Live Free or Die-ARC Read online

  Interested, he jumped over to the Glatun and received the shock of his life. One of the big questions on earth about the Glatun was pronouns. Generally, the Glatun were referred to by male pronouns. But it had been noted, quietly, that they didn't seem to have appropriate reproductive parts. And they responded perfectly well to neutral gender terms such as 'it.'

  What he found out, quickly, was that they were all three. Or, rather, the Glatun with which people dealt were hosts to both. Male and female Glatun were non-sentient parasites that existed within a brood pouch on the Glatun sentient neuters. More or less on command they would reproduce, the female releasing an egg and the male fertilizing it. Then the offspring would be raised in the pouch. If it was male or female it would stay there, more or less turned off, until a ceremony where it would be transferred to a young neuter. If a neuter it would be raised to a certain size, released from the pouch, then raised to adulthood by its 'parent' neuter.

  "Okay, that's bizarre," Tyler muttered.

  He decided to examine the Glatun a bit more and received another shock.

  The Glatun were one of the older species in the area having been contacted by the Ormatur through the new Glatun gate nearly thirty thousand years ago. At the time there were very few sophont races in the immediate star systems and over a period of about six thousand years the Glatun had spread out and absorbed the thirty-two systems that made up the Glatun Federation. Along the way they had encountered four other sophont races and more or less absorbed them into the Federation. They also had encountered some that resisted absorption but had become trade partners.

  At this point, the Glatun Federation sat as the nexus of trade between fourteen different races, some of them having, in turn, expanded widely. They were rich even by Galactic standards and with riches comes problems. They had a permanent unemployed underclass approaching thirty percent, their military was paltry for their size absorbing less than point zero three percent of their GDP and their trade imbalance was becoming astronomical.

  "They're eating their seed corn," Tyler muttered. "You can afford to be the French if you've got a great big buddy to take care of you, but . . ."

  Tyler took a look at their strategic situation and nearly had a heart attack. They were bordered by nine 'expansionistic' groups. Of course, Earth and the Horvath, neither actually strategically dangerous, were included. But the Rangora, Ogut, Barche and Ananancauimor each had military forces that, in sheer number, dwarfed the Glatun. They were all technologically inferior, but . . .

  "Quantity has a quality of its own," Tyler muttered. He wasn't sure that Earth hadn't hitched itself to a falling star.

  Speaking of military technology . . .

  Primary ship weapons were fusion pumped visible light, X-ray and gamma ray lasers. Secondary weapons were high-acceleration missiles using either kinetic or fusion pumped laser warheads. A relatively new weapon on the scene was the gravity gun which could disrupt ship's shields and cause massive damage. However, it was relatively short range and of limited utility. It also required truly massive amounts of power so it was only found in capital ships.

  "No unobtainium," Tyler said. "Good. And speaking of power and drive systems . . ."

  He got confused almost immediately. The primary power system was a helium3 driven . . . Well, it was a matter conversion plant not a fusion plant. Still required H3 to keep it from producing radiation. It converted matter to plasma and electricity. And then it did . . . something with the plasma and got more electricity and less plasma, somehow converting the neutrons and protons of the plasma to electrons? How? The last of the plasma could be used for . . .

  Tyler realized his basic science background was kicking out information that was contradictory to background and gave up. Let the big brains figure it out. But it needed . . . Ah, hah! Heavy metals, primarily in the platinum group! That was the reason the Horvath were so hot for platinums. The power systems were thick spheres composed entirely of metals from the platinum groups. The drive system of a freighter the size of Wathaet's was . . . half a terawatt? That couldn't be right. He checked. That was right.

  Earth produced four terawatts a year of power worldwide. The entire eastern US power grid could be driven by a ball of osmium six feet across.

  Inertial control was induced by spinning plates of . . . Brain lock. Brain lock. These people obviously had some theory that contradicted most of what he thought he knew. The grav plates looked doable. They required some exotic metals but that was what orbital mining was for. Scratch that. Basically beryllium bronze with a touch of lanthanides and platinums. Pretty much all of that was available on earth. You needed grav plates to make grav plates, though. How'd somebody make the first ones?

  The drive system was a function of grav plates. Drives generated . . . pressor beams? That pushed on what? Generated mass points?

  "SAN check," Tyler muttered, sitting up and pulling out of the welter of information. "I feel like the WWII Air Force general that said that jets couldn't work because they didn't have anything to push. I think these guys have rediscovered Newton's aether. I need to get somebody smarter than me a set of plants and some free time."

  For right now, though, what he wanted was a ship. The problem being, then he'd need a captain and an engineer. And one ship wasn't going to do.

  What he needed was Boeing able to make ships.

  He'd brought a laptop with 400 petabytes of atacirc installed. Surely that would be enough to fill in the basics?

  Barely. And he needed a fabber to make grav plates so you could make a larger factory to make bigger grav plates. And he was going to need people who actually understood this stuff.

  And a ship drive. They looked tough to make.

  Did this place have eBay? He spotted a reference in the grav plate system information to a vender called Pangalactic Nihukow, which produced grav fabbers, and probed on that.

  "PANGALACTIC NIHUKOW! PANGALACTIC NIHUKOW!

  PANGALACTIC NIHUKOW! PANGALACTIC NIHUKOW!"

  "OW!" Tyler muttered. The answer was: Yes. You could go shopping. If you could figure out how to ignore the commercials. Flashing banner ads on a screen were bad enough. Flashing, screaming, banner ads in your brain were another matter. He just rode the tide for a while, trying not to whimper.

  "Right," he said, pulling out of the ad flood. "I'm going to need more blood sugar to handle this. AI?"

  "Mr. Vernon?" a voice said.

  "Do you have a name that is less than five syllables?"

  "You may call me Isna, Mr. Vernon."

  "Isna, I had some Terra foodstuffs sent along," Tyler said. "Is the serverbot really programmed to produce terran foods? And what's available?"

  "Over six hundred and twenty-eight thousand recipes have been obtained from the Terran information net," Isna said. "With the available foodstuffs, using substitutions, two hundred and forty-seven thousand possible combinations are available."

  "I didn't bring that large a range of materials," Tyler protested.

  "Yes, you did," Isna said. "You even brought a full range of spices."

  "Damn," Tyler said, thinking about it. He'd delegated the foodstuffs to one of his assistants. Find a chef and tell him to send along everything he'd want if he was going to be stuck on an alien planet for three months. "Do you think the bot could lower itself to doing some spaghetti? We'll start there."

  "There are six thousand . . ."

  "Spaghetti with meat sauce," Tyler said.

  "Four hundred and . . ."

  "Spaghetti with meat sauce," Tyler said, his mouth starting to salivate. "Bit more tangy than sweet. Heavy on the meat. Heavy on the oregano. Pick a recipe that's along those lines. Thin spaghetti noodles. Chianti or the closest approximation to accompany. And can I get a Coke?"

  "Your supply of Coca-Cola, since it is toxic to Glatun systems, is still in customs hold. It should be released in a few days time."

  "Tea. Earl Grey. Hot."

  "Coming right up." There was a 'ding' and a compartm
ent on the wall opened. There was a steaming cup of tea in it. "Sugar? Cream? Lemon? Lime? Orange . . . ?"

  "Just sugar, please," Tyler said. "One teaspoon to each five ounces."

  "That is very close to solubility," the AI pointed out. There was a rushing sound and the tea cup floated out of the compartment. "Your tea, sir."

  "Thank you," Tyler said, taking the cup. It was a tiny little thing. "Next time could you put it in a bigger mug? Say about sixteen ounces? I drink this stuff by the gallon, but gallons are hard to hold."

  "Of course, sir," the AI said. "Your spaghetti is being prepared. The robochef assumed standard accompaniments. A balanced diet seems to be important to maintaining regularity of the Terran digestive tract and balance of trace nutrients."

  "Uhm . . ." Tyler said. "Okay. Just the spaghetti would have been fine. I'll eat an apple or something. Are there apples?"

  "Yes, sir," the AI said. "Would you like an apple?"

  "Not right now," Tyler said. "I'm just going to pick around on the net for a bit."

  "I'll leave you alone, then."

  "Oh," Tyler said, looking at his cup. "And I need another cup . . . mug . . . of tea. And maybe some bottles of water to just, have around."

  "Coming right up."

  Tyler lay back down and, with more information, started to ponder on the central subject that had been occupying his mind ever since the end of the aborted Maple Syrup War: How to get the Terran system up to Glatun standards in the shortest possible period.

  'Rome wasn't built in a day.' This was most certainly true. But part of that was that Rome spent much of its history getting hammered in wars. Wars are waste. There were times when war was the only practical answer, there were things worth fighting and dying for, but infrastructure didn't get built during wars. While the Glatun were still sufficiently interested in the Terran system to keep the Horvath off Terra's back, mostly, Terra needed to build orbital infrastructure. Fast.

  The problems were . . . immense. All of Terra's industry was earth-side. Just being able to smelt metal in space wasn't enough. There were way too many things that had to get made in places like China and Bangladesh. Eventually, systems would have to be self-supporting off-planet. Building all that infrastructure, though, was going to mean, in the meantime, getting stuff out of the gravity well. Which meant ships.

  Then there was the problem of doing anything in space. Space was an unforgiving bitch. And to do all the work that was going to need doing meant that taking six months to practice a five minute space walk was right out. Space suits. He'd completely forgotten the problem of space suits!

  Then there was the personnel problem. Tyler had gone on a hiring binge before leaving earth. He figured that anything that was normal and regular you could get MBAs and PhDs to handle. He was only interested in the new and odd. Once it was making money, there were little people to handle it. Which was why he no longer had to go tap maple syrup himself.

  But doing stuff in space was going to require people with special abilities and training. Of which there were maybe two or three hundred on the whole planet. Much of the work could be done with robots, but robots couldn't think their way out of new problems. Tyler was going to need thousands of people handling tens of thousands of robots. And they were going to have to be people who could think on their feet. People who understood space without being afraid of it. They didn't need PhDs. He could get them trained in the basics pretty easily using implant technology. They just needed to be smart and able to handle implants. Which meant people familiar with information technology.

  The last problem being that even the solar array system was costing him like crazy to set up and run. He had a lot of money but eventually it was going to run out. Getting a couple of thousand people who were what NASA would consider qualified, and thus extremely expensive, was just out.

  "Where in hell am I going to get a couple of thousand geeks willing to work in dangerous, and at least at first horrible, conditions for low pay just to be able to work in space?"

  Put that way, the answer was simple.

  "Your spaghetti, sir," Isna said.

  It smelled wonderful and came with an attractive selection of grilled mixed vegetables and a bottle of wine, one glass already poured.

  "Ah," Tyler said, "ambrosia." He tucked up to the table and had a taste . . .

  "I have limited experience dealing with human facial expressions," Isna said, "but from your reaction this was not the most perfect gustatory experience possible?"

  "Isna . . ." Tyler said as soon as he'd finished the glass of wine. "Make a note to the chef. Bit lighter on the cayenne in the future? Especially if he's using a hot style of dried tomato. And by a bit lighter I mean none."

  Three

  Ronald Reagan, 44th President of the United States, once famously stated that: 'The only way Earth could ever have a unified government is if it was invaded by aliens.

  As it turned out, he was optimistic. Despite first contact with extraterrestrials, Horvath destruction of multiple cities, the seizure of all of earth's precious metals and the abortive Maple Syrup War, Earth did not have a unified government. Worse, despite many conferences, negotiations, meetings, summits and various other diplomatic endeavors, earth had neither a centralized space management command nor even a finalized treaty on space extraction, nor exploration nor colonization. The monthly shuttle from Glalkod, by default, communicated with the US Space Command in Eglin Air Force Base because it was going to be setting down in US territory. The Horvath, on the other hand, wouldn't deign to speak to Eglin and had repeatedly threatened to nuke it from orbit. If they bothered to speak to anyone it was to call Russian Space Command or the South African mining consortium. Usually by cellphone.

  Tyler, however, was despite some people's opinion an American patriot.

  "Space Com, Space Com, orbital mining ship Monkey Business with four heavy robot tugs leaving gate and preparing for orbital insertion . . ."

  "Uh . . . Roger, Monkey Business. We have you on trajectory for orbital insertion. You're not showing a Glatun registry, Monkey Business. Please state home world and species, over."

  "Home world, Terra, Space Command," Tyler said. "Species . . . Human."

  * * *

  "Boy, you're getting too big for your britches," Mr. Haselbauer said, looking up at the side of the still steaming Paw Four. The space tug, unlike the Monkey Business, had the ability to land on a planet. It was not, however, very aerodynamic and even careful reentry tended to heat up the surfaces.

  On the other hand . . . it could take it. The robotic tug was a mass of gravititc generators, drives and power plants surrounded by a thick shell of high-strength alloys. It looked like a steel brick the size of a small warehouse.

  "You bought a ship?" Mr. Haselbauer said, incredulously.

  "Leased," Tyler said. "I leased a ship. The tugs came with it. And you don't want to know how much it's costing. Dollars trade at something like five hundred thousand dollars to the credit. So this is costing me about a billion dollars a day. Sorry, make that twenty billion. We'd better get something extractable out of that asteroid or between the cost of this thing and the cost of the Very Large Array I'm going to go from the richest man on earth to the poorest in a nanosecond."

  "And who the hell is flying it?" the farmer said. Despite being, like Tyler, an instant multi-billionaire, Mr. Haselbauer hadn't changed. He still dressed like a homeless man, still worked his fields every day and still didn't seem to know the meaning of the word 'vacation'. Which was why he'd 'volunteered' to come pick Tyler up from the Manchester Spaceport.

  Tyler hadn't changed either. He did know the meaning of the word 'vacation.' He just didn't seem to be able to find the time. And he wasn't going to any time soon.

  "I am," Tyler said. "I had to have a certified pilot to get it to the gate. But on this side there's no certification requirement. Yet."

  "So you're a rocket pilot now?" Mr. Haselbauer asked, pointing the way to the truck.

 
Manchester Spaceport was not part of Manchester Airport. During the Maple Syrup War, one of the targets the Horvath vaporized was Tower Village Mall. It looked like a very inviting target.

  Which it would have been had they dropped the rock during the day. Instead, they'd dropped it at four AM local time. And the bomb they dropped was one of their smaller ones. Nobody had been killed and very few people were even injured.

  The smashed spot, however, was in a perfect place to put in a space port. Close to I-93 with good access using US-3 maple syrup could flow in from the region and galactic goodies could flow out. Of course, the 'Spaceport' currently consisted of some poured concrete, large areas of slagged concrete and metal and a parking area that was what was left of the mall parking lot.