SpaceCorp (14 page)

“What about armor?” Senator Pitstick asked. “The president’s limo is supposed to have some new kinda weird armor.”

“We have depleted uranium bullets. They’ll go through both sides of his ‘weird armor’ like a hot knife through butter. Problem is unless it hits the target on the way through, it just ends up making a pair a holes and nothing else. If the armor ain’t that weird or we can set up close, we got a frangible round what punches through with a tungsten core that busts up into a bunch fragments and kills everybody inside. But we gotta know more about that armor. Otherwise we need to pick him off between the building and the car. For that, we go back to the depleted uranium—it’s actually the fastest round at 3700 feet per second. You still want to be close though. A man can do a lot of jerking around in a second and a half—that’s how long it’d take to travel a mile. And I don’t have to tell you, the closer the weapon stations are, the tighter the security will be.”

Senator Pitstick paused. “Okay, we’ll get somebody on it.”

“How you gonna get him to come out of his hole?” Senator Pike asked.

“The State of the Union speech,” Senator Pitstick said. “I’ll convince him the people need to see him in person. Country’s going to wrack and ruin. People need leadership they can see, hear, a leader in the flesh. I’ll slather him with warm Lincolnian goo—give him a hard-on about his face up on Mt. Rushmore. We’ll have him deliver it in broad daylight, from the West Steps of the Capitol Building where all can see him standing in plain view behind that wall of bullet proof glass.”

“You think that’ll bring that half-pint pussy out of his hole?” Senator Kershaw asked.

“I’ll tell him I’m gonna be up there with him. My family too,” Senator Pitstick said.

“You’re gonna put your family at risk?” Senator Kershaw said.

“Course not! The president will be history long before he gets to the Capitol Building. He’ll get tapped leaving the White House as he’s getting into that big limo he rides in. Once I get confirmation that your boys have taken him out, I’ll give an impromptu speech in place of the president’s state of the union address. Make it sound like an announcement about the untimely demise of our beloved head of state. Then I’ll wrap it up saying say these horrible assassinations have gone on long enough and the only way to stop them is to return the right to vote to the people.”

“Who we gonna run?” Senator Kershaw asked.

“Don’t matter,” Senator Pitstick said. “While both parties are strategizing about the election, the Iranians are gonna shoot down the space station and I... we... will declare martial law and disband the Federal Government citing its failure to support and defend the Constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic. That shouldn’t be hard to sell to a nation of sheep seeing as how the president has hardly seen the light of day for the last 24 years.”

“And with no Federal Government, we can secede and not look like the bad guys,” Senator Kershaw said. “It’ll be Fort Sumter all over again only without the cannons! That could work!”

“Okay, we have a plan,” Senator Pitstick said. “This meeting is hereby closed. To Dixie!”

“To Promised Land!” Senator Young said.

“To a country of our own!” chorused all the attendees.

C
HAPTER
T
EN

December 2070

SCS Pelican

Like her namesake, the
SCS Pelican
was not pretty. In the entire SpaceCorp fleet she was the only station with the SCS designation, the ‘C’ was for construction. She had no spokes, hence no central hub. All maneuvering and station-keeping thrusters were mounted in the torus ring. At two kilometers in diameter, she was twice as wide as the rest of the stations, enough to get away with rotating slightly under one RPM to achieve a full g of gravity on her outer decks. The cross section of the ring was a rectangular 300 meters radial thickness by 500 meters longitudinal thickness giving her the appearance of a giant washer. A kilometer-sized space station could fit inside her with 200 meters clearance all around. Her outer walls were a full hundred meters thick, aluminum honeycomb filled with self-sealing, fire-retardant rubberized foam. She was permanently stationed in a 35° inclination orbit that was timed to pass daily over the Vandenberg rendezvous point 320 kilometers west of the launch facility at Rogers Dry Lake Bed.

The old girl had taken quite a beating from space debris over the years, so much so that she’d added another fifty percent to her mass, some of it from repairs, the rest of it the hard way. Over time, she’d had to expand her water ballast tanks to maintain dynamic stability with the additional mass from absorbed debris that was too hard to dig out of the outer walls. But the upside of all that ugliness was that in twenty years of space operations the old girl had completely cleared her orbit of debris... well, mostly.

Her hull shielded the 1400-meter interior construction yard, big enough to assemble an entire standard sized space station. It was laced with topside and bottom side construction cables that spanned the ring and supported ‘mules’ that hauled various pieces into place for assembly. Stations under construction rotated with the
Pelican
, hence dynamic stability had to be planned into the assembly process. The construction yard was shrouded top and bottom with nanocellulose ‘chicken wire,’ not to keep debris from getting in but to keep construction materials from getting out and exacerbating the space debris problem.

Like the other stations, the
Pelican
was divided into four quads. Quad IV was the hangar deck where incoming spacecraft carrying parts and supplies docked with the station. Quad I was the crew’s quarters, the crew consisting of mostly engineers who designed and programmed assembly robots, various numerical control machinists, able spacemen, and a small contingent of officers. Quads II and III were for parts manufacturing and assembly, and materials storage. When a part was ready to be added to the main structure of a new space station, it was pushed into the construction yard where it was attached to overhead mules that towed it into position where assembly robots held it fast until it could be bolted or welded into place. 

Docking with the hangar deck was a tricky maneuver that required the incoming spacecraft to match angular velocity with the rotating torus ring. When the spacecraft got close, robotic monkey’s fists were cast down to the station where they were grabbed by robotic longshoremen. The longshoremen hauled in the lines slowly, gradually closing the separation until the spacecraft made contact with the elevator deck and could be safely moored to cleats. Once secured to the cleats, the elevator withdrew into the hull where the spacecraft could be towed out of the way to make room for the next incoming craft. While all this was going on, water ballast was pumped to different tanks to maintain dynamic stability. Once inside the hull, stanchions connected the spacecraft to the hangar area making her a fixed part of the station.

After a space station was completed—usually a three to four-year affair—the overhead cables and chicken wire were cleared out of the way and the new station was gently maneuvered into a formation orbit with the
Pelican
. A set of eight thrusters were temporarily attached to the central hub alongside the permanent orbit-keeping ion drives. The thrusters’ job was to maneuver the new space station into its permanent orbit. Four of the thrusters were for acceleration and pointed down. The other four were for deceleration and pointed up. Orbit changes were a slow and gentle process—too much acceleration could buckle the spaceframe. LEO changes usually involved inclination changes if the station was destined to operate in a more equatorial or more polar orbit rather than its 35° construction orbit. Plus there were phasing maneuvers and altitude changes. All in all, a transfer to a new LEO could take weeks.

A bit more than half of SpaceCorp’s business took place in LEO—anywhere from 300 kilometers where most of the atmospheric drag let up, out to about 1000 kilometers where the inner Van Allen radiation belt began. Most of the rest of its business was in Geostationary Orbit, or GEO, at about 36,000 kilometers above the equator for communications and some weather monitoring. Getting to GEO meant passing through the entire inner Van Allen which let up at 6,000 kilometers and the worst of the outer Van Allen radiation belts which let up at 19,000 kilometers. Between the radiation belts—from 6,000 kilometers out to about 13,000 kilometers—there was not a lot of commercial activity. GEO orbit transfers took months—far longer than a human crew could afford to be exposed to all that radiation. Hence, they were done robotically and the crew joined the station via fast transfer rocket once the station transfer was complete. 

Just beyond the outer Van Allen belt at 20,000 kilometers was a layer of 24 unmanned GPS satellites, orbiting in six planes with four satellites each. Each orbital plane was inclined off the equatorial plane by 55 degrees. And to keep them from colliding with one another, each was separated from his neighbor by 60 degrees. Today SpaceCorp operated the GPS system under contract to the U. S. Air Force. Even after SpaceCorp took over their operation, the satellites remained unmanned, there not being much debris at that altitude. The Air Force would likely continue ownership of the equipment for the foreseeable future. If SpaceCorp assumed ownership, the first thing they would do was charge a subscriber fee—not a popular idea among the ubiquitous constituency of the GPS market. GPS still assumed a significant defense role and the ability to turn off the signal was considered a strategic capability best kept at the Pentagon.

For twenty-three years—enough for six shiny aluminum-hulled space stations—this had been the routine on the
Pelican
. For twenty-three years every one of her crew had known his job and excelled at it. Now, Monica Carvalho was the only one of an 1100-person crew who knew what they were doing. That would have been all right except that today she seemed to also be the only one who believed the new space station construction technique could work, and work in less than a third of the time it took to build a space station the old fashioned way.

“You’re saying we’re supposed to cut a hole in the top-side deck to let sunlight hit a bunch of algae tanks?” The First Watch Chief Engineer was a stocky, bull-necked fellow whom everyone called Smitty. No title—hadn’t needed one for years—just ‘Smitty.’ He looked like he’d be more at home in a longshoreman’s meeting hall than supervising a watch team in the intricacies of constructing a space station. Nobody could stare him down, yet that is what Monica was trying to do right now.

“That’s right, Smitty. The algae need sunlight.”

“And are the algae gonna make juice for the station? Cause we’re gonna have to get rid of a lot solar panels if I’m reading your drawings right, missy.”

“Monica. Call me Monica or Carvalho, but I’m not your ‘missy.’” Monica leaned her head down and stared at the shorter man through the tops of her eyes, keeping the rest of her expression flat and calm. It was like the face-off at the beginning of a mixed martial arts bout. She had a good face-off expression… at least in the ring.

Smitty glared back for several seconds before answering. “Okay…
Carvalho
… where do I get my juice without solar panels?” He leered at her as he said Carvalho.

“Nukes,” Monica said. “Read your spec sheet. No more solar panels. Too fragile anyway, the way the debris clouds have been thickening out here.”

“Bull shit!” Smitty said. “We’ve all but cleared out the debris from our orbit!”

“The big stuff. Not the marble-sized stuff. Look at the pics of your solar panels. They’re in constant need of replacement and they don’t come cheap these days.”

“What, and the clear panels that let the sunlight through to feed your slime farm is gonna be tougher?”

“And cheaper and able to be manufactured right up here instead of on the ground and shipped up.”

“What about the fuel for these nukes?” Smitty asked. “You gonna tell me that stuff is cheap?”

“Actually, it is. We just made a deal with the Feds.”

Smitty guffawed. “The Feds! Like we’re supposed to trust that bunch of thieves!”

“We already have a pretty good supply of uranium fuel rods in underground storage at Rogers Lake.”

“And the radiation?”

“What about it?” Monica asked.

“Everybody up here is goosey as hell about blowing through their rem limits. Becoming a groundie is not a popular retirement option.”

“They’ll be stored in an armored pod that trails the
Pelican
about ten kilometers back. When you need a fuel rod, a robot goes and fetches one.”

“So you’re planning to have nuclear fuel on the Pelican?”

“That’s right. It’s the way of the fut—”

“Forget it, missy! My crew ain’t buyin’ into no fuckin’ express ticket to earth side.”

“But there’s no other—”

“Piss off, missy!” With that, Smitty stalked out of the room.

So much for the way of the future.

Bill Traynor had been leader of First Watch for four years and had been observing the conversation between Smitty and Monica.

Monica looked at him. “Well?”

“Well what?”

“What am I supposed to do with Smitty? He’s
your
Chief Engineer.”

“Maybe come up with something besides nukes? I’m not real enthused about early retirement either.”

“We can’t afford solar panels anymore—not with the damage rate.”

“Maybe we should make them up here?” Bill asked.

“We still need the algae to make nanocellulose,” Monica said.

“We’re not farmers, Monica. We’re space station engineers and construction workers. Maybe you should have the groundie farmers make the nanocellulose and then fly it up.”

“We can’t make a change like that without blowing our whole schedule!”

“Hmm… sounds like you have a problem.” Bill got up from the picnic bench table where he had been nursing his coffee. He leaned down close to Monica’s face. “Good luck with that…
missy
.”