Troy Rising 2 - Citadel (18 page)

They had to cut through four bulkheads and a control room to get to the fuel line.

“Wait,” BFM commed as Butch started up his torch. “Control, Fourteen Alpha.”

“Fourteen Alpha, Control.”

“Is there a shut-off valve?” Price commed.

“Roger, Fourteen Alpha, stand by.”

“He's expensive. Why waste salvage?” BFM commed on a side channel to Butch.

“Makes sense,” Butch replied.

They found the shut-off valve in the next compartment over, got the fuel shut off then headed back to the power-room entry.

When they reached the main entry, Butch still occasionally bouncing and bonging off of the walls, the sparking had stopped.

“Prime slice,” Price commed, making a cautious entry to the room. “Looking at two hundred million dollars, minimum, right there.”

“That's prime,” Butch said.

“Let's get 'er cut out,” Price commed. “I'll stabilize, you cut. And only cut where I tell you, probe. I don't want my salvage wrecked by your clumsy attempts to be a welder.”

“I am beat,” Butch said, clambering into his bunk. He'd done his suit checks, though, before he put it away.

“Same here, brother,” Drac said, yawning. “I want to go get something to eat, but I'm too tired to move!”

The salvage operation had been called after twelve hours, the maximum the company would let people work continuously. They had a mandated twelve hours off before beginning again.

“I already had thirty hours in this week,” Butch said, trying to do the math. “That's forty two. And we've got . . . What's the deal with OT on a salvage operation? Since we get shares.”

“OT is the same,” Drac said, yawning again. “The shares, they look small, like point oh, oh, one percent or something. But it's good money even for probes. The straight wage come out of the cost of salvage. The shares pay out after that. So you're sort of paying yourself or something. It's supposed to be an incentive to keep the cost of salvage down or something.”

“I'm gonna think about it in the morning,” Butch said, cutting off his light. “I'm going to have to kiss some Navy guy, though, for giving all that beautiful loot.”

“What I wonder is what they're going to do with it?”

“I'd heard you were insane,” Kelly Ketterman said. “Now I understand what they meant.”

Kelly Ketterman was the Managing Design Engineer of Night Wolves, the Granadica Design and Prototyping Center. Located inside the walls of the fabber called Granadica, the center was Tyler Vernon's version of Skunk Works or Phantom Works. And since the Granadica was, currently, located in the Wolf 359 system . . . Night Wolves.

A petite blonde, she was barely taller than the notoriously short Vernon even when wearing heels.

“All it really takes is enough power and grav plates,” Tyler said, shrugging. “We're going to need a lot of osmium, admittedly. But that's just a matter of mining enough asteroids. And we just got several tons of prime grav plates. And we'll probably get a bunch of damaged power plants we can remelt. Well, we will have them once the salvage guys get done with the junk that's drifting around the gate.”

“It's not a tithe of what you'd need, sonny,” Granadica said. “You want Troy to actually be mobile? That's a lot of grav plates.”

Granadica was the AI of the fabber, a massive mobile Glatun space factory that had been built back when Crusaders were beating on Saracens.

“We need to get it so it can rotate, first,” Tyler said, bringing up the plans schematics. “That, right there, is going to take a bunch of power.”

"They're planning on lining the control levers with plants and

placing the grav plates on the ends,“ Kelly said. ”Didn't they already start?"

The massive “horns” in the bay of the Troy were intended to permit the space station to rotate. That way it could move the transmitted SAPL beams around and actually aim them. It also would permit spreading damage from attacks. The “horns” were so long because the more leverage that they had the less total power was needed.

“Right,” Tyler said. “But what then? All I want you to do is look at the design requirements for a power plant and drive system large enough to move the Troy. Not just back of the envelope designs. A full design. Let me figure out the logistics.”

“Well,” Kelly said. “I do like a challenge.”

“The efficiency of plates goes up for something like that the larger they are,” Granadica said, dubiously. “The best plates are going to out mass your Constitution class cruisers. They're going to out mass me.”

“We'll figure it out,” Tyler said.

“You're not going to make a power plant in me, either,” Granadica said. “You're talking about an osmium sphere two hundred meters in diameter. That's beyond my fabbing ability.”

“Granadica,” Tyler said. “I built a battlestation nine kilometers across. And I'm building another one. You really think a little bitty ball of osmium's going to stop me?”

“No,” the fabber said, sounding mildly amused.

“Where are you at on building your . . . twin,” Tyler asked.

“Apollo's finished with the shell,” Granadica said. “It's still cooling, though. You guys have come up with some crazy ways to make steel, but it works.”

Making steel in a fabber was dead simple. Insert raw materials in one end, first quality steel came out the other.

Making a shell of steel big enough to encompass a ship fabber, a kilometer long and three hundred meters in diameter, was a different story.

But the problem had already been solved for another project, the Wolf Mining Facility. It had needed “support plates,” two kilometer around “washers” that were intended for the upper and lower portions of a massive space elevator and gas mining facility.

Building the plates in any reasonable period of time, and the with approaching war Vernon was in a big hurry, seemed impossible.

Apollo Mining had solved the problem, however. By making a sort of circular shell of layers of steel material and then melting it, they could now create any sized ball of steel. Forming it was, then, dead simple. As long as you wanted something that was vaguely round it was a matter of using enough tugs to form it like a potter formed clay.

“If it's crazy but it works . . .” Tyler said.

“It's not crazy,” Granadica said. “You humans are the only sophonts in this galactic region to have that saying. Most people just go with ‘that's crazy.' ”

“Internals?” Tyler asked.

“78% complete,” Granadica said. “I'm mostly stuck on power plants. Still building up materials. Speaking of osmium.”

The matter annihilation plants centered around circular balls of platinum group metals. Osmium was the best choice but any of the platinum group, ruthenium, rhodium, palladium, osmium, iridium, or platinum, could be used.

The problem was, they were all relatively rare. They were extremely rare in terrestrial conditions. Being heavy metals, they tended to stay in the core of planets and were uncommon in crustal materials.

They were more common, however, in asteroids. Not very common, they were only formed in supernovas and even then by the repeated fusion of other metals in multiple supernovas. They were unlikely to ever be common. But they were more common in asteroids, especially nickel-iron asteroids, than on planets.

But even with all the mining that Tyler was doing in the solar system and now Wolf, there was never enough. He was having to trade more than half of his refined metal to the Glatun to keep up with payments and ongoing purchases. Only the remainder was left to supply not only the Navy but civilian ships, terrestrial requirements, the replication of Granadica and all the construction going on in the Wolf system.

“Priorities, priorities, priorities,” Tyler muttered. It was always the problem. If he had his current situation and decades before a massive war broke out, the situation would be simple. Spend all his time building infrastructure and wait until the last three or four years to start constructing warships. But humanity was starting at the bottom of a hole. It was only fifteen years since Tyler had found a useful trade good to open up full trade with the Glatun, barely more than a decade since they'd managed to kick the Horvath out of the system. They were still learning how to work in space. There were never enough trained people, enough material, for what he could see coming.

The Glatun, Earth's first trade partners and their closest “ally,” were a dying civilization. They had slowly slipped from being a robust, expansionist, society to one with high unemployment and a “bread and circuses” attitude towards life.

That worked as long as you didn't have any strategic threats. The problem was that other species, many of which the Glatun had worked to advance so they would be better trade partners, were expanding in the galactic region. Four of them, led by the Rangora, were eyeing the Glatun planets with a look in their eye like a wolf examining a sick, old caribou. Just last year, Glatun had ceded sovereign control over a whole series of bordering star systems to other polities.

That wasn't going to be enough to buy off the Rangora for long.

Once war broke out, Earth's problems would be magnified a thousand fold. The Glatun were busy trying to build up their fleet, and having massive problems, but they still had hundreds of fabbers like Granadica. Some of the metal going to the Glatun was coming back as formed materials. Power plants, grav plates, atomic circuitry and, most especially, highly refined He3 fuel for the power plants. Once that supply line was cut off, Earth was going to be stuck with its limited industry and Granadica. For fuel, Tyler was desperately depending on the Wolf gas mine being finished before the war started and all hell broke loose.

Most models had the Rangora, who were ten times the problem of the Horvath, attacking Earth as part of the war. Planetary heavy bombardment, dropping fractional C kinetic energy weapons with yields up to a hundred megatons, were considered a legitimate tactic. Earth had already suffered devastating bombardments from the Horvath. She would take a pasting if the Rangora got any sort of foothold in the system.

The flip side was that they would have to be able to hold the gate area long enough to transport through to Wolf to attack Granadica and the mine. Tyler was banking on Troy being able to prevent that.

“Earth has more than enough power,” Tyler said. “There's hydro, nuclear, coal . . . I'm going to discontinue the civilian power plant program and shift all the material to you. Get the twin up.”

“Okay,” Granadica said.

“And when you have the twin up,” Tyler said. “Start on another. When the second one is done, we'll move the first into the Troy. And so on and so forth. I think that's the best pattern we can plan for now.”

“How many battlestations are you going to make?” Kelly asked.

“Depends on how long the war lasts. Speaking of war. We've got a bunch of damaged but possibly salvageable ships in the Sol system. I'm thinking about pulling them through to here and having you work on them in your spare time.”

“I don't have a lot of spare time,” Granadica pointed out.

“I'll get some people in here,” Tyler said, grimacing. Finding good space engineers was like pulling hen's teeth. Among other things, most of them were going into the Navy and with stop-loss they weren't coming out. Problem to fix later. “What's the status on the gas mine?”

“All the parts are produced,” Granadica said. “I've shifted my production schedule to producing construction bots. They're starting installation of the main processors and weaving of the pipes.”

“Okay,” Tyler said, nodding. “That's next on the agenda.”

“Well, we have a refreshing change in the interstellar situation,” the Secretary of State said.

“That sounds like good news,” the President said. “I could use some good news.”

Even though, for once, an attack through the gate had not dropped KEWs all over the Earth, the economy and society were just a shambles. Between the destruction of capitals and the breakdown in international security, whole swathes of the planet were failed states. Just keeping the flow of oil, still a vital strategic commodity even with the improving technology, required three divisions deployed in the Middle East. They weren't so much there to fight terrorists anymore as to make sure the “legitimate” governments were able to keep the oil pumping.

The government, especially the states, was just starting to get a handle on the effect of the Johannsen Virus. Women were, and the president dearly hoped continued to be, a vital part of the American economy. Their entry into the workforce in large numbers started with World War II, the last time the US tried to go to full war production footing.

Maternity leave was, to say the least, cutting into productivity. And the teen pregnancy rate was hammering education for women. A girl might still go to high school with one child. By the time it got to three, she was mostly out of school, and the workforce, for the foreseeable future.

Congress, responding to the reality of their constituent's positions, had increased the child tax credit. A family earning $50,000 with four children, which was starting to be just about median condition, paid essentially zero taxes. Which made an already difficult budgetary situation impossible.

The one bright spot was that with industry damaged across the globe and the baby boom just starting to reach productive age, the US was, once again, an industrial powerhouse. Most of the industry that had been destroyed in the bombardments was “legacy” industry that had needed to change to more modern techniques. Over the decades before the bombardments, more and more factories were going in to areas where labor was cheaper and easier to deal with than in the Rust Belt. Which meant that whereas China, Japan and Europe had lost most of its production to the Horvath bombardments, the US, with most of its new capacity dispersed into cheap, relatively rural or small city areas, primarily in the South, had come out with more functional production than the rest of the world combined.

“Oh, it's not good,” the Secretary of State said. “It's refreshing. We actually have a declaration of war.”

“By the Horvath?” the President said, sighing. “How many more ships do they have to lose to get the picture?”