Dr. Kimura took a breath and a pause, composing his thoughts before continuing. “The underground tunnels and chambers are a consequence of the geology of Jehannum. As you know the orbit of Jehannum is an elongated ellipse. It comes very close to Alpha Shaitan, and then goes very far away during the course of an entire orbit. This difference in the tug of gravity alternately squeezes the planet and restores it back to a sphere, similar to the tides on Earth. Only on Jehannum, it is the land itself that rises and falls.
This constant stress on the crust causes it to crack and reform constantly, until it forms a stable honeycomb structure that can deform and reform constantly without breaking any further. These honeycomb structures is the labyrinth of tunnels and chambers below the surface that the Major has been talking about.
I have done a mathematical modeling of the eternal deformation and restitution of the Jehannum surface, and if you would allow me, I would like to display it on the screen. He looked at the admiral for permission and Hamid nodded. Dr. Kimura had turned full tech-head on being chosen for the expedition, and it took him a fraction of a second to retrieve the model and display it on the screen.
The screen displayed a 3D model of Jehannum with a solid crust which squeezed slightly and then restored back into its original spherical position continuously. The animated diagram slowly turned the surface into a bewildering network of cracks, which constantly changed shape. It was impossible to keep track of individual crack. Slowly but surely the cracks started increasing in width, but became more constant. The cracks changed shape fewer and fewer times, but kept growing in width, till they were almost constant, with a rare change in shape once in a while.
“This is the model speeded up millions of times to show how the tunnels of Jehannum have evolved. If you notice that the tunnels have now stabilized after millions of years, rarely breaking catastrophically. Further the point to notice is that Jehannum is squeezed such that its equator bulges out and deforms the most, while the poles deform the least.
As a result most of the major tunnels are aligned longitudinally, but are interconnected at random places with latitudinal interconnections. I will now turn the model 90° to show you the North Pole. If you notice there are hardly any crack on the surface or the crust at the pole. Whatever few crack that exist are not connected to any of the major tunnels running longitudinally. A similar situation exists on the South Pole as well.” Dr. Kimura flipped the globe to show the South Pole.
“Brilliant! So you have found a place for us to establish a beachhead!” exclaimed Col. Uzi.
“It is not that simple ma’am. Let me explain a bit more in detail.” Dr. Kimura said. Col Uzi glared at him at the breach of protocol. She expected to be addressed by her rank and not as ma’am. Ed raised his hand subtly to signal Col. Adina Uzi to calm down. Civilians were not expected to know such protocols. What Dr. Kimura had to say was for more important than bickering over protocol.
Thankfully Dr. Kimura had not noticed his faux pas and continued unaware. “As I had mentioned, this is only a mathematical model and not a real map of Jehannum. We have taken tomographic images over the poles of Jehannum to confirm that at least on the surface, it matches my mathematical model. Unfortunately imaging from space cannot penetrate beyond the top surface.
While I am fairly confident that there would not be a large number of tunnels to the poles, one cannot rule out a random tunnel or two having developed over the eons despite my mathematical models. This is within the range of random stochastic perturbations that take place in any mathematical model. Nature matches mathematical models closely but not exactly, there are always random variations that cannot be predicted by any mathematics.”
“Oh…” There was a definite tone of disappointment in Ed’s voice. “So what you are saying is that you can show us a place where there is less likelihood of being underground tunnels, but there are no guarantees.”
“I can do one better, sir!” said Dr. Kimura. Ed realized in an epiphany, why Dr. Kimura was addressing the brass as ‘sir’ and ‘ma’am’. He had forgotten or probably never bothered to remember the individual ranks of the men and women sitting around the table! So how else could he address them formally but to call them ‘sir’ and ‘ma’am’? So typical of civilians. No one could however hold a grudge against this gentle and tragic man.
Dr. Kimura blinked his eyes a few times as he did his tech-head thing and modified the model on the screen. The tunnels of Jehannum were now illustrated in various colors. “I have now added information in the model about the relative stress of each of the tunnels. Dark red being the ones with the highest stress and the dark blue having the least stress, and all colors in between having intermediate stress as indicated by the shades.
You may notice something strange and counterintuitive in the model. The tunnels near the equator are mostly blue, and they get redder as one climbs towards the pole. The tunnels near the Poles being darkest shades of red, and hence under maximum stress. One might ask that if the equator deforms the most, and the poles the least, why should the tunnels near the equator have the least stress and the ones near the poles have the most stress.
The answer to that is simple, the equator deforms so much that the tunnels near the equator flex and crack if necessary to relieve the stress, so there is no residual stress left on those tunnels. The tunnels end just before the Poles. The stress here is less, not enough to make further cracks and flex the tunnels, so whatever little stress that is felt by the crust out here remains stored as stress.
So how does that help us, you may ask. Like a compressed stick under pressure, just below the threshold for it to snap and break, this part of the crust is just under the critical stress level. A small helping hand will make much of the crust out here collapse. Allow me to demonstrate.” Dr. Kimura blinked a few times and the graphics re-animated itself.
This time small dots converged from space towards the pole in a circular fashion, encircling the North Pole. On striking the ground, the circular area around the pole developed jagged cracks and then the crust all around the pole collapsed until the North Pole stood out like a giant Mesa isolated from the rest of surface of Jehannum by a deep chasm.
“This simulation assumes 12 kinetic devices weighing 500 tons each being slammed in a circular fashion around the pole. The kinetic devices need to be travelling at one and a half percent of light, which is a speed that is easily achievable by our ships. With a strike like this, even in the worst case scenario you have a high probability of isolating the surface of the North Pole a few hundred square kilometers in area from the rest of the surface with a chasm kilometers wide and 2 kilometer deep.
The North Pole would become a two kilometer high tower, guaranteed to be disconnected from any tunnel, and next to impossible to climb up vertically. You see this cookie shaped land? This cookie shaped land is a fortress with hundreds of square kilometers area, which can only be approached by air.” Dr. Kimura gave a bow in his typically Japanese way indicating that he had finished his discourse.
Every person around the room looked at him in stunned silence. This unassuming man had delivered a hammer blow of an idea to an invasion force that had been floundering.
“This might sound like a stupid question, but is there any special kind of material required in the kinetics that we use?” Col. Uzi asked.
“At the speed we are talking about ma’am, one could even use bags of sand to get the desired effect, although I would suggest using raw ores from AS-d as the most dense and efficient material to pack. The key is to direct them within a target range of a few kilometers, hence we will have to use guided kinetics to position the payload precisely. Beyond that there is no special requirements.” Dr. Kimura answered. This time Adina couldn’t care less what Dr. Kimura called her.
“One more question.” This time it was Ed. “You said that there is a ‘high probability’ of this happening, by which I mean that there is no certainty. How high is the probability?”
“The ma
thematics says between 95% and 96%, sir” answered Dr. Kimura.
“That is good enough for me. Thanks doctor for giving us our cookie cutter. Do me a favor though. You don’t report to me, so you don’t need to call me ‘sir’. I know that you don’t remember our ranks and probably never will, that is fine. Nobody is perfect.” Ed said with a wink. “Just call me Ed. I believe you have earned the right to call me by my name.” Ed finished with a mild applause in appreciation. Somehow it caught on and soon the whole room was giving a standing ovation. Whoever had classified Orientals as ‘yellow’ had not seen Dr. Kimura, for his cheeks were flush red.
Chapter 17
Raising the tether
AS-d (Devil’s Workshop), Alpha Shaitan System
February 2108
Operation ‘Cookie cutter’ had a side benefits. It speeded up the plans to repair the Shaitan space elevator on AS-d. Being the de facto base of human operations on Alpha Shaitan and hence their home for the last few months, life became a lot easier when one could move between the surface and the ships without have to wait for shuttle schedules. The quality of life on both the ships and the surface improved as transportation of raw materials and fabricated goods became easier and cheaper.
Six thousand tons of rock and raw ore had to be lifted up to the orbit on to the Kali, which was to be the delivery ship for the cookie cutter. It was possible to do so with the 24 shuttles that were at the disposal of the 5th Fleet. However the time taken to do so with the shuttles would be unacceptable, especially since the shuttle fuel generation plant had just been set up and its production capacity would not be able to keep up with the demand.
So the first order of business in operation ‘Cookie cutter’ was to raise the Shaitan space elevator, which the humans themselves had destroyed in their opening round of ‘shock and awe’. At the speed at which the crowbars had travelled, it would have been impossible to target the tether of the space elevator. Instead the big fat counterweight, which also acted as the space station for the elevator had been targeted.
The counterweight and the space station had been blown to smithereens, and the tether had fallen down, but was still anchored to the surface. All the humans had to do was to raise the tether once again and attach a counterweight. It sounded simple but was far from it, especially since the humans were operating so far away from their home planet, and didn’t have the proper infrastructure to execute the job.
The engineers devised a clever and quick, but dangerous way to raise the tether. The Shaitan space elevators used the same tether design philosophy as the humans, probably because it was the most practical design. Just like the human tethers, the Shaitan tether consisted of many strands which had been bundled together.
Each individual strand added to the combined strength, but at the same time the tether was unlikely to suffer a catastrophic failure if any one strand snapped. Individual strands could be added or replaced as needed without taking the space elevator offline, and the thing most important to humans right now was the fact that individual strands weighed far less than the combined weight of the tether, thus making it easier to install them.
The thing that had excited the engineers most about the Shaitan space elevator though was the material used to make the tether. The tether was made out of carbon nanotubes! The holy grail of materials. Something that the humans had been struggling to fabricate into long enough lengths for over a century. With carbon nanotube tethers, one could make a space elevator on Earth. Something that had not been done yet because humans didn’t have a strong and light tether material yet. It would open up space for humans like no other single space technology development.
The Shaitan manufacturing techniques that had been reverse engineered had shown the way to make larger carbon nanotube structures than ever possible by humans before, but even those were not long enough to make a tether for a space elevator. The Shaitans obviously had that technology and manufacturing capability, probably guarded somewhere deep within the catacombs of Jehannum, for it had not been found on AS-d.
The news of this discovery and other such technologies had been conveyed to Earth. It was clear that there were many more advanced technologies to be learnt from the Shaitans that were probably being jealously guarded in the underground realms of Jehannum. That realization only made the directive from Earth stronger on taking Jehannum as intact as possible to be able to study the technologies.
The strands of the fallen tether were unbound, and each individual strand was raised separately. The strands of carbon nanotubes were far lighter than human materials, and the 20% gravity of AS-d compared to Earth meant that that the strands were far shorter and lighter than what would be needed on Earth. Yet a single strand of the tether was heavier than what could be lifted to space by a single shuttle.
It took 6 shuttles controlled in tandem by a single quantum computer to lift a single strand. There were no pilots on the shuttles since the flights were so dangerous, and humans could not precision control this operation anyway. The computer monitored the tension on the cables attached to each shuttle every millisecond and adjusted the thrust on each shuttle to keep the load balanced.
Once the first strand reached a point far beyond the geosynchronous orbit point, it was attached to a jury rigged temporary counterweight that had been assembled outside the Redeemer using discarded metal scavenged from all the three ships. A tension monitor was attached to the strand and then the computer slowly started easing out the tension from the 6 shuttle cables, all the time monitoring the tension on the strand.
If the tension on the strand reduced, that would mean that the counterweight had been under-calculated and it was being dragged to the surface. In that case the shuttles would immediately increase the tension on their cables to prop up the strand, and more weight would be added to the counterweight.
On the other hand if the tension on the strand increased, then the counterweight had been over-calculated and the strand was in danger of being snapped. In that case the shuttles would drag the strand down to relieve the stress on the strand and some weight would be reduced from the counterweight.
Once the first strand was up with the right balance of counterweight, the entire process was bootstrapped using the first strand. Carbon nanotubes are good conductors of electricity, and the engineers had figured out that the Shaitan space elevator ran on a linear motor very similar in principle to a maglev train. When the elevator had been hit, the elevator car had been on the ground and had survived relatively unscathed.
Humans were now fairly comfortable operating Shaitan hardware, unless they were heavily encrypted. The space elevator for whatever reason was not considered worthy of encryption, so it was fairly easy for the engineers to operate the car. What was not clear was whether the car could be lifted on a single strand of the tether.
The strand was over 2 centimeters thick at the ground level and nearly four times that at its thickest point near the geosynchronous level. In theory it should be able to lift the car. A test run with no load proved that fact. Test loads of iron, titanium, aluminum and manganese cubes were sent up the car. These were refined metals that had been lying in stock in the Shaitan warehouses. The load was gradually increased until it was approximately the same weight of a single strand of the tether, to ensure that the next strand can be lifted up by the car.
The Avenger class ships carried micro refractories for cold and hot casting, which could be fed ingots normally produced by humans. Fortunately Shaitan cubes were slightly smaller and thus there was little problem in using the metals. Sophisticated composite alloys were hard and time consuming to produce but the Redeemer was not aiming to make anything sophisticated.
What the Redeemer’s crew were making was steel angles, strips, nuts and bolts etc. They were trying to make a permanent counterweight. It was very much 19th century technology. The only tricky part was that the counterweight would be assembled and the weight added gradually as more and more strands got added to the counterweight.
After the second strand was lifted and attached, the margin of error was far more relaxed and things proceeded smoothly and fast thereafter till all the 16 strands were lifted and attached. There was so much refined iron stored in the warehouses of AS-d that instead of using bulky iron ore as the payload, it was decided to use the manufactured iron cubes instead which were far more compact and easier to handle.
It was with a measure of satisfaction that the humans noted, that the iron from the same warehouses would be used to hit Jehannum, which had been used to hit Earth in the Kinetic Holocaust. Revenge tasted sweeter when you used the enemy’s own weapons against him.
The crew of the Redeemer had the toughest time constructing the shell of the 12 kinetic missiles. The construction was complicated by the fact that it had to be done completely outside the ship, since there wasn’t enough space inside. It was painstakingly slow work.
One had to get shape of the missiles right so that they would remain balance in mass on all sides. Scavenged rockets from GK-3 crowbars had to be precisely placed on those missile shells to ensure balanced thrust, otherwise the missile might tumble and spin when trying to make course corrections. The navigational units, which had also been scavenged from GK-3 crowbars had to be recalibrated for this heavier payload and different missile geometry.
Retribution (Shaitan Wars) Page 30