“Ladies and gentlemen, y’all are now formally on notice that I’ve accepted command and administrative control of this gadget,” stated Bolino, swinging his arm around the room to emphasize the ‘gadget’ was the entire Storm Killer station. “For now, as per the documented plan, y’all now report to me through Adam. Over the next forty-five days, the full transition to my hands will occur.”
The staff nodded their heads in agreement. The senior staff present at the table included all department heads save one, and Bolino and Sands. Greg Ballard had been at the table but had received an urgent request to come to the environmental control center about some problem they were having.
Doctor Francine Cruz, the station’s attractive, auburn-haired physician from Mexico laughed, “Bradley, the entire medical department is at your service.” This brought laughs from the assembled staff members since Francine’s ‘department’ consisted of only herself and her RN nursing assistant.
Brad smiled at her and asked, “What have you got in your bag of tricks for a cold?”
Francine placed her hand on his brow and after a moment said, “I don’t think you have a fever. Stop by the infirmary and I’ll check you out and give you one of my witches brews.”
Reginald O’Donnell, the elected head of the sixty man science team, stood up and called for attention. He raised his Styrofoam coffee cup and, in his best attempt at a Scottish brogue, requested of the assembled personnel, “Lads and Lassies, allow me to offer a proper toast to our defunct project manager, Mr. Adam Sand, for his devotion, professionalism, and personal drive that brought Storm Killer to operational status one month early.” He took a sip of the tepid coffee as the audience clapped for Adam who appeared slightly embarrassed by the praise.
Layne Bartlett, the head of Storm Killer’s Command And Control Center, raised his own cup of warm tea and stated, “Yes, let’s thank Adam for bringing Storm Killer online just in time to assault Hurricane Edna. I was concerned we would come online and have to wait around for a storm to kill. Now we get to tackle one within a few hours of going to operational status! As my mama used to say, “Y’all are sittin’ in the catbird seat.””
Layne was another of those southern gentlemen. He had been born close to Brad’s home and had been friends with him since grade school days. They had attended the University of Alabama together as undergraduates and then Clemson for their PhDs in physics. Bartlett had beaten Brad in overall grades. Now Brad was to be his superior on Storm Killer. They were old friends and Layne was ecstatic about his childhood friend’s success.
The other department heads nodded concurrence and again applauded Adam. At that moment, a quavering wailing sound filled the room. It was the environmental alert siren signaling a life support emergency to all Storm Killer inhabitants.
Storm Killer had been operational for only two hours when this first serious glitch surfaced. At the instant the siren sounded, Greg Ballard paged Adam. “Adam Sand, pick up on channel three. Emergency, pick up!”
Adam pulled his cell from his pocket and toggled to channel 3. He could barely make out what Ballard was shouting. The video feed was turned off on Ballard’s cell so Adam was forced to rely entirely on Greg’s voice. “Air lock…(hiss)... Problem… (squeal)... Oxygen…(static)...Forty minutes,” was all Adam could make out from the overdriven audio circuit caused by Ballard’s shouting into the cell phone.
“Whoa, boy. Calm down. Lower your voice a few hundred decibels so I can understand you!” ordered Adam into his cell.
“Give me a second, Adam,” Greg yelled back. Adam heard a whooshing sound through the open communication channel. He then thought he heard the sound of a door sliding open and then a second later sliding closed.
“Adam, can you hear better me now?” asked Ballard. He had also flipped the video on and Adam could see a tense look on Ballard’s face.
“Yes, now what’s the emergency?” responded Adam.
Ballard began describing the situation in a very hurried manner. He was talking at a word rate many times faster than his normal slow, sure style.
Adam interrupted him, “Greg, slow down! I never heard you talk this fast before. I can’t even get the gist of what you are trying to tell me.”
Greg stopped talking, took a few deep breaths and began again.
Brad had crowded in close to view Adam’s cell and listen in on the conversation. Brad waved to Layne, the closest department head, to approach. Writing a short note from the notebook he always kept in his back pocket, he handed it to Layne without saying a word. The note read simply, “Turn off the damned alarm. I can’t hear a thing.” Layne picked up the conference room phone to take care of the order.
Greg spoke in a normal voice now, “Sorry I had to yell, but the air rushing out of the airlock is making one hell of a racket. We seem to have a situation with the airlock that cannot occur according to the technical guys. The airlock doors are partially open on both sides. Theoretically, this isn’t possible. The control software and hardware have triple redundant systems and the inner door should not open if either the outer door is not closed and locked, or air pressure in the lock is not equal to the interior pressure. I really don’t understand how this….”
Adam immediately interrupted and asked, “Greg, how much time do we have?”
Greg responded, “We have about forty minutes before the air supply and reserves hit critical levels. Listen, we’re dealing with a one-inch gap in the inner door. If we can seal off the door, we can salvage this situation. I’ve sent for the meteor seal machine and we’ll attempt to build a seal to fit gap in the door.”
“Get your repair guys into environmental suits and then close off the reception section of the station,” ordered Adam as Brad nodded to him to take command of the situation.
“Well, boss, we would, but we can’t. Whatever has hosed up the air lock systems has also locked out the controls for the hull breach doors in this whole area of the station. The environmental guys think something has happened in the computer hardware because the two sub-processors that deal with these two control systems are physically side-by-side inside the frame. The computer systems are not responding to diagnostics the techs are trying to run. It will take them a few more minutes to get inside the hardware to inspect these sub-processors.”
Adam told Greg to proceed with his repair plan and that he was on his way to the airlock. With that, he signed off and turned to Bolino. “Brad, do you want to add anything or issue other orders? After all, she’s your station now.”
Brad shook his head, “Do what y’all have to do to stop the leak. I’ll take the lead on finding out what’s hosed up with the computer systems.”
The emergency sirens ceased their wailing just as Brad added, “And I want everyone to put on their environmental suits or go to their closets.”
The emergency life support safe areas were not really closets, but were more like small kitchenette apartments with self-contained life support systems.
Storm Killer inhabitants were required to frequently rehearse environmental emergencies and go to their pre-assigned safe areas. When filled with the assigned dozen personnel, the residents said it felt like they were in a closet. Thus the name stuck. There were thirty such ‘closets’ strategically located around Storm Killer. So if one could not get to his or her pre-assigned closet, they could go to the nearest ‘spare’ unassigned closet.
Adam quickly retraced the route to the elevator he had recently used and took it back toward the airlock known as Reception. At the top of the elevator, a power sled was tied to the railing. It slowly rotated on its bi-polymer yarn anchor rope in concert with the spin of the station.
The rope was thirty-five percent stronger than the previously used standard polypropylene fiber rope. They had adopted using this style rope after a tied up thousand kilo web rod section had broken away during the early construction phase. This new rope was almost impossible to cut with anything other than a laser knife.
A single insignia
on the sled’s cowling denoted it as the environmental department’s meteor strike emergency vehicle. Greg has been on the ball as usual, thought Sand. The sealing equipment was already at the site of the event.
As Adam approached the airlock area, he heard the roaring as the air was being sucked out into empty space. Even as he neared the airlock door, there was a distinct diminishing in the roaring sound of the escaping air.
Ballard was standing behind two technicians as they applied the final portion of the sealing material across the bottom half-meter gap in the airlock door.
They had a large hydraulic arm with a half-meter pan to accept the prepared sealing material. This material was a variation on the same bi-polymer yarn used on the power sled anchor rope. The reverse side of the material was an epoxy adhesive product that activated when an aerosol spray was applied.
The technicians had just completed the aerosol process and were using the hydraulic arm to place the repair seal into the door gap. There was no way the technicians could have hand-applied such a large seal against the tremendous air pressure in the gap.
As the seal sank into place, it ballooned slightly inward, and the roaring sound ceased. The emergency portion of the event was over. Now, the cleanup and correction actions would start.
Adam contacted Bolino on the executive channel, “Brad, it’s under control. Issue the all clear.”
“I’ve got the crew started on Storm Killer systems diagnostics and are having them continue the scheduled demise of Hurricane Edna. They need to be busy and not have time to think about the causes of this incident,” Bolino replied and then broke the circuit.
Adam motioned to Greg to follow him and they headed back to central core to begin the investigation on what went wrong and how to correct it. Hopefully, Bolino was already well on his way to determining what had gone wrong.
15
Storm Killer Lives
Seen from a distance, the dumbbell, with its hundreds of acres of the four shimmering optical film webs, appeared to hang over the east coast of the United States.
The webs were slowly extending to their full four thousand meter length. The use of carbon filament rods could only provide part of the structural support. No lightweight material known could be made long enough with sufficient strength to handle the webs at their full deployment.
The Storm Killer designers had implemented an ingenious solution. The rods simply stored the optical film mesh as a Roman blind stores the material when the blind is open. At the end of structural support rod was a box-like structure. In this box, attached to the wire, was a small device about five meters by ten meters. This machine looked almost exactly the same as the Personal Propulsion Units, or PPUs, used by the crews working outside the dumbbell.
Attached to the wire every half-meter was a fold of the magnifying film material lying tightly bunched along the length of the support rod. The wire ran through the support rods to huge power take up reels that could hold up to ten thousand meters of the ultra-thin wire.
The wire’s SKID unit was a specialized PPU. SKID stood for “Station Keeping and Independent Deployment Unit”. The SKID housed an ultra fast, super powerful computer that controlled the unit’s hydrogen powered deployment engines and position holding jets. This computer was tied into the core’s central mainframe that directed the entire deployment and station keeping procedure. The onboard computer ensured the adherence to the master computer’s commands by real time checking of its current coordinates against the planned position.
The fully deployed, eight-thousand-meter configuration of film on each of the two rows was considered the optimum surface and magnifying power required for the platform’s planned mission.
The concept of Storm Killer was extremely simple. Hurricanes and typhoons are spawned when warm seawater feeds upward moving air currents that rapidly rise into the colder air many thousands of feet above sea level. This process accelerates until the storm eventually hits land and loses its warm water supply of energy.
Since it was impossible to affect the supply of warm water, what if one could affect the temperatures of the upper air levels? What if one could warm the upper air until it was almost the same temperature as the lower air?
What if one could harness the sun to accomplish this?
The reasoning went that this temperature increase would cause the upward circulation of air to slow or cease.
At least that was the theory. CORDEX’s own models, as well as the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration’s weather models seemed to support the theory.
The insurance companies, underwriters, and reinsurance providers believed in its potential, and had supported CORDEX and NOAA in their efforts to interest NASA and the United States Congress, since the government was the only entity with deep enough pockets to afford to build the proposed hurricane killer. After the disastrous Gulf Coast storm events in first decade of the twenty-first century, both the insurance companies and the federal government were looking for relatively cheap solutions to avoid the hundreds of billions of dollars paid out to rebuild the ruined regions.
The theory went, that after the hurricane had formed and developed an eye wall, Storm Killer could target the topmost cloud layers of the eye wall and hopefully raise the air temperature by heating these water-laden clouds.
This rise of temperature would lower the heat gradient between the upper and lower levels of the atmosphere and cause the storm to loose its energy generation capacity.
The topmost web of optical film was back embossed with a micro-prismatic reflective film similar to the kind currently used in traffic road signs. This film provided a highly reflective surface that made this web a superb mirror. This web collected the sunlight, magnified it, and bounced the light back through the other three magnification layers of webs.
By varying the configuration of the four sets of optical film webs in the dumbbell, the intensely magnified sunlight could be targeted to a pinpoint of focused energy only ten meters in diameter. At such a setting, the intense heat could burn through a steel armor plate one meter thick in less than two seconds. It could also be adjusted to a wide dispersal area over three kilometers in diameter. In this configuration, one billion kilos of water vapor could be increased in temperature by one degree centigrade every hour. By focusing the beam on the upper eye wall for twelve to twenty-four hours, the hurricane should weaken and collapse from the short-circuited natural heat transfer by decreasing the temperature gradient.
Of course, if Storm Killer missed the correct target point, it could actually be heating the sea-level water. Although this heating would take longer, the NOAA models indicated that an increase of one degree in the seawater could increase the storm by one full category on the Saffir-Simpson scale.
The implications of this technology were huge. The Department of Defense was looking at it as a possible weapon, and, in fact, a smaller but more powerful prototype using six synchronized optical webs was already being tested in a secret polar orbit. Some think tanks were looking into it as a possible way to light urban areas at night.
The webs were now deployed to their operational length. The SKIDs appeared to be doing an admirable job of keeping the webs aligned with the station and with each other. The station would be in the correct position with the sun and the earth in exactly forty-seven minutes. At that point, Storm Killer would be trained on Hurricane Edna and the world would change forever.
Storm Killer lived and awaited her first kill.
16
On The Surface
The United States Navy had blockaded the western one-half of the Atlantic waters adjacent to the Caribbean Ocean. All private surface vessels and civilian aircraft had been banned from the area. Several private and commercial ships had been escorted from the area by armed surface warships. The only craft allowed in the area were military and a large contingent of scientific surface vessels.
The scientific community had monitoring stations on board the surface vessels surrounding th
e hurricane every three degrees of the compass. They were maneuvering as closely as possible to the eye of the storm. The U.S.S. Lincoln was maintaining position two hundred twenty kilometers due west of the storm’s eye wall.
These ships would observe the storm’s center for changes and evaluate the affects of Storm Killer. NASA had grounded the usual flights through the eye wall due to the uncertainty as to what the impacts would be on the aircraft flying through the intense light beam heating the upper atmosphere.
Navy Rear Admiral Charles Olsen stood on the bridge of the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, Abraham Lincoln. He could not see beyond the end of the flight deck because of the heavy rain whipped by the almost hurricane force winds of a rogue thunderstorm spawned by Hurricane Edna still so far away. The wind-driven seas were impressive with dark waves of three to four meters, but the huge aircraft carrier barely rolled from their effects. He squinted into the storm-ravaged early morning gloom as he sipped his first coffee of the day.
He saw his reflection in the window glass. What looked back at him was a fit trim man of forty years old. The man was clean-shaven, with piercing blue eyes and a ruddy complexion from spending far too time in the sun.
The Abraham Lincoln was his flagship for the strange assortment of vessels that made up his ‘fleet.’
Olsen was in command of the fleet of science vessels scattered around the edges of the ever-growing hurricane.
He was an Annapolis graduate with a spotless record of command assignments on various naval vessels. This was his first fleet level assignment where he was responsible for multiple vessels.
His fleet consisted of one hundred and twenty vessels. These vessels were private science research laboratories, and NOAA weather ships, as well as twenty Navy destroyers and frigates stationed at each eighteen degrees of the compass. These navy vessels were the anchors of the observation net and would receive and process weather information from the smaller science vessels. They, in turn, would forward the data across broadband connections to the Abraham Lincoln’s converted ‘war room’. The war room now housed two massive parallel processing computers capable of doing hundreds of millions of calculations per second. The only computer more powerful than these was housed at Fort Meade, Maryland. That was the massive machine built to break any known encryption standard for the National Security Agency.
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