Rescue Branch (Kinsella Universe)

by Gina Marie Wylie

  “I told you, the Rescue Branch is going away; it’s not a surprise. You will not do anything stupid like quit. I’m going to be under the care and maintenance of the docs for a while. I don’t want to have to ask you to leave every time I need a bedpan. Go, show the rest of the clowns how it’s done.”

  “I was thinking maybe you need a crackerjack assistant.”

  Anna laughed. “On Steph’s budget, I couldn’t afford even one. Here, I knew what I needed and had two. You were good, that you were, but you came along at the time we were almost complete.

  “No, you get out of here for a while. I am not going to be a good patient.”

  “Look me in the eye and tell me that you are going to be able do deal with all the changes just fine, without a friend close?”

  “For God’s sake, Becky! Read between the lines! I’m not sure who Steph likes the most -- John Gilly or me. I’d think John was a father figure, but she’s happy with the father God issued her. I’m maybe a sister... I don’t know. Neither of us had sisters, so we’re both clueless what that would be like. In any case, until I’m on my feet -- two of them -- you’ll never be far. I will have plenty of company.”

  “Can they really do that?”

  “John has friends where you’d never believe. Steph -- I don’t know about friends, but she knows where the skeletons are buried. What she wants she gets -- mostly, people never notice it, but it happens, no matter what they want. The story of her life... I could tell you such stories about Caltech -- she was a living legend there. She drove the other faculty nuts -- and they tried to shaft her, over and over. History is going to show just who shafted who.”

  She laughed then. “And then again, maybe not. Steph has an allergy to history books.”

  When Becky got back to her quarters, there was a message for her from Admiral Delgado, personally. “Lieutenant, in recognition of the work you’ve done, and your current personal circumstances, I’ve decided to temporarily assign you there on Psyche. Spend some time training their emergency services people in the new gear -- take at least a month. Then, when you feel they’re ready, let my office know and we’ll find something else interesting for you to do.”

  She could only shake her head. She’d just been doing her job.

  Anna Sanchez brightened everyone’s day. She was uniformly cheerful, she made jokes about her injury that made people wince -- but left them smiling in the end.

  Becky taught classes in vacuum rescue techniques. She hadn’t realized she’d become an expert, but somewhere along the line she’d absorbed an enormous amount of practical information about what worked. The emergency response teams on Psyche went from respectful to awed in just a few days.

  A week after the other leaders had left, Eagle and Kat were back, having heard about what Becky was teaching. Becky was surprised when Captain Gilly detached her for two weeks to the aft Trojans. She didn’t want to leave Anna, she had had her hip replacement surgery and while it had gone well, Becky was still worried.

  Anna had laughed. “Physics, dear Beck! Physics! They promised you wouldn’t be far from my side. Psyche is outside the fan well, the aft Trojan habitat is outside the fan well. In theory we’re not that far apart. The delta v is currently about four and a third kilometers per second.”

  “And you just happen to know that number off the top of your head?” Becky asked, unable to keep the bitterness out of her voice.

  “Beck! Look at me!”

  She did; she’d seen Anna angry at others before, but the anger directed at her was a new and unpleasant experience.

  “Tell me about Psyche, Beck!”

  “It’s a substantial asteroid, considered to be in the inner belt.”

  “That’s like saying you’re a woman, a little young. Is that a good description of you?”

  “No. I... Anna, I’m sorry, I’ve never looked it up. I should have.”

  “Maybe. I would have been disappointed in you if you’d come here to rescue me and been so ignorant. That’s not why you were here.

  “Beck, Psyche is a great huge chunk of nickel-iron, roughly ellipsoidal and one hundred and eighty kilometers on average in diameter. Beck, if they mined everything, the entire asteroid, it would be more than all the iron and steel produced by the human race since the dawn of time -- and at a dollar a ton, worth about ten to the sixteenth dollars -- more money than exists on the planet.

  “They’re rich!” Anna exclaimed.

  “Okay, they’re rich,” Becky told her. “Admiral Kinsella didn’t say anything about me having a part of it.”

  “Steph doesn’t always know everything. It’s top secret, but between bonuses and what I’ve invested, I’ve got about a percent of the rock. I mean, I didn’t have anything else to spend my pay on, right? One percent of ten to the sixteenth dollars is even more than Steph has.

  “There is just one tiny fly in the ointment, Beck. Psyche is what the astronomers call an undifferentiated body. This is all there is, there are almost no volatiles. Everything we eat, drink, and breath has to be hauled here from elsewhere.

  “The question is, from where? I told you -- there is a four and a third kilometer per second delta v from the Trojans, and we’re both out of any fan well. And the Trojans are coated with a thick layer of volatiles. Guess where we get the air you’re breathing? The water you drink? Earth, with an eleven kilometer per second gravity well to climb out of, a couple of hours to the fan limit, and then another 30 kilometer per second orbital velocity to adjust. From a standing start on Earth, it takes three quarters of a day to get here at an uncomfortable three gravities. It’s two hours from the Trojans at one gravity.”

  “I’m not very bright, am I?”

  “You’re like me, Beck! Focused! The first few months I spent up here, I ran into this brick wall every time I turned around. Where were we going to get that?”

  Her laugh was even more bitter than Becky’s had been. “We do everything we can to encourage trade between habitats. Eagle has the same problem we do: every year we notch double digit gains in trade between each other. But it’s a monumental battle to stay even in the percentage of overall trade between us -- Earth is still our dominant trading partner. It’s not that they are like the old colonial powers -- Steph saw to that! Even so, if we ever expect to be functioning economies, we have to produce more of what we consume ourselves.”

  “I had no idea.”

  “I didn’t either, until it started to matter to me. And if you think it’s tough here -- imagine how it’s going to be for an extra-solar colony? We need a replacement widget, and push comes to shove, we can get it in a day. A true colony is going to have to wait weeks -- and it’s not going to be a simple flight with a few kps delta v, either. Stars have random velocities, in random orientations. It’s going to be a top priority of new colonies to become economically self-sufficient.”

  Many hours later Becky sat up abruptly in her bed, fortunately the netting saved her from a nasty bump. She made some notes, and then lay back down, but was unable to sleep. What did “economically self-sufficient” mean?

  She was at the hospital the very first thing, embarrassing both Anna and herself. Bedpan time -- Becky could understand wanting privacy at times like those!

  Finally she smiled down at Anna. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking.”

  “Out here, it’s not as hazardous to your health as back on Earth.”

  “What do you mean economic independence?”

  “If a colony has to rely on outside sources for their finished goods, there is going to be a net outflow of wealth. If you’re a mature society, making lots of ends meet, that’s no big deal. Compound interest is a fierce thing, Beck! Fierce! A dollar invested early in a colony’s future offers big rewards. If you have to send that dollar elsewhere... it sucks money from the colony and badly stunts its growth in the long term.

  “A colony is going to make a really good investment if it can build a factory that can make, say washing machines, for internal consu
mption. They’ll get the benefit of both ends of the trade. And given the economies of orbital production -- raw material costs are going to plummet to functional zero. Robotics and the like are going to reduce labor costs. If the factory construction takes advantage of the same sorts of cost savings, pretty soon prices are going to go too low for it to be worthwhile to import competitive products.

  “Once competition is out of the picture, the price of goods will reach a local equilibrium.”

  “Anna, if it isn’t economic to import goods, what are ships going to carry?”

  “Steph told me; she told the others. I believed her, but mostly everyone else doesn’t. They see cargo ships like they traditionally have been -- haulers of all sorts of goods. Steph thinks that the most valuable, the most numerous cargo that will leave Earth for the next few centuries is people.”

  Becky blinked as Anna went on, “Yes, for twenty or so years a new colony will import a lot of goods. Bulk haulers will do it -- but every year the colony will import less and less -- until it goes to nearly zero. Art, gems and jewelry in general, rare and unique items will still move -- but it’s not going to be a high volume business. It’s anyone’s guess what commerce will be like in a century, but there aren’t going to be thousands of ships plying the space ways. Hundreds, certainly, but not in massive numbers.”

  “Wow!”

  Anna looked at her seriously. “Beck, it’s simple. If we can predict anything close to what will happen, we can make a bundle. Babies -- we agreed on babies. I didn’t have enough money growing up to do hardly anything. I went to Caltech on a scholarship. Steph won’t tell me if she’s responsible for any of that -- but she’s from a wealthy family and was no investment slouch herself, even before she met Benko and Chang.

  “I want to see a lot of smart kids going to good schools. I want to see my kids going to good schools. If I make much money, a good part of it is going there.”

  “Anna, the only way I could afford college was to win an appointment to Annapolis. My father was a Navy chief. I’m the youngest, and no surprise, the one who forever got the leavings. I learned to excel because that was the only way I was ever going to be able to make it.”

  “Steph is a serious disease, Beck.”

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “She plans. She plays people; she plays our entire society like others play chess. It took me the longest time to figure out why she was helping me. Then I looked around and found out I was not alone. John Gilly, even you were the same.”

  “What is she doing?”

  “She’s finding competent people to do the things she wants done. She’s particularly happy with competent people whose highest ambition is to be competent at what they do... they don’t want to get promoted to a job beyond their competence.”

  “That’s -- a rather limited goal,” Becky said, curious.

  “Do you think so? If you were going to be light years from the nearest help, which would you rather have -- a glory hog or a competent engineer? Who do you want to build your ship? The best person you could find for the job, or someone picked out of the ranks of the Air Force general officers whose turn it was to do something like that? If, God forbid, there’s an accident, who do you want coming to help? People like you and John Gilly or one of the death-hungry fliers?”

  “So, she likes us because we’re good at our jobs? Not because we’re geniuses?”

  “Geniuses are going to be busy geniusing; competency is what’s going to get the job done in space.”

  Becky grimaced. “The French guy wished we had a medal for competence, so that he could give it to me.”

  Anna laughed. “That’s funny. If the French were in charge of things, there probably would be a medal for something like that. Beck, you came to my rescue. You saw the problem, figured out what to do and got right to it. I’m alive today because you’re competent. I saw you, you know. You never but once looked at my leg. You weren’t brave -- you did what you had trained to do. I could have been anyone, anyone at all, and you’d have done the same thing.”

  “I wouldn’t have let just anyone pat me on the butt,” Becky said with what dignity she could muster.

  “And that’s as it should be. You go off to the Trojans now. You show them how it’s done; they will be grateful beyond measure. Spend some time thinking about what you want from the future. I’m going to be doing the same.”

  Becky took the shuttle, flown by one of the Psyche pilots. She was amazed, as they undocked and headed away from the asteroid, at how she felt about the trip.

  “I remember the first time I went up,” she told the pilot. “I was just short of terrified; I was awed and filled with a sense of wonder. That and I was in a spacesuit and had a catheter. Now it’s more comfortable than a commercial airline flight ever was -- and about as scary.”

  “Well, I was told that if I put a dent in the shuttle I’d never hear the end of it. It’s roughly as safe as civil aviation was before fans -- which isn’t nearly as safe as commercial aviation was and is still. Using fans in the low fan mode is as safe as commercial aviation, though. Hang on; we’re about to go to High Fan. That’s a little more sporty.”

  “I spent three weeks on Miracle at Orleans between her malfs.”

  “Good God! Not nearly as sporty as that!”

  There was a minute of nausea and then the universe was back. “We’re working on better navigation hardware and software,” the pilot told her. “We should be able to come off fan and pinpoint our location in just a few minutes. It used to take an hour or two, and still takes at least a half hour. Right now I have a rough vector on the habitat, based on radio signals, and I have a rough cut on the delta v we need, so I’m not losing much time navigating. This wouldn’t work around another star, though. Or headed to a location without radio beacons.”

  They docked with the habitat and Eagle and Kat met her. Within a short time she was showing a tape someone had made of her rescue of Anna. Again she spoke to an attentive audience and it was clear that they were impressed by the utility of sticky tents and rescue bubbles.

  Later she had dinner with Eagle, Kat and a number of the other leaders of the habitat. Becky brought up what Anna had said earlier about colonial -- and by extension -- habitat economics.

  “You have no idea,” Kat told her. “Eagle hated letting me come along when he was out prospecting, but I wouldn’t let him go alone. We designed the habitat about a million or maybe ten million times. When we started putting it together we had to stop a dozen times and do a redesign. The first year we had it in place, we had to evacuate four times, sometimes for the damndest things.”

  Eagle laughed. “We’re fond of cats, and if we were going to permit us a cat, we couldn’t very well say no to dogs. Sure enough, a couple of months later the place was hopping with fleas. Nothing we tried worked at first. At first we had some luck knocking them back, but at six months it was impossible to go around without being eaten alive,” Eagle told Becky. “I had to get hard ass about pets. None permitted! Even then we still couldn’t keep a handle on the bugs.

  “We finished a major expansion, no one had been permitted to take their suits off in there. We just brought people over a couple at a time when we were ready to move in, hit them with tons of DDT and other chemicals before they got into the environment. Then we popped the locks on the old habitat and spaced those bugs!”

  “Getting back on topic though,” Kat explained to Becky, “It was hard at first, very hard. It was enormously expensive to live out here and we didn’t hardly make anything anyone wanted. Then we started using methane and similar gasses for turbine fuel and feed stocks in general and we started to turn things around.

  “It just doesn’t make any sense to put a hundred million dollar nuclear power plant into a shuttle that only costs a few percent of that. Methane is easy to use, easy to store and relatively safe to handle. Did I mention dirt cheap?”

  “Captain Gilly said that’s what killed all those people at the
fore Trojans,” Becky said.

  “That’s right. Once we realized the utility of methane, we had to find something to oxidize it with -- something to make it burn. Oxygen just about doesn’t occur in nature in pure form -- it oxidizes with too many things and too readily.

  “That problem turned out to be relatively simple. You get excess energy out of steam reforming methane and water. That produces carbon monoxide and hydrogen as well as process heat. You take the carbon monoxide and mix it with more water and you get carbon dioxide and more hydrogen.

  “Do you understand the definitions the Federation made as regards to habitats, colonies and economic activities?” Eagle asked Becky.

  “I never looked into it,” Becky admitted.

  “It’s pretty simple, really,” Eagle told her. “An individual or corporation may claim an independent body in space up to four thousand cubic kilometers in total volume -- roughly a sphere 10 kilometers in diameter. If you publish the orbital elements and put a transponder on the surface, such a body is yours, in fee simple. There are requirements for the economic activity that you have to engage in on the body -- something like the old rules on mining claims in the US.

  “A habitat is a self-contained environment attached to or in orbit around an airless body. There’s an ongoing debate about what should an environment floating free should be called. The only one like that just now is Grissom Station -- they are calling it a base, and not a habitat. The term will probably stick.

  “A colony is a geographically contiguous concentration of population. A colony or habitat becomes a sovereignty when they hold a constitutional convention and the constitution is accepted by the Federation. No sovereignty may deny the right of another concentration of population to secede and form their own sovereignty. A population may elect to join another, contiguous sovereignty if both agree. Emphasis on contiguous. No sovereignty can be a subsidiary of another that is at a remove from it.

  “This grandfathers in all the original nations on Earth.

  “An airless body too large to be an economic zone may be divided up into many economic zones that can be owned by a variety of individuals, corporations or sovereignties, with the usual rules for economic activity. They have to, however, occupy it in an economically beneficial manner. We don’t have to build a factory on the asteroid below us -- it’s enough we claim a chunk and scoop up the crud on the surface.