Troy Rising 1 - Live Free or Die (31 page)

“I'd say we wouldn't but...” Steve said. “In time we might.”

“I can't even get large loans,” Tyler said. “Rightfully, the Glatun banks consider earth
to be in a war zone. The Glatun government would have to make security guarantees. Which
they haven't. We don't have a mutual defense treaty. We don't have
any
real treaties. Their rationale is that we don't have a world government but the truth is
the Glatun military is so stretched they couldn't support a guarantee, anyway. They had to
withdraw their cruiser to go do a humanitarian mission.”

“Sounds like we need a space fighter,” Steve said, shrugging.

“I've got nine mirrors sitting on the ground,” Tyler said. “Eight BDAs and a VSA that
AMTAC
assures
me will work this time. I'm going to have to schedule a
Paw
to go pick them up. Which means it's
not
collecting metals to trade to the Glatun to pay for more ships. Which is why I'm trying to
move to all space based production of VLAs. Here...”

He switched to a visual of a metal rod and Steve canted his head to the side, trying to
figure out the scale.

The rod was spinning in space, he could tell by the occasional changes in reflection of
sunlight. As he watched, a SAPL beam hit near the end and cut off a chunk of metal which
floated away from the rod. More heat was applied, numbers scrolling across the screen and,
as the glass from Icarus had done, the chunk of metal began to spread out into a disk.

This time there seemed to be several SAPL beams hitting it from various directions. The
spin was increased and the chunk of metal quickly formed into a thin, very shiny, disk.

Tyler zoomed back and revealed that there were more than a dozen of the plates spinning
through space.

“We're doing it in the shadow of the VLA,” Tyler said. “The plates cool pretty quick. I've
got one of the big gravity bots from the
Monkey Business
out there catching them. They're not big enough to need a
Paw
. Attach a satpak, we weld it on with a very refined BDA mirror and I had the last two
shipments just dumped off in space and they got themselves there on their own, and then
they fly up to the VLA.”

“That looks like you're making one about every ten minutes,” Steve said, his eyes wide.

“I am,” Tyler said. “And I'm trying to create another site to make a more refined system
so I can make BDAs in space and only have to create the VSAs on the ground. That, by the
way, is where about half my nickel from Connie is going.”

“An increase of, what? Eleven hundred square meters of mirror
per day
?”

“Yep,” Tyler said. “About three hundred and seventy-six thousand watts. Which we can't use
very effectively because the VSAs are the sticking point. A single VSA mirror has to
handle, get this, ninety
terrawatts
of power. All being reflected by a ten meter mirror with the main power on a patch of
mirror the size of your fist. Which the first one did. For about thirty seconds.”

“And then?” Steve asked.

“Very pretty explosion,” Tyler said. “Very
expensive
, very pretty explosion.”

“Cryogenic beryllium...”

“Which is what it was,” Tyler said. “The sticking point was heat transfer. There was just
too much waste heat for it to move it away from the mirror fast enough. So we have all
these other mirrors, which
do
work, spreading heat instead of concentrating it. Spread heat works for some things. Not
for others.”

“I can see why you sort of dismissed the space fighter,” Steve said. “That's... a lot of
power. Six months...”

“A lot of it was in planning when we made our little jaunt,” Tyler said. “The Lair was
under construction. The VSAs were in preliminary planning stages. Stuff like that.”

“Incoming call,” the mission commander said. “Aten Command Center.”

“Hey, Bryan,” Tyler said. “Look who's visiting.”

“Hey, Steve,” Bryan said. “You're a surprising face to see in the Lair.”

“I'm being very gracious because I want to get back into space,” Steve said. “What with my
abrupt departure from Boeing, I'm pretty much persona non grata in all the usual circles.”

“I'm thinking about letting him fly the
Lizard's Paw
,” Tyler said.

“
Lizard's Paw
?” Steve said.

“One of the Rangora ships I'm looking at is a pretty simple lifter tug,” Tyler said.
“They're cheap among other things. Its job will be to lift out of the gravity well and get
stuff up to orbital. When it doesn't have a lift to do I'm going to have the pilot start
cleaning up the orbitals.”

“Garbage scow,” Steve said, grinning. “Got it.”

“Hey, it's a rocket man job,” Tyler said, smiling. “What's up, Bryan?”

“We're reaching the point of no return on chunking Connie,” Bryan said.

“Time to go to Phase Two?” Tyler asked.

“That's my professional opinion as chief cook and bottle washer.”

“Phase two?” Steve asked.

“Bryan?”

“We've been cutting chunks off of asteroid 6178 1986 DA for the last three months,” Bryan
said. “Then cut them up a bit more, spin process a bit and then give them the
Business
. It's been
very
profitable and I hate to give it up since Tyler put me on a bonus structure.”

“Keeps your nose to the grindstone,” Tyler said, grinning.

“That it does. Thing is that we're working with a really big, very cold, asteroid. And we
can't get enough thermal coefficient on one spot unless it sort of sticks out. Hit an area
with large cubic to dump the heat and all the BDA power in the world won't do a damned
thing. It just warms up the asteroid.”

“Which is, in fact, phase two,” Tyler said. “We're just going to warm that puppy up. It's
got a multi-axial spin like Icarus.”

“Heat it until it's a ball, let the metals separate then start snake-cutting,” Steve said.

“Exactly,” Tyler said. “Thing is...”

“Connie's about ten times the mass and half the base temperature of Icarus,” Bryan said,
shrugging. “It's going to take some time to warm up.”

“Most of it is iron,” Steve said, frowning. “What are you doing with all the iron?”

“Dumping it out of the
Business
as fast as we can,” Tyler said. “It's making an asteroid of its own. Which I'm going to do
something with. Someday. But for all practical purposes it's slag. There's no economic
benefit to dropping it into the well and we don't have the resources to make anything
really major in space. We'll do something with it. Someday.”

“Too bad you can't get Connie into a single axis rotation,” Steve said.

“Technically,” Tyler said. “With all four
Paws
working on it for six months we could. We're thinking about it. We'd have to be careful
with the BDA beams but it's not something we
can't
do concurrently with the heating. Thing is, we're only going to use about eighty percent
of the VLA to do the heating. And a bunch of it's going to be done with VLA mirrors, not
BDA. All we really need for this part is getting power on target. In the meantime, we're
going to be working on... Bryan?”

“2006 WQ29,” Bryan said. “It's in the right region, it's not too big and it's got a fairly
high level of useable materials. This time, though, we want to capture the volatiles. We
can use them to replace losses on the
Business
. We're also planning on making a sort of... volatiles asteroid. Sort of a man-made comet.”

“Once you've got all the gases collected in one place they just sort of sit there,” Steve
said. “Interesting idea.”

“I want to make a habitat eventually,” Tyler said, shrugging. “But doing that is going to
require two of the
Paws
working more or less full time. Which means
not
changing Connie's spin. And we can't really get that much He3 off of Twenty-Nine. If we
could get as much He3 off Twenty-Nine as we're going to use I'd do it. Can't. Fuel is
still costing me out the wazzoo.”

“Not on the subject of slowing Connie,” Steve said, musingly. “But about Connie. You've
got all that iron just sitting there, right?”

“Right,” Tyler said.

“And you're just retransmitting VLA power to Connie,” Steve said. “Can you use the iron as
a mirror?”

“Spin it up into a big mirror?” Tyler said, looking up at Bryan. “Bryan?”

“The reflectance of pure iron is
not
all that great,” Bryan said. “It would absorb a good fraction of the power as waste heat.
Of course, if we made it thick it would then dump it on the shadowed side. It's an
economic question but we might take the nickel we were getting ready to send to earth and
make
that
into a mirror. We've got several tons of it on-hand on the
Business
that we were waiting for a
Paw
run to send home. That's a good chunk of change but if we spun up a big mirror from it we
could use fewer BDAs on the warming project. More BDAs on Twenty-Nine means mining it
faster. Eh...” He closed his eyes for a second then nodded. “We were planning on three
months to get Twenty-Nine down to essentially, glass. With twenty BDAs working on
Twenty-Nine we can probably cut that down to a month then move on to the next asteroid.”

“Sounds like a better long-term plan,” Tyler said. “Get somebody to do the rough numbers.
Go with Plan A on phase two. It's not like we can't change horses mid-stream on it. Keep
the nickel on hand until we've got the report done.”

“Will do,” Bryan said.

“Anything else?” Tyler said.

“Not at the moment,” Bryan said. “See ya.”

“That's the constant problem,” Tyler said. “How much of the materials do I use for
infrastructure and how much do I use for sale? And since I'm the
only
guy doing anything up here, still, I either have to sell it to the Glatun or drop it into
the well. And people get really tricky if I
just
drop it.”

“Two thousand tons of nickel
does
tend to make a bit of a hole,” Steve said with a chuckle.

“Seriously, you want a job?” Tyler asked.

“Since you're sober,” Steve said, “yes.”

“Find five more good pilots,” Tyler said. “They need an FAA flight license. Preferably the
sort that the FAA thinks they walk on water.”

“You just sort of generalize on this stuff, don't you?” Steve said.

“Yes. I'm assuming you are able to fill in the details. If you're not, I'm talking to the
wrong guy. They'll go to Glalkod, get implants and qualified to drive ships. While they're
doing that, doing it right requires about three months, you'll be going to the Rangora
Empire to look at their stuff. With Rangora stuff, I'm going to want
new
ships. Or only slightly used, anyway. We need nine tugs and two shuttles or small
freighters that can move in and out of our gravity well.”

“That's a lot of ships,” Steve said, blinking his eyes.

“Did you look at the board?” Tyler said. “I've got a pretty good credit balance on Glatun
from trading metals. I may have to do some materials trade to get them and I'm
definitely
going to have to find someone to loan me the money. But I should be able to swing it. I'm
going to see if I can get a Rangora bank to do the loan. They've got an... interesting
relationship with the Horvath. If the ships are owned by a Rangora bank the Horvath are
going to be
extremely
loathe to shoot them down. Pirate them, maybe. Destroy them, no. And even piracy is going
to be a bit unlikely. So... You up for that?”

“Gosh,” Steve said, grinning. “Go to other planets, meet other civilizations? To boldly...”

“So don't go there,” Tyler said. “You're going to have to take the usual food supplies and
for as long as you're going to be gone that's a lot of food to ship. I take it you're up
for it. I need a definite yes.”

“Yes,” Steve said.

“Good,” Tyler said. “As soon as the Horvath are gone so are you. You have about a week to
find people.”

“I already have the list,” Steve said, then frowned. “Define interesting relationship. The
Horvath and the Rangora that is.”

“If the Rangora were on our flank we'd
really
be hosed,” Tyler said. “Both polities are aggressive, expansionistic and essentially
Hobbesian in nature. The Rangora are that oddest of ducks, a functional military dominated
oligarchy. Think one of the South American junta countries.”

“Functional?” Steve said, blinking rapidly in surprise. “I mean... art, literature,
science, industry... They don't usually function well under a junta.”

“Aliens,” Tyler said. “Go figure. And it's a pretty good description for Japan pre-WWII so
we've
done
it. The Horvath are essentially a communist society.
True
communism. They don't even have an executive, just a distributed bureaucracy. Which also,
demonstrably, doesn't work with humans. Just look at the EU. But about their relationship.
They don't border each other, so they're friendly. Separate spheres of influence. The
Rangora are a bigger technology trade partner with the Horvath at this point than the
Glatun. Think Italy and Germany pre- World War Two. Horvath are the Italians.”

“Who are the Japanese?” Steve asked.

“The metaphor does not work perfectly,” Tyler said. “But probably the Ananancauimor if
we're going to extend it.”

“That would make us...”

“Ethiopia,” Tyler said. “The Horvath just haven't used gas. Yet.”

***

“What's up with our Horvath friends?” the President asked. “I heard a report on the news
that they're not acting like their usual friendly selves.”

“Pretty much normal,” the National Security Advisor said. “Shuttles go down, shuttles go
up. The only difference is their orbit. They're doing a ball-of-twine orbit instead of
their normal geosynchronous.”

“Mapping?” the President asked.

“Possibly,” the NSA said, shrugging. “We don't have any internals from the Horvath. We've
asked the Glatun, who probably do, for some but who wants to give up intelligence? Mapping
doesn't really make sense, though. They can still pull from just about any commercial
source and the Russians and South Africans give them whatever they ask.”

“But other than that, no change?” the President said.