Chapter 29

Dear Willow,

I'm officially impressed. 6.9?! That Is Awesome!

Okay, now I've got that out of my system let me get onto things I'd like. If you could send some fruit tree seeds, apple, peach, plum, cherry, apricot, etc as well as maybe a box of mixed nuts that is all raw, unsalted nuts I would appreciate it. We should be making landfall at Atlantis-At soon. I understand that there really isn't much land at all on the world but that we are building in specially engineered domes that are under water! At least 150+ meters at the shallowest point. I understand that the township where Marissa will be living (and me and the four girls, yes we officially adopted Dana [Bob ended up getting reCAPPED so to speak and failing, no one wanted Bill, 'cause he couldn't perform with a woman:-(]) is under nearly 2000 meters of water. All the better as far as I'm concerned, Sa'arm don't swim. In fact (I think I told you earlier) that is something that we should be thinking about a lot as we begin to combat the Sa'arm in various locations.

If you and Erica can make sure that you are fairly insulated from other people spotting you coming and going together that and having a living place where the neighbors don't snoop on you ... then going out to places where pickups might happen is a good idea. Places where there are lots of people who have particular skill sets like the club near the community college that tends to hold chess tournaments and D&D night. There are a lot of eggheads in both of those sets of people. The thing is that when the Cube ship comes on line it will be picking up almost everyone in a medium sized town every six weeks. I think that it will take a couple of shake down cruises then they will be trying to put a new one into operation every six weeks until it becomes unsafe to pickup from Earth as the Sa'arm have arrived. Of course even then we'll probably pick up people as we'll continue to harass the Sa'arm as long as we can to help the people of Earth resist them. Maybe by then we'll have come up with some effective ships and tactics. I understand that the 'submarines' that were invented by a 12 year old (yeah she was that young) are proving to be very effective. How long that will last, I don't know. There is also a whisper that some people (besides the Arabs) who are supposed to be the Mafia have a different sort of ship and have been doing fairly effective work on killing Sa'arm ships. Truly I think that the battle will be won in space long before we start winning on planets. Indeed it seems to me that Earth will be the link pin in that effort. We really may not start to fight the Sa'arm planet side until we have to kick them out of our back yard.

My guess is that people who do as I'm doing with rats and other sorts of vermin will be the beginning of winning the war planet side. However as I noted earlier that is going to be a long, arduous task. Even considering that we're guessing that people may live up to 200 years with the help of Confederacy nanotech in the form of nanites to help support our health I doubt that any child born in the first 50 years of this war will see the end of it. Then again we could discover that Sa'arm are like rats ... That is we come to a sort of uneasy coexistence with them. I doubt that we will do that though as they are space capable and more predatory than a pride of lions.

What do I want fruit tree seeds for (and nuts)? You ask. It seems that we will have quite a bit of open space where we'll be living. I want to experiment with them. Even if I don't get good ones from seedlings I should get some varietals that are acceptable in cooking. I don't know if anyone can get me a few sugar cane corms but I would like them too ... Heh! It looks like your brother will be a farmer when he's not genengeneering rats to carry RFID chips into Sa'arm warrens. The AI's don't like the idea of making nanites that pass to the infants and form a RFID chip or something a bit more sophisticated than that. Something that actively pings a receiver and with the assistance of a swarm of GPS type of satellites can actively track where the rats go to help build more accurate maps of Sa'arm warrens. The thing is that human knowledge was almost to that level before we met the Confederacy so I've been requesting massive data dumps from every source I can access on technical matters. I've convinced the replicator to build me the equivalent of a chip making robot. Except that it is much smaller and able to manipulate smaller chips than we ever imagined even a few years ago. And they are more powerful!