May 11, 2440
By the morning of May 11, the barley field across from the Leta crossing no longer looked remotely agricultural.
It looked like a lumberyard had exploded across it.
Thousands of feet of stacked trunks lay in long rows, walnut and the best oak separated from the general timber, cottonwood, gum, maple, lesser oak, and everything else worth keeping sorted well enough that somebody could find it again.
The difference today was that the piles were finally getting smaller.
Ellis Chakrobarty stood with Ravi near the road watching the first of the two V’ren-built sawmills work.
Ravi had been staring at it for several minutes.
“That’s a sawmill?”
“That’s what they told me.”
“It doesn’t look like one.”
Ellis shrugged. “Neither does half the stuff they bring us.”
A loader placed an entire trunk onto the intake.
The mill drew it forward, scanned it, and started cutting.
There was no crew wrestling the log into position. No one measuring boards with a tape. The machine simply decided how best to break the tree down according to the instructions it had been given.
A few minutes later, finished lumber began emerging from the other side.
Ravi walked over to the stack.
“That was the cottonwood?”
“Yeah.”
He picked up the end of one board and inspected it.
“Looks like lumber.”
Ellis gave him a look.
“What were you expecting?”
“I don’t know. Alien lumber.”
“It was a Missouri tree ten minutes ago.”
The second mill was working farther down the field.
That one had been assigned the premium pile.
Walnut and the best oak went through more slowly, not because the machine had difficulty with them, but because nobody wanted useful high-grade timber turned into whatever happened to be convenient.
They were already accumulating separate stacks by dimension and intended use.
The ordinary timber was being processed much faster.
Anything useful became lumber.
Anything that was not worth making into boards went into another pile.
And there was still plenty coming across the road.
The Type 12 continued its ridiculous routine.
Tree down.
Straps on.
Everyone clear.
Tree flies across the road.
Ravi watched another gum tree descend into the field.
“We’re still losing.”
“What?”
“The sawmills aren’t keeping up.”
Ellis looked at the cutters working beyond the road.
Ravi was right.
They were just losing more slowly.
At 10:16, another shuttle came over the tree line.
Ellis had gotten used to them enough that he no longer stopped working every time one appeared.
Then he saw what it was carrying.
“Dad?”
“I see it.”
The shuttle settled into the landing area they had spent the previous week building.
Matt arrived a few minutes later.
Ellis met him near the edge of the staging ground.
“What did you bring me now?”
“Power.”
Behind Matt, V’ren crews were unloading a reinforced container-sized unit.
Ellis looked at it.
“That’s the fusion plant?”
“T-38.”
“And the other thing?”
“Reclamation unit.”
Ellis looked from one machine to the other.
“What are we reclaiming?”
Matt swept one hand toward the entire construction site.
“Eventually? Pretty much everything.”
“That clears it up.”
Matt smiled.
The T-38 went down first.
By then the V’ren construction machines had already established enough of the service area that installing it looked less like erecting a power plant and more like setting another piece of equipment into an increasingly crowded work yard.
Ravi wandered over and stopped beside Matt.
“How much power?”
Matt looked at him.
“Enough.”
“That’s not a number.”
Ellis laughed.
“I have been telling him that all week.”
Matt ignored both of them.
“The important part is we stop caring as much about what power is available out here. Printers, mills, reclamation, whatever else we bring in, we can run locally.”
Ellis looked back toward the woods.
Clearing had spread far beyond the original landing strip now.
Grading equipment worked behind the cutters.
V’ren machines were preparing portions of the future sitio.
Across the road, two alien sawmills were turning the forest into neatly stacked building material.
And now somebody had dropped a fusion plant beside the parking lot.
Eleven days ago, none of it had existed.
Ravi pointed toward the reclamation unit.
“So what does that make?”
Matt looked at it.
“Ask me tomorrow.”
Ravi frowned.
“Why tomorrow?”
“Because today we’re turning it on.”
Ellis sighed.
He already knew what May 12 was going to be like.
Something else was going to start coming out of a machine.
