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 went 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.

"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 binoculars. "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."