Live Free or Die-ARC

by John Ringo

  "I knew you had kids," Nathan said. "You never seemed to want to talk about them. Congratulations on getting one of them married off."

  "I'm thinking about making him your assistant," Tyler said.

  "Oh, that's just what I need," Nathan said, laughing. "A hot-shot . . . grad student?"

  "Well, when he's got his masters."

  "A hot-shot with a masters that also happens to be the boss' son-in-law," Nathan said. "Toss me out an airlock without a suit why don't you?"

  "As I said, he's a pretty good kid," Tyler said. "And stabilization is going to be dead easy."

  "Oh?" Nathan said. "Really?"

  "Really," Tyler said. "Melt a couple of big patches. Big patches. Then get some tugs and pull out the metal as far as you can. Try to keep it straight."

  "Horns?" Nathan said. "I thought this was the Troy not the Viking raiders."

  "Archimedes, Nathan," Tyler said, sighing.

  "Levers," the small planetary objects physicist said, slapping his forehead. "Damnit."

  "Why do I have to think of these things?"

  "Do you know how hard it's going to be to do?" Nathan asked.

  "No," Tyler said. "Easier than anything else that comes to mind, though?"

  "Yes," Nathan said. "Easier than all our other thoughts. And the reason you have to think of things like this is that we worker bees are trying to figure out how to get your visions to actually work. But . . . damn. Levers. Heh."

  "'Give me a lever big enough and I shall move the world,'" Tyler said. "Times like this I wish I had a time machine. 'Hey, Archy, come on into the future. We made a lever big enough.'"

  "And . . . we have contact," Nathan said.

  On the screen the six hundred meter asteroid impacted the side of the massive metal ball. Following the laws of physics, it then recoiled, bounced, off. It was like moving a beachball by hitting it with a fast-ball. The difference being that in this case the 'beachball' was a thousand times more massive than the baseball. The 'fast-ball' bounced off with a spalls of metal pinwheeling through space.

  Troy didn't seem to move at all.

  "How's our trajectory?" Nathan asked.

  "Pretty good," the technician said. "About 98% of nominal. We're going to have to adjust carefully on arrival."

  "Do we know where the poor asteroid is going?" Tyler asked.

  "Towards Jupiter orbit?" the tech said. "It's probably going to contact Ceres. We'd already planned to stabilize it."

  "More nukes," Tyler said, sighing. "Those things are expensive, you know."

  "And more at the other end," Nathan said. "The good news is that it also decreased the spin. Slightly. Hmmm . . . if we do the adjustments with a bit of English . . ."

  "Space billiards."

  "Apollo Mining and Tyler Vernon are up to it again, grabbing headlines across the world with a bank-shot in asteroid engineering! Here with us is Fox space analyst, Doctor James Eager. Okay, Doctor Eager. They hit Troy with a nickel-iron cueball and now it's drifting into the spacelanes! What's up with that?"

  "Well, Nick, it's clear that all of our initial estimates of Troy's purpose were wrong. I'm not sure how big they were actually planning on Troy being, but it wasn't supposed to swell up to full size. And it wasn't, ever, supposed to stay in the asteroid belt. Given the course they set it on there's only one target."

  "Target? Is it a weapon?"

  "I'm not sure if you'd call it a weapon, per se. But the name now makes sense. Troy is headed for a near collision with the gate. It's pretty unlikely they mean to hit it. They'll have to adjust its course at some point. But they're probably planning on parking it by the gate. And that has only one meaning."

  "And the meaning is? Don't keep us in suspense, Doctor!"

  "It's a battlestation, Nick. A massive fortress to protect the solar system from hostile ships coming through the gate. And with kilometer and a half thick walls and the SAPL . . . That's going to be one heck of a deterrent . . ."

  "Levers," Tyler said. "Heh."

  He'd gone ahead and gotten the ship even if Steren didn't want to get married in it. Smaller than if it was designed for parties, it was based on the Emergency Rescue Shuttles. He'd thought about getting a converted frigate but that just seemed too much overkill. The differences between a stock ERS and the Starfield being . . . many. ERS didn't have one wall replaced with optical sapphire. And they weren't nearly as comfortable.

  He leaned back in the couch and watched with his naked eye as just about every tug in the system lined up on the two horns that had been extruded from the Troy. The melt area had left two large dimples at the base which were going to take some consideration. He didn't want two great big bulls eyes on the battlestation. But getting the rotation out was the main problem at present. It wasn't like there wasn't lots of nickel iron in the system. They could melt the levers back into the mass easily enough. Take a while to cool, though.

  Lining up on the levers was the tough part. The exterior of Troy was rotating at sixty three meters per second. The levers, though, were five kilometers long, the longest Nathan thought they could make without seriously damaging the structure of the battlestation. That meant they were moving at ninety-seven meters per second. That was only two hundred and some odd miles per hour, a crawl at astronomical speeds. But it was rotating. It was like trying to catch the tire lugs on a snow tire. The tugs could barely keep up. The only reason they could was that there weren't any puny humans on board. They were pulling nearly forty Gs of delta-v as they maneuvered into position.

  "Tugs in place," Argus said. Tyler had taken one of the AIs he'd gotten from Gorku and installed it as the overall manager of the SAPL and other Apollo operations in the solar system. The Class II AI was necessary with the now thousands of clusters set up all over the inner system. He also managed civilian space traffic. At the moment, though, all such traffic was in holding pattern as the full resources of the AI were devoted to the job of stabilizing Troy.

  "Here goes nothing," Nathan said over the circuit. "Initiate Delta One."

  When they were at full power you could see the gravity field from the tugs. They distorted starlight. Ninety-six tugs, each with the same capacity as the original Paws, started to strain against the massive levers.

  "Flexion," Argus reported. "Reducing power."

  "Damnit," Tyler said. That was what they were mainly worried about. Nickel-iron was not as rigid as steel. The levers were tapered, a hundred meters at the end where the tugs were attached and six hundred at the base. But it still wasn't sturdy enough for the full power.

  "This is going to take some time," Nathan said. "But it's working. We've already slowed rotation three percent."

  "This will take about six hours," Argus said. "The tugs will exhaust their onboard fuel supplies before the evolution is finished. I will schedule rotations for refueling."

  "I've got calls to make," Tyler muttered. At some point he had to find somebody to share things like this with. It was no fun by yourself. Maybe he should go on tour like Steve.

  "Oh, the hell with it." He leaned back in the comfortable couch and watched the tugs work.

  Before long he fell asleep.

  Nine

  "And we have burn-through," Nathan said.

  There was no telling how much delta-v they were going to get from the gases in the interior. Since the Troy was running a bit high and fast to stop at the position planned, it had been decided to cut the door - which started with burning through to release the gases—on the 'upper front.' That wouldn't put the door in much threat from an enemy. Troy was planned to be 'over' the gate. They planned to put the main opening 'up' and 'spinward' of the gate, well away from enemy fire. Not that Tyler planned on the door being open when an enemy was firing.

  Tyler had had his fill of meetings in the last two months. The stockholders were up in arms, investors were rioting and nobody knew quite what to make of the whole thing. And when Congress calls you to testify you go. He thought he'd done pretty well. The Armed
Services Committee had been friendly all things considered. And the ratings had been high. No death threats.

  Troy was center of most news. People were still trying to grasp how large it was.

  The Finnish corporation that was working on the crew quarters had managed to put it in perspective. They'd made a scale model. Then models, to scale, of various notable buildings, ships and landmarks.

  The one that finally sunk home was the model of the Twin Towers. They were still an icon, despite being gone for nearly three decades. And when STX pointed out that the crew quarters were nearly the same size, and those were the size of a toy car compared to the massive battlestation, the reality started to hit.

  "That's a lot of gas," Tyler said. The Troy was spurting a gush of gases that looked for all the world like God's fire extinguisher.

  "Not actually adjusting the delta that much," Nathan said over the hypercom. "We're going to have to do some adjustments."

  "Are we going to be able to do that with the door cut?" Tyler asked.

  "We've got it under control," Nathan said. "Our models say that we'll continue to have pressure for about two days. It's a small hole and a lot of volume. Then we'll get back to cutting. We're not going to be done before we have to do the final adjustments. The remaining material will hold it just fine."

  They were using a VDA. It had taken two hours to cut the one hundred millimeter wide, one and a half kilometer deep, hole. When they started on the door cut, they were going to use practically every VDA in the system. As they approached the gate, even the primary defense VDAs would be used. It was still going to take two months. If nothing went wrong. Something was bound to go wrong.

  The amount of material they were planning on extracting from Troy during construction was as bizarre as any of the other numbers related to it. Just the 'bits' they'd gotten from the levers was tons and tons of material. They'd pulled sixteen tons just from cutting the exhaust hole. The main door was supposed to be a kilometer in diameter with 'bits'. It was going to be a lot of nickel iron burned out. Before they got started on the firing ports. Minimum diameter on the missile ports was three meters. If they went in a straight line, which they weren't, that was three hundred and thirty five thousand tons of nickel iron. Most of which would be essentially discarded.

  Tyler had people to do math like that for him. Bottom-line, what they were planning on doing to Troy was going to make the Connie project a backwater. One estimate he saw was that they were going to have to remove five times more material from Troy in Phase One than they'd mined off of Connie in five years.

  And he planned on being done with Phase One in six months from when the door was finally open.

  Most of the nickel-iron was just going to have to wait to be turned into useable materials. There weren't enough smelters, there wasn't enough market, for all the material they were going to be pulling out of the battlestation. Some of it was going to go back in as 'fiddly bits.' Most of it was just going to have to sit in orbit until they had time to get around to it.

  However, they were planning on doing some extracting. Because each port also yielded nearly a ton of platinum group metals. He had a special plan for those.

  "Okay," Tyler said, as he gazed around the stupidly huge interior of the battlestation. "This is just silly."

  There was some remaining atmosphere. It gave the interior a slightly yellowish cast. What you could see of the interior because . . .

  "Big, huh?" Nathan said. He'd accepted Tyler's offer of the ride in the Starfield since it was much more comfortable than a regular shuttle.

  Cutting the door had gone easier than expected. With ninety-two VDAs working on the door it had been done on schedule. They'd even managed to park the Troy before they were done.

  Then they had to get it open.

  It was a kilometer across, with three 'bits' which might someday be hinges and a latch. It was a kilometer and a half thick. It was less a door than a plug. It weighed five hundred and fifteen million tons.

  It took a lot of tugs. It stuck to the side of the Troy pretty well, though. They both had notable gravity.

  "Not that," Tyler said. "I expected big. What I wasn't expecting was how hard it was going to be to navigate. You can't see a damned thing!"

  Light did not 'bend' in space. Shadows were absolute blackness, without any of the relief caused by diffusion of atmosphere on earth.

  The door wasn't pointed anywhere near the sun. The entire interior was in shadow. Tyler could see a shuttle doing an interior inspection across the seven kilometer sphere they were calling the main-bay. It was a speck and the only reason he could see it at all was that it had a nine million candle-power spotlight on it which was reflecting off the interior walls.

  "What's first on the agenda?" Tyler said.

  "Start cutting the plug where we're going to insert the crew quarters," Nathan said. "Then there's the air and water tanks. That's going to be . . . interesting. We're going to have to bounce the VDAs in. We're also going to start on burning the firing ports."

  "Right," Tyler said. "Two more things to put on the list. We're going to have to be able to rotate this thing. Maneuver is out of the question but it has to be able to rotate at some point. We need some interior levers. Big ones. Use the wall material or what you're taking out, whatever makes more sense. I take it I don't have to suggest you be careful when you're doing this? Anyone stumbles through a VDA and . . ."

  "You don't have to mention it," Nathan said. "We shudder about it every day. The power involved in this project is just crazy."

  "Second thing. I'm going to go talk to Bryan about another special project."

  "What's that?" Nathan said.

  "Finding out how many laser engineers it takes to screw in a light-bulb."

  "You want a what?" Bryan asked. "You're . . ."

  "Insane," Tyler said. "I know. But you can't see your hand in front of your face in there. It's a safety issue. We need a light."

  "You're not asking for much, are you?" Bryan said. "You want a light that will illuminate a seven and a half kilometer diameter sphere. That's four and a half miles!"

  "Very little diffraction," Tyler pointed out. "It really doesn't have to be that bright. There's nothing to attenuate it. There's what looks sort of like atmosphere in there but you'd die pretty quick if you tried to survive on it. Besides the fact that it's mostly ammonia. Point is . . ."

  "You're right,' Bryan said. "It just has to scatter light well. But it's still going to take a lot of photons."

  "We've got all these lasers," Tyler said, shrugging. "Can't we use them somehow?"

  "Hmmm . . ." Bryan said. "I'm getting an idea crazy enough to be one of yours. I'll need to talk to Nathan about it."

  "Which is?" Tyler asked.

  "You're always being mysteerrious," Bryan said, waggling his fingers. "My turn."

  "Bastard."

  "Okay," Tyler said. "That's pretty damned crazy."

  "We call it the Dragon's Orb," Nathan said, proudly.

  The Dragon's Orb was a one hundred meter diameter sapphire that, yes, was held in place by what appeared to be an amazingly huge dragon's claw extruded from the bay wall. A simple BDA laser powered it. There were microscopic flecks of platinum mixed into the sapphire that scattered the sunlight. The result was a light bulb big enough to illuminate the entire the main bay.

  Shuttles and tugs floated everywhere. Well, almost everywhere. There were lines of red floating lights that marked laser paths. The ships kept well clear of those.

  "Making it was good practice for extruding the control levers," Nathan continued. "We're going to start the first heat on those next week. We've determined we need at least three, preferably six. And they're going to be long enough to nearly meet in the middle. So things will get a bit more crowded."

  "Firing lanes?" Tyler asked.

  "Going slow," Nathan admitted. "Mostly because of all the material we have to extract. And then there's the jogs."

  Creating lines that wen
t straight into the interior was a recipe for disaster. Some knucklehead in an X wing was bound to come along and drop an energy torpedo into your main power plant and anyone knows how that ends.

  So the firing lanes, missile and laser, had zig-zags built into them. For the lasers that was, relatively, easy. Just drill to a certain point, clear it out, put in a VDA mirror and bounce off that. Managing the drilled material was a pain in the butt, but it was doable. And it had a ton of heavy metals already partially processed.

  The missiles that were planned for the Troy were only two and a half meters wide, but they were fifteen meters long. The zig-zag point, therefore, had to be large enough for the missiles to go sideways. And the tubes, themselves, had to be at least three meters. That was a lot of nickel iron to melt.