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Overview
First Contact Was Friendly
When aliens trundled a gate to other worlds into the Solar System, the world reacted with awe, hope, and fear. The first aliens to come through, the Glatun, turned out to be peaceful traders, and the world breathed a sigh of relief.
Who Controls the Orbitals, Controls the World
When the Horvath came through, they announced their ownership of us by dropping rocks on three cities and gutting them. Since then, they've held Terra as their own personal fiefdom. With their control of the orbitals, there's no way to win and Earth's governments have accepted the status quo.
Live Free or Die
To free the world from the grip of the Horvath is going to take an unlikely hero. A hero unwilling to back down to alien or human governments, unwilling to live in slavery, and with enough hubris, if not stature, to think he can win.
Fortunately, there's Tyler Vernon. And he has bigger plans than just getting rid of the Horvath.
Troy Rising is a book in three parts—Live Free or Die being the first part—detailing the freeing of Earth from alien conquerors, the first steps into space using off-world technologies and the creation of Troy, a thousand-trillion-ton battle station designed to secure the Solar System.
Praise for Live Free or Die:
". . . infused with plenty of old-fashioned two-fisted can-do attitude, a heavy dose of science, and occasional bursts of dry humor . . ." —Publishers Weekly
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781982192709 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Baen |
| Publication date: | 07/04/2023 |
| Series: | Troy Rising , #1 |
| Pages: | 432 |
| Sales rank: | 158,951 |
| Product dimensions: | 9.00(w) x 6.00(h) x 1.30(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Live Free or Die
By John Ringo
Baen Publishing Enterprises
Copyright © 2010 John RingoAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4391-3332-3
Prologue
It is said that in science the greatest changes come about when some researcher says "Hmmm. That's odd." The same can be said for relationships: "That's not my shade of lipstick ..."-warfare: "That's an odd dust cloud ..." Etc.But in this case, the subject is science. And relationships. And warfare.
And things that are just ginormously huge and hard to grasp because space is like that.
* * *
"Hmmm ... That's odd."
"What?"
Chris Greenstein, in spite of his name, was a gangling, goodlooking blond guy who most people mistook for a very pale surfer-dude. He'd found that he was great with the ladies right up until he opened his mouth. So his public persona was of tall, blond and dumb. As in mute. He had a master's in aeronautical engineering and a Ph.D. in astrophysics. The first might have gotten him a really good paying job if he could just manage to get through corporate interviews without putting his foot in his mouth. The second generally boiled down to academia or "Do you want fries with that?" He had the same problem with academia he had with corporations.
Chris was the Third Shift Data Center Manager for Skywatch. Skywatch was an underfunded and overlooked collection of geeks, nerds and astronomy Ph.D.s who couldn't otherwise find a job who dedicated themselves to the very important and very poorly understood job of searching the sky for stuff that could kill the world. The most dangerous were comets which, despite having the essential consistency of a slushee, moved very fast and were generally very big. And when a slushee that's the size of Manhattan Island hits a planet going faster than anything mankind could create, it doesn't just go bang. It turns into a fireball that is only different from a nuclear weapon in that it doesn't release radiation. What it does release is plasma, huge piles of flying burning rock and hot gases. Over a continent. Then the world, or the biosphere at least, more or less gets the big blue screen of death, hits reset and starts all over again with some crocodiles and one or two burrowing animals.
One comet killed the dinosaurs. Most of the guys at Skywatch made not much more than minimum wage. It gives one pause.
The way that Skywatch looked for "stuff" was anything that was quick, cheap and easy. They had databases of all the really enormous amounts of stuff , comets, asteroids, bits, pieces, minor moons, rocks and just general debris, that filled the system. They would occasionally get a contact from someone who thought that they'd found the next apocalypse. Locate, identify, headed for Earth? yes/no? New? yes/no? Most of it was automatic. Most of it was done by other people: essentially anyone with a telescope, from a backyard enthusiast to the team that ran the Hubble was part of Skywatch. But thirty-five guys (including the two women) were paid (not much more than minimum wage) to sort and filter and essentially be the child of Omelas.
Chris was a nail biter. Most people who worked for Skywatch for any period of time developed some particular tic. They knew the odds of the "Big One" happening in their lifetime were way less than winning the lottery fifteen times in a row. Even a "Little Bang" was unlikely to occur anywhere that it mattered. A carbonaceous asteroid with a twenty-five megaton airburst yield like Tunguska was unlikely to occur over anything important. The world is seventenths ocean and even the land bits are surprisingly empty.
But living day in and day out with the certainty that the fate of the world is in your hands slowly wears. Most people stayed in the core of Skywatch for fewer than five years if for no other reason than the pay. Chris had started as a filter technician ("Yes, that's an asteroid. It's already categorized. Thank you ...") six years ago. He was way past his sell-by date and the blond had started going gray.
"It's a streak. But it's a really odd streak. The algorithm is saying it's a flaw."
The way that asteroids and comets are detected has to do with the way that stars are viewed. The more starlight that is collected the stronger the picture. In the old days this was done by having a photographic plate hooked up to a telescope that slowly tracked across the night sky picking up the tiny scatter of photons from the distant star. Computers only changed that in that they could resolve the image more precisely, fold, spindle and mutilate, and a CCD chip was used instead of a plate.
When you're tracking on a star, if something moves across your view it creates a streak. Asteroids and comets are closer than stars and if they are moving across your angle of view they create such a streak. If they're moving towards you it creates a small streak, across the view a large one. The angle of the Sun is important. So is the size of the object. Etc.
Serious researchers didn't have time for streaks. But any streak could be important so they sent them to Skywatch where servers crunched the data on the streak and finally came up with whether it was an already identified streak, a new streak, a new streak that was "bad," etc. In this case the servers were saying it was "odd."
"Define odd," Chris said, bringing up the data. Skywatch researchers rarely looked at images. What he saw was a mass of numbers that to the uninformed would look something like a really huge mass of indecipherable numbers. For Chris it instantly created a picture of the object in question. And the numbers were very odd. "Nevermind. Albedo of point seven three? Perfect circle? Diameter of ten point one-four-eight kilometers? Ring shaped? Velocity of ...? That's not a flaw, it's a practical joke. Who'd it come from?"
"Max Planck. It's from Calar Alto. That's the problem. Germans ..."
Calar Alto was a complex of several massive telescopes located in Andalusia in southern Spain and was a joint project of the Spanish and German governments. The German portion was the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy and despite its location, Max Planck did most of the work at Calar Alto.
"Famously don't have a sense of humor," Chris said. He looked at the angle and trajectory again and shrugged. The bad part of working for Skywatch was worrying about "The Big One." The good part was that nothing was ever an immediate emergency. Anything spotted was probably going to take a long time to get to Earth. "Mark and categorize. It's not on a track for Earth. Angle's off, velocity is all wrong. Ask Calar to do another shot when they've got a free cycle. And we'd better keep an eye on it because with that velocity it's going to shoot through the entire system in a couple of years and if it hits anything it's going to be really cool."
"You know what it looks like?"
"Yeah. A halo. Maybe it's the Covenant."
Chris picked up his phone groggily and checked the number.
"Hello?"
"Chris? Sorry to wake you. It's Jon. Could you come in a little early today? We've got a manager's meeting."
"What's up?" Chris asked, sitting up and rubbing his eyes. Jon Marin was the Director of Skywatch. He knew his managers didn't get paid enough to be woken up in the middle of their equivalent night.
"It's Halo. There's been an ... anomaly. We'll talk about it when you get in. We've got a video conference with Calar at four. Please try to be there."
"Yes, sir," Chris said. He looked at the time and sighed. Might as well get up, day was shot to hell anyway.
"Good afternoon, Dr. Heinsch ..."
Jon Marin, in spite of his name, looked and sounded like the epitome of a New York Jewish boy. Which was what he was. His first Ph.D. was from NYU, followed by MIT and Stanford. His brother was a top-flight attorney in New York who pulled down a phone number every year. And his mother never let him forget it. He kept trying to point out he was a doctor, to no avail.
"Dr. Marin, Dr. Eisenbart, Dr. Fickle, Dr. Greenstein ..."
"Doctor." "Doctor." "Doctor." "Doctor."
"As first discoverers we have named the object the Gudram Ring. This will, of course, have to be confirmed. But there is an anomaly we are having a hard time sorting out. We had a cycle that was doing a point to that portion of the sky but when we attempted to find the ring, it appeared to have disappeared."
"Disappeared?" Chris said. "How does something ten kilometers across disappear?"
"We wondered the same thing," Dr. Heinsch replied soberly. "I was able to get authorization to do a sweep for it. It took three full sweeps."
"Your sweeps cost about ...?" Dr. Marin said.
"A million Euros for each. But something that was once there and now is not? We considered the outlay appropriate. And we were right. We finally found it. Here is the new data."
The astronomers leaned forward and regarded the information for a moment.
"It slowed down," Chris said after a moment. He finally found a finger that wasn't chewed to the quick and started nibbling. "Was there ... It didn't have anything to cause a gravitational anomaly. It's coming in from out of the plane of the ecliptic."
Most of the "stuff" in the inner Solar System lay along a vaguely flat plane called the "plane of ecliptic." Earth, Mars, the asteroid belt, were all formed when the Sun was a flattened disc. The outer layers cooled and congealed into planets and then life formed and here we are. We are all star stuff .
If the ring had been coming in along the plane it might have passed a moon or planet and had a change in velocity, what was referred to as a "delta-V." But there weren't any planets "up" in the Solar System and it was inside the Oort Cloud.
"Correct," Dr. Heinsch said as if to a particularly bright child. From the point of view of "real" scientists, those who can, do, those who can't, teach, and those who can't do or teach, work for Skywatch.
"Is this data confirmed?" Dr. Marin asked very cautiously. Skywatch generally only made the news when they screamed "The sky is falling!" Since every time they'd screamed that, it hadn't, they'd gotten very cautious. And this wasn't the sky falling. This was ...
"Absolutely," Dr. Heinsch said. "However, we have sent it to you in raw form. We have also contacted the Russian, Japanese and Italian Institutes."
"Yes," Dr. Marin said, nodding. "I think we need to stay very cautious about this until we have a confirm all around ..."
"It's a spacecraft !" Chris blurted.
"We need to be very cautious," Dr. Marin said, turning to glare at Chris.
"But it's decelerating!" Chris said, waving at the screen. "At the current rate of delta it's going to come to rest somewhere near Earth!"
"It appears to be headed for the Earth/Sol L2 Lagrange point," Dr. Heinsch said, nodding. "What it does then, of course, is the question."
"We need definite confirmations on this before we take any action," Dr. Marin said.
"I'm sure we will have those quite quickly. I would request that you contact Palomar for their take. Good day, Doctors."
Planning for shots by the big telescopes of Earth's major countries is blocked out months and even years in advance. They also cost a lot of money.
As the terminator circled about the globe that night, all such scheduling was put on indefinite hold and dozens of telescopes pointed to a very small patch of the sky.
There was, of course, a huge outcry amongst "real" researchers who had grants to study oxygen production of Mira Variables that, naturally, were more important than anything else that could possibly be happening especially with those bunglers at Skywa-A WHAT?
And then the press found out.
"The Gudram Ring has settled into a stationary position in the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange point," Dr. Heinsch rumbled, looking at his notes. "The position it has taken is not entirely stable but it seems to have some form of stabilization system. Since it was able to maintain delta-V such as to decelerate into the system, that ability is self-evident. However, the L2 point creates a stable point of gravitational interaction which is why so many space telescopes are placed there. Power output for stabilization is, therefore, reduced. As of now, we have no idea as to its method or purpose. Questions?"
"What is it for?" the first reporter asked.
"And I repeat, we have no idea as to its method, we don't know how it works, or its purpose, we don't know why it is here. At this moment, it is as enigmatic as the monolith from 2001 ..."
"Office of the President. If you would like to leave a message for the President of the United States, press one. For the Vice President, press two. For the First Lady, press three ..."
The phone bank for the general contact number for the White House was not in the White House. It was in a featureless office building in Reston, Virginia. There a group of seventy receptionists, mostly women, received calls from the general public directed at the President.
In the early days of telephone, all calls were listened to, notes taken and daily they would be collated and tracked. This took a lot of people looking over the notes and figuring out what they meant. But there were general tenors. Do a three-part scale. "I love the President so much I want his sperm." "The President's an idiot." "The President is going to die at four PM on Friday." So then there were standard forms. Then computers came along. And Caller ID and voice recognition and automatic voice synthesis and phone trees and ...
What the seventy people did was mostly let the computers handle it.
But if you worked the phone tree hard enough, you could get a real human being.
"Office of the President."
"This is not a prank call," a robotic voice said. "This system cannot normally block Caller ID. Please look at your Caller ID."
The receptionist looked at the readout and frowned. The Caller ID readout was a random string of numbers.
"The penalty for hacking the White House is-"
"Please contact your intelligence agencies and confirm that this call is coming from a satellite and has no ground-based transmission. We are the Grtul, the People of the Ring. We come in peace. In five days, on your Thursday, at 12 PM Greenwich Mean Time, we will call your President through a more secure means. This should give him time to clear his schedule. This will be a conference call with several of your major leaders, all of whom have been contacted or will be contacted. Please ensure your President is informed of this call. Thank you. Good-bye."
"So ... do we know which secure line they're calling?" the President asked.
The Secure Room in the White House was, like most of the rooms in the White House, small. And compared to some secure rooms, not particularly secure. It had been repeatedly upgraded, but when you started off with a concrete basement in a limestone building built in the 1800s there was only so much you could do. The Joint Chiefs much preferred the Tank in the Pentagon.
"We're ready no matter where it comes in, Mr. President," the chief of staff said. The room was more or less at capacity since nobody knew the agenda for the meeting. State, Defense, the Joint Chiefs, NSA, DNI, himself, even Treasury and Commerce had horned in. About the only member of the "core" cabinet not present was Interior. Surprising even himself, the Director of NASA had managed to get a seat.
"Nobody talks but me," the President said just as the phone rang. He took a deep breath and pressed the button for the speaker phone. "President of the United States."
"Waiting ... Waiting ... Present are the presidents of the United States and Russia, prime ministers of Britain, France, Germany, Japan, China, India, Brazil. Each have staff present. We will not be responding to questions. We are the Grtul. We come in peace. The ring in your sky is a gate to other worlds. We produce these rings and move them into star systems. Use of the ring requires payment. The payment schedule will be sent to you. There is to be no use of hostile energy systems within three hundred thousand kilometers of the ring which are capable of damaging the ring. Anyone who pays may use the ring.
"In seven days we will make a general broadcast to the people of your planet on the subject of the ring. This will give you sufficient time to make your own statements and prevent panic.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Live Free or Die by John Ringo Copyright © 2010 by John Ringo. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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