Live Free or Die-ARC

by John Ringo

  "Troy," Tyler said, slowly and lovingly. "Nine trillion tons of smoking nickel-iron destruction. Exterior diameter of ten kilometers. Interior diameter of eight point five. Walls of refractory stainless steel a kilometer thick. Forget fullerene. The energy needed to scratch Troy exceeds that of the entire Glatun fleet. Room to hold not just two divisions of Marines, not just a fleet of landing craft, not just the estimated ten thousand civilians and military personnel needed to man it but over thirty Constitution class cruisers. All of those, including the cruisers, snuggled safely away in the very walls that make up this massive battle station, protected from the sting of battle until Troy has worked its doom upon enemy fleets. And a door . . . well the door is going to take ten Constitutions to open and close. You don't want to know the mass of the door."

  "Oh . . . my God," SpaceCom said, leaning back in his chair. "Oh . . . my . . ."

  "Ja," the CEO of STX said, laughing and slapping the table. "Yes! Yes! This is magnificent! Now I understand the project! Yes!"

  "You don't think small, do you?" the CEO of BAE snapped. He was clearly incensed to see their most advanced design in battle craft ever upstaged. More like reduced to the value of a handful of peas.

  "I think Cheops was insufficiently ambitious," Tyler said, shrugging.

  That produced a series of giggles and guffaws as the sheer enormous, mind-boggling size of the space station sank in. The interior would be nearly four miles across. It wasn't just huge, it wasn't just enormous, it was giganormous. The now flattened Great Pyramid would disappear into the interior of Troy. It would be a minor little blip on the interior walls. A pimple on the exterior.

  "The Constitutions have a very important job. To say that Troy will not be particularly mobile is the understatement of the millennia. Moving it will require pumped fusion bombs. For anything that requires maneuvering, you'll have to have ships. And, at least initially, the weapons of Troy will not be internal."

  "That I don't get," the general said.

  "We simply cannot make something as powerful as SAPL," Tyler said, shrugging. "Not as a stand-alone system. We can't even make laser emitters as strong as the Horvath. Yet. And appropriate lasers for Troy . . . secondary weapons for Troy would be main gun weapons on Glatun dreadnoughts.

  "Troy is, essentially, a focus and aiming point for SAPL. It will draw the power from SAPL and be the final focus engine while shielding, visually, the critical array components from an attacking enemy.

  "We have snags to overcome. To get the full power of SAPL, and it still won't be full power because, well, I do keep making those damned mirrors, don't I, we need some equipment that we're still designing. A mirror array that can concentrate twenty to fifty, probably more like twenty, medium power VSA clusters and a collimeter for managing it within the walls. Essentially twelve hundred terawatts of power. The VSA beams that shredded the Horvath are, by comparison, one hundred and forty. So the near order of ten times as much power. That will penetrate even Glatun shields. We call it the Variable Dialing Array or VDA."

  "The Glatun aren't a threat," the BAE representative said.

  "And I don't perceive them ever being a threat," Tyler said. "The Horvath and Rangora are getting friendlier with each other every day. One can see the Rangora eventually 'loaning' the Horvath some of their older fleet units."

  "Which we've been looking at," SpaceCom said, nodding. "And other issues. Yes, I see what you mean by distorting our budget."

  "You'd be surprised," Tyler said. "I'm not going to sell it to you by the ton. Or nobody could afford it. During the process of making it I'm going to try to extract some useful metals but the truth is the walls will still have veins of precious metals in them. And while I've been working with the Finns on internal systems, you're going to have to handle most of the . . . fiddly bits yourself."

  "Fiddly bits?" the BAE rep said.

  "Crew quarters for thousands, things like that," Tyler said. "I see it as an ongoing project, frankly. I can, will, set it up to take the SAPL power and I'll make sure there's plenty of room for consumable storage. When you get it, it will be marginally capable of fighting. Oh, and I understand we now have a breacher heavy missile system. I've been taking a look at magazine storage for them. Troy should be able to hold, and rapid fire, about two hundred thousand."

  "My God," the Boeing rep said. "We can't produce that many in a hundred years!"

  "Yeah, it'll need its own fabbers," Tyler said. "Lots of fabbers. Beyond that, it's going to be up to other corporations to handle. All I'm really giving you is the shell."

  "We can work with that," the general said, nodding.

  "This reduces the Constitutions too . . ."

  "I like the Constitutions," Tyler said, placatingly. "I love the Constitutions. But, face it, we don't have the muscle or the tech or the infrastructure to make the sort of fleet we need to hold this system any time soon. The Troy is not sophisticated, even by our standards. It's just massive and practically invulnerable. We don't have quality. But quantity is a quality of its own. Troy is an act of desperation as much as anything. With it, we can at least hold the system. Nothing's going to live to get past Troy once it is even partially operational."

  "That's clear," SpacCom said, nodding. "If it can pump a thousand terawatts . . . what is that? An exawatt? If it can pump a thousand terawatts, with that thick of armor . . . The missiles will be sort of like nuts in the brownie. I'd rather have tanks, but given that the approach is through the gate . . . a super-mongous Maginot fortress works."

  "And now you know why I've been spending so much money," Tyler said, nodding to his CFO. "But you still don't get to explain it to the shareholders."

  "How much are we going to get paid for it?" the Chief Financial Officer asked, still bemused.

  "I think the standard rate is cost plus eight percent," Tyler said, looking at SpaceCom. "Which is going to be about one tenth the materials price. But the asteroid was just sitting there. However, I am not, not, NOT, going to play the usual accounting games you guys insist upon. I'll show you my books, I'm not going to charge for overhead or any of the usual crap. But I'm also not going to employ an army of accountants. I'll give you a price and show you why and if you don't want it, you don't have to buy it."

  "There are going to be screams to high heaven over this," the general said. "I want it. My God do I want it. Explaining it is going to be tough. And explaining why we're just paying you for it rather than putting it out to competitive bid."

  "Nobody else in the solar system could make it," Tyler said, shrugging. "I own SAPL."

  "Nobody else in the solar system would have the balls to make it," the Boeing CEO said, shaking his head.

  "Fitting it out is going to employ every defense contractor on earth," Tyler said, looking at the reps at the table. "There's plenty of graft to pass around. Frankly, I don't think the US can handle the whole thing on its own. Oh, the majority. Even with the devastation from Horvath attacks, we've still got the largest economy and the largest military on earth. But we're definitely going to need partners on this. And that, gentlemen, ladies, is all I've got for you. Troy. The shell, assuming no more major issues, will be formed in about seven months. It will, however, take some time to cool. Then we can really get cracking. Oh, yeah, one more thing, general."

  "What?" SpaceCom said.

  "I own this thing," Tyler said. "And I can still make more money off it by cutting it up than selling it to you. So the contract is going to stipulate that the name remains the same. Anybody who tries to name this after some unknown congressman is going to get a hundred terawatts of personal indignation straight up their keister."

  "Okay," the CFO said, after the meeting. "I get the Troy. And I'll admit, it's very cool and as a former New Yorker having something like that in the sky will be . . . comforting."

  "Agreed," Tyler said, sitting back in his chair.

  "And the VDA project is, I'd guess, the new mirror."

  "The Variable Distributed Array," Tyler
said. "Any time it's a mirror, it's Dr. Foster."

  "Ruby?"

  "Pass," Tyler said, sighing. "I hate talking about anything I don't know will work. Troy is far enough advanced we're pretty sure it will work out. Or that we'll be able to work out the bugs. Really, really, really big bugs, but workable.

  "Last but not least," the CFO said. "You want us to secure a billion credit loan from the Glatun? For Troy?"

  "No," Tyler said. "Their government's not going to let me borrow money for defense systems. I'm working that end. All I need you to do is the paperwork. What it's for . . . ? That's sort of complicated. But we're going to need a lot more mirrors . . ."

  Three

  "Okay," Tyler said, as he stepped off the shuttle. "I just told Space Com and my CFO and my CEO and everybody else in the 'black' world that we can pump an exawatt, I think, of power and manage it."

  "Petawatts, surely," Dr. Foster said.

  "Peta, exa, wattever," Tyler said. "Tell me we can do it."

  "We can do it," Dr. Foster said. "Probably."

  "I hate this job," Tyler said, banging his head on the hatch coaming. "Ow!"

  "Don't," Bryan said, clapping him on the back. "This is what you came to see, right? If we can pump a petawatt?"

  "Yes," Tyler said. "So . . ."

  "So, first I explain how magnificent I am," Bryan said, leading him into a conference room. This was a converted Rangora ship, rechristened the Lava Lamp, which had been refitted for the deep-space science projects involved in the VDA. Most of the materials for the VDA could only be built in space or with Glatun technology. And Tyler wasn't interested in most people knowing he was working on a new BDL. The Horvath bombardments had gotten people looking at the sky nervously. And he still wasn't a big hero to the news media. Having a bigger and better laser should be taken as a good thing. Somehow, though, people always started making Snidely Whiplash noises.

  "Explain," Tyler said.

  "The VDA wasn't going to work without Ruby," Dr. Foster said. "No standard material could, consistently, support a petawatt of power hitting them. And the VDA, unlike the VSA, had to be capable of maintaining maximum fire of at least a petawatt, preferably one point five, for up to thirty minutes."

  "So how magnificent are you?" Tyler asked.

  "Not all that magnificent," Dr. Foster said. "I had to go to the Glatun."

  "I saw the charges," Tyler said. He still refused to think in terms of exchange rates, even though those were getting better.

  "We needed three things from the Glatun," Dr. Foster said. "We needed superconductors, piezoelectics and help in large artificial sapphire production."

  "And . . . ?"

  "All three were considered standard industrial processes," Bryan said. "So they didn't fall under military hardware restrictions. So we have all three."

  "Excellent," Tyler said.

  "We can produce the sapphires using all earth tech," Dr. Foster said, reaching down and setting what looked like a large magnifying glass on the table. "Those we could produce before. The problem was, they were hugely expensive and a couple of feet across was the best we could do."

  "And now?" Tyler said, picking up the artificial sapphire. It was lighter than it looked.

  "If we did those assembly line style," Dr. Foster said, "that would cost about a buck."

  "Damn," Tyler said, his eyes wide. "Right in there with glass."

  "Yep," Bryan said, grinning. "Really easy once we got the kinks out. And we can make them, more or less, any size. I mean, any size we can physically handle. And shapes. Pretty much any shape."

  "Okay," Tyler said, setting the sapphire down. "Superconductors."

  "Superconductors and piezoelectrics," Dr. Foster said. "They're connected."

  "Piezoelectrics are . . . they convert heat to electrical power across different . . . Damn."

  "You were getting there," Dr. Foster said. "Across a potential range."

  "If you've got heat on one side and cold on the other you produce current," Tyler said.

  "Right," Dr. Foster said. "Earth piezoelectrics need a very high potential and the output is low. They also don't really cool the system. They need cool to get current. Glatun piezoelectrics don't need as much potential and have their own, inherent, potential . . ."

  "Inherent potential?" Tyler said.

  "You want the math?" Dr. Foster said.

  "Please, no!" Tyler said, holding up his hands in dismay. "I'll take your word for it!"

  "Bottom-line, pump in heat, any heat over about negative fifteen Celsius, and you get current," Dr. Foster said. "And very efficient output. It's part of their ship tech we hadn't realized we were missing. It makes power-plants much more efficient and keeps ships from overheating."

  "Which we need to distribute," Tyler said. "Go on."

  "So," Dr. Foster said, bringing up a schematic. "The VDA mirror. Ninety-six separate small mirrors in an array. Layer of optically damned near perfect sapphire. And by damned near I'm talking parts per billion of contamination. Like . . . six parts per billion. Thin layer of palladium reflector. Palladium's the only thing that's going to take the energy and is reflective enough. Backing of Glatun superconductor to transfer the heat from the palladium. That way the waste heat automatically gets distributed. Then three thousand lines of piezoelectric wrapped conductors leading to the cryogenic cooling unit. Which leads, in turn, to a shielded cooling array of superconductor, again, that can dump the heat into space, we think, fast enough. For it to work in bursts of up to thirty minutes at least.

  "The system doesn't quite power itself. That would violate the second law of thermodynamics. But it's very efficient. Oh, the stabilization is so tight you can use the beam to shave with. Tighter, actually. Accuracy of three millimeters at six light seconds."

  "Awesome," Tyler said. "Sounds like it's a bitch to build."

  "Well," Bryan said, shrugging. "How many are we going to need?"

  "About . . ." Tyler thought about it and shrugged in turn. "About three hundred and eighty-two to start. And we're probably going to need a bigger, tougher system so start wrapping your brain around it."

  "You're joking," Dr. Foster said. "For what?"

  "Compartmentalized," Tyler said. "But there is a new need as of last month. So, when do we find out if it works."

  "Uh . . ." Dr. Foster said, his mouth still open. "Uhm . . . right this way? Three hundred? Really?"

  "Really."

  * * *

  "Asteroid 152536," Dr. Foster said, proudly. "It's about the same mass as the original Icarus."

  "It took us six months to melt the Icarus," Tyler said. "How long?"

  "You asked about an asteroid shattering kaboom on Icarus," Bryan said, grinning. "Behold the power of this fully operational VDA! Chuck!"

  "Yes, sir," the technician said, grinning.

  "Open fire!"

  "Takes a few minutes," Chuck said. "We've got to get all the mirrors repointed, permissions for retargeting . . ."

  "Got it," Tyler said. "I've done this a few times."

  "Okay," Chuck said. "The BDA mirrors are online."

  "Lase it," Tyler said.

  He wasn't sure what he was expecting. From the gasps of astonishment in the room nobody else was expecting the asteroid to blast apart into splinters.

  "Holy hell," Dr. Foster said, his mouth dropping again. "It wasn't supposed to do that."

  "I think you got it, Tex," Tyler said, chuckling. "Asteroid shattering kaboom indeed. I'd guess it had some volatiles that hadn't been detected. And I hope the VDA was way back."

  "Far enough," Dr. Foster said. "Holy hell. Uh . . ."

  "Think it works," Tyler said with a chuckle.

  "We don't really know, though," Dr. Foster said. "I mean . . ."

  "Oh, it's working," Chuck said. "Temperatures are still nominal. I mean, the asteroid is gone but that's no reason to stop the test."

  "The fact that we're taking sixty percent of the VLA is," Tyler said. "No, we need to get it fully tested
, but since it apparently works, let's test it on something useful. I doubt it's going to do that to Troy. But it is a Very Dangerous Array."

  "The asteroid we're constructing Troy from is fairly oblong," Nathan said. "We thought we could work with that. We've been lasing the ends and trying to get them to melt. But even with a wide BDA array and seven VSAs, we can't get the ends to heat up properly. We need a more focused system. Does the Very Dangerous Array work?"

  "As far as we've tested it, it works like a charm," Bryan said. "But what I'm wondering is why he knows about the VDA and I didn't know about Troy? And, by the way, holy hell, Tyler! Are you a complete megalomaniac?!"