Troy Rising 2 - Citadel (40 page)

“You must have been an A school instructor,” Dana said. “Esme, you know the Myrms we drive?”

“Yes,” Esme said.

“And you probably know to a cent how much they cost,” Dana said. “Chief, how many Myrms would it take to give the Troy one gravity of acceleration?”

“Easy,” Barnett said. “Eighty-four million and change.”

“Impossible,” Esme snapped. “You made that up.”

“Okay, genius, you do the math,” Barnett said. “Two point two trillion tons divided by the weight of a shuttle . . .”

“Sixty tons,” Dana said.

“Divided by four hundred gravities of acceleration,” Barnett finished.

The accountant closed her eyes for a second then shook her head.

“I still can't believe that,” she said, her mouth tight.

“It's fricking math!” Barnett said. “You're an accountant! Don't tell me you can't do the math!”

“I'm leaving,” Esme said. “I don't have to put up with this.”

“What?” Barnett shouted to her back. “Logic? Sorry, Bill.”

“It's okay,” Bill said. “I was getting tired of her attitude anyway.”

“People like that just piss me off,” Barnett said.

“What, Democrats?” Rammer asked.

“I usually vote Democrat, sonny,” the Chief said. “And not liberals, neither. You find people who just will not follow the logic everywhere. They don't like the answer so they think wishing makes it so. Conservatives have got the same problem. Talk to one of them about prostitution, gambling or drugs.”

“Abortion,” Dana said.

“There you go,” the Chief said. “My body, my choice. Cannot do the logic. It's not just a liberal thing. Moving the Troy? Cannot do the math cause their brains shut down.”

“I wasn't laughing because you can't get the Troy to move,” the brunette said. “You can. You can even build a drive for it. One that would give it . . . oh, up to six gravities of acceleration.”

“B . . . what?” Barnett said. “Impossible!”

“Do the math, Chief,” the girl said, grinning. “Or, rather, I can do the math. And, no, it's not impossible. Difficult? My dad would refer to it as ‘fiddly bits.' There's just one problem.”

“Which is?” Dana asked.

“Hello!” the girl said, waving her hands around. “We're in a pool! In the middle of the vessel, for want of a better word. Can you say ‘Slosh,' Chief?”

“How in the hell are you proposing to move the Troy, honey?” Barnett asked. “You sort of skipped that bit.”

“That's for me to know and you to figure out, Chief,” the girl said, grinning. “And when you figure it out, try to figure out how to install inertics on the whole system. That is the biggest issue. All the rest is . . . fiddly bits.”

“You're kidding,” Nathan said.

“No, I'm not,” Tyler replied. “When have I ever kidded about something like this?”

Tyler was not much of a draftsman but Nathan was by now used to working from his, very rough, ideas. And it wasn't like the former “Minor Planetary Objects” expert didn't know the idea.

“Tyler,” Nathan said, carefully. “The Troy is not designed to move.”

“It's got to be moved sooner or later,” Tyler said. “It's already nearly completely out of position. And not just the Troy. I want the same system on Thermopylae.”

“Two Orion drives?” Nathan practically shrieked. “Okay, I give up. Everyone's right. You're not kidding, you're insane!”

The idea was simple and went back to the early days of the space program, and the nuclear program, back when people were just fine with thinking big. And scary.

Orion worked best large. Make a very big platform, which they already had with Troy. Put a scary large plate under it. Orion was originally conceived as a lift drive to get out of the atmosphere. Connect the plate to the platform with some very large, and robust, springs.

Then set off a nuke on the plate.

The plate, obviously, had to be large enough and robust enough to survive being hit by the blast front from a nuclear weapon. And the springs had to be . . . large. But it would recoil, push the springs, the springs would push the platform and you had acceleration.

Repeat, quickly, and the platform moved.

“It's really simple,” Tyler said, pointing to the diagram. “We cut off the inside of the door for the pusher plate. It's already curved. We'll have to install a chute for the nukes, but that's just fiddly bits. Install it on the outside of the door. It's big enough to take the little bit of accel we're going to get. We'll need to put in more locking bars to handle the pressure. The springs are going to be sort of challenging . . .”

“Tyler . . .” Nathan said, gently.

“I want it done in a month, so you'd better quit talking and get to work,” Tyler said.

“Now that's just silly,” Nathan said. “I mean, I don't even know how we're going to make the springs. Steel, sure. Spring steel? Wound?”

“Ah-hah!” Tyler said. “You're already starting to figure out how to do it! Knew it!”

“That doesn't mean I think it's a good idea!” Nathan said. “The impact is . . .”

“We're not going to use big nukes,” Tyler said. “Not at first. Just a bit of a tap. Repeated. You know a good guy for pumped fusion bombs?”

“Sure,” Nathan said. “Dr. DeWolfe, same guy we used when we . . . Hey!”

“Seriously, Nathan,” Tyler said, waving his hand at the door. “This is a big project. You're going to need to get going. Oh, and we're going to have to accelerate production on the large vessels bypass and the heavy laser program.”

“Oh, that's all,” Nathan said. “Like two major projects aren't enough?”

“Nathan,” Tyler said, smiling thinly. “The Rangora have apparently conquered the Glatun. We wiped the floor with one of their task forces. They're not going to take that lying down. So the quicker you stop talking, the faster we can get this done.”

“It's going to cost a lot of money,” Nathan said.

“I'll get the money,” Tyler said. “I want the drives, the lasers and the bypass done in no more than three months. I don't care what it takes. Just get it done.”

“Right,” Nathan said, thoughtfully. “Right. Orion. From scratch. Rebuild the door system to take the delta. Springs the size of . . . Bigger than anything I can think of off hand. Increase the rate of installation of the internal laser systems. Large vessel bypass. Yeah, that's going to be a necessity. We're going to have to remove all the power systems and grav plates we've already installed on the door . . .”

“There you go,” Tyler said, pulling him to his feet and walking him to the door. “Now you're cooking with fuel oil. If you need anything, you've got my number . . .”

“There,” Tyler said, shutting the door and brushing his hands. “It's all about people. Speaking of people . . .”

“Butch,” Price said, looking in the welder's room. “We got a hell of a thing, here.”

“What's up?” Butch asked. The older welder hadn't been around a lot lately. Butch didn't have many other friends among the welders. Not really people to hang out with. He was feeling sort of put out.

“They're bringing in the damned Indies,” Price said.

“Well, there goes this job,” Butch said, angrily. “It's always like this with corporations.”

“Maybe,” Price said. “Purcell wants a meeting.”

“We don't have enough people,” Purcell said to the group of assembled welders, fitters and other EVA artisans. “We just got orders to speed up installation of the large vehicles bypass, the power center and we've got a new door project. That's on top of the work being done on Thermopylae. What's going to happen is each of you is going to be assigned a group from the salvage operation we're hiring on contract from E Systems. They're not going to know diddly except how to cut out stuff and it's going to take a lot of work. The upside is it's a bump in pay across the board. Probationary employees with sufficient experience to manage a team are going to be paid as team leaders. Team leaders that get bumped, which is pretty much all of you, are going to be paid as group leaders and so on. Pretty much everybody's going to up their pay by at least fifty percent.”

There was a muttering of agreement to that at least.

“They going to be staying?” one of the fitter leaders asked. “I don't see Apollo giving up cheap labor.”

“Everything, and I do mean everything, that I've seen says this is a temporary situation,” Purcell said.

“They'll stay,” a voice from the back said. “Some of them. The good ones. Or they'll be back. But that's not a bad thing.”

Butch turned around to see who said that and blanched.

“Crap . . .” Price muttered as Mr. Vernon walked through the group.

“Hey, guys,” Tyler said, stepping up on the podium Purcell was using. "Let me give you the skinny. First the part that nobody has really been talking about. We are, in case you hadn't noticed, at war. So when it was apparent that Apollo couldn't handle the salvage, and we need that salvage for some reasons I'll get to in a minute, we hired E Systems to work on it. And I know there was some muttering about that at the time. You guys make a nice chunk of change off salvage and you felt like you were getting cut out. I couldn't at the time, and can't now, think of a good way to make that up. This is one way, sort of.

"The point being, as you know, they hired a bunch of Third Worlders, showed them a suit and put them to work. And those poor, and I do mean poor in every meaning of the term, bastards have been dying like flies. I nearly pulled the contract they were taking so many hits. But I didn't. Cause we need the salvage. Why?

"Cause the ‘power center' isn't a power center. We've been pulling all the power systems off those wrecks and been installing the ones that aren't totally trashed. Sure. But we've also, as you might have noticed, been installing all their laser systems that are in good condition.

“That's the laser power of a whole fleet in one place. And we've been bringing in more as Granadica and Hephaestus can make them. We are trying to, as fast as we possibly can, duplicate the power of the SAPL internal to Troy. Because if we've got Thermopylae on one side with SAPL and the Troy on another with the same power, we're going to shred anything that comes through that gate.”

He looked around at the workers with a hard expression on his face.

“Any. Thing. So I had you guys working on installing the systems and those poor bastards from Indonesia and the Philippines and Pakistan and Ghana and wherever ripping it out. Cause you guys are trained and prepared to build and they didn't know anything but how to cut it out. And not much of that. We needed those power plants, we needed those lasers, and we needed those relays. And we are going to use them to teach the Rangora a lesson they won't soon forget!”

“Yeah!” Butch said.

“We have some updated intelligence,” Tyler said. "It's not solid but we're pretty sure that the Rangora are going to be coming back. Soon. With blood in their eye over the loss of their Aggressor fleet. They're not going to be pussying around this time. They're going to be sending their heavies: Assault Vectors.

“I know you guys have been watching the Rangora propaganda. And most of it's big lies and more lies. But it's hard to lie about how bad and nasty the AVs are. They're big, ten kilometers long, a kilometer wide. They're tough, shields tough enough to handle a swarm of Glatun missiles and armor twenty meters thick. They are an absolute bitch to kill. For earth to have any chance to survive, to keep us from being slaves to the Rangora, Troy and Thermopylae have to be able to dish out every living hell on those AVs. So I told the people that report to me that everything else takes a back seat. We are going to make Troy and the Therm into the toughest, nastiest, bad-assedest platforms in the galaxy.”

“Hell, yeah!” Price shouted.

“To get that way, fast enough,” Tyler said, “we needed people. So I told E Systems to send me their best. Only guys who have figured out how to survive in that screwed up environment. Guys who could do the job. You guys, who know how, are going to be doing and teaching as fast as you can. Because, people, we do not have much time. In no more than a few months we are going to have the Rangora here, determined to squash us once and for all. So you can bitch about it. Or you can work your asses off trying to save you homes, save your family, save earth. Oh, and get a bump in pay out of it,” he added with a smile.

“Take that,” one of the workmen said. “But . . . you said they're going to stay?”

“Like Mr. Purcell said,” Tyler said. “If some of them are good enough, if you guys recommend, we'll send the earthside to go through the full training course. You know how hard it is to find people that can do this job. You guys, and I'm not blowing smoke, are the cream of the crop. But if you mean am I going to say ‘Hey, we've got all this cheap labor, why keep paying top rate?' Hell, no. We're probably going to have to go back and redo half the work when we've got time. You guys are, sorry, pretty much irreplaceable which is why you get paid so damned much.”

“Not enough!” someone shouted from the back of the group.

“Gimme a break,” Tyler said, grinning. "Know anything that pays more that doesn't involve a master's degree? And you're worth every penny. When my bean counters start bitching I just say ‘You wanna do this work?' In case you weren't aware, the books of Apollo are open. You guys can go see what the pay rates are for the whole company. A probie makes more than most groundside managers short of executives. Most of you guys make more than Purcell.

"If I have my way, and I usually do, every one of you is, someday, going to be doing his job. Or owning your own space company. You don't have to worry about getting displaced by cheap labor. You only have to worry about how much any one person can do. Even when the war ends, there's going to be plenty of work. You guys are at the forefront of this entire industry. You own space.

"But one more thing about the Indies as you guys put it. They work slow but they also don't take breaks. It's their culture. Total productivity is close. Work with that. They also have a lousy, and I do mean lousy, approach to safety. That's not going to fly here. You guys are going to be responsible for their safety. And you know how much paperwork goes into any accidents. Unless you want to be spending unpaid time doing paperwork, make sure there aren't any. They don't have personal suits. So make sure their ship-suits are good before they hit death pressure. Your plants will handle translation but they don't have a clue about culture. Work with it.