I’ll have to say this for the Solarian Marine Corps. They believe in taking care of their people. The chow line ran continuously, with breakfast foods served between 0200 and 1000 hours. Instead of the expected powdered eggs, juice from concentrate, and cremated breakfast meat, we had fluffy omelets, flaky pastries, fresh French toast, strawberries, grapes, and blueberries grown hydroponically, spicy sausage, smoked bacon, and sugar cured ham. All in all, it was much better than I had eaten on Earth.
Shannon and I eagerly filled our trays with a little bit of everything, reveling in the taste of the wholesome food after spending days on ship rations. “What do you think all this costs?” I asked around a mouthful of strawberries and cream.
Shannon paused with a fork halfway to her mouth. She looked pensive for a moment before shoving an oversized bite of French toast past her lips. “The livestock and the fruit are grown here. The flour comes from grain, and you’ve seen the miles of tunnels that they have here that do nothing but grow wheat, oats, and barley. Water comes from the craters on the poles, oxygen comes from the lunar soil, and energy from the solar collectors on the surface.”
“So once the initial investment was made—“
“Exactly. You spend some capital to make the system as self sufficient as possible, and then you spend minimal amounts to replenish what happens due to natural losses.”
It made a certain kind of sense. The gravity well of Earth was simply too deep to make it worth our while to expend the energy launching much more than manpower from the surface. It made much more sense to launch what infrastructure we had to into orbit and then make everything that we needed from materials that weren’t so expensive to boost. Energy wasn’t a problem, just raw materials. And once those raw materials were obtained from lunar sources and captured asteroids, everything else was just sweat and hard work, something that humans were used to in developing new businesses and new frontiers.
Where once the space surrounding Earth was empty except for the occasional communications or spy satellite, it was now a hotbed of activity that resembled a sprawling boomtown. Geostationary points above the United States and Europe held massive ship building enterprises, capturing the same spirit of engineering and experimentation of the early days of the Age of Sail. Three fully developed space stations served as floating dormitories for the construction crews. The crews rotated on and off every four months, making nearly three year’s salary in that time. Experts in every field combined their talents to make the ships we produced faster, more comfortable, and more lethal in combat.
The crown jewel of Earth’s new construction boom were the mass drivers stationed above and below Earth, roughly centered over the poles. Constructed out of the nickel-iron shell of captured asteroids, remotely-operated robots would remove pieces of the asteroid from the inside, coat it in a dense iron shell, and launch it with a superconducting magnetic catapult. The resulting projectiles could reach nearly seven tenths of the speed of light (0.7c) by the time they reached the orbit of the moon. The projectiles were unguided, but a massive computer was devoted to calculating the trajectories. So far, the mass drivers had killed an impressive thirteen Rak’Lan ships before they traveled inside the orbit of Mars. The limiting factor for their range was now the speed-of-light limit. Our ability to detect ships rapidly decelerating from the speed of light gave us barely enough warning to find a target, obtain a firing solution, and deploy our weapons appropriately.
The Solarian Navy boasted nearly two hundred ships, with twenty of them considered to be “ships of the line.” They were expected to be able to stand toe to toe with a Rak’Lan battleship and hold their own. They had done so shortly before our attempted take over the Jovian Rak’Lan base. It was the first illustration that our technology was at least achieving parity with theirs, if not gaining ground.
Recently, a naval historian out of Annapolis had successfully brought the air craft carrier concept into space. Since space is so vast, comparatively speaking, small, two or four man fighters could home on enemy positions and remain nearly undetectable. There was so little cross section for any kind of speed-of-light limited radar that detecting these smaller ships would give even sophisticated artificial intelligence systems fits. Maneuvering under high acceleration that could be nullified by our artificial gravity technology, these fighters could get close enough that it would be impossible to miss, release their ordinance, and be gone before the enemy vessels even knew they were there. Of course, the fighters were all engine, sensor package, and weaponry. It certainly didn’t leave much room for armor, and the radiation shielding was minimal. Fighter jocks were the only ones with a higher danger classification that the Marine Corps, and with good reason.
Humanity had done most of this development in the last ten years, much of it occurring after San Francisco and Shanghai were destroyed. We had needed something to push us out of the cradle, as one of my basic training instructors had explained. Sure, we had plenty of economic reasons to develop our space-based technology, but there was no imperative. People could make money just as well on the surface, without all the effort and risky investment.
The Rak’Lan had awakened the best in humanity, pulling us together as a species for the first time in the history of the globe. Where once war between nations had been inevitable, it was now nearly unthinkable. There was still the occasional police action or terrorist activity, and the Middle East would probably never experience full peace, but for the most part, the economy of the globe was booming. Prices were falling as goods became cheaper and cheaper to manufacture. Governments were finding themselves with embarrassing surpluses due to the economic benefits of space-based technologies.
“A penny for your thoughts,” Shannon said, and touched my arm. I looked down at my plate and noticed that I had eaten nearly everything.
“Just thinking,” I said. “We’ve come a long way.”
“We?” she asked. “Oh…you mean ‘we’ as in ‘humans.’”
“Yeah,” I replied. “I mean, look at us. We’re on the moon, enjoying a gourmet breakfast, walking around like it was Earth thanks to artificial gravity.” I laughed. “Just a year and half ago, I was arguing with my father about joining the Marine Corps, and now I can look out of a window and see Earth.”
Her grip tightened on my arm. “Any regrets?”
I shook my head. “I can’t imagine doing anything else. The race needs us, Shannon.”
She cocked her head. “Are you scared of what might come next?”
I shrugged. “I suppose. I’m trying to take this a day at a time. I can’t change where we fight. I can’t pick our battles. I can only go where I’m told, do my job, support my team, and hopefully get out again.”
“We might die on the next mission, you know?” Her face was somber.
I forced a smile. “We might.” I sighed and pushed my plate away from me. “I refuse to think about that right now. I have this day, and several others like it, to spend with someone I care about, doing things that don’t involve war or death or the vagaries of the chain of command.” I put my hand on top of hers. “Let’s enjoy today while we have it.”
“Carpe diem?” She asked. The Latin sounded odd in her clipped brogue.
“Every day,” I replied.
Pardon my exposition here. When writing in first person point of view (by far the most difficult, I think), it is often necessary to chart the journey of a character’s internal monologue. In some ways, this is the only way to provide narrative, since there is no omniscient or limited omniscient narrator to provide information to the reader.
I’m trying to establish Earth as an economy in transition…making the change from reliance on just planetary materials to materials that come from extra-terrestrial sources. I’m also making a thinly veiled political and economic statement in simple language; i.e. if we have the courage to invest in our next frontier, then the benefits we reap should be enormous.
This will be a boring section to those who like action. Now that we’ve pulled a “James Bond” and introduced the characters in an action-filled opening sequence, we’re going to sit back and do some character development and world-building.
Bear with me. I have great plans for O’Leary and Collins.
For those of us old enough to remember the space race in the 50-70’s era, it is evident, at least to me that your absolutely correct in the value of the spin-off technology that would be developed in the crisis.
Our space race with the Soviets gave the average citizen so many things that are taken for granted today from materials technology to medical breakthroughs. Even war, as bad as it is fosters rapid technology growth with the resultant spin-off technologies that ultimately benefit mankind. You are correct in that we need a catalyzing motivator in order to spend the initial resources to power the jugernaut.. Blitz
good stuff!