The raspberry cobbler was still warm, the crust just starting to sag where the syrupy filling pushed at the edges. It was the fifth pan he’d sampled from today and berry season had only just begun. With ten thousand bored V’ren kids suddenly available, every fencerow and hedgerow within walking distance had been stripped clean. The homestead’s staff kitchen, already a facility most militaries would envy, had quietly turned into a cobbler factory, sheet pans moving from oven to cooling racks in an endless rotation.
Matt loved cobbler, but he was already starting to suspect there might be such a thing as too much of a good thing. He jotted his final note, took another bite, and nodded.
“So far, so good. Next.”
Rodney Jax, human engineer and known fast talker, did not waste a second. “I will keep this short, since you are honestly running a stopwatch. What we are proposing is an off grid battery solution based on V’ren power tech, a unit we are calling the arc cell. That is the closest I can get to the original V’ren term, and this one has stuck.”
Matt had already heard the name and had looked at the specs. They were impressive.
He tapped the remote and a diagram lit the room, a matte black capsule roughly the size of a chest freezer laid on its side, half a meter wide, one meter tall, and two meters long. Its surface was smooth, broken only by recessed service ports and a ring of narrow status bands that wrapped the casing like quiet intentions. One glance told you if it was charged, charging, or offline.
Alvin picked up the thread. “Each arc cell can power about one hundred four bedroom homes at peak usage for ten full days. Stack two, and you get twenty. Our proposal is to rotate them on a rolling fifteen day cycle. You get overlap, diagnostics, and built in redundancy.”
Matt sat up a little straighter, running the numbers in his head. Rural energy independence, field swappable. No grid requirement. No fire risk. If the specs held, there would be no reliance on whatever was left of civilian infrastructure.
Drang Mull, the V’ren engineer overseeing fabrication and diagnostics, spoke more quietly. “It is not experimental. The underlying design is five centuries old in our archives. Stable, reliable, and self cooling. Fully inert when taken offline. You could store one under your bed if you wished.”
“And replacement?” Matt asked.
“One person, one trailer, ten minutes,” Alvin said. “You back the trailer in, drop the old unit to standby, disconnect, winch it out, slot the new one, scan it, and bring it online. Any recharge source works, solar, wind, fusion, stardrive bleed off, or what is left of a human grid.”
Matt gave a slow grin. “When can I see the prototype?”
Rodney looked briefly sheepish. “That is the thing. We already built it. It is running the tractor barn as of this morning. Ugly as hell, but rock solid. We want your approval to start swapping out a few standard packs next.”
“How long to build more?”
Rodney and Alvin both looked to Drang, who hesitated just long enough to be polite. “The first one we did by hand, about five hours. With proper support, we can bring assembly down to thirty minutes. Add one hour for full diagnostics and stress tests, and each fabrication station can turn out eight units per hour.”
Matt leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “And how many functional fabrication units do we have?”
“Two hundred eighty four of the size we need on the surface,” Drang said. “Sixty four are offline due to damage. Many of the crews who could repair them were lost.”
“Are those teams available on the other ships?”
“Yes,” came a voice from the edge of the room. T’salk W’ard, young, on crutches, and still stubborn as ever. “But the request channels are unclear. The chief engineer is injured, and with no captain or executive awake on that hull, the hierarchy is, fractured.”
Matt did not sigh, but he wanted to. “Tell whoever is playing gatekeeper that I expect those machines to be operational by the end of the day tomorrow. If that is not possible, I want the excuse delivered in person.”
He turned back to the team and nodded once. “Authorize the first production run now. I want one more unit completed before morning and dropped into a real load, something dirty, not just the barn. Then you go home, you sleep. If it tests to spec, you have clearance for a hundred more.”
Rodney grinned, Alvin let out a breath he had been holding, and Drang gave a small, satisfied nod.
Matt set his fork down at last, the last smear of raspberry and crust gone from the plate. A new power grid was being born, in his living room, over dessert, with no contracts signed and no cameras in sight.
That, he thought, was how you changed the world.
