Beyond the Ranges by John Ringo & James Aidee

Author:John Ringo & James Aidee [Ringo, John & Aidee, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Science Fiction, Action & Adventure, Space Opera, Space Exploration
Publisher: Baen Books
Published: 2024-05-06T14:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 19

“Free at last, free at last,” Jason said.

“Glad to be headed back to the planet, huh?” Tom said as they entered the access tunnel.

The bay was busy with ships, a sure sign that the economy was starting to get into gear.

“Administrative trivia is a necessity of business,” Jason said. “It’s also close to my least favorite thing in the world.”

It had only taken three days of training for the teams. It took five days to complete all the discussions, start developing SOPs and develop a business structure, most of the ovals unfilled, for the expansion. Capital had to come from sales; there was nowhere else to get it. Even then, Richard could only loan them money for more equipment if he had money flowing into the bank. And staying there.

Banks taking money from individuals and businesses could only loan twelve times the amount of money they had in the bank. That was a fairly standard rule and it still applied in Pegasus.

Richard had to have Brandywine leave as much capital in the bank as possible to make the loans that Brandywine, in turn, needed to buy equipment.

Everybody was bootstrapping.

A lease had to have something to harvest to make it really worthwhile. Desert areas, interesting as they might be, weren’t going to be producing much in the way of protein. Game meat in temperate areas was best in fall when the animals had had a summer to pack on fats. That ruled out Europa and America Nova for game; they were in spring.

So, the majority of the teams were going into Chindia for the time being. But teams were being dispersed into limited areas on those two continents as well. Fungi were a year-round thing, with the exception of winter, and spring meant the potential for spring greens. It also gave an idea what might be available in fall in different biomes. As long as the lease made its nut, finding what might be a big earner was worthwhile. Were there wild apples in a particular zone?

In the tropical areas it was monsoonal oriented. The end of the wet season was the best time to harvest.

Until they had at least a year and a half of data on leases, many questions would remain unanswered. To that end, Jason researched power technology. He’d already determined that Cyber energy storage was insanely efficient. That an Alfred could run for twelve hours, flying, with half its maximum carriage weight, was insane. It would be the equivalent of a Tesla being able to drive around the world a dozen times on one charge.

And there were industrial batteries held by the government.

The decision was made to leave ten drones and an Alfred in each lease area for the entire year along with a conex and a coffin of batteries. Batteries were cheap and the lease on the conexes was doable. If the drones detected anything that was viable for harvest a team could be returned. In the meantime, the drones and Alfred would slowly collect whatever was saleable in the lease and get a full ecological and marketability profile.

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