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  "Why are we getting scatter?" Butch asked. He wasn't nervous exactly. It was a mixture of nervous and excited. But anything unexpected was causing a bit of increased stress. "No air, the lights shouldn't scatter."

  "Still enough breathable to scatter some," Price replied. "Not enough to survive, as that guy found out."

  A Horvath, his suit ripped open and the squidlike body bloated up and out so it was hard to recognize as one of the ETs, was floating in the corridor.

  "What do we do?" Butch asked.

  "Pull it out," Price commed, snatching the slowly spinning body. "Put a beacon on it. Somebody will pick it up later. Not like he's going anywhere."

  The team lead used the waldoes to hand it over to the probe.

  "You okay with that?" Price asked. "You're not going to puke or anything?"

  "I'm good," Butch said. In truth it was hard to think of the twisted bit of freeze-dried meat as a sapient being. It looked like a dried clam.

  "Take it to the entrance, slap a beacon on it and just give it some minor delta," BFM commed. "I'm gonna sit here and do a survey for power sources."

  Butch carried the Horvath to the entrance, put a radio beacon on it and sent it spinning slowly into the void.

  "Bit of a navigation hazard," Butch said as he headed back up the corridor.

  "Anything hits it is going to slag it and not get slagged," Price replied. "According to the plans, this thing's got a power room up ahead to starboard. Let's go see if it survived."

  They made their way, slowly, down the debris-filled corridor. Debris was floating everywhere in the microgravity. Butch couldn't even put a name on most of the stuff. Some of it appeared to be food packs. There were what might be tools or eating utensils. Clothing. He hadn't even known the Horvath wore clothing.

  "Should be behind this bulkhead," Price commed, slowing his sled to a stop. They were having to continually adjust delta to the spinning ship, since if they didn't the centripetal force would "push" them out, and Butch was having a lot harder time with it than the experienced team lead. His sled "pranged" lightly on the top of the corridor.

  "Careful," Price commed.

  "Trying to get my balance, lead," Butch said. This wasn't anything like working in the main bay.

  "Gotcha," Price replied. "Just, seriously, be careful. The potential around here is high. I think the power's still on but shorting into the hull."

  "Right," Butch said, getting his vector adjusted so he wasn't hitting the bulkheads or the deck or the overhead. And then he had to adjust it again. "Lead, I'm having a hard time maintaining stable formation."

  "Grab that hatch coaming," Price commed, pointing to the hatch to the engineering section. "No way we're fitting through that hatch. Neither is a power plant. We're going to have to cut the bulkhead."

  "Right," Butch said, grabbing the coaming. That got it.

  "When we do, the plate's going to want to get away from us 'cause of the spin," Price commed. "I'll lock the plate. You do the cut. Don't cut my waldo."

  "How big a cut?" Butch asked. He stuck out another waldo that had a small grav plate on it and locked it on the far side of the corridor, giving him a really stable platform.

  "Top to bottom," Price commed, getting an equally stable position and locking two grav points to the bulkhead. "About four meters wide. If that's not enough to get the power plant out, we'll cut it wider."

  "Right," Butch said, pulling out his high power laser head.

  "Low power," Price commed. "Use about a forty millimeter beam."

  "Low power," Butch said, switching heads. "Right."

  "You know you say 'right' a lot?"

  "Right."

  —|—

  "Whoo-hoo," Price commed as he got the plate fastened down and out of the way. "This sucker's live, all right."

  The power plant, the center of which was a meter-wide ball of iridium, was in the middle of the large compartment. The rest of the compartment was secondary power transfer systems and a mass of electrical relays that were spitting sparks all over the place.

  "Salvage control, team Fourteen Alpha," Price commed.

  "Fourteen Alpha, SC."

  "We've got a live plant in Sierra Seventeen. Looks like it was at full power when the ship got hit. Room is energized. How do we turn this sucker off?"

  "Stand by, Fourteen Alpha."

  "Gotta check the manuals," Price commed.

  "Right."

  "Fourteen Alpha, SC."

  "SC, Fourteen Alpha."

  "Best bet seems to be to cut the fuel lines. Fuel line enters from the port bulkhead. Can you access that?"

  "Stand by, SC," Price commed. He panned his lights around the room. "Not from our primary entry. I'm not going in that compartment, and primary entry is to starboard. Download a schematic and I'll see if we can get around to port."

  "Roger, Fourteen Alpha. Download on the way."

  —|—

  They had to cut through four bulkheads and a control room to get to the fuel line.

  "Wait," BFM commed as Butch started up his torch. "Control, Fourteen Alpha."

  "Fourteen Alpha, Control."

  "Is there a shut-off valve?" Price commed.

  "Roger, Fourteen Alpha, stand by."

  "He3's expensive. Why waste salvage?" BFM commed on a side channel to Butch.

  "Makes sense," Butch replied.

  They found the shut-off valve in the next compartment over, got the fuel shut off, then headed back to the power-room entry.

  When they reached the main entry, Butch still occasionally bouncing and bonging off of the walls, the sparking had stopped.

  "Prime slice," Price commed, making a cautious entry to the room. "Looking at two hundred million dollars, minimum, right there."

  "That's prime," Butch said.

  "Let's get 'er cut out," Price commed. "I'll stabilize, you cut. And only cut where I tell you, probe. I don't want my salvage wrecked by your clumsy attempts to be a welder."

  —|—

  "I am beat," Butch said, clambering into his bunk. He'd done his suit checks, though, before he put it away.

  "Same here, brother," Drac said, yawning. "I want to go get something to eat, but I'm too tired to move!"

  The salvage operation had been called after twelve hours, the maximum the company would let people work continuously. They had a mandated twelve hours off before beginning again.

  "I already had thirty hours in this week," Butch said, trying to do the math. "That's forty-two. And we've got... What's the deal with OT on a salvage operation? Since we get shares."

  "OT is the same," Drac said, yawning again. "The shares, they look small, like point oh, oh, one percent or something. But it's good money even for probes. The straight wages come out of the cost of salvage. The shares pay out after that. So you're sort of paying yourself or something. It's supposed to be an incentive to keep the cost of salvage down or something."

  "I'm gonna think about it in the morning," Butch said, cutting off his light. "I'm going to have to kiss some Navy guy, though, for giving all that beautiful loot."

  "What I wonder is what they're going to do with it?"

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  "I'd heard you were insane," Kelly Ketterman said. "Now I understand what they meant."

  Kelly Ketterman was the Managing Design Engineer of Night Wolves, the Granadica Design and Prototyping Center. Located inside the walls of the fabber called Granadica, the center was Tyler Vernon's version of Skunk Works or Phantom Works. And since the Granadica was currently located in the Wolf 359 system... Night Wolves.

  A petite blonde, she was barely taller than the notoriously short Vernon even when wearing heels.

  "All it really takes is enough power and grav plates," Tyler said, shrugging. "We're going to need a lot of osmium, admittedly. But that's just a matter of mining enough asteroids. And we just got several tons of prime grav plates. And we'll probably get a bunch of damaged power plants we can remelt. Well, we will have them once the sal
vage guys get done with the junk that's drifting around the gate."

  "It's not a tithe of what you'd need, sonny," Granadica said. "You want Troy to actually be mobile? That's a lot of grav plates."

  Granadica was the AI of the fabber, a massive mobile Glatun space factory that had been built back when Crusaders were beating on Saracens.

  "We need to get it so it can rotate, first," Tyler said, bringing up the plan's schematics. "That, right there, is going to take a bunch of power."

  "They're planning on lining the control levers with plants and placing the grav plates on the ends," Kelly said. "Didn't they already start?"

  The massive "horns" in the bay of the Troy were intended to permit the space station to rotate. That way it could move the transmitted SAPL beams around and actually aim them. It also would permit spreading damage from attacks. The "horns" were so long because the more leverage that they had, the less total power was needed.

  "Right," Tyler said. "But what then? All I want you to do is look at the design requirements for a power plant and drive system large enough to move the Troy. Not just back of the envelope designs. A full design. Let me figure out the logistics."

  "Well," Kelly said. "I do like a challenge."

  "The efficiency of plates goes up for something like that the larger they are," Granadica said dubiously. "The best plates are going to outmass your Constitution-class cruisers. They're going to outmass me."

  "We'll figure it out," Tyler said.

  "You're not going to make a power plant in me, either," Granadica said. "You're talking about an osmium sphere two hundred meters in diameter. That's beyond my fabbing ability."

  "Granadica," Tyler said. "I built a battlestation nine kilometers across. And I'm building another one. You really think a little bitty ball of osmium's going to stop me?"

  "No," the fabber said, sounding mildly amused.

  "Where are you at on building your... twin," Tyler asked.

  "Apollo's finished with the shell," Granadica said. "It's still cooling, though. You guys have come up with some crazy ways to make steel, but it works."

  Making steel in a fabber was dead simple. Insert raw materials in one end, first quality steel came out the other.

  Making a shell of steel big enough to encompass a ship fabber, a kilometer long and three hundred meters in diameter, was a different story.

  But the problem had already been solved for another project, the Wolf Mining Facility. It had needed "support plates," two-kilometer-around "washers" that were intended for the upper and lower portions of a massive space elevator and gas mining facility.

  Building the plates in any reasonable period of time, and with the approaching war Vernon was in a big hurry, seemed impossible.

  Apollo Mining had solved the problem, however. By making a sort of circular shell of layers of steel material and then melting it, they could now create any sized ball of steel. Forming it was, then, dead simple. As long as you wanted something that was vaguely round it was a matter of using enough tugs to form it like a potter formed clay.

  "If it's crazy but it works..." Tyler said.

  "It's not crazy," Granadica said. "You humans are the only sophonts in this galactic region to have that saying. Most people just go with 'that's crazy.'"

  "Internals?" Tyler asked.

  "Seventy-eight percent complete," Granadica said. "I'm mostly stuck on power plants. Still building up materials. Speaking of osmium."

  The matter annihilation plants centered around circular balls of platinum group metals. Osmium was the best choice but any of the platinum group, ruthenium, rhodium, palladium, osmium, iridium, or platinum, could be used.

  The problem was, they were all relatively rare. They were extremely rare in terrestrial conditions. Being heavy metals, they tended to stay in the core of planets and were uncommon in crustal materials.

  They were more common, however, in asteroids. Not very common, they were only formed in supernovas and even then by the repeated fusion of other metals in multiple supernovas. They were unlikely to ever be common. But they were more common in asteroids, especially nickel-iron asteroids, than on planets.

  But even with all the mining that Tyler was doing in the solar system and now Wolf, there was never enough. He was having to trade more than half of his refined metal to the Glatun to keep up with payments and ongoing purchases. Only the remainder was left to supply not only the Navy but civilian ships, terrestrial requirements, the replication of Granadica and all the construction going on in the Wolf system.

  "Priorities, priorities, priorities," Tyler muttered. It was always the problem. If he had his current situation and decades before a massive war broke out, the situation would be simple. Spend all his time building infrastructure and wait until the last three or four years to start constructing warships. But humanity was starting at the bottom of a hole. It was only fifteen years since Tyler had found a useful trade good to open up full trade with the Glatun, barely more than a decade since they'd managed to kick the Horvath out of the system. They were still learning how to work in space. There were never enough trained people, enough material, for what he could see coming.

  The Glatun, Earth's first trade partners and their closest "ally," were a dying civilization. They had slowly slipped from being a robust, expansionist society to one with high unemployment and a "bread and circuses" attitude towards life.

  That worked as long as you didn't have any strategic threats. The problem was that other species, many of which the Glatun had worked to advance so they would be better trade partners, were expanding in the galactic region. Four of them, led by the Rangora, were eyeing the Glatun planets with a look in their eye like a wolf examining a sick, old caribou. Just last year, Glatun had ceded sovereign control over a whole series of bordering star systems to other polities.

  That wasn't going to be enough to buy off the Rangora for long.

  Once war broke out, Earth's problems would be magnified a thousand fold. The Glatun were busy trying to build up their fleet, and having massive problems, but they still had hundreds of fabbers like Granadica. Some of the metal going to the Glatun was coming back as formed materials. Power plants, grav plates, atomic circuitry and, most especially, highly refined He3 fuel for the power plants. Once that supply line was cut off, Earth was going to be stuck with its limited industry and Granadica. For fuel, Tyler was desperately depending on the Wolf gas mine being finished before the war started and all hell broke loose.

  Most models had the Rangora, who were ten times the problem of the Horvath, attacking Earth as part of the war. Planetary heavy bombardment, dropping fractional C kinetic energy weapons with yields up to a hundred megatons, were considered a legitimate tactic. Earth had already suffered devastating bombardments from the Horvath. She would take a pasting if the Rangora got any sort of foothold in the system.

  The flip side was that they would have to be able to hold the gate area long enough to transport through to Wolf to attack Granadica and the mine. Tyler was banking on Troy being able to prevent that.

  "Earth has more than enough power," Tyler said. "There's hydro, nuclear, coal... I'm going to discontinue the civilian power plant program and shift all the material to you. Get the twin up."

  "Okay," Granadica said.

  "And when you have the twin up," Tyler said. "Start on another. When the second one is done, we'll move the first into the Troy. And so on and so forth. I think that's the best pattern we can plan for now."

  "How many battlestations are you going to make?" Kelly asked.

  "Depends on how long the war lasts. Speaking of war. We've got a bunch of damaged but possibly salvageable ships in the Sol system. I'm thinking about pulling them through to here and having you work on them in your spare time."

  "I don't have a lot of spare time," Granadica pointed out.

  "I'll get some people in here," Tyler said, grimacing. Finding good space engineers was like pulling hen's teeth. Among other things, most of them were going int
o the Navy and with stop-loss they weren't coming out. Problem to fix later. "What's the status on the gas mine?"

  "All the parts are produced," Granadica said. "I've shifted my production schedule to producing construction bots. They're starting installation of the main processors and weaving of the pipes."

  "Okay," Tyler said, nodding. "That's next on the agenda."

  —|—

  "Well, we have a refreshing change in the interstellar situation," the secretary of state said.

  "That sounds like good news," the President said. "I could use some good news."

  Even though, for once, an attack through the gate had not dropped KEWs all over the Earth, the economy and society were just a shambles. Between the destruction of capitals and the breakdown in international security, whole swathes of the planet were failed states. Just keeping the flow of oil, still a vital strategic commodity even with the improving technology, required three divisions deployed in the Middle East. They weren't so much there to fight terrorists anymore as to make sure the "legitimate" governments were able to keep the oil pumping.

  The government, especially the states, was just starting to get a handle on the effect of the Johannsen Virus. Women were, and the President dearly hoped they continued to be, a vital part of the American economy. Their entry into the workforce in large numbers started with World War II, the last time the U.S. tried to go to full war production footing.

  Maternity leave was, to say the least, cutting into productivity. And the teen pregnancy rate was hammering education for women. A girl might still go to high school with one child. By the time it got to three, she was mostly out of school, and the workforce, for the foreseeable future.

  Congress, responding to the reality of their constituents' positions, had increased the child tax credit. A family earning $50,000 with four children, which was starting to be just about median condition, paid essentially zero taxes. Which made an already difficult budgetary situation impossible.

  The one bright spot was that with industry damaged across the globe and the baby boom just starting to reach productive age, the U.S. was, once again, an industrial powerhouse. Most of the industry that had been destroyed in the bombardments was "legacy" industry that had needed to change to more modern techniques. Over the decades before the bombardments, more and more factories were going into areas where labor was cheaper and easier to deal with than in the Rust Belt. Which meant that whereas China, Japan and Europe had lost most of its production to the Horvath bombardments, the U.S., with most of its new capacity dispersed into cheap, relatively rural or small city areas, primarily in the South, had come out with more functional production than the rest of the world combined.