Chapter 22: Open-Eyed Conspiracy

“While you here do snoring lie,
Open-eyed conspiracy
His time doth take.”

- Ariel, The Tempest, Scene II, Act I

Captain Ramjeet Singh settled into his command chair on T’klikrooz’ bridge and picked up the data pad. According to the device, his ship had been utilizing power at a steady clip since the little heart-stopping conversation aboard CSS Dance of Spirits less than two hours before. Every extra erg was being used to convert all the cargo pods into barracks, as promised.

From his time at Mars Fabrication Centre Dagenham, Singh was aware that there was a proposal out to modify the current pod design to include small fusion reactors. The Mark II pod design had yet to get the go-ahead, however, and all the pods aboard were the current battery-powered design. As a result, all the transformations were being done by T’klikrooz using his own power supply. Up until this point, the pods had been in the process of re-converting to the standard “unused” model of alien greys and standard layout, dumping the custom fits and finishings that the newly delivered Marines had created back before departing Earthat. Now, all that work had been stopped.

Nobody knew the exact dimensions of the work that both Tuull freighters had taken on, but they were about to find out.

Lieutenant Kirk Boland really hadn’t paid all that much attention to the colony’s orbital fabrication centre. He hadn’t even given it a name, as it was just an automated factory replicator. He’d assigned it to make pods, and then largely left it to its own devices.

Every morning he scanned the reports to ensure that nothing was going awry, and then he handled whatever “priority” issue that the Governor had come up with overnight. Variations were the last thing he wanted, not with his colonel’s constantly changing stream of directives, and now Lieutenant Whitefeather breathing down his neck with yet another set of priorities – highly logical, well-thought-out priorities that even Boland could comprehend.

The production report from the orbiting facility had produced all of “zero” for pods overnight. Suddenly, instead, it had produced almost a third of a new tanker. He called up the queue to discover that this was not a sublight tanker either but held a small supraluminal drive capable of propelling it across the Atalanta’at system. Already, the queue had produced a new supraluminal drive for his existing tanker.

“Damn,” he muttered to himself, “What’s going on here?”

He pulled up the production list. Next in line after the second tanker were several tiny items that would in total take the place of another pair of pods. Then there was something that was vaguely round, sort of like a very large hula hoop, but with several small chambers – like some giant under the influence of LSD had decided to make a revolver’s cylinder out of a hula-hoop. Then there was another small craft with supraluminal drive, clearly intended to be unmanned.

But the mystery was doomed to go unsolved, at least for now. “Mr. Boland!” rang the cry across the office.

“Yes, Colonel!”

“I need you! Can you come here for a moment please?”

“Yes, Colonel!” He picked up his data pad and headed for the Colonel’s expansive, luxurious office.

The little knot of Marine non-coms clustered around Lieutenant Whitefeather stared at the contraption. “Sir, what IS that?” Gunnery Sergeant Stephen Lucassen of the First Regiment demanded. A few scant months ago, this sergeant had been an insurance agent for a major American firm in a small town in a Midwestern state, a place he considered a Godforsaken dump. Now, he was on a planet that made his former home look like a lush tropical paradise in comparison. Things had been relatively easy under Lieutenant Boland, but now he and his men were taking directions from this new man, and they didn’t know quite what to make of him.

“Watch,” Whitefeather suggested.

The “that” in question looked like a cross between a NASA Mars rover and a miniaturized floating oil drilling platform. Using a highly focused laser, it quickly drilled a hole. The laser mounting smoothly moved aside and a mechanical arm moved a sixty-centimetre rod over the hole. The two-centimetre-wide rod was capped with a plate about ten centimetres across and four centimetres thick. The arm swiftly inserted the rod straight into the newly-drilled hole, and as a small transporter nexus resupplied the little robot with another identical rod, the machine rose into the air on repulsors. A pair of thrusters pushed it over to land several dozen metres away, where it repeated the process.

“We’re installing sensor packages all along the front,” Whitefeather advised them as the telescopic rod extended a metre or so into the air. “We’ll have these placed every 20 metres in front of our line inside of a week, and then start on another ring 10 kilometres beyond that. Then we’ll start on a grid pattern away from the base, one sensor every twenty thousand kilometres until we’ve either covered the planet or run out of time.”

He led the men out farther from the base. “Between those first two lines of sensors, we need antitank mines. They’re the only things that’ll stop the thundering herd of Swarm, the anti-personnel toe-poppers don’t seem to be having an effect. We’ll need access points through the lines, both for Marines and for vehicles. And I want barbed wire. You’ve received the briefing about the changes to the perimeter trenches?”

“Ah, no, Sir,” the startled sergeant confessed.

Whitefeather wasn’t surprised – nor was he terribly impressed. Boland probably had been kept too busy with that tin-pot little dictator’s colony improvement program to brief his soldiers on their duties as Marines, and was still too green as grass to realize the danger of his error. “Lots of changes here. We need to make the lines zigzag. We need firing points and kill zones. And we need bunkers – we can use some of those surplus cargo pods, place transporter nexuses in them, provide them with arms and ammunition and rations and water and medical supplies.”

Lucassen stared at him blankly. “You want med tubes in the bunkers?”

“No.” Whitefeather made a face. “Think, man, THINK! Med pods on the front lines are vulnerable. What if the AI gets destroyed? They run these bloody med pods, and then we’d be stuck without any medical services whatsoever. And what happens if the bunker gets overrun? If the casualty is that badly hurt, we’ll send him to the main colony for repairs, otherwise we’ll just patch him up here and have him continue fighting.”

“Sir.”

A platoon of about 25 men led by Sergeant Hopson came marching smartly across the smooth ground from the direction of a nearby arroyo. Whitefeather noted the newly arriving body. “OK, we need to get an eighth of the perimeter into the jagged pattern by twelve hundred. You’ve got firing range at thirteen hundred. Get your men. Get started, the clock’s ticking!”

“Firing range?” one corporal asked, astonished. He was an engineer, not an infantryman, and wasn’t used to looking at the world like an infantryman.

Whitefeather quickly disabused him of the notion. “In case anyone forgot to tell you, Henderson, you joined the Marines.” He then added in a voice dripping stalactites of sarcasm, “Hoo. Rah.”

“Sir,” replied the abashed Corporal Henderson.

“If you’re not done by twelve hundred, you’re going to keep working until you are, and you still have to be on the range at thirteen hundred! Too bad about lunch!”

The non-coms moved along as Hopson approached Whitefeather. Behind the former JAG, the platoon of 3rd Regiment infantry continued to the base. The two exchanged salutes.

“Sir, we have a handful of potential snipers, and the usual proportion that couldn’t hit the broad side of a Pennsylvania Dutch barn at ten paces.”

“Understood. This IS their first time firing live laser rifles, after all.”

“Sir. And the range needs to be upgraded. It’s basically a few targets of the tin-can-on-a-post variety. We need to stretch it along so we can do a platoon at a time, give them proper firing points and interactive targets, that sort of thing. And a hut with a pair of replicators and a couple of transporter terminals, and shelves to keep the range supplies out of the weather and store a first aid kit would be most useful.”

“AI, add that to the to-do list. I want the range upgrade scheduled for the next forty-eight hours.”