The Hot Gate Page 2

  “Now, now,” Thermal said. “You know the significance of the crowbar. Let it not be used for lesser purposes.”

  “Athena warned of debris up ahead,” Dana said, temporizing.

  “I heard,” Thermal said. “I can fly this thing nearly as well as you. Out! Away to your mission, Comet.”

  “Bastard,” Dana muttered, undogging the hatch.

  She was immediately assaulted by the sound of children. They weren’t screaming so much as having to talk very loud to be heard over the kids who were talking very loud to be heard over…

  “AT EASE!” Dana bellowed. “That means quiet down!”

  “Coxswain’s Mate?” one of the PAO officers said. He was a lieutenant which meant Dana was seriously outranked. On the other hand, this was her shuttle.

  “I’m going to conduct a class on Myrmidon maintenance, sir,” Dana said, sliding around to the aisle. The Myrmidon, with all its seats installed, didn’t have much room to maneuver. “Since these kids are into space and all that. It’ll keep them from trying to take it apart to see how it ticks.”

  “I know how it ticks,” one of the boys said. “I made a complete scale model of a Myrmidon last year, every part.”

  “Every part?” Dana asked. “Even the components of the Sector Seven grav module?”

  “No,” the kid said. “I had to do that as one module. It was too small to do all the components.”

  “Not in here,” Dana said, hefting the heavy toolbag into his lap. “So out of your seat. It’s time to do some PMCS. And you get to start. Where’s the Sector Seven module?”

  “Underneath her chair,” the kid said, struggling with the twenty kilo bag.

  “So how are you going to move the chair?” Dana asked.

  “Uh…”

  “Everybody up!” Dana said. “All the chaperones to the rear. Unless you’re really interested in space shuttles. It’s going to take at least four of you. Get the number three and four chairs undogged and moved forward. Do not touch the hatch. It’s locked internally but God knows what you little demons could figure out.” She stopped with her hands on her hips looking at the suddenly quiet group. “I said get those chairs moved! Move it! Move it!”

  * * *

  “And…fore!” Tyler Vernon called, swinging his golf club.

  The head connected with the ball and sent it out on an almost straight trajectory towards the circle of red lights set up a kilometer away in the main bay. It went left, a slice, and lower than he’d expected, and nearly hit one of the gravity drives on Horn Four.

  “Damn.”

  Rising up from the interior of the six kilometer wide main bay of the Troy were four three kilometer long “horns.” They tapered from six hundred meters wide at the base to two hundred meters at their terminus. The terminus was ringed with grav drives larger than any ship’s.

  Their purpose was to rotate the Troy which they could manage at about ten meters per second. Given that they were moving two trillion tons, that was pretty good. Archimedes, the father of leverage, once remarked that if he had a lever long enough he could move a world.

  Tyler was quietly proud that he’d finally proven the old guy right.

  They were also a convenient place to hang secondary systems. Horn Four, besides its grav drives and the massive matter conversion plants necessary to drive them, was home to four “small” one-hundred-meter fabbers, primarily used to produce missiles. There were more on Horns Two and Three while Horn One was home to the main ship fabber, Hephaestus.

  Since Troy was full up on missiles again, all four hundred and fifty thousand in the two completed missile magazines, the fabbers switched to producing laser emitters and power systems. Which was building up Troy’s onboard laser capability nicely.

  “I’ve got to get rid of that slice,” Tyler said, taking his next swing.

  Golfing in space suits had a venerable history. Alan Shephard, commander of Apollo Fourteen, had hit two golf balls on the moon. At that time, lifting the mass of his golf club and the two balls had cost nearly sixty thousand dollars.

  Tyler’s company had figured out how to give a two trillion ton asteroid an Orion drive that accelerated the battlestation at .2 G. Lifting his golf clubs wasn’t a big deal.

  What was a big deal was trying to hit the balls in microgravity. Tyler was in a space suit whose boots were grav-locked to the top of the Starfire. That meant that he couldn’t rotate his body worth a damn. Shephard at least could get a decent rotation going. Tyler was blaming his tendency to slice on that.

  Then there was the problem of having golf balls, which weren’t going to lose their momentum in the microgravity of the main bay, bouncing around the six kilometer, somewhat busy, sphere. Fortunately, Paris had some pretty darned good tractor beams and wasn’t terribly busy at the moment. He was also rather happy at his new upgrade to Class III AI and more than willing to catch balls. Even if they were occasionally errant.

  “If you wouldn’t mind holding off on the next one, sir,” Paris commed. “We’ve got an incoming Myrmidon heading for the civilian docking bay.”

  “Okay,” Tyler said, straightening from teeing up. “It’s not like a golf-ball’s going to hurt a Myrmidon, though.”

  Tyler didn’t like being in a suit and didn’t like EVA. He’d been in a “low atmosphere” condition one time during an abortive attack by the Horvath back when Earth was just starting to get advanced technology. It was the first attack the US had managed to beat off, due as much to Apollo’s Solar Array Pumped Laser as anything. But because he was one of the few people with Galactic implants, which appeared absolutely necessary to fly Earth’s first star fighter, he’d ended up sucking vacuum in a half destroyed fighter.

  He also had, over the years, lost all hobbies. Work had absolutely eaten him up for the last decade to the point where he’d barely managed to attend his daughters’ weddings. He effectively owned LFD, the parent corporation of Apollo Mining LLC and SAPL, which was a ninety hour per week job.

  Once upon a time he’d been a cartoonist. He had been a manager in the software industry. A programmer. He had a family, he golfed and played ultimate frisbee.

  He’d had a life.

  Combining golfing, which was a hard skill to relearn in the first place, with EVA was a natural. It got him out of his quarters and in the fresh vacuum.

  Now if he could just overcome that nasty slice.

  “I suspect the clang as it hit the side would startle the crew, however,” Paris replied. “And it’s the winners of the naming contest. We don’t want them peeing all over the shuttle.”

  “Damned stupid idea, anyway,” Tyler muttered. “I’m going to name it what I want to name it.”

  Part of Apollo’s contract with the Navy was that Apollo Mining, LLC—which was the only company in the system with the ability to make the Troy class battlestations—reserved the right to name them. What that meant, in real effect, was Tyler got to name them. There had been some questions about the names thus far. Both were famous battles where the losing side had won a moral victory.

  Few people remembered what city Agamemnon or Achilles came from. Just about anyone recognized the name Troy. By the same token, it took a historian to know any details of the Persian side of the battle of Thermopylae.

  “What’s the betting pool, anyway,” Tyler said, resting one arm on his driver as the shuttle passed.

  “Six to one for Alamo according to New Las Vegas,” Paris responded. “Top vote is Iwo Jima.”

  “Iwo Jima?” Tyler said. “That was a victory.”

  “Not to the Japanese, sir,” Paris commed. “They’re voting rather heavily. Also Saipan, Tarawa and Okinawa.”

  “Those are classes of Marine assault ships,” Tyler said. “If we ever get around to making Marine assault ships. What’s next?”

  “Constantinople,” Paris commed. “Stalingrad, Changsha, Islawanda and Clervaux.”

  “Changsha?” Tyler asked.

  “Battle between the Japanese and Chines
e around the time of the Second World War,” Paris replied. “First time the Japanese lost to the Chinese.”

  “Might as well call it Guadalcanal,” Tyler said. “Midway. El Alemain. Silly people. No sense of history.”

  “Shuttle is past, sir,” Paris commed.

  “Right,” Tyler replied. “Forrrre…”

  TWO

  “So, you have fun?” Thermal asked as Dana lifted her hands from the controls. Entering the docking bay was up to the tractor beams of the Troy.

  “I don’t know if you’d call it fun,” Dana said. “It was illuminating. I won’t say some of the kids knew more about a Myrmidon than I do, but they knew a lot for their age. And they were just as bratty as I expected.”

  “You really don’t like kids,” Hartwell said. “I’m sort of surprised.”

  “If I wanted kids I’d have had them a long time ago,” Dana said.

  “You’re only twenty,” Hartwell pointed out.

  “Most of the girls I want to school with were knocked up by the time they were fifteen,” Dana said. “Which is why Nebraska changed back to having a fourteen year old minimum for marriage. I am one of two blondes who managed to make it out of high school without a belly full. And you couldn’t move around school without running into somebody’s kid. Didn’t care for them then, don’t care for them now.”

  “Well, you’re going to have to put up with them for a couple of hours,” Thermal pointed out. “We’re part of the show.”

  “I can gargle helium for a couple of hours,” Dana said. “Doesn’t mean I like it.”

  * * *

  “And this is the main viewing area,” Dana said, leading the group into Bay Nineteen.

  The first and most important evolution had been getting all the kids rotated to the head. After that they’d been shepherded, with much need for sheep dogs, through Xanadu, the Troy’s sixty acre water park, the flight caverns which were technically the “air mixing compartment,” a snack in the main civilian cafeteria and now into Bay Nineteen for a view of the main bay.

  “Whoa…” was the general response.

  Bay Nineteen was a recreational area often used for parties that was in the “innermost” ring of compartments before you got to the main bay. “Outward” was towards the surface of the Troy. Fifteen meters high, twenty deep and fifty meters across at the inner bulkhead, that bulkhead was, deck to overhead, optical sapphire so it looked as if there was nothing between the bay and vacuum.

  Dana really didn’t care much for Bay Nineteen. She really liked to have more than a thin sheet of sapphire between her and vacuum. She was fine in EVA but stuff like this made her nervous.

  Most of the kids didn’t seem to mind that. They rushed across the darkened room, weaving between tables and ignoring the pleas, threats and orders of their adult chaperones to press their noses against the sapphire.

  “Don’t worry,” Thermal said. “They can’t break it.”

  “It looks like glass!” one of the mothers said.

  “It’s not,” the PAO lieutenant said. “It’s optical sapphire. They couldn’t break it if they hit with at table. An adult couldn’t break it if they hit it with a table.”

  It probably would have helped if he didn’t sound so nervous himself.

  “Those are the control horns,” Donny said.

  “I know that, dummy,” one of the girls snapped. “We all know that.”

  “Look, there’s a Constitution going into the parasite bay!”

  “What’s that Aggressor doing?”

  The six hundred meter battleship had been captured from the Rangora and only recently brought into Terran service after the battle damage was repaired. The captured ship docks and supply ships, which carried parts for the Aggressors, had been very useful.

  “It’s docked,” Hartwell said, coming up behind the group of kids. “They don’t fit in the current parasite bays. We’re having to dock them to the control horns for the time being. The new bay in Sector West is going to be refitted to hold four of them.”

  The Troy was so big it had its own task force of “parasite” ships. The Constitution class cruisers were two hundred meters long and seventy across. The parasite bay in Zone Two, which also was held the 142nd Boat Wing, held six of the cruisers along with twelve Independence class frigates. The ships stayed in the hull during major battles and were fired out through launch tubes to do clean-up.

  “Is that Granadica?” one of the girls asked, pointing to a large cylinder attached to one of the horns.

  “Hephaestus, dummy,” Donny said. “Granadica is in the Wolf system. Engineer Mate Hartwell, do you know when they’re going to move Vulcan to the Thermopylae?”

  “As soon as they finish the next ship fabber,” Thermal said. “Or that’s the plan. What you learn around the Troy is that plans tend to change. We only found out we were getting the Orion drive about a week before they started installing it.”

  “They’re not going to use it while we’re here, are they?” one of the chaperones asked, nervously. “I don’t think I want to be around nuclear explosions.”

  “You won’t be,” Hartwell said, chuckling. “You only sort of notice it by the acceleration. Feels like you’re being pressed sideways, usually. And I don’t think there’s a fire planned any time soon.”

  “What if the Rangora attack?” another of the mothers asked.

  “Then you’re in the safest spot in the system,” Hartwell said, reassuringly. “I’d much rather be on Troy than on the ground.”

  The Galactics considered bombardment of the civilian populace by kinetic energy weapons, similar to nuclear bombardment sans fallout, as a perfectly legitimate tactic of war. Which was why most of earth’s cities were gutted. The last attack had been the first in which the enemy didn’t bombard earth. Probably because they were getting slaughtered by the Troy and Thermopylae.

  The last attack had been lead by six Assault Vectors, ten kilometer long, one kilometer in diameter, ships specialized for taking gate defenses.

  The main defense of the Solar System, until recently, had been SAPL. SAPL was a powerful solar pumped light beam, made up of thousands of mirrors that captured and reconcentrated sunlight into a mining tool and, in a pinch, weapon. Before it developed its own laser system, Troy had been, essentially, the final focus and aiming system for SAPL. Together with its massive store of missiles it had shredded the first two attacks through the gate after it came online.

  By the time of the last attack, Troy had developed its own internal laser system composed of dozens of separate emitters that were combined into one very powerful laser. Not as powerful as SAPL which had climbed past one hundred and fifty petawatts of power. But powerful enough when thousands of penetrator missiles crushed the AVs’ shields.

  The first squadron of three had done some serious damage to Troy and Thermopylae. But they apparently thought that the Thermopylae wasn’t online yet. And that the Troy didn’t have its own lasers.

  With Thermopylae firing SAPL and Troy hammering them with missiles, the AVs, which had taken down dozens of star systems in the Rangora’s recent war with the Glatun, were turned into so much scrap.

  The second three had the unfortunate luck to be coming through the gate while Troy was maneuvering past it. They came out at a relatively high velocity and the Troy was right in front of them.

  The AVs were, for ships, massive. The Troy outmassed them by several orders of magnitude. What had been left of the most powerful assault ships in the local arm could barely be picked up as scrap. Tugs with powerful tractor beams were still sweeping up the megatons of debris. The main damage to Troy was three very noticeable impact craters. They were currently being repaired.

  Neither group had been concentrated on bombing Earth.

  “I’m surprised you’re not protecting the diplomats in Erid…” one of the mothers said. “Eradeen…”

  “Eridani,” Dana said. “Epsilon Eridani, the fifth star in the Eridani constellation. And the Rangora made it a re
quirement of the negotiations that the Troy or Thermopylae could not be present.”

  “We shouldn’t have agreed,” the mother said. “Let them see what they’re up against.”

  “We’d rather they not be absolutely sure,” the Public Affairs lieutenant said, smoothly. “Better that they overestimate us.”

  “That’ll be the day,” Dana said.

  “Is that guy golfing?” one of the kids asked.

  Dana looked where he was pointing and saw the distant figure on top of a shuttle. He certainly appeared to be golfing although at the moment he was just standing on top of the shuttle.

  “That’s Tyler Vernon,” Thermal said. “You see him around. That’s his shuttle, the Starfire. And, yes, he appears to be golfing.”

  “Isn’t that dangerous?” one of the girls asked. “I mean, an object at rest remains at rest, an object in motion remains in motion. If he hits a golf ball, it’s going to keep bouncing around until it breaks something or hurts someone.”

  “The one thing you learn working on the Troy,” Dana said, “is that Tyler Vernon does whatever he wants to do.”

  * * *

  “This is the sort of reason I get paid the big bucks,” Tyler said over the com. “It doesn’t mean I enjoy it. So I’d appreciate it if you two overpaid clerks would kindly decide once and for all what SAPL should cost internally and be done with it.”

  Tyler was video conferencing while golfing. It was simple enough. Emitters in his helmet projected on the interior in such a way as the two executives, the CFOs of SAPL Corp and Apollo Mining, appeared to be sitting about six feet away. Which, if they were physically present, would put them in vacuum. And that was becoming a more and more desirable outcome.

  “Conditions change, sir.” Rebecca Mizell was the Chief Finance Officer of SAPL. But while she was attractive for her age, Tyler didn’t have to worry about his innate tendency to defer to pretty women affect him. He’d hired her because she was a revolving bitch. That was often a useful quality in a CFO whose usual job was telling people “no.”