Chapter 145: The List

"Copy," I said into the radio, while Ruth and Kara looked up at me from the far end of the kitchen table, where they had been arguing over the placement of a shower block for the better part of an hour.

"Don’t wait up~" Nia said, and the channel went to static.

I set the handset down beside the coffee pot and sat back down, and Ruth watched me do it with the same face she’d worn in the yard that morning.

"Two of them left the truck stop on the flatbed, heading this way, with a rifle each. They’re not going to arrive."

Kara’s pen stopped moving on the paper in front of her for about two seconds, and then started again, and she didn’t look up.

"...Handled," Ruth said.

"Handled... sure."

She nodded slowly, then picked her coffee back up and went back to the map.

[Two down... Forty-one to go, and that Hallam guy is gonna notice by morning that his people don’t come back from this road... and that’s gonna piss him off... he’d send some more... some more will die, that’d whittle his manpower... then he’s gonna slow down... and that’d give us the few days I need...]

The table had been ours since noon.

Ruth’s map of the property was drawn in pencil on the back of a feed-store calendar, every fence post and both barns and the creek and the well head and the bad patch at the bottom of the drive that flooded every spring.

Beside it sat Kara’s list, written in the neat square handwriting, in columns, with prices in the right-hand column that only I could actually see, and she had been writing them down as I read them off the air.

Tikki was asleep in the middle of the map, on top of the barns, which Ruth had ruled was a vote.

Mr. Norton had gone up to bed at ten, after dictating the medical bay line by line for forty minutes without once consulting a note, and I had bought every item on it as he named it without reading a single price, which is not a thing I had done before in my life and not a thing I intend to make a habit of.

So the list was nearly finished, and I had the whole thing hanging in the air in front of my face, and I read it back to the two of them one item at a time, the way you read a contract back before you sign it.

"The wall," I said. "It’ll be three meters made of reinforced concrete, a walkway behind it, a tower on the north corner and one on the south. It follows the fence line except at the bottom of the drive, where it comes in twenty meters, because Ruth says the drive floods."

"The drive floods," Ruth said. "The old gate’s where it is for a reason. The people who built this place weren’t stupid."

"Alright, twenty hours for the wall, and everything else goes up inside that window."

Kara wrote twenty hours in the margin and underlined it.

"The well," I said. "New bore, three hundred meters down, and a filtration plant on top of it, and a tank. That’s gonna take four hours."

"Water first," Ruth said. "Before the wall, if you can."

"Before the wall it is then," I nodded.

"The showers." Kara didn’t look up from the paper. "We need six of them."

"Four."

"That’s thirty-one women, Nikki."

"...Six," I said, and she wrote six, and I saw the corner of her mouth move.

"Hot water," I went on. "Septic... A laundry... Then the medical bay, which Mr. Norton has already spent more of my money on than I’ve spent on most of my upgrades, so let’s not argue about what’s in it, only where it goes."

"By the house," Kara said, at the same moment I said, "Inside the house."

We looked at each other, and Ruth said, "By the house..." without lifting her eyes from the map, and that was that, because apparently a medical bay needs fresh air more than it needs the security of being inside the house.

[I have spent years arguing with this woman about just about everything, and I have never once won, and I’m not going to start winning in a stranger’s kitchen with the stranger on her side.]

"The range," I said, and Ruth’s eyebrows went up. "A berm at the back of the south field. We’ll go with eight lanes... A rack of .22 LR AR-style rifles for practice, because the ammunition’s cheap and the recoil’s nothing, and the real guns pretty much run the same..."

"Most of them have never held one."

"Yeah, why do you think I’m buying that load of pea shooters?" I deadpanned.

She looked at me for a second, then nodded and wrote something, and I’m pretty sure it was about how handsome I was~

"The greenhouses." I pointed at the map, at the two barns with a cat asleep on top of them. "I’m planning two of them. Fifteen hundred square feet each, climate-controlled, with a seed catalog the System swears grows in a quarter of the time and doesn’t care much about frost... They go where the big barn is."

"That’s Bill’s barn."

"The barn comes down."

"Bill will cry."

"Bill will have homegrown fully organic tomatoes in less than a month."

Ruth considered that, and then said, "Bill will still cry, but she’ll eat the tomatoes," which was the closest thing to a yes I was going to get about it.

Kara wrote greenhouses, two, and drew a box around it.

"Now the pond..." I went on. "Two thousand square feet, insulated, heated, filtered, and stocked."

"Stocked with what exactly?" Kara looked up with an eyebrow raised.

"Tilapia. A Blue tilapia, to be exact... It’s a System exclusive fish. They’re cold-tolerant down to nine degrees, grow a kilo in eight weeks, and they breed in every season..."

"Damn... fantasy fish basically..." Kara muttered as she wrote it down.

"Yep..."

She wrote pond, and then, after a moment, she wrote fish with a question mark, and I let her keep it.

Solar after that, high-density panels on the south field with a storage bank in a container, enough to run the whole property and the greenhouses and the pond heaters through a winter with no sun. Cameras on every corner of the wall with a monitor in the kitchen and a designated CCTV Room. Four recon drones in a charging rack that Nora would label the second she woke up. A radio station with a proper mast, twenty meters high, and a base set that could reach us from far farther west than four kilometers.

And through all of it, Kara was watching me. Her eyes were more on my face than on the list.

She’d been doing it since the yard that morning, since the stone I threw at that man’s head, not expecting it to pop like a balloon, and I didn’t know what it meant, and I’d decided at some point in the afternoon not to think about it, and had then spent the entire afternoon thinking about it.

She refilled my coffee twice without asking and without looking. When I added the greenhouse line wrong in my head and said four hundred and twenty, she said "Four hundred and sixty" without looking up, and she was right, and she didn’t make anything of being right.

And once, when I was staring at the map trying to work out where the pond went, she reached across and put two fingers on my sleeve to make me look at the corner of the calendar where she’d already drawn it.

Two fingers. On my sleeve. For about a second.

[Okay... That’s a thing. I don’t know what it is... Moving on. Yeah, no... I am not moving on... and I’m losing sleep over this...]

Ruth put her coffee down at the end of it and looked at the list, at the whole of it, the wall and the water and the fish, and she looked at me for a while without saying anything before-

"Handsome," she said. "You don’t owe us this."

"Yeah... I don’t owe anyone shit..."

And that was the whole conversation. She nodded, and I opened the panel.

-Ding!

{

Centralized Resource Exchange and Distribution Interface Terminal (C.R.E.D.I.T.)

Base Building Module: Settlement Construction Order

Site: Farmhouse, 41 acres, single residence, 31 occupants

Construction Class: Fortified Homestead (Prototype)

...

Tender Summary:

Perimeter Ballistic Wall, 3 m, reinforced, walkway, two towers, reinforced gate: 1,860,000 Credits, 20 hours

Bore Well, filtration plant, storage tank: 214,000 Credits, 4 hours

Sanitation Block, six showers, hot water, septic, laundry: 168,000 Credits, 6 hours

Medical Bay, surgical, per attending physician’s specification: 712,000 Credits, 8 hours

Shooting Range, eight lanes, berm, ten .22 LR training rifles, 20,000 rounds: 86,000 Credits, 2 hours

Greenhouse, climate-controlled, 1,500 sq ft, System Exclusive seed catalog (×2): 624,000 Credits, 12 hours

Aquaculture Pond, 2,000 sq ft, insulated, heated, filtered, 400 System Exclusive Blue Tilapia: 338,000 Credits, 10 hours

System Exclusive Solar Array, 80 kW, storage bank: 486,000 Credits, 6 hours

Surveillance Network, twelve cameras, thermal, monitor: 58,000 Credits, 1 hour

Reconnaissance Drones (×4), charging rack: 46,000 Credits, immediate

Radio Station, 20 m mast, base set, repeater: 39,000 Credits, 2 hours

Site Integration, Certification: 124,000 Credits

...

TOTAL DUE: 4,755,000 Credits

Elapsed Construction Time (parallel fields): 20 hours

...

Advisory

Construction fields are opaque, silent, and impassable for the duration. Do not attempt entry.

Water systems will be commissioned first at the requesting client’s instruction.

Existing barn (large) will be removed. Contents should be cleared prior to confirmation.

No warranty implied.

}

[Four million, seven hundred and fifty-five thousand... For a wall and some fish... And a medical bay, and the water, and the thing where thirty-one women stop dying because a man decided they were his... Fine. It’s actually fine. I said I’d handle the money. I’ll handle the money.]

"Confirm," I said. "Do it."

And the kitchen windows turned blue.

Every pane on the east side of the house went blue at once, a deep, even blue with no flicker in it, and it came through the curtains and lay across the table, and the map and the cat, and Ruth stood up so fast her chair went over.

Outside, along the whole east fence line, a wall of blue had come up out of the snow, three meters tall and completely silent, and it stood there with the snow falling into the top of it and not coming out the other side.

And right on cue, the house woke up.

I heard it happen above us, floor by floor: feet on boards, doors slamming, and Bill’s voice booming, "Aliens?! Where’s my shotgun!" clear through the ceiling.

And I legit laughed out loud.

"How long?" Ruth asked, while I was still reeling.

"Twenty hours."

Ruth kept her hand on the wall and did not look away from the road.

"They’ll come before that... the whole lot..."

"Oh don’t you worry, that was just the first draft~"