It took our engineers more than a month to get the first Valkyre prototype ready for its test flight.

I have to admit that this was partly my fault. No, not because I refused Naveen the use of my (25m)³ NADA. Get real, I needed that thing to get my Constructor done, and Naveen had access to enough 625m³-NADAs to get it done.

The Valkyre was designed to be built with those kinds of NADAs from the get-go.

Most of the delay was an argument inside of the security division about which variant to build first if you can believe it. They wasted more than a week on that before they even started. That stopped when I sent them a ‘friendly reminder’ that the base unit was the same for all variants.

Heck, a single 625er-NADA was enough to build the complete set of weapon modules in one go as well. That left the mission modules. In my opinion, they should have started with something simple. The freight variant was easy and fast. Or the basic bot transport, considering that we needed something like that anyway.

But no, they actually went with the Fafnir. Good idea, start with the most expensive, most complicated, and probably least used variant first. But whatever, that’s their decision.

And ‘somehow’ its specs got leaked to Captain Murdock, who promptly deman… ahem, politely asked for a gunship with the same kind of fusactor.

Not that I had not already expected that, mind you. He just needed to decide on the weapon loadout. If he wanted to change it from what I had prepared. Two full-sized grav guns, fixed forward, two disrupter turrets, one each ventral and dorsal, as well as four particle beams in side-mounted turrets. Oh, and of course eight point defense grav guns.

Like the Fafnir, it had fuel for around two days.

But to get back to the delays with the Valkyre… the one thing that was my fault here was that when they pulled the first armor plate out of the NADA, they broke the crane, and I got an irate call from the chief engineer about it.

To give you a direct quote: “What the fuck is this fucking shit? How fucking heavy is it that it breaks the fucking crane? Are you fucking us with this crap?”

It was at this moment that I realized that I had forgotten to explain the new eight-dimensional armor material that Warden came up with.

A careful explanation was in order here. I called that stuff Synth-Ultra-Carbon, or SUC for short. Because it was still made mostly out of carbon, with some tungsten thrown into the mix.

The problem was that it had a bit more than five times the density of standard carbon-composite armor, which resulted in the armor plate being five times as heavy as the engineers expected. And being frugal in that matter, they used the small crane, which should be enough for carbon-composite, but not enough for SUC.

Now, why use SUC instead of CC? Simple, SUC may have five times the density, but more than 15 times the strength. In other words, 1mm thick SUC weighted as much as 5mm thick CC but protected as good as 15mm CC. Or for the old-school folks, the equivalent of 53.7mm of RHA.

So yeah, it took them a day to fix the crane enough to move it out of the way, and another couple of days before they could divert the large crane from its current task. So in a way, those three days delay were my fault.

Why they did not just use a tractor beam is anybody's guess I think. The rest… would you believe me that they needed a week to build the fusactor? A fricking week. They had the goddang plans for the dang things right there. They just had to order the NADA to build the parts. A couple of days max.

But no, they argued, and went over the equations, over the whole construction, to ‘make sure it is safe’. Only for them to use the exact same blueprints that I had created with Warden’s help. Not a single change, not even the paint scheme was different. Talk about wasted time.

Needless to say, by the time they had the Valkyre ready for its test flight, my Constructor was almost ready as well.

The funny thing was that the Einherjar had to… divert a couple dozen ‘curious civilians’, aka spies, from entering the water dome, where the fully civilian, completely mundane Constructor was built, while the very normal construction hall where the revolutionary military vehicle was put together flew completely under the radar.

The delays for the Valkyre got worse though. Halfway through the beast being put together, they finally got the idea through their thick heads that they needed to test all the mission modules. Not just the armageddon variant with the name of Fafnir. Fortunately, all the other modules were a tiny bit faster to build. Who would have guessed that the most complicated variant took the longest to put together?

After what seemed to be an eternity, they finally put the Valkyre through its flight tests. They used the Isimud to bring the prototypes, yes while they were building the modules they had the time to build a second head section, to the very same quarry where we had tested our first weapons.

And then tested them. And tested them. And tested them. By the time they had the flight tests finished, after three weeks, my Constructor was already done with building the barracks.

I had the platoon decide on the aesthetics, though I used the same SUC for the outer walls, one meter thick, and paired Q-links instead of windows. Oh sure, it would take a month or so to finish the interior and furnish it, but it was mostly done.

I had ‘sacrificed’ the ludicrously large parking lot that nobody ever used. Its entrance was directly opposite the entrance to the fortress, and there was a skyway on the third floor connecting the two buildings.

There was also a tunnel between the second basements. I also integrated a big 572GW fusactor and a 15625m³, or (25m)³, NADA for their equipment needs.

After seeing what the Constructor could do in a single week, James asked me to start a second one. Not that I could do that, mind you. The second one was already a week into the build by that time.

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What? You think I did not understand what a boon this thing would be for Enki?

And so it came that the Constructor was already placing the foundation for my new lab/workshop when Naveen and his people finally moved on to the weapons test phase.

And the worst thing about that? They had not even started building the 100x100x100m NADA that they said they wanted. Sometimes I just don’t understand people.

The good thing though was that we were all invited to observe the weapons test in VR. Michael even included Nate and some of his engineers. Something about giving the license for those new weapons to Vandermeer. I could live with that, honestly. And as long as we did not sell the big weapons, like the grav guns or the particle beams, and certainly not the disruptor, I did not care much about it.

Now to the credit of the Vandermeer engineers, they understood almost immediately what the improved Chalybs Imber meant, even though they mostly viewed the Gatling Gauss with a bit of indifference.

They now had the technology to build a Gauss gun that would equal, or even surpass, any rail gun. Not a grav gun, as the very fact that the mass of the projectile had no impact on the muzzle velocity, was simply not beatable. But suddenly the Gauss gun was a very good second place. And one where Vandermeer had the virtual monopoly, as Enki did not plan to sell weapons any time soon.

This also meant that for virtually everybody, the new Gauss guns would be the best they could get.

The PACs caused more of a stir. From Enki personnel as well as Vandermeer people. Understandable, as without knowing about the proton lance, it was an entirely new technology. Add to that that it was flashy as heck… yeah, I could see that it would be a sales leader in the future. The pulses lasted, as I already stated, only three microseconds, but the afterimage remained quite a bit longer. Long enough that the next pulse was already long gone by the time it faded.

It created the image of a blindingly bright white beam, similar to what the proton lance produced. Sure, it had only .15% of the energy of the lance, but for any not fully solid projectile, one pulse was enough to disintegrate it. Three to four pulses should be enough to take out any moderately armored vehicle as well. Unfortunately, any solid projectile was mostly immune to it. But anything that fired solid slugs heavy enough to go through the 25mm thick SUC armor of the Valkyre was something it should not face in the first place.

Sorry but not sorry. We can protect our skimmers only so much, and I had armored this thing so thoroughly that the only things posing a realistic threat to it were anti-ship weapons. If a skimmer was confronted with anti-ship weaponry, any skimmer, its only chance of survival was to hoove it to safety.

As it was, I was proud that I had managed to make this assault skimmer virtually immune to any anti-skimmer weapons out there.

But to get back to the weapons tests, the heavy MG as well as the autocannons were nothing all that interesting either. Sure, they were new and shiny, but proven, old technology just in a new exterior.

That left the good one for last though. The plasma cannon impacted quite explosively, if you forgive me my pun here.

For one, it ripped a new, big hole into the stone wall of the quarry. Yes, it was very effective as a weapon.

But more important was that it was new and shiny, and for real this time. Something the world had not seen before, like the PACs. And again, Vandermeer was getting the virtual monopoly on it.

That had the regrettable side effect that I was now required to answer a barrage of questions about it. At one point I squirted everybody the specs of that thing, but noooo they still had inane questions to ask.

That mostly concluded the weapon trials. Mostly, because we had the SEAD, the GA, the AS, and the Bomber variant still to test. And of course, the Fafnir. Can’t forget the Fafnir, can we?

To make things short, neither the SEAD, nor the GA or the AS, and for sure not the Bomber variant caused more than a mild interest.

I mean, anti-radiation missiles, unguided rockets, multi-homing missiles, or bombs, none of them were even approaching being new. Sure, the new ones had better computers, and for the homing missiles I used small grav coils instead of rocket motors, but that was just detail work.

And then they tested the Fafnir. They had gone and used the two additional hardpoints for plasma cannons. I personally would have gone with the 30mm-Gatling Acs but they were the military people.

Needless to say that the Vandermeer people were salivating at the sight of this monster. And they were also pretty disappointed when they were told that no, Enki would not sell this technology. Oh, they could make the fusactor themselves. That was not the problem.

No, the problem was the proton lances and the disruptor. The last one especially. We remained firm in that respect though. We would sell them the finished Fafnir if they seriously wanted it, but only them.

And so it happened that we in the end finally tested, and approved, the Valkyre, exactly as I had designed it, despite all the delays.

Yes, I understand testing is important. But let’s get real, after almost two months, we had barely gotten a hint about what the Valkyre could do, but on the other hand, we had wasted so much time just doing basic flight tests that the weapon tests were seriously delayed.

And we still had barely scratched what was necessary for weapon tests either. What we had was basic functionality, and we could use it to ferry Einherjar around. A bit costly if something went wrong, but if we had the Valkyre piloted remotely, then no humans were in danger.

Not that I expected anything to go wrong. Except for human error that is. Think about it, I took two weeks, in real-time, to design it.

At 240:1 that meant I invested around 10 virtual years into it. I had Calliope go over the software again and again. I simulated every single permutation of the electronics. I can’t even imagine how much computing power Warden used to perfect this skimmer.

True, nothing of that was real world, but simulations had become so good, that only something completely unprecedented could pose a serious risk anymore. It might not work quite as well as I imagined, but that was a risk that any new design had. There was only negligible risk of a catastrophic failure though.

Not that I could convince Naveen and his troupe of that.

Nonetheless, the world kept turning, the water kept flowing and time kept creeping forward, and I was busy with other things. One special joy of mine was seeing the new building practically grow from the ground.

It was a big building. 100x200m, eight stories above ground, four below. A good quarter of the building was a big, continuous workspace going from the ground to the roof. It had the same 1m thick SUC exterior walls, though except for some load-bearing walls and columns, the interior was standard carbon composite.

Even when the building itself was done, it would take me a few months to fit it out. Naturally, a single floor was reserved for all my server racks. Finally getting the rooms in the fortress back.

I should probably remodel the north wing, but that was for a later time.

Enki was doing moderately well for all that time… just kidding, we kept increasing our profits and were by now at a bit less than $120 billion/month. Honestly, it was becoming a bit boring that way.

The Manhattan project was slowly taking on steam. We were negotiating about the whole island, and frankly, with the Constructor, and its siblings, it would be really fast to set up some living space there.

In other news, about Blumenthal, we had the hot, interesting new information of… nothing. Bupkiss. Whoever was behind him, they were pretty anal about operational security. Sure, from the chat log we had found, they had a few lapses here and there, but at this moment, Blumenthal had nothing of interest to us in his Crystal collection.

It is a bit annoying if the opposition is not composed of arrogant idiots, let me tell you. I know, how inconsiderate of them, right? As it was, we were looking for some fixers that did no fixing in Philly, DC, Chicago, and so on. It was slow going though.