Stronghold

2028 January 15 21:01
Test Year 1, Day 238, 9:30 MST
Tau, White Towers

The White Towers weren’t white. Xin had drawn the name from Tolkein. Officially, ten days after reading Wolf’s report of the monolith trees, he had established a research station five hundred meters up one of the larger specimens in the grove. In practice, even then the Revere Company had sensed the need for a fortress, so they had given the project their blessing and support.

On the top of tree, layered amongst the slowing moving parts of the bud, were a hundred kilowatts worth of solar cells. Hidden wires led down to fuel accumulators and batteries in the erosional cavities that were inhabited. Rainwater was channeled from runnels in the trunk into holding tanks. At six and four hundred meters altitude, on opposite sides of the trunk, were ledges that could serve as landing pads for the helicopters. Living quarters, food storage, and a modestly supplied servicing shop were here and in smaller cavities that were accessible by high-level climbing or internal fissures. The monolith’s core was off limits, of course. Only the dead insulation wood of the outer fifty meters could be used. But even that made a large and very secure installation.

The internal tunnels had been eaten out by a slow-eating and very large relative to the insulworm grubs that had been such a problem in the first year. As far as Zhujing could tell, the grubs did nothing to aid the tree and were true parasites, so they had been burned out and the tunnels slightly extended to connect the inhabited levels. The entire place was very rough around the edges and nowhere near as comfortable as campus had been, but it was safe.

When he’d arrived with the evacuating Berets, Delbert had ordered a half-dozen watch posts, on top and on adjacent trees, before tracking down Zijun and starting to take stock. Gera arrived at the base by raft, with the remnants of pika and their one prisoner. They had left their vehicles in a reasonably distant hiding spot. Hildenstoy found a party of escapees with Marriner and his violin in its case and led them until they were picked up by one of the choppers a day’s hard drive away from MIT. Julia Morbidini’s guards had gotten her away, but Rob Lesikk, the last of the Four, was either dead or in MIT’s hospital under Chao’s guards.

Two days in, an approximate count was available. All but two of the Revere Company had survived, making the force seventy-six including Delbert. Fifteen of those had sufficient skill at commando-type operations to be termed Black Berets, although the distinction was not that important at present. In addition to Zhujing and the ten other Techers who had been at the White Towers before the rebellion started, a total of three hundred and fifteen, including half of the infants, had escaped the Failure offensive. If the estimates of a little over two hundred left actively fighting for Chao (or Maness, to follow the official line) and three hundred and fifty dead were correct, that left about five thousand ‘civilians’ contained within the radius of the hostage bomb.

Chao’s forces could not attack the Towers. They had no air force, and any improvised missile could be struck down fifty kilometers away by the choppers’ countermeasures. Ground operations were impossible in the swamp. Even if a missile could get through, nothing in Chao’s arsenal, even one of the bombs, would destroy the tree. But neither could the oligarchs and the cadets attack campus.

Kathryn and Delbert both did the math as people showed up. Figure thirty-eight cadets on duty at any time. Twelve at the guard posts and eight in air operations to move and tamper-safe the fuel stations against any wandering Failures and lay more spread out across southern Massachusetts. That left twenty in a shift available for ground scouting, retrieving outlying infrastructure, resettling the refugees and training them into a fighting force. Even without the hostage situation, they were greatly outnumbered.