SpaceCorp (18 page)

Joe gave him a sideways look, then said, “We can handle that. What else?”

“This is supposed to be classified,” Monica said, “so just you guys get to know.”

“Sweetie, everything we do up here is classified,” Frieda said.

“I mean it!” Monica said. “No writing home to mama.”

“Okay, scouts’ honor,” Bill said.

“I wasn’t a scout,” Frieda said. “You take a pinkie promise?”

Monica glared at her for several seconds. “It’s a ray gun. A great big honkin’ laser cannon. It’s gonna run off reactor power that we bleed from the nuclear rockets.”

The table was silent for a while. “I wondered when they’d come up with that idea,” Joe said.

“Okay,” Bill said, “I’ll bite. Exactly
why
do we need a laser cannon?”

“Because,” Monica said, “according to some friends in high places, the
SSS Albert Einstein
is supposed to be a target for a ground-launched missile.”

“Who from?” Frieda asked.

“Iranians.”

“What the hell for?” Bill asked.

Monica shrugged. “Why ask why? Finish what they started with the Centaur shoot-down, I guess.”

“And the laser cannon is supposed to destroy the incoming missile?” Joe asked.

“Hopefully.”

“When is this attack supposed to take place?” Joe asked.

“As soon as the
Einstein
goes operational.”

“Okay,” Joe said, “so this laser cannon knocks out the missile, then what? What’s to stop them from going after an easier target?”

“Yeah,” Bill said, “like us for instance?”

“I don’t know,” Monica said. “We’re working on that.”

April 2071

Mess Hall, Quad I,
SCS Pelican

“What’s this?” Monica asked. The object she held was a one-meter hex shape of pure nanocellulose, twenty cm thick.

“It’s a hub cap,” Bill said. “It’s the last piece of the hull. Parts of the hull have been sealed and functioning for weeks now, but this is the last piece of the exterior—kind of symbolic. We do it for all new space stations.”

“We’d like you to place it,” Joe said.

“Once you get it positioned,” Frieda said, “we’ll foam it from the inside. That will give us full hull integrity. Then we can finish fitting her out. I believe the topside nukes are next?”

“You want to trust something like this to a yo-yo?” Monica asked.

“Yo-yos are people who are up here for no more than three months at a time,” Joe said. “You stopped being a yo-yo... ah, twenty-six minutes ago. And the tradition says the newest official crew member who is on board at the time gets to do the honors.”

“You’re crew now, Monica,” Frieda said. “Your name has been added to the ship’s manifest, and you have a permanent cabin with your name on it.”

“But I have to go back soon,” Monica said.

“Hell, even crew go downside now and again,” Bill said. “Now if you’ll quit whining and suit up, we have a hull to seal.”

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTEEN

April 2071

Detroit inner city

The Detroit inner city had been a ghost town for fifty years. The driveway icons that spelled success in America of the late 1960s and 70s were now rusty memories eroded by Asian quality and European style and the fickle Mid-East oil supply. There was a short revival in 2009 paid for by a transfusion of Federal tax dollars, but it wasn’t long after that before once again owning Detroit iron branded you as the chattel of your parents. The car market couldn’t live without the youth market. And as cars lay dying in the lots, the high-margin product lines of pickups, vans, and trucks moved across the Detroit River into Windsor, a border town in the country now known as French Canada.

British and French Canada had gone their separate ways in 2035, the British side to pursue oil shale for the Pacific Rim and Midwestern American markets, the French side to pursue life as it had been. It was a bloodless separation, not unlike a middle-aged couple realizing after the kids leave that they no longer have any use for one another culturally, economically, or politically. British Canada was running out of oil shale and the petroleum markets had been wounded by the worldwide economic downturn. The only way to make a profit was to skip restoring the great open pits where the oil shale was found, leaving giant black scars that could be seen from space.

French Canada was doing a little better. Their obsession with preserving their cultural and economic past had turned out to be a good strategy. People had legitimate jobs that didn’t pay well but that was better than a society dominated by illegitimate jobs that did pay well. In the lower forty-eight, when the government discontinued traditional welfare safety nets like unemployment and food stamps, the disenfranchised created their own welfare—cooking crystal meth and other forms of chemical recreation. There was always a market for substances that could take you someplace else or make you someone else. And chemicals tended to be cheaper and safer than other variations of the vice trade such as selling sex. Besides, with the right substance, sex didn’t matter so much anymore.

Inner city Detroit’s loss was another group’s gain. Its lack of people and tall albeit derelict buildings made it an ideal staging site for rehearsing assassinations. Assassinations had become a lucrative business in a society where control of the legislature meant the difference between profit and loss for your business. Buying a million dollar bullet was a lot cheaper than buying a ten million dollar political campaign. Prices varied with the level of the politician of course, but the one to ten price ratio stayed about the same regardless of whether you were talking a city councilman or a prominent senator. People referred to the practice as
a continuation of politics by alternative means
, a clever aphorism originally attributed to 18
^th
Century military theorist, Carl von Clausewitz.

Clever as it was, the assassination business was subject to an old fashioned predator-prey arms race. High powered scoped 30’06 rifles were good for 800 meters until the targets started wearing bulletproof Kevlar vests. Then after .50 caliber rifles with armor piercing bullets extended the maximum range to two kilometers, the targets quit exposing themselves in public altogether, traveling from one fortified Point A to the next fortified Point B in heavily armored cars. The weapon of choice for today’s assassins was the 20 mm rifle. With a depleted uranium round, it could punch through any kind of practical armor that a target might have at ranges out to five kilometers. But raw firepower aside, the real technological revolution was in a pair of electronically linked smart scopes—a spotter mounted on a tripod and an aimer mounted on the weapon. The Hollywood practice of having the sophisticated lone sniper unpack and assemble his weapon from a building twenty stories up and half a kilometer away and taking out his target with the first shot was pure crap at these ranges. There were just too many variables—temperature of components, wind, thermals, humidity, elevation, not to mention the fact that no weapon could be reassembled with the same geometrical exactness as when it was last zeroed.

The ‘dirt-meat’ shot was the preferred method of an assured kill.  Both spotter and aimer put their reticles on the same aim point near where the target was expected to appear—no windage or elevation adjustments necessary. With both scopes electronically synched, the spotter scope would be slaved to the aimer scope. When the target appeared, the first round would go down range sending an infrared LED signal back to the spotting scope. With no wind data and a rifle assembled
in situ
, the first round would often as not end up in the dirt. The range to the target and the speed of the round were both knowns, so the displacement of the strike of the round was an easy calculation. The reticle of the aimer scope was repositioned to a new aim point by the scope’s brain before the weapon was back in battery from the recoil. The ‘meat’ shot could be fired shortly after the ‘dirt’ shot—depending on range—and the target splashed a second or two after that. But all that took practice and the more realistic the rehearsal venue, the greater the probability of a two-shot kill. Inner city Detroit had a lucrative industry guaranteeing the privacy of assassination teams.

*   *   *

“Team One, your target will be 375 meters. Sight in on the old Ford pickup.”

“Where is it?”

“Look on your map. It’s at the northeast corner of the intersection at Woodward and W. Adams. Remember, your target will likely be behind it entering from the doorway of the South Portico. We’re simulating that with the corner of the church tower behind the pickup. Have you got it?”

“Team One target.”

“Team Two, you will have a tight gap between the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the Old Executive Office Building, range 430 meters.”

“Team Two target.”

“Team Three?”

“Still looking for it.”

“Just sight down the west side of Washington Blvd. Can you see it?”

“Okay, Team Three target.”

“Okay, good work. Now take the next hour to set up your cradles. Remember, you only get one zero mikes on A-Day. And at these ranges we don’t want you guys to be anywhere near when the triggers are pulled.”

One hour later...

“Teams, how you doing out there? Based on today, how realistic is one zero mikes going to be?”

“Team One was Up in about two zero mikes. Floor is unstable in this building. Cradle kept wobbling until we braced it with some planks. That’s not going to be a problem when we set up live.”

“Good. Team Two?”

“Team Two was up in zero niner mikes. No problems this position.”

“Excellent! Team Three?”

“Team Three was up in one zero mikes, but the site is exposed and windy. Keeps shaking the table.”

“Yeah, you’re on top of Joe Louis Arena. Best we could do out here. ‘Sorry. You’ll be inside on A-Day. Maybe we can rig some tarps as wind breaks for the live fire tomorrow.”

“Or shoot at night?”

“No good. The target won’t be there at night. Besides, we need to match weather conditions as closely as possible. We’re expecting 30+ degrees C and 90+ percent humidity.”

“Well, we got the humidity right now. Can’t believe people used to live in this soup.”

“All Teams, check your weapons are empty.”

“Team One empty.”

“Team Two empty.”

“Team Three empty.”

“All Teams. Do your local checks on your trigger solenoids, then recock.”

“Team One positive and recocked.”

“Team Two positive and recocked.”

“Team Three positive and recocked.”

“Good. Remote Operators, attempt a remote fire on each weapon in succession on my marks... Mark One.”

“Away One.”

“Shot One.”

“Mark Two.”

“Away Two.”

“Shot Two.”

“Mark Three.”

“Away Three.”

“Shot Three.”

“Great, we have a dead president... by the way, everybody okay with that?”

“Team One, we’re
supposed
to be okay with that?”

“Just checking. This will be the highest profile we’ve ever done. And some of you don’t have experience with politicians.”

“Team Two, I’m nothing with it. If they want me to be okay with it, they have to pay extra.”

“You guys are shameless.”

“Team Three, I can do shame. How much you want for it?”

“Okay, Teams, pack it in. Tomorrow we do live fire.”

C
HAPTER
F
OURTEEN

May 2071

The Construction Yard,
SCS Pelican

With Monica’s placement of the hub cap, the
SSS Albert Einstein
finally looked like a space station. She had to be secured in place by heavy construction hawsers lest she bump up against the inner walls of the
Pelican
. And her hull was still pretty hollow but at least it was sealed and safe enough for people to work inside to complete the fitting out. Robots did the heavy lifting, but human technicians still needed to see the workspace to program the robots for the rest of the assembly.

The algae farms for nanocellulose production and parts manufacture were about the only portions of that station that were functional. Electric power to keep the tanks warm came from the
Pelican
. But today the arrival of a supply ship would begin to change all that. It carried a single liquid hydrogen propellant pod destined for the hub. Eventually, there would be eight of them—one for each nuclear thermal rocket in keeping with SpaceCorp’s policy of never putting all its eggs in one basket. There were cross-feeds to keep all rockets firing should an LH
₂
propellant tank get knocked out by an impactor. Such an event was unlikely given that the hub was inside the ring and the tanks were inside the hub, still SpaceCorp’s anal retentive design policy dictated it was far better to have a contingency protocol and not need it than to need it and not have it.

Ordinarily, supply ships docked at the hangar deck. But the LH
₂
tank was so large it would have been difficult to maneuver it through the ring and into the construction yard given the presence of the completed hull of the
Einstein
. Instead, the supply ship maneuvered to a spot directly over the hub where the safety netting had been peeled away. Robots would off-load the LH
₂
tank and maneuver it into the proper position inside the hub. This maneuver was made easier by the fact that artificial gravity was close to zero at the hub. Still, it meant operating above the protective ring of the
Pelican
, so the ‘No-Humans-Allowed’ rule was in effect.