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him down.
"Take it easy, Jim. They saved you," Dr. Clemons said.
"They're the ones that put me in this shape!" Jim cursed.
"Dr. Daniels, I apologize deeply and sincerely, but we never meant any harm.
It was all a misunderstanding," I assured him.
"Yeah, a misunderstanding and a bit of paranoia on your part," Tatiana added
smugly and 'Becca gave her an evil look.
"Dr. Daniels, you'll be fine," I told everyone in the room. Then I thought
about the massive damage and Lieutenant Ames being injured. "Tatiana, let's
get to the other wounded, now!" We zipped from table to table and from room to
room in the hospital. I just happened to be the one who fixed Lieutenant
Ames. General and Dr. Clemons stood over my shoulder the entire time they were
both concerned from a parenting point of view, and I could tell they were very
curious about the technology.
"Then it is you, Mr. Montana?" Lieutenant Ames asked me as the last few
lacerations on her face and stomach vanished away.
"Yes, and it's Steven, Lieutenant," I told her.
"Then it's Annie, or Anne Marie, if we are on a first-name basis." She held
her hand out for me to shake it. She was amazed that it was no longer broken.
"Sorry for all this. I didn't mean for any "
"Forget it. We were just as much to blame, Steven. That damned Rebecca never
follows orders.
Civilians!" She shook her head and harumphed.
Then we went out into the city and used the sensors from the
Phoenix to search for other wounded.
After several hours there were no longer any immediate emergencies. If you
didn't count the Gray threat, that is.
Look what a mess, Steven.
Tatiana pointed out at the lunar town.
I know, gorgeous. We will help them fix it.
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CHAPTER 16
It took us a good couple of weeks to get the little town on the Moon back in
order. Apparently the kids in town were glad that school was canceled while we
rebuilt. Thankfully, it was fall break and the kids had not been in school at
the time or the incident could have been far more tragic than it was. A few
trips to Earth in the little warp ships were made for various materials until
I set up a materials generation and replication area with a downloaded version
of Mike controlling it. Basically, any computer-drawn model of an object would
enable it to be constructed from the rubble and lunar materials available. The
nanomachines in the facility Tatiana and I put together would take the
material and convert it into whatever piece of equipment, construction
material, or whatever else was needed. If precious or exotic elements were
required that weren't available, then we sent the warp ships to Earth. The
nanomachines could only manipulate atoms, so if you needed a gold atom in
something you had to have a pile of gold atoms to begin with.
On the other hand, we increased the budget capability of the little lunar town
tremendously because there is plenty of carbon on the Moon. Diamonds are made
of carbon and the lunar base became one of the Earth's small suppliers of
diamonds unbeknownst to the general public of course. General Clemons had the
CIA acquire a South African diamond company to fence the lunar diamonds
through of course, the CIA got a big cut for its troubles. We allowed just
enough of the lunar diamonds to flow into the market as not to cause suspicion
or to flood the market and drive down the revenues. The diamond
market was about a thirty-billion-dollar business each year and we planned to
take in about a third of a percent of that and thus keep a low profile in the
business. We also set up similar markets for the billion-dollar-a-year silicon
wafer market, the two-billion-dollar-a-year flat glass (mirrors and such)
market, the multibillion-dollar fiber optic market. Remember there are a lot
of silicates on the lunar surface. The CIA called this contingent the "diamond
factory," which was along the same lines as the old
"fly by night industries" business they often used. We continued to branch out
into as many business areas as we could but never took more than a fraction of
a percent of the business so we didn't attract any unwanted attention.
Another aspect of the business was so highly classified that only a few folks
on Earth knew the intricacies of it. We set up a manufacturing facility that
could rapidly prototype highly technical instrumentation for classified
programs.
Say there was a need for a new fourteen-billion-dollar Top Secret
communications satellite; our nanomachine system could build it from specs in
a hundreth of the time and for practically no cost. It cost more money to set
up the cover facilities and for the overhead than for the actual device. We
spun off two companies that could produce the rapid prototypes and then the
CIA arranged for Boeing to buy one of them and Lockheed Martin to buy the
other. The two companies would never know that they both would get these
classified products from the same plant on the Moon. And we made almost eighty
percent profit from these products, after the big industry, CIA, and cover
companies raked off their share. We made a lot of money through this program.
There were two other programs that were classified even more deeply and I
won't talk about them here. All I can say is that one had to do with using
SuperAgents to understand, predict, and drive various economic engines. The
other had to do with perfect counterfeits of foreign currencies that enabled
us to control their inflation rates. We made a lot of money off those programs
as well. From here on, we simply followed the CIA's lead and referred to all
of these efforts with the encompassing and nebulous title "the diamond
factory."
The fact that we enabled the Clemons's facility to become a viable business
and no longer a drain on budget improved Tatiana's and my situation with the
W-squared crew tremendously.
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I was even given that long-overdue security clearance. Of course, Tatiana
wasn't. She was not an
American citizen and there was always that isolated abductee issue. I was
still thinking about that. On the other hand, only I could really keep
anything from her and it appeared as though the W-squared group realized this.
They made us both honorary members of the W-squared team and treated Tatiana
as a cleared and accessed member. In fact, General Clemons pulled some strings
and had an "interim"
clearance issued to Tatiana with Clemons as the responsible party. But I
needed to deal with the security implications of the isolated abductee issue
somehow. I wasn't sure how yet; in fact I wasn't even sure why she was
isolated and what that meant. As far as Mike and I could figure, for some
reason out of the millions of humans that have been abducted by the Grays in
the past, a couple hundred thousand of them were different somehow. The Grays [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]