Troy Rising 1 - Live Free or Die (42 page)

“Yeah,” Tyler said, taking a sip and musing. “But if it's reducing, you're going to have
to convert it to an oxy-nitrogen atmo.”

A reducing atmosphere was the original atmosphere of earth, consisting of a, to humans,
toxic mixture of ammonia, hydrogen sulfide and carbon dioxide.

In earth's early history, microorganisms, starting with archaeobacter, had slowly
converted the atmosphere, 'eating' the ammonia and hydrogen sulfide for fuel. Archeobacter
were generally now only found deep in the earth or, notably, around undersea volcanic
vents where they were the basis of a deep ocean food web.

As those reduced, blue-green algae had arisen and converted the carbon dioxide to fixed
carbon and oxygen. Remnants of that period could still be found in banded iron formations.
As the oxygen rose in the atmosphere, surface iron, which had stayed in a more or less
pure state, locked up the oxygen in what was essentially rust, forming the red bands in
banded iron. With the oxygen locked up, more iron could deposit. Then, oxygen levels built
up and it got locked up again. And so on an so forth until all the iron was converted and
oxygen could start to seriously build. Then came plants and animals and the biosphere as
it currently stood.

“You're going to lose some total mass to absorbed material. Still... Steve, that is great
news!”

“Also has a big rubble belt,” Steve said. “And the last part is the most interesting. The
gas giant has a
really
odd atmo. Not only is it unusually high in He3, at the level where there's a nearly earth
normal gravity, about point seven, the atmosphere is oxy-nitrogen.”

“You're kidding,” Tyler said, his eyes wide. “
Not
reducing?”

Free oxygen tended to bond to just about anything, which meant that reducing atmospheres,
with all the free oxygen bound up, were bound to be common. To have an oxy-nitrogen
atmosphere like the earth you practically
had
to have something keeping it that way. On earth, that was called 'plants.'

“Nope,” Steve said. “Damned near earth normal. Most of the reducing gases are either
higher or lower so it might be a sorting thing. There may be some life in the atmosphere,
microbiology at best, that's converting them but we're not sure. Higher percentage of
noble gases, but completely breathable. It's damned odd. But I figured you could probably
use it to help terraform.”

“That, yes,” Tyler said, thoughtfully. “But this is only one gate jump away, right?”

“Yeah,” Steve said.

“And on the back side of us from our enemies,” Tyler said, pursing our lips.

“Of which we haven't seen hide nor hair since just before we left.”

The Horvath had not taken the loss of their cruiser lightly. Shortly after the battle,
they had sent four
more
cruisers through the gate with the intention of teaching earth a permanent lesson.

Again, they had launched missiles from long range. And they had, unfortunately, been
nearly as impossible to stop as the first barrage. A ring of BDA mirrors around earth had
intercepted about half but the other half got through. Rome, Madrid, New Delhi, the list
was long. The difference was that most governments had set up solid evacuation plans and
even drilled on them. And as many people as could manage were moving out of cities. It was
still impossible to entirely do without them, but they were... dwindling.

The death toll had still been staggering. And most of humanity had buried its dead,
shrugged it off, picked up and continued on.

The Horvath ships managed to fire their barrage. And they had started hitting the VLA
nearly as fast.

There were seven VSA clusters working on Connie and other targets. They'd
all
turned on the Horvath ships as fast as they could be retargeted.

“If the Horvath would quit bombing our cities, I could almost thank them for coming
through,” Tyler said. “We've gotten nearly sixty tons of prime grav plates off of them.
Not to mention some surviving power plants and laser emitters. For a while there, I was
doing less mining than salvage. Most of that is going into the
Constitution
.”

Earth's first heavy cruiser had been under construction for nearly a year. It had,
fortunately,
not
been targeted by the Horvath. It was larger and more powerful, potentially, than a Horvath
cruiser. Unfortunately, BAE was saying it was going to take six more years to complete.

There was still no declaration of war with the Horvath. There had been, in fact, a
declared cease fire. Which was when the Horvath ships came through. The Horvath didn't
seem to
get
the concept of keeping a negotiated peace. Might made right, period.

The estimates as of when Steve left were that the only reason they weren't sending more
ships through was that they only had
seven
cruisers.

Earth had destroyed five.

“What happened to the prisoners?” Steve asked.

Some of the Horvath ships had managed to get crew off before being slagged. Some.

“We turned them over to the Glatun for repatriation,” Tyler said, shrugging. “It wasn't
like we could feed them.”

“We have got to secure the gate better,” Steve said, his face tight. “We can't keep
getting bombarded over and over again.”

“Yeah,” Tyler said, enigmatically. “Would be nice. Hey, have you seen what we did with
Connie?”

“I haven't seen much news lately,” Steve said. “So... no.”

“Check this out,” Tyler said, turning on a plasma screen.

The view was of a disk spinning in space. Steve tilted his head to the side, trying to get
some scale. Then he realized the nearly microscopic dots moving near its face were
Paws
.

“Holy hell,” he said, his eyes wide.

“We got it into a stable spin by detonating some clean pumped fusion bombs on the
surface,” Tyler said, excitedly. “Then we heated it back up. It's been separating pretty
much the whole time you've been gone. At this point, it's just a matter of how fast we can
pull stuff off. I've mostly farmed it out to the Glatun. There's a Limaror smelter with
sixty tugs working on it full time. We're not getting much heavy metals, yet. We're mostly
getting aluminum, copper and tin. About six hundred
tons a minute
.”

“I see you can afford the Centennial,” Steve said, holding up his nearly empty snifter.

“Hell, I can afford to buy Martel,” Tyler said, topping up his glass. “And I'm spending it
nearly as fast as I make it. There are over two thousand people working in space full time
at this point, ninety percent for me. And despite joking about working for low pay,
they're not. We're still having to buy ships from the Glatun and the Rangora. But I have
high hopes. Boeing's managed to improve their shuttles already. I'm pretty sure they're to
the point of being able to make at least small ships. About thirty percent of our lift is
earth built shuttles. I'm hoping to get that to seventy percent by the end of the year.”

“You're starting to sound like the Evil Overlord again,” Steve warned. “
I
hope?”

“I know,” Tyler said, shrugging. “But... people keep talking about 'the recovery.'
What
recovery? We're not going to get back the people we lost. We're not going to get back the
treasures we lost. I mean, we lost the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian, the
British Museum, the Forbidden Palace and the Louvre in one
day
. Then we lost the Taj Mahal. The biggest remaining stash of art treasures in the world is
in my really top-secret lair. And it's
staying
there. We're not going to recover that. We're not going to recover the people. That's the
past. Let's talk about the
future
!”

“Which is?” Steve asked.

“Well,” Tyler said, shrugging. “Sounds like we've got a planet we can terraform. And...
other stuff.”

“You're being mysterious again,” Steve said.

“Confidential,” Tyler said. “Really. It's very tightly held. And I'm trying to keep it
that way. Hey, we're starting on a new mining project.”

“You can't extract everything from
Connie
,” Steve said, shaking his head. “And you're starting a
new one
?”

“These things take a while to heat,” Tyler said, shrugging. “Especially this one. It's a
six kilometer asteroid in the belt.”

“That's going to take some power,” Steve said.

“We're trying a slightly different take,” Tyler said. “Turns out there's some
differentiation to them. So we stabilized this one and we're doing a laser drill to the
interior.”

“You're drilling into the interior of a six kilometer diameter asteroid?” Steve said,
blinking. “You really
are
thinking big. What are you going to do, blow it up?”

“Nah,” Tyler said. “There's better stuff to do with it.”

“Dinner is served,” Dr. Chu said, entering the room followed by a group of waiters. “Mind
if I join you? Since I fixed it?”

“Conrad!” Steve said. “I'm glad to see you survived.”

“Many friends did not,” Dr. Chu said, picking up the bottle and pouring himself a drink.
“Absent companions.”

“Absent companions,” Tyler and Steve said.

“To the future,” Steve said.

“I'll drink to that,” Tyler replied. “To a better, brighter,
bigger
future.”

“I'm doing this,” Dr. Nathan Bell said. The huge 'small planetary object' specialist was
handling the drilling project on
Troy
. “I'm fully involved in the project. I'm working the problems, and they haven't been
small.
Nothing
about this has been small. And I think you're insane.”

“How's the drill rig working?” Tyler asked.

The 'drill rig' was a complex of mirrors physically connected to asteroid 3159. The main
belt asteroid was an eight kilometer long, five kilometer wide, mass of virtually solid
nickel iron. Sixteen BDA mirrors were pointing 'out' to a VSA perched over the drill point
on thin nickel-iron rods. The BDA mirrors captured a series of beams off the SAPL to
supply sixty-four megawatts of power to the drill beam. The VSA, since the drilling was
taking place in shadow, could easily manage the heat waste heat of a mere sixty-four
megawatts.

Clearing the drill hole had been a problem at first. A good bit of the nickel iron was
heated to vaporization by the beam but most of it just sort of slumped out of the hole. A
tug had been collecting it, and setting it aside, for the last two months. There was now a
minor planetary body circling the minor planetary body.

Also circling the minor planetary body was a small, leased, freighter. It had been
refitted to function as a construction site management ship. It wasn't the most
comfortable place in the system but Tyler had done his best. And it had a good cook and
great food. It had to have something going for it, the crew had been informed they were
staying aboard until they were done with the first phase.

Naturally, it had been renamed
Trojan Horse
.

“Pretty well, actually,” Nathan said. “The biggest problem has been routing it out.”

One of the problems was that they needed a
big
hole for the overall plan. So the beam had to continuously track around the hole, opening
it up.

“We're only about two hundred meters down,” Dr. Bell said. “Which, given what we're
working with, is amazing. And the rate has increased as we've been figuring out the
problems. We should get to the center on schedule in four months.”

“I hate waiting,” Tyler said.

“Tyler, this project is insanely huge,” Dr. Bell said. “And I don't think that most of the
steps are going to work nearly as well as we've planned. Do you know how
hard
it is to steer a
comet
?”

“It's a big ball of ice,” Tyler said. “Use ice hooks?”

“We got the bombs attached,” Nathan said, sighing. “We adjusted the course. Sort of. It's,
sort of, headed this way. Should arrive in three months. At that point we, somehow, have
to get a hundred meter wide ball of ice to stop
exactly
where we want it. Too far away and we're going to be transferring ice for the next decade.
Too close is when it hits the array. This thing is massy enough it has a noticeable
gravitational field. If the comet stops
next
to it, we're going to have an icy coating to work with. But even if we get it to the
precise spot we want, we still have to, somehow, shove it down that little bitty hole and
to the center. In space! And unless you want us to wait until this thing cools, we're
going to be dealing with vaporizing ice as we're doing the stuffing!”

“Ice hooks,” Tyler said, shrugging. “We're going to do it. We'll figure it out.”

“What's this 'we', short man?” Nathan said, chuckling. “You seriously have a Napoleon
complex, don't you? Again, I'm fully involved in this project. Everybody thinks it's cool
as hell. Also
insane
as hell.”

“The SAPL is vulnerable,” Tyler said. “We can't depend on it being able to protect us
against a cunning enough enemy. We are
going
to secure the solar system. And
Troy
is the first step.”

“So how are we going to stuff the comet in the hole?” Dr. Bell said.

“Wrong way around,” Tyler said. “Put a tractor system at the bottom. Then
pull
the comet in. Even if it vaporizes, you're still pulling the material in.”

“We're going to lose the tractor system,” Nathan said. “But that... might just work.”

“See?” Tyler said. “Ice hooks.”

***

“I thought you were mining this,” Steve said, looking at the comet parked next to the
asteroid. “What's with the comet? Mining for volatiles?”

“Sort of,” Tyler said, grinning. He admitted he couldn't keep a secret worth a damn. But
it was Steve. And Mathilda. He really liked both of them and if he could find a girl half
as pretty, and smart, as Mathilda he thought he might just give marriage a shot again.
“And we're selling some of the stuff we've melted out. Not all, but enough to pay for the
project. Fortunately.”

“We've drilled out a five meter wide, two and a half kilometer deep, hole in the
asteroid,” Dr. Bell said. “We've just put a self-powered tractor system at the bottom of
the hole. Now we're going to suck the comet into the hole.”