Chapter 506 A "Small" Base of Operations
?The next day.
Timothy and Siobhan got out of bed at three o’ clock in the morning, neither of them requiring much sleep thanks to their enhanced physiques and various implants. In order to maintain their covers, neither of them would be accessing the simulation unless an emergency came up. Augmented reality was also limited, preventing them from using it for things like virtual keyboards and screens. What remained was mostly akin to a HUD that would give them increased situational awareness without the possibility of any outward signs that they were using imperial technology. N♡vεlB¡n: Unleashing Imagination, One Read at a Time.
Even their old beat-up pickup truck was exactly what it seemed, just an old truck. Their only imperial technology, beyond the necessaries like their WESS and other layers of security systems, had been safely tucked away in various slicks and the growing underground facility that the atomic printer nanite colony was currently building and expanding. Their implants had informed them that the facility had reached initial completion and all that was left were the optional modules that could be customized and configured as necessary.
The two had discussed the options and chosen to build a storage facility for printer “cartridges”, a holding facility with room for up to ten prisoners in secure solitary confinement cells, a gym with the equipment necessary for maintaining their enhanced bodies—after all, no civilian gym anywhere outside the empire had gravity manipulation technology capable of creating weights in the range of tons, and anything less than a ton was about as strenuous for a reaper to lift as a beer can was to a normal, unenhanced civilian—and a hangar for their stealth shuttle.
Tim and Siobhan confidently strode down the hallway to the center of the base and into a circular room of about fifteen meters in diameter. In the middle of the room was a five-meter-
wide sphere of shining metal, within which was an artificial star capable of outputting ten petawatts of electricity, more than enough to satisfy the entire North American continent’s annual energy consumption by multiple orders of magnitude.
The base was laid out in a cross along the four cardinal directions, and the central hub had access points at each main hallway. A brushed aluminum railing surrounded the fusion reactor, along which were various backup manual workstations capable of operating every aspect of the base itself in the event that the quantum microcomputer implants in Tim and Siobhan’s brains somehow ceased to function. And as the beating heart of the base, certain security measures were always in effect, with small turrets dotting the ceiling every meter or so and a complicated uneven stair leading from the doorways to the sunken floor of the rest of the room.
The two operatives nodded as all of their checks returned reports of fully operational equipment, then toured the living quarters in the north, consisting of comfortable apartments, a mess hall, recreation center, and the still-under-construction gym. To the south of the main control center was an enormous hangar capable of holding twelve stealth shuttles or four ARES combat landers, and across from the hangar was a cavernous storage facility of a hundred meters wide by a hundred meters long and six stories high. It was currently empty, but atomic printer nanites were busily producing modular storage containers in various shapes and sizes, each of which would be equipped with a temporal stasis field generator to maintain their contents in perfect condition.
To the west of the control center was the planned site of the prison complex—ten reinforced cells, a holographically simulated prison yard, and a shared dining facility. And to the east was an armory, a clinic with medical pods for up to fifty patients simultaneously, and a ground vehicle garage with enough room to fit ten buses, or any combination of a wide variety of smaller vehicles.
Tim and Siobhan toured the entire facility and, as false dawn was just beginning to brighten the sky over the distant Cascade Mountain Range, they climbed in their old pickup truck and headed toward Shelton, where they would begin their first workdays in the high school and courthouse, respectively.