chapter 101
POV: Bob
Each time I received a message from Forward Horizon, I felt a bit of worry that something might be wrong. As the latest message finished decrypting, I relaxed as it was just an update telling me that they finished clearing the second portal.
It was going to be interesting going through all the gathered materials. Hopefully, my underlings were doing a good job at storing and processing everything. It would have been nice to be able to go with them, but I was the only one who could be left to guard this base of ours.
With everything good with the ship and the captain, it was time to get back to work. There was a lot to do with the factory.
The current configuration was excellent for producing weapons and ammunition, and while we will be producing some backups and keeping some ammo production online, most of this needed to be converted over to producing other things.
With the market we had available here, we couldn't sell any weaponry as that would require extra licenses and inspections. That was something we would want to avoid. While those would make us the most credits, there were some other things that we could make that would get close to that profit.
One of those things would be rations. Food was quite expensive here, but that was to be expected, as the moon only really had one place where food could be grown, and this was this city. On the planet below, food was also surprisingly expensive, but that was because of the hostile environment.
Already packed meals with lots of calories for the biologicals would always be a good way to make credit. Lola and I have discussed ways of mass-producing calories using the captain’s store of Earth plants, but they just aren't competitive enough with what's out there currently.
There are way better plants to be found, but I believe Lola will eventually get us good enough samples that we can add this to our production lines.
The second best is equipment for life support. A lot of equipment needed replaceable parts, especially scrubbers for different types of air compounds. While CO2 would be the most prevalent, there were other compounds that needed to be filtered out, as not every biological needed the same air mixture.
These needed to be for personal use all the way up to large bases. The market seems to always be in demand for these items, and even my best estimates for how much we could produce would not meet the need the market has.
Using AR was just so convenient for planning. With simple editing tools, I could change the current layout I could see of the factory floor and start placing machines and simulating workflows.
Some tasks were simpler to complete than others, so perhaps only one machine was needed for a part of the line, but it needed to possibly be fed by multiple machines so it wouldn't just be sitting there not doing any work.
Of course, sometimes it's better for some machines not to work optimally, as trying to get them to be optimally used might throw off the rest of the workflow, and I do not have infinite space to work with to make close to everything optimal.
A large portion of the factory will also need to be kept to process the materials we will be getting from all the portals. While we will be processing everything down to the very best each of those materials can give us, the byproducts should be enough to run the rest of the factory on.
Very rarely, there might even be materials recovered that could be converted to food and perhaps some other things as well. Also, knowing the captain, he might have some crazy ideas that we might need to accommodate as well, so a part of the factory will also need to be general purpose, that could be used to make anything.
Stolen novel; please report.
As always, I wished I had more space, but the constraints made it so much more interesting. I fell into what the captain calls a flow state, as everything I did seemed to be exactly what I needed. Simulations were not able to keep up with my own planning, as I seemed to always come up with more optimal configurations.
It was always fascinating to see the captain in this state. Whenever he was designing something, especially for the ship, it was just so much more efficient than any simulation could hope to be. There are many other things he was like that with as well, but what always surprised me was how good the captain was at most things.
A perfect example was the current factory. It was far from optimal, but it was definitely good enough for our needs at the time. We had this base fortified so fast, but he didn't configure it in the flow state like he usually did with stuff he was truly good at.
It was easy to mistake his knowledge for true expertise, but if you knew him well enough, you could see that most of the time he was using someone else's knowledge.
I have not asked him yet where he got this type of knowledge, but the more I observed him, the easier it was to notice it.
When he truly knew something, he did it immediately like it was a part of him, but when he didn’t, he needed a moment to think, like remembering a conversation before he started giving out orders.
He has also started delegating more and more as the rest of us have started to develop in our specialisations, eclipsing his understanding of the subject. I do not know if he did it on purpose, but all of us truly treasure that fact.
Now I have three different configurations that should work excellently for our needs. The question is what should we focus on more: making credits, processing portal materials, or having more capacity to make specialised items.
I did not yet have the data from the portal clears, so I do not exactly know how much material we were getting from each one. It seems that I need to put my plans on hold for a moment and wait for the return of the others.
Also, while making credits was important to keep up with operational costs, it wasn't that important and perhaps I should scale it down even more. Once again I went into planning mode, but I didn’t get far as an alert brought my attention to the outside of the base.
For a moment, I was confused as I didn’t see anything, but soon the pattern recognition software showed hints of possibly hidden unknowns.
Whatever was out there was trying to hide itself, and it was doing an excellent job of it. Sometimes something moved around. Whenever they did, the software seemed to get a better hint of their outline. It wasn’t itself confident enough to classify anything, but I was pretty sure there were some biologicals out there.
Were they scouting or was this something more serious? Then I felt something. It was like someone was searching for me. All of a sudden, I felt ripping. Oh, someone was trying to take the bond I had with captain and make it their own.
Their attempts were weak, and only a few seconds after they started they realised that they wouldn't be able to take the bond for themselves. Seems like enough time has passed for that cult to start targeting us once again.
The method of attack changed. Now instead of completely taking the bond for themselves, they applied pressure constricting my bond with captain, connecting their own bond to me, basically making a bypass so that now I would be under their control.
If the captain was here, this wouldn’t work, but right now, technically they were in control.
“Shut down the defences,” came the command, and I followed it because that would be funnier.
The turrets went into standby mode; electrified walls shut down.
“Now open the front gate.”
That voice sounded so nasally, and I could even picture the current bondholder. It was a small, gangly creature, more afraid than anything else.
The gate started to open up and for the first time I saw the hidden forces outside. There must have been at least 40 people, all of them looking kinda rough. My bondholder wasn't like them. He, at least, was dressed nicely and didn't seem to be dirty.
Also, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen that gang before. From the database, I pulled out the local information we had of this place, and yes, this was one of the gangs that was in charge of the territory we were in.
So perhaps that cult isn’t as free as I originally thought they were if they were using local gangs and someone obviously disposable. I got back to planning.
They were quite cautious about the approach, so I got quite a lot of work done. Now they were all in front of the main building, waiting to get in.
“Open the front door,” my current bondholder told me. This time I didn’t do as he told me.
I now focused fully on the cameras. They had all come inside and even brought two trucks that they were probably going to fill up with the most expensive stuff they could find here, and the rest they were most likely going to destroy.
They were all confused because the front door didn’t open; instead, the gate that had so graciously let them in started closing behind them. None of them suspected anything for a bit, but then the front door just didn’t click open and an argument started.
“I said open the front door, and why did you close the gate?” my bondholder now communicated with me, panic in his command.
Not talking back would probably be more frightening, so yeah, let's go with that. The gate now slammed closed with all the turrets popping out, aiming at the intruders.
“What the hell is this? Make it stop!”
“I told you this was a bad idea!”
“Why are we here?”
“What’s happening?”
All of that was said basically simultaneously as all of them started to panic. My bondholder was yelling at me, but I simply didn’t care. With a simple mental command all of them were designated as hostiles.
Some of them seemed to have some magical skills to fight back, but there was too much firepower on our side. Most of them were dead in a few seconds, with three of them surviving nearly six seconds.
There wasn't much left of the two trucks, but now there were some extra materials for the factory.
“All right, we have some cleaning up to do. Let's get the front entrance looking clean once again,” I ordered my subordinates, who got to work.
To the captain, I sent out a message that the problem was solved, as they had already gotten a notification that intruders had infiltrated. They really shouldn’t have let the captain have that amount of time to fortify this base.
Hopefully, more of them will attack, because that would be so much fun.