Troy Rising 1 - Live Free or Die (43 page)

“The comet's about a hundred meters, right?” Mathilda said. “The hole is about fifty
thousand cubic meters. The comet is five hundred thousand cubic meters. Too big.”

“We had a hard time finding a smaller one,” Tyler said. “And this actually works better.
We won't be sucking in as much rock. And the total volume of ice we're shooting for is
more like ten thousand cubic meters. We're going to stuff the material we've collected on
top of it and seal the hole.”

“What's the point of that?” Steve asked, confused. “So you get a nickel iron asteroid with
a nice icy center.”

“Do
not
tell me that you're going to balloon it!” Mathilda said. “What was it?
Analog
in the 1950s? You're serious?”

“Balloon...” Steve said then blanched. “So... you stuff ice in the middle... Seal the
holes...”

“Heat it up,” Tyler said. “Which is going to need a lot of power. What was that number,
Nathan?”

“One point three time ten to the twelfth megajoules,” Dr. Bell said. “Think two hundred
and seventy megatons and it makes more sense. Just... doesn't have to be instantaneous.”

“My God,” Steve said, laughing. “You're kidding!”

“Got any idea how much power SAPL is pumping?” Tyler said. “We think it will take about
six months.
That's
how much. We'll also have to get it rotating in a ball of twine rotation to get the melt
even. When its melted, the ice in the middle boils into gas and the asteroid blows up like
a balloon. We're going to have to be careful to get it heated evenly and in a nice, neat
sphere before the melt is finished. That's going to be tough. But doable. We should end up
with a ball of nickel iron about ten kilometers across with walls that are about a
kilometer thick.”

“What's the point?” Steve said. “I can understand spinning Connie to pull of the metals,
but I don't get the point of this in mining.”

“Mining?” Tyler said, chuckling. “Who said anything about
mining
?”

***

“We're getting a lot of solids in there,” Nathan said. “And a lot of the volatiles are
being lost to sublimation. They keep blowing the comet off for that matter.”

“It'll either work or it won't,” Tyler said over the hypercom. He'd simply had to go back
to earth to stomp out some fires. He always tried to get subordinates who were smarter
than he was to handle his various affairs. Dr. Bell was a prime example. That didn't mean,
especially on the business side, that they could intelligently expand upon his
generalizations. That had recently become obvious with the space-components side. The
Finns were fine. It was the main office in Littleton that was having problems.

With the ongoing threat to the cities, it was getting easier to get quality help in small
cities. All you had to do was go to any headhunter and make a decent offer. Tyler had
started moving his offices to Littleton before the first orbital bombardment. Mostly it
was a matter of convenience. The now defunct, along with its command staff, Lair was near
Littleton. Having a place where there were some of 'his' people and good meeting
facilities meant he wasn't always having to drive, or more often take a chopper, to
Boston.

After New York got hit, he had people hammering on his doors.

But not all of them quite got his vision. In part because he was keeping very quiet about
a lot of it. But the requirement had been clear. 'Design living and working space for two
thousand people that was transportable in stages by space tugs and that could be assembled
on site, in microgravity and vacuum conditions, with minimal support. Think in terms of a
high quality portable space facility with internal gravity for a Marine Expeditionary
unit.'

The Finns had dived into the project with alacrity. But it took a lot of engineering
support which meant paying a lot of draftsmen and designers. And Tyler had insisted that
they be
good
draftsmen and designers. This thing really
was
going to have to go together like Legos.

But while he was off fiddling about in other projects, the bean counters had gotten
involved.

“Just keep stuffing,” Tyler said. “Sooner or later it's going to cool the interior. Then
you can weld it.”

“It's playing hob with our schedule,” Dr. Bell pointed out.

“If you think your personnel can keep their mouths shut, we'll rotate them out,” Tyler
said. “They've been out there for nearly a year.”

“I think most of my people want to stay to see this part finished,” Dr. Bell said. “My
wife isn't quite as enthusiastic but she's enjoying the bonuses.”

“If you've got people who can cut and run let them,” Tyler said. “This is getting too big
to keep totally quiet for much longer. I was hoping to wait until it was ballooned to go
public. But we may have to do it earlier.”

“What's the status with the VDA and Ruby?” Nathan asked. “None of this is going to work if
we don't have at least one and preferably both. Among other things, we're going to need
Ruby to do the rest of the project.”

“Not well,” Tyler admitted. “Bryan's running into some major snags. But we'll get them
worked out. It's just engineering. The theory's good.”

“Well, tell him to get a move on. Assuming no more problems with the stuffing, we're going
to be ready to move on to phase two in about a month. After that... well, we'll just have
to see if the models are accurate.”

“Yeah, models,” Tyler said, making a face. “And on that note, I've got a meeting. See ya.”

“Take care.”

Tyler cut the hypercom and just sat for a moment, collecting his thoughts.

“I would rather face a thousand deaths...”

***

“Gentlemen and ladies,” Tyler said. “Thank you for coming.”

Most of the people in the room either worked for him or were contractors that depended on
his business. The people from Lockheed Martin, BAE, Boeing, Honeywell and, especially, the
general currently commanding Space Command did not fall into that category.

“Everyone is reminded that this meeting and all information is proprietary,” Tyler said.
“Recently, my internal people have been asking a lot of questions regarding certain,
entirely internal, expenditures. Some projects that are absorbing an enormous amount of
Apollo Mining's resources, time and money. Some of them don't make any sense, such as the
design work being done by the able firm of STX.” Tyler gave the Finns a nod. “And then
there are the proprietary Ruby, VDA and Troy projects.”

“Troy is that asteroid you renamed,” the general said. “That's a mining project.”

“Which is costing more than the materials we're extracting,” Apollo's CFO said. “Mr.
Vernon, the thing to remember is that Apollo is now a publicly traded company. You don't
have to deal with the questions from the shareholders. I do.”

“The shareholders are common stock shareholders,” Tyler said, mildly. “They bought the
shares on the assumption that I would, as I usually do, make out like a bandit and they
will get in on it.
Troy
and the rest are the necessary... infrastructure costs for our next big capital infusion.
Which I'm planning on getting from Space Command.”

“How big?” the general said.

“Big enough it's going to distort the US government's budget,” Tyler replied. “Especially
if I charge you by the ton. Gentlemen, and ladies, behold...
Troy
.”

The picture on the plasma screen was of a ball of metal. It rotated through three hundred
and sixty degrees and then zoomed in. Small marks could be seen on the surface. As it
zoomed closer, it could be seen that they were ports of some sort. Suddenly a door was
revealed, a very large, round door. A small vessel, about one tenth the size of the door,
was near it. Zooming in, again, it became obvious the tiny little tinker-toy was the still
incomplete
Constitution
.

“
Troy
,” Tyler said, slowly and lovingly. “Two point two
trillion
of smoking nickel-iron destruction. Exterior diameter of ten kilometers. Interior diameter
of eight point five. Walls of refractory stainless steel a
kilometer
thick. Forget fullerene. The energy needed to
scratch Troy
exceeds that of the entire
Glatun
fleet. Room to hold not just two divisions of Marines, not just a fleet of landing craft,
not just the estimated
ten thousand
civilians and military personnel needed to man it but over
thirty Constitution-
class cruisers. All of those, including the cruisers, snuggled safely away in the very
walls that make up this massive battle station, protected from the sting of battle until
Troy
has worked its
doom
upon enemy fleets. And a door... well the door is going to take ten
Constitutions
to open and close. You don't want to know the mass of the door.”

“Oh... my God,” SpaceCom said, leaning back in his chair. “Oh... my...”

“Ja,”
the CEO of STX said, laughing and slapping the table. “Yes! Yes! This is
magnificent
! Now I
understand
the project! Yes!”

“You don't think
small
, do you?” the CEO of BAE snapped. He was clearly incensed to see their most advanced
design in battle craft ever upstaged. More like reduced to the value of a handful of peas.

“I think Cheops was insufficiently ambitious,” Tyler said, shrugging.

That produced a series of giggles and guffaws as the sheer enormous, mind-boggling size of
the space station sank in. The interior would be nearly four miles across. It wasn't just
huge
, it wasn't just
enormous
, it was
giganormous
. The now flattened Great Pyramid would
disappear
into the interior of
Troy
. It would be a minor little blip on the interior walls. A
pimple
on the exterior.

“The
Constitutions
have a very important job. To say that
Troy
will not be particularly
mobile
is the understatement of the millennia. Moving it will require pumped fusion bombs. For
anything that requires maneuvering, you'll have to have ships. And, at least initially,
the weapons of
Troy
will not be internal.”

“That I don't get,” the general said.

“We simply cannot make something as powerful as SAPL,” Tyler said, shrugging. "Not as a
stand-alone system. We can't even make laser emitters as strong as the Horvath. Yet. And
appropriate lasers for
Troy
...
secondary
weapons for
Troy
would be
main
gun weapons on Glatun dreadnoughts.

"
Troy
is, essentially, a focus and aiming point for SAPL. It will draw the power from SAPL and
be the final focus engine while shielding, visually, the critical array components from an
attacking enemy.

“We have snags to overcome. To get the
full
power of SAPL, and it still won't be full power because, well, I do keep making those
damned mirrors, don't I, we need some equipment that we're still designing. A mirror array
that can concentrate twenty to fifty, probably more like twenty, medium power VSA clusters
and a collimeter for managing it within the walls. Essentially
twelve hundred
terawatts of power. The VSA beams that shredded the Horvath are, by comparison, one
hundred and forty. So the near order of ten times as much power. That will penetrate even
Glatun
shields. We call it the Variable Dialing Array or VDA.”

“The Glatun aren't a threat,” the BAE representative said.

“And I don't perceive them ever
being
a threat,” Tyler said. “The Horvath and Rangora are getting friendlier with each other
every day. One can see the Rangora eventually 'loaning' the Horvath some of their older
fleet units.”

“Which we've been looking at,” SpaceCom said, nodding. “And other issues. Yes, I see what
you mean by distorting our budget.”

“You'd be surprised,” Tyler said. “I'm not going to sell it to you by the ton. Or
nobody
could afford it. During the process of making it I'm going to try to extract
some
useful metals but the truth is the walls will still have veins of precious metals in them.
And while I've been working with the Finns on internal systems, you're going to have to
handle most of the... fiddly bits yourself.”

“Fiddly bits?” the BAE rep said.

“Crew quarters for thousands, things like that,” Tyler said. “I see it as an ongoing
project, frankly. I can, will, set it up to take the SAPL power and I'll make sure there's
plenty of room for consumable storage. When you get it, it will be marginally capable of
fighting. Oh, and I understand we now have a breacher heavy missile system. I've been
taking a look at magazine storage for them.
Troy
should be able to hold, and rapid fire, about two hundred
thousand
.”

“My God,” the Boeing rep said. “We can't produce that many in a hundred years!”

“Yeah, it'll need its own fabbers,” Tyler said. “Lots of fabbers. Beyond that, it's going
to be up to other corporations to handle. All I'm really giving you is the shell.”

“We can work with that,” the general said, nodding.

“This reduces the
Constitutions
too...”

“I like the
Constitutions
,” Tyler said, placatingly. “I love the
Constitutions
. But, face it, we don't have the muscle or the tech or the infrastructure to make the
sort of fleet we need to hold this system any time soon. The
Troy
is not sophisticated, even by our standards. It's just
massive
and practically invulnerable. We don't have quality. But quantity is a quality of its own.
Troy
is an act of desperation as much as anything. With it, we can at least hold the system.
Nothing's going to live to get past
Troy
once it is even partially operational.”

“That's clear,” SpacCom said, nodding. “If it can pump a thousand terawatts... what is
that? An exawatt? If it can pump a thousand terawatts, with that thick of armor... The
missiles will be sort of like nuts in the brownie. I'd rather have tanks, but given that
the approach is through the gate... a super-mongous Maginot fortress works.”

“And now you know why I've been spending so much money,” Tyler said, nodding to his CFO.
“But you still don't get to explain it to the shareholders.”