“That is a—” the Glatun VP said angrily.

  Tyler held up his hand. “Granadica, not helping your case. Okay, so Granadica says that your system is an overpriced piece of crap. You say that it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread. Do we have a less invested arguer? Mr. Audler? You’re the primary human contractor.”

  Byron Audler had come up through ship design and construction. Wet ships. He’d made a smooth transition to the Constitution project, though. Tyler had practically stolen him from BAE to be the project manager on the LFD side.

  “When the question came up I did some research,” Audler said. He was middle height and heavy-set with a shock of red hair. He also apparently smoked a pipe. Or maybe he just habitually had one stuck in his mouth. “And they’re both right. The pre-separation process should work and save money in the long run. And so far, it doesn’t.”

  “We’ve gotten the bugs out,” Ujo Chit said. The Gorku project manager ruffled its back hair in exasperation. “The problem was inherent with the Mi’Wexiqey design. There were mass interactions in high-pressure cryogenic conditions we hadn’t taken into account. We’ve redesigned, and as soon as we can get the authorization, we’re going to rebuild Mi’Wexiqey to fit the new designs. We haven’t gotten that yet, so of course it’s still not working right! This is the right design.”

  “Can you build it with…I guess Granadica’s idea of what the upper separation should be and the pre-separators?” Tyler asked.

  “Yes,” Audler said. “But it’s going to add another fifteen percent to the cost. And more power usage, which is higher cost in the long run.”

  “We’ve got time to decide since none of this takes place until the upper and lower rings are done, right?”

  “Yes,” the Glatun VP said.

  “We’ll do it with both. If Gorku will provide the pre-separation system without additional surcharge,” Tyler said.

  “Impossible,” the Gorku rep snapped. “As I said, this is state of the art. We’re not just going to give it away.”

  “Yes,” Tyler said, smiling. “You are. Because right now, nobody will touch it with a ten-thousand-kilometer pipe. If it works here, others will buy the system. As I said, this will get worked out later. If Gorku doesn’t want to field test their system, we’ll do it without the pre-separator and I’ll take the hit on the upper separators which I know work. But, frankly, this will be a discussion between myself and your bosses. Thereby my Solomon act. Get to work on the rings and the skyhook, Granadica, start working on the standard separation systems. And the pre-separators will be discussed in another forum.”

  “Okay,” Audler said, nodding at the Gorku rep.

  Tyler had enough experience of Glatun at this point to pick up that the Gorku rep looked relieved. That didn’t give him great hope for the pre-separators.

  “The next question,” Tyler said. “Aware that the answer from engineers is always going to be ‘no.’ Any way to speed this up? I’d like to have it online in three years, not five. I have specific reasons.”

  “Two years cut off?” Audler said with a wince. “I really don’t think so.”

  “Possible on our end,” the Apollo mining rep said. “But we’d need more SAPL. And we’re still looking at exactly how to make a steel washer the size of Lake Washington. Nickel iron won’t cut it for this.”

  “If we’ve got the washers we can increase the spin speed with more spinners,” Granadica said. “If we double the spinners we can cut six months off the space elevator construction.”

  “We don’t have double the spinners available,” the Gorku VP said.

  “I can make them, kiddo,” Granadica said. “If you’ll cough up the permissions. I’ve already got the plans. All we need is eight more. I can do that in a day.”

  “No way,” a Gorku representative down the table said.

  “Besides,” the Apollo rep said. “There’s the problem of enough separated carbon.”

  “Carbonaceous asteroids?” Tyler said.

  “They’re not pure carbon,” one of the Glatun said. “Not pure enough by far.”

  “Okay,” Tyler said. “To speed up construction of the elevator we need: more pure carbon, eight additional spinners and a way to make giant steel washers in space. What about the pumping and separating equipment?”

  “A year’s run,” Granadica said. “If you want me to keep going with my current program. I’m devoting thirty percent of my cycles to repair and replacement. Another five percent to maintenance. That will go down a bit when I’m done with my rebuild, but that’s going to take another year at this rate. Ten percent to mirror construction. Not VLAs. Just BDAs, VSAs and VDAs. Ten percent to prototype and small ship construction. That’s fifty-five percent of my cycles. This is a lot of pumping equipment. It’s the equivalent of building a billion-ton freighter in difficulty. Take a year.”

  “Start right away,” Tyler said.

  “I’ve been working on the stuff that wasn’t being argued,” Granadica said. “Still take a year. And Gorku is insisting that their pre-separator system has to be built by their own fabbers. And since they’re backed up, they can’t even give us a start date on them.”

  “And another year and a half of installation,” Byron said. “Cut that down, some, if we have more hands and bots. But that takes—”

  “Trained people,” Tyler said, wincing. Even with many of the five billion and change people left on Earth being unemployed because of the damage done by the Horvath attacks, finding people who were willing, qualified and capable of working in space was a nightmare. Everybody needed more qualified people. “There’s some overlap, though, right?”

  “Yes,” Byron said. “Some. Quite a bit, actually. The main thing we need is the rings to get started. More spinners would be nice. I’m ready to get started on this thing!”

  “Okay,” Tyler said. “I’ve got some people to see and some calls to make. Get going on what you can get going on. I’ll see what I can scrounge up on my end.”

  * * *

  Tyler had moved to his ship for the calls. Technically, he could order Granadica to not listen and it couldn’t. The call would go into a locked memory buffer. Probably. But he didn’t want the AI having an itch it couldn’t scratch.

  He placed the call, wondering if it would pick up.

  “Tyler,” Niazgol Gorku said. “How was the meeting?”

  “So, does your pre-separator work or not?” Tyler asked.

  “Oh, Gol,” Gorku said. “Are they trying to foist that piece of fleck on you?”

  “I take it that’s a no,” Tyler said.

  “My chief engineering officer insists it works,” Gorku said. “And he has some arguments. It would be great if it worked. So far, no joy.”

  “So I pitched you sell it to us for cheap,” Tyler said. “If they can get it to work, great. Then you can point to Wolf and say ‘It works!’ There’s something about the new design having to be installed initially or something. But to make sure, I’m going to have to put in a normal separator system. So I can’t take the hit on the newfangled system and the old one.”

  “Sounds like a fair compromise,” Gorku said. “I’m not willing to take a hit, though. I’ll give it to you at cost. That will be slightly higher than without it but not the full price.”

  “Hey, you’re an investor,” Tyler said. “Do the math and see if it works.”

  “I’ll do that,” Gorku said.

  “What’s the word on the home front?” Tyler asked.

  “The Benefactor rep on the Multilateral Talks is an idiot,” Gorku said.

  The Multilateral Talks were an outgrowth of the Glatun release of the border systems with the Rangora. With that crack, every major polity in the area had poured in wanting to trade systems.

  Humans were only allowed an observer. The Horvath were sitting at the table.

  “They’re going to give up E Eridani to the Horvath,” Tyler said, grimacing. It was their only contact lane with the Glatun and the rest of the galaxy.

  “The requirement is that all ships be given free passage,” Gorku said bitterly.

  “Like that’s going to happen,” Tyler said. “So much for human freighters plying the space lanes. Oh, on that note, I need permissions for Granadica to produce some of your proprietary spinners and all your proprietary mining stuff.”

  “That…would be a hard sell,” Gorku said.

  “We’ll cut you half the profits you’d normally make,” Tyler said. “And you don’t have to take up time on your already overworked fabbers. Also if the Horvath put us under an embargo we can do everything on this end.”

  “Seventy-five percent. And your point on the fabbers is good. We were tapped out on time.”

  “Done,” Tyler said. “Keep in mind that we’re probably going to need release at some point on everything. If worse comes to worst.”

  “I’m putting pressure on the Council to do releases of military equipment,” Gorku said. “But on commercial releases I have to deal with the board. They’re worse.”

  “Tell me about it,” Tyler said. “Okay, nice talking to you.”

  “I’ve got to go, too,” Gorku said. “Good luck.”

  “We make our own.”

  SEVEN

  “So what eeevil inventions are we dreaming up today?” Tyler asked, rubbing his hands together in glee. “Bu-wah-hah-hah-hah-hah!”

  Dealing with bitchy AIs and vice presidents was work. Visiting the Night Wolves was how he paid himself for it.

  Night Wolves was, technically, the Granadica Design and Prototyping Center. Fourteen Terran engineers and draftsmen had been shipped off to live on Granadica on a more or less permanent assignment. Their job was to prototype systems. All sorts of systems. But mostly those with a military bent.

  The idea was to make systems that were a combination of Terran and Glatun technology. As much as possible, things that could be produced on Earth, or at least by humans, for what was shaping up to be a big war.

  One of the problems was that the Glatun didn’t want anyone to have ships as good as theirs. They were superior in three ways—armor, speed and firepower—which pretty much defined “superior” in a warship. The armor was a matrix of fullerene and “other substances” that was impossible to duplicate without the codes for the fabbers. Glatun warships could maneuver at over four hundred gravities. Commercial systems were relegated to ten gravities of inertial control. And they sported five-hundred-terawatt gamma ray lasers as their main armament. None of the systems humans had access to could produce more than a five-megawatt laser.

  The Night Wolves’ main mission, which was only discussed when Granadica couldn’t listen, was to design around the lock-outs.

  “Oh, nothing we work on here is evil, Mr. Vernon,” Kelly Ketterman said, smiling. Kelly was the managing design chief for the Night Wolves, a large title for a very short, even elfin, blonde. “All of it has purely commercial or emergency purposes that are for the betterment of all mankind.”

  “Your mission statement in a nutshell,” Tyler said. “And what have you created?”

  “The first item is a new, improved VDA mirror,” Kelly said, bringing up a schematic. “It is lighter, stronger, more accurate and has better heat transmission. All of the materials, including now the superconductor, are producible by human manufacture. Granadica’s main contribution was in bringing in some engineering we didn’t previously have access to and building the prototype.”

  “You’re welcome,” Granadica said. “This is the sort of thing I enjoy!”

  “We’re working on an upgraded system,” Kelly said. “For…extreme mining. We’re hoping that it will take up to one hundred times the amount of energy of a VDA.”

  “Ung,” Tyler said, grunting.

  “Yes, that’s what we said,” Kelly said, dimpling. “If it works, it is going to be great for mining.”

  “Uh, yeah,” Tyler said. “Great.”

  “The first ship design is an emergency response shuttle,” Kelly said, bringing up a picture of what looked very much like a rectangular box with some jet engines on it. “The prototype is complete and works very well. The ERS has a crew of two and can carry up to thirty-eight personnel or eighteen casualties. The forward assembly consists of four magnetic grapnels, a bivalve ramp system that works to prevent damage to the air lock or for deployment or rescue on land, and a multiconnector expansion air lock. If there is no standard air lock available, the MEA permits the ERS to dock directly to a distressed ship’s hull so that rescuers can cut into it to rescue stranded personnel. The ERS has two external mounts for searchlights that can generate up to five terawatts of raw light for searching.”

  “I thought that was a bit much,” Granadica said. “But that was the specification. I wouldn’t want to be looking into a five terawatt light, that’s for sure.”

  “Nor would I,” Kelly said. “The ERS has twenty gravities of acceleration so it can move in and out of orbit rapidly. This, of course, would place some strain on passengers, so there are conformal seats that can be moved in and out. So it can either be an open box for carrying emergency supplies or, with the acceleration couches, a very fast rescue ship. The ERS can operate for up to seventy hours on its own at a cruising acceleration of five gravities and has bunks and support facilities onboard for the two-member crew. Thus, a single ERS can cruise out to Neptune orbit and back on onboard fuel. Just in case we have a ship stranded out by Neptune. At maximum drive it exhausts onboard fuel in about ten hours.”

  “I can think of thousands of purposes for that,” Tyler said. “Wish we’d had a bunch of them during the plagues. We probably ought to make…”

  “Lots,” Kelly said. “We already have a contract from the USSN for three hundred.”

  “Thank you, Granadica. And my stockholders thank you as well.”

  “You’re welcome, Mr. Vernon.”

  “Most of the portions of the ERS are being made by subcontractors,” Kelly continued. “Final assembly takes place here, and there are certain components Granadica can just make better, faster and cheaper. Essentially, we’re feeding her components and Granadica puts out the finished product.”

  “Any problems with integration?” Tyler asked.

  “Not integration,” Granadica answered. “Quality control, yes.”

  “We think we’ve fixed that issue by a change of providers,” Kelly said. “And, unfortunately, we still have to pull most manufactured equipment out of the gravity well on Earth.”

  “Earth’s a bad enough target,” Tyler said. “I don’t think I want to build any space factories. Not in the Sol System.”

  “The problem remains,” Kelly said. “And we simply don’t have enough space-capable shipping. Granadica, Night Wolves and Apollo mining, therefore, reinvented an old idea.”

  “Liberty ships?” Tyler asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Kelly said, frowning.

  “I was going to ask about those,” Tyler said. “It was on my mind. Continue.”

  “When Apollo mines most asteroids, there is, unfortunately, a good bit left over,” Kelly said. “Mostly silica.”

  “We’re using a good bit of that in the Sol System on the VLA,” Tyler said. “They’re doing silica mirrors with a thin nickel or aluminum backing.”

  “Yes, sir, they’re doing the same design here,” Kelly said. “They still make more melted silica than they can use. Together with some Apollo engineers we came up with this.”

  The picture looked like a Mason jar with a robot spider on one end.

  “The hull is mostly silica,” Kelly said. “We’ve set up a production facility that turns those out in large quantities. Then a lift and drive engine is installed that has a low but sufficient drive. Specifically, two gravities of acceleration with a full one-hundred-thousand-ton load. Higher empty. Maximum acceleration empty is ten gravities, since that is the maximum inertial control available to us. The bottleneck is the lift and drive systems. We’re having most of the raw equipment built on Earth, again, and assembling it here.”

  “Silica…is not a good structural material,” Tyler said. “Glass hulls?”

  “Not entirely silica,” Kelly said, smiling. “They have wound-in carbon nanotube. That’s another bottleneck, but Granadica made a fabber that produces carbon nanotube winding in good quantity.”

  “It’s basically an old-fashioned version of the Gorku spinners,” Granadica said. “And mine can handle anything that’s got carbon in it. Apollo broke up a carbonaceous asteroid and we’re turning out more nanotube than you can believe. We’ve been gluing it on the outside of the shuttles, since if you figure in a space disaster, there’s probably a lot of debris flying around.”

  “We don’t have people to run them, unfortunately,” Tyler said, sighing.

  “They don’t take much,” Granadica said. “Three watch crew, three engineering and a few support. They’ve got their own gravitic loading and unloading system. Send us some personnel and we’ll have so many ships going back and forth between here and Sol you won’t believe it.”

  “Alas, we still don’t have the trade,” Tyler said. “But we will. This is great, but it’s got to be looked at as a prototype for now. I’ll get some people working on crews, though. We do need to get the components moving back and forth. It can lift out of the grav well?”

  “Easily,” Kelly said. “The hulls have the added benefit of being convertible to helium-three tankers with some minor modifications. We’ve also looked at modifications for…in-space repair and support ships.”

  She carefully had not said “Fleet colliers.”

  “Well, we still don’t have much in the way of ships that need support,” Tyler said. “Anything else?”