“Coming right up.” There was a “ding” and a compartment 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.”

  “Um…” 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 Ph.D.s 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 Ph.D.s. 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, 40th President of the United States, once famously stated that the only way Earth could ever have a unified government was 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 U.S. Space Command in Eglin Air Force Base because it was going to be setting down in U.S. 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 cell phone.

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

  “SpaceCom, SpaceCom, 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.

  “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 asked. Despite being, like Tyler, an instant multibillionaire, 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 spaceport. 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.

  It also was remarkably unsecure. Glatun traders had their own defenses to prevent nosies or thieves damaging or stealing from their ships. And nobody could quite figure out how to manage ships over which even their own Space Command didn’t have control. Which, given that an orbital reentry ship was another name for potential crater the size of Washington, was another thing to be negotiated.

  “It’s not a rocket,” Tyler protested. “And, yeah, I am. I took an online course while I was on Glalkod Station.”

  “But you couldn’t get certified,” Mr. Haselbauer said.

  “I had to spend five years as a mate first,” Tyler said, shrugging. He tossed his carry-on into the back of the pickup and got in. “I didn’t figure I had five years to waste piloting a freighter. Most of the systems are automatic. The pilot’s really just there to tell it what to do. The big problem is, I need an engineer. Fast. I’ve hired a couple of Glatun to help out but I’m going to need a human crew. Which means finding some people to send to Glalkod to get implants and training. Oh, and training on this particular ship is sort of hard to find.”

  “Why?” Mr. Haselbauer asked, starting up the truck.

  “Well, it’s kind of old,” Tyler said. “I couldn’t afford a new one. Which is why I need an engineer. Quick.”

  “This truck’s old but it don’t need an engineer on call all the time,” Mr. Haselbauer said. “Just some decent TLC. How old is old?”

  “Let’s put it this way,” Tyler said, leaning back in his seat. “I considered calling it the Santa Maria.”

  * * *

  “You bought a ship?” Dr. Foster said. The chief science officer of Aten Mining Corporation, it seemed to Vernon Tyler, Chairman of the Board, was a bit nonplussed. “You didn’t say you were going to buy a ship.”

  Aten had started off in a small and cramped set of rooms in an industrial park in Huntsville, Alabama, not far from the company that made their mirrors. Since Aten was ninety-five percent of their customer base, Aten had quickly absorbed AMTAC, which was now a division of Aten. And they’d moved into bigger offices as the workforce had expanded. It needed to expand. Three doctors and a few lab rats could control fifty mirrors. Without an AI, though, controlling four hundred and fifty mirrors was a different ballgame.

  It was costing Tyler like crazy. Not as much as the lease on the tugs, but still costing like crazy.

  “Leased,” Tyler said. “Five. Sort of. We needed tugs. There was an orbital mining control ship and four tugs going for cheap on the Glatun version of eBay. I leased them through a subsidiary of Gorku, Inc. They gave me a deal. I think Gorku likes me for some reason.”

  “You leased a spaceship,” Dr. Foster said in a far-away tone.

  “For one hell of a lot of change,” Tyler said. “Since Icarus was a bust, what have you been up to while I was getting implants and leasing ships? Because we need to put them to work. You know, pulling useable metals off of an asteroid.”

  “You leased a spaceship,” Dr. Foster said, again.

  “Can we get past that?” Tyler said.

  “No,” Dr. Foster said, grinning. “Look, nobody gets into this business if they’re not seriously bent on getting into space. So far, despite Glatun freighters coming every month, I’ve been grounded on this rock. I’m not getting younger. When do I get a ride?”

  “It’s not for thrill rides…” Tyler said.

  “Who said anything about a thrill ride?” Dr. Foster replied. “Does that ship have probes? Spectroscopic and magnetic detectors? Some way we can figure out what these asteroids are so we’re not trying to figure out what a rock is from the ground?”

  “Umm…” Tyler said, closing his eyes and accessing his hypernode link. “All of the above.”

  “Then let’s go!” Dr. Foster said, grabbing his jacket. “Where’s the ship?! I’ll call my wife on the way…”

  “It’s in Manchester,” Tyler said, holding up his hand. “FAA had conniptions when I wanted to fly it down here. I leased a plane to fly down. Getting from Manchester to Huntsville, commercial, is an incredible pain.”

  “So let’s go!” Dr. Foster said, heading to the door of his office.

  “Wait!” Tyler said, grabbing him by the collar. “We’ve got to do this one step at a time. Do you have a passport?”

  “A what?” Dr. Foster said.

  “ICE is treating off-planet flights like going out of the country,” Tyler said with a sigh. “We can leave just fine. Getting back you need a passport or you’ve got a lot of explaining to do to Immigrations. The tug only has room for five. And it only has bare minimum facilities. And those are for Glatun which, as it turns out, we can kind of use. They use basically the same sort of toilet we do and a shower’s a shower. But the living quarters are on the Monkey Business. There’s room for up to ten if you’re very friendly. And two of those slots are taken up by the Glatun engineer and pilot temps. There are no EVA suits. I was planning on buying some off of the Russians. Well, there is one real space suit, but it’s mine. So if there’s an emergency you better hope we can hook up to one of the tugs to get back to Earth. And there’s bound to be a problem since all the ships are older than the United States. Oh, and there’s no cook, and don’t get me started on the robochef. Last but not least, you’re the chief science officer of this lash-up and you can’t just go gallivanting off into space at the drop of a hat.”

  “I’ll quit,” Dr. Foster said.

  “Then there will really be no reason for me to bring you,” Tyler pointed out. “And what about Dr. Bell? He’s the small planetary bodies guy.”

  “Fine,” Dr. Foster said. “We’ll take Nathan, too.” He paused for a moment and thought about it. “Will he fit?”

  “Yeah,” Tyler said, shrugging. “Barely. You’re determined to do this, aren’t you? I really do need you keeping this lash-up running.”

  “I can do that remotely with the hypernet,” Dr. Foster said. “At least for a while. I’m not that bad of a manager, thank you. I’ve got a passport. So does Nathan. Uh…the question is how long we’ll be gone. What sort of acceleration does the ship have? How quick can we do some fly-bys?”

  “Ninety gravities,” Tyler said. “The tugs are about a thousand at max power but it costs like crazy in fuel.”

  “A thousand gravities?” Dr. Foster said, boggling. “Continuous? The space shuttle only pulls ten! And that’s for about a minute!”

  “They’re space tugs,” Tyler said slowly and carefully. “They’re basically space bulldozers. If you’re going to move rocks in space, and time is money, note, you need something that can move rocks. The flip side is they’re expensive and kind of clumsy. If you really want to go, though, we can do this. Who’s coming along?”

  * * *

  “I think we’re going about this all wrong,” Dr. Bell said as the Gulfstream took off.

  “I don’t care,” Dr. Foster said. “We’re going.”

  “No, I mean the mining,” Dr. Bell said. “Look, yes, putting the VLA in towards Venus makes sense. We can get twice the insulation as putting it in Earth orbit. We’d get more farther in, but anything past Venus starts to get tricky with heat management.”

  “So what are we doing wrong?” Tyler asked.

  “Most of the Atens are stony, chondritic, carbonaceous…” Dr. Bell said, then shrugged. “I can keep going in the Cs and Ss if you want. They have metal but they’re not primarily metals. And Icarus is a case in point for how screwed up that can make things.”

  “What’s screwed up?” Tyler asked.

  “You’ll see when we get there,” Nathan said balefully. “But what we need is an M Class.”

  “Which I’ve noted in my extensive research,” Tyler said sourly. “Problem is, we’ve got all our mirrors down in Venus orbit.”

  “Which is not as much of a problem now that we have a ship,” Dr. Bell said. “Sure, we’ll keep the VLA down in Venus orbit. It’s easy enough to kick the mirrors out of the freighter as it’s headed out-system and let them fly there on their own. Or, hell, we can use the tugs to bring them up. But we’ve got enough mirrors in the VLA at this point that we can start doing some serious reflectance. Put one, well, probably three or four, of the BDA mirrors up out of the ecliptic. Then get one down by our target asteroid. Which should be 6178 1986 DA. Definitely metallic unlike Amun.”

  “Heard about that one,” Tyler said. “Except it’s so freaking huge. Our system is designed around melting the thing in-situ and then extracting. Melting it is going to take a while. We’re talking about a mile-wide ball of stainless steel. And we need a better name.”

  “Point,” Nathan said, scratching his head. “What about adjusting the approach?”

  “How?”

  “How do the Glatun mine asteroids?”

  “With more tugs than we’ve got,” Tyler said. “They land diggers and dig them apart and use fusion-pumped lasers I’m not going to try to run. The problem is rotation. If you have a high rotation, and 6178 has a very high rotation, even if you cut bits off they go flying away due to the low gravity. So they slow the rotation of big asteroids with really big and many tugs. What I want is a small M-class asteroid. There have to be some. One hit the Earth not too long ago in a place called Crater City, Arizona. That one was only fifty meters across. That’s about right for starting out. And we still need a better name.”