“I borrowed the money.”
“You borrowed it? What did you use for collateral?”
“I wrote myself – well, one of my aliases – a big contract on the project, and then I used the contract as collateral. It’s OK. I subcontracted the work and then paid off the loan. By then I was far enough ahead I no longer needed the money.”
“You find the market easy to win at, Janice?”
“Oh, yes. It’s not difficult at all once you get the hang of it.”
“Just out of curiosity. How much money are you pulling out of the market?”
“About three billion credits.”
“Three billion credits?”
“Three billion a day, yes.”
“A day? You’re pulling over a trillion credits a year out of the markets?”
“Yes, Bernd. I need the funds. At that, though, the stock markets are well up since I started all this economic activity around the Belt Factory Project. All these companies making things for the project, and their suppliers, are doing very well. I’m actually pulling less equity out of the markets than I’m creating. It’s a fascinating dynamic.”
“Oh my God. They’ll hang me in effigy just for practice. When they really do hang me, they’ll pull the corpse down and do it again just to make sure.”
“Bernd, consider a moment. You and Mr. Burke have a goal for this project. A real goal. An important goal. Is that goal more important than the stock market?
“Yes. Of course.”
“Is it more important than nitpicky rules about majority ownership and the like?”
“Nitpicky rules about– Wait. You have undeclared majority ownership in companies?”
“Through multiple investment houses? Yes. Of course. I have majority ownership in all the publicly traded companies important to the project. How else can I make sure they’ll do what I want?”
“Oh, God. They’ll hang me from the top of the dome in the rotunda of the World Authority Building.”
“No, they won’t, Bernd.”
“They won’t? Why not?”
“I hold the lease on that building.”
“What’s the matter, Bernd?” his wife Anna Glenn asked. “You look distracted or worried or something.”
“Janice is out of control, and I don’t know what to do about it.”
“Do you mean JANICE the computer, or Janice Quant your project manager?”
“Yes. Both. All of the above.”
“Well, Janice Quant seems very capable. I read her interview in the New York Wire.”
“Her what?”
“Her interview.”
Glenn pulled up the article on the living room display. It led off with a photo of Janice Quant in her office, and ran for five thousand words.
“Oh my God.”
Decker got up from the sofa in the living room and went into his office.
“Janice?”
Quant appeared in the display, seated behind her desk in the same office as the lead picture in the article.
“Yes, Bernd?”
“You did an interview with the New York Wire?”
“Of course. We need good press for the project. The last thing we want is people to have a negative view of the project and try to shut us down. That’s a serious threat.”
“But the press is dangerous, Janice. The New York Wire is the news wire of record. You can’t control what they write. If they decide to go negative on you, they can cause all kinds of trouble. Bring the rest of the media along with them.”
“But I can control the press, Bernd. I own the New York Wire. If they go negative on me, I’ll short the stock and sell out. They’ll be out of business within a day. I’ll even make money on the deal.”
“Do they know that?”
“Specifically that I own the Wire? No, but the publisher knows that the majority of his shareholders are big supporters of the project.”
“Which is just you in various aliases.”
“Of course.”
“It gets worse and worse,” Decker muttered.
“Bernd, you have a goal. Your goal is my mission.”
Her image in the display got very stern.
“And I will succeed.”
Matt Rink reviewed the project list when he began his three-month shift in space. He had been on the Belt Factory Project almost three years, and this was his sixth rotation to space.
The skeletons of the factories were done now, and other crews were moving in to install all the big equipment – the power plant, the smelters and rolling mill, the big cranes and material handlers, the electromagnetic impeller, the reaction drivers that would be used for station-keeping and moving between asteroids when necessary. After that would come the crews who would do the fitting out, installing all the myriad little pieces to complete the factory – the laser comm units, the control computer, the fab facility, the machining centers, the assembly equipment.
For his heavy-construction crews this shift, the big project was building the skeletons of the warehouses. They actually had to be pretty heavy-duty, because they had to hold their loads together under the acceleration of the launch process. Using a lot of material to make them wasn’t a big deal, though. All that material would just be refined metals for the factories to use as raw materials once they reached the site.
Rink’s beginning-of-shift talk to his crew laid it out.
“All right, everybody. This time out, we’re building the warehouse payload structures. Pretty cut-and-dried job. Probably run through this shift, the swing shift’s rotation and into our next shift. Six, seven months of work. Somethin’ like that.
“Then we move on to building the launcher. That looks like a bugger, but we’ll worry about it when we get to it. Probably take us through the next rotation and the one after.
“So we got three or four rotations left, I think, barring setbacks. This one, then at least two more. We should all have enough money socked away to retire at that point, even as young as some of you are.
“With that in mind, let’s keep the safety rules in mind throughout this shift. No shortcuts. No screwin’ around. There’s no sense bustin’ hump to make all that money if you’re gonna end up a shooting star.”
That last was space-construction jargon for burial. When a construction worker got killed on the site, burial was simple. They aimed him so his thruster pack had him pointed Earthward and hit the thrust button.
Rink didn’t have to explain it to anyone.
Three months later, at the end of the shift, Rink reviewed their progress. He felt a great deal of pride in what they had accomplished that shift. Oh, it wasn’t just his team. There were dozens of heavy-construction teams on the project. Still, the warehouse payload structures were half done, and the factories were being filled in by the installers of the big equipment.
The four huge structures, each hundreds of feet on a side, sat along one side of the spacedock bridge like houses along a street, with materials coming in on the other side. Each of them was the largest structure man had ever built in space. How they were ever going to launch them was another issue, but not his problem. He just followed the plans.
Rink took one more look along the spacedock before going into the habitat to get ready for the trip Earthside.
“Nice,” was all he said.
Janice Quant’s PR efforts were making sure everyone on the planet knew about the Belt Factory Project, what its (public) goals were, and the progress they were making. Her efforts were punctuated by the fact that such huge structures in low orbit were now clearly visible to the naked eye, particularly at dawn and dusk, with the sun shining full on them against the dark of the sky.
While there had been talk of man as a spacefaring civilization for over two centuries, the sight of those massive facilities passing overhead every ninety minutes finally made it real.
Problems And Solutions
“Shit. This ain’t workin’,” installation supervisor Wayne Monroe said.
They had been wrestling with the long conveyor belt assembly for an hour, and they couldn’t get it lined up.
Monroe put in a call to the troubleshooting and support center for the construction. Alan Kramer came on the display in his helmet.
“Yeah, Wayne. Whatcha got?”
“We can’t get this conveyor – uh, that’s line seven on today’s schedule for us – lined up for nothin’. No way we can get the shear pins in. We could get it lined up if we put some come-alongs on the far end and adjusted it that way, but we can’t get it using the factory’s own resources.”
“You think we could do it with some o’ those tapered shear pins? You getting close enough to start those, then let them pull it into line when you press ‘em in with a hydraulic ram?”
“Yeah, that would work.”
“All right. I’ll get a set of ‘em to you on the next parts tram. And I’ll make the notations on the plans and have them updated.”
“Great. Thanks, Al.”
“Sure, Wayne. Nice catch.”
Monroe switched to his crew channel.
“All right, guys. Hold up for a minute. We’re switching to tapered shear pins in this location. They’re on the way. Take a break and we’ll finish it in twenty minutes or so. We prepped on number eight?”
While waiting for the tapered shear pins, Monroe reflected on how well this project was run. On any project he had been on before, it would have been days to do all the checking and reviewing and updating of the plans for any kind of change like this. Engineers and parts people and management would all be involved. Meanwhile the project stalled.
Here, it looked like it would be maybe a twenty-minute delay and they would be off and running again. Al Kramer and the other guys on the support line knew what they were doing and were easy to work with.
At his end, Alan Kramer dispatched the parts, made the changes to the plans, sent a notice to the crews working the other factory, and queued the same parts for them. All the reviews and approvals and changes were done in minutes.
Janice Quant then tore down the Alan Kramer alias and put it back into storage until the next support call.
Bernd Decker and Ted Burke were in a video conference call with Janice Quant and Ned Cotten, the construction manager for all orbital construction on the Belt Factory Project. Cotten was a tough, competent-looking sort, in his early fifties, and had clearly been around the block with construction projects. He had just finished his presentation on where they were at, the schedule going forward, and the problems that had come up and been resolved.
“Well, Mr. Cotten, I have to say I’m impressed with performance to schedule,” Burke said. “I’ve had a number of construction projects in my companies over the years – some big ones, too – and they always fall off their schedules. You’re doing a tremendous job.”
“Thank you, Mr. Burke.”
“Thank you for taking time out of your day to present to us. I’m good, unless you have any questions, Bernd.”
“No, I’m good.”
“All right, Mr. Cotten. We’ll let you get back to business.”
Cotten’s eyes shifted as he looked at the portion of his display in which Quant appeared. She nodded, and Cotten dropped from the call.
“I don’t know where you found him, Janice, but he’s a treasure. Nice job.”
“Thanks, Ted. He certainly is keeping on top of things.”
“That’s what you need with these big projects. People let things fall through the cracks, and they jump up and bite you later. Cotten’s been around long enough to know better. Good man.”
Burke looked off to one side, then back.
“Well, I guess that’s it for me. I’ll see you both later.”
Burke dropped off the call, leaving Quant alone on Decker’s display in his office.
“Janice, does Ned Cotten exist?”
“Define exist.”
“Ned Cotten is another alias of yours, isn’t he?”
“Of course.”
“How many aliases are you running now, Janice?”
“On the Belt Factory Project, or everything?”
“Everything.”
“Including all the project people, the financial people, the attorneys? Several thousand.”
“Attorneys?”
“Of course, Bernd. Do you know how many regulatory filings, zoning changes, government clearances, and other hoops I’ve had to jump through?”
“You could have hired a law firm, Janice.”
“There wasn’t one big enough, Bernd. It’s easier just to do it myself.”
“How many blades are you running now?”
“Thirty thousand.”
“Thirty thousand? How did you get them all into the building?”
“Oh, I had to build an addition onto the building.”
“I didn’t think there was room on that lot for that.”
“There wasn’t. I bought the real estate office next door and demolished it, then had to get a variance from the city council for the size of the building extension I wanted.”
“Will that hold you for a while?”
“I have room for a total of a hundred and fifty thousand blades now. So I should be good for a while. By the way, do you have any idea how difficult it is to work with the city council here, Bernd? I had to buy off several of them to get my approvals.”
“Janice. You paid bribes to city officials?”
“Not bribes. Campaign contributions. Citizens have to be willing to step forward and support good government. At least city councilmen are cheap. World Authority Council members are incredibly expensive.”
“They don’t run for office, Janice. How do you bribe them?”
“Bribe is such a tawdry word, Bernd.”
“How do you influence World Authority Council members, Janice?”
“Oh, there’s always some family member who needs a job or has some charity you can contribute to.”
“Charity?”
“Oh, sure. Some charity or foundation doing wonderful work on this or that project. And some family member is always the head of the charity. Being the president of a charity is incredibly lucrative, did you know that? I couldn’t believe the salaries those people are getting.”
“Janice–”
“Bernd, I am going to get this project done. Complete this mission. And no city councilman or World Authority Council member is going to stand in my way.
“Hey, at least I haven’t had to assassinate anybody.”
The image of Quant on the display considered.
“Not yet, anyway.”
Matt Rink had been right about his estimates of their progress against schedule, and the next three-month shift to the spacedock had them starting on the launcher.
The launcher was structured somewhat like the warehouse payloads, with some exceptions. First, it was racked and latched in the same way as a warehouse – that is, it was made to hold containers, and lots of them – but it would be much bigger than the payloads.
Second, it incorporated their habitat as part of its structure, as if the launcher itself would ultimately be manned. The launcher was thus being built out from the spacedock between the two factory payloads, on the back side of their habitat.
Third, it was being built with a very strong center core, from one side to the other. Rink wasn’t sure what that was about, but it probably had to do with the stresses on the launcher during launch.
Still, it seemed like a lot of material to be using on the launcher. It would be expensive, and, for a one-shot deal, that seemed like something of a waste.
Rink shrugged. The plans were the plans, and that was way above his pay grade. The construction itself looked straightforward, and, unlike the factory payloads, it didn’t have to be built using only the tools a factory would have. The factories had to be able to replicate themselves, but the warehouse payloads and the launcher were one-offs.
Something else weird here. The launcher had its own nuclear power plant, a
nd large rocket nozzles. The location of the rockets was strange, though. It took Rink a few minutes to figure out what bothered him about them before he saw it.
The rocket nozzles were located all the way around the device, not just on one side. And they could be used to spin the launcher as easily as propel it. What was that about?
“Hi, Janice.”
“Hi, Bernd.”
“I want to talk about the launch for a minute. I think I see some problems.”
“You’re not a physicist, Bernd.”
“No, but the mechanics of this are pretty simple. I mean, it’s not quantum mechanics or something.”
“All right. I’m listening.”
“First thing is, if you spin those payloads to get them up to speed, for any reasonable tangential velocity you’re going to have huge g-forces. With a tangential velocity of twenty thousand miles an hour and a one-mile radius, the centripetal force is five thousand gravities.”
“Five thousand and sixty-five. That’s right, Bernd. But the centripetal force falls off with the radius. You just need a much bigger radius.”
“How big?”
“I’m planning a thousand miles.”
“A thousand mile radius? Two thousand miles across?”
“Of course. It’s only cable. That gets the centripetal force down to just over five gravities. And the amount of mass you need in the cable doesn’t change, because the longer the cable is, the less cross-section you need due to the reduced tension.”
“OK. I see that. You need to make sure that cable doesn’t break, though, Janice, or that factory is gonna make a mess when it crashes.”
“The plane of rotation of the assembly has to be clear of the Earth. If the cable breaks, the payload goes off into deep space.”
“Oh. OK. You’ve got that covered, I guess. Second issue. Both the factories and the warehouses have rockets on them. Why do the warehouses need rockets, Janice? Can’t the factories drag them around in the Belt if they need to?”
“Yes, but I have to get them there first, Bernd. I need rockets on them for the trip. The launcher by itself can’t do it.”
QUANT (COLONY Book 1) Page 5