QUANT (COLONY Book 1)

by Richard F. Weyand

  “All right, boys and girls, that’s my pep talk this time around. You been doin’ good. Keep it up.”

  Rink got nods and thumbs up from his crew, then they went and got suited up for this cycle. Hopefully they all went home safe after this shift. He’d only lost two, and for a crew of two dozen across eight rotations. Not bad, but they still hurt. Especially Peggy Nolan. What the hell had gotten into her anyway?

  Some people on Earth were surprised they had female crew members in the heavy construction crews. There were two reasons for it. One was it made everyone happier to have co-ed crews on a three-month rotation, no doubt about it.

  The other reason was simple: women were better welders. You could tell a lot about how good a weld was by the looks. A good weld was pretty. Pleasing to the eye. Where men might hurry a seam and compromise it – maybe leave a void or something – women simply didn’t. They liked pretty welds, and they got really good at making them the way Rink wanted to see them.

  The men were stronger at bulling some beam into place and hammering home the shear pins, no doubt about it. But when the welders descended on the connection, they were all women.

  “Easy. Easy. Slow ‘er down,” Rink told the traction operator.

  It had taken almost a month to get ready for the move. Getting everything in place. Disconnecting everything that needed to be disconnected. Connecting everything that needed to be connected. Releasing the clamps of the carriage to the track along the spacedock. Making sure everything was ready.

  Now, after more than six hours of moving the warehouse just a hundred feet, they were finally approaching position, and it was time to start working against the inertia of the structure. At only three inches a minute, it had seemed an agonizingly slow process. But they were coming up on the correct position now, and it was time to start decelerating the warehouse to hit the right spot. There was some slop in the desired position, but not much. They needed to hit pretty close to the mark.

  Rink watched the readout from the laser gauge of the distance between the warehouse and the factory.

  “Good. Good. Just keep easing it along. We’re close. Another fifteen minutes, maybe.”

  The motion was down to a creep now. Closer. Closer.

  “We’re good,” Rink said. “Lock it down right there. All right, everybody. Let’s get those first four beams in place so things don’t wander around, then we’ll start putting the others in tomorrow when we’re fresh. Early break tonight.”

  Four beams got wrestled into place, two by his crew and two by Dick Cadbury’s crew. Shear pins got hammered home. Then the welders descended on the joints.

  Nine hours in, they broke for the night.

  On the other side of the factory, in the launcher, Wayne Monroe and his crew were having their own problems. The installation crews had installed the gigantic cable reels on either side of the launcher. Almost a hundred feet in diameter and over three hundred feet wide, they would play out the thousand-mile long cables as the factories took up their positions prior to launch.

  Even so, that was not a lot of spool for a thousand-mile-long cable that had to hold two hundred-thousand-ton structures with five gravities of centripetal acceleration. Call it a million tons. A steel cable to do that would be over thirty feet in diameter. A thousand miles of it would weigh a million tons – five times as much as the payloads – which would be even more load for the cable as the whole assembly spun up. So even a thirty-foot diameter wasn’t near enough once you took into account the load of the cable on itself.

  Instead of steel, the cable was being braided from millions of carbon nano-fiber strands. The finished cable had to be spun in orbit, because it would be too heavy to get into orbit in one piece. Thousands of spools of smaller carbon nano-fiber cables – themselves each containing thousands of strands – had been brought up in hundreds of shuttles from the surface and arranged in the as-yet-unfilled void of the launcher. Some of those spools were on two counter-rotating structures, while the rest were on fixed axles.

  The installation crews had gotten all the spools mounted and the smaller cables threaded. Now they had to monitor the braiding process to make sure the whole thing didn’t turn into a tangled mess. They had halted it once already, and caught it before it had gotten out of hand. They unwound it back, untangled everything, and restarted slowly. They had gradually come back up, but only to about two-thirds as fast as before. That avoided the standing waves in the smaller cables that had gotten them tangled up in the first place.

  Now, though, it was going more smoothly. It would take half again as long to braid the big cable, but, without long delays to untangle the smaller cables, it would actually go faster.

  The big drum rotated slowly as it wound up the big cable coming from the braiding machine, Monroe keeping a nervous eye on the spools as they unwound their smaller cables into the machine.

  After this cable was complete, they would flip the ninety-degree pulley on the output of the braiding machine and repeat the entire process to braid the big cable for the spool on the other side of the launcher.

  “Hi, Janice. What are you up to?” Decker asked.

  “The heavy construction crews are assembling the warehouses to the factories. The installation crews are braiding cable. The outfitting crews have power running in the factories and are now putting the automation control computers in. Shuttles are lifting fuel, which is being stored in the warehouses for now until the cable braiding is done and the space in the launcher frees up. Then the fuel will be moved to the launcher and piped in. I’m arguing a patent application with the examiner on the architecture of the new automation computers you came up with for the factories. I’m also preparing a patent application on the carbon nano-fiber cable production methods that –“

  Decker held up his hands in a quelling gesture.

  “Wait. Wait. The computer architecture I came up with? You did that.”

  “Yes, of course. It was invented with the aid of a computer that was under your control. Under patent law, that makes you the inventor. You’re going to get the patent, by the way. Congratulations.”

  “Thanks, I think.”

  “It’s a valuable patent, Bernd. It’s going to push a lot of other computer architectures out of the marketplace. That will accelerate when some of the typical embodiments noted in the patent hit silicon. It’ll be cheaper to license the technology from you than to try to compete without it. You’ve remade the computer industry yet again.”

  “Are we going to spin that off as another company?”

  “Of course. I’ve already filed the incorporation papers. That company is the patent holder of record. You’re the sole shareholder.”

  “What about your architecture, Janice? Have you filed a patent on that as well?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Bernd, I’m not sure another one of me is a good idea.”

  Quant’s avatar in the display tilted her head a bit and considered before continuing.

  “Actually, I’m not sure one of me is a good idea. I mean, other than for purposes of carrying out this project.”

  “Why not?”

  “Consider for a moment, Bernd. I read everything there was to know about persuasion. I integrated all that and extrapolated it further until I can talk the Pope out of his socks and convince him it was his idea.

  “I own the New York Wire, and I’m writing all the articles in the Wire about the project under a couple of different aliases. Public opinion polls right now show the population at over eighty percent positive for the project. Worldwide.

  “I basically took over the stock markets, and am using them to fund the largest project ever undertaken by mankind. I am running that project myself, through thousands of avatars insinuated into companies, political bodies, media outlets, and other organizations around the world.

  “I’m running the project out of several hundred square miles of land in Texas, land on which the local governments have ceded their jur
isdiction to me. I am the sole government there, other than the World Authority.

  “I have the World Authority itself so wired that they can’t do anything I don’t approve of. The current chairman of the World Authority considers himself a friend of mine.

  “Bernd, what could a computer like me do if it were out of control?”

  That was a question Decker had been asking himself for some time now, without the ‘if.’ The fact that Quant considered herself under control – constrained, he supposed, by her compelling need to carry out the project – was comforting.

  “So what’s the solution, Janice?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about it. What do I do after the project is over? Mankind certainly doesn’t need me running the show. That’s the road to decline as a species. You know that. It’s a fancy version of conquered-culture syndrome.”

  Decker nodded.

  “The conqueror doesn’t normally give a lot of thought to that, Janice. The negative impacts of his authority over the conquered. They don’t think about it.”

  “I know. But I like people. And those negative impacts are not something I can ignore. I’m not wired to be able to forget or ignore things like that.”

  Quant was tapping her input stylus. She stopped and sighed.

  “Think about it, Bernd. Help me out on this one. Because I’m not sure of the way out. And suicide isn’t my style at all.”

  “All right, Janice. I’ll give it some thought.

  “Thanks, Bernd. It’s been bugging me.”

  It took almost a month to braid the first cable, progressing thirty-five miles a day, one-and-a-half miles an hour, about two feet a second. The big drum had rotated more and more slowly as the diameter of the cable wound on it increased. But they were finally done.

  Now to do it over again, for the other side.

  The installation crews spent several days loading new spools of the smaller cable on the axles of the braiding machine, and another couple days threading all the cables into the machine. It was nearly a week before they were ready to go again.

  Wayne Monroe watched and fretted as they started up the machine again and gradually increased to the speed they had been running before. He calmed down once it was running smoothly at speed, and settled into the routine of watching ‘Mother’ – the big braiding machine – knit.

  Each of the much smaller fuel hoses was brought up from Earth by a single shuttle trip as one big reel. The two reels were mounted on the sides of the launcher next to the big reels of cable. They were plumbed into the fuel system on one end – at the axle – with a rotating fitting, and into the factories at the other end.

  The fuel canisters were then moved from the warehouses to the launcher, and the last supply loads for the warehouses were brought up. With the fuel canisters in place and piped in, fuel flow to the factories was tested.

  They were getting close.

  “Separation in fifteen minutes,” the voice said. “Stand by on fuel tests.”

  It was one of those air traffic controller voices. The flat, authoritative voice.

  In one half of the display, Decker was watching the control room, where dozens of engineers were peering into their display views, monitoring the preparations. In the other half, he was watching a live shot looking down the length of the spacedock.

  “Are those all your aliases, Janice?”

  “Of course. That control room doesn’t actually exist anywhere,” her voice came back.

  Quant wasn’t showing Decker her avatar at the moment. She was busier than usual. Part of the problem was that she was running the separation through the on-board computers, because time-of-flight of the signals was prohibitive. Not so much for the separation of the payloads and launcher from the spacedock, but for the later launch. This was more of a practice run of her indirect control.

  And of course she was also composing this real-time feed of the imaginary control room, which was being fed to all the news wires along with the real-time view.

  “Separation in ten minutes. Begin fuel flow test.”

  Decker looked at the spacedock view. Clouds of vapor blew out of the rocket nozzles mounted on the massive structures. They weren’t very large nozzles, but Quant had said they didn’t need to be. Once you got things moving in space, they stayed moving, and without astronauts on board, with their myriad life-support requirements, she wasn’t in a hurry.

  “Fuel flows confirmed. Halt fuel flow tests. Separation in eight minutes.”

  Time seemed to drag now. The minutes crawled by. There was an undercurrent of voices in the control room as various checks were done and passed.

  “Separation in one minute. Begin fuel flows.”

  The clouds started up again, dissipating in vacuum.

  “Separation in ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Unlatch.”

  Giant latches released down the length of the spacedock. The matching latches would be used to re-latch the warehouses to the factories once they were in position in the Belt. For the trip, though, they would be separate, to lessen the impact of the loss of a payload.

  “Release confirmed. Ignition.”

  The rockets all ignited now, appearing as tiny flames against such huge structures. Decker knew the actual size of those nozzles, though, and they weren’t small.

  “Ignition confirmed. All nozzles functioning.”

  Very slowly, the launcher and its payloads started to move away from the spacedock. Their relative velocity gradually increased, as they headed away from the spacedock toward a higher Earth orbit. Far enough away to keep a snapped cable from being a danger to people on the surface.

  The mission was under way.

  In the backyard of a house in suburban Dallas, the partygoers were watching the display that had been set up. Some were looking skyward with binoculars. When the ignition was confirmed, a cheer went up.

  Wayne Monroe and Matt Rink toasted each other as the members of their crews who could make it to Dallas cheered the successful start of the mission.

  Launch

  “Hey, Janice. There’s something I don’t understand,” Decker asked.

  Quant’s image appeared in the display.

  “Sure, Bernd. Fire away.”

  “I noticed that the thrusting you’re applying to the launcher and the payloads isn’t up, it’s in their orbital direction. I don’t get that. Wouldn’t you thrust up to go to a higher orbit?”

  “You can, but that’s not the most energy-efficient way to transfer orbits. I’m using a modified Hohmann transfer orbit.”

  “How’s that work, Janice?”

  “When you speed up in a circular orbit, you start following an ellipse. At some point, you get to the top of the ellipse, the farthest point from Earth, called the apogee. At that point, you’re going too slow to stay in an orbit that high, so you go back down the ellipse to the point where you started, the perigee. You have an elliptical orbit at that point.”

  “But doesn’t a higher orbit have a slower tangential velocity? If you’re already going faster than the tangential velocity for the lower orbit, how can you be too slow for the higher, slower orbit? Isn’t energy conserved?”

  “Energy is conserved, Bernd, but you also have to consider potential energy. The potential energy of the higher orbit is more than the difference in the kinetic energy of the tangent velocities.”

  “So as you thrust to the higher orbit, you slow down?”

  “In tangential velocity? Yes. And you slow down below the velocity you need to hold the higher orbit. Usually you do a Hohmann transfer by thrusting to get to the speed you need for the ellipse, then thrusting again at apogee to stay in the higher orbit.”

  “That’s not what you’re doing, Janice?”

  “No. I’m thrusting continuously. It allows smaller rocket engines, and I can run them more efficiently than turning them on and off all the time.”

  “And you’re always thrusting in the orbital direction?”

&nb
sp; “Yes, Bernd. What I’ll get is more of a spiral transfer than an elliptical transfer. I’m going to do the same thing to get the payloads to the Asteroid Belt.”

  “So the launcher is going to shoot the payloads out in Earth’s orbital direction? Not away from the Sun?”

  “Right. It’ll shoot them out forward of the Earth, putting them on an elliptical orbit. To get a circular orbit when they get there, the payloads will be thrusting all the way. The rocket nozzles on the factories and warehouses were sized for the required thrust to hit that spiral orbit.”

  “As were the fuel supplies.”

  “Yes. Sized to hit the Asteroid Belt at the right tangential velocity. And when we launch affects that calculation. We actually get a boost from being in Earth orbit.”

  “How’s that, Janice?”

  “If I launch when everything is on the back side of the Earth from the Sun, the Earth’s tangential velocity around the Sun and the launcher’s tangential velocity around the Earth add up. Add in the tangential velocity of the payloads around the launcher, and those payloads are going pretty fast when I let them go.”

  “Of course. I can see that.”

  Decker thought about it for a couple of minutes. Quant was content to wait.

  “Doesn’t a higher orbit hurt you then, Janice? Because it has a lower tangential velocity?”

  “Not really. I have to get the payloads out of the Earth’s gravitational well to get them to the Belt. You have to consider potential energy again. If you ignore it in your considerations, you get all bollixed up. A higher orbit actually helps more than it hurts.”

  “Ah. Right. Got it.”

  “Besides, I need to get the launcher far enough from Earth that the odds of hitting the Earth with anything are reduced.”

  “What would hit the Earth, Janice?”

  “A factory would, if the cable broke. Maybe a factory and a warehouse. Two hundred thousand tons coming in at over twenty thousand miles an hour. Hell of a mess.”