“Which it takes into account, but you see my point,” Tyler said. “Maybe Antarctica then over the south Atlantic. But that’s not my favorite view and I don’t want to take another thirty minutes out of my day flying halfway around the world to get more or less straight up. So it finds the safest route within my preferences by using a very advanced and partially intuitive query I don’t even really set up. I just comm ‘Following all local directives, get me up to the ship.’ It gives me a set of routes, I pick the top one and then keep an eye out for visual aspects. Like there was a Cessna you guys probably didn’t see at about seven miles out when we took off that wasn’t on the FAA screens for some reason. The system also highlighted that and both informed me and took it into account. That’s what the system is for.”

  “You’re right,” Steve said, shaking his head. “Four years of academy training…A monkey could fly this ship.”

  “A Monkey is flying this ship,” Tyler said with a grin. “When I figured out how easy it was, I knew the name for the ship right away. But it can’t figure everything out.”

  “Example?” Steve asked.

  “Picking up the mirrors,” Tyler said, gesturing “under” the ship. The ship had rotated so there was now a view of the star field beyond the mirrors. They were also pretty much clear of the atmosphere. “It didn’t have a programmed way to do that. I figured that we could either adjust the width of the grav beam to prevent damage to them or find a hard-point. We sort of did both, maximizing lift at a hard-point while adding support to the lighter parts of the structure. Then we wrapped them in a grav bubble when we got them off the ground—they’ve been in zero g since we took off—and off we went. But the computer didn’t have that method programmed. Now it does and the next time it’ll be easier.”

  “And if a failure happens?” Steve asked.

  “If the main engines give out, the mirrors or anything else we’re lifting gets dropped,” Tyler said. “Which could be potentially ouchy for somebody. There are two redundant back-ups that can get this thing down safely in up to a three-gravity environment from within the well. Stored capacitor power and a mass of grav plates which can be used for drives in a pinch.

  “If I lose contact with the Monkey, I’m qualified to do a personal drop. I’m not going to promise I won’t conflict a satellite on my way down. But I probably won’t. The plants and the comp on the Paw are good enough to manage that much traffic control. And you can be sure I’ll declare an emergency. FAA can route planes around my inbound track. Which will be to the nearest flat spot I can find. I can drop this thing, in an emergency, right into Times Square easier than you can land a trainer. The world has a lot of flat spots if you don’t need five thousand feet of runway.

  “If everything gives out, which is pretty damned unlikely given that this thing has been tinkered with and refined over five hundred years, then we’re either stuck in orbit until another ship comes along and pulls us off or we’re a dropping brick. Can’t help you with that one.”

  “If you had some serious pilot’s training, I don’t think there would be a single issue,” Steve said, shrugging. “It all sounds…almost too good to be true.”

  “That’s because it is very advanced,” Tyler said. “We won’t be able to replicate this system in the next fifty years. The programming is just too complex. But we’ll be able to make something nearly as good in short order. And as to the pilot, you can be sure that I’ll get someone more qualified as soon as I pick a good candidate and get him or her planted. You can run things without plants, but it’s not easy.”

  “I’ve had about all I can take of NASA,” Steve said with a grin.

  “You don’t want this job,” Tyler said. “Seriously. The guys on this ship are going to be doing grunt work. Nobody here wants this job. You need to be working on our ships. I’ve got a joint project going with Boeing and Lockheed Martin to produce the first class of ground-space shuttles. I turned over all the plans for power plants and drive systems to them as soon as I got back, along with a functioning power plant from a scrapped freighter and a gravplate fabber. And they’re scratching their heads and talking about a hundred billion dollars and ten years’ development. Which I’ve already commed them is just out of the question. If they can’t get off the stick I’m going to form my own company to do it. They’re still talking about light-weight composites and noodle programming. With a power plant and a grav system you can fly one of these things, made out of raw steel, with a stick. They can’t get their head around ‘the better is the enemy of the good.’”

  “Serious problem with NASA as well,” Steve admitted.

  “The problem being, a start-up is based around new and customized systems,” Tyler said, shrugging. “I need Boeing and Lock-Mart’s expertise at mass production! I need shuttles, a lot of shuttles, so the Paws aren’t constantly carrying stuff into and out of orbit. I’m going to be sending back materials, but a lot of it’s going to stay in space and build orbital systems. And I can do the big stuff, hulls and such, in space. But I still need all the fiddly bits built by ground-based companies. So I need shuttles. Several and some of them pretty damned big so they can carry big fiddly bits up. And I don’t need them in ten years. I need them yesterday.”

  “What about the Horvath?” Nathan asked.

  “I’m hoping like hell the Horvath consider this part of the human tribes they’re not allowed to touch,” Tyler admitted. “And once we leave, I’m going to be keeping the Monkey Business well away from Earth and the region between the gate and Earth. Last, they were another reason to lease it. Its Galactic transponder shows it, and the Paws, as belonging to one of the biggest Glatun corporations there is. I’m pretty sure that the Horvath don’t want to explain to Gorku why they destroyed one of their ships. Even an old one.”

  “But human ships, it’s a different story,” Astro said.

  “Absolutely,” Tyler replied. “Probably. Which is, again, why I’m not going to be doing a lot of stuff around Earth or the gate if I can avoid it. Just parts and food up and materials down. If I’m far enough away, the Horvath will have to go out of their way to destroy whatever I’ve got built. And they’re not going to be able to easily sort out the human stuff from Glatun. It’s the best defense I can come up with so far.”

  “What about the beam?” Dr. Foster asked. “I’m thinking that could probably do some serious damage.”

  “Not powerful enough,” Tyler said. “It’s a one terawatt laser so far.”

  “It’s not a laser…” Dr. Foster said tiredly.

  “My orbital death ray, my name,” Tyler replied with a chuckle.

  “This sounds like an old argument,” Steve said.

  “The name laser is an acronym,” Dr. Foster said.

  “Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation,” Astro said. “Don’t have a degree in optics, but anybody knows that. What’s the problem?”

  “The light beam is not a laser,” Dr. Foster repeated. “A laser is a beam of polarized light of a single frequency generated, well, in various ways at this point. This is nothing more than, in effect, a concentrated view of the Sun.”

  “A very concentrated view of a lot of the Sun which just happens to burn and melt stuff,” Tyler said. “I know, I know, it’s nothing more than Archimedes’ Mirror writ large. But we don’t have a good name for it other than laser. I’m not going to call it The Solar Beam. It’s a one terawatt laser. Which is great. But not enough. We need a lot more power than that to defeat the shields on the Horvath ship. At least a hundred terawatts. We can collect that much power…”

  “That is one seriously powerful laser,” Steve said. “Sorry, Doctor.”

  “I’ll get over wincing sooner or later,” Foster said ruefully.

  “Thus the acronym,” Tyler replied, grinning. “Technically, it’s the Solar Array Pumped Laser.”

  “SAPL,” Steve said. “Serious ass powerful laser?”

  “Got it,” Tyler said, still grinning. “Problem being, we can’t concentrate it. Most we can concentrate so far is about four terawatts. Let’s just focus on mining and leave the defense of the system to Earth’s governments.”

  * * *

  “So, we’ve been heating Icarus for nearly a year,” Dr. Bell said, gesturing at the screen. “And it’s heating up. No question there. It’s even melting. But it’s not doing what we expected. The volatiles are all burned off. But what we’ve got is now a shiny ball of what appears from spectroscopy to be mostly nickel iron with some small admixture of noble metals. But it’s not melting, per se. And given that we’ve determined the iron composition to be barely ten percent…we’re sort of stymied.”

  The Monkey Business was decelerating at fifty gravities towards the smelting region. Due to orbital eccentricities, the VLA was currently about halfway around the sun from Earth. And so was Icarus.

  They’d just finished a really excellent dinner—Dr. Chu turned out to be as good a cook as he was an astrophysicist—and the bots were clearing the dishes. Which was just about the best time to contemplate a problem in Tyler’s opinion.

  “How did it turn into a ball of iron?” Tyler asked. “Computer?”

  “This method of orbital smelting is outside my experiential parameters,” the ship replied. “I have no idea what is going on.”

  “And you guys have already kicked this around,” Tyler said. “So you don’t have any clue?”

  “No,” Dr. Foster admitted.

  “Steve? Conrad?”

  “Not a clue,” Astro said.

  Dr. Chu, on the other hand, had a distant look on his face.

  “Conrad?”

  “Could you run your estimates of composition for me again, please?” Dr. Chu said, looking at the screen. The view of the spinning asteroid was replaced by a mass of numbers that Tyler could barely follow. His plants were giving him translations but it wasn’t the same as knowing what he was looking at. That came from training and experience.

  “Ah, I thought so,” Dr. Chu said, nodding. “Very interesting problem.”

  “Which is?” Tyler asked.

  “The body is rotating around three axes at a very low rate,” Dr. Chu said. “The majority of the Minor Planetary Body is silica. Relatively low melting point compared to iron or nickel but also very viscous and low volatility even in vacuum. The remaining material can be assumed to be similar elements such as the high level of aluminum.” He paused and looked around at the group as if at a set of favored students. “Comments?”

  “It’s a glass eye,” Steve said after a moment. “The silica melted and the heavier elements migrated to the area of, relatively, higher acceleration, the outer layers. It’s probably layered all the way down with…silica being at the center, then various metals arranged outwards like the skin of an onion. What was the mechanical composition of the nickel iron? Are we talking about big chunks of metal?”

  “Probably not,” Dr. Bell said. “The material was probably formation pellets. Small blobs of nickel iron that were left behind in the original system formation.”

  “Getting that to melt will be tricky,” Dr. Chu said. “They have more surface area to dissipate heat.”

  “Crap,” Nathan said. “Crap, crap, crap. What the hell do we do now?”

  “We can pull the nickel iron off,” Bryan said.

  “Very high viscosity you are looking at,” Dr. Chu said. “While it is feasible, I suppose, with the Paws, there will be a high energy penalty. Which translates to fuel which translates to cost.”

  “Finally somebody in this lash-up who thinks in business terms,” Tyler said, musingly. “Hmmm. If we increase the rotation, it’s going to make the nickel iron easier to pull off.”

  “Also harder to control when it separates,” Dr. Chu said. “High orbital velocities. And the tugs will have to increase the rotation. Energy penalty again.”

  “I’m really thinking this one is a bust,” Tyler said. “But I’m not willing to give up. Among other things, my recently tinkered-with brain is screaming at me about last year’s Olympics.”

  “Olympics?” Steve said. “That brings up that Chinese sprinter who got all the medals to me. Tanzania…”

  “No,” Tyler said, rubbing his forehead. “Thanks, but no. Don’t brainstorm for a second. I think…No, you were right. Chinese. Specifically, Chinese food.”

  “Which we just had,” Dr. Foster said.

  “Which uses lots of onions,” Tyler said. “Which have layers. Which can be…peeled!”

  “Peeled?” Dr. Chu said. “Ah. Fascinating. Use the beam as a knife. Peel off the outer layer of nickel iron. Catching it will still be difficult.”

  “I’m not sure if the material will come off straight or like a snake,” Tyler admitted. “I’m not even sure how thin we can cut it. But either way the Paws can be set up on its trajectory to catch it. Stop cutting then snip the strand when they have a full load. Take it to the Monkey for further processing. All the metals should be on the outside. When we spot a new one spectroscopically we’ll pre-separate that at the laser smelt. What we’ll end up with is a ball of silica which we can toss into the Sun.”

  “Highly refined silica,” Dr. Foster said. “This has been spinning in a melt condition for nearly three months. Most of the impurities are going to have been pulled out. Perfect for mirrors.”

  “Which we’d have to pay energy penalty to drop onto Earth,” Tyler said.

  “But we’re going to have other metals available,” Dr. Foster said. “Backing materials. We can make one huge fricking mirror out of this thing. All we have to do is spin it harder and get a disc. Slow it down, put some melted aluminum on the back, it will stick due to microgravity interaction and vacuum welding, and we’ve got ourselves a mirror.”

  “Ah,” Tyler said, nodding. “So maybe it’s not a bust.”

  SIX

  “Snake it is,” Tyler said.

  The three BDA mirrors they had brought out had been picked up by Paw Two and brought into alignment with the asteroid. By bringing in four more from the main BDA they created a massive mirror array. Six were arranged in a circle that concentrated the light on a small spot on the seventh. This became the cutting beam.

  The terawatts of power punched through the semi-molten nickel iron, and a thin stream of it pulled off of the asteroid in a wriggling formation. The “small” snake of nickel iron was about three meters across and two meters thick on average.

  Paw Three was set up two thousand kilometers away, practically point-blank in orbital terms, to catch the spalling nickel iron. All of it wasn’t coming off in a solid stream; the power of the laser on such a small spot was causing some of it to flash into gas. That would have been a real problem on Earth since nickel gas was highly toxic.

  It wasn’t a problem for the Paw, though. The gas followed more or less the same trajectory, and gravity gathers everything.

  “We’re getting some trajectory change on Icarus,” Dr. Bell said. “The change in mass is causing it to…wobble is the best term that comes to mind. Also a slight increase in rotation speed.”

  “Can we adjust the beam?” Tyler asked.

  “Now that the computer understands what we’re doing,” Dr. Foster said. “It’s compensating. So far. These things aren’t super-precision instruments.”

  “Quantity has a quality of its own,” Tyler said. “Solutions?”

  “Two beams,” Astro said. “As exactly opposite as we can manage. That way the mass removal is balanced.”

  “Do we have enough mirrors?” Tyler said.

  “No,” Dr. Foster said. “We don’t.”

  “We need more BDA mirrors,” Tyler said, sending a note planet-side. “If we can handle the wobble, we’ll keep on like this.”

  “And we can’t,” Dr. Foster said.

  “Crap,” Dr. Bell cursed.

  “What?” Astro asked. “Oh.”

  The material that had been snaking off of the asteroid was now wrapping onto it.

  “Readjust targeting,” Tyler snapped. “Never mind. Taking control.”

  The BDA beam retargeted on the material, cutting the snake off. What was left was a molten piece of iron that looked a good bit like a noodle writhing in vacuum as various vectors caused parts of it to go one way or another.

  “Let some of the orbital eccentricity work out of that,” Tyler said. “It’s going to miss the Two by a gigamile. I’m going to send the Paw Four to follow it. Right now it’s headed for the Sun at three hundred and eighty-six meters per second. We’ll recover it. We’ll also need to heat it from time to time to keep it molten. Okay, what did we learn?”

  “We need two sets of mirrors,” Dr. Bell said.

  “Or a thinner snake that will break instead of sticking,” Dr. Foster said.

  “We’re getting too much wobble,” Dr. Bell insisted.

  “We’re dealing with too many parameters,” Dr. Chu said. “There is too much orbital eccentricity in the satellite, which makes it harder for the computer to adjust to the wobble.”

  “We’re too far out,” Tyler said.

  “With the BDA?” Dr. Foster said. “We’re at sixty thousand meters. How close do you want to be?”

  “A couple thousand meters,” Tyler said. “Maximum. No matter how fast light is, precision is a matter of distance. With off-the-shelf satpaks we don’t have enough precision in aiming to be way back. We can’t keep up with the wobble even with FTL communications. So add we need better satpaks for the BDA and the other mirrors we’re designing. And we’re dealing with too many parameters and we need a smaller snake for the time being until we get this right. And we need another set of mirrors. For now, though, we’ll have lunch, let it melt back into a nice quiescent ball and come back and try it again. I’ll readjust the mirrors while we’re eating.”

  * * *

  “You were right,” Dr. Foster said. “We needed to be closer.”

  The BDA, from so close it was practically getting splashed, was accurate enough to maintain the snake of metal even with the minor wobble the satellite was developing.

  “And all the other ands,” Tyler said, nodding. “But closer is more precise. Also we can get the focus area of the laser tighter. Cut that snake and let’s try for a thicker one.”