Just as I was about to leave I got a message that the manager of the apartments had found a good location for the warehouse, a supplementary building for a Baptist church. It was normally used for church socials and the like, but it was a thirty by thirty foot concrete block building, making it only slightly larger than we needed. I teleported back to town, bought a Warehouse 2 with what little money the town had, and walked over. The building was mostly empty, but one good feature of the warehouse was that if objects existed in the space the warehouse was taking over the objects would be absorbed into the warehouse. Once I had set it up, I ordered Gary to assign all seven thousand plus citizens in Anarchist’s Redoubt, all three thousand plus in St. Nicholas’s Outpost, and the few hundred in the mining outpost a cubic meter of space to store things in. I then put a bulletin on the board about giving them storage space, as well as the fact that you could rent additional warehouse space for one zerka per cubic meter per month.
With that taken care of, the rest of the day was spent trying to set up a sanctuary for the non-combatants to hide in if they attacked the town. I went to the basement of the church where they had Sunday School rooms and, after storing the trash that had been left behind and asking the Recycler to deal with it, I went to a room that I knew was completely under ground. As the city was out of money, I bought an autominer with my own money and set it to start digging a ramp downward at a ten degree angle with platforms every ten meters of depth to stop runaway rolling objects and block line of sight in case someone was shooting at us, and store the material in the warehouse. After a minute it was through the concrete block and I was seeing dirt. Realizing that I was risking tunnel collapse I quickly purchased something called a “Builder” which could build buildings. I instructed it to use concrete and rebar to reinforce the tunnel. We were running a bit low on both, but once we reached the stone level I would start sending any calcium carbonate, silicon oxide, and most of the magnetite that was being removed so that they could make more.
With nothing to do but wait, I left for my RV. It was already past six pm, so I had worked more than a full day. Because the city now had a settlement core they had started offering an exchange rate of $5 per zerka. This let the hundred thousand or so people in town use cash at the local businesses and the local businesses to exchange it for zerka, which they could use for trade. I teleported over to the city and went to the nearest building where a money exchange was located. The $23500 I had in my inventory became 4700 zerka.
The next day I noticed that the city had an extra fourteen thousand in its account, and I had an extra hundred. Now we had a bit of money to do things. I bought a chemical processor with my money as well, to start extracting the calcium carbonate, silicates, and magnetite from the rock that was being mined and send it to the bulk warehouse at the main mine. All of the other minerals were going into my cubic meter of storage space, so that no one could claim that it was city property. I wanted to see if it was possible to build new settlements with a small amount of equipment, and this was giving me a lot of useful information.
A few hours later, seeing that I had enough rare minerals for it now that the chemical plant had processed all of the material the mine had produced over the night, I rented one of the city’s Nanite Forges to make me a Nanite Forge. In general if the nanite forge was making you something that was System tech, you needed thirty to fifty percent of the object’s value in raw materials, and at full power it could make about ten thousand zerka of value in product per day. So a quick estimate would say that the Nanite Forge would cost me 15-25 thousand in materials and take about five days. Due to the mining, however, I had the raw materials so that was free. The actual time it would take was also four days, nineteen hours. I paid the thousand zerka rental fee in advance. I could figure out later how I wanted to use the last two days of manufacturing time. The other nanite forge was ordered to produce a Generator 3. We were demanding slightly more power than we had to spare, and that had resulted in Bob having to slightly lower the amount of power his time dilation field was using, making the food production cycle five hours longer. I didn’t want to slow food production, however, as this town, the city, and other settlements were depending on the food we produced, so I was making another generator to guarantee that we didn’t have any power shortages.
After a few hours in the office I had finished all of the paperwork and met with everyone that wanted to see me, so I returned to the church basement. The miner was below the water table now, and the bottom of the ramp had a few centimeters of water covering it. Thankfully, the miner could just ignore the water and dig underneath it. With nothing for the builder to do, as we were digging through solid stone that needed little reinforcement, and little for the chemical plant to do, as it was so much faster than the miner, I ordered the chemical plant to start making a water sealant and ordered the builder to apply it to any place that was leaking. The water sealant was some alien epoxy that could rapidly set underwater, so soon everything that wasn’t being currently mined had been sealed. The miner could then rapidly send all of the water to the Chemical Warehouse where the city’s water supply was being kept.
Another week passed with things continuing as normal. The city made around seventy five thousand and thanks to the large amount of material my mining effort had processed and the sale of raw materials I had made over a hundred thousand. If we ran into a financial crisis later, I would just sell the stockpile of millions of zerka in rare minerals the city had. For now, however, we were saving them in case anyone in town needed them to manufacture goods in the Nanite Forge.
The last two days of my manufacturing time was spent on a Medium Nuclear Reactor, a more powerful version of the small nuclear reactors I was using. It produced five times as much as the Generator 3, but at a cost of only twenty thousand Zerka. Though it could burn one hundred times the fuel of the small version I had used before, the fact that it was only powering the Sanctuary meant that it generally only ran at five percent or less. If it needed to run at full power, though, I had about a month’s supply of uranium and thorium in the Sanctuary’s warehouse.
One of the first things I had made with my new Nanite Forge was a Warehouse 3, followed by a Bulk Warehouse 3, a Chemical Warehouse 3, and a Food Warehouse 3, renting one of the town’s Nanite Forges to speed up the job. I was currently printing a teleporter so that the people could evacuate to here from anywhere in the town or its outposts, and would give it an Outpost Core as well, so that they could have something automatically control the devices. An Outpost core could only control limited number of devices, but there weren’t that many down here.
Once the miner had gotten underneath the water level and everything had been sealed against leaks, the chemical plant had been set to making memory foam, nylon, and plastic. The Builder then started setting up many bunkhouses, with one hundred bunk beds per room. The bunk beds were all plastic with nylon sheets. There was also a restaurant with a Food Service Terminal, plastic tables and chairs, which could use the food stored in the Food Warehouse to make meals for them. It wasn’t fancy, but once it was finished the people would be able to live down there for months once the food warehouse was full, or almost indefinitely once I made a Conservation Core for them and upgraded it. The main limiting factor in that case would be that they would need to continuously mine rock and extract the radioactive minerals to keep the power online, but I had chosen nuclear power rather than the standard generators because the standard ones could be tracked through hyperspace, giving away the location of the Sanctuary. When fighting an evil megacorp like the GCA, I didn’t want to take the chance that they would track the people down and try to invade them.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
Instead of walking the entire staircase to leave, as it was over a kilometer long due to the sanctuary being over two hundred meters below the ground, I had downloaded a new power, Linked Teleport. At low levels it could only teleport you to a teleporter, but at level three or four you should learn to order the teleporter to move you to another one, and at level six you got the ability to teleport from the teleporter to another location within your range. I linked the power to the one in the middle of town and used it.
I gritted my teeth as the pain went away due to my pain resistance skill. Apparently, at low levels the teleportation actually left some of your cells and even more chemicals from your cells behind, which caused damage throughout your body. Thankfully, my HP recovery would fix the problem within a few minutes.
I would definitely need to attend this meeting. I tried reaching out to the teleporter there, but it was just outside my range, so I just ordered the teleporter I was standing on to send me there. I went to the building where Paul and Silan were reviewing the footage and joined them. Once it was time for the meeting, I walked with them to the field where they the meeting would take place. Over a thousand people were standing there, including all of the town leaders and most of the team leaders. Good. It might not be official, but Di, Tony, Tom, Paul, Simon, and Lawrence were pretty much the town council.
Once everyone got quiet Paul informed the people of the facts of the situation. Over two thousand Grilk and around a hundred sapient beings of other races, as well as over a thousand non-sapient alien creatures were spotted just over a kilometer outside the mine, just outside the range of the detection field, by a scout from Fort Solinan, and was verified by a scout team from the militia. They obviously could detect our field and avoid it. Silan then told them that standard GCA procedure was to attack from the direction of the rising sun in order to blind the enemy troops, which is how they knew when the attack would begin. Since detection they had set up their camp in that area, being careful not to get within our detection grid’s range.
“Can’t we just attack their camp while they sleep?” asked a man in the crowd.
“The GCA equips all of its military facilities, including temporary camps, with anti-air and anti-ground automated turrets.” responded Silan. “Any attempt to do so would just result in the troops dying.”
Several other bad ideas were proposed and rejected before everyone ran out of ideas, so Paul took over the meeting. “I know you guys are scared. I am too, and I served two terms in the middle east. But we need to protect this mine, not just for the resources it provides, but to send a message to the GCA that they can’t invade us and get away with it. If we don’t at least try and stop them here, they will have taken their first step to conquering Earth, which is something I’ll never allow to happen. We will be stationing anyone that wants to fight on the wall, where we will drive the enemy back to their settlement.
If you don’t want to fight, however, we can always use more people to take more ammunition to the people on the wall, or to bring meals to the fighters, or to help people who have been wounded but not killed. Or in other roles. Anyone that is killed will be sent back to the Revival Room in the city, and the militia will cover the cost of their stay there until they revive. So you don’t have to worry about being captured by the enemy or being left out there if you are shot.”
“I don’t know if it will help,” I said as loud as a could, “But the city will pay anyone that participates in the battle as a non-combatant one hundred zerka per day, and anyone that participates in a combat role two hundred zerka, not that we are expecting the battle to go on for more than a day.”
The people started nodding. Many of them wanted to buy something from the Market, and that money was definitely useful.
After the meeting I shook hands and thanked everyone for coming, then, when most of the people who didn’t want to help had left, I went to talk with the town leaders. There I saw Jacob. “Hey, I wasn’t expecting to see you here.”
“Well, I figured that the people might need some counseling in this time of need, and, even though I doubt it will be necessary, many of the people here doubt the stories of people reviving after death and will want someone to perform their Last Rites if they should die. And, if nothing else, I can help treat wounds.”
“That will mostly be my job,” said Tim as he walked up to us. “I brought my team, ten ex medical staff, to help out. Even if you won’t really die, we’ll try to keep you alive as long as possible. Plenty of people will get shot, and some may even lose limbs, and we’ll be there to stop the bleeding and remove the bullet. Which reminds me, have you figured out what you’ll be doing with the severed limbs? We’ll need them if they are going to be reattached.”
“Bob’s going to dump the animals in his cloning tanks just before sunrise and store them there.” said Paul. “If they are too damaged, he can also grow replacement limbs in a few hours each, but having the old one is still preferable. Or the people can go with prosthetics, if they are more into the whole cyborg thing. The System can make some really nice ones.”
Tim nodded. “In that case, I’d like to take over one of these buildings to use as a field hospital.”
Paul motioned to one near the main office. “We already emptied a building for that. Go build your M.A.S.H. unit.”
Tim nodded, and left with his team. It was after nine pm when I left for the Town. I told Vera to wake me up fifteen minutes before sunrise and went back to my RV, where I ate a quick supper and went to bed.
The next morning I went to the teleporter where several other people were waiting, including Di. The teleporter was only capable of sending ten or eleven people at a time, and so many people wanted to go to help at the mines that a line had formed. “So, I didn’t expect to see you lining up.” I said to Di. “I also didn’t know you owned casual clothes.” She was wearing jeans and an AC/DC tee-shirt.
“Well, I bought this shirt as a teen in the late eighties. I wasn’t sure it still fit.” She pointed at my own jeans and super hero t-shirt. “You look like you’re used to it, though.”
“Well, I didn’t start dressing up until I was forced to be a politician. So, are you going to fight?”
“I’ll be helping the medical teams. Maybe I’ll actually get a use out of majoring in psychology. If not, I had enough medical classes to help.”
I nodded. “Are you armed?”
“I didn’t see the point in a counselor carrying a gun. Besides, I know you won’t let them inside.”
I pulled the pistol and holster out of my inventory and held it out to her. “Well, just in case, you can add that to a combat load out and auto-equip it on command. I wouldn’t want you to risk dying just because it’s unlikely.”
She smiled, nodded, then the item disappeared. As it was our time to use the teleporter, I stepped onto the platform and, once everyone was on, the operator sent us to the mine. Five minutes after arriving, as I neared the wall, Paul made another announcement to everyone in the camp. The enemy had just entered the detection field and would be here in less than two minutes.