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.
The only downside to them was that people who feared tentacles, like most Japanese girls of a certain age (read: schoolgirls), would probably get a severe case of the ick when they saw them for the first time.
As the ARCHies continued unloading the materials from the cavernous cargo holds of the logistics vessels, the people watching the stream had many questions in their minds, but they all boiled down to who, what, when, where, why, and most importantly, how. Who had built what they were seeing now? What were those things? When were they built? Where were they before today? Why tentacles? And how did they function?
After all, the robots were one thing, but the vessels themselves were another thing entirely. They were enormous enough that someone should have spotted them if they were built on Earth, so were they built by aliens and only delivered now? And the robots were another mystery. They were humanoid in shape, with two legs, two arms, and a head, all attached to a central torso, unlike the constructor swarms that resembled beetles more than anything else.
People were absolutely flabbergasted and stuck between wanting to immediately rush to the Akashic Records to learn more about them and wanting to stick around until the end of the livestream to see them in operation. Men were fascinated because giant robots and construction tickled their fancy, and women watched out of a sense of morbid curiosity.
After the ships were unloaded at the first stop, they oriented themselves in the direction of their next assigned city location and rocketed off once more, again at an incomprehensible speed. The ARCHies were left behind, and the livestream ended as the robots began their work. What happened next would remain confidential and classified, as it involved the security of the empire.
......
In a stealthed government shuttle hovering high above the cracked, glassy plain that was once Islamabad, Felix and Sarah watched as the enormous logistics vessel rocketed off and the ARCHies on the ground started working.
Unlike what people assumed, most of the boxes the ARCHies had unloaded from the logistics ships contained atomic printers, and only a few contained printer cartridges. After all, the most advanced alloys the researchers in the materials science lab headed by Doctor Brechet required materials that weren’t found on Earth and had to be collected from the solar system.
Even now, collector vessel after collector vessel was rolling off the line and sweeping the system like lawnmowers, collecting even the smallest specks of cosmic dust and forging them into pure material for use in atomic printers. No resource would be left unexploited, not even the tiny dust particles that floated in the endless void of space.
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.”
