Live Free or Die, Second Edition by John Ringo

Author:John Ringo
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science Fiction
ISBN: 9781982192709
Publisher: Baen Books
Published: 2023-07-04T04:00:00+00:00

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

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.