The enormous logistics vessels continued their journey, and soon, the entire convoy had passed through the shield. They split up from there, headed to different areas of the planet before initiating their deorbit burns and dropping into the atmosphere. However, having already entered the core of Earth’s gravity well, they had disengaged their ion drives and were using their gravity drives to control their descent, ensuring a smooth, silent, and pollution-free journey the rest of the way.
As they reached an altitude of 30 kilometers above sea level, they turned and oriented themselves toward the site of their first deliveries and rocketed off at a speed that was incomprehensible for objects of their size and mass. Each of the thousand vessels carried the machinery required to dig the foundation for five cities—industrial atomic printers and ARCHies, primarily—and enough raw materials to lay the cities’ foundations to cover for the atomic printers as they dug out the secret subterranean levels.
They would require another trip to deliver the materials for the construction crews to use, but that was no problem. The round trip from Earth to the logistics center in the moon base was only a few hours, after all, and if loading and unloading times were to be added, it would be completed in a day. That wouldn’t inconvenience people too much, which was still a concern; even though the project was an imperial order, the company carrying it out was still a private enterprise and had to consider public opinion.
After all, private enterprises, even those owned by the imperial family, had no special privileges.
Soon, the logistics fleet vessels had reached their first designated delivery point. The people watching the livestream felt like their eyes would soon fall out of their sockets as they watched hundreds upon hundreds of five-story-tall robots, each of them with twenty-four eerily flexible tentacles extending from their back, leap from the side door of the hovering mothership in the sky. They carried a pair of enormous black boxes under their main arms and drifted to the surface like a falling leaf in October.
They were none other than ARCHies—Autonomous Robotic Construction Helpers, another brainchild of the nerd herd in Lab City. The researchers had decided that giant robots were a man’s romance and, when faced with the need for a constructor swarm carrier, had decided to go all in on the robot aesthetic. Thus, the ARCHies were born. Tall and wide enough to carry hundreds of constructor swarm queens, with manipulator arms tipped with construction equipment and configurable arm attachments for heavy construction machinery needs, they were all-purpose kings of the construction field.
Sarah was stunned by the ARCHies. “But... but... but why tentacles!?” she asked, turning to Felix.
When the three friends were younger, they had nearly simultaneously discovered anime and had become rabid consumers of it. Their obsession was so overwhelming, in fact, that they had even refurbished an old VCR and picked up bootleg anime VHS tapes from eBay and other more... specialized websites. And some of the things the three had watched had instilled a lifelong fear of tentacles in the young Sarah.
Understandably so, even.
“Because they’re flexible enough to reach difficult-to-reach locations. After all, the robots themselves are entirely too large for more delicate work, but construction isn’t all about brute force and size. So they gave them tentacles to do that part of the job,” Felix soothingly said as he wrapped his arm around Sarah’s shoulders and pulled her into a side hug, understanding where she was coming from with her question.
“But... don’t you already have constructor swarms?”
“True, we do have those. But they aren’t good at heavy lifting, and we need to hide the atomic printers from people.”
“And aren’t those... those tentacle monsters carrying constructor swarms? Since they can carry constructor swarms, again—why tentacles!?” Sarah had goosebumps at the sight of the giant robots.
“Should we scrap them then? Just say the word and we’ll feed them into printers and turn them back into stock,” Felix soothed her.
“I...” she sighed. “It’s fine. I’ll get over it. I mean, what if we get hostile tentacle aliens coming in the future? Am I gonna just roll over and die then? I’ll just treat this like a vaccine.”