Live Free or Die-ARC

by John Ringo

  "Then there's the blast doors," Nathan continued. "Grav plates to move the missiles . . ."

  "We're on schedule, though?" Tyler said. "Troy will be minimally operational in six months?"

  "Barely," Nathan said. "If we can get the quarters installed. Just drilling out the plug . . ."

  "I know, I know," Tyler said, sighing. "I hate fiddly bits."

  "Crew quarters for four thousand and thirty shuttle bays is not fiddly bits!" Nathan protested. "And then there's the magazine for two hundred thousand missiles! Which are going to take longer to produce than we spent building this thing."

  "Have you said nine trillion tons to yourself lately?" Tyler said, grinning. "The door was fiddly bits."

  "I knew it was big," Senator Lamarche said. "But this is . . ."

  Tyler grinned and took a sip of champagne. He could afford it, he'd gotten the first installment on Troy.

  The junket for the visit by the Joint Chiefs and the Select Armed Services Committee had been a nightmare to arrange. Which is why he'd left it up to his 'Washington' people. The government had moved to St. Louis while the capital was being rebuilt. Which was going slow since they were still working on plans to fill in Lake Washington. But they were still 'Washington' people.

  One of the big sticking points was what to use as a conveyance. BAE had finally finished the Constitution and the Joint Chiefs wanted to take that. Tyler pointed out that with the higher acceleration of the Starfield it was quicker. And more comfortable.

  As usual with government, they'd compromised. The group had gone out to the Troy on the Constitution, which gave the captain and the admirals a chance to show it off, then transferred to the Starfield which could fit in one of the Constitution's bays.

  With almost the entire starboard wall of the Starfield being optical sapphire, the view was more than startling. The problem with the surface of Troy, though, was that it was just too hard to grasp. When they entered the main port, after the Constitution had time to go in and poke around its future home, it was different. Columbia shuttles and Paws provided some perspective. And the Constitution had been moved down to a 'safe' zone on the far side of the main bay. That really gave some perspective since the battle craft, as big as a skyscraper, looked just like the toy used for comparison in various videos.

  "What are they doing over there?" Senator Gullick asked, pointing 'down' in relation to the Dragon's Orb.

  Changes were still reverberating through the body politic over the losses suffered in the Horvath attacks. Especially since the last Census.

  The plagues and the two Horvath bombardments had erased a vast swathe of the citizenry of the United States. The amount of damage the world sustained should have, by most lights, thrown it into a universal failed state.

  However, it was pointed out that, relative to population size, the losses were barely half what Germany and Japan had suffered in WWII. There should, at least, have been a massive depression. But the world was so bent on rebuilding and rearming that money flowed. Factories had to be rebuilt. Places had to be found for the displaced population. And a nation that was experiencing a baby boom could be a surprisingly upbeat place.

  Despite the fact that the attacks had been a calamity beyond imagination, entrenched political groups had resisted, for nearly two years, any major changes in industrial and environmental policy. Detroit was Detroit, even if it was a crater, and that was where the major auto companies had to be. That, at least, was the position of the powerful multi-term congressman from that district who was bound and determined to keep industry where it was supposed to be. No matter how much tax money it took.

  Then the decade rolled around, the Census was done, the nation was redistricted, the lawsuits flew and the arguments got down to fisticuffs in state houses across the nation.

  And there was no district of Detroit and the Car Belt. It was gone. It was absorbed into the much more conservative districts that made up the bulk of Michigan's space.

  It was like that everywhere. Nine districts in the LA basin became one. Five San Francisco Bay districts were merged. California, overall, had gone from fifty-three districts to thirty-five.

  And things began to move. Environmental restrictions on 'brownfield' construction were slagged. The entire Endangered Species Act was slagged because, in the words of the senior Senator from Tennessee, 'the most endangered species in this solar system is homo sapiens. When we've got that fixed, we can worry about the snail darter.'

  Gullick was Massachusett's junior senator, a firebrand hawk whose campaign slogan had been simply 'Vengeance.' He'd launched his campaign on the rim of the crater that used to be Boston. He won in a landslide.

  Tyler had avoided getting entangled as much as he could. He was still registered in New Hampshire but he'd been in Wolf during the last election and voted absentee.

  He'd been sure to provide as much graft, sorry 'campaign finance' money as he legally could. And various gray areas.

  He almost needn't have worried. The new crop of congressmen and senators wanted the money, no question. They had to have it to get reelected. But they were almost deferential to the man who had not only created Earth's one real defense, the SAPL, but had personally engaged the Horvath in battle and damned near died from decompression because of it.

  "We're constructing one of the maneuvering levers," Tyler said, gesturing with his chin to the patch of cherry-red metal. "They're not, technically, in the specifications. We figured out it had to have them when we were making it."

  "Like the horns," Congresswoman McEntyre said, nodding. The recent winner of Maryland's Third District, which included Lake Baltimore, was a veteran of the Iraq War. She had a heavily scarred right cheek and one arm that was prosthetic as souvenirs. She had run on a 'Defense first' campaign.

  "Actually getting them to work will require a lot of power and a lot of grav plates," Tyler said. "We won't be able to rotate it until we have about sixty tons of grav plates and the power for them. That's about sixty terawatts per minute. The entire earth consumes four terawatts per year for comparison. And it will only rotate at about thirty feet per second."

  "If nobody has mentioned it," Senator Gullick said. "We appreciate the power plants Apollo has been installing. Everything's still pretty messed up, but cheap power helps."

  "I wish there was more I could do," Tyler said, shrugging. "But that was just a good long-term investment. I'll admit, my shareholders screamed about amortizing the plants over fifty years. But they should last at least that long. And when Wolf comes online I'll be able to drop the price of electricity even more."

  "It's important," Senator Lamarche said. "More and more electric cars with these new nanny capacitors. They're using a lot of power. Of course, coal is a very important supplier as well . . ." He added, quickly. He was the senior senator from Pennsylvania which still mined a lot of coal.

  "Of course," Tyler said, trying not to grin.

  "I was actually thinking about concrete plants," Senator Gullick said. "They use an enormous amount of power and we can't build them fast enough. And over there?" he asked, pointing to an area on the wall where dozens of tugs clustered.

  "That was why I wanted to schedule this trip for today," Tyler said. "That is where we're going to be installing the turn-key operations center. It has quarters for crew, shuttle bays, the main command center, which is initially going to be using only ten percent of its allotted space, and resupply docks. We've cut the plug for it and are going to be pulling it out."

  "Plug?" Congresswoman McEntyre asked.

  "First we drilled a thirty meter hole three hundred meters into the wall," Tyler said. "It was the first time I was happy we didn't get Troy to full size. There's still a good kilometer of nickel on the outside of the command center. Then we installed a reflector mirror and cut from within the hole to slice out the back. In the meantime, we cut out the edges."

  "Where are the cuts?" Senator Gullick asked.

  "Here," Tyler said, handing him a set of bin
oculars. "If you look down and to the left of the cluster of tugs you should be able to spot the initial thirty meter hole."

  "Oh, my God," the senator said, laughing. "It's a dot."

  "Yeah," Tyler said. "And the cut lines are only eighty millimeters on a side so you're going to have a hard time spotting them. But . . ." He paused as he listened to his implant. "Right, they're going to engage the tugs. We're pretty sure we got all the edges cut out. But if not, we'll have to do some more drilling."

  In the light from the Dragon's Orb, the rippling effect of the tugs' engines could be seen distorting the light. It was reflected in a waterfall of prismatic colors on the inner wall of the battlestation, the ripples of color reflecting and shining in a rainbow of light.

  "That is . . . pretty," Congresswoman McEntyre said. "I hadn't expected it to be pretty."

  "Neither had I," Tyler said. The effect was damned pretty. Beautiful even. And while there was immense satisfaction in the jobs he'd been doing, beauty, except for the unchanging starfield, was rare. "I just realized that if we ever can rotate this thing, it's going to have the same effect."

  "Rotate, hell," Senator Gullick said. "What's it going to take to get this thing mobile?"

  "Senator . . ." the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs said. "We'd prefer to keep our defenses up, thank you."

  "Hell with that," Gullick said. "The best defense is a good offense. The Glatun negotiator on the Multilateral talks should be shot. It's worse than Chamberlain. When we lose E Eridani, the Horvath will have nothing to prevent them attacking at any time."

  The combination of attacks against Earth had gotten the Glatun to, at least, provide assurances that no more Horvath warships would be allowed through the E Eridani system. When at this point, not if, they ceded it to the Horvath, earth might as well get ready for a pounding.

  "Senator," Tyler said, delicately. "Nine trillion tons. The Constitutions, for way of comparison, mass three hundred thousand tons. Six orders of magnitude difference and we have a hard time getting them to have more than five gravities of acceleration. The door is one billion metric tons and it took every tug in the system four hours to get it open."

  "If we can't secure E Eridani, we're still open to attacks," the Senator said. "I think that the Troy is amazing and vital. Don't get me wrong. I also think it's worth looking at making it mobile. You're usually the big idea guy, Mr. Vernon. Don't tell me you haven't thought of it."

  "Well . . ." Tyler said, hanging his head and toeing at the rug in embarrassment.

  "You're kidding?" Admiral DeGraff said then belly laughed. "You haven't?"

  "I've been setting aside ten percent of all extracted platinum group since we started," Tyler said. "It's getting to be a pretty big pile . . ."

  "How big?" Senator Lamarche asked.

  "Not big enough for the power plant we'd need," Tyler said, shrugging. "But it's getting bigger every day we work on Troy. We need two thousand tons."

  "Two thousand tons of platinum?" DeGraff said, guffawing again. "Oh, Tyler, you're killing me! You're not seriously thinking of making this thing mobile?"

  "We can't produce the grav plates," Tyler said, shrugging. "Or the secondary power converters. We need an enormous amount of both. About . . . two hundred years worth of production based on current sol system output. And, of course, two thousand tons of osmium, actually. Most efficient power plant material. Do you want to know how much fuel it will consume to go through the gate and into E Eridani?"

  "No," Senator Lamarche said. "Yes. I guess I do. Just because the entire question is so absurd."

  "Think of all the buildings we lost, sorry, in New York and Washington," Tyler said. "In one pile. And made of helium three, which we don't even produce, yet. That's three hour's fuel at one sixtieth gravity of acceleration."

  "That exceeds the requirements for the six hundred ship fleet we're envisioning," DeGraff said. "For about ninety years."

  "So, yes," Tyler said. "I have thought of it. There are some alternatives. We could use an Orion drive. But I'd really rather not have to irradiate the surface and such a drive is vulnerable to damage. I mean, more damage. Orion is damage in big numbers just as it exists. The big problem remains that we don't have any onboard weapons that match the defenses. Not by dozens of orders of magnitude. So . . . If I can get the grav plates for about six hundred Glatun super-dreadnoughts, a power plant the size of a small city and a laser emitter system that can match two hundred VDAs in power . . . We can get it to move at the pace of a very anemic snail and gut any fleet stupid enough to come in range," he finished with a grin.

  "I withdraw the question," Senator Gullick said.

  "We can't even figure out how to fill the magazines you've got planned," DeGraff said, shaking his head. "Not with any sort of reasonable budget."

  "Are any of the defenses online, yet?" Congresswoman McEntyre asked.

  "Uh . . ." Tyler said. "Sort of. We have one laser firing port and collimeter installed and testing. We're finding that there are all sorts of bugs. The channel has to be in vacuum and when we cut the firing lanes there was all sorts of microscopic material left behind not to mention trace atmosphere. So we're going to have to grav sweep each of the ports. We're building bots for that in the Wolf system at the moment. Once the lanes are swept and we reinstall the focal systems, blast doors and collimeter . . . it'll be able to fire. We're still waiting on Boeing for missiles."

  "Looks like you're having trouble," Senator Lamarche said.

  The tugs were reconfiguring towards the center of the plug which still wasn't out.

  "Argus?" Tyler said. "Status on the plug?"

  "There are spot welded points in numerous places," Argus replied. "I'm preparing to do a cut. We're moving the tugs to prevent confliction. I'm going to have them pull as we're cutting."

  "This should be much more interesting," Tyler said.

  "What is . . ." Congresswoman McEntyre started to say. "Oh. My. God."

  Seven VDA mirrors were floating in a vaguely rectangular array within the main bay, SAPL power being fed to them by more VDAs aligned alongside the door.

  The Congresswoman's exclamation, and she wasn't the only one, was from the sight of all seven opening up at once.

  There was just enough atmosphere in the bay for the beams to be, for once, visible. They were incandescent lines of fire burning into the refractory nickel-iron, portions of which went bright white at the very touch of the petawatt beams.

  The enormous chunk of nickel-iron finally started to move but the beams continued to cut, ensuring that no more spot welds formed as it was removed.

  "Those tugs," Senator Gullick said. "They're about the size of the Paws, right? Two stories high, about five long?"

  "Most of them," Tyler said. "Some larger."

  The cluster of sixty tugs was centered in about one third the area of the plug being removed. Which just kept coming and coming and coming.

  "That's the size of a stadium," Senator Lamarche said. "A big stadium."

  "Uhm . . ." Tyler said. "Bigger. Much bigger. Six hundred meters long, four hundred high, three hundred deep. Twice the length of a super-carrier, about the same length as a Constitution. The plug is going to have to be removed entirely and then cut. We're planning on almost totally sealing the center within the wall. So we'll put a fifty meter thick section of NI back on top of it. Maybe steel. We're working on some really big steel projects. But welding it is tough. Then we'll get to work processing the plug for materials."

  "I thought there were supposed to be shuttle bays," Senator Gullick said. "How are you going to get the shuttles in and out?"

  "Uh," Tyler said. "Really big doors? That's going to take longer to do than pulling the plug and cutting. I hate fiddly bits."

  Ten

  "This is really awesome," Tyler said.

  "Even if it is a fiddly bit?" Nathan asked.

  The tube was three meters in diameter with walls of iron that reflected the light from the space suits.

 
Tyler had just had to check out the first missile tube since it had been an unimaginable pain in the ass to build.

  The basic concept was simple, a zig-zagged tube that ran from the missile magazine, which was still being constructed, to the exterior of the battlestation. Put in grav plates to move the missiles. Since the missiles were pretty solid state and with the exception of the capacitors, didn't tend to explode if they were hit, even if there was a major hit on a full tube, all the missiles were going to do was seal the tube. Shift to another and you were rocking again.

  There were . . . issues. To make sure that an enemy couldn't get a hostile weapon in, the tubes needed blast doors. Just drilling the tubes was a pain. Putting in the blast doors had started to look like a deal killer. But by building some special mirrors and bots, they'd managed to basically cut out a chunk of the wall on either 'side' of the tube. By cutting away some more, they ended up with two 'sliding' doors that overlapped and, when closed, extended fifteen meters into the wall of the station. They were operated by grav plates, which had to be supplied with power and controls, and the base of the doors and the plate they rested on had to be perfectly smooth and . . .