Troy Rising 1 - Live Free or Die (21 page)

Ronald Reagan, 44th President of the United States, once famously stated that: 'The only
way Earth could ever have a unified government is if it was invaded by aliens.

As it turned out, he was optimistic. Despite first contact with extraterrestrials, Horvath
destruction of multiple cities, the seizure of all of earth's precious metals and the
abortive Maple Syrup War, Earth did not have a unified government. Worse, despite many
conferences, negotiations, meetings, summits and various other diplomatic endeavors, earth
had neither a centralized space management command nor even a finalized treaty on space
extraction, nor exploration nor colonization. The monthly shuttle from Glalkod, by
default, communicated with the US Space Command in Eglin Air Force Base because it was
going to be setting down in US territory. The Horvath, on the other hand, wouldn't deign
to speak to Eglin and had repeatedly threatened to nuke it from orbit. If they bothered to
speak to anyone it was to call Russian Space Command or the South African mining
consortium. Usually by cellphone.

Tyler, however, was despite some people's opinion an American patriot.

“Space Com, Space Com, orbital mining ship
Monkey Business
with four heavy robot tugs leaving gate and preparing for orbital insertion...”

“Uh... Roger,
Monkey Business
. We have you on trajectory for orbital insertion. You're not showing a Glatun registry,
Monkey Business
. Please state home world and species, over.”

“Home world, Terra, Space Command,” Tyler said. “Species... Human.”

***

“Boy, you're getting too big for your britches,” Mr. Haselbauer said, looking up at the
side of the still steaming
Paw Four
. The space tug, unlike the
Monkey Business
, had the ability to land on a planet. It was not, however, very aerodynamic and even
careful reentry tended to heat up the surfaces.

On the other hand... it could take it. The robotic tug was a mass of gravitic generators,
drives and power plants surrounded by a thick shell of high-strength alloys. It looked
like a steel brick the size of a small warehouse.

“You bought a
ship
?” Mr. Haselbauer said, incredulously.

“Leased,” Tyler said. “I
leased
a ship. The tugs came with it. And you don't want to know how much it's costing. Dollars
trade at something like five hundred thousand dollars to the credit. So this is costing me
about a billion dollars a day. Sorry, make that
twenty
billion. We'd better get something extractable out of that asteroid or between the cost
of this thing and the cost of the Very Large Array I'm going to go from the richest man on
earth to the poorest in a nanosecond.”

“And who the hell is flying it?” the farmer said. Despite being, like Tyler, an instant
multi-billionaire, Mr. Haselbauer hadn't changed. He still dressed like a homeless man,
still worked his fields every day and still didn't seem to know the meaning of the word
'vacation'. Which was why he'd 'volunteered' to come pick Tyler up from the Manchester
Spaceport.

Tyler hadn't changed either. He
did
know the meaning of the word 'vacation.' He just didn't seem to be able to find the time.
And he wasn't going to any time soon.

“I am,” Tyler said. “I had to have a certified pilot to get it to the gate. But on this
side there's no certification requirement. Yet.”

“So you're a rocket pilot now?” Mr. Haselbauer asked, pointing the way to the truck.

Manchester Spaceport was not part of Manchester Airport. During the Maple Syrup War, one
of the targets the Horvath vaporized was Tower Village Mall. It looked like a very
inviting target.

Which it would have been had they dropped the rock during the day. Instead, they'd dropped
it at four AM local time. And the bomb they dropped was one of their smaller ones. Nobody
had been killed and very few people were even injured.

The smashed spot, however, was in a perfect place to put in a space port. Close to I-93
with good access using US-3 maple syrup could flow in from the region and galactic goodies
could flow out. Of course, the 'Spaceport' currently consisted of some poured concrete,
large areas of slagged concrete and metal and a parking area that was what was left of the
mall parking lot.

It also was remarkably unsecure. Glatun traders had their own defenses to prevent nosies
or thieves damaging or stealing from their ships. And nobody could quite figure out how to
manage ships over which even their own Space Command didn't have control. Which, given
that an orbital reentry ship was another name for potential crater the size of Washington,
was another thing to be negotiated.

“It's not a rocket,” Tyler protested. “And, yeah, I am. I took an online course while I
was on Glalkod Station.”

“But you couldn't get certified,” Mr. Haselbauer said.

“I had to spend five years as a mate, first,” Tyler said, shrugging. He tossed his
carry-on into the back of the pick-up and got in. “I didn't figure I had five years to
waste piloting a freighter. Most of the systems are automatic. The pilot's really just
there to tell it what to do. The big problem is I need an engineer. Fast. I've hired a
couple of Glatun to help out but I'm going to need a human crew. Which means finding some
people to send to Glalkod to get implants and training. Oh, and training on this
particular ship is sort of hard to find.”

“Why?” Mr. Haselbauer asked, starting up the truck.

“Well, it's
kind of
old,” Tyler said. “I couldn't afford a new one. Which is why I need an engineer. Quick.”

“This truck's old but it don't need an engineer on call all the time,” Mr. Haselbauer
said. “Just some decent TLC. How old is old?”

“Let's put it this way,” Tyler said, leaning back in his seat. “I considered calling it
the
Santa Maria
.”

***

“You bought a ship?” Dr. Foster said. The Chief Science Officer of Aten Mining
Corporation, Vernon Tyler, Chairman of the Board, was a bit nonplussed. “You didn't say
you were going to buy a ship.”

Aten had started off in a small and cramped set of rooms in an industrial park in
Huntsville, AL, not far from the company that made their mirrors. Since Aten was
ninety-five percent of their customer base, Aten had quickly absorbed AMTAC which was now
a division of Aten. And they'd moved into bigger offices as the work-force had expanded.
It needed to expand. Three doctors and a few lab rats could control fifty mirrors. Without
an AI, though, controlling
four hundred
and fifty mirrors was a different ballgame.

It was costing Tyler like crazy. Not as much as the lease on the tugs, but still costing
like crazy.

“Leased,” Tyler said. “Five. Sort of. We needed tugs. There was an orbital mining control
ship and four tugs going for cheap on the Glatun version of eBay. I leased them through a
subsidiary of Gorku, Inc. They gave me a deal. I think Gorku likes me for some reason.”

“You leased a space ship,” Dr. Foster said in a far-away tone.

“For one hell of a lot of change,” Tyler said. “Since Icarus was a bust, what have you
been up to while I was getting implants and leasing ships. Because we need to put them to
work. You know, pulling useable metals off of an asteroid.”

“You leased a space ship,” Dr. Foster said, again.

“Can we get past that?” Tyler said.

“No,” Dr. Foster said, grinning. “Look, nobody gets into this business if they're not
seriously bent on getting into space. So far, despite Glatun freighters coming every
month, I've been grounded on this rock. I'm not getting younger. When do I get a ride?”

“It's not for thrill rides...” Tyler said.

“Who said anything about a thrill ride?” Dr. Foster replied. “Does that ship have probes?
Spectroscopic and magnetic detectors? Some way we can figure out what these asteroids
are
so we're not trying to figure out what a rock is from the ground?”

“Uhmmm...” Tyler said, closing his eyes and accessing his hypernode link. “All of the
above.”

“Then let's
go
!” Dr. Foster said, grabbing his jacket. “Where's the ship?! I'll call my wife on the
way...”

“It's in Manchester,” Tyler said, holding up his hand. “FAA had conniptions when I wanted
to fly it down here. I leased a plane to fly down. Getting from Manchester to Huntsville,
commercial, is an incredible pain.”

“So let' s go!” Dr. Foster said, heading to the door of his office.

“Wait!” Tyler said, grabbing him by the collar. “We've got to do this one step at a time.
Do you have a passport?”

“A what?” Dr. Foster said.

“ICE is treating off-planet flights like going out of the country,” Tyler said with a
sigh. “We can leave just fine. Getting back you need a passport or you've got a lot of
explaining to do to Immigrations. The tug only has room for five. And it only has bare
minimum facilities. And those are for Glatun which, as it turns out, we can kind of use.
They use basically the same sort of toilet we do and a shower's a shower. But the living
quarters are on the
Monkey Business
. There's room for up to ten if you're
very
friendly. And two of those slots are taken up by the Glatun engineer and pilot temps.
There are no EVA suits. I was planning on buying some off of the Russians. Well, there is
one real space suit, but it's mine. So if there's an emergency you better hope we can hook
up to one of the tugs to get back to earth. And there's bound to be a problem since all
the ships are older than the United States. Oh, and there's no cook and don't get me
started on the robochef. Last but not least, you're the Chief Science Officer of this
lash-up and you can't just go gallivanting off into space at the drop of a hat.”

“I'll quit,” Dr. Foster said.

“Then there will
really
be no reason for me to bring you,” Tyler pointed out. “And what about Dr. Bell?
He's
the small planetary bodies guy.”

“Fine,” Dr. Foster said. “We'll take Nathan, too.” He paused for a moment and thought
about it. “Will he fit?”

“Yeah,” Tyler said, shrugging. “Barely. You're determined to do this, aren't you? I really
do need you keeping this lash-up running.”

“I can do that remotely with the hypernet,” Dr. Foster said. “At least for a while. I'm
not that bad of a manager, thank you. I've got a passport. So does Nathan. Uh... The
question is how long we'll be gone. What sort of acceleration does the ship have? How
quick can we do some fly-bys?”

“Ninety gravities,” Tyler said. “The tugs are about a thousand at max power but it costs
like crazy in fuel.”

“A
thousand
gravities?” Dr. Foster said, boggling. “Continuous? The Space Shuttle only pulls ten! And
that's for about a minute!”

“They're space tugs,” Tyler said, slowly and carefully. “They're basically space
bulldozers. If you're going to move rocks in space, and time is money note, you need
something that can move rocks. The flip side is they're expensive and kind of clumsy. If
you really want to go, though, we can do this. Who's coming along?”

***

“I think we're going about this all wrong,” Dr. Bell said as the Gulfstream took off.

“I don't care,” Dr. Foster said. “We're going.”

“No, I mean the mining,” Dr. Bell said. “Look, yes, putting the VLA in towards Venus makes
sense. We can get twice the insulation as putting it in earth orbit. We'd get more further
in, but anything past Venus starts to get tricky with heat management.”

“So what are we doing wrong?” Tyler asked.

“Most of the Atens are stony, chondritic, carbonaceous...” Dr. Bell said, then shrugged.
“I can keep going in the Cs and Ssss if you want. They have metal but they're not
primarily metals. And Icarus is a case in point for how screwed up that can make things.”

“What's screwed up?” Tyler asked.

“You'll see when we get there,” Nathan said, balefully. “But what we need is an M Class.”

“Which I've noted in my extensive research,” Tyler said, sourly. “Problem is, we've got
all our mirrors down in Venus orbit.”

“Which is not as much of a problem now that we have a ship,” Dr. Bell said. “Sure, we'll
keep the VLA down in Venus orbit. It's easy enough to kick the mirrors out of the
freighter as its headed out-system and let them fly there on their own. Or, hell, we can
use the tugs to bring them up. But we've got enough mirrors in the VLA at this point that
we can start doing some serious reflectance. Put one, well probably three or four, of the
BDA mirrors up out of the ecliptic. Then get one down by our target asteroid. Which should
be 6178 1986 DA. Definitely metallic unlike Amun.”

“Heard about that one,” Tyler said. “Except it's so freaking
huge
. Our system is designed around melting the thing in-situ and then extracting. Melting it
is going to take a while. We're talking about a mile wide ball of stainless steel. And we
need a better name.”

“Point,” Nathan said, scratching his head. “What about adjusting the approach?”

“How?”

“How do the Glatun mine asteroids?”

“With more tugs than we've got,” Tyler said. “They land diggers and dig them apart and use
fusion pumped lasers I'm not going to try to run. The problem is rotation. If you have a
high rotation, and 6178 has a very high rotation, even if you cut bits off they go flying
away due to the low gravity. So they slow the rotation of big asteroids with really big
and many tugs. What I want is a
small
M class asteroid. There
have
to be some. One hit the earth not too long ago in a place called Crater City, Arizona.
That one was only fifty meters across. That's about right for starting out. And we still
need a better name.”

“6178 should have about point oh oh one eight percent platinum groups,” Dr. Foster pointed
out. “That's one hell of a lot of platinum group.”

“I'm doing the math,” Tyler said, his eyes closed. “We can currently pump, what? About one
million watts? Ten to the sixth. Seventy-eight requires one point five times ten to the
nineteenth
joules per second to melt it. We're going to need more mirrors.”