Cowboys and Aliens Ch. 22

Atlantis 2.0

After Mark had went to sleep, Cricket had been monitoring the Atlantis area and when there were no ships in the area, she had activated the holographic construction dome that surrounded the island and included 150 nautical miles around it. The drones were hovering 25 metres above the water at the 200 nautical mile perimeter, so they could communicate with ships and instruct them avoid the area.

That night on the evening news, there were reports coming in from vessels, claiming they heard voices from the heavens, telling them to avoid the area and reports from airplanes saying they could see a yellow and black construction zone in the middle of the ocean.

There was even a report from an environmentalist ship that tried to go into the construction zone. They mentioned that they had heard voices and when they didn't change their course, a giant sea monster picked their ship up out of the water, turned them around and warned them not to come back.

Mark asked, "Cricket, what is this sea monster they are talking about?"

"Remember that blue pod? When I looked into some of the legends Earth had about Atlantis, some of them mentioned a sea monster called the Kraken. So when you asked me to come up with some sort of defence system against submarines and boats, that could EMP against their hull, I figured I could try making one of their legends come true. A giant octopus is perfect for wrapping around a vessel to emit an EMP directly against the hull," she answered.

"Oh I like it!" Mark thought.

When Mark turned and looked at everyone, Annabelle asked, "What did Cricket say about the sea monster?"

Mark smiled, "One of my worries was having a nuclear submarine sneak right up to our doorstep to attack. So I told Cricket to look into some sort of underwater security system that can do an EMP right against the hull, bypassing the insulating effect of salt water. Cricket found an ancient legend that mentioned a Kraken, so she created a mechanical one."

Joe laughed, "That is an awesome security system! Not that I was too worried to begin with, but I have a feeling once Atlantis exists, some of the superpowers may not like losing their superpower status, or you get some upstart wannabe like North Korea that attacks just to try and make a name for themselves."

Mark just smiled, "Joe, I'm hoping they will realize we are here to stay and that they should learn to get along with us. I'm also hoping they realize the futility of trying to use inferior technology against us, but as you have said on many occasions, never underestimate the extent of human stupidity! As such, I already have numerous plans in motion, that can be executed immediately, should any country do anything stupid. All of it non-lethal of course and some of it could be quite the spectacle to see!"

As they went to bed that night, Mark was talking to Cricket, "We know the locations of every submarine in the oceans don't we?"

Cricket replied, "That question cannot be answered, if we haven't detected it then we wouldn't know about it!"

He laughed at her response, "Touché, but we THINK we know where every submarine in the world is don't we?"

"Yes."

"Do we know what country owns each of those subs?"

"I'm 98% certain for all the nuclear submarines, but only around 50% certain for the older diesel submarines, as those may have been manufactured by one country and then sold to another when the nuclear models went into service."

"If it's possible I'd love to get some smaller versions or variants of the Kraken and have them swim around and take a picture of every sub's identification markings and then attach themselves to the hulls. It would make them easier to track and, if we had to act, we could EMP them on demand."

Mark had a restless night as he was trying to make sure all bases were covered as far as security.

In the morning Mark woke up as usual, they did their workout, had breakfast and went out to do their chores.

Once the chores were done, they went into the lodge for some coffee to warm themselves up. It hadn't been a terribly cold winter so far, but winter is winter, it's still cold when there's snow on the ground.

The phone rang and Kat answered the phone, figuring it was another of the boarders apologizing. But she looked surprised and then said, 'Please wait, I'll get him for you,' then she turned to Mark, "There is a call for you."

'Hello, this is Mark, who am I speaking with?'

'Mr. Phoenix, my name is Admiral Caldwell from the US Navy. I'm calling you because of reports of a sea monster in the Atlantic.'

Cricket then told Mark, "Last night a Virginia class nuclear submarine tried to approach the island, they had a run-in with the Kraken. He redirected them back outside the perimeter."

Mark thought, "Do we know which sub it was? Are there others in the area?"

Cricket replied, "It was the USS John Warner and there's a Los Angeles class sub named the USS Alexandria, about 100 kilometres to the south, headed north."

'What about Mr. Cuddles, is he bothering you?'

'So you're admitting the sea monster is real and he's yours?'

'He's not mine, but yes he's real.'

'He's causing problems all over the Atlantic!'

'Well, considering he only patrols the area around Atlantis, I hardly think that's all over the Atlantic. It's a pretty big ocean!'

'He's causing problems for vessels in the area.'

'Actually the audible warnings have worked for the other ships, they're all detouring around. You're just calling because the John Warner got too close last night and had a run-in with Mr. Cuddles.'

The man yelled, 'That's classified!'

'Classified or not, I know what happened, also please warn the Alexandria, she's 100 kilometres to the south and heading north.'

'That's classified information! You cannot know where our submarines are!'

'Classified or not, I know!'

'You have to do something about your monster!'

'No, I don't! You need to stay out of his area! Atlantis is NOT going away! You're going to have to learn to live with it. He's playing nice right now by giving audible warnings and then gently relocating stupid people that don't listen. Once Atlantis is built, he WILL protect the island, so I wouldn't piss him off!'

'Are you threatening the USA?'

'I'm not threatening anything, I'm simply stating a fact!'

'It sounded like a threat to me. You better watch yourself, you speak of pissing off your monster... you do not want to piss off the most powerful country in the world!'

'I'm sorry, I dozed off there, did you have something of substance you called to talk about?'

Suddenly there was a click and the line went dead, so Mark just shrugged his shoulders and hung up the phone.

Kat was staring at Mark, "Did the US Navy just threaten you?"

Mark laughed, "Yup, I don't think they like Mr. Cuddles."

Annabelle asked, "What are they going to do?"

"I have no idea, if they're smart, they'll stay away, since I doubt they can detect him, either that or they're going to attack him. We'll have to wait and see!"

Cricket said, "Mark you just got a message."

Mark checked his wrist and sure enough there was three emails. One was from Elisha asking about the sea monster and the other two were sent through the website and neither were in English, but he could make out enough to see they were also talking about a sea monster.

"Well, I should probably make a post about the sea monster, I'm not sure what the messages say, but I can make out 'monster'," Mark informed the group.

So Mark went to see the breakfast club and make a post informing everyone about the Kraken patrolling the area around Atlantis, and that ships should stay clear. We are giving people audible warnings when they get close to his zone, but if people don't heed the warnings, he could potentially cause damage.

The weather throughout the day continued to deteriorate as a storm was blowing in and the forecast wasn't looking good for the next few days, so Mark and Joe went out and brought all the horses in to the barn and also brought all the horses in the group pasture into the arena. By mid afternoon, it was full on blizzard conditions with the temperatures around -40C with the windchill. Nothing like a late winter blizzard!

Liyana, Gyges and Maren stayed up on the embassy helping to ready things for the upcoming relocation. Since they were all originally staff from the Poseidon, a few of them indicated they would like to go home, since many people were on their way to Atlantis to work and live.

The next day, the Cleito arrived and distributed three deployment pods around the planet. They immediately began roaming the planet, fully cloaked of course, getting detailed scans of the entire planet and deploying drones based primarily just on population density or wherever a weapon of mass destruction was detected.

With the blizzard raging on, everyone was content with having meetings, planning and relaxing, knowing that it was going to get hectic once the island was ready. They had also spent lots of time in the playroom.

The breakfast club had more or less taken over responding and maintaining the website and there had only been one more incident with a ship complaining about having to change course. They had also taken on the task of building an official website for Atlantis. Cricket had given them some images to show where it was, as well as a map of the island.

Fortunately the site wasn't live yet as they kept changing things on the island. The main argument was about whether the port should be on land or floating. Floating did eventually win out due to a few factors, first it demonstrated the Atlantean floating hub system, which may eventually be needed if Earth didn't do something about it's population growth. Second, it was floating, so therefore it could be expanded and changed as required, and lastly, it was offshore far enough that there really wouldn't be any noise pollution for anyone. This wasn't something most Atlanteans considered, because they didn't have any experience with jet airplanes.

To speed up the ocean charting procedure for the rest of the planet, Cricket resized the construction zone to match the actual size of the island and realigned the security drones to match the actual EEZ perimeter, rather than just being a big round dome.

Mark had lengthy discussions with Liyana, Angela and other historians, about what sort of information they should put in the museum. During that process, they had decided the Pegasus, which was the crashed cargo ship, would be moved and parked near the airport, now that it was a historical artifact.

Liyana also talked to Samira, who then ran a story about Atlantis being resurrected and that within a week it would be available for residence. In the report she announced that there would be a high demand for architects, teachers, restauranteurs, security and other business owners to run tourist and entertainment type businesses.

A day after running that story, there was apparently already a waiting list of close to half a million people, looking to move to Atlantis and there were already a couple of Starliner class transports already on their way to Earth. The news about how fast the population was going to grow made everyone reconsider some development options.

There was lots of discussions about how much to pre-build in each of the towns and how much infrastructure to create, until Marta voiced an option that they hadn't considered, "Why pre-build anything? Why don't we temporarily house people in the capital, until they figure out where they want to live? It shouldn't take too long to figure out where people want to live, and by that time we'll know the population demographics and the skills of the people moving here."

Nobody could argue with her logic, so then the debate was about where to allow construction. Everyone agreed that the Seewarte Mountains and the Meteor Plateau should be considered national parks and any construction would be via special permits, that companies would have to apply to the capital for. They also wanted the area around Poseidon's Garden, at the base of Mount Pnyx, to be included in the national park.

By having 10 regions proposed they figured they could quickly scale up to handle however many people moved here as long as everyone did not want to live in the same area.

Acropolis was going to remain the capital city, but in order to spread people around on the island, they were going to turn it into an inland business hub... eventually. In the beginning, it was going to have temporary housing, for as many people as could fit, and they could have 1 month to figure out where they wanted to live. After one month, they would have to stay in a hotel or at a resort, which hopefully would exist by that time.

The bronze outer ring has 12 bridges, laid out like a clock with a bridge at every number, to the inner ring. The silver coloured inner ring only has bridges at 3, 6, 9 and 12 to the copper coloured wall around the city centre. The four major bridges that spanned all the rings, were wider than the other bridges and lined up perfectly with North, East, South and West.

To transport people around the island, they were thinking about an above ground train system similar to what was on Atria, but opted instead to have the lift system. Unlike the lift system on other planets, these lifts were only going to operate 200 metres above the ground and move at 250 km per hour, so people could actually see the sights.

They were also going to have hover carts, which in essence were just like golf carts, except they hovered, which made going where there weren't any roads easier. There would be a few of them parked at every proposed townsite. This would allow people to explore pretty much any place on the island, except for rivers, lakes or the national parks. If they wanted to explore a national park they could hike.

On the third day of the blizzard, Cricket announced that construction was above the highest points on the seamounts and that construction speed would increase dramatically. Everyone was delighted to hear that, because that meant they would be soon be able to leave the blizzard for a warmer climate.

On the afternoon of the following day, Cricket announced that the island had broke the surface and she estimated the island would be complete and ready for occupation on Saturday morning... so another day and a half of winter.

The storm broke that night and they let the horses out to run around, while everyone worked at clearing away the snow drifts. The new technology the lane and driveway were made of, were clear of any snow as it had been melting upon contact with the road, which always stayed at a constant temperature, warm enough to melt snow in the winter, yet cool enough that you could be barefoot on the hottest summer day and not burn your feet.

During this downtime, they had been contemplating about what to do with the ranch. One of the options was to revert the ranch back to the way it was, before all the alien upgrades and sell it. Another option was to continue to own the ranch, and turn it over to Maria and Sofia to operate, even if it was just for boarding and the lodge. It all depended on whether Maria and Sofia decided to move to Atlantis or not. A third option, that was gaining traction, was for Jason to take over running the ranch and then Joe and Kat would just fly back, as required, to help with larger group and multi-day trail rides.

Maria was still undecided about moving to Atlantis. She did have family in the city and had just started seeing an old friend, Jorge. He had lots of experience with horses, having been raised on a farm in Argentina, so if he stayed in the picture, Joe and Kat would gladly let them run the ranch on their behalf. It all depended on whether Jason decided to stay or not.

Just in case though, Solara had put together a construx program to revert the lodge and barn back to its original configuration, and remove all traces of the alien technology... even the road would revert to its former self.

No matter what the final decision was, they wanted Jason and Annabelle to graduate before moving to Atlantis.

According to Cricket, the island would be finished that night, so everyone agreed they should probably have naps that afternoon and have anything they were taking with them ready to go. Then wake up, have supper and hopefully they'd be leaving soon after supper.

As they lay down for their nap, Mark, Annabelle and Rayven were all too nervous to sleep, so a quick glance between the girls and Mark soon found himself staring into Annabelle's beautiful pink pussy, while the girls took turns licking and sucking his cock.

Mark loved licking her pussy, it was such a pretty pussy and it was always hairless and smooth. That was one of the biggest advantages of being a citizen with active medibots... you never needed to shave, the only hair that grew was on your head, or wherever you wished it to grow. The medibots also kept the girls pussies tight and ready, so the fact that Annabelle enjoyed fisting and being double penetrated, meant that her pussy would always eventually return to normal, just like Mark's cock.

As Mark was enjoying her sweet nectar, he felt his cock slip inside a warm wet pussy. Temporarily using his fingers to spread her pussy open, Mark glanced down his body and between Annabelle's perfect breasts, he could see she was now giving Rayven a blowjob, as Rayven was fucking him.

Mark resumed his ministrations on her sensitive clit and soon had her orgasming on his tongue. Bathing his face with her pussy juices and causing him to start cumming inside of Rayven who then began squirting her cum all over Annabelle's face and Mark's stomach.

A quick shower, reset the bed and soon they were asleep.

Cricket had removed the construction zone during the night, so as the sun came up the island would be fully visible. Mind you no one could get within 200 miles of it, so only planes and satellites would see it.

At 21:00 Alberta time on March 18^th, Cricket announced that Atlantis was ready. The last step she had completed, was tapping into the original underwater springs that fed the waterfalls and rivers, including the special hot and cold springs that Poseidon had made for his wife, Cleito.

Cricket had put in several mass fabricators into the sub-level of the port terminal, which was enabling her to build lifts and hover carts, etc. She was still building lifts for the transit system, but she had over 50 lifts operational already and she had two hover carts at each of the proposed townsites.

Upon hearing Atlantis was ready, Mark told the breakfast club to put the Atlantis website online and make a post on the Federation website saying that Atlantis was reborn. Then pack up their belongings and their computers and get ready to relocate.

Within a half hour of the announcement, Maren was landing her shuttle at the ranch to pick everyone up. It was evening in Alberta and Atlantis was 6 hours ahead, sitting in the UTC-1 time zone. So March 19^th, the spring equinox, would be Atlantis' re-birthday.

Sarah was going to be taking Liyana, Gyges and a shuttle full directly to Atlantis. In fact, everyone on the embassy would be coming down to the island throughout the day.

The flight didn't take very long and they were approaching the island as the first light of dawn hit the island. The other shuttles were just leaving the Battlestar and Embassy, so Maren took them all on a low speed fly-by around the entire island. It truly was a sight to behold.