The Road to the Stars - Chapter EIGHT
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Anyways, enough blather. Time for the good stuff!
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Chapter Eight
The atmosphere remained tense after Lynch was
removed. Nobody spoke for long, long minutes, until the silence was finally
broken by Hartman.
“How do you know about Mr. O’Quinn’s Second
Fleet idea?” she finally said.
Before Mac could say anything, Cass
intervened. “I believe that the industry term is proprietary information,
Madame Director.”
“Is that the way we’re going to play now? All
formalities? And I thought we were getting along so well.”
Kendra sighed. “We were, until that jackass
decided to go off the rails again. Why did you bring him, again?”
Hartman lifted one shoulder in half a shrug.
“He was in the initial meeting, and he is the Director of Protective Services.
If we’re going to talk about active, armed resistance to the Union then he
seemed to be a logical inclusion.” She looked directly at Cass, then Kendra in
turn. “Dr. Cassidy, Ms. Cassidy. I apologize for my error.”
A glance between them was enough.
“Accepted,” said Cass, far more lightly than
her previous tone. “And please, if we’re going to get anywhere in this
discussion, I’m Cass. She’s Kendra. Doing the whole “Doctor Cassidy” and “Ms.
Cassidy” is way too formal, not to mention confusing.”
“Then, please, call me Mya. Mr. O’Quinn is
Theodore.”
“People usually call me Ted,” corrected O’Quinn.
“Not the Director, of course.” That actually evoked a mild laugh.
“Fine. What say we start over, one last time?”
Cass suggested.
“With more wine,” amended Kendra. “I think
wine will help.”
Wine was distributed and the conversation
started again.
“Mya, you told us that you wanted to get the
Union off our backs and get the UE into space, right?” Cass looked for
confirmation.
“That’s right.”
“Why? And don’t go all noble on me. No
politician does anything for purely noble reasons. What’s behind this push?”
“I’ll answer that,” said O’Quinn. “In twenty
years, the UE will have starved to death unless we can use our own minerals to
improve conditions for our people.”
“Is that just the UE, or is it the whole
world? Not to be crass, or cold, but doomsayers have been predicting a
Malthusian disaster since, well, since Malthus!” Kendra gestured around her. “Sonora’s
in pretty good shape, for example.”
“Oh, there are pockets which will be less
impacted,” agreed O’Quinn. “But nowhere is immune. There simply aren’t enough
rare earth metals being mined to supply what the UE needs plus satisfy the
demands of the Accords.”
“And the demands are increasing,” added
Hartman. “We can barely keep up as is.”
Kendra nodded. “And since the Union has the
upper hand, no pun intended, they’re aware of everything you try.”
“Exactly.”
“Can’t the UE break the Accords? The
Amendment, at least?” Cass looked up from her notes. “That would solve the
problem, right?”
“We can break them, but then they drop rocks
on us,” said Hartman. “I’m not willing to sacrifice any innocents.”
“But they have plenty of rare-earth metals!” insisted
Mac. “It’s all over their systems, they’re trading in hundreds of kilos a week,
just about anything you want to name, it’s being mined out of the asteroids
mostly, their system security is really shoddy, it’s not even a single system,
they might call themselves the Solarian Union but there’s no single
organization, it’s just a bunch of colonies that more or less get along, or
more or less go along with Artemis, and the only thing they all agree on is
that they want the UE to keep shipping up ore, and like I said they have kilos
and kilos of the stuff!”
“Can you share that with Mya? Mya, would that
allow the UE to get out of the Amendments?”
Mac nodded, fingers working, while Hartman
spoke. “We’ve had that information for years, regularly updated. As your
specialist just said, their security is truly terrible. It still isn’t enough.”
“Why the frak not?” said Kendra.
“Because they can drop rocks on the UE.” Cass
was nodding sadly as she said it. “While they might have a legal right to break
the Amendment, that doesn’t do any good if the Union can force the issue.”
Hartman was nodding. “We have no military
worth speaking of. Oh, there’s Lynch’s Protective forces, but they’re little
more than a glorified police force. There’s no air or sea mobility worth
discussing. The craft which is carrying our support?” She nodded at Stone. “You
were right, by the way, it’s a Falcon transport. We had to rent it from the
Republic of Texas for the duration. We don’t have any of our own.”
“In other words, you can’t project the force
you have,” said Stone.
“Yes, exactly.”
“Ted, you had talked about refitting the
Second Fleet. You totally stole that idea from Star Blazers, didn’t you?”
“Wha –”
“Hello? Mya, you did a background check on
me. What was my hobby before I got into the Diana Project?”
Mya looked inward. “Twentieth, early twenty-first
century pop culture.”
“Television and movies – sensies. Once we
heard your meeting, and yeah, we heard it all, I did some digging. Wasn’t hard.
So you want to turn Second Fleet into a bunch of Argos. How? Did you work the
details out?”
O’Quinn looked to Hartman for permission
before speaking. “We’ll have to do this in stages. First, evaluate the wrecks
for usability.”
“Part of that is hull size,” added Hartman. “Kendra,
how big is your warp drive?”
Now it was Kendra’s turn to look surprised.
Hartman looked just a bit smug. “Come now. We
have our own sources of intel. Besides, you haven’t exactly been quiet about
your projects.”
“Um. No, I guess not. The warp drive itself
is fairly compact. Maybe fits in an area two meters wide, five meters long,
three meters high.”
O’Quinn was enthusiastic. “That’s great!
Almost any hull could take a warp drive then!”
Kendra looked regretful. “No, you really couldn’t.
First there’s the radiation that the drive puts out. It’s easy enough to
shield, for values of easy. Nothing exotic, or complicated. But it takes space.
Then there’s the system that actually manipulates the warp field, and that
takes up way more space. Finally, you have to consider that creating a warp
field isn’t cheap, in terms of energy. Our test rig has two superconducting
capacitors, each of which can store –” She stopped and checked her ‘plant. “Two
terawatts. We use those to initiate the field, not run it, but good news,
maintaining a warp field takes way less energy. Only about six gigawatts. Oh,
and those capacitors need something to charge them. We use a He3
fusion reactor, so there’s that, plus fuel storage.”
“She’s saying it’s not small,” Cass
clarified.
“How many cubic meters would the whole system
need?”
“Let me ask my project head.” Kendra sent a
ping to Roberts, asking her to open a hololink.
The voice started before the projection
focused. “Do you know what time it is? Did you ever think I might be busy with something else?”
“Were you?” asked Kendra.
“That’s not the point,” insisted the
scientist, her image appearing. “I could have been.”
“But you weren’t.”
“Well, no.”
“I’ll bet you’re still at the test site. How
did it go?”
“No problems at all! We ran up to full power,
held it there for six hours, then smoothly collapsed it. Everything worked
exactly as it did last time, and the time before. Boss, we’re ready!”
“You’re amazing, Val! That’s great news!
Okay, so here’s an off-the-wall question for you.”
“Since when do you announce them?”
“Shut it. If we wanted to install a warp
drive, how much space would it take up? Cubic meters.”
“What do you want included? Control runs?
Fuel tanks? Sensors for warp navigation?”
“Just what has to be in proximity.”
“None of it needs to be in proximity. We
could have the capacitors a kilometer away if we wanted, but we’d pay a penalty
in current lost in transmission.”
Kendra resisted the urge to grind her teeth.
“Let’s say we wanted to retrofit a ship with a warp drive.”
“Good luck with that! None of the ships your
wife builds at HLC is designed for the stresses –”
“Can I have the simple answer, please?
Hypothetically, then.”
“Hypothetically? Say five thousand cubic
meters. That’s for the drive generator, capacitors, controls, and annie, plus
shielding. Doesn’t include anything else.”
“Okay, that’s –”
“And this hypothetical ship better have
massive Bussard scoops.”
“Right, good point –”
“And don’t forget the grav plates. Don’t want
your crew floating around.”
“Oh, yes –”
“You’ll need good inertial dampers integrated
into the design, otherwise, floating or not, that crew’s going to be paste the
first time you push the accel.”
“Val!”
“What? It’s a goddam ridiculous question,
Kendra! There is one, count ‘em, one, warp drive in existence, and it’s going
to be installed in Enterprise just as soon as we get it dismounted and
checked over for transport to orbit! We’re building more, but these aren’t like
hoverbike engines, you can’t just order one off the shelf. At least for now, after
we finish with the essential components, they’re going to be custom-built for
the ship they’re fitted to.”
Kendra sighed. “Thanks for confirming what I
thought.”
“If that’s what you thought, why didn’t you
just ASK that?”
“Long story. I’ll comm you tomorrow –”
“You’re not going to leave me hanging!”
“- and fill you in.” Kendra shut down the
link and turned to O’Quinn. “That’s what I thought. No warp retrofit for the
fleet. And also no wave motion gun if you were thinking about that. That’s
total felgercarb.”
“Felger-what?”
“Never mind. The point is, we can’t do what you’re
thinking of. Sorry.”
Cass had been chewing the inside of her lip
pensively. “Actually, we might be able to do something.”
Kendra whirled to face her wife. “You’re
shitting me.”
“We can’t do a warp drive, or that gun thing,
but Ted didn’t say anything about those, did he?”
“Hmm.”
“Ted, what exactly do you want to lift into
orbit?”
“In the simplest form, something that will
let us take the war to the Union.”
“What about an Orion?” said Cass.
“What’s an Orion?” asked Hartman, interested.
“It’s a really old idea for pushing heavy
loads into orbit. Before Photonic Laser Thrusters, someone – Niven? Pournelle?
Some rocket scientist – thought of building a big plate, stacking stuff on top
of it, and then setting off nuclear bombs beneath it. The detonations would
push the plate up with whatever was on the other side.”
“Holy shit,” whispered Kendra. “Nukes?”
“I didn’t say it was good idea,” Cass
chastised her. “But it was the inspiration for the PLTs. We do the same thing,
we just skip the violent turn-matter-into-energy part. Remember E=MC2?
Well, you can apply that here.”
“I get that,” said O’Quinn. “But you can’t be
thinking about setting off nuclear weapons beneath a ship?”
“No, I said that’s a bad idea. What I was
thinking of was we build a plate, and then instead of nukes to lift it we use
the most powerful PLTs we can build.”
“So we lift a plate into orbit? So what?”
Cass looked exasperated. “A plate with
stuff on it. We refit the ships, strap them to the plate, and launch. Once
in orbit, we release the ships and you’ve brought your war to the Union.”
O’Quinn was stupefied. “That’s brilliant!”
Cass shrugged. “I never said I wasn’t a
genius.”
“Wait, wait,” interjected Stone. “Before you
all get swelled heads. How are you going to get these ships onto this plate? I
thought you all said the Union watched everything and had a nasty habit of
dropping rocks on things they didn’t like. You think they’ll be chuffed to let
you patch up warships for any reason?”
“Not if they think we’re going to strip them
for scrap,” answered Cass.
“Why would they think that?”
“Because we’re going to buy them from whoever
owns them and announce our plans to do just that.”
Quickly, Cass sketched out more of her idea.
It all hinged on open-handed deception. The first step would be the building of
the plate. If asked, it would be described as a new method to get large masses
into orbit. PLTs would be built below it, for launch, and on top, for return to
the surface. “And that’s all true,” said Cass. “We’re just not talking about
what we’re going to launch.”
While the plate was being built, HLC would
announce the purchase of the sunken fleet for scrap in the low-key way
corporations used for routine transactions. They’d contract out the recovery to
another Trust company. Recovery might be tricky, but Cass was confident that the
purely technical issues would be worked out. Once the hulks were recovered the
real work would begin.
“We’re going to have to make it really look
like we’re gutting them for scrap,” said Cass.
“Which shouldn’t be a problem,” said Kendra.
“We’re going to have to pretty well take out everything belowdecks to fit in
engines, fuel, and munitions. And that doesn’t count the ships that we will be
scrapping.”
“Scrapping?” said O’Quinn.
“It all has to look absolutely real. We’re
going after the salvage rights to the whole fleet, right?”
“I suppose you would be.”
“Then we have to recover the whole fleet. And
we’d start with the smaller units, to evaluate the recovery techniques, so they’re
going to need taking care of. Actually, recovering the small ones first will
buy us time. We can drag out the scrapping process as a reason why we won’t be
working on the large ones. At least, not where we can be seen. The interiors,
like I said. We’ll be gutting them.”
“What sort of munitions are we talking about?”
said Stone.
“I think our best bet will be missiles,” answered
Cass.
“Why missiles? Why not install lasers in the
turrets? Can’t beat light speed for weapons.” O’Quinn looked rebellious.
“Because I don’t want to kill anyone we don’t
have to, and once you fire a laser you can’t stop it. A missile you can
self-destruct before impact.”
“Oh.”
Kendra added, “You really didn’t think this
through, did you? “We’ll bring the war to the Union,” you thought, and you
grabbed this idea and ran with it. Guess what? War is ugly, war is pain, and
war is waste. No, you saw that television show, saw them blowing things up, and
your little mind got all sorts of ideas.”
“We might be on board with the idea of
resisting the Union. We might even think that having the UE in space will be a
good thing. But if you think that we’re going to do anything that will wantonly
slaughter people who just happen to be on the other side of a disagreement over
exports you’ve got another think coming.”
“Ladies –” started O’Quinn, but Hartman cut
him off.
“No. They’re right. Cass, Kendra, if you’re
going to help us, then we’re going to listen most carefully to your concerns.”
Cass said, “Not good enough, Mya. You want us
to do the work, take the risks, and give you cover. That means we call the
shots, not you, not Ted, and not that jagoff Lynch.”
There was a long moment.
Finally Hartman spoke. “I think we can agree
to that in principle. We’ll have to work out details.”
“There’s going to be time,” said Cass. “Best
estimate we came up with for getting the recovery and refit done is three
years.”
“Three years?” sputtered O’Quinn.
“Best case,” reiterated Cass. “Which is good
because there’s no way in hell we’re going to settle everything tonight.”
“But you are going to help?”
Cass and Ken only needed a glance; it had all
been decided that afternoon, in any case.
“Of course.”
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