Déjà Doomed

by Edward M. Lerner

  “Yes and no,” Rodriguez said. “No single warhead, obviously. Multiple standard warheads, rigged to trigger simultaneously.”

  “Kludged to trigger simultaneously,” someone muttered.

  “A bomb that large?” It was Long Sideburns again. “You can’t tell me that might not produce a hail of rubble out of even a solid metallic mass.”

  No one can tell you anything. Marcus kept the opinion to himself.

  The general was more diplomatic. “It might. But if so, at least some of that debris will disperse, will miss us.” Her eyes narrowed. “But if you have a better suggestion?”

  Sideburns did not. No one did.

  “Very good,” Tyler said. “Kirill, why don’t you take over for awhile?”

  “Very good.” The Russian spook steepled his fingers. “General Volkov, would you address for us the matter of launch sites and vehicles?”

  In Moscow, a silver-haired man pushed his chair back from the table, stood with difficulty, and limped to the front of the room. He had heavy jowls; an impassive, heavy-lidded, reptilian gaze; a broad and much creased forehead—altogether intimidating, even before taking note of the chestful of ribbons on his uniform.

  I served under him in the ADFB, Yevgeny texted. Focused on the mission. No nonsense. Good man.

  “Volkov, Aerospace Defense Forces Branch,” the general began gruffly. “Even at best, the largest thermonuclear weapons can produce only a tiny deflection in Hammer’s orbit. That means the intercept must occur well before it reaches Earth. Of course, an ICBM is not sized for such a mission. To cut to the chase, as my American colleagues would say, the launch must be aboard a heavy-lift booster launched from Florida. And soon.”

  Soon, it transpired, meant days. Exactly how few was also still being determined.

  All of which made at least half of the Russians visibly unhappy. And so what? The laws of physics did not give a shit about Russian pride or paranoia. Or as a science-fiction author once put it, Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

  Reality was that SpaceCo had an Eagle Heavy booster prepped for launch from Cape Canaveral. That missile had, just barely, sufficient lift for the mission. Company and launch complex alike had handled classified payloads—although never before nukes!—for the Air Force and the National Reconnaissance Office.

  Which meant that “all” that remained to accomplish in the remaining few days was:

  —reprogram the Eagle Heavy’s guidance computers.

  —remove 20,000 pounds of commercial satellites already mounted atop the missile.

  —mate an absurd number of nukes to an ICBM payload bus. (Or, to play safe, two such buses. Or three. The maneuverability of the Hammer remained unknown.)

  —retrofit sensors and the terminal-guidance computer from a strategic-defense missile to the payload bus(es).

  —reprogram that terminal guidance, among several necessary updates, to accommodate closing speeds in excess of twenty miles per second: far beyond the design spec of any antiballistic missile.

  —implement a synchronized triggering mechanism for all bombs on a common bus.

  —mate the payload bus(es) to the civilian missile.

  —and, of course, launch.

  Are you hearing this. Marcus texted Yevgeny. Does this plan seem remotely doable.

  Yes. Remotely. Yevgeny answered. Over the downlink to Earth, he asked, “Can we do this in stages? Bring the weapons to Earth orbit, offload them to a fully fueled lunar-transfer vehicle, and fly that to the intercept?”

  General Volkov said, “This approach was considered and rejected. Beyond being more complicated than the mission as proposed, there are no provisions in orbit to secure thermonuclear weapons. More than the MSS may have observed the movement of warheads.”

  “A squad of commandos accompanying the payload is security enough,” Yevgeny argued.

  “We see no advantage to this,” Volkov insisted. “To the contrary, to change vehicles adds complications. One would have to configure the LTV to carry the payload bus and its warheads as cargo, and then release it in flight.”

  Tyler, pointedly, studied his wrist.

  “Our superiors require us to make a recommendation,” Kirill interjected smoothly. “If anyone sees a reason the general’s approach won’t work, speak now.”

  Won’t work was an impossibly high hurdle. Marcus did not speak up.

  But Yevgeny did. “What is our Plan B, General?”

  “Yevgeny Borisovich, is it? It is a fair question. SpaceCo has another Eagle Heavy at Cape Canaveral nearing readiness for launch. They are accelerating its preparations.”

  “Reliant, then, on the same infrastructure,” Yevgeny said. “Why not a launch from Baikonur Cosmodrome?”

  Volkov’s expression, somehow, turned dourer. “The mission parameters are challenging. Baikonur, or any of the major Russian or Chinese cosmodromes, lies too far north. Launching from any such high latitude would consume fuel that cannot be spared. No, we need a launch site near the equator. French Guiana would be ideal, but discreet inquiries indicate Arianespace cannot make a suitable rocket available at The Spaceport in our time frame. We must use Cape Canaveral.”

  A fuel margin that slim did not instill confidence in the mission. At best, Marcus thought, this was Plan A-and-a-half.

  Yevgeny evidently agreed. “With respect, General, an identical launcher, from the same launch site, is far from an ideal backup.”

  Volkov stiffened. “And yet, this is the best option we have.”

  “Perhaps not,” Yevgeny said. “We believe an alien something here on the Moon ordered the attack. Maybe that same thing can call off the attack. Maybe we can make, or convince, it to call off the strike. Or maybe we can convince whatever on the rock has local control to abort.

  “The five of us here are the closest thing to experts on the Titans. And evidently the radio and antenna of my shuttle are sufficient to communicate with the Hammer.” Pause. “A supercomputer or two, if someone could fly it in from Aitken, might accelerate our efforts.”

  As if their track record with Titan technology inspired confidence. Still, Marcus thought, what did they have to lose? “If anyone can pull it off, that will be Dr. Komarova.”

  Doctor. Yevgeny texted.

  Marcus: I would imagine the FSB can arrange an honorary doctorate for Katya. Don’t you think she’s earned it.

  Yevgeny: Fine.

  Tyler looked down, brow furrowed, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Kirill, what do you say to that?”

  “As a backup plan? I see no harm in the Humboldt group, and the specialists who have been supporting them, looking into it.”

  “Then we have our decisions,” Tyler declared. “Thank you, everyone.” And he broke the comm link.

  * * *

  Scrolling rapidly, Marcus reviewed his notes. Plan A? Implausibly ambitious. Plan B? Different wishful thinking. Which left them in need of Plan C.

  Never mind how bat-shit crazy the lone, quarter-baked idea that came to his mind.

  Chapter 46

  Somehow, the job was completed. With more than an hour to spare. And with more than a few shortcuts taken.

  “T-minus ten,” the final countdown echoed across historic Launch Complex 39A. This was the starting point, before the onset of commercial spaceflight, of every manned Apollo mission and many space-shuttle flights. Most of those missions had gone well.

  A good omen?

  “Nine. Eight ….”

  Within the VIP viewing area and in public parks across Brevard County, crowds gathered, as for every major launch, to watch. They knew nothing about the payload, beyond that the government had “for reasons of national security” preempted a scheduled commercial launch. That bit of mystery had, if anything, swelled the swarms of onlookers beyond the usual turnout.
/>   “Three. Two.” Beneath the missile, two-hundred-plus feet high, flame blossomed. “One. Liftoff.”

  As by the flicking of a switch, night became brighter than day. In every viewing area, people cheered. They cheered louder still as the stentorian roar, catching up with the sight of the launch, rolled over them. The few people in the close-in bunkers—alone, among so many observers, aware of the stakes—cheered the loudest.

  Slowly at first, the rocket climbed. Within seconds, flame-tipped nozzles stood even with the top of the launch tower. Billowing smoke, illuminated by the rocket’s exhaust flames, spread from the pad.

  And a great, erratic glob of flame erupted, engulfed the rocket. Wreathed in fire, the rocket hesitated. Wobbled in midair. Fell. Disappeared in a gigantic fireball.

  Sirens wailed. Hundreds of workers, thousands of panicked onlookers, fled.

  In one warhead, unseen, heat, or shock, or circuit failure detonated the high-explosive trigger of the primary fission bomb. That explosion began a chain reaction among the other high-explosive triggers. Blast and flames engulfed the launch complex.

  Despite everything, complex safety interlocks operated as intended. The plutonium jackets did not fission. Without a flood of neutrons and X-rays from fission, the fusion core also remained inert.

  But as the blast wave fanned the flames, a cloud of vaporized plutonium—deathly radioactive, deathly toxic—sped across the landscape ….

  NECESSITY

  Chapter 47

  SpaceCo streamed the launch, as it streamed all its launches. Only unlike dozens of previous ones, this launch erupted into a cataclysmic fireball, and ended in a test pattern.

  “Jesus Christ!” Donna whispered, awestruck.

  Marcus was too shocked to speak. Valerie had been invited to Cape Canaveral, to the VIP bunker, for the launch. The last he had heard, she had been unenthusiastic about traveling, even on a government executive jet. His hands shaking, he managed to tap out a text to her. I just saw. Are you okay.

  Watching from home. Stunned.

  Earth remained in the cross hairs, but he breathed a guilty sigh of relief.

  Until Val continued, Jay, Tyler, and Ethan all went to the launch.

  * * *

  As Ekatrina (and a gaggle of fellow wizards flown in from across the Moon) labored, Yevgeny helped however he could. Coordinated the delivery of ever more computing power, esoteric test equipment, and a small nuclear-fission reactor to handle the surge in power demand. Researched and downloaded obscure digital resources. Welded cages for various bits of salvage from the Titan scrap piles the techies selectively revived. Fetched food and coffee. Fretted. Lived in his vacuum gear, apart from the helmet, the more expeditiously to run whatever errands would contribute.

  Ilya and Donna did much the same. Not so, Marcus. Since the catastrophe in Florida, he had withdrawn. Mostly he sat by himself in the cab of an American tractor. Occasionally—despite everything—he ventured outside alone. “Thinking,” was all the explanation he gave.

  As Yevgeny stacked newly warmed snacks in an insulated carrier, the status lamp over the igloo airlock began strobing. Through the tiny inset window of the inner hatch he saw a figure in emerald green. Marcus.

  The lock cycled open and the American stepped inside. He popped his helmet. “How are they doing?”

  Yevgeny shrugged.

  “Still nothing? Well, it was worth trying.”

  Watching from the sidelines as the world ends? It was exhausting. But resignation? That guaranteed failure. “It remains worth trying.”

  Only given that the window had closed for a new launch to the Hammer, there was nothing else to try.

  Marcus set down his helmet. Studied his gloves, at a loss what to do with his hands. Ended up, arms behind his back, in a sloppy imitation of parade rest. “Maybe we’re going at this all wrong.”

  Yevgeny continued packing food for the people actually contributing. “I’m listening.”

  “So, the idea—and again, I’m not knocking it—has been we master Titan technology enough to divert the Hammer. Learn enough to send an abort code or order a course-correction-slash-misdirection. Or convince ourselves we’ve learned a safe way to reactivate whatever was active belowground, and convince it to send the order. And getting one of those done before the Hammer is too close for whatever propulsion system is on the Hammer to accomplish the necessary deflection. I mean, it can only have so much oomph.”

  Oomph? No matter; Yevgeny got the gist. “I am aware.”

  “The thing is ….” Marcus’s hands came out front again, underwent renewed scrutiny. “The thing is, Yevgeny, our main successes to date—if you want to call them successes—have been in waking up alien tech and, sometimes too late, powering it back down.

  “Contrast that history with what we’re now attempting to do. Reverse-engineer alien comm protocols from a tiny sample. Or reverse-engineer alien neural nets, trying to glean clues from a mummified alien brain. How long have biologists and neurologists tried to work out how our brains work? Or matching wits with a genocidal alien AI, were we to dare to power it back up. Beyond desperation, what hope have we for progress?”

  The last of the meals packed, Yevgeny sealed the insulated carrier. “If you have a point, I wish you would make it.”

  “Our few true successes have been with the Titan’s physical gear. That’s how we got into the base to begin with, and aboard the alien ship. That’s how Ilya worked out as much as he has about their fusion reactor, and how folks back at Base Putin have replicated the Titans’ room-temperature superconductors.” Marcus breathed in deeply, and out sharply. “So here’s my idea, Yevgeny. We’d do better on the Hammer. Rather than hoping to learn enough here to trick whatever intelligence ordered the attack on Earth, or whatever intelligence now controls the Hammer, we bypass whatever controls the rock and directly engage the propulsion system there.”

  Disgusted, Yevgeny snatched up his helmet. “And how do we do that? It’s too late to reach the Hammer, even as a flyby. And you think to rendezvous with and land on it? There is no way.”

  Inexplicably smiling, Marcus pointed … downward. “Except that maybe there is.”

  * * *

  “You must be joking,” Yevgeny said. And at that, it was a pitiful joke.

  Marcus shook his head. “Ilya says the ship in the lava tube has an advanced, high-thrust drive. If it has the performance parameters he expects, that ship is the only thing that can get us to the Hammer in time to do any good. In a few days. No chemical rocket can do that.”

  Yevgeny set his helmet back down. Katya and company were too focused on their work—and too exhausted—to notice if they ate, much less what they ate, much less if it were hot. And while Marcus’s idea seemed insane, he was right about at least one thing: the efforts underway were, at best, long shots. “A 65-million-year-old ship. Technology we do not understand. Control systems we dare not trust.”

  Because the time we turned one on, we awakened … it did not bear thinking about.

  Marcus glanced around the igloo, found a shelf piled high with snacks. He tore open a Snickers wrapper and bit the end of the candy bar. “All fair points, but let’s review. Tech in the alien base, given power, still worked, even self-repaired, after those millions of years. Belowground, everything was sheltered from radiation and maintained at a constant, protectively low, temperature. Vacuum precluded oxidation and any biologically based degradation. And in all that time, the Titans knowing a thing or three we don’t about material science, parts didn’t vacuum-weld together. Not stator and rotor of electric motors. Not the moving parts of airlocks. Not”—and he shuddered—“the moving parts of starfish bots. Hell, not much of anything as much as accumulated dust.

  “And you know what? Even if spaceships weren’t intended for an environment of cold, radiation, and vacuum, the ship has been sheltered, like the base, deep ins
ide the lava tube.”

  Yevgeny considered. “And considerable technology on Hammer must have survived the intervening ages, too.”

  Marcus bit off another big chunk of chocolate. Chewed. Swallowed. “There you go. Damned fine engineers, these Titans. And more than smart, they were conservative engineers. Case in point: the not especially efficient, but very reliable, type of motor they chose for their airlocks. Another example: while the brains of the starfish bots continue to stymie us, the motors, gearing, and linkages are another story. Those are simple, elegant. The mechanical parts, however they were made, exhibit very precise manufacturing tolerances.”

  “And this helps us how?”

  “It might not.” The last of the chocolate disappeared. “Still, it’s a theory I think worth testing. If I understand the Titan engineering approach, their shipboard systems will have all manner of fault-tolerant and fallback capabilities. Say that a computer failed or rebooted, or comm between bridge and engine room were interrupted. I’d think low-level controls in the engine room would take over and prevent a reactor meltdown. Maybe even keep things running.”

  “So?” Yevgeny prompted.

  “So, let’s assume Ilya works out how the fusion reactor works. How the main drive works. The basic operating procedures, I mean. A big-picture understanding. I expect that, at least in the short term, the low-level electronics and software that runs those systems will remain cryptic. Now suppose we gut every wiring harness leading from the bridge to the drive and engine, take a hammer and chisel to bulkheads amidships to cut any connections hidden beneath the surface. Then, let’s see if our own computers can be configured to run things. If not, well, we’re none the worse off. It isn’t as if you, or I, or even Ilya, are contributing much to current efforts.”

  And if a fusion reactor melted down? Went bang? Either might make them a lot worse off. But only, as seemed increasingly inevitable, until Earth died.