Live free or die second.., p.41
Live Free or Die, Second Edition, page 41
“If we do wedding of the century it will be covered up with papparazzi,” Steren said. “I still have to occasionally chase them away from the clinic.”
“Heh,” Tyler said, grinning. “Depends on where we have it.”
“Space?” Tom said, grinning.
“All traffic is carefully controlled by Space Command,” Tyler said. “And I know people.”
“We are not having it on some orbital project,” Steren said, then paused. “What are you thinking, exactly?”
“Hmmm…” Tyler said. “I’ve been thinking about building a ship for my own uses. I suppose I could get one fabbed up pretty quick. Nice one. Big enough for a fair-sized wedding party. Large viewing deck of optical sapphire. We’re casting those big these days. I’m not sure about getting an inertial system that permits it to be the dance floor—”
“Ooo,” Steren said, shuddering. “I don’t think I want to do my wedding dance over the Moon. Or Earth.”
“Just a thought,” Tyler said. “I could probably still get a custom yacht built to any spec you’d want from Glalkod Yards. Probably a better choice. Nah, come to think of it, they’re backed up too. I’ve been thinking I really need my own ship. This would be a good opportunity. I’d give it to you as a wedding present, but I don’t think you’d want it.”
“No, thanks,” Steren said. “I was sort of uncomfortable the one trip I took out with you when I was sixteen. I’ll keep my feet on the ground.”
“Could rent an island,” Tyler said. “Fly your friends in. Again, I know people. If we did it in certain areas the government would be happy to keep out papparazzi. Stay there for your honeymoon if you want. Please let me chip in for the honeymoon.”
“Done,” Steren said. “We accept. I’ll tell you what the plan is when we decide. But if you want to spring for an island wedding, I’m all for it. Sorry, Tom?”
“No problem,” Tom said, smiling. “Whatever you want, honey.”
“Any idea where?” Tyler asked. “Greece? Carribean? Polynesia?”
“Let me look around,” Steren said. “I’ve tried very hard not to play poor little rich girl. So I don’t really know since I don’t run in those circles.”
“Just let me know,” Tyler said.
“Have you been by to see Christy?” Steren asked.
“What? You two don’t talk?” Tyler said. “She’s covered up in work. I’ll probably see more of her when she graduates. I’m going to throw her at LFD at first. She’s not into orbital, either.”
“No,” Steren said. “We’re not. So what are you going to do with Troy? Inflate it again? Mine it?”
“That is…proprietary,” Tyler said. “Sorry, but it’s a big project. There’s a lot riding on it.”
“The basic properties were pretty straightforward,” Tom said, his brow furrowing. “The team came to the conclusion that there was no way you were going for a big habitat.”
“Nine kilometers is pretty darned big, Tom,” Tyler said. “And let me note, Steren, that you were the one talking shop.”
“I know,” Steren said, grinning. “I just could see you getting uncomfortable talking about the wedding.”
“Decide what you want to do and I’ll just write the checks,” Tyler said, smiling. “I’m really looking forward to it. Seriously. But about Troy. I really can’t talk about it for another…two months. About.”
“When it’s cooled?” Tom said.
“When it’s cooled,” Tyler said. “Then we really get to work.”
* * *
“Sorry it took so long,” Tyler said.
“It” was a two-kilometer in diameter steel washer with divots already cut out for the support lines. Six tugs were maneuvering it carefully from the gate to Bespin. Which was going to take about a week.
Because there wasn’t an intelligent species in the system, the Grtul had just set up the gate to orbit naturally. Thus it was rarely near Bespin. Travel times were going to be a pain.
“No problem,” Byron said, chewing on the end of his pipe. “We’ve got the spinners and carbon ready to go and Granadica has been turning out parts like nobody’s business. We also set up a portable separator system in the meantime. We’re not at independence from Glatun fuel supplies but we’re at about sixty percent in the system. Doesn’t quite cut down on cost because the portable is pretty expensive. But it’s something.”
“We’re going to need to talk about tankers,” Tyler said. “Fuel in this system is great. We need it in Sol. A lot of it.”
“Well…” Byron said, pulling out his pipe and contemplating it. “The Glatun method for producing tankers is to put them together not too much unlike a regular ship. I’ve worked on ’em. I think we can do that pretty well with Granadica’s help. Been looking at it.”
“Which takes, like, forever,” Tyler said.
“Yep,” Byron said. “Or we could use the Liberty ship design. But we’d only be pushing ninety thousand tons of fuel in each ship. That’s a lot of fuel, but not what you’re talking about.”
“No,” Tyler said.
“Or, and this is just a thought…” Byron said, staring through the crystal wall at the giant washer that was about to become the upper portion of a giant space elevator and which had been constructed in about three weeks. “We could do what you did with Troy. Blow up a nickel iron asteroid. Thinner and smaller, mind. Just a big grape-looking thing. Slap on one of the engines and crew quarters from the Liberty ships. Depends on the size of the asteroid and the amount of fuel, but you could get some boost there. Be slow but steady.”
“That is more like it,” Tyler said. “How soon can you get started?”
“We’re about done drilling. I figured you’d like it and I know how you hate to wait.”
* * *
“This had better work,” Tyler said.
“We’re going to be learning by doing,” Nathan said. “Get used to it.”
“Yeah, but if we really mess up, we can’t just fix it with duct tape,” Tyler pointed out.
The first thing that had to be done was get Troy moving. And once they did that, it was going to be apparent where it was going.
That Troy was a DoD project was bound to hit the news sooner or later. The line item had finally made it into the budget. Questions were already getting asked on the “white” side of Congress, the part that had to vote on a multibillion dollar military line item but hadn’t yet been briefed in. The fact that it had taken this long was surprising.
Moving it was the next problem. They’d stabilized the asteroid with pumped-fusion bombs. But even though they were very clean in yield, they’d been counted out for this evolution. Let an enemy irradiate the surface of the battlestation.
Instead, a poor, lonely nickel-iron asteroid that was so minuscule it didn’t even have a name had been chosen as the accelerant. After stabilizing the six-hundred-meter diameter asteroid’s rotation it had been fitted with the largest pumped fusion bomb ever created by man, adjusted to point at the target, and then the bomb had been set off.
The man-made super-missile was about to hit the Troy at ninety kilometers per second and, with luck, send it on a course for its eventual home, just outside the three hundred mile “no heavy weapons” interdiction circle of the gate and “up” in the plane of ecliptic.
“No,” Nathan said. “But the worst that’s going to happen is Troy will be out of pocket. Then we’ll just have to drop back to plan B.”
“Nuclear attitude adjustment,” Tyler said. “I’d prefer to avoid NAA.”
“Same here,” Nathan said. “But we have bigger problems. We’ve done the rotational equations and we’re probably going to have to use some nukes. With every tug in the fleet pulling, which means shutting down every other project, it will only take seventeen years to get the rotation out. And until we get the rotation stabilized, we can’t really do anything with it. We especially can’t poke a hole in it. The atmo inside has to be under pretty severe pressure. When we pop it, it’s going to apply delta-V.”
“And if it’s spinning…”
“The delta-V is going to be a bit like a balloon that you open up the spout,” Nathan said. “Especially since when we burn through is going to be a guess.”
“I know a guy who says all these equations are easy,” Tyler said.
“He’s either an idiot or a student,” Nathan said, watching the numbers from the asteroid’s trajectory. “This is looking too good.”
“Student,” Tyler said. “Steren’s fiancé. Seems like a good kid. I’d frankly dreaded who Steren was going to pick for a husband. Love her to death but…dreaded. As it turns out, another dread I could put aside.”
“Who’s Steren?” Nathan asked.
“My daughter?” Tyler said. “I mean, really, we’ve been friends for how many years?”
“I knew you had kids,” Nathan said. “You never seemed to want to talk about them. Congratulations on getting one of them married off.”
“I’m thinking about making him your assistant,” Tyler said.
“Oh, that’s just what I need,” Nathan said, laughing. “A hot-shot…grad student?”
“Well, when he’s got his master’s.”
“A hot-shot with a master’s that also happens to be the boss’ son-in-law,” Nathan said. “Toss me out an air lock without a suit, why don’t you?”
“As I said, he’s a pretty good kid,” Tyler said. “And stabilization is going to be dead easy.”
“Oh?” Nathan said. “Really?”
“Really,” Tyler said. “Melt a couple of big patches. Big patches. Then get some tugs and pull out the metal as far as you can. Try to keep it straight.”
“Horns?” Nathan said. “I thought this was the Troy, not the Viking raiders.”
“Archimedes, Nathan,” Tyler said, sighing.
“Levers,” the small planetary objects physicist said, slapping his forehead. “Damnit.”
“Why do I have to think of these things?”
“Do you know how hard it’s going to be to do?” Nathan asked.
“No,” Tyler said. “Easier than anything else that comes to mind, though?”
“Yes,” Nathan said. “Easier than all our other thoughts. And the reason you have to think of things like this is that we worker bees are trying to figure out how to get your visions to actually work. But…damn. Levers. Heh.”
“‘Give me a lever big enough and I shall move the world,’” Tyler said. “Times like this I wish I had a time machine. ‘Hey, Archy, come on into the future. We made a lever big enough.’”
“And…we have contact,” Nathan said.
On the screen the six-hundred-meter asteroid impacted the side of the massive metal ball. Following the laws of physics, it then recoiled and bounced off. It was like moving a beach ball by hitting it with a fast-ball. The difference being that in this case the “beach ball” was a thousand times more massive than the baseball. The “fast-ball” bounced off with a spall of metal pinwheeling through space.
Troy didn’t seem to move at all.
“How’s our trajectory?” Nathan asked.
“Pretty good,” the technician said. “About ninety-eight percent of nominal. We’re going to have to adjust carefully on arrival.”
“Do we know where the poor asteroid is going?” Tyler asked.
“Towards Jupiter orbit?” the tech said. “It’s probably going to contact Ceres. We’d already planned to stabilize it.”
“More nukes,” Tyler said, sighing. “Those things are expensive, you know.”
“And more at the other end,” Nathan said. “The good news is that it also decreased the spin. Slightly. Hmmm…if we do the adjustments with a bit of English…”
“Space billiards.”
* * *
“Apollo Mining and Tyler Vernon are up to it again, grabbing headlines across the world with a bank-shot in asteroid engineering! Here with us is Fox space analyst, Dr. James Eager. Okay, Dr. Eager. They hit Troy with a nickel-iron cueball and now it’s drifting into the space lanes! What’s up with that?”
“Well, Nick, it’s clear that all of our initial estimates of Troy’s purpose were wrong. I’m not sure how big they were actually planning on Troy being, but it wasn’t supposed to swell up to full size. And it wasn’t ever supposed to stay in the asteroid belt. Given the course they set it on, there’s only one target.”
“Target? Is it a weapon?”
“I’m not sure if you’d call it a weapon, per se. But the name now makes sense. Troy is headed for a near collision with the gate. It’s pretty unlikely they mean to hit it. They’ll have to adjust its course at some point. But they’re probably planning on parking it by the gate. And that has only one meaning.”
“And the meaning is? Don’t keep us in suspense, Doctor!”
“It’s a battlestation, Nick. A massive fortress to protect the Solar System from hostile ships coming through the gate. And with kilometer-and-a-half thick walls and the SAPL…That’s going to be one heck of a deterrent.…”
* * *
“Levers,” Tyler said. “Heh.”
He’d gone ahead and gotten the ship even if Steren didn’t want to get married in it. Smaller than if it was designed for parties, it was based on the Emergency Rescue Shuttles. He’d thought about getting a converted frigate but that just seemed too much overkill. The differences between a stock ERS and the Starfire being…many. ERS didn’t have one wall replaced with optical sapphire. And they weren’t nearly as comfortable.
He leaned back in the couch and watched with his naked eye as just about every tug in the system lined up on the two horns that had been extruded from the Troy. The melt area had left two large dimples at the base that were going to take some consideration. He didn’t want two great big bull’s eyes on the battlestation. But getting the rotation out was the main problem at present. It wasn’t like there wasn’t lots of nickel iron in the system. They could melt the levers back into the mass easily enough. Take a while to cool, though.
Lining up on the levers was the tough part. The exterior of Troy was rotating at sixty-three meters per second. The levers, though, were five kilometers long, the longest Nathan thought they could make without seriously damaging the structure of the battlestation. That meant they were moving at ninety-seven meters per second. That was only two hundred and some odd miles per hour, a crawl at astronomical speeds. But it was rotating. It was like trying to catch the tire lugs on a snow tire. The tugs could barely keep up. The only reason they could was that there weren’t any puny humans on board. They were pulling nearly forty Gs as they maneuvered into position.
“Tugs in place,” Argus said. Tyler had taken one of the AIs he’d gotten from Gorku and installed it as the overall manager of the SAPL and other Apollo operations in the Solar System. The class II AI was necessary with the now thousands of clusters set up all over the inner system. He also managed civilian space traffic. At the moment, though, all such traffic was in holding pattern as the full resources of the AI were devoted to the job of stabilizing Troy.
“Here goes nothing,” Nathan said over the circuit. “Initiate Delta One.”
When they were at full power you could see the gravity field from the tugs. They distorted starlight. Ninety-six tugs, each with the same capacity as the original Paws, started to strain against the massive levers.
“Flexion,” Argus reported. “Reducing power.”
“Damnit,” Tyler said. That was what they were mainly worried about. Nickel-iron was not as rigid as steel. The levers were tapered, a hundred meters at the end where the tugs were attached and six hundred at the base. But it still wasn’t sturdy enough for the full power.
“This is going to take some time,” Nathan said. “But it’s working. We’ve already slowed rotation three percent.”
“This will take about six hours,” Argus said. “The tugs will exhaust their onboard fuel supplies before the evolution is finished. I will schedule rotations for refueling.”
“I’ve got calls to make,” Tyler muttered. At some point he had to find somebody to share things like this with. It was no fun by yourself. Maybe he should go on tour like Steve had done.
“Oh, the hell with it.” He leaned back in the comfortable couch and watched the tugs work.
Before long he fell asleep.
NINE
“And we have burn-through,” Nathan said.
There was no telling how much delta-V they were going to get from the gases in the interior. Since the Troy was running a bit high and fast to stop at the position planned, it had been decided to cut the door—which started with burning through to release the gases—on the “upper front.” That wouldn’t put the door in much threat from an enemy. Troy was planned to be “over” the gate. They planned to put the main opening “up” and “spinward” of the gate, well away from enemy fire. Not that Tyler planned on the door being open when an enemy was firing.
Tyler had had his fill of meetings in the last two months. The stockholders were up in arms, investors were rioting, and nobody knew quite what to make of the whole thing. And when Congress calls you to testify, you go. He thought he’d done pretty well. The Armed Services committee had been friendly, all things considered. And the ratings had been high. No death threats.
Troy was center of most news. People were still trying to grasp how large it was.
The Finnish corporation that was working on the crew quarters had managed to put it in perspective. They’d made a scale model. Then models, to scale, of various notable buildings, ships and landmarks.
The one that finally sank home was the model of the Twin Towers. They were still an icon, despite being gone for nearly three decades. And when STX pointed out that the crew quarters were nearly the same size, and those were the size of a toy car compared to the massive battlestation, the reality started to hit.
“That’s a lot of gas,” Tyler said. The Troy was spurting a gush of gases that looked for all the world like God’s fire extinguisher.
