A Sword Into Darkness (27 page)

This particular nameless asteroid had been chosen for one reason only, and a cynical, informed observer could not help but notice that the planetoid’s shape and size bore a striking similarity to that of the Deltan control ship.  Nathan had suggested the target and Henson and Torrance had been happy to agree with it.  None of them would admit to having pre-conceived notions of the aliens’ intentions, but neither would they object to being prudent.

LCDR Rudy Gutierrez made some selections on his screen to which Kris nodded.  Elsewhere on the ship, in CIC just dorsal of them and in the missile deck monitoring station several levels above, his selections were taken as commands to the officers working there, who carried them out and acknowledged them almost automatically.  Gutierrez turned to the CO.  “Captain, all weapons stations report ready.  Track 0017 targeted at range 674.3 km, bearing 340 by 075 relative off the port dorsal bow, bearing and closure rates negligible.  Asteroid target and ownship at zero thrust.  One missile, portside dorsal cell 12, selected for launch.  Weapon, drive, and tube capacitors are charged, and ripple warhead pattern selected.  Ready for nuclear weapons release on your authority, sir.”

Colonel Henson looked over at Nathan.  “Mr. Kelley, assure me there’s no chance I’m going to end up raining meteors down on Earth should this test be successful.”

Nathan frowned and double-checked the missile vector and their relative positions of the Earth and 2006 UA22.  Eventually he shrugged.  “There’s no way I can give you a hundred percent certainty, but the missile is detonating on a line between the asteroid and the planet.  Any debris we get should be aimed away from that vector.  I can’t say nothing will ever change orbits and fall to Earth, but the chances against it are … astronomical, I guess you could say.”

Henson narrowed his eyes and turned to the Weapons Officer.  “Batteries released.  Shoot one.”

Gutierrez stabbed down harder than necessary on his touchscreen and was rewarded with a quick thump-THUMP and a slight shake of the whole ship.  Outside, on the forward port dorsal face of the hull’s wedge, one of the square missile hatches flipped open.  Powerful coils surrounding the missile tube then flexed with magnetic force, expelling the missile from the tube with sudden, violent efficiency.  It shot out from the ship at a constant speed and the hatch closed behind it softly.

Fifty meters from the ship, the missile’s sacrificial capacitor bank began to break down, converting its blend of electrolytes, activated carbon cells, and dielectrics into a froth of free electrons.  This explosive cascade of electric charge funneled down through platinum waveguides into Kris’ photonic drive and the small missile erupted into brilliant life.

Gutierrez nodded as a new track appeared on their screens.  “Missile ignition.  Accelerating to target at 300 meters per second squared.  Fifty seconds to warhead separation, 67 seconds to contact.”

The missile flew out, quickly closing with its quarry.  For twenty seconds, it flew straight as an arrow, but then it began to jerk erratically about, tracing an uneven corkscrew through space.  Strobes of light and flares of invisible radiance exploded from it for seemingly no reason.

“Electronic countermeasures and terminal defensive maneuvering engaged—no faults.”

Henson nodded at Gutierrez, his eyes remaining riveted upon the screen.  “Good.  Of course, there’s no proof they’ll be effective in the least.”

Nathan shrugged, but kept looking at the main screen as well.  “Can’t hurt to be prepared.  It’s impossible to hide the drive effect on something that small, so we had to give it some sort of defense or it might never reach the target.  Besides,
Promise
’s telemetry showed its maneuvers were somewhat effective at avoiding that alien disintegration beam, and it was both bigger and slower than our missiles.  Have faith.”

At fifty seconds, several large lobes of the missile broke free, their own smaller drives igniting in turn.  The corkscrew blossomed second after second into a small squadron of six arcing points of light.

Gutierrez’s voice was almost a whisper in anticipation.  “Warhead separation.  Ripple fire in three, two, one . . . .”  They all held their breaths.

With the warheads now widely spaced from one another, the first detonated, 100 kilometers from the asteroid.  A secondary bank of sacrificial capacitors dissolved into plasma, driving a spherical, inward-looking photonic mesh and an outer coil of superconducting wire.  The resulting implosion compressed a solid core of lithium deuteride into a plasma as dense as the core of a star, forcing it to fuse.  This plasma rebounded and exploded outward with nearly a megaton’s worth of pure energy, but was largely wasted, detonating much too far out from the target.

Yet it was not a complete waste.  Even as the components of the missile were vaporized, they were put to work.  A small pinch of electromagnetic energy from the secondary coil forced the protons and electrons of the newly generated helium plasma into a brief, rigid order.  Photons clumped and streamed down these channels of subatomic particles and the fusion blast became something more.  Nearly ten percent of its explosive energy was suddenly converted to coherent x-ray laser light, orders of magnitude stronger than the ship’s primary lasers.

The beam speared invisibly past the other five warheads and stabbed into the asteroid, blasting and vaporizing a chasm into its surface.  Seconds later, at fifty kilometers out, a second warhead exploded in laser mode, sending another lance of heat and light piercing into the same spot.  Then a third warhead lased, burning their target shaft still deeper.

On the bridge, the crew sat in slack-jawed awe, staring at the strobes of light puncturing the enormous mountain of nickel, iron, and silicates.

The fourth warhead detonated in proximity mode, eschewing the lasing coil for the brute heat of a close-by thermonuclear explosion.  Though there was little concussive force to the blast outside of an atmosphere, its radiance a mere kilometer out was powerful enough to vaporize and melt away a significant portion of the narrow laser wound’s entrance.  This wider shaft allowed the next two warheads to fly deep into the rock itself.

The fifth and sixth warheads crashed through the softened minerals of the twenty kilometer diameter asteroid’s interior and detonated in rapid succession, the first on contact with the inner surface of the wound, the second moments after burying itself into a few tens of meters of lava.  These blasts were largely hidden from the crew, blocked and absorbed by the bulk of the rock itself, but their effect was immediately apparent.

2006 UA22 shattered, exploding outward in an oblate shockwave of fire and pulverized, glowing debris.  Five pairs of hands shot up in the air on the
Sword of Liberty
’s bridge, the two civilians and the military crew all shouting in triumph together.  They laughed and yelled, matched over the intercom by the twelve other officers and enlisted crew, all of whom had been watching the weapon test.

Torrance gripped Nathan’s arm, shaking him and grinning.  “Good lord, Kelley!  You all certainly can kill some rocks!”

Henson shook his head in dismay.  “We just vaporized Mt. Everest.”

Gutierrez turned away from the main screen and looked at Kristene, his sense of astonishment shifting from the vanished asteroid to the designer of the Hell-weapon he had just fired.  “Ma’am, may I tell you something?  I’m sorry if I offend, but you are one
scary
person.”

Kris did not look offended.  If anything, she preened.  “Why thank you, Rudy.  That’s very sweet.”

Henson and Nathan both shook their heads at that, then Nathan zoomed the display out from former site of the asteroid.  Chunks of debris, from the size of office blocks and houses down to pebbles and sand crowded the screen with individual tracks and vectors, each streaming away from the annihilation.  Nathan pointed and motioned for the CO’s attention.  “Sir, please note there are no debris tracks on a direct course for Earth.”

“Thank you, Nathan.  Now, how about debris on a direct course for us?”

Nathan smiled and made several selections on his touch screen.  “Of those we have an abundance.  Standing by for phase two of our tactical trial.”

Henson nodded.  “Very well.  Batteries release.  The helm is yours.”

“Aye aye, sir.”  Nathan made a few final selections on his screen under the watchful eye of CDR Torrance.  Graphics crowded in on his tactical display, showing power and temperature states for all six laser emplacements, as well as power, temp, and ammunition magazine states for the forward railgun.  Everything showed up in the green.

Nathan gestured to the main screen before them all, drawing the attention of the CO, XO, and Weps.  Kris stayed focused on her own panel, working at a furious pace, sweat glistening upon her upper lip and brow.  Nathan highlighted several hurtling meteors.  “We’ll focus on the largest rocks on a direct collision course first, then we’ll work our way out.  I’ll be firing a number of different munitions from the railgun, from explosive, to unitary kinetic, to flechette, and we’ll just see which ones work best where.  Now, since the gun is too big for a stable turret, it only has an aim swing from its cradle of 10 degrees to centerline.  Anything outside of that arc will require maneuvering of the ship, but we can slave the helm to the gun target line with just the push of a button.  Like this.”

Nathan reached out and made another selection.  The ship’s bland feminine voice then sounded from every speaker.  “All hands, brace for maneuvers.  Acceleration may change without further warning while engaged in gunfire evolutions.”

“From this point, aiming and fire is automatic,” Nathan said.  “There’s no way an operator could ever effectively aim these shots over the ranges we’re talking, so whoever you assign to gunnery will only have to manually select targets and monitor performance, or else he can program in his own target selection doctrine and let the computer do everything.

Torrance grunted.  “If it works anything like Navy weapons doctrine, we’ll be shooting at every Gemini urine bag and discarded Russian satellite the radar can track.”

Nathan grinned and nodded.  “Well, I never said it was perfect.  I’m still a big believer in man-in-the-loop, myself.  So, now that I’ve manually designated all my targets, I back it up with auto laser handoff.  Any chunks or secondary debris that makes it past the gunfire will then get targeted by the lasers to be burned away.”

Kris looked up from her preps.  “And that’s it.  Easy, squeezee:  your basic cone of impenetrable destruction.  These rocks won’t know what hit ‘em, and neither will the Deltans.  We’re ready on my end, babe.”

“Thanks, Kris.  Firing … now.”  Nathan caught Colonel Henson’s gaze and firmly pressed the blinking icon on his own panel.  The screen chimed and the ship immediately shook.  Then again, and again, and again, once every two seconds, as the railgun fired its way through the target list.  A distant thumping ring sounded with every bump, transmitted through the hull by the violent electromagnetic pressures building and releasing up in the bow.

Outside the ship, white light flashed with every round, a soundless bolt of lightning and plasma jetting forth on the heels of each shot.  Over time, the plasma boiling away from the twin rails of the railgun would begin to degrade their surface treatments, preventing the shell armatures from firing effectively, but that moment was thousands of shots away.  For now, the system worked flawlessly, sending blinding shot after blinding shot straight out into the void, directly down the gun line.

Having serviced the targets inside its firing cutouts already, the railgun began to guide the ship to new targets.  The
Sword of Liberty
started to jerk erratically, dodging from vector to vector to bring its massive gun to bear, her pylon thrusters firing at seemingly random intervals.

Kris started to feel queasy.

Downrange, the massive tons of meteors met the irresistible forces of the railgun rounds.  Unitary rounds—slender sabots of hardened tungsten alloy—struck the largest boulders, converting their enormous kinetic energy into heat, light, and shattering force.  The meteors cracked up into hundreds of smaller pieces, and each one was tracked in turn and added to the firing queue.

Flechette rounds deposited their momentum and kinetic energy in a different way, breaking up into a cloud of diamond hard slivers before striking their medium size targets.  The dozens of smaller sabots worked in concert to pulverize these rocks into dust and pebbles, sizes which could be more reasonably handled by the ship’s point defense and armor.

The smallest targets—man-sized chunks of rock and tight formations of rock and debris—received the attention of the explosive rounds.  These larger railgun shots were directional blast fragmentary rounds, cylinders of scored steel plate sandwiched with sheets of octaazacubane (N8) explosive.  Striking and detonating with the combined kinetic energy and explosive force of thousand pound bombs, their targets were obliterated and dispersed into relatively harmless detritus.

Aboard the ship, the crew watched as the darkened storm of incoming meteors blossomed into clouds of light and gas, coloring the infinite black with violently hued destruction.  Henson shook his head.  It was impressive, even graceful, but he shuddered to think about what would happen if such a weapon was turned upon something more significant than asteroidal debris.  From its high perch in orbit, the
Sword of Liberty
could potentially devastate any city with impunity.

In its own way, it was even more terrifying than the sudden apocalypse of the nuclear warheads.  That mind-boggling terror had been over in a literal flash.  This was enduring, relentless, chewing away at chunks of solar history like some voracious colony of insects.

He looked over at Nathan.  The former sailor was a decorated veteran, a hero and a patriot, but Secretary Sykes had warned him that he was also driven by an almost religious need for the ship to be a success.  Such an intimately profound sense of motivation could easily turn and twist into something darker.  Nathan Kelley had been nothing but helpful to the new crew, but he was also bitterly disappointed in the current state of affairs.  Henson suddenly realized how glad he was that this would be the first and last time Nathan would be handling the ship.