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 surprising 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.”