Instead, he was living in the most perfect manicured parkland. Nigel Sheldon had chosen Cressat for its botany. Its G-class star and lack of a big Earth-style moon gave the planet a passive meteorological environment. It had the standard climate zones and seasons, but storms were rare, and with such a stable atmospheric milieu evolution had produced some spectacular plants. Every tree grew tall, two or three times the size of Earth’s pines and oaks, sporting huge colorful flowers. In midsummer, the native grasses turned from their usual near-terrestrial green to a shimmering swan-white, vast prairies of milky rippling stalks releasing clouds of honey-scented spores that turned the air silvery over entire continents. Vines and creepers ran riot in the forests, their imposing flower cones swelling out to heavy berry clusters.
Biewn, the hurriedly built dormitory village where they were housed, was forty kilometers away from Illanum, the town where the CST wormhole emerged. Nestling in rolling meadowland, with the western horizon bordered by distant snowcapped mountains that reminded all the Vernons of the Dau’sings, it catered solely to the large influx of technicians and experts working on the project.
The forest that formed one side of the village towered over the clutter of single-story houses like arboreal skyscrapers. Streams wound through the undulating land, bridged in several places as the network of roads was steadily expanded. More houses arrived each day, brought in on the back of wide low-loader trucks. They might have been mobile homes, but Biewn hardly qualified as one of the employment-whore trailer parks that sprang up around the CST stations on all new worlds in their early years. It had its own schools, restaurants, bars, shops, and civic center; the pre-equipped unit blocks of the new hospital were locking into place like a wall of massive bricks. Everything was being done to give Biewn the same amenities that Illanum enjoyed.
It was spoiled only by the factories. Long rows of the simple, massive cube structures had been built on the opposite side of Biewn to the forest, their dull brown weather-resistant walls eating into the virgin countryside like an unstoppable mechanical cancer. Still more were being built, their assembly going on around the clock. The cybernetics that filled them were arriving at an equally impressive rate.
As soon as their bus drove around the edge of the forest and started down the last kilometer of the new highway to the village, Mark knew he was going to fit in. It was as if the second chance he’d been given financially had magically been extended to his lifestyle. He imagined Biewn being the kind of place that Randtown would ultimately have evolved into, wealthy and purposeful. It had industry instead of agriculture. And instead of the Trine’ba they had the forest, which the inhabitants were already calling Rainbow Wood after its astonishing flowers. But it retained that small-town community cohesion. Less than an hour after they moved into a house as big as the one in the Ulon Valley, three neighbors had dropped by to introduce themselves and ask if they needed help. Sandy and Barry rushed off with a bunch of other kids to explore.
His one regret was that he hadn’t seen any of the legendary fabulous mansions that the Sheldon Dynasty members had built for themselves. None of their country-sized estates were anywhere near Illanum.
That just left his job. He worked in factory 8. At his orientation class he learned it contained three assembly bays. He considered that ordinary enough. Then they told him their size: cylindrical chambers twenty-five meters in diameter and thirty-five high. They were lined by a hundred plyplastic tool arms, and twenty heavy lift manipulators; up to a hundred and fifty engineeringbots could be deployed inside at any one time. The construction operation was supervised by an array loaded with RI-level software.
“You’re building starships,” Liz told him when he got back home after his first exhausting twelve-hour shift. “Everyone in town says it.”
“Yeah, but they’re not for the navy. The assembly bays are putting together complete compartments; that’s why they’re so large and complex. These are like spheres that have six airlocks. All you have to do is stack them together on top of a hyperdrive section, and you can have any size ship you want. It’s the ultimate in modular design concept.”
“What’s in the compartments?”
“Factory eight is doing suspension tanks,” he said.
“Damnit. I bet they’re evacuation ships. I had the placement office call me today and ask if I’d like to work in a team designing state-of-the-art genetic agronomy laboratories. You know what that means?”
“Modifying terrestrial crops to grow in alien soil.”
Liz sucked on her lower lip. “Sheldon’s going to leave if we lose the war,” she said with grim admiration. “He’ll probably take most of his Dynasty with him. How many suspension tanks are in the compartments?”
“A hundred each. We’re receiving all the major subcomponents already integrated; with the exception of the hull and the life-support systems, most of it is standard commercially available hardware. The assembly bays just plug all the pieces together. There’s a lot of development gone into this. It would have taken a long time, even with advanced design software. I think he’s been planning this since before the invasion.”
“A hundred per compartment?” she mused. “That’s a big ship.”
“Very. Factory eight is churning out six completed compartments a week. Some of the other factories are just packaging industrial cybernetics for long-term storage. You’ve seen how many trucks are using the highway; they’re shipping all the completed compartments out somewhere.”
“Six a week, in one factory? That’s…” She half closed her eyes as she did some multiplication. “Jesus damn! How big are these ships? He must be planning on taking a whole planet with him.”
“If you’re intending to establish a high-technology civilization from scratch, you need a lot of equipment, and a decent population base.”
She put her arms around him. “Do we get to go, too?”
“I don’t know.”
“We need to find out, baby. We really do.”
“Hey, come on; this is just a rich man’s paranoia. The Commonwealth’s a long way from falling to the Primes.” Mark stroked her back, moving gently down her spine the way she liked.
“Then we should get paranoid, too. If we do lose, what would happen to Sandy and Barry? We’ve seen the Primes firsthand, Mark. They don’t give a fuck for humans; we’re lower than pond scum to them.”
“All right, I’ll ask around. Someone at the factory should know. Hey, did I tell you, old Burcombe is one of the managers. He’ll probably tell me.”
“Thanks, baby, I know I’m a pain to live with sometimes.”
“Never.” He held her closer. “I don’t know where they’re putting these ships together. It has to be in orbit, but I’ve not seen anything here. Not that I’ve really looked, but anything that large would show up like a small moon.”
“It could be anywhere within a hundred light-years. Hell, that asteroid of Ozzie’s was a perfect place to use as a shipyard, ultra top secret and habitable. You could house a cityful of people in there and barely notice them.”
***
The cloud had thickened up in the Regents, bringing with it a cloying sleet riddled with slender hailstones. Morton could hear them striking his armor suit, a constant tattoo of crackling to complement his feet as they squelched through tacky slush.
It was slow going back up the mountain to the saddle. The human survivors from Randtown were all riding in the bubbles, which could tackle the terrain easily, while the remaining members of Cat’s Claws simply walked up in their armor. That left the alien who claimed to be Dudley Bose. It didn’t have any kind of clothing to protect its pale skin. Bose said its body would work in the cold, but with difficulty. So they had to drape it in blankets and scraps of cloth, then hang sheets of plastic on top to protect it from the worst of the weather. Even so, the creature couldn’t move fast up the muddy slope.