Live Free or Die-ARC

by John Ringo

  "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 80% 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.

  "Nothing we've noted."

  "The world breathed its usual sigh of relief with the uneventful departure of the Horvath tribute ship. One person who breathed a particular sigh of relief was Tyler Vernon, the maple syrup king, who is joining us from his aptly christened Lair in New Hampshire. Good morning, Mr. Vernon. How's the weather down there?"

  Tyler had his own TV crew, thank you very much, and had set up position on the command platform of the Lair so the backdrop was the plasma screens, now all set to shots of various space projects. The shot was also from a slightly down angle so he didn't look quite so short.

  "Sixty-eight and clear, Courtney," Tyler said, smiling. "How is it in New York?"

  "Nice to be able to hide in an underground bunker," Courtney replied, smiling with an equal lack of honesty.

  "Every evil madman has to have his lair, Courtney," Tyler said. "It goes with the orbital death ray. Which I understand is the plot of the next James Bond thriller in which the villain is short, bald and wears a goatee."

  "I'm sure that has nothing to do with you, Mr. Vernon," the reporter said. "On the subject of the Horvath, though, they really don't like you."

  "Which is why I have an underground bunker, thank you," Tyler said. "I'm pretty sure if I was out in the open they'd make a 'mistake' in their targeting. Since I don't want any innocents injured, here I am. For a communalist society with a positive lack of individuality, they sure can pick out individuals to dislike."

  "From lumberjack to financier, mining conglomerate owner and wealthiest man in the world must be challenging," Courtney said. "And now you've bought MGM studios? What are your plans there?"

  "I'm pretty much of a hands-off kind of guy, Courtney," Tyler said. "MGM was, as many people and businesses are, suffering from the continued tough economy. But it's a great long-term investment in my opinion. Most of what I'm going to be doing, directly, has to do with investments in their technological side. Getting more and more of their film library available for distribution through the internet, that sort of thing. Remember, I might have been a lumberjack before I discovered the maple syrup connection, but my background is IT. I'm not going to be tinkering on the creative side so much as helping the studios get more invested in the future."

  "So you're not planning on directly choosing shows or movies?" Courtney said.

  "Courtney, I've got a building space based industry, a large scale agricultural concern and interstellar security issues," Tyler said. "Do I look like I have time to read scripts or go to sets and look over directors' shoulders? I'm far more interested in its film library. For that matter, I bought a number of movies from your own parent corporation and I'm not telling them how to make movies. I'm sure your friends in the movie business will be happy to know I'm not planning on making them remake The Sands of Iwo Jima word for word, line by line and motion by motion. I've got much bigger fish to fry. Including a new asteroid, another potential earth killer, which we're looking forward to turning into inexpensive raw materials to help with the commodities metal shortage on earth and get the economy turned back around."

  "Well, it's been a pleasure to talk to you, Mr. Vernon."

  "My pleasure as well, Courtney."

  "And that's the word from the Maple Sugar King," Courtney said, smiling at the camera. "And now the orbital mining king and if his underground lair is any indication, our future king. This is Courtney Courtney with CNN . . ."

  "Wow," Colonel George Driver said. "She really doesn't like you."

  "Nobody," Tyler said, "and I do mean nobody in the entertainment industry likes me. Okay, I suppose there are a few. But by and large, the MSM absolutely hates my guts. Even Fox is barely neutral."

  "And was it just me or was she being pretty . . . She seemed to make you out as more of a threat than the Horvath."

  "It wasn't you," Tyler said, reading a report and not looking up. "I'm what her culture, her tribe, has long seen as the bad guy. Wealthy, self-made, conservative. White. Male. I'm a more comprehensible evil, and it is viewed as evil, than the Horvath. Also easier to kick around because they know, deep down, that I'm not going to use the SAPL to burn the CNN building to the ground. There's a touch of Stockholm Syndrome in the whole thing, I swear. They were like that with the terrorists. In that case, they used the fact that they were a downtrodden culture as an excuse but I'm coming to the conclusion, based on the way that they treat the Horvath, that it's some sort of automatic submission in contemporary urban liberal culture. Oh, they protest their butts off but not against something, some group, that they actually view as dangerous."

  "I see what you mean," Colonel driver said. "But I don't understand it."

  "I don't understand it, either," Tyler said, looking up. "Not if you mean emotionally. I can intellectualize it, but I don't understand it. Nor do they understand me. Or you for that matter. The difference is, I try to understand them. They don't even try to understand me. They see my motivations as being theirs. I'm rich because I'm greedy. I have power so I must be ambitious for domination. Control, maybe. Domination qua domination, no. They think, the people at MGM think, that I bought a controlling share so that I can change the creative culture at MGM and make it more in line with my personal politics."

  "That's what I thought for that matter," Colonel Driver said.

  "Heh," Tyler replied. "I bought MGM as another experiment. And I am interested in changing cultures. Just n
ot ours."

  Eleven

  It started, as it generally does, with front-line medical practitioners.

  Dixie Ellen Pfau was 27 and a team-lead intern at the Mayo Free Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. With green eyes and long brown hair she kept in a careful bun, she had, until becoming an intern, been almost whipcord thin from daily runs.

  Dixie's father was on permanent disability from the only job he'd ever had, working at a 3M mill after he dropped out of school. Dixie's mother worked, when she worked, in retail. Generally as a checker in grocery stores or a convenience store clerk. Dixie had two brothers and a sister, all younger. Her younger sister had three children already. When other interns talked about their family she changed the subject and she used her schedule, which for the last few years had been very full, as her excuse for not having talked to anyone in her immediate family for three years.