Live Free or Die-ARC

by John Ringo

  "You keep saying 'you'," Dr. Givens said.

  "Which is the other part," Steve said, handing Gnad a piece of paper. "My resignation. I didn't start this abortion, I tried to stop it and I nearly got killed and just pissed off a guy I like and admire failing to fix it. Maybe, if I grovel, I can still get a job on one of the garbage scows he's going to buy from the Glatun since he can't trust Boeing. Or, by extension, any other aeronautics or military contractor. So I'm out of here. See ya."

  "You have a lot of out-brief to do," Gnad said, angrily.

  "Funny, that," Steve said, pausing at the door. "If you get laid off, security can have you on the street in three minutes. In case you hadn't noticed, I took all my personal effects home the first day I saw that piece of junk you call a space fighter. As I said: Seeeee ya."

  "And sell all my Boeing stock . . ." Tyler snarled as he took a corner. "I know you're not my broker. Tell my broker to call me. Every last bit . . . ! What do you mean the SEC won't like it? The hell with the . . . Fine. Do the press release, then sell the stock. I bought it high, because the partnership had been announced, and I'll be selling it low, because everybody is going to bail, but what the hell. Compared to the three billion dollars I just pissed down the drain . . . I'll call you back, I've got another call coming in. Hello?"

  "Tyler, Steve," Steve commed. "What's your twenty?"

  "Getting out of this burg as fast as humanly possible," Tyler said. "And you're not high on my list of people I want to talk to right now, Steve. Maybe in a month or two. Year."

  "I quit."

  "Bully for you."

  "As such, I no longer consider myself bound by certain non-disclosure agreements," Steve said. "Although I am still bound by USC 18. But I'd like to talk. Seriously."

  Tyler consulted his plant then just pulled over.

  "Bar called O'Malley's on Fifteenth Street," Tyler said. "You got wheels?"

  "I've got wheels."

  "Good. You may be driving. I need a drink."

  Tyler was at the bar sipping on a highball when Steve walked in. He was also smoking a cigarette, very much against city and state regulations.

  "I thought smoking was illegal in bars," Steve said, sitting down. "Rum and coke."

  "Sissy drink," Tyler said. "I bought the bar. Then I told everybody the smoking lamp was lit and I'd pay the fines. That's all they do, fine you. Well, if you keep it up they close you down. Just another pussy ass regulation designed to prove who's the man."

  "You're really exercised," Steve said. "About which I totally agree. I know pointed memos is not what you want to hear right now, but I knew when I signed on at Boeing what you wanted. When I saw what they'd created, I asked to see the contract. After much hemming and hawing finally I told them I'd call you and ask you what the contract said. And when I saw it I started pumping out memos and emails more or less saying that what was going to happen was . . ."

  "Exactly what happened," Tyler said, stubbing out the Marlboro and lighting another.

  "I didn't even know you smoked."

  "Quit ten years ago," Tyler said, coughing at the inhale. "When my first child was born. A child I haven't seen in three months. You know what really pisses me off? What really horks my horn?"

  "What?" Steve said, sipping his rum and coke. The bartender had been generous with the rum.

  "The reason I haven't seen that child, who I most dearly love, is that since this started I have been focused like a BDA beam on one thing and one thing only. You know what that is?"

  "Money?" Steve asked.

  "Bite your tongue," Tyler said. "Money is only ever a means to an end for anyone but a miser. Steve, I don't have a wife, I don't have a girlfriend, I never see my kids and I've forgotten what the word vacation means. I'm going to a fundraiser at the Smithsonian in two days and I'm having to hire an escort so I have a date! Because I've been focused like a laser on getting the God damned Horvath out of our skies. Period. Dot. Earth owning our own orbitals. Totally hold the gate? Maybe, maybe not. But I'm . . . Okay, humanity, is going to own our skies. Not the damned Horvath. And those clowns go and skip right past steps two, three . . . seven? and make a damned space fighter?"

  "Might want to keep it down," Steve said. "You're under USC 18, too, you know."

  "Press release is going out stating exactly their contractual failure," Tyler said. "Already talked with my lawyer about it. He didn't like it but he doesn't like most of what I do."

  "Crap," Steve said. "They are going to crucify you, you know."

  "Fat chance," Tyler said. "If they crucify me, they also lose the power plant and the fabber."

  "So you're letting them keep those?" Steve said.

  "Yeah," Tyler said. "Two reasons. One, they might get the POS to work if the government horks up some of my tax dollars. Two, it's leverage. Decide to get stuffy about the rest of the stuff I'm going to throw at Boeing and the government and there goes that lovely fabber and the power plant. I'm going to make it clear through backchannels, though, that the minute they start 'defraying their costs' by using the power plant to power the grid I'm taking it back. I can make my own money that way. And then use it for something that has a purpose."

  "Ty," Steve said. "If you don't tell people your plans they can't follow along."

  "They don't follow along anyway," Tyler said. "Most of them do their level best to piss in your well just to piss in your well. And they can never think big. Space fighter? Space fighter? That's what really pisses me off! A dinky little space fighter? They have no fracking clue how badly they just screwed up."

  "Well, if you're going public they'll probably put the Star Fury on display," Steve said, shrugging. "War by public opinion."

  "Star Fury?" Tyler said, laughing. "Oh, my God. What nimrod came up with that name? It just reaks of bad SF. Why not call it an X-wing or something?"

  "I guess they figured Lucas would have issues," Steve said.

  "Yeah," Tyler said. "Because I already talked to him. One codicil of the contract was if they had a working system I got to name it. So they're in violation again! And I told him that maybe we were going to have a small shuttle soon and if we did I wanted to name it the Millennium Falcon. And he geeked for a ride for him and his kids on one of the Paws. Don't care for his politics but he really is an SF geek."

  "So what are your plans?" Steve asked.

  "Ain't tellin'," Tyler said, drunkenly. "Can't make me. Don't know if it's gonna work and if it doesn't that way I don't end up looking stupid."

  "Makes sense," Steve said.

  "I've gotta catch a plane for DC," Tyler said, standing up and then swaying. "Or, maybe I should catch a cab instead."

  "You're flying commercial?" Steve asked.

  "If it's reasonably convenient I fly commercial," Tyler said, shrugging. "But right now I don't think it's going to be convenient. I'll call my plane. Fly out tomorrow."

  "Let's go get some food in you," Steve said, dragging Tyler to his feet.

  "I got stuff to do," Tyler said, trying to pull away. "I've gotta get some ships from the Glatun an' some pilots . . . Hey, wanna job?"

  "Ask me when you're sober" Steve said, managing to get him to the door. "Hey, you said you're going to be in DC next week?"

  "Last time I checked," Tyler said. "See ya, guys!"

  "Aren't the Horvath coming around for their tribute like, next week?"

  "Not that soon," Tyler said. "When the Horvath come around, I am in an undisclosed location. I call it . . . the Laaaair."

  "The Lair?" Steve said, laughing.

  "Hey, every Evil Overlord has to have a lair," Tyler said. "I couldn't find a volcano next to a piranha pit but is close . . ."

  Ten

  "And we have gate emergence." That was becoming common enough that it wasn't a big deal. This time though, there was a bit higher alert level. "Emissions for a Horvath cruiser."

  The colonel in charge of the Space Command CIC spun around in his chair and brought up the data. Space Command, at this point,
had radar telescope data, ground based and airborne imaging and there was talk of a radar satellite in the works. And none of it beat a civilian system. Which was kind of annoying when you got right down to it.

  "See if we can get VLA imaging."

  "That's a pretty nice image," Steve said. "VLA?"

  The Lair was in a mine. It was located in New Hampshire, part of the mega land grab Tyler had gone on with his first maple syrup money. During the maple syrup war it was one of the, several, mines Tyler had hidden in to escape the wrath of the Horvath.

  After the war he had a road driven in, a small house built and the lower parts of the old copper mine drained and refitted as an underground command post. With hypercom links and an engineering, administration and maintenance staff, it was as easy to run his far flung enterprises from the Lair as from the main offices in Boston. It had a very military feel, though, because most of the gear in it was off-the-shelf command, communications, computers and intelligence gear. The facilities manager was a former colonel.

  The main command center, which was where Tyler and Steve were watching the arriving Horvath ship, had a two story wall of plasma screens which were set to not only the view of the ship but schematics of most of space projects Tyler had ongoing, business channels and news services.

  "Yep," Tyler said. "The Horvath really don't like the VLA but they're not sure what to do about it. It's so spread out that it's hard to hit. Now that we're working on Connie we've got stuff that gets closer to the gate. Last time they potted one of the BDA mirrors. Fortunately, Connie is well away from the gate this time. I keep waiting for them to run down the Monkey Business and demand all the heavy metals it's carrying. Which is why I trade them monthly to the Glatun. Ooo . . . Check this out. Colonel, taking over the upper left quad."

  "Your system, sir," the retired Air Force officer said.

  Tyler commed a command and a three dimensional representation of the solar system came up on four of the plasma screens. On it were large red and yellow lines.

  "You can rotate and zoom," Tyler said.

  "The SAPL?" Steve asked.

  "The same. "We retrans this to Space Command so that people know where not to navigate. And we move it around if it seems to be endangering one of NASA's probes. Or anybody else's, obviously."

  Leading from the VLA, which was marked in orange, lines in red went upwards above the plane of the ecliptic and led out to more orange areas near the orbit of Mars, then down into the plane to terminate where, presumably, the work was being done on Connie. However, there were smaller lines dotted around the inner system.

  "What are those?" Steve asked, zooming in. He found he could move all the way in to icons of other asteroids and even one comet, receiving the tender attentions of the SAPL.

  "We can't get the full weight of the VLA onto one spot until we get a good, functioning, VSA mirror," Tyler said, shrugging. "So we're heating up other asteroids to work on later. This one . . ." Tyler said, taking over control and changing targets. "This is the glass pile from Icarus. I'm going to take another shot at turning it into a mirror. Until I have a better use for silica, that's what we're using it all for."

  Steve paid some attention to the numbers and realized they were orbital and temperature data.

  "It's melted," Steve said.

  "We're working to get the impurities out using just the heat," Tyler said. "The silica is denser than the impurities so they're slowly migrating to the outside since it has very little spin. Then we hit it with heavy power and burn some off, let it percolate, hit it again. It's really just an experiment to see what we can do without using any other systems. Like, you know, space craft of which I still only have five. But I've got a bid out on some more tugs as Paws for the Monkey Business and it turns out the Rangora make ships cheaper than the Glatun. So I may be getting one from them. Problem is, they're harder to run and convert to human use. Heavier internal gravity, higher atmosphere and, well, the crew quarters are sort of oversized."

  "Nathan would approve," Steve said, grinning.

  "And I may just put him in as mission commander," Tyler said. "I need people! But the fact that Boeing, a major international conglomerate, has a hard time paying for implants shows just how hard it is. Even the Rangora ship needs people with plants. There's too much involved in control to use a regular computer interface. And we're so far behind the power curve on tech that it's not like we can make them. I was hoping that we could make something in the way of ships soon. Ships that humans without plants could use so we could make more money so we could get more people with plants and all the other stuff we can't produce."

  "Frustrated much?" Steve asked.

  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. Turn key 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 Rangora 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 hundred square meters of mirror per day?"

  "Yep," T
yler said. "About three hundred and seventy-six thousand 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 terrawatts 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."