Troy Rising 1 - Live Free or Die (53 page)

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
Starfire
, 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
and a kilometer wide on the interior. It was less a door than a cork. In keeping with the
enormity of everything about
Troy
, it weighed fourty-one
billion
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 two point two
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
Starfire
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
Starfire
, which could fit in one of the
Constitution's
bays.

With almost the entire starboard wall of the
Starfire
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.”