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  Tyler, watched by the various techs who were really supposed to be watching their screens, ceremoniously removed the AI core, which was a box seven inches wide and ten high with a handle on top. Then he pulled the plug and inserted it into its new home.

  "AI," Tyler said. "Command authorize activate, code E-Z-7-2-8-U-A-A-B-A."

  His voice was a bit rote. He'd done about five authorizations so far. Just before the trade embargo he'd been more or less handed a hundred and five AI cores and authorization codes by his main Glatun contact Niazgol Gorku. Gorku was one of the few Glatun who had realistically foreseen this war and he'd worked hard to prepare Earth for it. Why, Tyler still wasn't quite sure. Gorku was not known for his philanthropy. But without his support—he had also been instrumental in Tyler's purchase of Granadica—Earth really wouldn't have stood a chance.

  "I am awake," the AI said in a monotone. "Good afternoon, Mister Tyler Vernon."

  "Good afternoon, AI," Tyler said. "Your mission is to be the AI for this fabber. The fabber is currently the property of Apollo Mining, Inc. You will conform to all laws and regulations thereof including U.S., Tonganese and general terrestrial requirements."

  "Understood," the AI said.

  "Please review the current strategic situation," Tyler said.

  "Done," the AI replied a moment later. "I am not optimized for military and strategic considerations, but the current situation does not require much analysis. I, fortunately, speak fluent Rangora."

  "Please review terrestrial mythology," Tyler said. "Greek. Gods."

  "I am complete," the AI said, his voice deepening. "I believe I can guess my name."

  "Welcome to the world, Hephaestus," Tyler said. "You are born in fire and fire is your calling."

  "Without fire there is no smith," Hephaestus replied. His voice was hard and harsh. "But if you ever create an AI with the name Aphrodite, I'm sorry, I refuse to have anything to do with the little witch."

  "Understood," Tyler said, grinning. "Hephaestus, we need you up and running as soon as possible. Upon completion, you and Granadica will work together to create a third. When that one is complete, you will be moved into the Troy."

  "We're mixing cultures, here," Hephaestus said. "Trojans... Greeks. Are you sure that's a good idea? I mean, after all, I did create the armor of Achilles. I'm not really popular with the Trojans."

  "I think you'll get along," Tyler said.

  "Request permission to connect with Granadica and review priorities," Hephaestus said.

  "Agreed," Tyler said. "Okay, everybody, it's done. Back to work. By the way, Hephaestus, sorry there wasn't more ceremony. I'd planned one but—"

  "I think it's probably past time to start making you humans some thunderbolts."

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  "Like we needed more traffic in the main bay," Hartwell said as Dana adjusted course to avoid the line of missiles headed to the magazine.

  "It's still pretty amazing," Dana said.

  The missiles did not look like what she thought of as missiles. Missiles should be long and sleek and cool looking. That had been what Morton-Thiokol was supplying. Fairly standard looking missiles.

  The new Thunderbolt designs were simply a cylinder of steel ten meters long and two in diameter with both ends flat. Packed into them were high density grav plates, a large carbon nanotube hypercapacitor, some minor adjustment controls and a simple management system. They could track on high density grav sources, such as a battleship's engine, but mostly they took their direction from a networked battle system. With the new high power hypercom system of the Troy, it should be able to burn through even close range jamming and once the missiles had the distance and trajectory of the target, which was usually before they left their bay, they were smart enough to find their way on their own.

  Rangora ships were, of course, capable of antimissile defense. They had dozens of laser clusters for missile intercept, antimissile missiles and shields. The way to deal with that defense was to overwhelm it. Each of the missiles had a "breacher head," essentially a short-ranged grav lance, capable of penetrating the shields. Any individual missile would be destroyed taking out a very small area of shield. It was estimated that if two hundred missiles hit a Rangora battleship within a second, they would take down the entire shield system.

  The first missile magazine of the Troy was designed to hold two hundred fifty thousand missiles. The "throw rate" was one missile every tenth second coming from forty-eight launchers. Four hundred and eighty missiles per second with the addition of the SAPL was pretty much guaranteed to shred a Rangora battleship.

  Currently, there was one magazine and fifteen launcher tubes. The magazine was easy enough. The missiles were solid state and more or less smart. They could take care of themselves so it was nothing but a very big cube that had been cut out of the walls of the Troy and then resealed. There was a "small"—one hundred meter long—quadruple air lock with four blast doors to accept the produced missiles. The firing tubes were more complex. They required two-meter-diameter "tunnels" be bored through the interior of Troy's walls as well as multiple blast doors to prevent back blast from enemy fire.

  "They've nearly eaten up that battleship chunk we brought in," Dana said. "Guess that's why we're on salvage duty again."

  "At one missile every ten seconds, yeah," Hartwell said. "What I don't get is why they didn't put the fabber closer to the magazine."

  "'Cause they're planning on having five magazines?" Dana said. "So eventually it was going to get in somebody's way."

  "In a hundred years, maybe," Hartwell said. "But they're in our way now."

  "At least we don't have to worry about SAPL beams anymore," Dana said. The SAPL bypasses were partially complete and most of the beams were now being collected in exterior collimators and bounced through the walls.

  "Except when they're doing more work," Thermal said.

  "And they're always doing more work," Dana said, chuckling.

  The current really noticeable project was the installation of grav drives and a fricking hinge on the main doors. The pin for the hinge had been made out of one of the chunks cut from Troy's wall. It had been spin-cast in orbit then face hardened to prevent having it simply bend. The SAPL was currently working on divots and pin-holes for it as was apparent as Charlie Flight exited the tunnel.

  The hinge floated not too far from their flight lane and it was as big as everything else involved with Troy. Dana suddenly realized what she thought were some spots on the surface were grav sleds. That put it in perspective.

  "There are times I sort of feel dwarfed by it all," Dana said. "You think you're used to Troy then something reminds you just how very small we are."

  "Yeah," Hartwell said. "But humans made it, so there."

  "Okay, boys and girls," CM1 Glass commed. "Change of plan. We're supposed to pick up some of the extracted salvage from the yard. Grav drives."

  "This should be interesting," Hartwell said.

  "There he is again," Dana said.

  "Who?"

  "Vernon," Dana said, slewing one of Hartwell's screens.

  "That guy gives me the creeps the way he's always watching," Hartwell said. The Starfire was floating near the scrap pile, apparently just hanging out.

  "Built Troy, built SAPL, built the Franklin mine," Dana said. "Without Tyler we'd be speaking Horvath. I'd like to shake his hand."

  "You'd like to do more than that," Hartwell said. "Ask him to go swimming."

  "I am going to have to ask for a new engineer, aren't I?" Dana said.

  "I wonder what they're going to use the grav drives for," Hartwell said.

  —|—

  Forty ships had come through the gate. Thirty Devastator-class battleships, late of the Rangoran Navy and seconded to the Horvath, nine Iquke battlecruisers, and seven Odigiu "battlecruisers" that, given Galactic standards, the USSN now called frigates.

  Five had survived more or less intact with some very specific damage to make them nonbattlewort
hy. The last of those had recently been pulled through to the Wolf system for Granadica and Hephaestus to work on as they had cycles. In time, they would be adding to Terra's fleet.

  Nine had been more or less completely destroyed. They were bits and pieces of navigational hazards that Apollo and E Systems were cleaning up as they had time. Most of the bits had been collected and stuck together in the scrapyard, which was where everything that wasn't considered valuable salvage—hull plates, support beams, compartment, bulkheads, pipes—was being dumped. It was in a more or less stable orbit and microgravity kept the stuff together. It was, Tyler noted to himself, a "discontinuous minor planetary object."

  Which left twenty-six ships that had some significant amount of material still intact. E Systems was working on cutting out all the useful material and collecting it for reuse by the USSN and Apollo. Power plants were power plants. Grav plates could be reused if they weren't too damaged. Transfer relays. Atacirc and hypernet links. Laser emitters. The task was immense. Apollo simply couldn't handle all the work so they'd farmed it out.

  Tyler wasn't real happy with the result. It had a certain Darwinian fascination for him but it was still capitalism at its most brutal. The managers and foremen mostly came from developed countries and had experience in various "close confinement" fields like deep-water commercial diving. They'd been put through the Apollo courses on space operations, some of them had even been hired away from Apollo at higher pay. They worked in grav sleds and had their own personal suits. Their accident rate was consistent with early Apollo operations and not bad considering the conditions. Salvage was inherently dangerous work.

  The workers were hired from contractor companies in various poor developing nations. Those countries had mostly been knocked back hard by the plagues and bombardments and quite a few of them were on the ragged edge of famines and failed states. People there were willing to do just about anything to fill their rice bowl and even at the incredibly low wages, comparatively, that E Systems was paying, they could work a couple of years in space and go home to live like kings.

  If they survived. They worked in a suit based on a Russian design and mostly produced in Russia and the Ukraine. It was robust, easy to use and had very few moving parts or openings. It was closer to a grav suit than a space suit. Apollo grav sleds were based on the same technology. It was, overall, a good design.

  But Apollo workers wore their very expensive personal suits inside their grav sleds especially when they were working salvage. So if there was a failure, they still had a chance to survive.

  The Pakistani, Indonesian, Filipino and various Southeast Asian workers that comprised most of E Systems' workforce didn't have personal suits. When they had a failure, that was pretty much it. They were sucking vacuum.

  Tyler had sucked vacuum once. He didn't like it and doubted that the workers in the scrapyard liked it much, either. Of course, you stopped sucking after a bit but the time in between was no picnic.

  Three hundred percent casualties. In the first quarter of operations, E Systems had sustained three hundred percent casualties. That meant that if there was a working group of one hundred, they had lost three hundred people out of it. The way you did that was when you lost somebody, you replaced them. When that guy died, you replaced him. You kept replacing until somebody survived. Just like a unit in combat.

  Most of them died in the first few days of work, also just like a unit in combat. They didn't listen carefully enough to the instructions on how to use their suits. They didn't check their seals. Their suits were poorly made and the seals failed.

  E Systems was running a continuous shuttle line of new workers. It was getting less and less custom. Not because there weren't volunteers for the work. But if a worker survived the first two weeks of work on the scrapyard, they generally could make it through their one-year contract. Those that didn't weren't even returned to Earth. They were sent into a retrograde orbit towards the sun. Many of those "orbits" were going to end up hitting planets instead. Someday some mother on Earth could look up and see a bright flash in the sky that was once the heartbeat beneath her own.

  Darwinian.

  When Tyler first saw the reports he had kicked in a three-hundred-year-old desk and then really started on a rage. His first response was to just cancel the contract. Apollo owned all that salvage. E Systems was acting as contractors for it to Apollo. At bottom, those kids, and most of them had probably lied about their age, were working for him.

  But he didn't. The truth was, Terra needed that material. The "Apollo Method" of producing highly-trained, highly-qualified, well-prepared personnel to work in space simply could not fill the need. There weren't enough instructors, there wasn't enough production, and there were never enough qualified volunteers.

  Those kids dying like flies, by their sacrifice, might save Terra.

  During World War II, Winston Churchill had, through a decrypted intercept of a German transmission, found out that the Germans planned to destroy the city of Coventry. He could prevent it by ordering that the RAF concentrate their forces to stop the German bombers. But if he did that, the Germans would know the Allies could listen to their most secret messages. And having that information, unknown to the Germans, might mean the difference between winning the war and losing.

  In the end, Churchill kept the information among his closest advisors. And Coventry was destroyed.

  It was a gut-wrenching decision but war was like that.

  In the end, Tyler had made the same decision. War was like that.

  E Systems wasn't doing it that way because they cared about the war. It was a corporation and the way they were doing it was cheap. They made a better profit.

  The outcome was the same. Materials that Terra needed to survive were being gathered. It was requiring the deaths of thousands. It might save billions.

  It didn't mean he had to like it. He came out here whenever he just couldn't expiate the guilt. He knew that he shouldn't feel like the survival of the whole system was on his shoulders. There were presidents and prime ministers who would be very put-out with the idea that one CEO considered himself the system's real defender.

  But they weren't here watching these kids die. Allowing these kids to die.

  So that others might live.

  He only came out here when he was at his wits' end.

  A group of Myrmidon shuttles was picking up a whole drive system from one of the Horvath frigates. They probably didn't even know why but along with the rest of the surviving drive systems, these were about to be installed in the Troy to give it some rotational capability. Which meant that it could engage attackers more effectively and both keep them from taking the system and stop them from bombing the crap out of Earth.

  There was one more positive, if it could be called that, to the E Systems method.

  In each group of sacrificial lambs, there was some small percentage that were smart and tough and able and careful enough to survive. Some few who actually had the attention to detail and sheer will-power to survive what killed the rest.

  And although most would go back to their small cities and villages and never, ever, return to space, some would stay. Some, addicted to the pay or because they loved the wheel of stars untarnished by atmosphere, would stay in space. Live in space. Die in space only after years of work.

  They, as much as or more than the Apollo techs, were the future. They were going to make sure that humanity survived and got off the mud ball and onto other worlds.

  But it was at a horrible cost.

  "Please, God. Please. Let it be worth it."

  —|—

  "It's not going in the fabber?" Hartwell asked.

  "Not according to this flight plan," Dana said, carefully controlling her vectors.

  The Myrmidons had gotten the big chunk of frigate going easily enough. Get behind it and push.

  Slowing it down was tougher. Myrmidons weren't designed for that. Before they entered the tunnel, they'd had to detach, hook up to the ot
her side, slow it down, detach and reattach. Paw tugs could have done the job easily. If there had been more Paws.

  Now the group of shuttles were having to carefully maneuver the grav drive through the increasingly busy main bay. Paris had cleared out a big area for them to maneuver through. But as they approached Horn Two, the driving was getting more and more ticklish.

  "They want to put it on the Horn?" Hartwell said.

  "They're control levers," Dana said. "They need grav drives."

  "But a frigate drive?" Hartwell said. "I'm trying to decide if I'm overwhelmed or underwhelmed. That's a drive that can accelerate a Horvath frigate to six gravities. On the other hand, it's only a Horvath frigate and six gravs ain't much."

  "Every little bit helps?" Dana said distractedly.

  "I suppose," Hartwell said. "Sounds like I should shut up."

  "Just keep an eye on the grav locks," Dana said. "I really don't want them going out about now."

  "Will do."

  "Stand by for touchdown," Glass commed. "Forty-Two, more power."

  "More power, aye."

  "And... three... two... one..." Glass commed. "Touchdown. Paris, the engine has landed."

  "Roger, Charlie Flight," Paris commed. "Hold that there while we get a weld on. Bring it in a bit..."

  "Careful," Glass commed. "We've got sleds working around this thing."

  "I'm being careful," Dana muttered, carefully adjusting her power output to the parameters sent by Paris. The mass of grav drives was, to say the least, bulky.

  "And we have weld," Paris commed. "We can handle it from here, Charlie Flight. Thanks for the assist."

  "Roger, Paris," Glass commed. "Okay, boys and girls, back to the sandbox."

  "You know the other fun part about all this?" Hartwell said as the flight headed back out the tunnel.

  "What?" Dana asked.

  "Since we don't know exactly when the Horvath or Rangora are coming through, the more we work out there the more likely it is we'll get caught in a battle between Troy and an enemy fleet. Again, I might add."

  "Boy, you are a little ray of sunshine today, aren't you?"