of sheet metal. The racks were full, but the smaller racks of high-tensile rods overhead were down a bit. He had restocked less than a month before the goddammit armada had laid waste to Earth.

  That restocking had turned out to be a blessing, but the thought of the gray plains of ash where Earth’s proud cities once stood soured Joe’s mood. Out of the window behind him the flanks of the Rockies lay blackened and scared by erosion after recent rains.

  It was a reminder that his walks in the wild with his Axos image recorder had been taken away from him. The sky was still a dirty gray from the fires, though the Javelins with the ramjet engines were scrubbing it a little cleaner each day.

  Joe muttered under his breath, and turned his head to spit vehemently into a corner. His mutterings grew into a fully-fledged rambling – and then he realized what he was doing, and stopped himself. This was what the Invardii wanted him to do. They wanted to see his spirit taken up with lesser things, his thoughts filled with recrimination and empty plans for revenge.

  That was when he realized Earth wouldn’t grow strong again if the energy of its people was taken up with mindless ramblings.

  Joe snorted. Who knew what the slag-spawn Invardii wanted, or if they even thought in a way that Humans would understand as ‘thinking’. But then he was struck by a new idea – something he could do to strike back at the destructive bastards.

  He remembered his two contracted tours of the mining industry on Mars, when he was young. The Mars miners had made do with what they had on hand, and the engineering shop had run hot repairing anything and everything the miners needed. Sometimes they built entirely new machines, when they came across a problem that didn’t have a solution – according to the big production companies.

  Turning on his heel, Joe marched to the bay next to the metal racks. Here he worked to restore antique machinery, when he had the time. It was a hobby, and he opened the bay to the public whenever the town had a festival day.

  He strode to the back of the bay and pulled the cover off a Smithson auto-adjusting metal lathe. He’d never found a use for it, superseded as it was by the new laserpulse cutting technology, but maybe now . . .

  His father had kept it when his grandfather had sold the prefabrication side of the business fifty years before, and Joe had kept it when he inherited the business – as a sort of family heirloom.

  It took a while to connect a power lead, and then he booted up the database, rubbing the grime off the screen on the front. At least the town still had a minimum level of power. The bio-fuel generators were smelly things, but they worked.

  The lathe was antiquated technology now, but it still worked. The engineers knew how to build things to last in the old days, thought Joe appreciatively. He scrolled down the instructions and touched the icon for a list of typical uses. Yes, it looked like it would do what he wanted it to do. Modern versions of nuts and bolts, and rivets, and ceramic tips for welding rods rolled by. All old tech, and the only sort of technology Earth would have for years to come.

  Joe stared off into space for a moment, thinking about the things he could make with this lathe. Earth would soon desperately need these things, widgets as his grandfather had called them, now all its heavy industry had been destroyed. He wondered how the governments were going to organize the production of small things. They would be the first step, before it was possible to go on to bigger things.

  There wouldn’t be much choice for a while, and everything would need to be made in compatible sizes, some sort of ‘small, medium and large’ system. But how to coordinate this across Earth? Who would decide what the new ‘standard’ sizes should be?

  Joe went back to his office, and told his computer to open a line into WISH, the World Information Super Highway. Then he gave the computer an idea of what he wanted to find. WISH was in tatters now, the big servers in the cities all destroyed, but there was more than enough power in personal computers like Joe’s to keep the information highway alive in a limited way.

  Satellites were back in the sky, but for military use only. Resurrecting the old line-of-sight electronics towers had been the first achievement of local government in Canada, now that EarthGov had been suspended and local bodies were forming de facto governments around the world.

  Joe had been given access to WISH as an engineering consultant, for work purposes only. There was no longer any form of private access to the fragile world information web.

  It didn’t take the computer long find the newly formed Canadian Industrial Committee. Joe nodded his approval at the names on the list of members. Sensible, practical men, and the occasional very capable women. Engineering had never really embraced equality of the sexes, and Joe figured this was an area few women wan
ted to go into.

  Then he found what he was looking for. New specifications for industrial parts, limited to a handful of standardized components as he had guessed. He checked quickly for the engine housings he thought he and his crews might be able to make out of the sheet metal he had in stock. Most of the simple designs he had in mind were there.

  He checked for the long, high-tensile bolts he knew must come back as engines reverted to the old bio-fuel rotary models. He had been right again. The specifications for those were there too.

  Joe checked the dates. This list had been out for nearly two weeks, so why hadn’t he heard about it? With a guilty start he remembered where he’d been every night lately, knocking back the rough, locally made brew at the town hall.

  The building had been converted to a social center for the townsfolk as the town struggled to find its way in the new era. The social center was needed after long days on farms producing the food and bio-fuels now required of them. The huge underground shelter that had been built nearby for the attack by the groundships had been put to other uses. It was now a brewing center, alongside a number of other industries.

  Joe straightened his back, and found he stood a little bit taller, in spirit as much as in measurable height.

  He made a decision that his drinking days were over. He would be too busy at the garage now to afford time down at the town hall again. Hell’s teeth, with what he had in mind he would be collapsing into bed after eighteen-hour days!

  Joe grinned. He felt a lot better. There was something he could do to help rebuild Earth after all, something that used his old skills. It would be good to hear the old workshop resounding with machinery again, and with the voices of his crews.

  CHAPTER 9

  ________________

  The next day Joe was in his garage at the first light of dawn, building templates and setting cutting protocols for the lathe. By midday he had accessed WISH again, and left a list of what he thought he could produce for the Canadian Industrial Committee. As an afterthought he had added some idea of what the weekly volumes might be. Half an hour later the chairman of CIC called him.

  “What sort of machinery have you got out there?” asked the chairman, once the two engineers had spent time talking about the problems heavy industry now faced.

  “You’re not going to believe this,” said Joe, remembering to switch over to ‘send’ with each interchange. With the satellites only available to the military, the old computer-based voice links had come back for line-of-sight transmission. WISH was so stretched now it was only accepting one-way traffic at a time.

  Joe told the chairman about the ancient lathe he had at the back of his workshop, and the CIC man chuckled.

  “That’s brilliant, Joe,” he said. “I wish I had a thousand more like you.

  “I’ll check in from time to time, but you obviously know what you’re doing. Good luck!” he said, and the chairman disconnected the call.

  Now he had the official go-ahead, Joe made use of the new cellphone network. There had been enough in the way of materials and knowledge in the town to build an antiquated cellphone tower, and then it had been a matter of adapting some of the IT in each house to take and receive calls. The last Joe had heard they were close to being connected to other towns round about, but for now it was local calls only.

  “That you, Jimmy boy?” he said, as the call was answered. It was.

  “How about you turn up for work at the garage tomorrow?” said Joe, a smile in his voice. There was a stunned silence at the other end of the line.

  “Say what,” said Jim Seatoun at last.

  “You heard me,” said Joe, openly chuckling now. “An’ you’d better bring that idiot crew of yours as well, I guess we can find something for them to do.”

  This time there was a long and heartfelt “hallelujah!” from the other end of the phone.

  “Since when did you turn religious, Jimmy boy?” said Joe, delighted to be teasing his number one engineer.

  “Since you told me we’re going back to work, that’s when!” said Jim happily. “Did you know what they’ve had me doing? Driving this irritating little machine through the beet fields from dawn to dusk, weeding them would you believe. There was day after day of it, and I was going out of my mind!”

  “You’re a whinger, Jimmy boy, aint nothin’ good enough for you! But turn up here tomorrow morning and you can whinge as much as you like,” offered Joe.

  “I’ll be there!” came the reply, and the call ended.

  In a minute Joe would call the foreman of his other engineering crew, but for now he sat back and dwelt on what was yet to come.

  This is how it begins, he thought, sitting back in his chair and steepling his fingers. Air transports are out so we make enough bits and pieces to assemble a primitive truck, and we run it on bio-fuel.

  Then we detour the roads around the dust and rubble of the cities to start with, and we build new roads where we have to. Rough-as-guts gravel roads, because we just need to get stuff from A to B, we don’t need to do it in style. And because we’ll have air transport again in a few years.

  After a while we’ll be able to assemble the first big production machines. They’ll be made out of low tolerance machining but they just need to produce simple, utilitarian things. We’ll need metals again, and tons of the stuff. Iron, copper, and a few other basics to start with.

  We won’t be able to mine much in the way of ore, but we can melt down the metals we’ve got, so there will be a big recycling drive. We won’t have plasma shielding to melt it in, so we’ll make bricks again, the old-fashioned way, and then we’ll build foundries and cast parts in molds.

  He could see it all in his mind, and it felt good that his garage would be a part of the effort. Earth would come back from a subsistence existence, and it might be quicker than anyone expected. The engineers knew how to make the sophisticated machines of their civilization, they just needed to make simpler machines first and work their way up the complexity scale. That could take a little time.

  Roll on tomorrow, said Joe heartily, and rubbed his hands. It was going to be good to be useful again!

  At the end of the first year, Finch was able to attend a ceremony at Prometheus that marked the huge strides the Human race had achieved in that short time. Two new squadrons of Javelins had been produced for the defense force by the Mars miners, but the rest of the Solar System was too busy rebuilding to do anything similar. Still, it was a sizable fleet that defended the Solar System, and it had proved a deterrent to the Invardii.

  Finch watched the domed roof being lowered onto the new boardroom at Prometheus, pleased with his vantage point from the shuttle that was currently the admin center. The shuttle was permanently in close orbit around the small moon of Neptune. It was good to see the boardroom and its attendant offices, the heart of Prometheus, was almost finished.

  A message came in to the site overseer, seated in front of Finch. The man turned, a broad smile on his face, and gave the ‘thumbs up’ sign. The domed roof had been placed successfully on top of the building. It was another milestone in the construction of this version of Prometheus.

  The rebuilding of the giant base hadn’t been as hard as Finch had expected. Everything that used to be on the surface of the small moon had been completely obliterated, but the huge, fused pads the buildings stood on were still there. Building time was almost halved if the construction crews had the foundations.

  The research labs and living quarters built into the sides of the enormous, open-cast mine had suffered some quake damage from the fireballs as they pounded the surface, but that had been repairable.

  The greatest loss had been the zero gee factories in orbit. Replacing them had taken the entire output of K'Sarth for the last few months, plus the first shipments from the Aster site as it recommenced mining in the Asteroid Belt. Finch gave a silent nod to the K'Sarth traders, who had been a real lifeline to both Earth and the Sumerian empire after so much devastation. They had helpe
d across so many worlds.

  He thought of the devastated plains of white ash where Earth’s cities once stood. Fortunately, the great works of art, and the records of Human science, patented devices, and commerce, had been safely stored in shelters before the armada arrived. But it hurt Finch to see the destruction the armada had left behind. Some of the building had been works of art themselves, carefully preserved for hundreds of years.

  Those who had most enjoyed the cultural aspects of Earth life had been the most vocal in mourning their passing. Unfortunately, few of them would be out here on the front line, doing something about it, mused Finch.

  Still, a civilization is the sum of its parts, and different parts come into play in different situations. He was not prepared to dismiss as worthless so many people whose skills were now simply irrelevant. Their time would come again, and while they waited he hoped they would get some satisfaction out of planting and weeding crops so Earth could rise, phoenix-like, from its own ashes.

  Then he realized there was going to be another problem soon. The supplies of Orscantium for Earth’s stardrive-capable ships Cordez had put away years ago, when the Reaper ships first arrived, were running low. There were no nuclear accelerators left on Earth to make it, and the Sumerians had very few ships left that could sieve the vast dust clouds of the Spiral Arm for more of the stuff. Finch paused, then waved an aide over.

  “Send a message to Cordez,” he dictated. “Use sub-space. Tell him if the Mersa really want to help, they could use the production from the fledgling mining camps in their system to build accelerators and make Orscantium.”

  The reply came back to him a moment later.

  “Already onto it. Good to hear we’re covering the same ground.”

  Finch grinned. Cordez didn’t need back-up, he was a one-man think tank on his own. But it was nice to know the great tactical master approved of his line of thinking.

  Back in Canada, Joe’s garage had become big business, and Joe was also contemplating how far Earth had come.