by M. Modak
One of his senior engineers suggested that rebooting the system might allow them to regain control of the computers. However, to do that, he would have to find a way to cut the power to the generators. He went alone, searching for the main circuit breakers but found all the doors locked leading to that section of the building. Taking the long way around the building, he stopped at the fences outside surrounding the generators but they were electrified. Later he had discovered that the buildings smart systems had killed several security officers when they tried to gain access to the main computer rooms.
He wished he had explosives somewhere on campus. Out of options, he had ordered a complete evacuation, which meant he ran around yelling to everyone he saw, “Get the hell out now!” No one resisted his command. In fact, most were a step ahead of him. Then when he was sure that everyone was out of the building he went to his car, but it wouldn’t start; nothing dedicated to the network operated.
A minute ago a small private jet with the well-known Adison company logo painted on its side, screamed by not far overhead. It looped high into the sky and disappeared.
He took another bite of the tiny ham sandwich and waited. For a while, there was nothing but silence. Then he saw it! The sleek, white, blue and yellow jet dove at a steep angle and at full speed. With a loud Boom, it exploded into the power generators! Jolts of electricity leapt high into the air and across to the electrified fence. Other bolts hit anything metal around it sending down showers of sparks onto the wet lawn.
The huge mushroom cloud slowly began to speed up its rotation. Lightning struck again and again, within and around the massive cloud. Thunder shook the ground, building and cars. He got out of his car, never taking his eyes off the sky, and pressed a pair of binoculars to his eyes. Against the background of billowing smoke and flashes of lightning he saw the outline of four parachutes slowly gliding down toward the beach. Red and white strobing lights flashed on their sides of their packs. He spoke to himself, “They just saved the world!”
Then the whole cloud began to spasm and glow bright, neon green as it slowly collapsed in on itself. More jolts of electricity leaped up from the dying electric generators high into the sky. And suddenly, the entire storm was sucked in the black mass at its lower center; leaving a calm, clear, star filled sky.
Dr. Peterson combed the sky again but could not find any of the parachutes he saw only moments ago. He gathered a large group of people and together they searched all morning. But the four passengers, who had escaped just before the plane crashed, had vanished.
Chapter 12 EMP
Universe 311
The drill had been waiting at the Georgia World Trade Center’s large parking lot, not far away; it was just where the general said it would be. From inside the helicopter it looked like a small black bus. Its nose cone had spiraling teeth that glittered with diamonds from its tip to its wide base. A second cone attached on the rear gave the machine a funny two-faced look.
A ring of army trucks, tractor-trailers and tanks made a wide semicircular barricade around the drill. Before they landed, they had seen several people walking around in military uniforms not far away. Joshua hoped they were friendly. He was sure they were still carrying the same weapons the soldiers he had with him had been issued.
Joshua had sat the helicopter down not far from the drill. Anna and all the new people who had switched with the soldiers meant to protect them jumped out and began unhooking the cables from the base of the helicopter. They were relieved when they didn’t hear any gunfire coming from the gathering people at the parking lot’s edge.
Joshua told Anna he needed her back in the chopper when they took off. She would coordinate, through radio, with the men on the ground. All but three of the people, now in the professor’s, general’s and the Major’s bodies took up positions around the drill in a large circle. They all wanted to help hook up the cables to the drill but it quickly became clear that many of them had no idea what to do with the instructions he was giving them. Therefore, Joshua had asked them to help keep the on-lookers away from the drill as the others hooked it up.
Only three of the men were able to hook to up the cables to the drill’s platform. In their other lives they were all construction workers of one type or another. They had experience with moving heavy objects and cranes.
Joshua was just glad they could understand what he was talking about and was willing to help. Joshua asked, “Are we ready?”
“Yes,” everyone said as the three men moved away from the helicopter and walked over near the drill.
The storm was expanding above them. Joshua pushed on the throttle and power surged into the twin rotating blades. They roared to life pulling them quickly up off the ground.
Joshua maneuvered the helicopter as best he could against the strengthening currents of the wind. He could hear Anna talking with the men on the ground through the radio. She repeated the instructions they were giving her aloud, “Move forward and to the right,” she said, and finally “Almost there, okay, keep it steady I’m lowering the cables.” Anna flipped the electric motor on and the four cables descended toward the drill. The wind had picked up again and Joshua was having a harder time staying still. Anna said, “They need some more slack in the cable to compensate for all the movement.” She pressed the button again lowering the cables another 10 feet. Then she shouted, “Okay that’s good.”
He waited for her another minute. She said, “It’s ready let’s go.” He gave the chopper a gradual increase of power, feeling the strain on the cables as they went taught from the load resisting their ascent but the helicopter was more than powerful enough for the job. They took off, headed for Aughra.
Anna thanked the men below and then repeated Joshua’s warning that Aughra still might explode. They needed to get as far away from here as possible and they needed to go now.
Joshua flew the helicopter high into the air. Some of the buildings were so tall he didn’t try to go over them but the wind was increasing, causing the drill to sway hard as he veered around the tall structures.
To his alarm, he noticed the weight of the helicopter and the load from the drill was steadily increasing, making the engines work harder to do the same task. On average, the drill’s load was increasing at 100-pound increments every few hundred yards. He quickly did the math in his head and realized that if the rate of increase didn’t suddenly jump the helicopter could handle the load. But, on second thought, he decided to drop altitude and get as close to the roads as he dared to; preparing for an emergency landing if it came to that.
They soon emerged out of the thickest cluster of buildings, and only one building complex stood between them and John’s lab. In the distance, he saw four incomplete towers. They reminded him of the Human Core Tek Inc. buildings that looked down on the Laytech warehouse in Drakes world.
Then he looked into the sky and all other thoughts left his mind. Lightning filled the atmosphere as it struck the looming shape of an enormous, neon green mushroom cloud.
“What’s that?” Anna said.
“I don’t know he told her. He flipped the onboard radar system on and a holographic map of the cloud took shape. It was gigantic extending into the stratosphere. Its electromagnetic signal extended beyond his radar’s scope and into space. It looked like it was interfering with the Earth's electromagnetic field. There was a black mass at its base not far above Aughra. The black mass registered on the computer scanner as “Lacking data.”
He checked for radiation but nothing registered the on Geiger Counter, so far, and the fact that they were still flying meant that a nuke hadn’t gone off.
He said, “It’s not nuclear. It looks like it could be the start of a building gravitational well tha…” The helicopter dropped rapidly before Joshua could compensate and they heard a strain followed by a bang, popping sound!
He said, “Were going down!”
Anna screamed! Joshua pushed the throttle to full power and pulled back on the controls, trying to stop
their forward motion. The drill swung forward in a slow arc and the helicopter groaned under the strain. Just when he was sure the cables would snap and the propellers would go flying off into the sky. He reached deep inside his mind. He was surprised to find it clear of all pain. The fervent need of the moment had driven him past the regular mechanics of his thoughts and touched the strings of his soul. Time seemed to stretch as he listened to its vibrations. He was in tune with the moment like never before. He prayed, “Chopper stop now!” A soft blue glow flashed from his chest. The helicopter began to glow with a blue hue as it gave a little creak and then stabilized. Everything swayed a little more as the drill rocked back and forth coming to rest directly below them. Quickly, he lowered the drill to the ground and shouted, “Release the cables!”
Anna slammed her hand on the emergency release button and the helicopter jerked up as the drill dropped safely the remaining few feet to the ground. She leaned over and looked Joshua in the eyes. “What…was that?”
Joshua took several deep breaths and glanced down at his chest. He said, “Nothing, static electricity or something...” He looked back up at her and smiled. He said, “Hold on.” The helicopter touched down in-between the four incomplete towers a few hundred feet from the lab where Aughra waited. He went to the back of the chopper, opened a heavy lidded container and removed the tactical nuclear warhead.
Anna said nothing has he went about his grim task of checking that it was operational and armed. He was glad that they had given him the key and codes needed to detonate the bomb earlier. A note with a sketch showing how the nuke should look once in place under Aughra was stuck to the controls. Joshua had insisted the Major leave the note, just in case they came under this circumstance. The message wasn’t the full lesson he was supposed to have gotten on the ride here, but he didn’t need it anyway. The nuke was a little bigger than a suitcase but in this case, size didn’t matter. Now all he needed was the drill.
Anna and he dropped down out of the helicopter and ran over to the drill. Anna opened the door and the two climbed in. John took the first seat directly behind the nose and Anna took the slightly higher seat directly behind him.
“Let me guess, you were a drilling engineer in another life,” She said.
Joshua laughed, “Actually I was, but this machine seems to be unique to this world. I can’t remember seeing anything like it before but I think I can figure it out.” A holographic display appeared and he pressed a floating button. The radio came on and his favorite 311 song was playing. He smiled taking it as a good sign and pressed the button again. The music went off. He said, “Okay let’s try this.” He slid a red bar across the display. A view screen and more controls lit up before him as the drill’s electric motor came to life. He found the cone’s activation button and the whole drill violently shook as the front and back drills bits began to spin in opposite directions. He found the accelerator and he slowly gave it power. The bits spun faster as the wheels started to turn.
They drove a hundred meters across the shaking ground. Anna was putting in the calculations Joshua had given her into the computer. They would determine the distance from Aughra’s base and the angle of descent needed to match the drill’s RPM limits.
Georgia was full of thick red clay. This drill should be able to chew through it with no problems but huge slabs of granite littered the soil. He dialed the ground penetrating radar to maximum strength, mapping the ground beneath them all the way to Aughra’s base beneath the lab.
Anna said, “The computer has set a course. It estimates 35 minutes to target depth… Is that going to be enough distance? Won’t we be too close to the surface when the nuke explodes?”
“This is a Harmonic Tactical Nuke. We have to be close enough to project the blast straight up under Aughra but deep enough so the radiation is trapped underground where it will be kept to a minimum.” He looked at the computer’s drilling projections and added a different, higher soil density for the clay at various places along the route and a few other corrections that the computer had used to estimate the time it would take them to make it. He wanted to have a worst-case scenario in place. The new projection put them under Aughra in 43 minutes. They had one hour until the full alignment with Nebula311 was complete. He wasn’t sure what would happen then but, if his dreams had been correct, he knew it wouldn’t be good.
“Let’s do this,” he said,
The back of the vehicle started to rise as the front-spinning nosecone lowered to the preset angle. The drill slid forward and down. It slid off the vehicle that had transported them here as the spiraling nose bit into the soil. They began to slide into the Earth as it chewed deep in the surface. The grinding sounds were deafening as the superheated dirt scraped the exterior. Small bars along the sides of the hull extended and retracted, keeping them level. Without the bars, the drill would counter rotate with the turning bit. The drill continued digging, engulfing them in complete darkness. They slid headfirst toward the last place in the universe they wanted to go.
Red light from the holographic controls played across their faces. They held their breath as they saw sewer pipes on the radar, as big as the drill, passing within feet of them. The drill tunneled deeper into the ground and as the minutes passed sweat beaded on their face. They had charted a straight-line in-between underground gas lines, electrical conduits, computer fiber optics and transmission cables. Then something began to change. The pressures against the drill were starting to lower.
Joshua recalculated the variables and concluded that gravity had changed again. Aughra was now above them and it had created a new center of gravity that was competing with that of the Earth itself. He quickly input the new pressure changes into the computer and the estimated time to their destination shrank.
He smiled back at Anna, glad the pressure had decreased. The Earth had been shaking more violently all around them. The declining pressure had reduced some of the vibrations that threatened to tear the drill apart.
He said, “It’s a break in our favor.”
“What happened?” Anna asked. “Why are we getting there faster?”
“The Earth is being pulled in two directions now, away from us.”
“So there is less force compressing the dirt together,” Anna said.
“Exactly!”
Anna asked, “So after all the trouble we went through to get an answer on how to stop Aughra, the professor told you simply to blow it up? I thought blowing it up was a bad idea.”
“That’s right we can’t just bomb it. But, this is not an ordinary bomb. This nuclear device will produce a powerful EMP. That is an Electromagnetic Pulse. When it detonates, it will be as if a billion magnets were created all at once. I wanted just an EMP but they couldn’t get one here in time. Aughra is sitting on the largest superconducting magnets in the world. The idea is that the electrical force is faster than the bomb’s shock wave. I will electrically tune it to Aughra’s magnetic polarity. When the EMP hits the magnetic fields below Aughra, they should repel each other sending Aughra straight up into the air, hopefully high enough, quickly enough, before she becomes unbalanced and implodes. The rest of the nuclear force is just in case our predictions don’t work. It should take care of Aughra if she refuses to leave.”
“If Aughra doesn’t leave and she explodes here, on the ground, won’t that kill us then?” Anna asked.
“Probably,” he replied, “You don’t want to live forever do you?”
“Well, I’d like to see Michael again, but since that won’t be happening, and if we’re going to be saving the universe, I guess my death could mean less.”
“I’m praying it works, but if it doesn’t… then Anna, it has been my honor to know you,”
“It’ll work,” she replied.
The drill rumbled on for another ten minutes then the computer said, “You have reached your target depth.” Joshua drove the drill another ten feet and stopped.
“What now?” Anna asked.
Joshua’s hands
danced across the red holograms and there was a snap followed by a crack that shook the whole cabin. He said, “Now we drop this bomb and get the hell out of here.”
He backed the drill up five feet then stopped, pulled the nuke out and set it on his lap. Typing in the code the Major had given him, he started the nuke’s electromagnetic frequency analysis program. After it gave a positive beep and a green light, he set the timer and opened a small hatch down by his feet. A slight hiss of atmosphere escaped and hot air filled the cabin. Leaning forward, he placed the nuke inside a pod waiting at his feet, where the base of the nose cone was. The hatch jammed for a moment before he could free it. Then he pressed the release button and set it on the hot dirt below him. He adjusted marks on the package to match the angle of the pod so the nuke would be facing in the correct direction. Then he pressed the anchor button and small rods shot out sticking it to the ground. Pausing, he wondered if it mattered which way the nuke sat when it went off but decided that he was going to follow the Majors directions to a tee, just in case.