Crescendo Of Fire

by Marc Stiegler

  The governor jerked. “It’s not just a matter of opinion, it’s a matter of law. We passed a law. It’s the law. You have to obey the law.”

  “Governor, as you might expect, my legal team is already preparing a case to persuade the courts to throw out your law. If I can get it to the Supreme Court, I wouldn’t be surprised if we win.”

  The Attorney General winced. The Supreme Court was stacked with Red lawyers. While the political dynamics for the Chief Advisor were complicated in this case, there was a real chance he would support SpaceR. The Supreme Court’s ruling in that case would be a foregone conclusion.

  But it would be far too late to help SpaceR, given the circumstances that were about to change. Right now.

  The governor smiled. The Attorney General could see that the governor had not yet forgotten that he still had control of the conversation; he still had the power. “I’m sorry you feel that way.” He lifted a phone dramatically as Matt and the Attorney General watched. “Commander, it’s a go.”

  He put the phone down and looked back at Matt on the screen. “The California State Guard has just entered your SpaceR rocket factory in Hawthorne. It is hereby seized on behalf of the State of California.” His smile grew broader. “Think of it as a mechanic’s lien. Just pay your four billion, and of course, the additional penalty for failing to pay promptly. The troops will leave, and everything will be fine.”

  Matt felt a guilty sense of relief. He finally knew for sure what the governor would do. He wasn’t surprised, actually. His management team had identified this as one of the low-probability possibilities—low probability because it wouldn’t just hammer SpaceR, it would hammer the SpaceR union members, a force even the governor needed to reckon with.

  Regardless, it was a catastrophe for the company. But at least it was now out in the open.

  Matt knew that what he ought to do was to start negotiating. He didn’t have the money anymore. He could pay maybe a billion now and the rest over time, but there were two problems with this. One problem was that it would never be over if he agreed now. The state of California had been talking for years about scoring an extra helping of direct income stream from the biggest companies’ revenues. He had no doubt that that was the direction this conversation would soon take. Four billion now, and more and more for all eternity.

  But that was not the reason Matt did not immediately begin a calm and deliberate negotiation. The real reason was that he was furious. Matt would not bow as if this jerk were a king.

  Matt did the best he could under the circumstances. “We’ll talk about this later,” he choked out, then hung up.

  He breathed deeply. He wondered idly if the Board would replace him now as they had so recently replaced his predecessor. But he realized he was probably safe. The Board knew as well as he did that any course of action other than the one he had taken was just a way to engage in slow suicide. They would leave him in place as long as he could figure out how to deal with this new crisis. All was not lost. He still had a couple billion in working capital.

  Matt already knew what to do, or at least what questions to ask, his contingency planning having progressed that far. He’d already rejected the idea of trying to move his manufacturing plant to SpaceR’s facility in Texas. They had no manufacturing infrastructure there, neither equipment nor skilled personnel. It would take years to bring up a new plant there. They didn’t have the time. There was only one obvious solution. Maybe.

  So Matt called Alex, the BrainTrust’s Chief Engineer for the Argus. Alex answered the phone with, “I’ve been expecting you to call. We have the stabilizers in place. You should be able to take the Heinlein outside the reef for the next launch. We won’t have to keep this crazy fleet configuration with every ship sitting in a circle like they’re in an occult seance.”

  “That’s great, Alex. It’ll be a relief to everyone to be able to walk between the ships again, rather than having to take a copter or a boat.” Though Matt had to admit a couple of the boats, built by entrepreneurs when they saw the need for better transportation around the detached archipelago, were pretty cool. He had thought about buying one, but where would he get the time to sail it? Meanwhile, he had an emergency on his hands. Again. “But that’s not why I’m calling. I have another emergency. I know the Argus is designed primarily as a ship for building ships. Have you ever thought about what it would take to build a rocket?”

  Matt enjoyed thinking of himself as a reader of people of reasonably advanced powers. He was having trouble reading Dash, however. So he was excited about visiting Dash in her office. Would there be any hints he could glean about her personality from the pictures on her walls and the memorabilia on her desk?

  Even before he entered the office, he found his first clue.

  Beside the door, a sheet of yellow legal paper in an elegant gold frame hung like a painting. The sheet was covered in mathematical symbols written in sharp strokes of the pencil; a little wild, as if the author were working either in haste or in pain.

  He saw Dash approach from the corner of his eye. She asked forlornly, “I don’t suppose you can see what is wrong with these equations?”

  He looked at it again. It had been a very long time since he’d done exotic math. He shook his head. “Sorry, it just looks like gibberish to me.”

  Dash sighed. “I just ask everyone who comes by and looks at it.”

  “I see.”

  Dash led him into the office. It was rather austere, but Matt thought it might have started the slow accumulation of memories that tended to fill a vacuum.

  In a vertical column upon one wall were seven tiny photos of elderly people. Each had a number beneath it. He recognized Ben’s photo with a zero beneath it. Photos below that had negative numbers, negative five thousand to negative ten thousand. Above Ben was a woman with a positive four thousand, and a man with a six thousand, and at the very top, numerically out of order, was a woman with a one and a plus sign beside it.

  The bookcase held little in the way of books. There was a legal pad, the top page of which was covered with the same kind of math he’d found outside. And there was a very thick sheaf of neatly stacked papers with an elegant black and gold pen sitting atop it.

  Those were the closest things to books to be found in the bookcase, but other odd items struck him. On a lower shelf in the bookcase were the remains of an old-fashioned stethoscope. The rubber tubing seemed to have been cut from it, leaving only pieces. And on a high shelf, a pair of gleaming black lacquer sheaths held two Japanese swords, one long one short.

  Matt had a suspicion that he was seeing keys to the soul of his business associate…well, face it, she was now his friend…but the keys themselves needed keys to unlock them. His curiosity would have to be quenched some other day. Today they had business. Emergency business.

  Colin walked into the conference room on the Argus, mystified. “Didn’t we just do this a couple of weeks ago?”

  Dash watched him as he looked around the table at the usual suspects: Matt, Werner, Alex and herself.

  Matt looked up at Colin from the head of the table, an exhausted, rage-tinted expression on his face. “I take it you haven’t heard the news from California.”

  Colin grabbed a chair and raised an eyebrow. “I take it your successful launch from the BrainTrust was not welcomed equally in all corners of the state?”

  Werner snorted. “That bastard in the governor’s mansion screwed us again.”

  Dash said, “Well, at least you have a little more time to respond this time.”

  Now Alex and Werner shared an exhausted look. Alex said, “Not as much as you’d think,” and Werner finished, “for a much bigger job.”

  Matt explained the situation to Colin; it was his fourth repetition that day. “They’ve seized our factory in Hawthorne. No more new rockets until we hand over the four billion dollars.” He continued wryly, “Half of which we don’t have anymore because we gave it to you.” He saw Colin about to object, and corrected
himself, “We used it to pay almost everyone on the BrainTrust, for something or another.”

  Alex pushed the conversation back on topic. “So you want to build rockets out here on the BrainTrust.”

  Werner and Matt both nodded. Matt said, “I don’t suppose you can just tweak the Argus to build rockets as well as ships? It seems like you manufacture everything else out here too, right?”

  Alex shook his head. “The Argus can manufacture an amazing variety of objects and systems. But building the ships requires a lot of specialized gear, quite different from the specialized gear you need to build a rocket, I suspect.”

  Dash entered an observation. “Even the materials are very different. The BrainTrust has spent over a decade evolving the science and technology to use local materials as much as possible. The graphene reinforced carbon on your launch pad is a perfect example. It is made from pure carbon that is extracted from the reef.” She pointed at the wallscreen, showing a real-time view of the Heinlein as it slowly motored away from the archipelago. “Your new launch ship has a hull made with a skeleton of magnesium alloy, embedded in calcium carbonate that actually grows onto the skeleton, accreted from the seawater.”

  Matt looked puzzled. “Calcium carbonate? I’ve never heard of that being used as a building material. Or as anything else, for that matter.”

  Dash explained, “You may not have heard of it, but you are quite familiar with it. Seashells are made of calcium carbonate. A team on the Dreams Come True adapted the mechanism from sea life. The hulls of the newest isle ships grow in seawater in a manner somewhat similar to the way coral reefs grow.”

  Colin veered back to the general topic. “Carbon, magnesium, calcium carbonate, plastics made from methane, these are the strongly preferred building materials here.”

  Dash continued, “Your boosters are made primarily with aluminum-lithium alloy. Lighter and stiffer than even pure aluminum. But utterly unlike anything we use here.”

  Alex nodded. “We have no tools at all for working with aluminum or its alloys. You’re talking about a whole different ecosystem of technology.”

  Werner shook his head. “Wait a minute. I know you built the VATT for the Heinlein out of titanium. So you do work with other materials.”

  Alex explained, “Yes, we use a lot of titanium even though we have to import it. One of our sets of printers is designed for additive manufacturing with titanium, though a lot of our titanium is used just to plate the magnesium in situations where the magnesium could corrode.”

  Dash blew out a breath. “Could we make the booster bodies out of micro-honeycomb titanium?”

  She looked at Werner. “When using a 3D printer for manufacturing, you can create shapes with intricate interiors as easily as shapes with solid cores. Micro-honeycomb titanium might have the weight and stiffness you need.” She muttered as she tapped on her notebook, “I’d need to talk to a real expert to find out.”

  Matt looked astonished that Dash would need to consult with a real expert on something. But he let it slide. He turned to Alex. “So, if Dash figures out a way to build the boosters at sea, using some sort of materials she’ll no doubt invent on the spot, do you have space to build the boosters here on the Argus?”

  Alex looked at Colin. “It’s a big change from everything else we build. We’re already way behind schedule on virtually everything planned before SpaceR’s arrival.”

  Matt chuckled. “I just can’t feel sorry for you. I’m sure you made a handsome profit off of me for that theft.”

  Colin confessed, “Oh, yes, we walloped you good. We now have plenty of money. But it takes a lot of time to turn money into production machinery, which is our current shortage.”

  Dash put her tablet down, upon which she had been tapping with intermittent fury. “My materials engineering friends think the titanium micro-honeycomb will work. Even with additive manufacturing, you’ll be using a lot of titanium, so it will be expensive. But you should be able to get more launches per booster. I think in the long run, once we have the process down, you’ll get a total life-cycle cost reduction.”

  Matt raised his eyes and his hands to the sky as if asking for deliverance. “How can it be that every damn thing on the BrainTrust costs more up front, but saves money in the long run? Couldn’t we have something that was cheap up front, just once?”

  Everyone laughed briefly. Colin spoke. “Half the reason these things are costing you so much is because of the emergency timelines. Once your situation settles down, your costs should fall appreciably.”

  Matt refocused. “OK, back to the key question. Titanium for the boosters. You’re all set up for 3D printing with it. Can you build them on the Argus?”

  Alex closed his eyes. The room hushed as everyone awaited his answer. Finally, he said reluctantly, “It would be best to build a new 3D printer. Something on a scale never before seen, that could print the whole booster as a single piece.” He shook his head. “What’s the diameter of the boosters?”

  Dash answered instantaneously, “Three-point-seven meters, or twelve feet, for you Americans.”

  Alex shook his head. “We’d have to rip out a deck. The printer will have to be two decks high. You’d be better off building a new ship.” He looked at Matt. “How much time do we have?”

  Matt’s shoulders drooped. “As you know, we have six Kestrel Heavies here. The average booster has about ten launches left in its lifecycle. We can maybe stretch that a bit. But we launch almost every day. We have two months before things go sour.”

  The silence was so thick Dash could have cut it with her scalpel. Colin asked, “What about your other three launch facilities in Texas? They’re running on borrowed time as well.”

  Matt ran his hand through his hair. “They’re in better shape than we are here. They have about five months of flight capacity before their last booster needs to retire.”

  Dash followed Colin’s lead. “So, if we could move two Kestrel Heavies, with an average of ten launches per rocket, we’d gain another month.”

  Werner pointed out the obvious. “But at the cost of accelerating the day when we can’t launch at all.”

  Alex sighed. “In three months we might be able to do something. We’ll need full blueprints of the current Kestrel Heavy, of course. And we’ll need as many subcomponents as you can get elsewhere, either onshore manufacturing or recycling from the spent boosters.”

  He pulled out his tablet and started muttering. “We’d want to rip up the Argus enough to make two double-height decks, one for building the new cores, one for scavenging the still-usable parts out of the old cores. We’ll need a list of all the things other than the cores that we need, and develop plans for importing or making them all. What other thing are there? The second stages, the payload fairings, the payload capsules are obvious ones. I suspect we are nowhere near being able to manufacture the crewed capsules.” He rolled his head from side to side. “The engines. Lots of the engine plumbing can be printed in-place with the fuselages. But I need a list of all the parts that can’t.”

  Werner waved the problem away. “If you can build the first stage boosters, I think you’ll find the second stage straightforward. We can contract with someone in a Red state to make the fairings, and the capsules have long lifetimes.” He paused. “We have enough engines stored in a warehouse in Texas for one more Kestrel Heavy if we can get them here.”

  Matt listened with a rising sense of anxiety. “Can you really do this? When I think about how long it would take to build an entire rocket manufacturing center from scratch back in Hawthorne, I find it almost impossible to believe you can pull this off. Recognizing the irony, of course, that I’m the one who was foolish enough to ask if it were possible. We couldn’t even bring up another assembly line in our current Hawthorne factory, with all the infrastructure already in place, in this time frame.”

  Colin addressed his concern. “Don’t let dirtside timetables and schedules distort your perspective too much, Matt. Remember, general purp
ose bots are completely legal here. They work twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Depending on the job needing to be done, we’re looking at a factor of five increase in speed. Even a factor of ten if a streamlined regulatory structure makes a difference. If you could do it in a year in California, we can probably do it here in three months.”

  Colin took a deep breath. “We’re going to have to figure out how to parallelize this project with the shipbuilding or the Board will never go for it. Alex, I realize that building the superstructures for new ships will have to be put on hold — this whole ship is going to be dedicated to the rebuild for punching out the boosters — but can we at least lay down skeletons and start growing the hulls for two or three ships? Since the reactors are built on the Hephaestus, their assembly shouldn’t be impacted. Once we have the hulls, can we bring their reactors online, and get them ready to install the decks and superstructures once we have some capacity again?”

  Matt looked once more to the heavens. “I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but if you’re laying down hulls, lay another one for me too. I can already see I’ll need another isle ship.” When everyone stared at him, he explained, “I’m going to have to bring my workers out here, aren’t I? At the end of the day, it’s all going to be here, right?”

  Alex laughed low in his chest. “We’ve already got one framework in the water. I guess I’ll put down two more hulls while we’re rushing around like chickens with our heads cut off. Even if Matt decides in the end not to take one, I suspect we’ll find a use for it.”

  Colin joined in the laughter. “I suspect so.” He paused. “The Board is not going to love this, profitable though it may be. As Alex already pointed out, this will play holy hell with our existing schedules.” He smiled at Matt. “But I think it will be profitable.”

  Matt just put his face in his hands and groaned.

  EASY CRUISING

  For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.