Regolith

by Brent Reilly

  His father and daughter, also holding hands, crept closer between the mattresses so the five of them formed a ring. Like metal to a magnet, his daughter probably sensed a video camera turned on. They looked kind of silly, the five of them with helmets on, not being able to see or hear each other. Yet getting it all on tape. The age of reality TV had finally gone too far. Again.

  You know a show is reality TV when it’s completely scripted. Jackson would prefer an honest sitcom to a reality show.

  Then a third hammer dropped and their world exploded. King Kong shook their little box like a tambourine. Good thing they were all laying flat with their arms and legs spread wide, or they would be been thrown against the hard metal wall like crouching Chava, flying Latino. As it was, his wife sailed into him, her knee smacking his side and her big titties window-wiping his helmet. He tackled her like a quarterback.

  That one felt worse than the damn asteroid impact. The concrete floor above them must have collapse because Jackson sensed a pressure wave push hard against their shed door. For the first time, the shed was on tilt. Unfortunately, it tilted away from their only escape hatch.

  The professor motioned with his gloved hand for them all to stay put. At least that was Jackson’s first interpretation. His head was ringing so loudly, his eyesight so suspicious, that his father could be flipping him the bird for all he knew. Not that it mattered. He didn’t have the energy to do anything more than pee. Which he had to concentrate not to do. Shit, not with Chava to record it. His family would never let him hear the end of it.

  Lisa, lifting her visor, was the first to speak.

  “Woo-hoo,” she whispered. “Someone call Disney!”

  Normally Jackson would have bettered her, saying something totally fucking wicked that made her look lame. Or so he assured himself. But concentrating on not peeing left him with no energy to think clearly. If that were at all possible in the first place. Dead tired, he faded out of consciousness. Again.

  Jackson woke up completely confused. Someone was snoring and it turned out to be Lisa. The mall was open, but nobody was shopping. He looked around -- where the hell was Chava when he finally wanted to film something? Five flashlights beamed around him, but failed to illuminate. He lifted his head, only to hit a mattress. As everything quickly came back to him, he barely avoided emptying his bladder into his blue jeans.

  There! He heard it again.

  “Open the fucking door!”

  Jackson watched his father slither like a pro, the old man besting them all. Someone kicking the door now became impossible not to hear. Their nightmare nearly over, they stampeded out of their mattress sandwich.

  In the one foot of space along the wall by the door Jackson saw his family step over what must be Larry Bond. Without his helmet, he smashed his head against the low ceiling, popping his head like a zit. Now that’s just fucked up, Jackson thought. The guy survives the fucking asteroid impact, a trillion tons of space rock landing not forty miles away, only to die from the gamma-ray warheads meant to un-bury them. That’s just not right.

  Then Chava popped up, so Jackson pretended to check the guy’s pulse and gave a sad shake of his head, hoping this wouldn’t become a damn habit. No sooner did he think this than Chava motioned to where the Kitt Peak director and his wife should be. Exhausted beyond imagination, Jackson slowly crawled back into the mattresses, losing his battle against claustrophobia, passed the dead white cameraman who peed himself, then found Dr. Kowalski laying dead next to his wife. Fuck. With barely concealed impatience, he checked both of their pulses, then looked into the camera, and sadly shook his head again. Jackson tried not to look at what used to be a baby, but really, how can that be avoided? These horrible images will have to compete with each other before turning into nightmares. He quickly slithered out of the mattresses so he could stand up like a normal person.

  This really was too much. Not while sick, claustrophobic, and nauseous. He had enough of dead bodies for one morning. Five of the ten people who stayed in this shed died. Thank God his wife and daughter didn’t have to see them.

  His father was right when he gave them 50/50 odds.

  Someone must have opened the door because a bunch of dust invade their coffin. The professor dug out a filter mask that went over the nose and mouth and held it up so everyone else would put theirs on. Then he put his helmet back on to avoid vaporized people clogging his ears, eyes, and throat. Putting their masks and motorcycle helmets on, his family looked like a surgical team lining up to enter a motorcross race.

  Then his father disappeared through the doorway and a yell of victory went up. His hand then re-entered to help Lisa through. Lisa and Lorena each carried a portable computer wrapped in bags that they hid between the mattresses. Their cell phones, cameras, and small electronics were placed in socks, then folded in towels. Jackson hated waiting in lines, and now, nauseous, claustrophobic, and needing to pee, it was especially bad, but he couldn’t go before his wife and daughter. Literally, they were blocking his way forward and there was nowhere to push them aside. So he closed his eyes and concentrated on slowing down his breathing.

  After doing Kegel exercises to not pee himself, Jackson finally went through the doorway only to nearly get killed by a canister of gas that his father was tossing from the other shed into a basket tied to a rope. He immediately understood: his hydrogen-fueled heloplanes were the only vertical takeoff aircraft with the range to reach them. It didn’t, however, have enough fuel to return the thousand miles back to civilization, so they stockpiled a ton of compressed hydrogen gas to refuel.

  Jackson looked straight up into Hell. At least, that’s what Hell usually looked like in movies. No blue or white. Falling dust and dirt painted the sky various reds, oranges, and yellows against a dark gray background, while he heard the sonic booms of rocks exploding beyond the clouds.

  It looked like the sky was falling. On Mars.

  “Help me with this,” his father ordered.

  Together they manhandled an amorphous metal safe (another global business he was quickly dominating) that contained a million dollars in cold, hard cash. Fuck-in-a! That money will come in handy. He had over $100 million cash in safes buried in Fairbanks and Chugwater, on the assumption that buying stuff using credit or debit cards may not work for a while. They tied it to a rope and pulled twice so those above could pull it up.

  Chava just finished scampering up a very long hill, somehow carrying Larry’s camera in addition to his own, to join the bald aliens pulling him up with a rope tied to a rescue vest. Jackson turned around slowly 360 degrees, and discovered that he was in the middle of ant hill. He sure as hell didn’t see any evidence of his home. Not even the concrete foundation.

  He somehow got nearly a hundred insurance companies to over-insure his home in October. He would be up a few hundred million if they all paid up.

  Wow, getting those sheds out is going to be a bitch.

  The three gamma-rays indeed saved their lives, and left a crater of loose dirt in their wake. That’s about the length of a football field to the top, he estimated, starting at a 45 degree angle before leveling off. Thank God his son evidently brought a lot of rope. This cone will funnel a lot of rain into the sheds.

  He poked his head into the second shed and helped his father with the last of the canisters. The rope with the vest descended and he motioned for his father to go next. Not out of chivalry, but because he had to take a massive piss.

  The porta-potty was fucking gone. That’s when he noticed the top edge of the sheds blackened by intense heat. Unlike metals, amorphous metal (which is technically a glass) has such a high temperature threshold that it must be cut by a high powered laser. A welding torch simply isn’t hot enough. Yet something melted the fuck out of it. If he put standard shipping containers instead of amorphous metal sheds, they wouldn’t have survived.

  He unzipped as soon as his father started getting slapped against the rising slope and the relief from urinating was immediate, profound,
and intense. He pissed away not only urine, but stress. It may not be therapy, but it sure felt therapeutic.

  “Urine the money,” he sang to himself, enjoying the flow.

  It never failed to dismay him how often he needed to empty his bladder since he turned forty. Diet and exercise kept most of his body’s betrayals at bay, but not his need to pee several times a day. He couldn’t even get through the night anymore without having to get up to go. And if he drank late, then he would be up at least twice. His father used a urine bottle so he wouldn’t have to leave the bed, but Jackson just couldn’t get himself to pee in a bottle. Not with his beautiful wife lying next to him. He may be fifty, but he didn’t feel his age. At least, he didn’t want to.

  His Zen-like trance deepened with the urine flow when something struck his head. Good thing he wore a helmet. He saw the rope with the vest and wondered how the hell his father got up so fast. How long had he been peeing? He shook off the remaining drops, tucked it in, then strapped on the vest. He pulled twice, then nearly lost a boot when the rope rapidly pulled him up. He must have kissed the slope a dozen times before he got to the top. His left knee smashed into something that made him see stars.

  Ahh! Halfway up a rock sliced open his shirt and chest. A slash the other way would have put an “X” on his chest. He bled on the regolith the rest of the way up. He saw several tired people pulling the rope far faster than he could scramble his arms and legs. His neck hurt more now than before the climb. He prayed they wouldn’t kill him, now of all times.

  When he reached the surface, Jackson saw his beautiful heloplane caked with dirt, and what looked like another planet. Wow! Arizona looked more Martian than Mars. Even the blood red sky looked extraterrestrial. In the distance, sonic booms overlapped like several thunder storms converging. Although not yet morning, there was enough light to read.

  Although people associate Arizona with hot desert, it actually had a lot of mountains, and those mountains had a lot of forests. Which burned now like smoldering giants. The result looked like millions of chimneys doing their best to offend Al Gore. Millions of trails of smoke floated up while millions of trails of smoke shot down. The sky had no sky in it. Just billowing clouds, streaks of paint, and an opaque gray that Jackson assumed was water vapor teasing the stratosphere.

  Art! That’s what the sky looked like. That impressionist shit where you threw colors on canvas then sold it for millions. A 3D video version of shitty art! Finally art that he could appreciate.

  Then he saw a curtain of smoke and dust that blocked the entire northwest. It looked like the place where the hobbit ventured in that last Lord of the Rings movie. With even better special effects. He tried to take it all in, but it was just too much. It dominated the landscape like nothing he ever experienced. And he knew that he needed to see it. Now.

  41

  “The Lorena is at full speed and running a parallel path a nautical mile behind us,” the radar operator informed him.

  “Wish them luck,” Wili instructed the communications operator, then brought up his binoculars. “What the hell is that idiot Bush doing?”

  Not that anyone could answer. The Lina was speeding past the USS Enterprise, a 51 year old carrier scheduled for decommissioning in 2013, itself going at maximum speed. The $6.2 billion USS George Bush, the newest supercarrier, was officially delivered to the Navy in 2009. The Enterprise was the first Nimitz class carrier, and Bush the tenth and last. The redesigned Ford-class carrier was suppose to begin replacing the Nimitz-class ones in 2015, but President McCain canceled it in favor of smaller, amorphous metal versions.

  The Lorena, Jackson’s first 200-meter cargo ship, blew President-elect McCain away. Standing at the bow of a ship doing 60 knots was like driving a convertible going 200 MPH. Jackson’s designers showed McCain and Pentagon experts how the design could be optimized for 1) a stealth mini-carrier carrying vertical liftoff F-35s; 2) a stealth heloplane carrier; 3) a destroyer that carried two F-35s and two heloplanes; and 4) cargo ships that doubled as an amphibious assault mothership that accommodated hundreds of small, fast, amphibious assault hovercraft. All armed with a speed-of-light laser, a railgun firing target-optimized gamma-ray shells, gamma-ray missiles, and armed drones.

  In a media blitz, Jackson used animation to show small heloplanes providing close air support to thousands of small armed hovercraft, jumbos airlifting battalions of amorphous metal “tanks” behind enemy lines, as ships fired lasers and railguns while F-35s cleared the skies of enemy aircraft.

  Jackson’s 100 and 50 meter long versions could be optimized as icebreakers, minesweepers, hospital ships, tugboats, bulk or container cargo, heavy transport, Coast Guard duty, as well as a laser railgun version without aircraft. All with just three hulls several times harder to penetrate, fireproof, corrosion proof, faster, stealthier, more seaworthy, and which would last over a century.

  Jackson offered to make ten amorphous metal submarines (with pop-up railguns), twenty 200-meter ships, thirty 100-meter ships, and forty 50-meter long ships for just $100 billion if McCain would pre-pay 10% to cover factory setup costs and produce three prototypes. Which President McCain did. After all, the first Ford-class carrier cost $9 billion, and the Zumwalt destroyers and the latest subs cost $3 billion each. And Jackson’s ships would save billions every year on fuel, labor, and maintenance. So McCain figured he was saving taxpayers money, multiplying America’s naval power, and would get credit for a next-generation Navy. Not a bad legacy for the son and grandson of admirals.

  In return, Jackson would classify the stealth mini-carriers as “McCain-class” (since McCain served aboard carriers) and the Navy could recoup their investment by selling their oldest ships to allies as Jackson delivered the newest ones. Just adding a heloplane and drones multiplied each ship’s usefulness.

  Over the next several years, Jackson planned on making 300, 400, and 500-meter long bulk and container mega-ships that the government could contract out as needed. Since super oil tankers, the largest ships afloat, max out at 450 meters, Jackson’s plans rocked the shipbuilding industry.

  Then McCain died and President Palin tried to renege on the deal. Jackson only qualified for the rest of the contract if he produced three good prototypes, so Palin counter-sued to get the $10 billion back, which forced Jackson to spend the $10 billion as quickly as possible. Then, right when they were ready to begin their first ships, asteroid fragments threatened to swamp coastlines, prompting Jackson to dismantle and relocate the factories, at great expense.

  Wili therefore captained one of the best ships in the world. In fact, except for the yet-to-be-made laser railgun version, the only ship in the world he would rather captain was Jackson’s billion dollar, 100-meter yacht.

  Most motorized cabin cruisers or luxury boats max out around 17 knots, but his double-M design skimmed over the ocean at over 60 knots. Because it split seawater to run on hydrogen gas, it was a true deep water craft capable of circling the globe. The yacht had two helicopter pads, 100 guest cabins, 1000 square meters of living space on five decks, three swimming pools (a large one, a lap pool, and a kiddie pool), a hot tub, sauna, steam room, three recreational rooms, a 3D movie theater, two gyms, a disco, three launch boats, a mini-submarine, a master suit larger than most homes, and a large array of non-lethal weapons to repel pursuers and paparazzi. Joggers could even do laps around the deck.

  All for just $1 billion USD. Not including the heloplane.

  Jackson was the first to ever offer a billion dollar luxury yacht. Sure, the 165 meter long yacht Eclipse reportedly cost $1.2 billion, but that was over twice its initial cost estimate. No, by deliberately marketing a yacht that cost a billion, Jackson was making a statement. Because the super-rich who buy the most expensive yachts want to make a statement with their purchases. And nothing states “I’m richer than you” than a billion dollar boat. The more exclusive the club, the more people wanted to get in. And what could be more exclusive than owning one of the world’s billion dollar yach
ts? Demand for his competitors dried up.

  What blew Wili away is that Jackson had sold over one hundred of them in just a few years, and he reportedly even had a year-long waiting list. Every big company, Internet millionaire, third-world dictatorship, Wall Street trader, Hollywood celebrity, and oil sheik wanted one. And they paid a billion, even though the hull and superstructure cost a small fraction of what conventional ones cost since he churned them out in a mass-production factory. Un-fucking-believable.

  The super-rich paid so much because the hull would last virtually forever; it was extremely fast; its free fuel gave it unlimited range; it was not just really long at 328 feet, but four times wider than conventional hulls; its low draft made it possible to go up more rivers and dock at more piers; and its greater width made it safer, more stable, and more seaworthy. The wider the ship, the harder it was to capsize and the less it made guests seasick.

  A billion dollar state-of-the-art ship made Wili think of the Bush. The carrier was brand new. The crew had three years to break her in. So what the fuck was the captain doing?

  They all had been circling at high speed while waiting for the mega-tsunami. Wili’s heloplane informed all the few dozen ships in the area when and where it found the wave, its size and speed. Both carriers then launched their helicopters rigged for rescuing people out of the water. Maybe the Bush had the bad luck to have its back completely to the swell and turning around to face it was taking too long. Or maybe the Bush was not listening to their emergency channel. Maybe Bush attracted catastrophe.

  “Keep the starboard camera on the Enterprise and track the Bush with forward cameras. Engineering, give me all you’ve got!”

  Wili blasted his horn in greeting as they passed the Enterprise like a sprinter out-pacing an old marathon runner. The USS Bush was a few nautical miles ahead of them and heroically trying to turn around in time. But Wili knew immediately that they would not make it. He ordered the helmsman to steer well away from the looming disaster.