Chapter 3

Elizabeth seemed to have a new zest for life since she had shared herself with both Ben and Sarah. The Stellarites around her certainly noticed the changes, as she had been transformed from a cynical, pessimistic individual into almost a re-incarnation of Hannah, who had loved life to the full.

Her changed personality helped her motivate her work teams on the ground around the caves, as they supported Thomas and his engineers in their project.

Thomas saw the energy and enthusiasm that Elizabeth was managing to imbue in those around her and valued the support his twin was giving. He knew from talking to her that she understood how excited he was a about completing the first of a completely new class of space ship. Thomas wasn't stupid however, and put only some of her changed personality down to Elizabeth getting caught up in what he was doing.

The scaffolding was long since complete and thousands of tons of concrete had been poured to form a rigid framework within which the new ship would take shape.

Inside the concrete frame, further scaffolding was in place to support the large sections of re-inforced mevlar that were beginning to form the skeleton of what would be the inside of the ship.

Even mevlar wasn't strong enough to form the base for the arrayed engines that would be fitted however. Thomas had called on Ben to secure enough raw ore to extract the titanium needed to create a light-weight alloy required to manufacture the entire engine room bay and the casings for the engines themselves.

The silvery alloy glinted in the afternoon sun as the mevlar sections were being fitted together around it.

Gantries extended from the concrete frame to a number of points that marked where firstly the inner skin of the hull would be assembled and then the outer skin.

Thomas and his Wodenite engineers scurried everywhere with their laser measuring devices — making sure that everything was being completed within the tightest tolerance levels.

Elizabeth had discovered something else about herself over the past week or so. Several of her offspring had shown themselves to have an incredible natural ability for creating computers and highly complex programmes to run on them. By sheer chance, Elizabeth found out that their ability was something they had inherited from her genes.

She had been looking for Ricky, her grandson, when she came across him working away at a touch screen in the computer lab. The screen was a mass of formula and symbols that to most people would have been completely unintelligible.

"Oh that's so neat!" cried Elizabeth, looking over Ricky's shoulder. "Can you really get it to carry out that many computations in a second?"

"You can read this?" Ricky asked in amazement.

"Of course," replied Elizabeth. "In fact, I think there's a small error just there."

When Ricky looked at the line of his code that Elizabeth was pointing to, he saw that she was right and any doubt he had that she understood his programme was gone.

"Grandma, do you think you could write something like this? I've been trying to come up with a system that will have overall control of the thousands of shields that Thomas plans to use for the ships, but I can't seem to get it just right. Why don't you give it a try?"

There was a second touch screen on a table facing the one Ricky was using and Elizabeth sat down in front of it.

"What seems to be the problem?" she asked.

"Well, each shield has to draw its power from the engines, but with thousands of them and with the engines being in a different array to what the Wodenites usually have, I can't get the sequencing to work. Worse than that, I can't figure out how to allow the weapons to fire when the shields are up," answered Ricky.

"Oh it's just a sequencing issue? That shouldn't be too difficult to fix, I'm good at that," said an excited Elizabeth. Her eyes became glued to the touch screen as her fingers started to fly across it and she was totally absorbed in what she was doing.

Ricky shook his head. Who would have thought it? Grandma was a super-geek!

Simeone was wandering through the various decks on the WS Scout looking for something to do. The natural beauty down on the planet was all well and good, but he longed for other things, things that he was used to from Woden society.

Ben knew that his 'father' was bored and that he wasn't satisfied with the simple pleasures in life. He had been looking for him to try to address that and he found Simeone chatting to some of the WS Scout's crew in one of the ship's cafes.

"Ah, good, I've found you at last Simeone. We need to have a word," said Ben.

The two crew members recognised Ben and discreetly made their exit. Ben sat down at the table and Simeone waited for him to explain why he had been looking for him.

"Don't you think that you should be doing a little more than simply wandering around?" Ben asked.

He could see Simeone bristle, unused to being taken to task so directly it seemed.

"There's more to life than communing with nature, beautiful though the scenery and the wildlife is on New Woden," Simeone answered cautiously.

"No, that's not what I meant," said Ben. "It seems to me that you're ducking your parental responsibilities. How much support are you giving each of your children? And even worse than that, what contribution are you making to the overall effort to prepare to liberate Woden?"

Simeone squirmed in his seat.

"I don't really know you or the other twins very well and to be honest I find it difficult sometimes to relate to you all. Some of the things that you do, some of the things that you say — even some of the things that you believe — are alien to me," he muttered.

"So because of that you'd rather spend your time talking to complete strangers in cafes like this?" Ben asked pointedly. "How are you ever going to understand us if you don't spend more time with us? If you let our differences force you away instead of trying to understand them, then you'll never be comfortable around us. Don't you want that? Isn't that why you came back to New Woden?"

Simeone looked away rather than meet Ben's eyes.

"I'm just getting in the way. All of you seem to be so focused on what you're doing; you seem to know exactly what your role is. What can I contribute?" Simeone asked.

"Good grief! Have you been feeling sorry for yourself? Have you really been walking around feeling that you've got nothing to contribute?" asked Ben.

Simeone nodded and Ben could see that his cheeks had flushed red with embarrassment.

"Simeone, what are you?" asked Ben.

"I'm the pilot of a seeding ship," Simeone answered without hesitation.

"Yes, you're a pilot and the father of the people who have given life to a planet. Now, what happened when you gave me a memory upgrade?" asked Ben.

"You gained the most recent knowledge Woden has and also inherited all of my personal memories," Simeone replied slowly, trying to figure out where Ben was going.

"Exactly, and now I know how to pilot a ship. The one thing I haven't done is actually try that out. At some point in the future we're going to need more pilots to command the ships that Thomas is going to build. Who are those pilots going to be?"

Simeone made the link at last and a look of surprise appeared on his face.

"You mean you want me to transplant my DNA into more of your people so they can become pilots?" he asked.

"Yip, and not only that, I want you to set up a programme so that each new pilot can actually have the chance to try out your ship. It would be too risky to have completely green pilots test-flying Thomas' ships so we need tried and tested pilots by the time the new ships are ready," said Ben.

He could see a light beginning to shine from Simeone's eyes. At last Simeone had something that he could concentrate on, something worthwhile and which made a true contribution to the preparations for war. Ben smiled as his father began to rattle of ideas about how to ensure the best training for the people Ben would select.

The trainees were now well into their third week of training at David and Beckie's camp. The physical fitness of each group had improved beyond all recognition and the teamwork that the twins were trying to engender was starting to emerge.

Two things happened in this week to provide the acceleration that David had described as being needed; some of the squads were supplemented by more of the Celestialites; and the four Benites began to exert their natural leadership.

There weren't enough Celestialites to ensure that all of the thirty-two, four man, squads could have a new member, but half of them did. To achieve even that, David and Beckie had to use some of their youngest fully trained people. Their plan was to use these additional people as role models for the others and have them demonstrate how real team players worked.

The four Benites began to meet up at the end of each day and compared notes on how their groups of thirty-two were getting on. The four were Simon, his twin Kirsty, Ben Jr and his twin Jenny.

"Are your squad leaders still playing mind games?" asked Simon of the others.

"Too right! This morning ours made us all give him two hundred press-ups because one of our squad wasn't singing the cadence loudly enough. Can you believe that?" snapped Ben Jr.

"Haven't you figured it out yet, Ben? The squad is supposed to unite together to despise the squad leader, it's part of making your squad a unit. You know, shared experiences, shared hatred of the authority figure," laughed Jenny.

"I think it's about time we started to fight back," suggested Kirsty.

Her words grabbed the other's attention.

"What did you have in mind?" asked Simon.

"Well, you know the sessions they made us go through yesterday, the ones on improvising booby traps? I was wondering whether there might be an opportunity to practice our new skills?"

"Oh man, that is so sweet!" exclaimed Jenny. "Now wouldn't it be a hoot to see that bastard of a squad leader of ours face down in the mud? Yeah! I'm in."

"We need to do more than just extract a little retribution by doing this," said Simon. "We need to try to use this as a way of getting the squads to bond a little more tightly as well. That means we have to get the others to buy into this."

"But isn't there a danger that somebody will chicken out and maybe rat on us to the squad leaders?" asked Kirsty.

"Kirsty, part of this training is about learning to have total trust in the members of your squad. At some point you're going to be depending on them to watch your back, you're going to be trusting them with your life. If we can't trust them to keep quiet about this then we're sunk before we begin."

"What about the newbies? They've only been here for a few days and we don't really know them," said Ben Jr.

"All the better," said Simon. "This should help our squads to get to know them that little bit quicker. Besides, the newbies that I've met have already got a strong sense of squad loyalty — it seems to be in their blood given the years of training they've already had."

"So are we agreed we share this idea with our groups and then think up how we put our plans into action?" asked Simon.

The other three agreed without hesitation.

"Let's do it tonight. The squad leaders normally have a briefing together at about nine o'clock. That's our opportunity to speak to our groups and find out if they're willing to play," said Simon.

Simon was assigned to the blue group and he made sure he was inside the barracks in plenty of time to take advantage when the two squad leaders left for their briefing. He made his way through the barracks and called everybody together. There were now thirty-six of them with the addition of four of the new Celestialites.

"Okay, gather round everybody. We need to make this quick before the squad leaders come back," said Simon.

His words grabbed everybody's attention. It sounded as if something good was in the offing if the squad leaders were being excluded.

"Some of us got to talking earlier and the other three groups should be having a meeting just like this one even as we speak. We decided that it's high time the squad leaders suffered a little pay-back for all the mind games that they've been playing on us over the past few weeks."

"What kind of pay-back?" asked somebody from the group.

"We were thinking that it's only right that we should take every opportunity to put into practice the various skills that we're being taught. For example, yesterday's training on improvising booby traps. An important skill I'm sure you all agree and one that we would do well to master as quickly as we can," suggested Simon.

The group quickly cottoned on to what he meant and there were smiles all round. It was one of the new Celestialites who responded first, voicing support for what Simon was suggesting. She was a young girl, no more than thirteen, and her name was Rosie.

"This is exactly the kind of thing that we should be thinking about. From what little I've seen over the past few days, the squad leaders are deliberately goading people and trying to get a reaction. Let's give them a reaction then, but one they're not expecting. I'm definitely in!" she said

The group spent the next thirty minutes discussing what they could do and Simon had more than enough volunteers to arrange the various surprises they quickly dreamed up.

"We should start small and try to avoid them getting suspicious," said Rosie. "That way we can stretch this out over a number of days and enjoy it all the more!"

There was general agreement with that.

"Okay, I'm going to share what we've got planned with the other groups to make sure we don't fall over each other. Remember, everything has got to be made to look like a genuine accident," grinned Simon, pleased that things were coming together so quickly.

The four Benites just had enough time before lights-out to compare notes. Each of the four groups had signed up to take a little retribution and in each case the most vocal supporters had been the new Celestialites who had preached the idea that this was about the squads starting to look out or one another.

The fun began during the obligatory morning run. The squad leaders had a tendency to run alongside the groups, but as a consequence were on the very edge of the paths through the trees.

Several members of the blue group had woken up even earlier than normal and had slipped out to organise the first 'accident'. There was just enough daylight to run safely through the woods, but not enough for the unfortunate squad leader to pick out the trap that had been set up at the side of the path.

The trap was a very basic one, fashioned out of some branches that had been lying around. A small hurdle had been set up and then covered with dead leaves — it was situated immediately in front of a muddy puddle of water.

The group sang out its cadence as the squads ran and then the squad leader on the left tripped on the booby trap and splashed face first into the mud. No one broke stride, but the cadence stopped and was replaced by howls of laughter.

The second squad leader called the group to mark-time while she rushed over to help her fallen comrade. The faller was covered in mud from head to toe and clearly not very happy. A quick search of the ground over which he had stumbled found nothing but leaves and dead branches, so there was nothing to give the group's game away.