As we drove through the construction site, I noticed something very strange was taking place. Many buildings had been repurposed from being residential, or offices. Scant few here were occupied, but even so, it was somehow bizarre to see such retrofittings. Heavy machinery protruded from houses, ill-fitting and placed with no regard for appearances. Most seemed to be rolling equipment, crushing what seemed like stone and other such things into a much finer material. Clearly, all that mattered was location, and I could see what looked like an entire neighborhood of freshly cleared rubble.
It was somewhat heartbreaking to see houses like that, but I reminded myself that anything anyone wanted out of them was probably long looted. Curious, I scanned the area, attentive to the details. I wanted to know how our hard earned M.E. was being used.
And then spotted someone I knew among the bustle.
“Guys, I’ll be back later,” I spoke through the mic, “I’m getting an update of the situation here, I’ll meet you back at HQ.”
“What?” Daniel was the first to respond, hesitantly adding, “Alright, see you soon?”
“A few hours tops, we’ll set up for a public thing at that point to give everyone a general update for now, until we get something more meaningful together for information again.” I stepped over the back of the truck, standing on the bumper and waving at the driver in the mirror.
The vehicle started to slow, then nearly stopped before I hopped off. No reason to stupidly open a healing injury.
“Understood, I’ll spread the word to some people. I’ll let Doug know, too.” Fran smartly added. I grinned morosely, she was probably enjoying putting me in front of people right now. Maybe something about getting me used to it.
“I’ve got Doug, I’ll ask him to get in touch with you.” I finished, walking towards the construction site. It was incredible seeing what looked like industrial mixers and truck fulls of dirt or other such materials being moved about efficiently. I wasn’t familiar with many of these processes, beyond what looked like concrete.
“Have fun!” Alice called out. I nodded habitually, looking around for the small group of people near the major construction. As I approached, the clunk of heavy metal and the acrid stench of what seemed like tar wafted through my helmet. At least, before I shut it out, counting yet another blessed feature of the gear I had.
They were wearing hard-hats as they went, some of them holding clip-boards with papers stuffed on them. Most of them seemed to me to be almost wholly stereotypical of a construction foreman, but no single one of them seemed to be flagging in spite of how animatedly they were going about their work. They exchanged words and information from teams as they passed, three molds with crisscrossing latticework of steel rebar being formed layer by layer by a dozen men, three of which per team had some form of mechanical assistance. I watched them crank out bent pieces of rebar with several ‘arms’ tooled with different implements before being passed on to the other nine men, who would quickly load it into some kind of winch that would fit the piece exactingly into the next part of the mold and spot weld it in a millisecond to the existing frame, winding wires together. All the while, the winch held a lithe arm above the whole affair, beeping and emitting an automated voice that likely went to the headsets on each workers head. These three stations worked with remarkable efficiency, coordinated by AI and checked over and assisted by the men and women all around.
As I watched, the bottom layer of steel was finished, and a separate machine with a rotating mixer fed a connected 3D printer, larger than anything I’d seen. As it lay concrete, I also watched an intense UV light came in behind a few shaping limbs. To my amazement, I could see the concrete harden over seconds as the UV bombardment continued.
To my knowledge, normal concrete took hours if not days and more to set. Something else must have been added to the process. And beyond that, the concrete was being produced on site, a modular design present in the industrial equipment that I was positive we didn’t have days ago. I’d never seen a factory that could be moved, let alone one with treads and a dozen sensors around it.
I turned my focus back to the group I intended to insert myself in. I could sit there mesmerized for hours watching the process as the cementing machine began to move to the next mold. One last look showed that the group added another layer of rebar reinforcement and joined it with bits of steel that protruded from the previous layer. From the look of it I estimated eight layers might be needed, or thereabouts. It was quick, I expected that they could crank out a finished section every hour or so.
Truly an incredible amount, but I had to wonder what the actual fortitude of such a structure had, and even beyond that, if we even had that much time to work with. I shoved that thought away, though, since if we didn’t have the timeline even with something like this, then we’d have never made it anyways. That’s what the Legion would be doing, anyways, buying more time to secure the border of the city.
My feet moved over paved and packed ground, crushed materials that hadn’t been moved by virtue of saving time. Moments later, I was only a few dozen feet from the group, and the man I was looking for saw me.
Doug had a look of surprise, one that quickly melted into a broad smile. He waved me over, some of the men around him taking a look to who he was gesturing too.
A few of them started at the sight of me, chrome weapon with gleaming red resting upon my back, cloak hidden within the suit for the time being. My helmet gleamed with a faint tinge of red, and even fainter was the visage of a skull that was barely visible. My armor plating, black with red highlighting, looked like it had taken something of a beating, and blood was still apparent on myself.
Which Doug noted with a brief twinge of emotion, concern touching his eyes before he shook it off. I couldn’t be sure what went through his head, but he greeted me as though I didn’t look like I’d just come from a battleground.
“Matthew! Excellent timing, I was just about to tour our prototype industrial site. You’ve met James, he’s our liason from Bulwark for now. This is Quill Masterson, head foreman-”
“And looking to be head of all construction if we get toys like these,” Quill, a gruff, seasoned man with white and grey in his beard extended a hand, “Nice to meet you, son.”
I nodded to him, clasping his hand with my left biosteel prosthetic, “Likewise, I’m glad to see some progress.”
He grinned at that, holding my handshake firmly, and with a broad grin said, “You look like hell. Least we could do is this.”
I frowned behind my mask at that, feeling his hold not change at all. The others watched with what seemed to be a mix of apprehension, some of them staring so hard at their foreman that I wondered if he might actually feel the weight of their gazes. He seemed like the type to be a no filter individual, a specific type of person that I both loved and hated, and sometimes loved to hate. But, at least I could usually tell where they landed in opinion without dragging it out of them.
“Hell is our business, and business is good,” I responded with a wry shrug, feeling the cheesy line to be strangely suiting.
The man laughed, slapping the back of my hand with his other, free hand, “Hah! See, that’s good, he doesn’t have a stick up his a--”
“Quill has problems with authority types.” Doug interrupted, and I could almost feel the construction crew groan.
He released the handshake with a chuckle, “Well, that’s usually ‘cuz they think they know my job better. Doug here’s checking in on us, making sure we’re not wasting resources and all that.” The man spoke flippantly, but with a strange kind of energy. He was definitely eccentric. I wasn’t certain I liked how carelessly he was treating concern for use of M.E., given what we’d gone through to get it.
“Of course, I don’t expect to know your job, but we do want to know what’s going on.” Doug replied smoothly, but a twinge of frustration crept into his voice.
“Yeah, yeah, come on, we’ll show you around.” The man continued, utterly unchanged in his temperament. He guided Doug through each section, who was frantically trying to write down information as it came to him. As he did, though, my good impression of the man, Quill, shook a bit. A few things he touched on were far too in depth, like how his men were working on the molds and how they’d found some general blueprints from the obelisk and repurposed them. And yet, conspicuously, he avoided much of the topic of Matter Energy. Doug prompted him a few times on the topic but every time Quill only managed a vague answer. “This here’s the main production, we make the concrete here, for now we’re getting everything from the obelisk, but we’ll be able to supply locally whenever we start getting a local supply.”
“And that’s the operation, not too huge yet, but we’re working on it. Got a few cranes that load the finished pieces of the wall onto trucks, we’ve paved a larger road after packing it down, not the best setup, but until we can get most regular industry back up, that’s what we’re working with.” He finished, nodding to the work as another set of three wall pieces neared completion.
“That’s all well and good, but how much are we looking at for all of this? We still haven’t received a ledger from you on how much this has cost.” James spoke up, a blend between his military sharpness and impatience cutting through. He looked to me briefly as he spoke, but quickly focused back on Quill. I had to admit to a certain level of annoyance at that, he was someone that at least somewhat knew me before all of this. What was he expecting? That I was going to explode at the answer?
Quill, though, also looked at me, namely at the gun on my back before looking between Doug and James, stroking his beard as he considered. The four or so others around him shuffled uncomfortably then, before Quill started to speak slowly. “Well, we don’t have a great breakdown right now, haven’t put together the books, so nothing we tell you is really going to be accurate at the moment.”
“Ballpark it,” James smiled, one that was completely lacking in any friendliness.
“Err… well, I guess I’d have to say around… twenty-four?” He stated it as calmly as possible. I felt my heart constrict a touch at that.
“Come again? Twenty-four… thousand?” Doug swallowed, looking again at all of the high tech equipment around him.
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
“Yeah, sounds about right, maybe a bit higher, give or take five or ten thousand.” Quill continued, completely calm sounding, though as he crossed his arms, I could just barely tell how tense he was, one fist clenched, hidden against his chest.
“How and the hell--” James started, flabbergasted, before I spoke up.
This wasn’t going to go anywhere constructive.
“Was it necessary?” I stated flatly, “In your professional opinion.”
The group focused their sights on me, and I felt the distant urge to shy away from the conversation, an old part of me that still persisted. Part of me had a silently smoldering fury, wondering if the man had wasted our hard earned Matter Energy. But, a much larger part told me that if we had to stop every step of the way and fact check every expenditure… well, we wouldn’t be getting very far with this system.
He opened his mouth, and I could see the carefully cultivated routine he had likely crafted over decades of working the job, reporting to superiors about costs and time, slowly clink into place.
And then grind to a halt as it left him in one deep exhalation.
“To be frank? Yeah. We damn well need this. We have none of the supplies to make this stuff, and most of the equipment I need ain’t gonna cut it with what we have to build and how fast we have to build it. We’re working with lime, clay, some admittedly locally sourced building materials from recycled concrete, and some crazy additives that the obelisk has for us. We’re getting water from the city grid right now, so there’s a large pump out back that… I didn’t mention. Well, oops” He shrugged, “Look, I know it’s a lot of Matter Energy, I don’t know how much you get off of beasties, but we’re starting from zero. We’re cutting corners as much as possible, but there’s lots of gear that needs to be made, and we don’t have the skilled manpower to deal with complicated projects. The A.I. stuff is expensive as hell, but the basic suits? They’re cheap. That monster over there is the big ticket item.” He pointed to the treaded vehicle that was 3D printing and moving back and forth between sites. “That thing cost us 10k on its own, but it’s walking the guys every step of the way through, and coordinating with the boom-arms that’re putting the steel in the right spot. We’re gonna add on three more mold pits if we can get local supply, at the least, but we’re eating through a lot of M.E. right now on these. Lime and stuff like that is pretty cheap, but not that cheap. One unit to something like twenty-two pounds or ten kilograms, way more efficient than organics, but still not that great when we’re working on the tons scale of materials.”
“We’ve got a few guys bringing in dump trucks of good rock and stuff and dropping it into a tumbler down the street to break it down into necessary sizes. That’s recycled gear, though, we’re, uh, repurposing some things to make it work, but we’ve got some chemists checking it, so we’re cutting a lot of use out there. But big chokes are lime, clay, some of the little-but-necessaries.” He paused then as one of the guys next to Quill cleared his throat.
“We’re gonna need more steel soon, we’ve got a bit left, but after today I think we’re gonna be tapped out. Steel’s pricey from the obelisk, but the base stuff’s a bit more reasonable. I don’t think we’re gonna get lucky and have iron nearby, but maybe coal? I know some guys who could help figure that out, but we’re gonna need space for that set out, actual dedicated factories are less expensive than this mobile stuff.” The man pitched in, before quickly adding, “But with building a huge ass wall, we’re better off using mobile stuff I think, at least for now.”
“Shit. Good catch, Jeremy.” Quill sighed at that, “Yeah, so, pricey stuff. The short answer though? Hell yeah we need it. We’re looking at recycling more, but I think we’re all better off trying to get this wall up asap.”
Doug and James looked pale at the tirade that Quill had gone on, and I honestly felt like I needed to put in a double shift for more biotics. I laughed heavily, putting a hand on my side and shaking my head.
“Alright, thanks for the breakdown.” I refrained from groaning, somehow managing to maintain a steady tone. “We’re gonna have to eat that cost then. We need that wall done, without it we’re going to have a repeat of this morning. Remember to leave space for weapon installations, we don’t have them yet, but that doesn’t mean we won’t later.”
Quill stood stock still for a few seconds before his mind seemed to catch up. “Oh, uh, yeah, that’s a good idea, we’ll work that in every… five walls? I guess? We’ll figure it out. So, about ongoing expenses?”
“We’ll keep the Matter Energy flowing, use it how it’s needed.” I answered, and added slowly, “Just remember we’re bleeding and dying for you all out there. All I expect from you is that you keep that in mind when you make a purchase.”
The man nodded gravely, “We’ll make it happen, even if I have to use a garbage truck to get it done.”
I nodded to him, then turned to leave, Doug and James coming up to flank me.
“Is that really okay?” Doug asked quietly on my left. James added, “That’s nearly double what they quoted.” As we left though, I could hear someone murmur behind us.
“Actually, a garbage truck would be pretty great in the meantime, right?”
Quill answered, “...Get on it, whatever we can get our hands on. Call up anyone who even so much as knows how to put drywall in, we’ll crash course them. Jeremy, call up your metalworking friends, and see if that A.I. thinger can teach people how to build before anyone else gets here.”
A grin spread across my face, “We’ll be fine. They’ll get the job done, and we need forward thinking on every front. I’ll get some teams back out as soon as possible, but they need a break. How much did the Legion rake in?” I asked Doug, though I could just check myself, I figured I’d bring it up now for everyone’s sakes.
“We hauled just about forty thousand M.E.,” he looked like he’d eaten something sour at that, “We could increase that amount if we took some from the teams, but that would be detrimental for further growth. We’re going to use it up in two days tops like this.”
I clicked my tongue at that, even surprised that we had that much. Though, they were tier 2 biotics, and while our fee wasn’t steep per legionnaire we did get a decent haul.
“Change our contribution per member for the time being, for now one-third of a kill goes to the Legion. We need to get materials processing up and running for us too, and we’ll supply our people better. There’s no option going forward, not having decent gear got people dead today that shouldn’t be.” I continued, “Fran plans on having me heading a public announcement of our results from the raid. We’re going to need teams out as often as possible, and we’ve got one team missing already,” I shook my head, immediately shuffling the missing team to a higher priority. “Get with Fran for now, coordinate what you’re doing. She’ll be communicating to the public with you.”
Doug quirked a brow and gave me a light smirk as he kept pace in spite of his prosthetic, “Delegating tasks? Should we consider this a permanent appointment?”
“At least you’re suited to it,” James chuckled, “This is making me stuffy enough.”
“Well, that’s regrettable,” I turned to him, “Considering you’re probably our official liaison from now on. You know what that means?”
His eye-lid twitched momentarily, “Great. When’s this public showing happening?”
“A few hours, I want transparency with the flow of Matter Energy and to address any potential concerns for cooperation between our organizations. This’ll be a good forum to address that.” I nodded, feeling rather smug with myself.
He sighed loudly and rolled his shoulders, shaking off the sudden additional stress his newfound duties gave him, “And what about the Legion’s plans going forward?”
“I’ll open them, Doug will detail them. I’ve got more biotics to hunt and a gut wound that I should take care of before then.” I gently patted my stomach, feeling the wound having mostly settled at this point, though it felt like it was a clot of iron instead of what I imagined it might feel like.
We continued through the city, figuring out logistics and noting a few details, sending messages to people who needed to put things into motion as we made our way through the city. A car was ready to take us through the streets, turning what would have been a long walk into a very short drive, especially with at least one lane cleared of cars. A few topics were touched on that we had no expertise in, however. Agriculture going forward would take time, and the food was actually quite inefficient for Matter Energy expenses as we’d come to find out. Only below clearly alien-level technology, weapons, completed objects and tools, until finally food. The general hierarchy definitely supported providing raw materials to a society after looking into it in detail, but definitely was less effective at later stages.
We’d have to look into it in more depth, I personally enjoyed the thought of hydroponics and local food supplies all over the city, and suggested so in the report I handed off to Doug, who would reword it into more official cant for James to present to the Bulwark. In a strange twist, Doug went from being my liaison to Bulwark, to being one side of the coin, James taking up the other side. They worked well together, if somewhat bickery when coming to a reasonable accord. If I didn’t know better, I wouldn’t have pegged James as military, but merchant instead.
When we finally arrived at the Legion building, I couldn’t help but feel a tremor of excitement rush through me. In spite of the losses, we were growing, and while it sure as hell wouldn’t be easy to rise, we were advancing.
The doors opened for us, and inside I could see the Legionaries around, celebrating their gains, and mourning their losses. Eating, dancing--apparently having gone so far as to have added what looked like a real bar without any permission--and a not insignificant amount of boisterous laughter. One voice rose above the rest altogether too loudly, leaving me with a smile on my face.
“Matthew! Over here!” Daniel shouted, more than a little red in the face, holding a mug in his hand. It was half drained, and what looked like an empty flagon was next to him. I resisted the urge to shake my head, and watched as Alice nursed a much smaller glass of richly colored liquid with what looked like whipped cream on top. Fran was drinking something else, probably a rum and coke.
“Have fun, we’ll grab something to eat and talk later.” Doug patted my shoulder good humoredly, “Not too much fun, though, we have a public discourse later.”
I nodded to him with a laugh, noting that the floor in the cafeteria looked like black crystal encased in acrylic, shining and glinting with the light. The middle of the room bisected by one of pure red, and the right side of the room with several other tables and the massive screens that listed information also now bore black flooring. A new addition rested there, as well, what looked like a memorial, similar to the obelisk but on a much smaller scale. From here, with magnification by the helmet, I could see a short list of names, but one that was critical all the same. They were our fallen Reapers.
At that, I turned back to the eating area, walking up to the table, noting the full flagon beside Daniel. He grinned, handing it to me and saying, “Sorry I got started without you.”
I laughed, grabbing the flask and feeling my helmet peel back, sinking against the armor at the back of my neck. My Reaper-modified eyes taking my teammates in, Terry mixing a few drinks together, the source of what the three of them were drinking here. He gave me a thumbs up as I held the drink.
“May as well kick this off right.” I said, getting a questioning look from Daniel.
I jumped up onto the table, whistling once sharply. Everyone looked to me as I hoisted the drink high, getting an immediate hoot from Daniel and those nearby that noticed me before then.
“To the Legion! And a job damn well done!” I called out, getting a cheer back.
I then promptly popped off the table, leaving some individuals waiting for me. I laughed, “What? Drink up, the victory speech comes later.”
That got more laughs, and I could tell some individuals were more interested in what would be coming later then. Hopefully, they wouldn’t be too wasted. We’d have quite a number of people coming to see us, after all.
“Didn’t expect that out of you,” Fran smiled, “Maybe you’re warming up to people after all?”
I paused, “Perhaps. Or just these ones. I guess I can make exceptions.”
We raised our glasses together, drinking to our own little toast as Terry hastily mixed several things for himself. “For the team, and continued success.” Fran toasted.
“And easy jobs.” Alice grinned.
Daniel followed up with, “But not too easy.”
Terry finished his now probably far too boozed drink with a shake of his head, “Damnit, that’s gonna go down like nail polish. Uh, but yeah! To making our hard jobs easy!” He cheered, getting a chuckle from the rest of us.
I lifted mine, “To the Legion!”
“To the Legion!” Our table, and every other table cried in unison, a feeling of unity warming me. I grinned, ignoring the itch of biosteel forming in place of the weakened tissues on my gut. Well, it was just another piece at this rate anyways...