Hail Warning

Hail Laboratory Complex — Batman, Uzbekistan

The electronics lab in Batman, Uzbekistan had everything Hail’s weapons engineers required. The nanoparticle filtered cleanroom had a multimeter, LCR meter, oscilloscope, soldering stations, precision mechanical tools, magnifying lenses and various power supplies. But this lab had some gear that would be considered expensive by lesser companies, including a function generator, signal generators, spectrum analyzer, signal analyzer, pattern generator, protocol analyzer, network analyzer, transistor tester and circuit board logic analyzer. Currently, Hail’s staff was using a wide wooden nonconductive table.

Hail had called Jarret Pepper, who had forwarded the Verba missile’s electronics schematics in addition to the guidance programming code to Gage Renner.

Setting the black cases on the wooden table, Renner and John Lang carefully opened them. Inside each case was a single missile launcher and projectile tucked into black foam. The foam had been cut to the exact dimensions of the launch tube and missile.

Back on the Hail Nucleus, Hail’s programmers were studying the guidance code, trying to get an idea of what made the missile tick, or more to the point, what enabled the missile to locate, track and lock onto its target.

Gage and Lang removed the two projectiles from their cases and laid them on the wooden tables. They opted to leave the launch tubes in their cases and set the cases on the floor. Right now, the only items of interest to them were the projectiles.

The mechanical schematics for the missiles were straightforward. There was a small access door on each warhead held in place by unique screws. Flown in from their ships, John Lang and Gage Renner, came prepared to remove the one-off screw type.

Gage stuck some rubber wedges around the missile to keep it from rolling around on the table. After the first missile was stable and positioned in a manner so the access door was on top, they could proceed. Lang opened a small jar containing a white gooey substance, and he poked his index finger into the jar, collecting a wad of the glue on his fingertip. The white glob was crammed into one of the special screw heads. He removed his finger, wiping it off on a clean white cloth, and Gage checked his phone so they would know when three minutes had elapsed. Lang verified the glue had hardened and removed the solidified white wad

from the screw head. Wasting little time, Lang removed any extra material around the screw head’s cast. He put a drop of rubber cement on the backside of the plastic cast and waited for the glue to tack up. He then pressed the plastic-hardened tip on the end of a fat metal cylinder, after which Renner placed the cylinder into a slot in the middle of an indexed turntable.

“Are you ready?” Renner asked.

“Yeah, we should be good. Scan it.”

Renner pressed the button on the machine, and the turntable began to rotate slowly. A bright red laser began scanning the newly cast tip. They let the turntable make several complete turns. An indicator light on the side of the scanner blinked from red to green. When the diode changed to a solid green light, Renner shut off the scanner’s laser, and the turntable wound to a stop. Inside a sealed compartment, in a machine next to the scanner, a steel rod had been locked into a vise. The image from the scanner had been automatically uploaded into the milling machine next to it, and a robotic arm came to life. It drilled away tiny sections of the steel rod. Very slowly, the robot jumped this way and that, touching its diamond-impregnated drill bit against the carbon steel, removing excess material until it resembled the scanned tip of the plastic cast.

Renner wished the machine would go faster. But the steel was hard, and the design of the special screw slot was complex. For that reason, there was no rushing the process. After what seemed an eternity, the robot finally withdrew its arm from the material and it automatically shut down.

Opening the door and releasing the part from the vise, Renner stuck the new screwdriver bit into a plastic handle and gave it to Lang, who placed the new tip into the first of the eight screws that secured the missile access cover. He gave Renner a smile and told him, “It fits nice.”

Renner gave him a positive nod of agreement.

While Lang removed the missile access door, Renner began to review the weapon’s schematics.

Once the cover was removed, they inspected the main circuit board. They found the narrow and long circuit board was covered with a mass of microchips, resistors and capacitors. Renner turned the schematics until he could orient the circuit board to match with the drawings in front of him.

He told Lang, “It looks like the I/O port is right there.”

Gage pointed the tip of a Phillips head screwdriver at a small set of ten pins sticking out of the circuit board.

“Wow,” Lang said. “That’s a lot of pins. I was hoping that making the cable would be a little simpler. I mean, this thing isn’t a frickin’ HD TV. All you must do is upload code to it. Why would they need ten damn pins?”

“Maybe it is an Apple missile.”

Lang chuckled at Renner’s joke.

“If it were an Apple missile, we would have to buy a new certified Apple cord for every missile they released.”

Renner began laughing.

“It doesn’t matter,” Gage said, still smiling. “We need to identify which pins are responsible for data transfers, and we need to make a cord that will fit. When the programmers back on the Hail Nucleus get the code mods completed, we need to be able to upload the updates to the firmware.”

“At least we don’t have to make a cord for each of these missiles. We can upload the new code one missile at a time.”

Gage suggested, “I tell you what, you start making the cord, and I will get the access door open on the other projectile.”

“Sounds good,” Lang said, and he began to study the four W’s on the schematic, what wire went where.