Entropy Risen (The Syker Key Book 3) by Aaron Martin Fransen Page B

craft, but the price of production was already starting to tumble as more firms wanted in on the action. Toshiba was the largest player, but at least fifteen other firms were now either selling or actively developing competing thorium salt reactors. It was going to be a busy market.
    The other thing that had saved the other airlines and given them time to recover was the sudden drop in the price of oil, allowing them to reduce ticket prices to nearly match their technically superior competitors. With perceived demand for oil dropping, consumption actually went up, at least for a time while companies struggled to produce enough thorium reactors.
    As for airliners, Boeing was first out the gate with their 1101, the first commercial thorium salt/gravity drive passenger airliner. Alaska Air was their first customer. They undercut every other carrier by 30%, made a huge profit, and cut travel times by eighty percent. And they were taking it easy. It also make Alaska Air the second airline to go interplanetary (behind Virgin, who had simply retrofitted some of their tugs to carry passengers) since the same Boeing 1101 worked to take passengers to the planets just as easily as to Pittsburgh.
    The countries that embraced the new technologies saw their economies explode; those that dragged their feet, buried in decades of bureaucracy driven by the sociopaths were left stagnant, and even home-grown businesses left for greener pastures; most of Boeing’s construction took place in Peru, while Airbus distributed their facilities in Africa.
    Virgin’s Spaceport America was just the first public space port, and they were in the process of constructing space ports on every continent. Even competitors like SpaceX were using their ports. The very need for a space port was almost non-existent, since the new craft could take off from any existing airport, but many nations found it simpler however to have a single point of entry for space travelers.
    John’s own tug, the fifth that Virgin and Boeing had built, was named “Jessica,” and it had become his home. Converted, in fact, the first space ship to become a personal motor home, though in the past few years a few more had undergone similar conversions, the chairman of Virgin not to be outdone.
    He tried very hard these days not to teleport, since he had been able to sense for some time that Jessica had been making up for the energy he expended. It was relieving and disheartening at the same time; he could sense Jessica was around, and that gave him joy, but that his actions were causing her to work harder, whatever the motivations, caused him concern. And he still missed her dearly.
    John’s last teleportation had been three weeks ago, to attend Zack’s high school graduation, since he hadn’t been able to plan ahead effectively to get there in time. He spent most of his time in the asteroid belt now, on Ceres, planning.
    In the years since receiving his personal space ship, the software had been upgraded three times and the engine once. It was now faster and smoother than ever, able to make the trip from Earth to the asteroid belt in under four hours. Mars, depending on the time of year, took from three to six hours. Short trip indeed.
    And he was hardly the only craft out there. In fact there was so much traffic they had all had to get together to design an interplanetary traffic control system. Gravity drives hadn’t been the only secret technology kept by the military, there were many others, but one in particular was the gravity detectors, and the design of the engines was such that you could typically detect an oncoming craft easily enough, but it was still dangerous. The traffic control system was at least enough to put the minds of the tourists at ease, whatever the misgivings of the miners.
    With all of this, light speed communications wasn’t fast enough. Pan and Arthur had worked with NASA to create IPC, InterPlanetary Comm. Instead of radio waves, it used neutrinos to