Homer and his crew continued to scour the system. They’d also implemented some techniques for bringing metal up from planetside. That was slow and laborious, especially given the scale of our requirements. I’d allocated a half-dozen printers to Homer—Colonel Butterworth, predictably, had screamed like a stuck pig—with instructions to bootstrap themselves up to a viable operation. So far, Homer was doing better than expected. The amount of refined metal on Earth was considerable, even after the war and subsequent bombardment. He’d already returned the printers to regular ship production, after printing up new ones.