It was the next morning when Michael contacted me to meet him in VR. Not that a strange occurrence, but still uncommon, so my curiosity was roused.

The viron was a VR copy of Michael’s office, and after a quick greeting, I sat in the visitor's chair.

“So… I am here. What can I do for you?”

It took Michael a moment to answer.

“What Maynard said yesterday… it made me think.”

“Well, I hope you got over it.”

“Ha ha! Very funny.” Nonetheless, he was smiling.

“The thing is… I don’t want to wait for the other corporations to get off their collective asses and do something about it. The situation is not yet critical… but it creeps closer and closer to the point of no return.”

He sighed.

“Maynard was right, we need more CO2. Let’s be honest, the climate has been rather cool for the last… 50 to 100 years as well. We’ve gone from coming close to a runaway greenhouse effect in the late 20th and early 21st century to a near-ice age in the mid-23rd.”

I could only shrug. Honestly, I had not spent much time looking into the climate thing, though I knew the basics.

“Here is what I want to do. Well, what I want you to do is more like it. I want you to design a harvester on the base of the Constructor. An automated ship that can be used to harvest the resources polluting our oceans.

Quite officially of course. We will claim that those resources are cheap and easy to get to, so why waste money on importing them from space, you know?

That it will clean up the oceans is ‘just a side-effect’. And it lets us harvest this methane clathrate that Maynard talked about.”

I considered what he had said for a moment before I reacted.

“That should not be that much of a problem. Except… well I guess you don’t want it to dig up the sea ground indiscriminately. We should try to avoid killing what life is still left in the oceans I think.”

That made him wince and he nodded slowly.

“Yes, that would be a good idea. But why is that a problem?”

“The easy way to do what you want is to simply use a tractor beam to suck everything into the ship, push it through a molecular forge, and eject everything we don’t need. Obviously, this way is a tad destructive to anything living in the way.

That means I have to find a way to identify what is living tissue and what is not before we engage the tractors. And the tractors have to be exceedingly fine controlled.

The control is not that hard, I have just to throw enough compute at enough emitters to make it work.

However, I have no clue how to identify what to process and what not. I… can’t promise a quick result here.”

He blew out a long gust of air and then shrugged.

“I understand. Just… do what you can. If anybody can do it, it is you.”

“Thank you… I think.”

Yippikayea, more work… how delightful. Who am I kidding, of course, I was already giddy to work on it.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

Not that Michael was done yet.

“Another thing… we need a corporate yacht by December.”

That, honestly, took me by surprise.

“A yacht?”

“Yes. You know, those private grav ships that are luxurious and representative. Expression of wealth and so on…”

I rolled my eyes.

“I know what a yacht is. I was questioning why we would need one. By December precisely.”

The timing should be doable. Barely. I mean, we had July the 17th already.

Apparently, Michael was in a playful mood, as he winked while he responded:

“We have to be represented at an event on December 10th in Stockholm. And it is a prestige thing. We can’t appear in a freighter or a warship.”

I sighed.

“And Stockholm is too far for the skimmers. Sure, we could modify them with a cold fusion reactor, but it would be a bit uncomfortable to sit in them for hours and hours.”

“Indeed. Ergo, a yacht. Sure, we could probably ask Nate, or rent one, but we need a yacht sooner or later anyway.”

I rolled my eyes.

“Fine, I will work on it. Well, I will work with the naval architects on it. You know my sense of aesthetics is not quite the best.”

The bastard had the audacity to snort at that. Yes, I know I was somewhat lacking in that aspect, but he did not need to make his opinion that clear.

“I think that is for the best. I will alert the architects that you will need them in a short while.”

“Do that. I don’t know how long I will need, but I will mostly take care of the technical aspects only, so not too long.”

“Do that. And keep me informed. Seeya.”

And he vanished. Marvellous. Well, it was not as if I had some urgent project of my own to take care of. After the debacle with the hoverbike, I was mostly just idling.

To get it started, I connected to my Archimedes and went to full compression.

The first thing to do was create a list of what specs I wanted the yacht to have.

The first thing was that I wanted it to be fast. Insanely fast in fact. As such I specified 4 10k Kepler for the primary coils, with 5k Kepler coils as secondaries.

To give you some perspective, the big mega freighters or the most modern battleships had primary coils in the 4k Keppler range.

And I seriously doubted that this yacht would be anywhere near the size of those monsters.

To power that I planned for two 572GW fusactors. Because it was a ship and might be transported to other planets, I decided on the dual pinch fusactors that could switch to magnetic pinch with a somewhat reduced output of 495GW.

That would give this ship a decent amount of power reserve and redundancy.

As I might be required to travel on board this yacht sometime, I specified that the hull should be made out of 1m thick SUC. Seriously, why use something weaker if we could make it tough as heck?

Oh sure, I was aware that the passengers of such a yacht would expect windows. I did not care particularly. Instead, I specified to use of Q-links to fake them.

The passengers would not even realize that the clear parts of the wall were not windows. At the same time, I decided we should cover the hull in Q-links as well, to make it look like anything we wanted. Why choose a single paint job when you could have all of them at any given time?

The number of staterooms… that was a more problematic question. I simply had no clue how many I should plan for. Finally, I decided to leave that to Botont and his crew. The same with the crew quarters.

There was, naturally, the big lounge, but I decided that we should plan for a small ballroom. I mean, come on, if we are getting a yacht for prestige reasons, then we should go all out. As a little extra ingredient, I specified that we should cover every surface of the ballroom with optical Q-links. I was sure dancing seemingly among the stars would appeal to quite a few people.

I quickly decided to leave such things as the galley, the laundry room, and of course storage, to the architects. They had the necessary experience to decide about those.

Now we needed hangar space for skimmers and/or shuttles, of course. I was taking my time thinking about how many we needed. I was briefly considering tying the size of the hanger to the number of staterooms but finally decided that would be… excessive. We would get away with a six-skimmer hangar just fine.

For the official hangar that is. I… was not trusting enough to simply keep this yacht unarmed, even with one-meter thick SUC armor and around 10 times the acceleration as any other ship.

To that effect, I specified a concealed hangar big enough for four Valkyries, or four Sirens, as Travis had decided to call the new gunships.

If we had four Fafnirs or four Sirens on board that would be a particularly ugly surprise for anybody who decided we were easy prey.

But that was not all. I made sure that the specification demanded that at least two point defense grav guns could cover any single spot on the surface of the ship.

Add in the defensive disruptors coupled with the plasma shield typical for space ships and it would be a tough ship.

As for sensors I also decided to let Botont do most of that, though I specified a large Palantír as well.

I similarly lacked the knowledge about the necessary controls, and was not too keen on investing the time researching them, when Botont and his crew were already specialists in that regard.

That was it with my solo part here. The rest would have to happen in cooperation with Botont.

Time to call the yard.