I showed Paul the various defenses we were planning to build and he pointed out an obvious flaw; we were building walls around the town, but the enemy already knew about the mines and would likely attack there first. Unless I was planning to either defend it without a wall or let them take it, I should probably build there first.
“And that’s why I wanted someone with military experience. I was so worried about them attacking the town that I wouldn’t have gotten the mine’s defenses up in time.”
Because of the number of citizens the town had Gary and the System rules restricted the maximum rank of the town militia to Captain, so I named Paul as our first Captain and put him in charge of developing our defenses and training the troops. He wanted to put all of the people through a version of boot camp, but as we only had two to three weeks before the attack, he settled on taking all of the volunteers on a run to the shooting range and having them practice with their rifles. Most of them were salvagers equipped with AK47s, as they were the first thing Philip made in the gun factory, but some of them were instead carrying M4s. He also had a few ex soldiers, police, and security guards. The tailor and garage had sent me a message that they were beginning to make plate carriers and the plates for them respectively, but for now none to the volunteers would have them.
Paul shifted two of the construction teams to building the wall around the mines, with the other one remaining here. The carpenters on that team would be building forms for the concrete to be poured into and adjusting where the automatic miner was so that it could dig the trench that would form the foot of the wall. If we got all of the walls up before the attacks we would shift the three miners to digging tunnels for the non-combatants to hide in, but for now if the mines came under attack all of the non-combat people would be teleported to the town, and if the town were attacked, all of the non-combat people would be teleported to the city.
The day after Silan came to the town was Valentine’s day. Lawrence had sold out of all the chocolate he had in stock, and Bob couldn’t make more because it was impossible to get viable cacao DNA from cooked cacao based products. He had, however, been cloning dozens of species of flowers, as he had many flowering plants in his inventory and some of the salvage teams had found flowering plants and seeds and brought them to town. The bar and all the restaurants except the first were all busy, as the first was pretty much serving as an extension of the soup kitchen and almost exclusively serving free meals. Once private rooms became available and we started giving preference to couples who wanted rooms, we had an explosion of the number of couples in town. In fact, we had went from 99% of the adults in town being single to over 40% being in a relationship, though Gary estimated that at least 70% of adults were participating in the “Human fertility holiday”. I wasn’t one of those, though, so I went back to my RV and practiced my Nanite manipulation, even improving my Detection field and Virtual Armor to level 6. Di did come over and we shared a drink, but I wasn’t willing to make it an actual date, especially with war preparations on my mind. Still, she looked like she was maybe 35 years old, and wore a really nice dress. Maybe I should have made more of an effort to get my mind off of the coming war?
A week after he arrived, Silan was at the shooting range giving a speech to the troops about the combat tactics of the Grilk and the GCA, Olivia had volunteered to train the mages to defend the town, and I was sitting in my office between meetings equipping and unequipping my 9mm. I had told the people that we would pay double the manufacturing cost instead of asking for half the profit for any approved manufacturing of goods needed for our defense. This had resulted in dozens of people bringing forward ideas on how they can help us, including some that didn’t even have borrowed equipment. Still, if there idea seemed like a good one I rented them the equipment. This had resulted in the city’s income dropping to only thirty thousand for the last week, as most of the money we were bringing in was being paid to the people making the goods.
Someone had informed me that some combination of the Inventory skill and the RP paradigm allowed you to set preset outfits up on your character sheet, then auto-equip the sets by selecting them. I only had one liter of storage space, though, so I had set the dress shirt and khaki pants I was wearing to both my normal and military loadout, but added the Glock and its holster to the military one. I didn’t really need it, as I had a power that could do more damage and fire faster, and only had the one full magazine Paul had sold me, but there was something about holding a gun that screamed “military”.
The alert startled me. I thought I would only get tiny scraps of experience on nanite based skills now that the System wasn’t helping me with my nanites. ‘Vera, how did I level up? Shouldn’t it be really hard for me to level up that skill given my class?’
‘Actually, that class leveled up because your theoretical knowledge of the skill vastly outstrips the practical level of the skill.’
‘You mean spacial magic?’
‘That and quantum physics. They are at four and six respectively, so your brain processing the data gives you a good bit of experience every time you use it just because you understand the theory behind what you are doing.’
‘Inventory uses quantum physics?’
‘The first version does. The second version uses Cosmic Physics, the closest thing Earth has being Cosmology, as they both deal with phenomenon that happen at the massive scale. The third version uses something called Universal Physics, which is the understanding of how the universe works and why the laws of reality are the way they are.’
‘So, the first creates pockets by manipulating quantum phenomenon, the second bends space-time, and the third bends the laws of physics?’
‘Essentially. In fact, that is why you won’t get the ability to slow time in your pocket space unless you have the second or third type.’
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‘Great. I need to learn even more alien physics. Mind getting the physics papers translated and ready for me to read them?’
‘On which subject?’
‘All of them, though I should probably start with quantum.’ As Vera started on that I looked at my inventory. It could now hold eight liters of stuff. I guess the size was based on the cube of the skill level. This was much more storage so, after checking to make sure my door was locked and my blinds were closed, I unequipped my clothes. All of them disappeared into my inventory and I was sitting buck naked behind my desk. They still didn’t take up the full eight liters, though. I would need to find more stuff to put in there to try and gain experience faster. I equipped my Combat outfit and suddenly I was properly clothed and holding a pistol. Nice. I guess the System pushed me off my chair slightly so that it could equip my pants.
I stood up and equipped and unequipped my combat outfit several times, bouncing upwards as my shoes appeared on my feet, before I heard a knock on my door. I made sure my normal clothes were equipped and answered the door. “Sir, your one o’clock appointment is here.”
“Thanks Joyce. Send them in.” I had finally gotten around to hiring a secretary, as I needed one now that I was becoming so busy. I walked back over to my desk and sat down. A few seconds later a man and woman from one of the restaurants entered carrying briefcases.
“Hello, Mr. Mayor.” the woman said.
“Please, just call me Greg.” I motioned towards one of the seats. “So, what brings you here?”
They took a seat and the man pulled a three ring binder from their briefcase. “There is a saying that an army marches on its stomach. Since the beginning of civilization the performance of an army has been largely influenced by both their availability and quality of food. That is why we are here to propose that we begin making low cost packaged food for the militia.”
“You want to start an MRE company?”
“Not just MREs. We would also provide recipes and prepared food for military kitchens so that the soldiers would have something good to eat when they return from the battlefield.”
“Most of our military action will probably be the defense of the Town and its outposts, so the kitchen thing could work well. I’m sure at some point we will need to engage in combat outside the settlements, though, so having some food the troops can take with them would be good. What are you asking for?”
“Well, the restaurant’s current Food Service Station can prepare the food, but to prepare preserved food we will need a device the System Market calls a ‘Food Preservation Station’. It can package and freeze dry food. Based on the volume we will need to prepare, we will need at least two of them.”
I quickly pulled up the Market Screen and checked on the items. Only 2500 each. We could handle that. “Sounds like we can make a deal. If nothing else we could use more preserved food.” When she came by my RV on Valentines day Di had mentioned that the food reserves would only last until the end of March, even if we bought all of the food Lawrence had.
In response, I had bought Bob a Biome Chamber, which he had loaded with powdered rock and nutrients, and was currently growing a field full of wheat and vegetables. The one million cubic meters of volume had been flattened into a 4m x500m x 500m field. This allowed him to have a meter of dirt and three meter ceilings, more than tall enough for the wheat to grow. He had been injecting the plants with various synthetic hormones to improve the efficiency with which they absorbed light, caused them to absorb nutrients faster from the soil, and had ordered the nanites in the plants to use their energy to construct sugar directly, in order to feed them more energy. This caused the wheat to undergo its normal three month growth cycle in seven to eight days. Once the Nanite Forge finishes making a Generator 3 to power the time dilation of the Biome Chamber tonight, the equivalent of an 8 megawatt generator, that would shrink by a factor of four to a harvest every two days, when we would receive hundreds of tons of wheat and vegetables. We only needed around five dry tons of food per day, so the food warehouse was quickly filled. After that we had sold most of it to Jacob, who then resold it to the people of the city, and to Fort Solinan, who sent us more trees in exchange. The Plant pods were changed to produce herbs, which received similar treatment, though far more of those ended up being exported via the Market. I also bought five more cloning pods, and we were now producing five hogs, three cows, six hundred pounds of chicken and five hundred pounds of fish every five days. That would solve our immediate food crisis, though we needed to preserve the food if we were to keep a stockpile of it. The Food Warehouse would only slow the decay.
I bought the two preservation devices and set the two of them as the renters, something I was used to doing now. “How about you prepare some sample dishes for us to try out? I’d like to have Paul and any other ex military personnel in the town taste test them and make sure that it is something that would make sense for a field kitchen or an MRE.”
“Thank you, sir.” said the man, standing up.
“No problem. If you hadn’t have brought this to my attention, I might have completely overlooked this.” I shook their hands and they left.
Once they were gone I relocked my door started reading the scientific papers while cycling my clothes on and off. Vera had pulled up multiple good papers on the subject of quantum physics, and I spent the next two hours trying to wrap my head around them. I got plenty of experience in my quantum physics skill, but I doubted I would improve my level before I understood the entire paper, and maybe not then.
A little after three in the afternoon Joyce knocked on my door and I equipped my clothes and answered the door. “Olivia asked to speak with you. Some sort of issue has arisen with the mages and she was hoping you would have a solution.”
“That’s fine. You can send her in.”
She flopped down in one of the office chair and spun it around a few times before stopping while looking at me. “Ok, I’m having two issues. One, mana capacity. You told me one time that you had over five thousand mana, but Fay is telling me that without upgrading the nodes in our brains, we can’t control more than like a billion nanites at a time. My max mana fluctuates at around a thousand. The problem with the upgrade is that it will take my Node offline for at least a day while it upgrades. That means that I will lose all control of my nanites. No magic and no other nanite based abilities like Inventory and Translation, and only the basic health functions. I don’t want to risk that when we know an attack is incoming, because it could be offline when the attack happens.”
‘Vera, any idea why I can have larger reserves than her?’
‘Your mana reserves are kind of a cheat. Remember when I taught you to put your nanites in sleep mode so that they wouldn’t decay? I’ve been using that on all of the nanites over the thousand mana since you went over the limit. If you use too many nanites, they will just replace the used ones. But because they are on standby, any skills like Regeneration and Poison Resistance that use excess nanites to fight problems can only use the one billion excess that your Node can control. Dormant nanites also use about one thousandth of the processing power that active ones do, just to keep track of them, so as you go over the limit the actual number of active nanites will decrease, hitting zero at around a trillion dormant nanites.’
“Well, I asked Vera about that, and she said my mana reserves are a cheat.” I explained the situation to Olivia, but offered to teach her the technique if she wanted it.
“Well, it will help. Even a few hundred extra mana over the limit could help greatly in battle.”
I nodded. “And problem number two?”
“Skill level. No one has a magic skill over six, and most are at three or four. You mentioned you had one at nine. Any pointers?”
“My Class actually lets me cheat a bit at that too. I can directly program the nanites to do what I want them to, then save the program as a skill. As a result, if I understand what I want them to do well enough, they can do it amazingly well. Most skills, however, work like you’re programming a neural network. It adapts and slowly improves the more you work with it, but the growth slows as you get to higher level. The one I have at nine just brings together a bunch of nanites and tells them to accelerate as quickly as possible. It’s pretty easy, and I can teach it to you to do it, but it will probably start at a low level. The only benefit I could see for it is that it is extremely energy efficient.”
“Might as well learn that too. An efficient way to fight will be useful when we run low on mana.” With that I spent the rest of the day teaching her the technique to get her nanites to go into sleep mode, and the Mana Bullet skill. Even for her it started at level 3 and could use as little as a tenth of a point of mana to fire a round on par with a pistol. I also taught her the Drain Electricity skill, so that she and the others could recharge their nanites at will and not have to wait for their body to generate the power for them.