In every direction around us shadows hung. The pool of bright light we stood within made the darker regions impossibly dense. I couldn’t see a thing beyond the single factory in the lit region.
Sandra gasped, however. “Kyle? Do you see them all? They are fantastic!”
Crow looked at her and smiled. He made a slow waving motion with his left arm. The lights came up then, revealing a vast area. I turned around, taking it all in. The area resembled a parking garage with a triply-high ceiling. Round metallic columns of what looked like construction nanites stood, holding up the roof. The columns undulated in shape, reminding me of three-foot thick termite mounds. The floor was concrete, but roof was all metal—all dully gleaming masses of constructive nanites.
What I saw between those columns wasn’t more factories, as I had expected. Instead, my eyes feasted upon ships. Nine sleek, beautiful ships. They looked like birds of prey nesting here in the dark.
“They are my design,” I said. “My destroyers.”
“Indeed they are, mate,” Crow said. “Fully-armed, this lot. Not like the ragtag force we threw together to face the Macros the last time they came into orbit. Every ship in the squadron has three heavy guns. I’d say any three of them can take down an enemy cruiser easily.”
Getting over my wonderment, I whirled on him and grabbed up a wad of his shirt. “You could have deployed them,” I yelled in his face. “You could have put them into the sky when the four cruisers came down and went on their bombardment run over Earth. Instead, you sat back and put up a token force for show. You let my men die up there fighting ship-to-ship!”
Sandra moved in a blur. It was as if she had waited for this instant all her life—perhaps she had. She moved behind Crow, grabbed up his arms with her small, steel-like hands. Crow reacted violently. He twisted away and whirled to face her. He was strong and fast, but not fast enough.
Crow froze when he realized Sandra had placed one of her incredibly sharp blades at his throat.
“Nanites can’t save you if your head is on the floor, Jack,” she whispered into his face.
They were both panting. I decided it was time to intervene. “Let’s stand down, you two.”
“Let me do it, Kyle,” Sandra said. The two had locked stares. “He let Gorski die up there on the Jolly Rodger. Gorski, and a hundred others like him. I want to cut the good admiral.”
I knew Sandra was firmly in the grip of one of her blood-lusting moods. I’d seen it before while fighting Macros. I had to move carefully to talk her down.
“You are by no means the first who’s had that wish, Sandra,” I said, keeping my voice calm in the hopes it would calm them both.
“You’ll have to take a number for the privilege,” Crow said.
I eyed him. He didn’t sound as if he were as worried as he should be. Then I saw it.
“Sandra, behind you,” I said.
She bound forward, spinning around in the air before she came down. Something long and dark snaked forward from the nearest of the destroyers. In the excitement of the combat, it had reached for her. Three thick fingers clicked together where her body had been a moment before. The arm itself was as thick as a tree trunk while the fingers were like black metal fire hoses with minds of their own. The arm rose up like a rearing cobra and darted forward to catch Sandra. She slashed at it and sprang out of the way. A spray of white sparks lit up our faces. One of the fingers was now about a foot shorter than it had been.
“All right, all right,” I said. “That’s enough you two. Stand down! We’ve got billions of people to worry about. Get your heads on straight, that’s an order.”
Crow waved back the arm. Sandra stood behind me with both of her knives in her hands. Crow and Sandra were breathing hard. Their eyes were wide and possessed by a wild light. I reflected that I’d been foolish to bring these two into close proximity. Neither was the best at self-control.
“I’m an Admiral,” Crow reminded me. He rubbed at his throat, where he was indeed bleeding from a thread-like cut. “A Colonel doesn’t command an Admiral.”
“I told you I would cut you,” Sandra said over my shoulder to Crow. She dipped her head close to my ear then and whispered: “You don’t order me around, either, Kyle. You know that.”
I sighed. Normally, I would tell them to shake hands, but I figured someone would be minus some fingers afterward.
“Okay,” I said to Crow. “Tell us how long you’ve been hiding these ships. And how many do you have?”
“He’s got nine,” Sandra said. “Can’t you see them all?”
I shook my head. “I only see one factory. You said you built more. I have to know what assets I have if I’m going to win this fight, Crow.”
Admiral Jack Crow looked irritable, but resigned. “Yeah. That’s why I brought you and you’re delicate flower of a girlfriend out here. So much for gratitude.”
I felt Sandra bristle behind me. I held up a hand again to prevent another outburst. “Just give me the numbers.”
“You have to understand, Kyle. When you came down in those Macro ships I wasn’t ready. I didn’t have these ships manned. I had no trained crews for the destroyers yet. I didn’t know if we could take them down, especially with green crews. Just getting pilots out here would have taken longer than the battle did in the end. I—”
“Cut the excuses and give me some numbers,” I said.
“All right. On the top floor, we have nine ships here. All the ships are on the first floor. Easier to fly out, you understand. The factories are building another squadron like this one.”
“Makes sense. What about the factories you spoke of?”
“On the floor below, we have twenty-one more factories. This one is special,” he said, walking over to the unit I’d seen first. “It’s the first one, but that’s not why it’s special. It’s my preprocessor. It takes in raw materials, refines them a bit, then distributes the partly digested product down these tubes to the factories below. That speeds up overall production, you see.”
I walked around the unit, inspecting his setup. In spite of myself, I was very impressed. “You aren’t a computer architecture expert, Crow,” I said. “Who helped you with this design?”
He cleared his throat. “I had a little help. Yeah, sure. I worked with General Kerr. He has a thousand computer geeks like you to back him up.”
I looked at him sharply. “Pentagon people?”
“Further out than that.”
“Langley?”
Crow shrugged. “Spooks come in many flavors.”
“Do they know about this installation?”
Crow smiled. “No. But they know something like it must exist.”
“How the hell did you get them to help you? Without them knowing what was really up?”
Crow looked modest. It was an odd look for him. “It was nothing, really. Just a bit of deception. They think I’m programming your machines at your base. I traded them some components for weapons and guidance systems. Brainboxes, sensors. But never a factory of their own. They are still dependent on us for any real production of Nanotech.”
I frowned, disturbed. Crow had been busy. But I supposed I should have expected that. He was a proactive person with ambitions that bordered on the delusional. In my long absence, I should have realized he’d try something like this.