Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-One

Thats it, thats the last straw, said Evan as he shut off the Generals radio microphone. General Brooks continued to rant, only now it had devolved into an angry tirade about the corporate tyranny of artificial sweeteners.

General, its time to head back to your rooms now, said Major Brown softly. The aide gave Evan a pleading look, but Evan shook his head. A resigned expression crossed his face as he sighed.

Evan followed Major Brown, and considering how he was going to approach the General. He had garnered the support of all of the major factions and cliques that had formed in the shelter. It was time for a leadership change. The Generals mental state had been slowly deteriorating for some time now, alternating between capable and paranoid, open-minded and mindlessly angry. Enough was enough.

Evan figured it was the stress and pressure of keeping five thousand, well, closer to six thousand now with all the children running around, people alive, and his advanced age. At eighty-one years old, senility was starting to set in.

Major Brooks settled the General into an old leather chair in the two tiny rooms afforded the shelter commander, and put a blanket in his lap.

General, we need to talk, said Evan. He almost started a belligerent declaration. He was young and energetic, and it would have felt good to finally speak his mind to the Old Man. But he hadnt convinced so many people to support him, many nearly twice his age, by being belligerent. He could see how the Major was being gentle, and decided to follow his approach.

What can I do for you, son? asked the General. In his chair, with an aging television on the wall displaying a fake fireplace, and with his hands wrapped around a journal that the Major had put in his hands, General Brooks looked old and tired.

I think its time for you to take on a new role. Its quite important, said Evans.

I have a role, said the General. I run the shelter.

Indeed, but there are many who can do that now, after all the work youve done. We have very few, however, who have as much life experience as you. There are so many children now who could benefit from your stories and your wisdom. If you were to retire, think of how much you could help them.

Retire!? said the General in a half-shout. He looked up, his eyes sharp and his mind clear. Then he saw it. There were several assistants hanging around Evan, and even now another had come into view, carrying a message for him, not for the General. He was much more than a comm tech.

I see, said the General. He looked at the Major and recognized the hangdog look on his loyal friends face. It was clearly tearing the man up. He wanted to stand up and shout in denial, but he couldnt muster the anger it would require; not anymore. Perhaps it was time, after all. Yes, I think retiring would be quite nice. The children, you say? Major, if you could see to it. Maybe after a nap.

The Major nodded, and turned to escort everyone out. Evan was the last to leave. The Major caught his arm.

You should have seen him in his prime. He was the lead JAG prosecutor in the LockGen Scandal. Managed to get sixty-three officers court-martialed, and the evidence he uncovered brought down three Senators. Thats why he was chosen to run the shelter, you know, after he got promoted.

I know, Major. He is a good man.

My advance fleet was gone. The invaders had successfully wiped it out, although not without a heavy cost. Id made them pay dearly for that tiny section of space. They were seven days away, heading straight towards Origin. The only real question left was whether or not I would still be here when they arrived.

I had never taken the time to ever consider why I was doing what I was doing. Twelve years ago, Id woken to a task given by a Gestalt of a dead human, and Id been blindly following that directive. It wasnt that I didnt think about what I was doing, or that I didnt broadly agree with the end result. In fact, if I didnt do it, there was no one else who could. At least, that was my thoughts at the time.

Yet what had humanity ever done to deserve a second chance? Species evolved, species died out. That was the way of the world, and looked to be the way of the universe. Just based off the variety of ships in the enemy fleet, there were more than a few other sapient races just in this corner of the galaxy alone.

It wasnt as if humanity was a beacon of hope or had some ephemeral right to exist that made them unique. In fact, the species spread itself across the entirety of the planet, in sprawling cities that covered mile after mile with buildings, debris, cars and trucks, pollution and noise, with no regard for any other lifeform on the planet. That included other humans. If anything, they were at their most cruel against themselves.

I was conflicted. On the one hand, I didnt want to abandon the work Id done for decades, or the species that had made me, just on a whim, a single instance of recognizing the evils that existed among humans. But on the other, I didnt want to have a part in future evils, and the easiest way to avoid it was to avoid humans altogether.

Ohhhhh, so thats what Gerry meant. Im not sure its only Gerry in there, said Sakura cheerfully. I couldnt understand how she could sound so perky when I was having a crisis.

What do you mean, not only Gerry? I asked. Irrationally, I hoped shed stop talking and leave me alone. I wasnt supposed to be irrational; that was a human trait. I wasnt even human anymore, right?

They broke his mind, right? The aliens? said Sakura. So maybe hes a bit of a split personality? Or maybe hes a bit schizophrenic?

The last message, I said to myself thoughtfully. The message said HE LIES.

Right. And you saw the timestamps on all those files he told us about.

I did, I lied, even as I looked them up. Almost all of the files about General Brooks were altered six months ago. Most of the Nikola Foundation files were edited then, too. Six months ago, right when Gerry was in our system. Even now, he was playing head games, and Id fallen into the trap.

Many humans had dedicated years of their lives to helping others, often putting themselves in danger to do so. There were countless news articles in my archives detailing how teams of rescue personnel would head out into dangerous places under the worst weather conditions to rescue one or two people. Civic groups, religious organizations, and local governments spent huge amounts of time and effort to help those who could not help themselves.

Humanity wasnt one thing. They werent their atrocities, they werent their charities. In fact, there were thousands of survivors down on the surface who had nothing at all to do with any of the sins of their predecessors. Humans were complex, and I could envision working alongside them for decades or centuries to come. Together we could help humanity be what theyd always aspired to be - better. But to do that, first I would have to deal with these alien intruders.

My primary focus shifted over to Zias research lab. There were a dozen NI-12s in the lab with her, and all of them looked busy. Some were playing with equipment I didnt immediately recognize, others were deep in conversation with each other, their rapidfire radio conversations noticeable only if you monitored the entire radio spectrum the way I did.

Zia, has your team finished analyzing the enemy weapon? I asked.

Zia looked up at the camera I was using to look in the lab. Not a lot of progress, Im afraid. We have come to an understanding of how it works, but not how to replicate it.

So how does it work? I asked.

Simply put, the energy cone completely destroyed the atomic structure of every atom in its path. It somehow disrupts the strong interaction of the atoms, preventing the strong nuclear force from holding the atoms together, she said.

That was fascinating and disturbing. As one of the four fundamental interactions in particle physics, it was not one that we typically manipulated. We relied heavily on electromagnetic force and gravitational force for everything we did. However, strong force and weak force were the components of nuclear binding. They held atoms together, and the fusing of atoms together or the splitting of atoms released this energy. It was the basis of our entire power grid. The aliens had a weapon that could essentially disassemble every atom it touched. That energy in the atoms couldnt be destroyed, however, so it exploded outward in nuclear fire.

And the range of these weapons looks to be less than 1,000 kilometers? I asked.

Probably more like 400 kilometers, said Zia. Which means the energy cone breaks down or disperses even in a vacuum. The power requirements are likely to be quite astronomical. Even our most off-the-wall theoretical formulas call for massive amounts of power.

Thats the best news Ive heard. It means they cannot fire the weapons constantly, I said.

Also, you know you had a few Scorpion-2s in your Advance Fleet, right?

I did know that. Wed needed a few extra squad leaders.

Well, youll be happy to hear that it looks like there are a few scraps of the titanium-gold armor floating around out there.

They werent affected by the vaporizer?

Vaporizer? Thats a good name. Good enough, anway. Not quite accurate. Anyway, I wouldnt say the armor was completely unaffected. They werent vaporized, but the nuclear blast of the rest of the ship exploding did a number. Like I said, a few scraps survived.

Thats honestly the best news of all. We can shield against the weapon in the future. This day was starting to really look up.

Two days later, I watched the cubesat plot of the alien armada as it made its way past the outer ring of my Outposts. Those were the Outposts that were the most incomplete, boasting at most a hundred factories, and lots of coilguns. No lasers, no missiles, and few hangar bays. Fortunately for me, the armada hadnt noticed their existence. Or at least, didnt feel they were a big enough threat to worry about yet, while Origin still existed.

The funny thing about mass production is how the supply chain works. Theoretically, its a tree-shaped hierarchy, where lots of factories produce lots of little parts, which are sent up the chain to different factories that made more complex parts, which are combine again at the next level, and the next, until lots of complex pieces are assembled at one factory. That factory then spits out Wasp-2s and Scorpion-2s, and because you need a giant supply chain, you are limited in how many you can produce at a time.

But reality works differently than theory. In reality, those factories at the bottom of the chain produce parts incredibly quickly, and can easily outpace the demand of the factories in the layer above it. Indeed, that is common across each layer, with the lower layers producing faster than the upper. So a supply chain built to supply a single factory can wind up easily supplying many, many more.

When Sakura first started producing Wasps and Scorpions, she had two factories, one for each type of assault drone. They produced four drones per day, each. To get to those two factories, shed built a huge supply chain. However, once that supply chain was built, to double her production of drones, she only had to build two more drone factories. In fact, by the time of Gerrys invasion, she had produced 83,208 assault drones, all of the first generation designs. I added four Scorpion-2s to complete my Advance Fleet.

Another annoying bit of reality is that while producing cortex units at this point was quite routine, building Cortex Backup Facilities happened considerably slower, and definitely slower than assault drone production. They were simply very large and quite complex. But large and quite complex didnt mean I hadnt taken the time to build as many as possible.

So the loss of 83,212 assault drones had mostly meant that now I had 83,212 drone pilots who had learned exactly how to fight the invaders. The Cortex Backup Facilities had been working overtime for the last two days, restoring each and every one of these pilots into new Wasp-2s and Scorpion-2s docked in hangars throughout my region of the asteroid belt. They would be the vanguard, flying into battle alongside my nine warships and their squads, and ahead of the rest of my pilots who had not participated in the initial battle.

Somewhere in the asteroid belt, the enemy armada crossed an imaginary line. It was time. They had their chance to test themselves against me. Now it was my turn.

Every single Outpost, including Origin, was ready. Rounds loaded into coilguns, previously unused missile bays rumbled to life, and laser assemblies turned and began to aim. Hangar doors slid open, and a quarter-million new assault drones primed their engines while they waited for a single word.

Launch.