Live Free or Die-ARC

by John Ringo

  It also was remarkably unsecure. Glatun traders had their own defenses to prevent nosies or thieves damaging or stealing from their ships. And nobody could quite figure out how to manage ships over which even their own Space Command didn't have control. Which, given that an orbital reentry ship was another name for potential crater the size of Washington, was another thing to be negotiated.

  "It's not a rocket," Tyler protested. "And, yeah, I am. I took an online course while I was on Glalkod Station."

  "But you couldn't get certified," Mr. Haselbauer said.

  "I had to spend five years as a mate, first," Tyler said, shrugging. He tossed his carry-on into the back of the pick-up and got in. "I didn't figure I had five years to waste piloting a freighter. Most of the systems are automatic. The pilot's really just there to tell it what to do. The big problem is I need an engineer. Fast. I've hired a couple of Glatun to help out but I'm going to need a human crew. Which means finding some people to send to Glalkod to get implants and training. Oh, and training on this particular ship is sort of hard to find."

  "Why?" Mr. Haselbauer asked, starting up the truck.

  "Well, it's kind of old," Tyler said. "I couldn't afford a new one. Which is why I need an engineer. Quick."

  "This truck's old but it don't need an engineer on call all the time," Mr. Haselbauer said. "Just some decent TLC. How old is old?"

  "Let's put it this way," Tyler said, leaning back in his seat. "I considered calling it the Santa Maria."

  "You bought a ship?" Dr. Foster said. The Chief Science Officer of Aten Mining Corporation, Vernon Tyler, Chairman of the Board, was a bit nonplussed. "You didn't say you were going to buy a ship."

  Aten had started off in a small and cramped set of rooms in an industrial park in Huntsville, AL, not far from the company that made their mirrors. Since Aten was 95% of their customer base, Aten had quickly absorbed AMTAC which was now a division of Aten. And they'd moved into bigger offices as the work-force had expanded. It needed to expand. Three doctors and a few lab rats could control fifty mirrors. Without an AI, though, controlling four hundred and fifty mirrors was a different ballgame.

  It was costing Tyler like crazy. Not as much as the lease on the tugs, but still costing like crazy.

  "Leased," Tyler said. "Five. Sort of. We needed tugs. There was an orbital mining control ship and four tugs going for cheap on the Glatun version of eBay. I leased them through a subsidiary of Gorku, Inc. They gave me a deal. I think Gorku likes me for some reason."

  "You leased a space ship," Dr. Foster said in a far-away tone.

  "For one hell of a lot of change," Tyler said. "Since Icarus was a bust, what have you been up to while I was getting implants and leasing ships. Because we need to put them to work. You know, pulling useable metals off of an asteroid."

  "You leased a space ship," Dr. Foster said, again.

  "Can we get past that?" Tyler said.

  "No," Dr. Foster said, grinning. "Look, nobody gets into this business if they're not seriously bent on getting into space. So far, despite Glatun freighters coming every month, I've been grounded on this rock. I'm not getting younger. When do I get a ride?"

  "It's not for thrill rides . . ." Tyler said.

  "Who said anything about a thrill ride?" Dr. Foster replied. "Does that ship have probes? Spectroscopic and magnetic detectors? Some way we can figure out what these asteroids are so we're not trying to figure out what a rock is from the ground?"

  "Uhmmm . . ." Tyler said, closing his eyes and accessing his hypernode link. "All of the above."

  "Then let's go!" Dr. Foster said, grabbing his jacket. "Where's the ship?! I'll call my wife on the way . . ."

  "It's in Manchester," Tyler said, holding up his hand. "FAA had conniptions when I wanted to fly it down here. I leased a plane to fly down. Getting from Manchester to Huntsville, commercial, is an incredible pain."

  "So let' s go!" Dr. Foster said, heading to the door of his office.

  "Wait!" Tyler said, grabbing him by the collar. "We've got to do this one step at a time. Do you have a passport?"

  "A what?" Dr. Foster said.

  "ICE is treating off-planet flights like going out of the country," Tyler said with a sigh. "We can leave just fine. Getting back you need a passport or you've got a lot of explaining to do to Immigrations. The tug only has room for five. And it only has bare minimum facilities. And those are for Glatun which, as it turns out, we can kind of use. They use basically the same sort of toilet we do and a shower's a shower. But the living quarters are on the Monkey Business. There's room for up to ten if you're very friendly. And two of those slots are taken up by the Glatun engineer and pilot temps. There are no EVA suits. I was planning on buying some off of the Russians. Well, there is one real space suit, but it's mine. So if there's an emergency you better hope we can hook up to one of the tugs to get back to earth. And there's bound to be a problem since all the ships are older than the United States. Oh, and there's no cook and don't get me started on the robochef. Last but not least, you're the Chief Science Officer of this lash-up and you can't just go gallivanting off into space at the drop of a hat."

  "I'll quit," Dr. Foster said.

  "Then there will really be no reason for me to bring you," Tyler pointed out. "And what about Dr. Bell? He's the small planetary bodies guy."

  "Fine," Dr. Foster said. "We'll take Nathan, too." He paused for a moment and thought about it. "Will he fit?"

  "Yeah," Tyler said, shrugging. "Barely. You're determined to do this, aren't you? I really do need you keeping this lash-up running."

  "I can do that remotely with the hypernet," Dr. Foster said. "At least for a while. I'm not that bad of a manager, thank you. I've got a passport. So does Nathan. Uh . . . The question is how long we'll be gone. What sort of acceleration does the ship have? How quick can we do some fly-bys?"

  "Ninety gravities," Tyler said. "The tugs are about a thousand at max power but it costs like crazy in fuel."

  "A thousand gravities?" Dr. Foster said, boggling. "Continuous? The Space Shuttle only pulls ten! And that's for about a minute!"

  "They're space tugs," Tyler said, slowly and carefully. "They're basically space bulldozers. If you're going to move rocks in space, and time is money note, you need something that can move rocks. The flip side is they're expensive and kind of clumsy. If you really want to go, though, we can do this. Who's coming along?"

  * * *

  "I think we're going about this all wrong," Dr. Bell said as the Gulfstream took off.

  "I don't care," Dr. Foster said. "We're going."

  "No, I mean the mining," Dr. Bell said. "Look, yes, putting the VLA in towards Venus makes sense. We can get twice the insulation as putting it in earth orbit. We'd get more further in, but anything past Venus starts to get tricky with heat management."

  "So what are we doing wrong?" Tyler asked.

  "Most of the Atens are stony, chondritic, carbonaceous . . ." Dr. Bell said, then shrugged. "I can keep going in the Cs and Ssss if you want. They have metal but they're not primarily metals. And Icarus is a case in point for how screwed up that can make things."

  "What's screwed up?" Tyler asked.

  "You'll see when we get there," Nathan said, balefully. "But what we need is an M Class."

  "Which I've noted in my extensive research," Tyler said, sourly. "Problem is, we've got all our mirrors down in Venus orbit."

  "Which is not as much of a problem now that we have a ship," Dr. Bell said. "Sure, we'll keep the VLA down in Venus orbit. It's easy enough to kick the mirrors out of the freighter as its headed out-system and let them fly there on their own. Or, hell, we can use the tugs to bring them up. But we've got enough mirrors in the VLA at this point that we can start doing some serious reflectance. Put one, well probably three or four, of the BDA mirrors up out of the ecliptic. Then get one down by our target asteroid. Which should be 6178 1986 DA. Definitely metallic unlike Amun."

  "Heard about that one," Tyler said. "Except it's so fre
aking huge. Our system is designed around melting the thing in-situ and then extracting. Melting it is going to take a while. We're talking about a mile wide ball of stainless steel. And we need a better name."

  "Point," Nathan said, scratching his head. "What about adjusting the approach?"

  "How?"

  "How do the Glatun mine asteroids?"

  "With more tugs than we've got," Tyler said. "They land diggers and dig them apart and use fusion pumped lasers I'm not going to try to run. The problem is rotation. If you have a high rotation, and 6178 has a very high rotation, even if you cut bits off they go flying away due to the low gravity. So they slow the rotation of big asteroids with really big and many tugs. What I want is a small M class asteroid. There have to be some. One hit the earth not too long ago in a place called Crater City, Arizona. That one was only fifty meters across. That's about right for starting out. And we still need a better name."

  "6178 should have about point oh oh one eight percent platinum groups," Dr. Foster pointed out. "That's one hell of a lot of platinum group."

  "I'm doing the math," Tyler said, his eyes closed. "We can currently pump, what? About one million watts? Ten to the sixth. Seventy-eight requires one point five times ten to the nineteenth watts per second to melt it. We're going to need more mirrors."

  "What about a big Mylar mirror?" Nathan said.

  "It's not that easy," Dr. Bell said. "Trust me on this. While you were going to conferences where you minor planets guys were getting all excited about big pieces of Mylar, I was at NASA conferences with guys who were trying to get small pieces of Mylar to properly deploy. It's not as easy as it seems."

  "And I've got reasons for wanting a bunch of small mirrors and one freaking huge one," Tyler said. "I am hereby designating 6178, which, yeah, seems to be the best choice, as Connie. We'll stay on Icarus for now. But as soon as we're done with Icarus we'll get started on Connie."

  "Why Connie?" Dr. Taylor said. "Old girlfriend?"

  "Because everything we're about to do with it is going to cause conniptions."

  "I know I don't have a freaking pilot's license, Bob," Tyler said. "I'm not driving an airplane. I'm driving an anti-gravity driven tug which I can do just fine. And as to 'airspace deconfliction', I now know why the Glantu and Horvath can hack our systems more or less at will. The only problem with avoiding aircraft is the FAA's system is so antiquated you can barely read it . . . Well, I've got to pick up a half a dozen mirrors in Huntsville and then get them into space. What do they want me to do, truck it down? The tug is the size of a freaking warehouse. And if the FAA wants to talk about deconfliction can we please start with orbitals? The fricking space around earth is so full of junk you won't believe it . . . No, I can't truck them up to Manchester, they're too fricking big. The Glantu have been picking these up with no issues. What's the difference with an earth pilot? Oh? Really? Then maybe they'd like me to take a course that doesn't exist? Maybe I should teach it! I'm the only guy on earth qualified to fly one of these things."

  "Marginally," Dr. Foster said, grinning.

  "Bob, I pay you one hell of a lot of money to fix things," Tyler said. "By the time I'm in Manchester, I expect clearance from the FAA to fly from Manchester to Huntsville, I don't care what altitudes they assign me, I'm perfectly comfortable with low-orbital, pick up some mirrors and some sort of blanket clearance in the works so I don't have to go through this red-tape bull crap every time I need to pick something up on earth. Oh, and speaking of things I need to pick up. By the time we're lifting off, I need a ship's cook. He doesn't have to have a PhD, he just has to be able to cook and be willing to do so in space. Bring his own pots and pans, there's a stove. And I need a ride from the airport to the spaceport . . . Because I pay you a lot of money, Bob. Any time you don't want me to keep paying you a lot of money, say so . . . Nice talking to you, too. Buh-bye."

  Tyler slammed the phone down and shook his head.

  "What do I pay these people for?"

  "Apparently so that you can shout at them," Dr. Bell said.

  "Robert Lyle is one of those attorneys under the impression I work for him," Tyler said. "If the Horvath couldn't push me around, he's not gonna."

  "And if you don't have clearance?" Dr. Foster asked.

  "Then I'll fly down to Huntsville, pick up the mirrors, and get a new lawyer," Tyler said. "It's not like even the F-22 can shoot me down. We'll be gone at least two months setting this up. By that time the furor will have died down and my new lawyers will have paid off the right people to keep me out of jail."

  "That hasn't worked out for all CEOs," Nathan pointed out.

  "All CEOs don't own megawatt orbital lasers," Tyler said, grinning. "Warren Zevon got the order wrong. Bring lawyers, money then guns."

  "What's up?" Dr. Foster said. Tyler was craning his neck out the window as the Gulfstream rolled to a stop.

  "Welcoming party," Tyler said.

  "Your people?"

  "Nearly as bad. Bureaucrats."

  Four

  "Mr. Tyler?"

  There were four people waiting for Tyler as he debarked. Two were obvious bureaucrat types. JC Penney suits and acrylic ties. One was TSA. That was in case he got nasty. The fourth was a big guy with a sort of goofy expression wearing a NASA golf-shirt.

  "Tyler Vernon," Tyler said. "And you are . . . ?"

  "Howard Hagemann. I'm with the FAA. This is Mr. Stanley Burnell with the National Aeronautic and Space Administration."

  "Hello," said Bureaucrat Two.

  "And this is Mr. Stephen Asaro," Mr. Howard continued, gesturing to the guy in the NASA shirt. "Also with NASA."

  "Hey!" the guy said, shaking Tyler's hand. "Great to meet you, Mr. Vernon!"

  "Nice to meet you, Mr. Asaro," Tyler said, recovering his hand from the death lock. The guy had a grip like a steel vise.

  "In consultation with your legal representation and noting the importance to earth of your missions," Mr. Howard said, "and in consultation with policy makers in the FAA and NASA we have agreed to come to a compromise on the subject of your over flight of American territory by an experimental craft."

  "It's . . ." Tyler almost said 'older than the United States Constitution, how can it be experimental?' and then had a sudden case of intelligence . . . "hardly experimental."

  "We do not have flight characteristics data on it," Bureaucrat Two said, pointedly.

  "Well," Tyler said, scratching his head. "That's because it doesn't really fly, per se. Flying is aerodynamics based. It's aerodynamic ability is pretty much that of a brick. If the grav drive goes out, which is pretty unlikely given the redundancy, it's going to have exactly the flight characteristics of a brick. A really, really big brick. A big steel brick. With screaming people in it."

  "You're not making your case here very well," Asaro pointed out.

  "I'm not trying to make a case," Tyler said. "Paw Four has been moving rocks and going in and out of gravity wells since before any of us were born and I had it fully serviced before I left Glalkod Station. So it's going to be able to get to Huntsville without incident. What we're talking about here is that I'm not playing your games. Fine, I don't play your games. I've got well-paid attorneys and lobbyists and MBAs to play your games. If you wanted to be petted, you came to the wrong guy. And the people I'm talking to are just messenger boys so I don't even have to worry about burning bridges. But you can pass on to your policy people that they might as well get something regular going. Because I, and additional pilots as they become available, are about to start moving in and out of orbit on a regular basis. And if what you come up with is stupidly onerous we're going to ignore it. I'd much rather have a good aerospace control system than try to pick my way through the crap that's in orbit on my own. But I don't figure either agency has a chance in hell of managing that. God knows NASA can't maneuver its way out of a wet paper bag without a five year study to study what they're going to have to do a ten year study on. Which is why when Glalkod ships head in to Terran orb
it they contact Space Command not Houston. So, what's your compromise?"

  "Mr. Asaro is a qualified Space Shuttle pilot," Mr. Howard said after a moment of looking as if he was sucking on a lemon.

  "What the hell are you doing in Manchester?" Tyler asked.

  "Boston," Asaro said. "I was doing a lecture at MIT on near earth navigational obstacles. You're right about the orbitals. They're chock full of junk."

  "As I was saying," Mr. Howard said. "Mr. Asaro is a qualified pilot. If you will agree to let him accompany you on this . . . mission and ensure the safety of your movement, NASA and the FAA will raise no further objections."