“What’s up, Alex?” Lucas asked the moment he entered the conference room.

  “I’ll discuss it in a moment, just waiting for one more person.”

  Lucas shrugged, then greeted Rush and the others before taking a seat and grilling the trio on some technical aspect of work he was trying to figure out.

  Alexander would have told his friend not to bug the three AIs with constant questions, but this had become the norm over the last few months between them. None of them seemed to mind the questions, so he let it continue.

  “Sorry that I’m late,” Yi Na said as he entered the room. He came to a stop as he spotted Rush, Four, and Serina. Then he turned to Alexander. “I think I should go.”

  “Please don’t,” Alexander hurried to stop him. “I know how your family feels about our guests, but we require your expertise on a project that will protect everyone on Eden’s End.”

  “For you, Alex, I will agree to sit and listen, but I refuse to work with your new companions until they apologize to my father for not stepping in when it could have saved my brother, Mingyu’s life.”

  Alexander winced at that. He knew that people would learn about the AIs rather quickly, but he hadn’t realized that other information about their time on Eden’s End had come to light.

  He shouldn’t be surprised that someone pieced the information together; the people who lived on Eden’s End weren’t stupid.

  Before Alexander could respond, Rush spoke up. “We are truly sorry for your loss. And you are right; I should have spoken to Huang Na by now. I’ll do so as soon as our meeting concludes.”

  Yi gave a tight nod of approval, but didn’t say anything else as he took a seat across from the others.

  Alexander laid out the plan for the group. The carbon-nanotube mesh, which acted as both the power supply and emitter, was easy to produce. It could be made in massive rolls that could be rolled out and plugged into the next roll.

  Getting those rolled out to cover the domes would be a time-consuming process, but Alexander was giving Yi a blank check to bring on as many part-time workers as possible to accomplish that goal. The multipurpose and construction bots would help, but they were optimized for zero-G work. The gravity of a planet severely limited their mobility.

  They could do the work, but it would just be slower than if a trained human did it.

  “What about the central dome?” Yi asked after Alexander explained the plan.

  “Good question.” Alexander turned to Rush.

  “Well,” Rush said, running his hand through a newly grown beard. “You could attach the emitter material to the inside of the dome, but that won’t stop lasers from flashing through the material and setting things on fire inside.”

  “Oh, I have an idea!” Lucas said excitedly as he raised his hand.

  Alexander pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed. “Lucas, this isn’t a classroom; you don’t have to raise your hand. If you have an idea, just tell us.”

  The man smiled unabashedly. “What if we paint the dome?”

  Alexander was confused. “Paint it? With what?”

  “The stealth coating. It’s essentially pure carbon. All we need to do is slap it on and let it dry. We don’t even need to align the nanotubes inside the material because we aren’t using it for its stealth properties.”

  “Will that work?” Alexander asked.

  “It should,” Four replied. “Honestly, if you have enough of the coating material, I would suggest painting everything after putting on the specialized concrete. It’ll help spread the heat across a wider surface.”

  That was true. The thin coating on missiles resisted laser fire for a bit longer.

  “Okay,” Alexander replied hesitantly. “Do we have enough of the coating material, and will it even adhere to the transparent aluminum of the dome?” He knew the material didn’t like to stick to certain surfaces.

  “I would have to do the math, Alex, but ever since we stopped using the stealth coating for anything other than missiles, we’ve acquired quite a surplus of the material. There may also be a second supply,” Lucas added with a wink.

  It took Alexander a moment to understand what his friend was hinting at. There was indeed a second supply of the substance at his secret shipyard. In fact, there was a significant amount of it over there because he had briefly toyed with the notion of coating the larger weapons with the substance. When he realized those devices would be nearly the size of a corvette, he simply switched to using the stealth armor plates instead. That meant most of the substance was sitting there unused.

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  “You’re right. I’ll get you the numbers of how much is stored there and have that brought over. What about my other question?”

  Lucas shrugged. “We’ll have to test it to see if the material will adhere. At worst, it won’t, but I believe we can still make it work; it just won’t last very long. A good rain might wash it away, but nothing is forecasted for the next few months, so that shouldn’t be an issue.”

  “I don’t believe adherence will be a problem,” Yi spoke up. “The acid rain does a nasty job of etching the outer layer of that dome. It has to be smoothed over and polished every six months, or it starts to look like frosted glass. I’ve been meaning to ask about creating a coating that might prevent that, but more urgent tasks have kept popping up. Anyway, it’s been about four months since the last polish, so the material should be extremely rough on the outside, perfect to adhere to.”

  “That is definitely an issue we should discuss in the future,” Alexander replied, “but I don’t know if a rough surface will be enough. The material is rather stubborn when it comes to what it wants to stick to.”

  “I’ll take a look, Alex,” Lucas cut in. “If it doesn’t work, I can always create some sort of substrate coating that will bind the two together. A basic glue might be enough. It’s not like it needs to survive high-G maneuvering in space or anything.”

  “Okay, go ahead with that, Lucas. Yi, I want you to work with Mr. Pembrooke to get as many workers as you can use. Don’t be shy about hiring. The faster we get this project completed, the better. I would prefer it to get done long before the Shican arrive. We have to assume we won’t get the full three months.”

  He turned to address Rush and the others. “Are you three okay with creating the concrete mix?”

  “Not the most glamorous job I’ve had,” Rush admitted with a chuckle, “but I think we can manage.”

  “Alex, what are you going to be doing?” Lucas asked.

  “Reinforcing our orbital defenses and upgrading the ground-based ones, just in case.”

  The man’s face took on a serious expression as he nodded. Out of everyone in the room, Lucas was the only one who had been around during Arkonis’s attack. If the Shican landed troops on the surface, it would make that attack look like a childhood spat.

  Alexander dismissed everyone and hurried to his workshop. The three AIs joined him because they worked out of the same room. He wouldn’t hoard the space from them for long. He just needed to pull an updated surface scan so he could figure out the best placement for new weapons systems.

  Rush or one of the others must have anticipated what he wanted, because by the time he stepped into the space, the holo was already online, showing a satellite view of the surface, including the facility and its surroundings.

  “Thanks,” he replied.

  He was surprised by the soft voice that responded.

  “You’re welcome,” Serina said quietly.

  Alexander looked over just in time to see Rush grin happily and ruffle the girl’s hair, earning a teenager’s death glare in response. She had to have learned that from Yulia. He smiled and shook his head, turning back toward the image.

  It only took a moment to bring up the current weapon emplacement locations. One was marked as decommissioned already because new construction blocked off a large portion of its firing arc.

  That was fine. Alexander had planned on removing all the rail gun positions at some point anyway; he just never got around to it.

  He zoomed out the map until he could see five miles beyond the facility, and he picked twenty-two spots on the map to place new EFEC emplacements. Those would be able to hit anything in orbit without any issue, but they needed to be far enough away from the facility to prevent the shockwave from damaging the buildings.

  He would need to coat the penetrators in some sort of ablative as well, otherwise the atmospheric friction would melt them before they reached their target. They would still do considerable damage, even then, but in all likelihood, they would be thrown off target by any deformation.

  The Shican would target the emplacements as soon as they spotted the weapons, so every shot needed to count. As soon as Alexander punched in the coordinates, he sent an updated list of instructions to one of the control ships in orbit. It would land near the first site and disperse its bots to begin preparing the locations.

  A series of laser installations went up next. He set these about a mile from the facility. They would be designed to intercept incoming missiles along with the current railgun emplacements. To ensure he had enough coverage, he placed nearly a hundred of them around the facility.

  The enemy would still destroy them once they fired, but a laser was a much smaller target to hit than an enhanced field-effect cannon. Alexander was also banking on the enemy trying to blitz their defenses as quickly as possible to strike at the facility. It was the only real way they guaranteed a victory before the fleet arrived.

  That was about all he could do for the planetary defenses, given the time they had and the resources available. He didn’t want to pull any more resources from orbit because that would reduce how many EFEC Swordfish he could produce, and each of those would be far more useful than any static installation. He also couldn’t pull any of the bots from Yi Na’s work because the man would need all of the ground-based units to work to complete the energized armor project.

  Alexander thanked Rush and the others for assisting, then he hurried off to find Damien.

  If there was going to be any sort of ground battle, the Head of Security needed to be made aware of it and given time to prepare. To ensure the security forces were up to the task of going toe-to-toe with the Shican, that meant giving them full combat gear. Damien wasn’t going to like that one bit, but it was the only thing that would shrink the gap between the guards and Shican cyborgs. Even then, it might not be enough.

  The last time people had access to such gear, there had been a coup attempt. Alexander wasn’t worried about that happening anymore. A lot had changed since Sorin’s idiotic attempt to take over. The Council no longer had any power, for one, and all of the drifter traditionalists had left. Not all at once, but over the years, they trickled out of the facility.

  Alexander hadn’t even been aware of them leaving until Theo pointed it out in a report once. He wasn’t all that broken up by them leaving. Eden’s End continued to grow, and if they couldn’t grow with it, they were probably better off somewhere else.

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