Regolith

by Brent Reilly

  In effect, China warned that it would have to adopt the Bush pre-emptive strike option in order to defend themselves from – wait for it – the Bush pre-emptive strike option. Bush’s pre-emptive strike rationale for invading a country that did not threaten America forced its enemies to pre-empt. Since Palin was threatening China with carrier groups, China could credibly argue that it was only acting in self-defense. It was like Bush threatening to topple the Iranian regime for building nukes, when nukes were the only thing that prevented the regime from being toppled.

  Even the new Aegis II anti-air system, limited to an 85 degree angle, could not tilt high enough to strike weapons falling from orbit. Just one hundred uranium rods could sink all four Far East aircraft battle groups, leaving America powerless as China added Taiwan’s trillion dollars in American bonds to its own $3 trillion. China would then own more U.S. Treasuries than Americans, giving them default veto power over the world economy. China, the world’s biggest creditor, would have enormous financial leverage over America, the world’s largest debtor. Like banksters, China would become too big to fail.

  The Taiwan Strait would no longer be international waters, and sure as hell would no longer be named the “Taiwan” Strait. Japan and Korea would bend over like new inmates as China screwed them with fees for everything that passed through the “China Strait”. China would be the Persian Gulf of imported electronics. America would be as dependent on China for electronics as they were dependent upon the Persian Gulf for oil.

  Americans would not be this surprised since proud patriotic Iraqis fought a brutal foreign occupation that tortured and sexually humiliated them rather than accept letting their families get by without basic security, electricity, and drinking water.

  Actually, Jackson knew that it was worse than that. American aircraft carriers operate on two-year operation cycles, with six months at sea followed by eighteen months in the shipyards getting overhauls, which left only three actually at sea at any one time. Commercial shippers would be shot dead by their shareholders if they only utilized their $100 million super-container ships a quarter of the time. Congress may as well go back to working 80 days a year as the Republicans did under Bush. Losing four carrier groups meant losing superpower status overnight, and once America looked vulnerable, a flock of two-bit dictators would be flipping her the bird.

  Since President Palin needed a war with China to get re-elected, Jackson needed to prevent or delay war with China. And that is where the governor of Texas came in.

  At least, if Lisa didn’t fuck it all up.

  What Lisa did not realize was that he was betting the family fortune on not just making this guy president, but doing so in exchange for a long list of very specific favors. Jackson and Cooper shared more golden handcuffs than an S&M orgy. So Lisa could easily fuck everything up. And since she has such a talent for sticking her hook into people, especially rich, famous, and powerful people, fucking everything up was a real possibility.

  The irony of battling his half-dressed daughter before dawn to save a trillion dollars, thousands of lives, and the family fortune was not lost on him.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Cooper will be late, but you could always meet them after your morning run,” he suggested.

  His daughter and Cooper’s wife did not get along. Lisa was way too good at acting cute, and Cooper had too long a history as a ladies man. Cooper’s wife feared that any man who could get it up was seducible and that her husband was only as faithful as his opportunities. If women were beauty objects and men success objects, then the most powerful man on the planet was a walking Spanish Fly attraction. Cooper could’ve looked like Mick Jagger instead of Dean Martin and still scored more views than YouTube.

  Lisa wasn’t buying what he was poorly selling, however. When she smiled he knew she already checked his scheduler, and once again he regretted giving her his password. Because he worked so much at home since becoming the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, she acted as his executive assistant. She was so good that he was tempted to pay her what she was truly worth. But letting her know just how dependent he had become on her would only give her that much more leverage over him, and politics is all about leverage.

  “What are you afraid of, daddy? Uncle Dan loves me.”

  Governor Cooper, indeed, seemed overly fond of her. Which was the problem. Jackson had no doubt that Cooper liked her far more than he liked him. Hell, everyone liked Lisa more than they liked him. She called him “uncle” because he was old enough to be her grandfather, good looking enough to be her boyfriend, and looked rich enough to be her sugar daddy. And it allowed her to get away with so much more. His daughter could get under someone’s skin faster than a starving mosquito.

  And she damn well knew what he was afraid of. She wanted to eclipse his own relationship with Cooper, which at the moment didn’t look hard to do. Jackson and Cooper were both political allies and rivals. Cooper needed Jackson because he raised millions of dollars for Democratic candidates as the chairman of the DNC. Jackson needed Cooper because he needed specific things that only the president of the United States could offer. Like multi-billion dollar no-bid contracts a la Halliburton.

  Such complex and ever-evolving relationships were normal in politics. Politicians were slick, deceptive, word-splitting, self-serving, hard-to-pin down evasive publicity whores because their public perception determined their power relative to everyone else. The net perception of this web of relationships determined who had how much power, over whom, when, how, why, and for how long. And that perception changed every day. Politicians kiss ass 10% of the time to get their asses kissed 90% of the time. Which was why, as Henry Kissinger put it, 90% of politicians gave the other 10% a bad reputation. Cooper was simply better at this than Jackson, who relied on money to gain leverage. Businessmen like Jackson entered politics because money wants what it cannot buy.

  “Cooper is mine,” Jackson said defiantly, annoyed how he came off like the child and she the adult.

  “Not yet, he isn’t,” Lisa pleasantly replied, not at all intimidated. “But he will be.”

  Just then he heard the echo of laughter coming from his house upstairs. Jackson easily recognized the seductive laughter of Cooper, who laughed easily and often. But Jackson had to concentrate for a moment before he realized that the woman laughing with him was their visiting French cousin, Monique. Jackson cringed as he realized that his daughter persuaded Monique to greet the governor at the front door so there would be no door bell for him to hear. Which meant Lisa was just distracting him while Monique ambushed Cooper. And she threw such a big clue at him with her first words.

  The little bitch out-maneuvered him again!

  While Lisa, post-boob job, was striking, Monique was the best looking woman in a family full of good looking women. Lisa may be a sports car, but Monique was a NASCAR-class hot rod. While Lisa struggled for grunt modeling work, Monique was something of a supermodel in Europe. Monique related to men via her sexuality, and thus always looked in the mood. Which made her an awkward house-guest for a happily married man with an insecure wife.

  Lorena, Jackson’s wife, was afraid Monique was too much of a temptation for her husband of nearly 25 years. Which was a reasonable assumption. What none of them knew is that Jackson lost his virginity to Monique’s mother 35 years ago, long before he met his wife. He attended the mother’s wedding, changed Monique’s diapers a few times, and even became her godfather. He therefore had no sexual interest in Monique. Which was good. What he didn’t know was if Monique knew that he fucked the shit out of her mother one glorious long-ago summer. (Literally – she loved anal.) Which was not good. So being around Monique made him feel vulnerable, just not in the way that most men did. His wife, however, picked up on his discomfort, and naturally drew the wrong conclusion.

  What Jackson was unable to explain to his beloved wife was that he did not lust after Monique, but after Monique’s long dead mother. The memory of her made him harder than calculus. She gave h
im more wood than Home Depot. Flashbacks kept him up longer than the neighbor’s rooster from his childhood. But, unfortunately, such Clinton-esque explanations were well beyond his meager means. Some itches simply cannot be scratched.

  And this was no reflection on Lorena. She tuned him like a piano. Their sex life was better now than it was a decade ago. He bragged that making love to her was better than sex. If you’re fucking when you want to come and making love when you want your lover to come, then they both fucked and made love like newlyweds. They had a sex life that rabbits would envy.

  Before proposing a quarter century ago, Jackson told Lorena a joke an uncle once told him. There are three types of women: (1) those who don’t like giving head, and thus give it as little as possible; (2) those who give it only when they are horny or drunk enough; and (3) the rare gem who fucking loves to suck cock. The punch line? If you ever meet a girl in Category Three, fucking marry her!

  That he promised her two organisms for every time she swallowed him was all the incentive she needed. Each thought they were getting the better end of the deal, which is the secret to a happy marriage.

  Jackson, for his part, went out of his way to not only stay faithful, but to give her nothing to even worry about. Her biological father left her mother for other women, which left Lorena permanently insecure. Which is why he always tried to bring someone along when he traveled.

  Lorena had good reason to worry about an affair, though, because Monique was instinctively attracted to rich, powerful men. Monique was born with looks, money, and connections, so the only thing left was power. The men she went out with – it’s odd to call married men “boyfriends” – represented the rich, famous, and powerful. As Kissinger put it, power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.

  Jackson saw this coming a decade ago when Monique was his daughter’s age. Monique had a fling that brought down the French Finance Minister in scandal. Underage sex with a total stunner by a powerful married man in public office could do that. Even in France. The resulting media frenzy helped launch Monique’s modeling career. She did her first television commercial not a month later. For condoms.

  If sex was a weapon, then Monique possessed WMD, and not even Iraq attracted this many inspectors. Cooper would not be the first president who tried to invade her and, as with the Iraqis, someone was likely to be sexually humiliated. What was worse was that Lorena knew that Monique was exactly his type, physically – dark hair, dark eyes, dark skin, and a narrow, athletic physique. In Spanish they’re called “morenitas.” Monique even laughed at his jokes without coming across as patronizing, which required true skill.

  Although not a traditionally handsome man, Jackson was built like a bear without the hair: 6’4”, barrel-chested, with massive arms and legs from years of working out too much. While governor of Arizona, word leaked that he wore size 15 shoes and the flood of dirty letters from women shocked him. He joked that he got more letters from single women than votes. No longer could he count on his modest looks to protect him from the flirtations of women. Even a stunner like Monique.

  Jackson mistakenly assumed that Lisa was the one ambushing Cooper, but once he heard Monique’s voice, followed by Cooper’s easy laughter, he knew how wrong, and how fucked, he was.

  Monique wanted to seduce Cooper!

  “No, no,” he quickly told himself. It was far worse: Lisa wanted Monique to seduce Cooper.

  Shit! Fuck! Shit!

  Nothing would attract Monique more than the next president of the United States. Jackson figured Cooper had only a 50-50 chance of winning the nomination, much less the presidency, but Monique didn’t know that. She would only know what Lisa told her. Like, say, “wanna meet our next president?”

  That would do it.

  Jackson had billions riding on Cooper winning, and hundreds of other rich investors counted on him to get Cooper elected. Even the hint of a sex scandal could blow Cooper out of the water like the USS Cole. He would not be the first presidential candidate destroyed by a sex scandal -- Gary Hart got caught fooling around with Donna Rice on a yacht ironically called Monkey Business in the 1980s. Jackson’s billions would go so far down the drain a plumber couldn’t save them.

  The realization of what was going on struck him like a kick in the nuts that took his breath away. When he saw Lisa’s face light up, he knew he was right. He hadn’t been this fucked since one glorious summer 35 years ago.

  2

  The asteroid hurled around the Sun at over 100,000 kilometers per hour. Although impossibly fast for a human spacecraft, that was a typical speed for rocks crossing the solar system. Some, like 24 kilometer comet Swift-Tuttle, transverse the solar system at over twice that speed.

  The C-type carbonaceous asteroid, half stone and half frozen gases, had traveled from at least as far as the Main Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter, half a billion kilometers away. Rocky asteroids tend to be dark, and icy ones bright. With an albedo of just .05, this asteroid was as black as coal.

  Originally 12 kilometers when discovered passing Mars, it was larger than the asteroid that exterminated the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, and therefore placed in the “Planet Killer” category of Earth-crossing space rocks. Although small compared to Ceres, a 950 kilometer Main Belt asteroid, Chiron, a 180 kilometer Kuiper Belt comet, or Chariklo, a 258 kilometers Centaur (between Saturn and Uranus), this new asteroid was still large enough to wipe out humanity.

  But hell, over one thousand space rocks large enough to wipe out humanity crossed Earth’s orbit. What made this new asteroid stand out was that it would soon become the largest space rock that crossed Earth’s orbit. It joined other Planet Killer NEOs (Near Earth Objects) like 1627 Ivar, at 6 kilometers and 1580 Betula, at 8 kilometers, both of which cross Earth’s path.

  Congress gave NASA the specific mandate, although not the money, to track all objects 70 meters or larger that crossed Earth’s orbit, although budget cuts by the Bush Administration delayed this mission by several years. The international Spaceguard, the University of Arizona’s Spacewatch, NEAT, LINEAR, the Minor Planet Center, JPL, and other automated NEO trackers had so far detected 1200 NEOs at least one kilometer large, tens of thousands at least 100 meters large, and millions that cross Earth’s orbit at least 10 meters large.

  The typical 250 meter-long NEO had more explosive power than all of Earth’s 50,000 nuclear weapons combined, and tens of thousands that size crossed Earth’s orbit. So Earth was threatened by tens of thousands of space rocks potentially more damaging than World War III, yet Bush cut the few million to track them.

  While the nuke that devastated Nagasaki had a yield of 20 kilotons, Earth was threatened by two million NEOs with explosive yields above a megaton, 200,000 in the gigaton range, 1200 in the teraton, and a handful in the pentagon yield range. All of the nuclear weapons on Earth would not produce a gigaton explosion, much less a teraton. The new asteroid had a pentagon explosive yield, which could flatten an entire hemisphere, like one did to Mars a few billion years ago, making northern Mars a couple kilometers lower on average than southern Mars.

  They were not called Planet Killers for nothing.

  Earth averaged a close call with a City Killer every few years, a “Nation Killer” every decade, and a “Region Killer” every century. Every year on average a rock with a yield of 15 kilotons or greater explodes in the atmosphere, with another dozen in the 1-kilometer range. In 1908, a 50 meter wide asteroid exploded several kilometers over Siberia and flattened 80 million trees over two thousand square kilometers, comparable to wiping out the entire New York metropolitan area. And that was just 50 meters big. Millions of rocks that size or bigger crossed Earth’s orbit.

  If a large rock hit deep water, the resulting tsunami could reach a few kilometers high before washing away coastal cities. And this threat was not as hypothetical as politicians treated it. A tsunami deposit has been found almost one thousand feet above sea level on the Hawaiian island of Lanai -- higher than the Empire State Building observation
deck. And the 350 megaton explosion that struck a few thousand years ago over Argentina was over twenty times more powerful than the relatively puny nuke that decimated Hiroshima in 1945.

  A one-kilometer rock – and over one thousand of them cross Earth’s orbit – could kill a few billion and create a nuclear winter that lasts for centuries. Plants would die within weeks, animals within months, and most of humanity within a few years.

  They’re not called “Extinction Events” for nothing.

  This particular Planet Killer, new to the inner solar system, was soon named 2011FU. The “2011” referred to the year it was discovered, and the public assumed the letters meant, “fuck you.”

  (The letters actually refer to when in the year it was discovered to clarify who reported what and when, since one object may be sighted by several observers. “AA” means it was found in the first half of January.)

  Asteroids have been named after people, places, sponsors, and even pets. 55 Pandora was named after the woman who released all of the world’s evils (that bitch!). The Finns in the 1940s and 1950 named many after their cities and ports (what imagination!). At least 16 have been named for the relatives of the legendary discoverers Eugene and Carolyn Shoemaker. Max Wolf named 482 Petrina and 483 Seppina after his dogs, who must have been totally gay. 2322 Kitt Peak was named after the Arizonan observatory that has found more NEOs than any other in the world. Perhaps the oddest was 2817 Perec, named after a French author who wrote a 300-page novel called La Disparition that never once used the letter “E”, the most common letter in English.