Swarm by Larson B. V

Author:Larson, B. V. [V., Larson, B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction
Published: 2010-12-22T23:00:00+00:00

-22-

Less than ten days after my conversation with Senator Kim Bager, Star Force had an official home base on Earth. I’d kind of expected to end up in some desert... out in New Mexico, maybe. But it didn’t turn out that way. They gave us Andros Island. It was a beautiful, tropical, relatively unpopulated place in the Caribbean. It was plenty big enough, over two thousand square miles—a little bigger than Delaware. I think they gave it to us because it was located right between the marching Macros and Florida. Also, it was surprisingly unpopulated. They evacuated less than ten thousand people to hand over an empty jungle paradise. Before it was ours, it had belonged to the Bahamas. I don’t even know what they traded them for it. I didn’t want to ask. Maybe they didn’t have any choice in the matter. Facing global extermination had made the superpowers harsh in their diplomacy.

Once we took ownership, we moved down there in a hurry. We had a dozen of our floating black ships work their long arms for the first day to rip out trees. We plucked thousands of them and stacked them up to form huge walls of logs around the edge of the compound. It wasn’t eco-friendly, but it went quickly.

When we had enough cleared land, we used the ships to carry pre-fabricated steel buildings down from Florida, where we’d had them built to order. We had permanent concrete buildings slated for eventual construction, but for now there wasn’t time for anything fancy. Steel shells with hastily-poured concrete pads underneath, that’s all we had time to put down. The U.S. Army Engineers helped us with the rest, building a pier with amazing speed. Freighters came in night and day once it was up with fantastic amounts of supplies. We had so much material of every kind, we had to expand the compound several times. The Earth governments, once they believed we were in this to help them, dumped supplies on us in hopes it could help the war effort. I imagined that similar depots were stacking up somewhere on the coast of Brazil. They might be losing to the Macros down there, but it wasn’t for lack of supply.

Most of the steel buildings we air-lifted down from the states were used as warehouses, but some were quarters for contractors and other staff we brought in from all over the world. I was sure many of these ‘contractors’ were spies, so I set up another base, deep in the interior of the island. The second base, the secret one, had two dozen steel buildings on another stretch of land plucked clean of trees. Inside each of these buildings, I set up one of the machines I’d been slowly constructing along with rows of generators to power it and a team of Nano ships to supply it with raw materials. The maw for each factory stuck up through the top of its shed like a chimney—but these chimneys consumed rather than exhaled.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.