Troy Rising 1 - Live Free or Die (52 page)

“That is more like it,” Tyler said. “How soon can you get started?”

“We're about done drilling. I figured you'd like it and I know how you hate to wait.”

***

“This had better work,” Tyler said.

“We're going to be learning by doing,” Nathan said. “Get used to it.”

“Yeah, but if we really mess up, we can't just fix it with duct tape,” Tyler pointed out.

The first thing that had to be done was get
Troy
moving. And once they did that, it was going to be apparent where it was going.

That
Troy
was a DoD project was bound to hit the news sooner or later. The line item had finally
made it into the budget. Questions were already getting asked on the 'white' side of
Congress, the part that had to vote on a multi-billion dollar military line item but
hadn't yet been briefed in. The fact that it had taken this long was surprising.

Moving it was the next problem. They'd stabilized the asteroid with pumped fusion bombs.
But even though they were very clean in yield, they'd been counted out for this evolution.
Let an enemy irradiate the surface of the battle station.

Instead, a poor, lonely, nickel-iron asteroid that was so miniscule it didn't even have a
name, had been chosen as the accelerant. After stabilizing the six hundred meter diameter
asteroid's rotation it had been fitted with the largest pumped fusion bomb ever created by
man, adjusted to point at the target, and then the bomb had been set off.

The man-made super-missile was about to hit the
Troy
at 90 kilometers per second and, with luck, send it on a course for its eventual home,
just outside the three hundred mile 'no heavy weapons' interdiction circle of the gate and
'up' in the plane of ecliptic.

“No,” Nathan said. “But the worst that's going to happen is
Troy
will be out of pocket. Then we'll just have to drop back to plan B.”

“Nuclear attitude adjustment,” Tyler said. “I'd prefer to avoid NAA.”

“Same here,” Nathan said. “But we have bigger problems. We've done the rotational
equations and we're probably going to have to use some nukes. With every tug in the fleet
pulling, which means shutting down every other project, it will only take seventeen years
to get the rotation out. And until we get the rotation stabilized, we can't really do
anything with it. We, especially, can't poke a hole in it. The atmo inside has to be under
pretty severe pressure. When we pop it, it's going to apply delta-v.”

“And if it's spinning...”

“The delta-v is going to be a bit like a balloon that you open up the spout,” Nathan said.
“Especially since when we burn through is going to be a
guess
.”

“I know a guy who says all these equations are easy,” Tyler said.

“He's either an idiot or a student,” Nathan said, watching the numbers from the asteroid's
trajectory. “This is looking too good.”

“Student,” Tyler said. “Steren's fiancŽe. Seems like a good kid. I'd, frankly, dreaded who
Steren was going to pick for a husband. Love her to death but... Dreaded. As it turns out,
another dread I could put aside.”

“Who's Steren,” Nathan asked.

“My daughter?” Tyler said. “I mean, really, we've been friends for how many years?”

“I knew you had kids,” Nathan said. “You never seemed to want to talk about them.
Congratulations on getting one of them married off.”

“I'm thinking about making him your assistant,” Tyler said.

“Oh, that's just what I need,” Nathan said, laughing. “A hot-shot... grad student?”

“Well, when he's got his masters.”

“A hot-shot with a masters that also happens to be the boss' son-in-law,” Nathan said.
“Toss me out an airlock without a suit why don't you?”

“As I said, he's a pretty good kid,” Tyler said. “And stabilization is going to be dead
easy.”

“Oh?” Nathan said. “Really?”

“Really,” Tyler said. “Melt a couple of big patches.
Big
patches. Then get some tugs and pull out the metal as far as you can. Try to keep it
straight.”

“Horns?” Nathan said. “I thought this was the
Troy
not the Viking raiders.”

“Archimedes, Nathan,” Tyler said, sighing.

“Levers,” the small planetary objects physicist said, slapping his forehead. “Damnit.”

“Why do I have to think of these things?”

“Do you know how hard it's going to be to do?” Nathan asked.

“No,” Tyler said. “Easier than anything else that comes to mind, though?”

“Yes,” Nathan said. “Easier than all our other thoughts. And the reason
you
have to think of things like this is that we worker bees are trying to figure out how to
get your visions to actually work. But... damn. Levers. Heh.”

“'Give me a lever big enough and I shall move the world,'” Tyler said. “Times like this I
wish I had a time machine. 'Hey, Archy, come on into the future. We made a lever big
enough.'”

“And... we have contact,” Nathan said.

On the screen the six hundred meter asteroid impacted the side of the massive metal ball.
Following the laws of physics, it then recoiled, bounced, off. It was like moving a
beachball by hitting it with a fast-ball. The difference being that in this case the
'beachball' was a thousand times more massive than the baseball. The 'fast-ball' bounced
off with a spalls of metal pinwheeling through space.

Troy
didn't
seem
to move at all.

“How's our trajectory?” Nathan asked.

“Pretty good,” the technician said. “About ninety-eight percent of nominal. We're going to
have to adjust carefully on arrival.”

“Do we know where the poor asteroid is going?” Tyler asked.

“Towards Jupiter orbit?” the tech said. “It's probably going to contact Ceres. We'd
already planned to stabilize it.”

“More nukes,” Tyler said, sighing. “Those things are expensive, you know.”

“And more at the other end,” Nathan said. “The good news is that it also decreased the
spin. Slightly. Hmmm... if we do the adjustments with a bit of English...”

“Space billiards.”

***

“Apollo Mining and Tyler Vernon are up to it again, grabbing headlines across the world
with a bank-shot in asteroid engineering! Here with us is Fox space analyst, Doctor James
Eager. Okay, Doctor Eager. They hit
Troy
with a nickel-iron cueball and now it's drifting into the spacelanes! What's up with
that?”

“Well, Nick, it's clear that all of our initial estimates of
Troy's
purpose were wrong. I'm not sure how big they were actually planning on
Troy
being, but it wasn't supposed to swell up to full size. And it wasn't, ever, supposed
to stay in the asteroid belt. Given the course they set it on there's only one target.”

“Target? Is it a weapon?”

“I'm not sure if you'd call it a weapon, per se. But the name now makes sense.
Troy
is headed for a near collision with the gate. It's pretty unlikely they mean to hit it.
They'll have to adjust its course at some point. But they're probably planning on parking
it by the gate. And that has only one meaning.”

“And the meaning is? Don't keep us in suspense, Doctor!”

“It's a battlestation, Nick. A massive fortress to protect the solar system from
hostile ships coming through the gate. And with kilometer and a half thick walls and the
SAPL... That's going to be one heck of a deterrent...”

***

“Levers,” Tyler said. “Heh.”

He'd gone ahead and gotten the ship even if Steren didn't want to get married in it.
Smaller than if it was designed for parties, it was based on the Emergency Rescue
Shuttles. He'd thought about getting a converted frigate but that just seemed too much
overkill. The differences between a stock ERS and the
Starfire
being... many. ERS didn't have one wall replaced with optical sapphire. And they weren't
nearly as comfortable.

He leaned back in the couch and watched with his naked eye as just about every tug in the
system lined up on the two horns that had been extruded from the
Troy
. The melt area had left two large dimples at the base which were going to take some
consideration. He didn't want two great big bulls eyes on the battlestation. But getting
the rotation out was the main problem at present. It wasn't like there wasn't lots of
nickel iron in the system. They could melt the levers back into the mass easily enough.
Take a while to cool, though.

Lining up on the levers was the tough part. The exterior of
Troy
was rotating at sixty three meters per second. The levers, though, were five kilometers
long, the longest Nathan thought they could make without seriously damaging the structure
of the battlestation. That meant they were moving at
ninety-seven
meters per second. That was only two hundred and some odd miles per hour, a crawl at
astronomical speeds. But it was
rotating
. It was like trying to catch the tire lugs on a snow tire. The tugs could barely keep up.
The only reason they could was that there weren't any puny humans on board. They were
pulling nearly forty Gs of delta-v as they maneuvered into position.

“Tugs in place,” Argus said. Tyler had taken one of the AIs he'd gotten from Gorku and
installed it as the overall manager of the SAPL and other Apollo operations in the solar
system. The Class II AI was necessary with the now thousands of clusters set up all over
the inner system. He also managed civilian space traffic. At the moment, though, all such
traffic was in holding pattern as the full resources of the AI were devoted to the job of
stabilizing
Troy
.

“Here goes nothing,” Nathan said over the circuit. “Initiate Delta One.”

When they were at full power you could
see
the gravity field from the tugs. They distorted starlight. Ninety-six tugs, each with the
same capacity as the original
Paws
, started to strain against the massive levers.

“Flexion,” Argus reported. “Reducing power.”

“Damnit,” Tyler said. That was what they were mainly worried about. Nickel-iron was not as
rigid as steel. The levers were tapered, a hundred meters at the end where the tugs were
attached and six hundred at the base. But it still wasn't sturdy enough for the full power.

“This is going to take some time,” Nathan said. “But it's working. We've already slowed
rotation three percent.”

“This will take about six hours,” Argus said. “The tugs will exhaust their onboard fuel
supplies before the evolution is finished. I will schedule rotations for refueling.”

“I've got calls to make,” Tyler muttered. At some point he
had
to find somebody to share things like this with. It was no fun by yourself. Maybe he
should go on tour like Steve.

“Oh, the hell with it.” He leaned back in the comfortable couch and watched the tugs work.

Before long he fell asleep.

“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 doorÑwhich started with burning through to release the gasesÑon 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.