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CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

“I don’t like it,” Alan Tolmach growled.

“I misremember the last thing you did like,” Cormag Dewar retorted with an edge of genuine exasperation. “Damn it, this is a win-win!”

“Says you,” Tolmach retorted.

“What’s the downside?” Dewar demanded, throwing both hands in the air. “We get a huge upgrade in our defenses, and every penny of it’s paid by the federal government. How could that possibly be a bad thing?”

“And when was the last time the Feds paid an ‘unauthorized expenditure’ this damned big?” Tolmach shot back. “I’ll tell you when it was—never! You do remember how they charged us for the missiles we used defending ourselves ten years ago, I presume.”

“But those missiles were expropriated by the New Dublin System Government,” Dewar pointed out. “They could argue that we lacked the legal authority to do that. It was a bean-counter, dipshit argument, but it was legally valid, damn their eyes. Murphy, as Governor, is signing off on everything he’s planning on spending, though. He’s got the legal authority to authorize emergency expenditures, and we’re not the ones stepping out of line like bad little peasants to do it in defiance of our system governor. They can take it up with him if they want, when he gets home, but we’re covered.”

“Assuming they pay any damned attention to their own damned laws,” Tolmach grumbled. “They’re not so very good about that, either, you know, unless it suits their purposes.”

“No, but we are on very solid legal ground, and if they’re too blatant about it—especially when we can point out that one of their own precious Five Hundred signed off on the order—it’s going to cost them big time in the Fringe. I know they’re not so very worried about Fringe opinion, most times. But this close after what happened to Inverness?” He shook his head. “Not now.”

“Then they’ll just bide their time. They’ve the memory of an elephant and the disposition of a shark—Old Earth or Crann Bethadh, take your choice! They’ll wait a few years, and then they’ll find some way to screw all this money—hell, we’re talking about an entire year or two of our system budget!—back out of us.”

“First, we have to survive long enough for them to do that. I don’t know about you, but I’m thinking that’s my first priority at the moment. Second—” Dewar’s tone dropped and he looked at Tolmach very levelly “—I’m not so very sure they’ll have years to wait. Of course, you’ll probably know about that even better than me.”

The office was silent for several seconds, then Tolmach snorted.

“I’ll not know until I’ve had the chance to discuss it with the other sector chiefs, but it might be you’re not so very wrong about that. Whippersnapper.”

“Well then?” Dewar sat back, raising cupped palms in front of him.

“If I’m honest, part of me is worried the damned Hearts will be more likely to think of themselves as a hammer and us a nail—or a walnut—if we build what he’s asking for. There’s a reason we’re not authorized that kind of capacity.”

“Still covered,” Dewar said. “I hadn’t really thought about it until Murphy pointed it out, but those new-gen printers they installed in the yards are perfectly capable of printing out missiles and drones. So if he’s willing to authorize the man-hours, and he’s willing to sign off on the raw materials we’ll need, there’s no reason we can’t build what he wants us to build. Not in the numbers he’d like to have, mind you. Not enough printers and not enough time for that, most likely. But one hell of a lot more of them than the Leaguies are going to expect.”

“And the fact that we’ve done it will suggest to the Hearts that we can go on doing it,” Tolmach said. “That’s what I’m worried about, truth be told.”

“We can’t control what they decide to do, Alan,” Dewar said seriously. “We know that. We can nudge things, push things, and hope like hell. But if the damned Heart Worlds have proved one thing, it’s that they’ll do whatever the hell they want to do and screw the rest of us.” He shrugged. “First, I want my family—including you, you curmudgeonly old bastard—to survive. Secondly, I know I can’t control the Hearts, so I’m not even going to try. And, third,” he bared his teeth, “if they do decide to come the ugly, I want all the missiles I can find to fire at the bastards before we go down.”

“You don’t think Murphy hasn’t thought the same thoughts?” Tolmach asked cynically. “He has to be making his own plans to keep us from being naughty boys and girls.”

“Oh, I’m sure he is.” Dewar showed his teeth again. “And damn all good it will do him in the end.”

* * *

Murphy clasped his hands behind his back as he stood on an observation deck in Goibniu Alpha’s spin section and gazed down through the vast expanse of its thick, tough crystoplast floor across the processing station’s drone farm. The spin section was eight hundred meters in diameter and completed a slow, majestic rotation every ninety seconds or so, producing a comfortable one gravity.

Someone who’d never experienced it before probably would have felt a few qualms about standing on a perfectly clear floor, looking “down” into the endless depths of space while the centripetal acceleration made them feel as if they were plunging into it. Most people could adapt to it—eventually—but some, like Simron, never did. That was one reason floors like this were normally made of smart crystoplast that could be turned opaque with the touch of a screen.

Unlike his wife, however, it had never been a problem for Murphy. In that respect, at least, he and his father-in-law were very much alike…which irritated his wife immensely. At the moment, he and O’Hanraghty wore reinforced vac suits—industrial models, not Navy combat gear. Ian Markel stood with them in a suit which was pitted and considerably older.

“Anything new on our arrival?” the admiral asked his chief of staff.

“No, Sir. Just the one Fasset signature, though, so I doubt it’s the League. Be another—” O’Hanraghty checked his chrono “—sixteen minutes before we get any light-speed info to confirm that one way or the other.” He shrugged. “Lowe and Mirwani are on it, and whoever it is, he’s still at least seven hours out. Plenty of time for Mr. Markel’s demonstration.”

“Good enough.” Murphy nodded and turned to their host. “The view’s already impressive, Mr. Markel. I’m looking forward to being even more impressed.”

“We strive to please, Governor,” Markel assured him.

Goibniu Alpha held geostationary orbit above New Dublin Extraction’s Goibniu Three base on the planet’s scorching surface, and an outsized hologram to one side showed an overhead of the mining station’s protective domes and automated ore extraction platforms. As Murphy watched the holo, four hatches on the dust-caked carapace of one of the platforms—a massive sealed disk a good seven hundred meters in diameter and designed to be deployed to new locations by counter-grav tenders—opened. A quartet of counter-grav drones, each about half the size of a standard cargo shuttle, arced upward. Once they’d risen far enough to clear the platform, fusion thrusters lit off in a blinding bubble of hell-bright brilliance and they streaked toward Goibniu Alpha.

“Spectacular,” Murphy said, watching the drones speed higher. “Don’t often see active fusion drives in atmosphere.”

“The counter-grav simplifies things within the planetary gravity well, but once you hit the hard ceiling where it can’t provide any more lift, you need something…more energetic. And since nobody lives on Goibniu—outside the domes, that is—the System High Court ruled that the usual regulations don’t apply. I can show you—”

“That was an observation, not an accusation,” Murphy said soothingly. “Please continue with your description of your operation here.”

He waved a hand at the holo of the extraction platform which had spawned the drones.

“That platform’s named Sheila,” Markel said. “Not the oldest. Not the newest. But she can extract three hundred thousand tons of ore a month. Right now, she’s working four shafts at between seventy-five and a hundred meters. Goibniu Three’s particularly high in platiniridium and the orebody measures four kilometers by three-point-seven kilometers—you can see two more platforms working it, there and…there.” He used a handheld unit to highlight Sheila’s sisters. “It’s also three hundred sixty meters deep, and survey says it’s about three hundred fifty million tons of ore, graded at almost twenty-two grams per ton of platinum group metals. We’ve mapped out seven additional orebodies, some of them even larger but none quite as rich as Three, so we’ve concentrated half our platforms here. The three of them, combined, are capable of processing just over nine hundred thousand tons a month, so that comes to—”

“Just under two hundred and forty tons of platinum group a year,” O’Hanraghty said.

“Theoretically,” Markel said with a grimace. “That’s why I want to put smelting plants here in Goibniu orbit. By the time we ship the ore all the way back to Crann Bethadh and it gets run through those antiquated platforms, the production queue’s so long and so complicated that Goibniu Three’s running at only about sixty percent of capability. If we could cut the transport time, and increase efficiency in—”

“Why aren’t there already smelters here?” O’Hanraghty asked innocently, and Markel turned away to glower at the drone farm as the planetary drones decelerated toward the space station.

“FARP,” he growled, and Murphy nodded.

The Fringe Assisted Revenue Program, passed during the third year of the war, had been intended to bolster the production of strategic resources in the Fringe. It had become a casualty of direct military wartime spending—in other words, Heart World corporations had succeeded in diverting its funding to more “critical” needs—decades ago, but before it had been…redirected, it had actually generated quite a bit of the Fringe-based industry it had been designed to foster. Especially in extractive industries, like New Dublin’s mines and Inverness’s gas refineries.

One of FARP’s provisions, however, had been that FARP-financed facilities must, as far as possible, be co-located with any given star system’s inhabited world. The intention was to place all of the system’s critical targets in the same volume of space in order to reduce the volume which must be defended and facilitate their protection. Exceptions to the provision could be made, but rarely were. Or, rather, rarely had been when FARP had still been a viable program.

“So the administrators were willing to help finance Goibniu-based extraction facilities, but not refining facilities,” the admiral murmured.

“Exactly.” Markel shook his head in disgust. “We pointed out to them at the time that transporting un-smelted ore seven light-minutes—at opposition!—would be a huge bottleneck, but they weren’t interested. Typical Heart stup—”

He broke off abruptly, flushing, and Murphy chuckled.

“I’m quite familiar with how Heart Worlders are regarded in the Fringe, Mr. Markel. And just between the two of us, we probably deserve it more often than not. Actually, I’m impressed you’re managing to operate at sixty percent efficiency down there.”

“We couldn’t without the deep-space drones,” Markel told him, obviously both surprised and relieved by his reaction.

“I realize that.” Murphy nodded again. “I don’t think I’ve seen the same approach anywhere else.”

“No, you haven’t, I’m pretty sure,” Markel said with a slightly complacent smile. “My Uncle Liam served his compulsory hitch in the Navy and got out about the time the Hauptman-drive drones came online. He’s the one who pointed out that all the old Mark Thirty-Seven launchers had just become completely obsolete.”

Murphy glanced at O’Hanraghty’s profile. The chief of staff’s lips were pursed as he gazed out through the crystoplast, and his expression gave no indication of how intently he was actually listening to the conversation.

Anti-ship missiles and counter-missiles were both powered by Hauptman coils, which no one had yet figured out how to apply to manned vehicles. The Hauptman drive could produce over three thousand gravities, but mere protoplasm couldn’t survive a fraction of that acceleration. Then there was the minor fact that an active coil poured out a flood of lethal radiation. Missiles didn’t really care about that, though, which made it ideal for them. It had taken quite some time to produce a Hauptman coil that could (a) be turned on and off again once it was initially activated and (b) didn’t burn itself out after a maximum of no more than fifteen or twenty minutes. As a result, shipboard reconnaissance, electronic warfare, and missile-defense drones had been forced to rely on the same sorts of fusion drives manned ships did. They’d been slow, compared to missiles and Fasset drives, and relatively short ranged, but their acceleration rates had still dwarfed that of any manned sublight craft and they’d had the endurance and flexibility to make themselves useful.

Getting them deployed far enough out quickly under emergency conditions had loomed large in the tactical analysts’ thinking, however, and the answer had been the Mark 37 drone launcher—an unusually large-bore mag driver capable of ejecting a drone with an initial velocity of 40,000 meters per second, which was actually ten percent higher than that of a broadside K-gun. But fusion-powered drones had been enormous, far bigger than manned fighters and over three times the size of an antiship missile. The energy costs of launching something that size at that velocity had been high and the recoil forces had been brutal. That was why the Mark 37s had been installed aboard FTLCs, not sublight units. The big carriers had sufficient volume to accommodate the launchers, enough mass to absorb the recoil, the power budget to feed their voracious appetite, and the effectively unlimited acceleration to maintain vector despite the recoil, although even something Ishtar’s size had heaved like an old wet-navy battleship firing a full broadside with each launch. The newer Hauptman-drive drones, on the other hand, required no mag drivers. They were fitted to almost every class of ship, and even the FTLCs had happily used the volume the Mark 37s had consumed for other purposes.

And all of those unneeded launchers had had to go somewhere.

“We had to redesign the deep-space drones, but they’re local-build here in the yards,” Markel continued. “They’ve only got about two-thirds the capacity of a standard deep-space ore pod, but operating expenses are barely a quarter of the conventional pod’s. Took just over a month for the first-generation to make the trip to Crann Bethadh, even at opposition, but put enough of them into the pipeline, and you had a continuous flow. Then one of my techs had another brilliant idea. He—”

Markel broke off and nodded out through the crystoplast as warning lights flashed.

“Coming up on a launch, Governor,” he said.

Murphy couldn’t see anyone out in the drone farm, but he was very much in favor of those lights. Getting in the way of something like this would be a…career-ending event.

A digital timer ticked downward in one corner of the hologram, and then even the massive bulk of Goibniu Alpha, at least five times the mass of Ishtar, quivered underfoot as a trio of cargo drones erupted from the converted Mark 37s far too quickly for the human eye to follow. Alpha was fitted with a relatively low-powered civilian-grade Fasset drive at the end of an extraordinarily long central spindle to adjust and maintain its orbit in the wake of such launches, although it could—theoretically, at least—have been used to move the entire station across the star system, if there’d been any reason to.

“Don’t really need the full initial velocity anymore,” Markel said as the warning lights blinked out. “The Hauptman coils we’ve fitted to the drones—that was my tech’s bright idea—could make the entire trip without it, but it reduces ‘burn time’ on the coils at least a bit. Fifteen minutes’ acceleration, and they’re up to point-two cee. Make the entire trip to Crann Bethadh at our current range in less than an hour, even allowing for deceleration at the other end. Each trip only puts half an hour on the coils, so they’re good for twenty round trips before we have to take them down for maintenance.”

He beamed with what Murphy recognized was justifiable pride.

“And you built all this from reclaimed military equipment?” O’Hanraghty asked.

“Surplussed.” Markel’s smile of pride disappeared. “Picking up cheap components from the breakers is the economic thing to do. Is there an issue?”

“I wasn’t aware that there was a significant market for surplus drone coils,” O’Hanraghty said thoughtfully, and Markel shifted his weight from side to side. “On the other hand, I did notice that the New Dublin yards seem to have quite a bit more capability to manufacture Hauptman coils than I anticipated.”

He looked away from the crystoplast and raised an eyebrow, and Markel swallowed hard. Federal law restricted the possession of current-generation drone drive coils to the military and a relative handful of major Heart World transstellars with the right connections.

“I…” Markel looked back and forth between Murphy and the chief of staff. “Um. Some years ago—seven or eight, I think—when they started upgrading the yards here. I…think the extra coil tooling was installed then. Is…is that going to be an…issue?”

“All Federation military hardware is standardized for integration,” Murphy mused, “so there’s likely no issue with our current-generation systems getting spliced into your operation, is there?”

“What…what do you have in mind? I’m operating at pretty much full capacity, so I’m not sure I’d have the margin—”

“Nervous?” O’Hanraghty asked. “There’s something you’d like to tell us?”

“I just—”

“We need to rent some launch time,” Murphy said, and Markel blinked.

“Sorry…You said rent?”

O’Hanraghty handed him a slate and double-tapped an icon. Markel’s eyes darted back and forth.

“This is insane,” he said. “I don’t even think it’s possible. And even if it were, it…it’ll void my insurance!”

“All three of your space stations are logical targets for the League,” O’Hanraghty said. “If they arrive in force, the chance of your stations surviving is pretty low, wouldn’t you say?”

“That’s why I carry so much insurance.” Markel offered the slate back, but O’Hanraghty didn’t take it. “If the League takes them out—God forbid—I get a percentage back to rebuild. Only about a third of their actual replacement cost, but better than nothing. Enough to put one of them back online, in fact. I can rebuild from there. But if I do what you’re asking, I get zero. Nothing.”

“You’re with Del Webb for your coverage,” Murphy said. “You know what their local adjusters at Jalal ruled for Inverness? Complete write-off. System not eligible for reconstruction; no claims honored.”

“Those bastards.” Markel dropped the slate. “Those absolute bastards. How can they do that? Do you have any idea what my premiums are?”

“You’re operating perilously close to the League,” O’Hanraghty said. “A Supreme Court case a couple of years back ruled insurers weren’t responsible for damages resulting from acts of war in ‘economically unviable’ systems.”

“A ruling that would never apply to a Heart World!” Markel snarled. “I’m going to fire my attorney. Wait. You think the League can hit New Dublin as hard as Scotia? We’ve got more warships in orbit than they had, and Crann Bethadh—”

“We’re concerned with Goibniu right now, not Crann Bethadh,” Murphy said. “Think of it as an opportunity to squeeze blood from this stone, if you will. We stockpile the missiles aboard your stations, and all of a sudden your old Mark Thirty-Sevens provide a significant upgrade in our firepower.”

“And ‘militarizing’ the stations absolutely voids my insurance under that ‘act of war’ clause,” Markel replied.

“Inverness,” O’Hanraghty murmured. “Inverness.”

Markel glared at him.

“If I give up space for these missiles of yours—and how much space are we talking about here, by the way?—I sacrifice room for my own deep-space drones, and that’ll cut into my overhead,” he said.

“You can lose a little now,” O’Hanraghty said, “or you can lose everything if the League arrives and we can’t stop them.”

“What are the chances of that?” Markel licked his lips. “Really, I mean?”

“If I could answer that question, I would,” Murphy told him frankly. “The problem is we don’t know. But no one expected Inverness, and the fact that they got in and out completely unchallenged can only increase their confidence if they decide to up the ante and keep pushing out here. Whether it’s for propaganda victories or simply to distract us from Beta Cygni doesn’t really matter as far as New Dublin’s concerned, now does it?”

“And we stand a lot better chance of stopping them with your cooperation,” O’Hanraghty said.

“Well…”

Markel bent and picked the slate back off the deck. He studied it for a few seconds, then shrugged.

“Okay, there’s a method to this madness…sort of. Theoretically. But if my insurance finds out—”

“We’ll keep your involvement a state secret,” Murphy said. “And we’ll see that the payments to you are…fungible. Just don’t get too creative when it comes tax time.”

“That’s reassuring, but there is one…smaller detail that might be an issue.”

Markel, Murphy noticed, had begun to sweat.

“Go on,” O’Hanraghty invited, crossing his arms.

“During construction, I used a number of subcontractors for some of the minor systems,” Markel said. “And, over the years, we’ve found some League parts here and there. Never an issue! Just had to patch some code, jerry-rig a few power splices…maybe source some replacement components…that sort of thing.”

“Subcontractors. How unfortunate,” Murphy deadpanned.

“Fly-by-night types! Fired them all as soon as I found out what they were doing!” Markel said.

“As one does,” O’Hanraghty said with a sober, understanding nod.

“We can overlook this…minor treason on your subcontractors’ part,” Murphy said thoughtfully. “If it becomes a hardware issue, we’ll subtract the cost of any necessary replacement components from your rent. Fair enough?”

“My guys aren’t as up on current-generation military tech as I might like for something like this,” Markel said. “I mean, they’re mostly ex-Navy and they could probably handle it, but most of them have been back in civilian life for years. I’d feel better if you brought in some of your own people to ride herd.”

“Uniformed personnel onboard civilian stations could make that whole state-secret thing a bit harder to maintain,” Murphy said.

“You could send them in civvies,” Markel suggested. “Have them cross-training as miners for concealment purposes.”

“That can work, Admiral,” O’Hanraghty said.

“Then let’s drive on.” Murphy nodded decisively. “The sooner the better.”

The slate in Markel’s hand buzzed with a new message. He handed it to O’Hanraghty, who tapped to accept. One eyebrow twitched ever so slightly.

“We have a guest who needs attending to, Sir,” he said, looking at Murphy. “Word from the Ishtar.”

“I don’t like your tone,” Murphy said. “Hostile?”

“Not as clear-cut as a League task force dropping sublight, but could be about as bad,” O’Hanraghty said. “We just got a transponder code on that Fasset signature. It’s Papsukkal.”

He paused, and Murphy nodded. Papsukkal was one of the Hermes-class FTL courier-transports. Far too small to carry any worthwhile parasite complement—the Hermes-class was barely two kilometers long—they were configured to carry passengers and high-priority cargoes, instead. Their Fasset drive fans were almost as big and powerful as a Marduk’s, however, which gave them an awesome acceleration rate and made them some of the fastest starships in the galaxy once they wormholed.

“Apparently, she’s come straight from Sol. With dispatches,” O’Hanraghty told him.


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