When the next Tuesday rolled around, I was still in a bad mood. Not only had Svenja stopped me from the initial tests of the hoverbike, but she, along with Lt. Thomson, categorically denied me ever using it.

It was ‘too dangerous’, they said. ‘Too much risk’ of something going wrong. I survived more than 18 years without them. I should be able to decide for myself. But no, not happening.

At the beginning of the meeting, I was accordingly hunched over my cup of brew, softly grumbling to myself, and when the others came and sat down, I growled a halfhearted morning.

They all looked at me a bit surprised, and Maggie exclaimed softly:

“Fuck, what’s bitten her?”

Michael the traitor on the other hand was completely unperturbed when he answered her:

“Don’t mind her. She is a bit grumpy because her guards are actually doing their job.”

I just rolled my eyes and hissed, not dignifying his statement with an answer.

Not that that stopped Marcel from snarking:

“What? They stopped her from a stroll in the park or what?”

That earned him several scathing looks, and even Michael rolled his eyes at him.

“Do you seriously think that Vivian would even be interested in a stroll through a park?”

He sighed and then continued much more lightly:

“No, they don’t let Vivian play with her newest toy.”

“And that is enough to make her sulk like that?”

Oh, how nice. I apparently could not even have a bad mood now and then. Marcel was not getting on my good side right now, though I ignored him for the moment.

And thankfully, Michael changed the topic.

“Well, as we are all now here, first, let us welcome Travis Murdock to the board, as our new Chief Naval Officer.”

Yes, we had decided that Travis needed a seat on the board. It was, of course, impractical for him to commute from L5 to NYC and back once a week, even if it took a good civilian ship only around 90 minutes to do so.

As a result, Travis was ‘present’ by use of an Incarnate, something those bots were explicitly created to provide.

Interestingly, when we invited him to the C-suite and the board, I offered to give him 0.91% of my ownership. I mean, come on, I had 80%, I could afford it.

Strangely though, the others decided that my stake, as well as the ones of Michael and Ben, should remain where they were. Instead, each of the others transferred 0.075% of their stocks to Travis, giving each of them 0.83%.

I did try to argue, but it was like talking to a wall. Nobody wanted to explain it to me, but for some reason, they thought my having 80% was important, and so I gave up fighting against it after a very unsuccessful week.

Not that I was particularly concerned at that very moment, mind you. I was just too busy being peeved off.

As it was, Travis stood up and did a small bow.

“Thank you all for your welcome. I look forward to working together with all of you.”

Again, I grunted a hello, even though the others were more friendly with their greetings. Give me some room here, please. I had planned the hoverbike for more than four months, I had essentially created the Constructor and my new shop specifically because I wanted to build it.

And I did not want to build it just because I wanted to see if it could be done. I wanted to ride the dang thing. And now I learned that it was simply ‘too dangerous’ for me to use it.

Did nobody realize that I had survived for 18 years all on my own?

Thankfully, Travis did not seem to hold my curtness against me. Of course he had worked with me quite a lot while we designed the corvettes, so he knew I usually was not quite that impolite.

I had already gotten used to him insisting on wearing his ‘uniform’ in VR, but even I was surprised that he somehow managed to program the holo emitter of the Incarnate to not only project his hat, but his full uniform as well.

I had designed those things and I did not know that they could project clothing as well. Creating that hack could not have been easy.

My mind boggled at the thought that he had invested that much time and effort, not to mention almost certainly quite a bit of money, just to display his uniform in those meetings.

But I could muse about Travis’ idiosyncrasies some other time, as Michael continued:

“Now… how are we going with production? Are we on course to satisfy the demand for Q-links as planned? It should be in a month when we reach break even, right?”

He looked at Marcel, who flinched and sighed.

“No… at the current projection, we are about eight months away from that point, but that is subject to change.”

It was Maynard who spoke out loud what most of us were thinking:

“Wait, how can it be eight months when it was six months five months ago?”

Marcel let out a heavy breath and pulled up a projection of some charts.

“The green line is our production capacity over time, while the red line is the demand. As you can see, the red line is steeper than the green line. In other words, the demand is growing faster than our production capacity. Somehow people are still finding new uses for Q-links.

The result is that the demand has almost tripled from what we thought it was five months ago.”

Michael nodded solemnly.

“So… subject to change means if somebody finds another new usage for Q-links, the demand will grow further.”

“Yes… but our production capacity has increased faster than projected as well. You can see the uptick at the time when James got the Constructor to work on new factories. Still not enough to catch up with demand, but if he gets a second one, or maybe a third one, we can probably manage to satisfy the demand in three to four months… if no new uses for Q-links are discovered. If the demand grows as it has in the past, with two Constructors, it will take us 11 months, and with three Constructors five months.”

James sighed.

“Unfortunately, we already have sold the next five constructors, and they still take a month to build.”

For a moment, everybody was silent, before Michael spoke up.

“Could we build a multi-story construction hall for Constructors?”

James blew out a wheeze.

“Yes, that should be no problem. If we use SUC, we should be able to get it to five construction points on top of each other. That would be 300m high. Do you want me to upgrade the hall?”

“No… I doubt you could do that without interrupting the current production. No, I thought about us building a new construction hall at Cryder Point. Remove the ruins there, and if we build it 300m high, we should be able to build 20 Constructors at once, when the hall is finished.”

“That is possible, but it will take us two months to build that hall.”

Something about what James had said did sound wrong, and a quick calculation showed me where he made a mistake.

“You are off James.”

His eyes focused on me and I saw him starting to contradict me before he sighed, shook his head, and then asked:

“In what way?”

“Two things. First, with five construction places on top of each other, it will be more like 350m high. Even with SUC, you need a vaulted ceiling to carry the weight. But we can put seven construction halls on top of each other.”

Michael chuckled softly while he confirmed his orders:

“I think 20 Constructors at once is enough. Heck, we have no idea how high the demand for them is.”

That, of course, was Marcel’s cue.

“Our research shows us that the demand will peter out at between 100 to 120 Constructors, excluding our own. There simply is not that much need for big construction equipment. Well, maybe 150 if we include the Moon and Mars.”

I had to frown.

“What about space-borne construction? A Constructor can build a space station as easily as a building. Or add to it.”

It seemed as if that information caught Marcel off guard, but he caught himself quickly.

“Space-borne construction is barely there either. We are essentially the only ones expanding one of their stations, or building a new one, if I interpret what you are doing around Jupiter correctly.”

“And nobody is rebuilding the present stations? Some of them are more than 200 years old by now. They have to be close to falling apart.”

“No, not really. Most of them are… what is the expression again?

Ah, yes, they are held together by spit and baling wire. Others are maintained to an acceptable standard, and a few are kept up to date. Mostly the big yard stations, as they have the workers that can do the maintenance at hand.”

Kenneth snorted.

“That is just another reason not to visit most of those death traps. But I guess when we use a couple of Constructors to build onto our yard, it will open a few new markets for them.”

“That still would stop the demand somewhere around 200.”

“And with a Constructor it is as easy to demolish the construction center as it is to pull it up. We might choose to increase the original site to build three or four at once first, but let’s be honest, the only thing we lose is some time. So yes, get to it please, James.”

Michael ordered the new course firmly, and James sighed.

“That will put us further behind the timeline to catch up to Q-link demand if we use our one Constructor for the hall for two months.”

That made me shrug.

“You can use mine for the hall. I have what I really wanted to have built. The rest can wait a bit. Though it might be an advantage if we let it finish the big NADA first.”

Maynard looked at me confused and then shook his head.

“What big NADA?”

“The new building I had started, and which is half finished, is a 100x100x100m NADA. Thought it might be useful. It should be done in two weeks.”

Michael dropped his head onto the table, while James facepalmed.

“You are building a one million cubic meter NADA? Right now?”

Yeah, James sounded a bit exasperated, though I had no idea why.

“Yes, as I said, I thought it might come in handy. But it is not really important right now. We can finish it later.”

James just sighed, while Kenneth shook his head. Most of the others just rolled their eyes, as if me building a big NADA was such a strange thing.

After a few seconds, Michael sighed and continued with the meeting.

“To conclude our operations situation, we are still running behind. But with the Constructors, it looks to become better, right?”

Marcel nodded, while James looked a bit grumpy. Kenneth raised his hand though.

“One thing, I think we should build multi-story fabrication buildings. If we can do that for the Constructors, there should be no reason to not do it for our normal production.”

After a moment of calculating, I answered him:

“If we keep at the same 350m height, we should get 34 floors at 10m height each into a building. It helps that with this we can use columns to carry the weight. If we go to a height of 20m, to use some bigger NADAs, we still will be able to get 17 stories.”

James thought for a moment.

“That should help a bit. Right now, the bottleneck is the time to erect the buildings.”

Michael nodded.

“Let’s do that then. Now, Naveen, how is our security situation?”

“In general, pretty good. We are still concerned about Blumenthal and this shadowy organization, as well as this Operation Tickle they plan. We doubt that this FMLF will be a problem for us in the foreseeable future, thanks to us providing the fertility treatments to our employees for free.

Tickle though seems to be aimed at causing a war between us and Ralcon. I am sure we would… well, probably not win, but we wouldn’t lose either. At current estimates, it would result in a draw.

That comes mostly from the fact that we now have eight divisions of Einherjar, as well as a division of the new Æesir, as we call the bots on an Achilles chassis, as well as by now 216 combat cyborgs with Achilles bodies.

The Valkyre is now in production, and we have nine squadrons of 72 Valkyres in service. For them, we have 232 air superiority modules, 118 ground attack modules, 172 bomber modules, 312 SEAD modules, and 32 Fafnir modules.

The biggest problem is that we barely have enough crews for them.

All of our holdings are well protected by grav guns, proton lances, missile batteries, and disruptors.

For the naval side of things, you have to ask Travis.”

Travis took that as his cue to continue:

“We have two dozen of those new gunships ready. Nasty little things, really. Will be a mighty surprise for any attacker.

Other than that, our first corvette squadron is halfway through production and should be ready to launch in a month, month and a half.

Right now, the station is well-defended, but we lack any ability to bring the pain to an enemy. When the corvettes are in service, that will change. If our simulations are correct, we can mission-kill any battle group in existence with one of our squadrons.”

Michael frowned.

“Wait, any battle group? You are talking about those formations that are headed by a battleship? And you think you can kill them?”

“Mission-kill. It’s not the same. It means we can stop them from finishing their mission, and send them back to the yard for repairs.”

“With corvettes? Eight corvettes at that. If I remember correctly, a battlegroup has somewhere in the range of 30 ships.”

“25 to 50, depending on who. A battleship, two to five cruisers, six to twelve destroyers, and 15 to 30 corvettes. But yes, indeed.”

“But… how? How can eight corvettes beat all that?”

Travis grinned.

“Basically? All the ships out there are simply completely obsolete. Only cruisers and battleships have a notable amount of point defense, except for the rare point-defense corvettes. Yes, they can, in the best case, deflect a rail gun slug, but that is a one-in-a-thousand occurrence. There simply is no point in wasting cubage on much point defense.”

Tiffany was visibly confused.

“But… don’t point defense weapons protect against missiles?”

Travis laughed out loud.

“Oh yes, they do. But… conventional wisdom is that missiles are barely even a nuisance. They are slow as snails, blind as a bat, and have a bite like a mosquito.”

That, for some reason, did not satisfy Tiffany.

“But… I thought the Griffin was the core of our corvette squadrons. Isn’t that a missile corvette?”

When Travis nodded, she continued:

“Why in God's name are we basing our navy on missile corvettes if missiles are so useless?”

Travis laughed again.

“Good question, lass. The thing is, conventional wisdom is only valid for the old missiles. Our missiles are a completely different kind of beast.

They are faster than any grav ship in existence, there is no way a grav ship can hide from them, and if they come as close as two kilometers, they can seriously damage or even outright destroy an enemy ship.

But nobody else knows that. That means that the four Griffins in our squadron can lob 160 missiles at the enemy, at speeds and with an accuracy that is simply unreal for everybody else, and watch everything except the battleships and possibly the cruisers blown out of the sky. What remains of the battle group will then have to stand up against the two Hunchbacks. Those are not strong enough to down a battleship on their own, even a damaged one, but they are strong enough to cause enough damage that the battleship has to get out of combat.”

I interjected:

“But that is only a temporary situation. As soon as the others begin to commission modern warships, our corvettes will just be corvettes again.”

“Ah, lass, that is the crux. Nobody has even begun building a modern warship yet.”

Maggie’s exclamation:

“What? Are they stupid?”

“Nah, lass. They are just not used to a universe with Enki in it. Usually, it takes between five and 15 years just to design a new warship class. Five for the corvettes by the way. After that, it takes between six and 32 months to build them. Again, six for the corvettes.

That means the earliest we can expect a modern corvette on any other powers navy will be in around five years.”

“Wait, five years? How come we have those new corvettes of ours launch in four to six weeks?”

“Ask Vivian.”

I sighed being dragged into the discussion again, and threw a scathing look at Travis, who just smiled and winked at me.

“It is the compression. We get our important technical and scientific personnel an ultra-jack and provide them with Archimedes systems. Even the slowest of them can sustain 60:1 compression easily. It took us a month to design the corvettes. Real-time that is. In virtual time, that makes five years.”

Travis chuckled.

“Yeah, but that was five corvette classes.”

“And we had Warden provide who knows how much computer support. A large part of the design time is just waiting for the simulations to run through.

Except for ABAS, nobody is using their best supercomputers to design new ships. And a single super-Grendel is easily equal to the best supercomputers out there.

Nobody knows how many super-Grendels Warden has by now, but I estimate we had around 50-60% of all of humanity’s computing power doing our simulations.”

Michael knocked onto the table.

“I know that is an interesting discussion, but I think we should get back to the topic of security, please. Now, Naveen, have you made any progress in respect of Blumenthal?”

“Not much, unfortunately. We have sent a psionic to read his surface mind, but all that we learned is that Blumenthal is fanatically devoted to something called ‘the path of light’.

Otherwise, not much. Vivian, you had a detective look into him. Has he found out anything?”

I shook my head.

“Nothing interesting, I fear.”

Marcel snarked:

“So, your detective was a dud?”

I shook my head.

“No… not really. He delivered quite a bit of information on Blumenthal. Information that, if we hadn’t had him under 24/7 surveillance would have been interesting. But as it is, we learned anything Sharpes found out on our own.”

Naveen nodded.

“Too bad, but I thought that would be the case. Still, if you think the detective did passable work, we can keep an eye on him in case we need something like that again.”

Michael rapped the table again.

“So… nothing new about this Operation Tickle?”

“Well, we think it has something to do with Phillip Rawleigh if we deciphered their naming schemes correctly. Other than that, we know nothing.”

“Too bad. I don’t have to tell you that this has the highest priority, so do your best, please.”

He took a deep breath and then continued.

“Well, we can’t do much about that right now, so let us get back to normal business. James, I fear we will have a new product to put on the market shortly.”

James frowned and looked at Michael expectantly, who smiled sweetly.

“You see, Vivian did it again.”

For a moment, everybody was frozen, before Maynard groaned.

“What now? How has she bullied physics into compliance now?”

“You will see. But the point is, the toy that her bodyguards don’t let her play with… well, look for yourself.”

He sent a signal to the central holoprojector and a transparent picture of my hoverbike appeared.

After a moment, Marcel asked confused:

“Wait… her new toy is a motorcycle? We had them for centuries.”

Michael chuckled and waved at the picture.

“Look closer. You might see that none of the wheels are powered. And they are mighty small. No, that is no mere motorcycle.”

He sent another signal, and a second picture, this time of the hoverbike in flight mode, appeared.

“What you see is most likely the world's very first hoverbike.”

Maynard sighed contently.

“Oh, fine. That is nothing too bad. It was just a matter of time until somebody built it. The new grav coils are cheap and small enough to make it feasible.

I assume it has the typical LX-NS batteries that Vivian likes to use?”

Michael snorted.

“Yes, of course it has. Though smaller than you might think. And the bike is not the interesting thing. As you said, it was just a matter of time. If it were, we could build a few dozen of them between runs and satisfy the demand for them easily.

No, the interesting thing is this.”

He exploded the picture of the hoverbike, the inactive one, and moved the various parts away until the cold fusion reactor was in the center of the picture and highlighted.

Maynard looked closer, rubbing his chin, though Marcel was a bit… snarky when he asked:

“So… it is a shoe box? Whoop-de-doo. We have a new shoebox now.”

Michael on the other hand was not disturbed by that and chided Marcel mildly.

“You should know that if Vivian has built it and I am warning James that it will eat up some of his production capacities, it will not be a shoebox.”

Then he waved at the picture again.

“No, my friends, this is a cold fusion reactor.”

Jessi was the first to react.

“Wait, I thought cold fusion reactors were just a big science hoax.”

I shook my head tiredly.

“No… not with what we know now. Every claim that was made about cold fusion involved some impure palladium electrodes. It is, naturally, no longer possible to find out what those impurities were… but I would guess it was silver and fluorine.”

After a few seconds, Maynard snorted.

“You think they accidentally used Kobashigawa alloy? And had some weird quantum effects?”

“Yep, and if the configuration was just random enough in the right way, it would have been impossible to repeat the test and get the same results.

In effect, if you lower the electrostatic repulsion enough, the hydrogen in water will begin to fuse. It is nowhere close to the efficiency of a proper fusactor, this one only produces 73kW, but it is way smaller than we can make a fusactor because it won’t become as hot.”

“So… a portable energy source. A really portable energy source at that. The ramifications are… “

Michael nodded when Maynard stopped.

“Enormous. I would bet that this will be soon one of our most sought-after products.”