Live Free or Die, Second Edition, page 25
Tyler slewed the view around to the Horvath ship.
“Fifty years ahead of us,” Tyler said. “When the first Glatun exploration ships found them they were using draft horses. The Glatun sent in a cultural advancement team and accelerated them to the point of being able to make their own ships, their own IT. Turnkey industries. Glatun university credits.”
“Really?” Steve said, surprised. “They’re not offering anything like that to us.”
“The Glatun used to do it all the time,” Tyler said. “Because it makes for good trade partners. Over time you make more money back than you spent. They stopped doing it for two reasons. One, they’re spending more and more of their government budget on internal support. Read welfare. Two, not only the Horvath but the Ogut and the Ochu, all of whom the Glatun advanced, have all become strategic competitors. They don’t want to also have the humans bearing down on them.”
“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 thousand square meters of mirror per day?”
“Yep,” Tyler said. “About twenty-nine million 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 terawatts 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 multiaxial 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 three hundred 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 He-3 off of Twenty-Nine. If we could get as much He-3 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 get 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 lend 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 loath 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-World War II, 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. The 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.”
