Physical training was a mistake. I’d been forced to get up at the crack of dawn and drag myself up to the gym, navigating around the many holes in the floor left by the Antithesis and currently patched with little more than plywood boards in order to reach the weight machines. Terry had then proceeded to put me through a regimen that would make a Green Beret cry uncle.

That wasn’t to say I was in such amazing shape that I could outpace or out lift a Green Beret; I was speaking relatively. It was more that my torturer- I mean, trainer- was aware of my regeneration. Since I could rapidly heal from overdoing it, he’d tailored my regimen to do that deliberately. It would drastically increase the speed I built muscle at but it was an absolutely miserable experience.

What neither of us accounted for was the suite of upgrades I’d begun last night. A swarm of nanobots was currently tearing my body apart and putting it back together and that meant I was itchy and sore all over to begin with. That wasn’t even factoring in the new organs being built in my gut from the ground up, which reduced my regeneration, or the glut of nanites in my veins that limited their capacity to carry more.

It didn’t actually make the workout Terry had designed less viable; it was just a hell of a lot more uncomfortable than he’d expected and I was stubborn to a fault on the best of days so I’d endured it to the end without speaking up. In other words I’m a dumbass and brought it upon myself.

“Well, you look like shit. Have a fun morning with Terry?” Alana asked wryly when I met her in the underground parking section of the building.

“I did all my new body mods at once last night. It was not my greatest decision,” I admitted with a groan. “Let’s just get on with this so I can go die on a couch somewhere. What’s up first?”

“First I wanted to install a maintenance bay for the walkers and expand the entrance to the parking lot. Right now the Titans don’t fit down here so we don’t have anywhere to shelter them,” Alana said, gesturing to the room where a handful of Wolverines had been moved. There were no cars down here anymore; most had been personal vehicles of mercenaries that no longer lived here and the rest were hover vehicles that could be stored elsewhere.

“So we need to start by smashing the floor to expand it? I’m down,” I said.

“That should not be necessary, but would not hurt either!” Juny exclaimed. “Installation of building materials will replace the existing sections seamlessly, but I can recommend explosives that would make a fun alternative!”

“Let’s hold off on the elective demolitions for now. Haley would never forgive us for doing it without her anyway,” Alana said before I got too excited. “I was thinking we’d just buy a garage with automated maintenance equipment and replace both this floor and the one below with it.”

“How many underground levels are there, anyway?” I asked. I’d never been much more than one or two levels deep during the siege.

“Four. They’re all parking from before hovercars were popular,” Alana replied.

“Were you thinking of putting the fabricators on the lower ones?” I asked, to which she nodded.

“The ones for vehicles, yes. Probably the reactor as well. Do you have the upgraded blueprints for the walkers?” Alana responded. I looked at Juny.

“Go ahead and send’m over.” I turned back to Alana. “Seems like a Titan will take a month to build, but the Wolverines should only take a week.”

“Considering the size difference, that sounds about right. We don’t need four times as many Wolverines as Titans, but that just gives us fabber time to build other things. Maybe we can get a few more of those anti-air turrets constructed. Dylta, go ahead and send over the specifications we chose so Erica can look them over,” Alana said, sending the facility schematics over for me to look at while she reviewed the walkers.

It was mostly a formality. There wasn’t much I was going to be able to suggest to improve on a garage of all things. I noticed she had selected two smaller fabricators that wouldn’t have the space for a Titan, but the answer to why was also in the list: a small automated factory that would take the components and build them into a finished mech. That saved on points because the factory required fewer advanced components than a large fabricator would, so it was cheaper to buy both than to consolidate into one larger fabricator.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

There was also a reactor in the list that would power the numerous fabricators and the teleporter we were planning on. Antimatter, apparently. As long as it had enough capacity I didn’t really need to know much more about it.

“Looks good to me. Wanna go ahead and buy it all? Juny, split our points 50/50 on the purchases,” I said after reading through the list.

“May as well. Dylta, go ahead and place it all.”

The shift was instant. One second we were in a grungy, decades-old parking garage and the next we were standing on a gantry in a two story, state of the art facility with numerous bays. Larger spaces were lined up to my right while smaller ones were to the left, with a central elevator at the far side leading down to the factory level and a very gradual ramp leading to ground level behind me.

“Huh, Juny wasn’t kidding,” I said as I looked the room over. Which was a lot easier with the better lighting included with the new facilities. I’d seen plenty of things appear out of nowhere by now, but seeing a purchase make things vanish was new.

“Dylta, go ahead and tell Selene we’ve got a place to stow the Titans.” Alana looked my way. “All our tank drivers left, so the militia had to fill in.”

“Anything else we need to do down here?” I asked, feeling like I hadn’t done all that much so far. Alana had really done most of the work with selecting the building upgrades. I’d volunteered to design and select the equipment blueprints we’d be buying for the fabricators to make up for it, though, so I’d feel like I actually did something. It would be some time before I had everything completed but the vehicles were already done.

I wondered how long it would take Alana to notice the sheer amount of nerd crap I’d slipped in.

“No, we can move onto the armory,” she replied as she headed for the ladder leading down from the gantry. “We can look the plans over on the way.”

As we headed for the elevator I received the layout for the armory. It would be going in near the middle of the building and would have three small fabricators dedicated to weapons, armor, and ammo respectively. The specialization made them slightly more expensive, but it also made them faster at the cost of scope, which was vital for mass production.

“I don’t have many weapons selected yet, but I have a basic set of light power armor we can use,” I told Alana. I’d designed something akin to the Semi-Powered Infiltration armor used by Spartan IIIs for this; like my first suit it hardly provided any strength or mobility, but it carried itself and had a self-contained environment so we wouldn’t need to worry about providing gas masks and such. I’d gone for the appearance of ODST battle-armor, though. This was for general use, not super-soldiers.

“Great; I’d love to get a head start on armor production. Weapons are less of a concern since we can feed the fabbers the ones I issued my squad in the short term, until we can source something better,” Alana replied, reaching the floor. We headed for the elevator.

“We could also use my old armor as a base for a heavier model. Maybe issue it to heavy weapon specialists like Huifang?” I suggested. The armor itself was as good as scrap, but the plating was just metal. It was the frame that was important, and that could support much heavier plating than the smaller-profile frame going out to most troops.

“If you’re fine with that, I’ll have someone take it up to the armory once we’re done,” Alana said as the elevator doors closed and we began to ascend. “I think it’s still in your old room.”

We only stopped on the middle floor briefly; just long enough for our AI to coordinate the purchase of the fabricators, secure armory section, and long-range equipment teleporter. I would have liked to test the latter, but my gear was in my suite right now and I would need to install transponders in my weapons first. The plan was to stage all of my weapons in the armory and only teleport what I needed to me, sending it back for reloading. It would increase my flexibility quite a bit and make it impossible for me to be disarmed.

Field units would instead carry ammo crates that could be sent back for refill- the power expenditure for shipping weapons that way was a bit extravagant.

“So, that leaves…the hangar and the industrial fabricator, right?” I asked as we ascended to the top of the building.

“Right. The hangar facilities are already pretty good, so I think I’ll just use the industrial fabricator to repair the shutters, but we can install a dedicated aircraft fabricator on the storage level below. We still have two gunships, so we could just feed it one and have that replicated. They performed fairly well during the siege as-is,” Alana explained. That wouldn’t do though; I was determined to put my favorite gunship into service.

“I’ll foot the bill for the gunships if you want. I have a design I’m pretty fond of that would be an improvement,” I replied.

“How are you doing on points?” Alana asked with a frown. “Did you reserve any for your own upgrades?”

“I’ve already gotten my body-mods and I have points ear-marked for heavier weapons, a sensor upgrade, and performance upgrades for my armor to take advantage of my enhanced strength,” I assured her. All taken together it still wasn’t a huge amount; most of my points were going into these building upgrades, actually, but I didn’t mind. I’d be benefiting from them too in the form of better backup and access to replacement parts and ammo, among other things. “That should cover the biggest of the problems I ran into during the siege. I’ll be able to detect Model Nines in the future and will have a few weapons that can take on models above twenty.”

“Hm, I should get a sensor upgrade too. I can probably get something internal that can be networked to allies…” Alana said, going silent as she consulted with Dylta. “Yeah, that’s doable. Anyway, if you’ve got yourself taken care of, then I won’t complain about better air support.”

“Great!” I said with a grin. “Let’s get the fabber put in and then I’ll show you what I have in mind.”