“This does not look like a test-bed for a shuttle, Steve,” Tyler said angrily. “This is a test-bed for a space fighter!”

  “All the basic design parameters are the same,” Steve said. “We’re still figuring out how to make anything. Fighter, shuttle, it’s all the same basic problems.”

  “Let me guess which department of the government paid in?” Tyler said, walking to the front of the bird. “I thought so. This thing isn’t even a ship. It’s a ship wrapped around a gun, Steve! I suppose Dr. Givens figured out just enough about gravitic interactions to make a grav drive, didn’t she?”

  “God damnit, Tyler,” Steve said. “Yes, so it’s a God damned fighter! And, yes, so we got money from the Air Force. And the Navy and DARPA. What we’re learning from it will not only make it possible for us to build you ships, it might just save our damned lives! The Horvath haven’t forgotten that stunt you pulled and you’re still pissing them off.”

  “Okay, point one,” Tyler said. “I invested three billion dollars in this project on the promise that Boeing would do its level best to build me a shuttle. Something to carry cargo from ground to orbit. How much did the U.S. government invest? A billion?”

  “I don’t know,” Steve said, shrugging. “From what I’ve heard…less.”

  “So Boeing goes and stiffs me on what I asked for to help out their pals that might buy more toys from them later?” Tyler said. “Point two. All the stuff you said, right back at you. If they’d gone and given me what I asked for, they could then upscale it to a space fighter. Instead, they went for what should, arguably, be harder. Building their friends in the Air Force a fighter instead of their customer, you know, me, a simple damned shuttle. And then they left you to explain it? Did you even whisper that you had issues with that, Steve?”

  “I’ve been doing more than whispering,” Steve said. “I said you’d hit the roof and probably pull out of the project.”

  “And now,” Tyler said, red-faced. “Now after they stiff me they want me to buy implants for pilots? For the Air Force’s God damned space fighter? Oh, hell no. No God damned way! Screw Boeing and screw the Air Force and the Navy and every other branch of the U.S. government! This crap is just raw!”

  “Is that your final answer, seriously?” Steve said.

  “Yeah, Steve,” Tyler said, walking to the door. “That’s my final answer. This thing is a hangar queen until the U.S. government is willing to pony up the money for implants. Because I’m out of this project.”

  “And what about the Horvath?” Steve asked, quietly. “You just going to let them crater our cities whenever they feel like it?”

  “Steve,” Tyler said, stopped by the door because, among other things, he didn’t have a pass card. “I can put at least twenty terawatts on target. From the numbers I’ve run, I still can’t take down the shield on that Horvath ship. So tell me how a pissy little grav gun that is going to accelerate, what? Ninety-kilo bricks of depleted uranium? At maybe a hundred g? Is going to take out those shields. No way, no how. Even in a closing approach, you’re talking about less than a megajoule.”

  “There are a few things we’ve learned,” Steve said.

  “You can breach their shields?” Tyler asked, turning around.

  “This isn’t a place to be talking about this,” Steve said. “And you are definitely not cleared for that.”

  “Even if you can,” Tyler said, shrugging. “That gun’s a pop-gun. The Horvath ship is armored and fracking huge. You’d be fighting a bison with a BB gun.”

  “Not. Cleared.”

  “Then I’m Not. Involved,” Tyler said. “So could you please escort me back to my car so I can go scream at lawyers? Because as I understand it some of the last payments haven’t been made. And they’re not going to be.”

  NINE

  “How did it go?” Gnad said nervously.

  “Exactly as I predicted,” Steve said. “Despite my absolute best efforts to spin it properly, he hit the roof. He’s out of the partnership.”

  “That would be…hard to do,” the vice president said.

  “No, it’s not,” Steve said. “All he has to do is point to the design parameters and then to the ship. Not to mention simply withhold all future support. As I stated when I came onboard this operation and saw both the contract and what you were actually doing. That is not a test-bed for a shuttle and that was clear from the beginning. And he made the same point that I made, which is that a shuttle would have probably been easier to do and actually what the primary partner, and primary potential customer, asked for. Boeing screwed its commercial customer, which was a huge market, to keep its military customers, which will not be a huge market, happy. Furthermore, you screwed Tyler Vernon, the guy who stared down the Horvath over maple syrup. And you screwed him on a three billion dollar deal. Even for Tyler, that’s got to hurt.”

  “You keep saying ‘you,’” Dr. Givens said.

  “Which is the other part,” Steve said, handing Gnad a piece of paper. “My resignation. I didn’t start this abortion, I tried to stop it and I nearly got killed and just pissed off a guy I like and admire by failing to fix it. Maybe if I grovel, I can still get a job on one of the garbage scows he’s going to buy from the Glatun since he can’t trust Boeing. Or, by extension, any other aeronautics or military contractor. So I’m out of here. See ya.”

  “You have a lot of out-brief to do,” Gnad said angrily.

  “Funny, that,” Steve said, pausing at the door. “If you get laid off, security can have you on the street in three minutes. In case you hadn’t noticed, I took all my personal effects home the first day I saw that piece of junk you call a space fighter. As I said: Seeeee ya.”

  * * *

  “And sell all my Boeing stock…” Tyler snarled as he took a corner. “I know you’re not my broker. Tell my broker to call me. Every last bit…! What do you mean the SEC won’t like it? The hell with the— Fine. Do the press release, then sell the stock. I bought it high, because the partnership had been announced, and I’ll be selling it low, because everybody is going to bail, but what the hell. Compared to the three billion dollars I just pissed down the drain…I’ll call you back, I’ve got another call coming in. Hello?”

  “Tyler, Steve,” Steve commed. “What’s your twenty?”

  “Getting out of this burg as fast as humanly possible,” Tyler said. “And you’re not high on my list of people I want to talk to right now, Steve. Maybe in a month or two. Year.”

  “I quit.”

  “Bully for you.”

  “As such, I no longer consider myself bound by certain nondisclosure agreements,” Steve said. “Although I am still bound by USC 18. But I’d like to talk. Seriously.”

  Tyler consulted his plant, then just pulled over.

  “Bar called O’Malley’s on Fifteenth Street,” Tyler said. “You got wheels?”

  “I’ve got wheels.”

  “Good. You may be driving. I need a drink.”

  * * *

  Tyler was at the bar sipping on a highball when Steve walked in. He was also smoking a cigarette, very much against city and state regulations.

  “I thought smoking was illegal in bars,” Steve said, sitting down. “Rum and coke.”

  “Sissy drink,” Tyler said. “I bought the bar. Then I told everybody the smoking lamp was lit and I’d pay the fines. That’s all they do, fine you. Well, if you keep it up they close you down. Just another pussy ass regulation designed to prove who’s the man.”

  “You’re really exercised,” Steve said. “About which I totally agree. I know, pointed memos are not what you want to hear right now, but I knew when I signed on at Boeing what you wanted. When I saw what they’d created, I asked to see the contract. After much hemming and hawing finally I told them I’d call you and ask you what the contract said. And when I saw it I started pumping out memos and e-mails more or less saying that what was going to happen was…”

  “Exactly what happened,” Tyler said, stubbing out the Marlboro and lighting another.

  “I didn’t even know you smoked.”

  “Quit ten years ago,” Tyler said, coughing at the inhale. “When my first child was born. A child I haven’t seen in three months. You know what really pisses me off? What really honks my horn?”

  “What?” Steve said, sipping his rum and coke. The bartender had been generous with the rum.

  “The reason I haven’t seen that child, whom I most dearly love, is that since this started I have been focused like a BDA beam on one thing and one thing only. You know what that is?”

  “Money?” Steve asked.

  “Bite your tongue,” Tyler said. “Money is only ever a means to an end for anyone but a miser. Steve, I don’t have a wife, I don’t have a girlfriend, I never see my kids and I’ve forgotten what the word vacation means. I’m going to a fundraiser at the Smithsonian in two days and I’m having to hire an escort so I have a date! Because I’ve been focused like a laser on getting the God damned Horvath out of our skies. Period. Dot. Earth owning our own orbitals. Totally hold the gate? Maybe, maybe not. But I’m…Okay, humanity is going to own our skies. Not the damned Horvath. And those clowns go and skip right past steps two, three…seven? And make a damned space fighter?”

  “Might want to keep it down,” Steve said. “You’re under USC 18 too, you know.”

  “Press release is going out stating exactly their contractual failure,” Tyler said. “Already talked with my lawyer about it. He didn’t like it but he doesn’t like most of what I do.”

  “Crap,” Steve said. “They are going to crucify you, you know.”

  “Fat chance,” Tyler said. “If they crucify me, they also lose the power plant and the fabber.”

  “So you’re letting them keep those?” Steve said.

  “Yeah,” Tyler said. “Two reasons. One, they might get the POS to work if the government horks up some of my tax dollars. Two, it’s leverage. Decide to get stuffy about the rest of the stuff I’m going to throw at Boeing and the government and there goes that lovely fabber and the power plant. I’m going to make it clear through back channels, though, that the minute they start ‘defraying their costs’ by using the power plant to power the grid I’m taking it back. I can make my own money that way. And then use it for something that has a purpose.”

  “Ty,” Steve said. “If you don’t tell people your plans they can’t follow along.”

  “They don’t follow along anyway,” Tyler said. “Most of them do their level best to piss in your well just to piss in your well. And they can never think big. Space fighter? Space fighter? That’s what really pisses me off! A dinky little space fighter? They have no fracking clue how badly they just screwed up.”

  “Well, if you’re going public they’ll probably put the Star Fury on display,” Steve said, shrugging. “War by public opinion.”

  “Star Fury?” Tyler said, laughing. “Oh, my God. What nimrod came up with that name? It just reeks of bad SF. Why not call it an X-wing or something?”

  “I guess they figured Lucas would have issues,” Steve said.

  “Yeah,” Tyler said. “Because I already talked to him. One codicil of the contract was if they had a working system I got to name it. So they’re in violation again! And I told him that maybe we were going to have a small shuttle soon and if we did I wanted to name it the Millennium Falcon. And he geeked for a ride for him and his kids on one of the Paws. Don’t care for his politics but he really is an SF geek.”

  “So what are your plans?” Steve asked.

  “Ain’t tellin’,” Tyler said drunkenly. “Can’t make me. Don’t know if it’s gonna work, and if it doesn’t, that way I don’t end up looking stupid.”

  “Makes sense,” Steve said.

  “I’ve gotta catch a plane for D.C.,” Tyler said, standing up and then swaying. “Or maybe I should catch a cab instead.”

  “You’re flying commercial?” Steve asked.

  “If it’s reasonably convenient I fly commercial,” Tyler said, shrugging. “But right now I don’t think it’s going to be convenient. I’ll call my plane. Fly out tomorrow.”

  “Let’s go get some food in you,” Steve said, dragging Tyler to his feet.

  “I got stuff to do,” Tyler said, trying to pull away. “I’ve gotta get some ships from the Glatun an’ some pilots…Hey, wanna job?”

  “Ask me when you’re sober,” Steve said, managing to get him to the door. “Hey, you said you’re going to be in D.C. next week?”

  “Last time I checked,” Tyler said. “See ya, guys!”

  “Aren’t the Horvath coming around for their tribute, like, next week?”

  “Not that soon,” Tyler said. “When the Horvath come around, I am in an undisclosed location. I call it…the Laaaair.”

  “The Lair?” Steve said, laughing.

  “Hey, every Evil Overlord has to have a lair,” Tyler said. “I couldn’t find a volcano next to a piranha pit but it’s close…”

  TEN

  “And we have gate emergence.” That was becoming common enough that it wasn’t a big deal. This time, though, there was a bit higher alert level. “Emissions for a Horvath cruiser.”

  The colonel in charge of the Space Command CIC spun around in his chair and brought up the data. Space Command, at this point, had radar telescope data, ground-based and airborne imaging, and there was talk of a radar satellite in the works. And none of it beat a civilian system. Which was kind of annoying when you got right down to it.

  “See if we can get VLA imaging.”

  * * *

  “That’s a pretty nice image,” Steve said. “VLA?”

  The Lair was in a mine. It was located in New Hampshire, part of the mega land grab Tyler had gone on with his first maple syrup money. During the Maple Syrup War it was one of the several mines Tyler had hidden in to escape the wrath of the Horvath.

  After the war he had a road driven in, a small house built and the lower parts of the old copper mine drained and refitted as an underground command post. With hypercom links and an engineering, administration and maintenance staff, it was as easy to run his far-flung enterprises from the Lair as from the main offices in Boston. It had a very military feel, though, because most of the gear in it was off-the-shelf command, communications, computers and intelligence gear. The facilities manager was a former colonel.

  The main command center, which was where Tyler and Steve were watching the arriving Horvath ship, had a two-story wall of plasma screens, which were set to not only the view of the ship, but schematics of most of the space projects Tyler had ongoing, business channels and news services.

  “Yep,” Tyler said. “The Horvath really don’t like the VLA but they’re not sure what to do about it. It’s so spread out that it’s hard to hit. Now that we’re working on Connie we’ve got stuff that gets closer to the gate. Last time they potted one of the BDA mirrors. Fortunately, Connie is well away from the gate this time. I keep waiting for them to run down the Monkey Business and demand all the heavy metals it’s carrying. Which is why I trade them monthly to the Glatun. Ooo…Check this out. Colonel, taking over the upper left quad.”

  “Your system, sir,” the retired air force officer said.

  Tyler commed a command and a three-dimensional representation of the solar system came up on four of the plasma screens. On it were large red and yellow lines.

  “You can rotate and zoom,” Tyler said.

  “The SAPL?” Steve asked.

  “The same. We retrans this to Space Command so that people know where not to navigate. And we move it around if it seems to be endangering one of NASA’s probes. Or anybody else’s, obviously.”

  Leading from the VLA, which was marked in orange, lines in red went upwards above the plane of the ecliptic and led out to more orange areas near the orbit of Mars, then down into the plane to terminate where, presumably, the work was being done on Connie. However, there were smaller lines dotted around the inner system.

  “What are those?” Steve asked, zooming in. He found he could move all the way in to icons of other asteroids, and even one comet receiving the tender attentions of the SAPL.

  “We can’t get the full weight of the VLA onto one spot until we get a good, functioning VSA mirror,” Tyler said, shrugging. “So we’re heating up other asteroids to work on later. This one…” Tyler said, taking over control and changing targets. “This is the glass pile from Icarus. I’m going to take another shot at turning it into a mirror. Until I have a better use for silica, that’s what we’re using it all for.”

  Steve paid some attention to the numbers and realized they were orbital and temperature data.

  “It’s melted,” Steve said.

  “We’re working to get the impurities out using just the heat,” Tyler said. “The silica is denser than the impurities, so they’re slowly migrating to the outside since it has very little spin. Then we hit it with heavy power and burn some off, let it percolate, hit it again. It’s really just an experiment to see what we can do without using any other systems. Like, you know, spacecraft of which I still only have five. But I’ve got a bid out on some more tugs as Paws for the Monkey Business and it turns out the Rangora make ships cheaper than the Glatun. So I may be getting one from them. Problem is, they’re harder to run and convert to human use. Heavier internal gravity, higher atmosphere and, well, the crew quarters are sort of oversized.”

  “Nathan would approve,” Steve said, grinning.

  “And I may just put him in as mission commander,” Tyler said. “I need people! But the fact that Boeing, a major international conglomerate, has a hard time paying for implants shows just how hard it is. Even the Rangora ship needs people with plants. There’s too much involved in control to use a regular computer interface. And we’re so far behind the power curve on tech that it’s not like we can make them. I was hoping that we could make something in the way of ships soon. Ships that humans without plants could use, so we could make more money, so we could get more people with plants and all the other stuff we can’t produce.”

  “Frustrated much?” Steve asked.