Live Free or Die-ARC

by John Ringo

  There was still no declaration of war with the Horvath. There had been, in fact, a declared cease fire. Which was when the Horvath ships came through. The Horvath didn't seem get the concept of keeping a negotiated peace. Might made right, period.

  The estimates as of when Steve left were that the only reason they weren't sending more ships through was that they only had seven cruisers.

  Earth had destroyed five.

  "What happened to the prisoners?" Steve asked.

  Some of the Horvath ships had managed to get crew off before being slagged. Some.

  "We turned them over to the Glatun for repatriation," Tyler said, shrugging. "It wasn't like we could feed them."

  "We have got to secure the gate better," Steve said, his face tight. "We can't keep getting bombarded over and over again."

  "Yeah," Tyler said, enigmatically. "Would be nice. Hey, have you seen what we did with Connie?"

  "I haven't seen much news lately," Steve said. "So . . . no."

  "Check this out," Tyler said, turning on a plasma screen.

  The view was of a disk spinning in space. Steve tilted his head to the side, trying to get some scale. Then he realized the nearly microscopic dots moving near its face were Paws.

  "Holy hell," he said, his eyes wide.

  "We got it into a stable spin by detonating some clean pumped fusion bombs on the surface," Tyler said, excitedly. "Then we heated it back up. It's been separating pretty much the whole time you've been gone. At this point, it's just a matter of how fast we can pull stuff off. I've mostly farmed it out to the Glatun. There's a Limaror smelter with sixty tugs working on it full time. We're not getting much heavy metals, yet. We're mostly getting aluminum, copper and tin. About six hundred tons a minute."

  "I see you can afford the Centennial," Steve said, holding up his nearly empty snifter.

  "Hell, I can afford to buy Martel," Tyler said, topping up his glass. "And I'm spending it nearly as fast as I make it. There are over two thousand people working in space full time at this point, ninety percent for me. And despite joking about working for low pay, they're not. We're still having to buy ships from the Glatun and the Rangora. But I have high hopes. Boeing's managed to improve their shuttles already. I'm pretty sure they're to the point of being able to make at least small ships. About thirty percent of our lift is earth built shuttles. I'm hoping to get that to seventy percent by the end of the year."

  "You're starting to sound like the Evil Overlord again," Steve warned. "I hope?"

  "I know," Tyler said, shrugging. "But . . . people keep talking about 'the recovery.' What recovery? We're not going to get back the people we lost. We're not going to get back the treasures we lost. I mean, we lost the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian, the British Museum, the Forbidden Palace and the Louvre in one day. Then we lost the Taj Mahal. The biggest remaining stash of art treasures in the world is in my really top-secret lair. And it's staying there. We're not going to recover that. We're not going to recover the people. That's the past. Let's talk about the future!"

  "Which is?" Steve asked.

  "Well," Tyler said, shrugging. "Sounds like we've got a planet we can terraform. And . . . other stuff."

  "You're being mysterious again," Steve said.

  "Confidential," Tyler said. "Really. It's very tightly held. And I'm trying to keep it that way. Hey, we're starting on a new mining project."

  "You can't extract everything from Connie," Steve said, shaking his head. "And you're starting a new one?"

  "These things take a while to heat," Tyler said, shrugging. "Especially this one. It's a six kilometer asteroid in the belt."

  "That's going to take some power," Steve said.

  "We're trying a slightly different take," Tyler said. "Turns out there's some differentiation to them. So we stabilized this one and we're doing a laser drill to the interior."

  "You're drilling into the interior of a six kilometer diameter asteroid?" Steve said, blinking. "You really are thinking big. What are you going to do, blow it up?"

  "Nah," Tyler said. "There's better stuff to do with it."

  "Dinner is served," Dr. Chu said, entering the room followed by a group of waiters. "Mind if I join you? Since I fixed it?"

  "Conrad!" Steve said. "I'm glad to see you survived."

  "Many friends did not," Dr. Chu said, picking up the bottle and pouring himself a drink. "Absent companions."

  "Absent companions," Tyler and Steve said.

  "To the future," Steve said.

  "I'll drink to that," Tyler replied. "To a better, brighter, bigger future."

  Two

  "I'm doing this," Dr. Nathan Bell said. The huge 'small planetary object' specialist was handling the drilling project on Troy. "I'm fully involved in the project. I'm working the problems, and they haven't been small. Nothing about this has been small. And I think you're insane."

  "How's the drill rig working?" Tyler asked.

  The 'drill rig' was a complex of mirrors physically connected to asteroid 3159. The main belt asteroid was an eight kilometer long, five kilometer wide, mass of virtually solid nickel iron. Sixteen BDA mirrors were pointing 'out' to a VSA perched over the drill point on thin nickel-iron rods. The BDA mirrors captured a series of beams off the SAPL to supply sixty-four megawatts of power to the drill beam. The VSA, since the drilling was taking place in shadow, could easily manage the heat waste heat of a mere sixty-four megawatts.

  Clearing the drill hole had been a problem at first. A good bit of the nickel iron was heated to vaporization by the beam but most of it just sort of slumped out of the hole. A tug had been collecting it, and setting it the side, for the last two months. There was now a minor planetary body circling the minor planetary body.

  Also circling the minor planetary body was a small, leased, freighter. It had been refitted to function as a construction site management ship. It wasn't the most comfortable place in the system but Tyler had done his best. And it had a good cook and great food. It had to have something going for it, the crew had been informed they were staying aboard until they were done with the first phase.

  Naturally, it had been renamed Trojan Horse.

  "Pretty well, actually," Nathan said. "The biggest problem has been routing it out."

  One of the problems was that they needed a big hole for the overall plan. So the beam had to continuously track around the hole, opening it up.

  "We're only about two hundred meters down," Dr. Bell said. "Which, given what we're working with, is amazing. And the rate has increased as we've been figuring out the problems. We should get to the center on schedule in four months."

  "I hate waiting," Tyler said.

  "Tyler, this project is insanely huge," Dr. Bell said. "And I don't think that most of the steps are going to work nearly as well as we've planned. Do you know how hard it is to steer a comet?"

  "It's a big ball of ice," Tyler said. "Use ice hooks?"

  "We got the bombs attached," Nathan said, sighing. "We adjusted the course. Sort of. It's, sort of, headed this way. Should arrive in three months. At that point we, somehow, have to get a hundred meter wide ball of ice to stop exactly where we want it. Too far away and we're going to be transferring ice for the next decade. Too close is when it hits the array. This thing is massy enough it has a noticeable gravitational field. If the comet stops next to it, we're going to have an icy coating to work with. But even if we get it to the precise spot we want, we still have to, somehow, shove it down that little bitty hole and to the center. In space! And unless you want us to wait until this thing cools, we're going to be dealing with vaporizing ice as we're doing the stuffing!"

  "Ice hooks," Tyler said, shrugging. "We're going to do it. We'll figure it out."

  "What's this 'we', short man?" Nathan said, chuckling. "You seriously have a Napoleon complex, don't you? Again, I'm fully involved in this project. Everybody thinks it's cool as hell. Also insane as hell."

  "The SAPL is vulnerable," Tyler said. "We can't
depend on it being able to protect us against a cunning enough enemy. We are going to secure the solar system. And Troy is the first step."

  "So how are we going to stuff the comet in the hole?" Dr. Bell said.

  "Wrong way around," Tyler said. "Put a tractor system at the bottom. Then pull the comet in. Even if it vaporizes, you're still pulling the material in."

  "We're going to lose the tractor system," Nathan said. "But that . . . might just work."

  "See?" Tyler said. "Ice hooks."

  "I thought you were mining this," Steve said, looking at the comet parked next to the asteroid. "What's with the comet? Mining for volatiles?"

  "Sort of," Tyler said, grinning. He admitted he couldn't keep a secret worth a damn. But it was Steve. And Mathilda. He really liked both of them and if he could find a girl half as pretty, and smart, as Mathilda he thought he might just give marriage a shot again. "And we're selling some of the stuff we've melted out. Not all, but enough to pay for the project. Fortunately."

  "We've drilled out a five meter wide, two and a half kilometer deep, hole in the asteroid," Dr. Bell said. "We've just put a self-powered tractor system at the bottom of the hole. Now we're going to suck the comet into the hole."

  "The comet's about a hundred meters, right?" Mathilda said. "The hole is about fifty thousand cubic meters. The comet is five hundred thousand cubic meters. Too big."

  "We had a hard time finding a smaller one," Tyler said. "And this actually works better. We won't be sucking in as much rock. And the total volume of ice we're shooting for is more like ten thousand cubic meters. We're going to stuff the material we've collected on top of it and seal the hole."

  "What's the point of that?" Steve asked, confused. "So you get a nickel iron asteroid with a nice icy center."

  "Do not tell me that you're going to balloon it!" Mathilda said. "What was it? Analog in the 1950s? You're serious?"

  "Balloon . . ." Steve said then blanched. "So . . . you stuff ice in the middle . . . Seal the holes . . ."

  "Heat it up," Tyler said. "Which is going to need a lot of power. What was that number, Nathan?"

  "One point three time ten to the twelfth megajoules," Dr. Bell said. "Think two hundred and seventy megatons and it makes more sense. Just . . . doesn't have to be instantaneous."

  "My God," Steve said, laughing. "You're kidding!"

  "Got any idea how much power SAPL is pumping?" Tyler said. "We think it will take about six months. That's how much. We'll also have to get it rotating in a ball of twine rotation to get the melt even. When its melted, the ice in the middle boils into gas and the asteroid blows up like a balloon. We're going to have to be careful to get it heated evenly and in a nice, neat sphere before the melt is finished. That's going to be tough. But doable. We should end up with a ball of nickel iron about ten kilometers across with walls that are about a kilometer thick."

  "What's the point?" Steve said. "I can understand spinning Connie to pull of the metals, but I don't get the point of this in mining."

  "Mining?" Tyler said, chuckling. "Who said anything about mining?"

  "We're getting a lot of solids in there," Nathan said. "And a lot of the volatiles are being lost to sublimation. They keep blowing the comet off for that matter."

  "It'll either work or it won't," Tyler said over the hypercom. He'd simply had to go back to earth to stomp out some fires. He always tried to get subordinates who were smarter than he was to handle his various affairs. Dr. Bell was a prime example. That didn't mean, especially on the business side, that they could intelligently expand upon his generalizations. That had recently become obvious with the space-components side. The Finns were fine. It was the main office in Littleton that was having problems.

  With the ongoing threat to the cities, it was getting easier to get quality help in small cities. All you had to do was go to any headhunter and make a decent offer. Tyler had started moving his offices to Littleton before the first orbital bombardment. Mostly it was a matter of convenience. The now defunct, along with its command staff, Lair was near Littleton. Having a place where there were some of 'his' people and good meeting facilities meant he wasn't always having to drive, or more often take a chopper, to Boston.

  After New York got hit, he had people hammering on his doors.

  But not all of them quite got his vision. In part because he was keeping very quiet about a lot of it. But the requirement had been clear. 'Design living and working space for two thousand people that was transportable in stages by space tugs and that could be assembled on site, in microgravity and vacuum conditions, with minimal support. Think in terms of a high quality portable space facility with internal gravity for a Marine Expeditionary unit.'

  The Finns had dived into the project with alacrity. But it took a lot of engineering support which meant paying a lot of draftsmen and designers. And Tyler had insisted that they be good draftsmen and designers. This thing really was going to have to go together like Legos.

  But while he was off fiddling about in other projects, the bean counters had gotten involved.

  "Just keep stuffing," Tyler said. "Sooner or later it's going to cool the interior. Then you can weld it."

  "It's playing hob with our schedule," Dr. Bell pointed out.

  "If you think your personnel can keep their mouths shut, we'll rotate them out," Tyler said. "They've been out there for nearly a year."

  "I think most of my people want to stay to see this part finished," Dr. Bell said. "My wife isn't quite as enthusiastic but she's enjoying the bonuses."

  "If you've got people who can cut and run let them," Tyler said. "This is getting too big to keep totally quiet for much longer. I was hoping to wait until it was ballooned to go public. But we may have to do it earlier."

  "What's the status with the VDA and Ruby?" Nathan asked. "None of this is going to work if we don't have at least one and preferably both. Among other things, we're going to need Ruby to do the rest of the project."

  "Not well," Tyler admitted. "Bryan's running into some major snags. But we'll get them worked out. It's just engineering. The theory's good."

  "Well, tell him to get a move on. Assuming no more problems with the stuffing, we're going to be ready to move on to phase two in about a month. After that . . . well, we'll just have to see if the models are accurate."

  "Yeah, models," Tyler said, making a face. "And on that note, I've got a meeting. See ya."

  "Take care."

  Tyler cut the hypercom and just sat for a moment, collecting his thoughts.

  "I would rather face a thousand deaths . . ."

  "Gentlemen and ladies," Tyler said. "Thank you for coming."

  Most of the people in the room either worked for him or were contractors that depended on his business. The people from Lockheed Martin, BAE, Boeing, Honeywell and, especially, the general currently commanding Space Command did not fall into that category.

  "Everyone is reminded that this meeting and all information is proprietary," Tyler said. "Recently, my internal people have been asking a lot of questions regarding certain, entirely internal, expenditures. Some projects that are absorbing an enormous amount of Apollo Mining's resources, time and money. Some of them don't make any sense, such as the design work being done by the able firm of STX." Tyler gave the Finns a nod. "And then there are the proprietary Ruby, VDA and Troy projects."

  "Troy is that asteroid you renamed," the general said. "That's a mining project."

  "Which is costing more than the materials we're extracting," Apollo's CFO said. "Mr. Vernon, the thing to remember is that Apollo is now a publicly traded company. You don't have to deal with the questions from the shareholders. I do."

  "The shareholders are common stock shareholders," Tyler said, mildly. "They bought the shares on the assumption that I would, as I usually do, make out like a bandit and they will get in on it. Troy and the rest are the necessary . . . infrastructure costs for our next big capital infusion. Which I'm planning on getting from Space Command."
/>   "How big?" the general said.

  "Big enough it's going to distort the US government's budget," Tyler replied. "Especially if I charge you by the ton. Gentlemen, and ladies, behold . . . Troy."

  The picture on the plasma screen was of a ball of metal. It rotated through three hundred and sixty degrees and then zoomed in. Small marks could be seen on the surface. As it zoomed closer, it could be seen that they were ports of some sort. Suddenly a door was revealed, a very large, round door. A small vessel, about one tenth the size of the door, was near it. Zooming in, again, it became obvious the tiny little tinker-toy was the still incomplete Constitution.