Surface Detail

A couple of minutes after the production process had begun, the filaments had shrunk back almost to the interior walls of the fabricary and the great clockwork machines had gone with them and become still. No parcels of matter issued from the machines or from the nozzles, slots and pits on the walls.

Sitting in the middle of the space now, there was a ship.

It was still very approximately ellipsoidal in shape; maybe six hundred metres long, two hundred across and one hundred in height. Its hull shimmered in the light, seemingly unable to decide whether it was pitch black or hazy silver. Rashed all over its shifting, uncertain surface were round black blisters of various sizes and sets of shallow, perfectly elliptical craters.

“Ta-ra!” Bettlescroy said, with a shy giggle, then glanced at Veppers and blushed. “One space warship,” it said.

“How fast can it go?”

“Maximum velocity two point four kilolights.”

“And it’s fully working?” Veppers asked, sceptical.

“Fully,” Bettlescroy said. “It would be no match for the vessel we have constructed for you, of course, but it contains a real-time grown medium-level AI substrate already running all relevant internal systems maintenance functions, full-spectrum radiative and skein sensory systems, a primer fusion power unit ready to start manufacturing anti-matter for its pre-functional warp drive and a variety of weapon systems including thermonuclear warhead missiles and thermonuclear plasma generators. All that would be necessary to activate it would be to transmit the relevant run-protocols into its processing substrate. A trivial task taking minutes at most. It would then be immediately ready for space-flight and battle, though obviously giving it a few days to produce its own AM would increase its utility and power vastly. Equip it with prefabricated AM for its power units and missiles and it would be even more powerful even more quickly.”

“How long does it all take?” Veppers asked.

“For this size, the whole process to the stage you see here takes between nine and fifteen days, according to the exact specification. Sufficient raw material being present, obviously.”

“That’s just the surface layers of the fabricary itself, isn’t it?” Veppers asked. Again, he wasn’t going to show what he was feeling here; he’d had no idea the fabricaria could spin a full-size working ship – especially a full-size tooled-up working warship – so quickly. He’d always known that the fabricaria the Veprine Corporation was allowed to use had been reduced in operational effectiveness before they’d been allowed to get their hands on them but he’d had no inkling by how much; he’d asked, naturally, but everybody involved had been professionally vague.

The Veprine Corp fabricaria could also produce a ship ready for fitting out in a matter of days – albeit a much smaller, much less sophisticated ship – but the devil was in the fitting-out bit; that was where most of the hard work lay. Even disregarding the processing substrates concerned – you always brought them in from other specialist subsidiaries anyway – the sensory, power and engine components were what took all the time to make, not to mention all the other bewilderingly many and arcanely diverse sub-systems a working spacecraft seemed to require. Just making the relevant components took months of expensive, high complexity work, and then fitting them all in place and getting them all working together took almost as long again. Getting all of that done in a week or two was almost preposterous.

“The outer surfaces of the fabricaria traditionally provide the semi-processed raw material initially,” Bettlescroy confirmed. “For longer-term sequential manufacturing there are shuttle-tugs ready to bring in further truly raw material from other parts of the system, though that would not be an issue here. The point of the exercise is to manufacture a fleet of ships very quickly for effectively instant deployment rather than to set up a sustainable production process.”

“How many ships are we talking about?” Veppers asked.

Bettlescroy made a whistling noise. “Potentially, anything up to approximately two hundred and thirty million.”

Veppers stared at the alien.

“How many?” It was hard not to show his astonishment. He’d thought only a few of the fabricaria would be able, or properly primed, to build ships. This implied that almost all of them would be able to produce a ship each.