Warp speed

CHAPTER 16

Three weeks into the therapy, Rebecca regained consciousness. I spent some time sitting with her. We all did. I explained to her what had happened to her. She was as amazed as all of us, and get a real kick out of the flubell huggers.

"I bet no physicians ever thought of building a cure from the atom up. Or if they did they had no idea how to do it," she said.

"Pretty cool, huh?" We both felt pretty sure of ourselves.

After the fourth week of the therapy she was up and walking around. Oh, by the way, throughout the treatment process we had to capture all of her excreted body materials and dispose of them safely. That included mucus, urine, feces, sweat, body hair, sloughed skin, and even her toenails. We didn't want to take chances. We placed all of these in the destroyed lower floor and electrocuted the hell out of them. Then we incinerated them.

The thirty-eighth day of the therapy I was chatting with Jim and 'Becca about the wedding plans for me and Tabitha.

"I don't know if I prefer an indoor or outdoor wedding. What do you think?" I asked them.

"What does Tabitha want?" 'Becca said diplomatically.

"I think she wants a big church thing, but she won't come out and say it."

"I've always been fond of those. Of course, the cruise idea was pretty cool also." Jim smiled as 'Becca elbowed him in the ribs.

Tabitha always seemed to have a knack of entering a room when you were talking about her. She looked troubled.

"What is it, Colonel?" I poked at her. She didn't snap back with her usual wit and repartee. Something wasn't right.

"It . . . it's terrible," she said. "Colorado has been destroyed."

"What?" resounded uniformly from the three of us.

"Which part?" I asked.

"All of it! Turn on the TV," Tabitha said.

We turned on the idiot box and on all the channels was the catastrophe. Some of the talking heads were calling it an extinction level event like the one that had caused the demise of the dinosaurs. Eyewitnesses had claimed that—there were no eyewitnesses. They were all dead. Roughly fifty million people were estimated dead. The President was to make a statement soon. In the meantime, various astronomers were suggesting that the recent meteor strike in Florida was a precursor to the Colorado Catastrophe.

Tabitha, Jim, 'Becca, and I all knew that this theory must be right on the money, but not at all what the astronomers had in mind.

Obviously it was a warp weapon. The warp weapon struck somewhere near Boulder, Colorado. The total destruct radius was several hundred miles. The satellite photos could only look at the dust and smoke plume, it was too thick for even infrared to see through. Centroiding on the plume put the center of impact at Boulder. Strategically this was a well-placed hit. Multiple military and civilian infrastructures were eradicated, literally wiped from the face of the Earth. Cheyenne, Wyoming, just north of the Colorado-Wyoming border was well within the total destruct zone. Military bases further south of Denver were also taken out. Strategic Space Command had taken a deadly blow. Even further out than the total destruction zone there was still tremendous damage. The plume would wreak havoc on communications with the Midwest for weeks to come. Who knew what it would do to the global weather patterns? And on top of that, how do you mourn for so many people. You can't initially—all you can do is watch and be in shock for a while. Unless, you can do something about it—then you focus and act! There might be other states out there in great danger and we had to think about them, instead of Colorado.

"If the President's going to make a statement, then he probably doesn't know that this could be some sort of preemptive strike," I said.

"I've put in a call and someone is trying to get a message through to him, Anson. Right now that isn't easy," Tabitha replied still in a sad tone of voice.

"Doc, you can't think that they have already built a warp missile, do you?" Jim asked. From his tone of voice I could tell that he had "turtled-up" and was ready to take whatever punches he had to until we figured out a strategy to fight back with. Good boy.

"It adds up," I remarked. "They could have been working on this thing from the beginning. Johnny Cache must have been giving them data and blueprints and reports from the first day. We've got to find out if there were any ships up at the time of the incident."

"Already ahead of you, Anson," Tabitha laid some large printouts on the table. "A friend of mine that I roomed with in undergraduate flight training works for an agency on the Beltway. He just secure-faxed me these documents and satellite photos. An unannounced launch of a manned Chinese spacecraft took place yesterday. The location of the spacecraft at the time of the impact in Colorado was almost three hundred kilometers directly over Boulder."

"Damnit Jim. It looks like they did better on the guidance calculations than we did. Unless it was a mistake?" I glanced around the room and got the impression that nobody believed the accident theory. "Then are we all in agreement that we think this was deliberate?

"Anson, I can't see it any other way." Jim pulled at his lower lip.

"Uh . . . what is the lift capacity of the Chinese rocket?" Rebecca asked.

"Why?" I wanted to know just where was she headed with that?

"Well," she began, "could it carry two of them?" You could have heard a pin drop for about three seconds. Then Colonel Tabitha Ames marched to the door. She stuck her head out and began barking orders to several of the noncoms. Then she turned to our crew.

"Anne Marie, Sara, Al, I need to see you three now!" They came running up to her.

"What's up, Mom?"

"You three go find the lift capacity of the recent Chinese manned launch vehicles. Al, determine how many ECC's and warp generators could be put in one. Sara, work with Al. Annie, find out how many of these rockets the Chinese have and how long it takes to prep one for flight. I need that info yesterday."

"Yes, Colonel." Anne Marie snapped a salute and bugged out. Al and Sara followed.

Tabitha turned back to us, "Anson, you and Jim find us a way to detect those damn things before they get off the ground. 'Becca, you up to earning your keep?"

"I feel strong enough to wrestle a Gundark!" She smiled but none of us laughed.

"Good. Let's you and me figure out how soon before we could get another Zephram built."

"Okay!" 'Becca responded.

"Hey hold on a minute," Jim said. "We don't have to build another Zephram. A missile that weighs one kilogram moving near the speed of light would do just about as much damage. Remember that the kinetic energy transferred is one half mass times velocity squared. In this case velocity is orders of magnitude more than mass. So, the mass isn't a big factor."

I butted in. "We could build basketball sized missiles perhaps. We just have to reconfigure the geometry of the warp coils. God, I hope the Chinese haven't thought of that. Someone tell the girls to plan to that design. Jim and I will work it out later. First, we need to build a detector. Come on, Jim." We made a break for the door and were off to find a whiteboard somewhere.

Three hours later, Jim and I had discovered why our system wasn't as accurate as our counterpart's missile. During our tests of the warp fields, we could never get the mathematical models to converge to a solution that would match the experimental data. This was because there was another source somewhere else being operated at the same times that we operated our tests. Johnny must have been slipping our schedule to his contacts all along. The effects of the other warp field on the other side of the planet, although a couple orders of magnitude smaller due to distance, put a gravitational pole out at infinity (mathematically speaking) and our feedback calculations never could account for it. I never thought that there should be a pole there because it didn't fit the physical model I understood for the world. But it was experimental data and if something is there, it is there. The theory is just not right. I had always attributed our problem with some frame dragging effect or some other General Relativity phenomena that wasn't well understood. Incomplete theory was the problem, or so I thought. As soon as Jim and I thought to add a second warped field to our model and ran the calculation in the computer, the model converged to a solution! We had precise navigation licked. We also knew how to find other warp generators being tested. The field coils for any missile would have to be experimentally aligned. It's during that procedure that we would detect them as poles in our system and measure precisely where they were to within a few meters.

Anne Marie poked her head in the conference room. "Anson, Mom would like to see you and Jim. How's it going?" she asked.

"Great! Jim deserves a Nobel Prize," I said.

"Mom always said that he was the real brains of this outfit." Anne Marie laughed.

Annie led us to a hallway and handed us off to two armed guards. "See ya in a bit."

At the end of the hallway one of the guards handed me a clipboard and said, "Gentlemen if you will please sign in."

Jim and I signed the paperwork as the other guard worked a combination on the door. Jim handed the first guard the clipboard back and he handed us each a visitor's badge that said "Escort Not Required." Jim and I entered the room to find Colonel Ames in full dress uniform and talking to a large flat-panel screen. I felt a little underdressed. I'm not sure Jim cared.

"Mr. President, we're fairly certain that this was the only system in orbit at this time. The electromagnetic pulse created just before impact was detected by our early warning and nuclear detonation satellite system, which accurately measured it. The early detection satellite measurements allowed us data enough to determine the size of the warp missile. It was basically a carbon copy of the unit known as Zephram—the brief you have already seen." Tabitha stopped for air and turned to introduce us.

"Mr. President, you already have met Dr. Anson Clemons and this is his associate Dr. Jim Daniels." She paused.

"Hello Mr. President," I said. Jim just nodded.

The President began speaking, "This is a fine damn mess you've caused, fellows! There are over fifty million people that are estimated dead and what am I to tell the public?"

Tabitha started to speak but I stepped in.

"Tell them it was another meteor, a bigger one. Only a handful of people know otherwise, unless the Chinese have made some ultimatum we're unaware of. We have figured out how to detect them. It's just a matter of time before we can counter them."

"Counter them! Are you suggesting we get into some sort of all-out secret war? Congress would never go for that. Besides, in this day and age war would be hard to cover up, especially given large numbers of casualties."

"Mr. President, these missiles are undetectable by anybody on the planet except for the people in this room and the people in a room similar to this in China. Looking at what has happened thus far, I would venture to guess that our opponents plan to play this one out to the end. We can gather intelligence on them. Determine how far along they are with more of these weapons and slow them down until we can catch up and take them out. And when we do take them out, we will take out their entire government and infrastructure. We will remove their capability to make war at all, in one complete and precise strike. Then we can offer to go in and help them rebuild their government and infrastructure, but this time it will be a capitalist system that is completely allied with us, or else."

"Jesus, son. I'm glad you are on our side," the President said.

"Thank you, Mr. President. I have no sympathy for a people that will let their government kill millions of people in an unprovoked attack. They should get what they deserve." I grinded my teeth a bit and I guess I should've tried to hide my anger better.

"Okay, what if they have one of these things ready to go now?" he asked.

"Can't we just shoot it down? I mean rockets blow up all the time," Jim interjected.

"Good idea, Jim. Wouldn't the National Missile Defense System be able to shoot down something as slow and big as a manned rocket?" I asked.

"Of course it could. We simply need to modify some trajectory calculations and adjust the Kalman filtering sequence," Tabitha assured us. "Mr. President. We need resources and we need people. And until we know exactly what is going on I think you're in danger."

"Son," he pointed at me, "you started this mess. You better by God get us through it. We're counting on you. General Ames," he smiled as he emphasized "General," "you have whatever you need."

"Yes sir. Thank you Mr. President." Tabitha squirmed a bit uncharacteristically.

Jim and I nodded and then were asked to leave. So we did.

A few hours later the President was on television issuing a statement to the public. "Hello America. I speak to you tonight with a grave heart. We have experienced the greatest disaster in human history," he began. "Scientists have assured me that indeed Colorado was struck by a meteor of a scale only slightly smaller than the one that destroyed the dinosaurs. It is likely our national and maybe even global weather patterns will be erratic and cooler than normal in the near future. Unlike the dinosaurs however, we're intelligent and will overcome this obstacle.

"As of now, we have no way of discerning the total amount of damage that has occurred, but we will not stop until we have combed all of Colorado for survivors. We're keeping a vigil watch on the climate surrounding the impact. As soon as the strong weather patterns and the firestorms have subsided, we will begin rescue effort deployment. FEMA and other volunteer emergency professionals are standing by until that time.

"There have been questions as to the possibility of further meteor strikes. I have asked both NASA and the remaining Strategic Space Command officials to concert all efforts on searching the skies for further possible impact meteors. I have also implemented an executive order to enable development of some sort of protection system from events of this type.

"Please, do not panic. Astronomers assure us that these impacts are very rare. It is likely that the impact in Florida weeks ago was a fragment of this very meteor. Hopefully, this is the end of these meteor impacts. I ask that you go about your normal lives as well as you can. And finally, pray for our fellow citizens in Colorado and for better weather. God bless America. Goodnight."

Five days later, there were more than two hundred people in our corridors at the bottom of wherever we were (I still didn't know exactly where we were hiding). Tabitha assured me that there were even more at other locations attempting to reproduce our efforts. They would be given designs and instructions and told to manufacture equipment without ever knowing that equipment's final application. The floor above us had been completely converted to a Mini ECC manufacturing facility. 'Becca and Sara were overseeing that operation while Jim and I had our floor turned into a copy of the warp coil development lab we had back in Huntsville, but again with newer and more expensive equipment. Al and Tabitha (General Ames to you) took the preliminary sketches of a Mini Warp Missile (MWM) and were designing it up via computer simulation and analysis design software. A lot of models have to be conducted on any new system and they were trying to get us ready to cut metal by the time the Mini ECCs were ready. Al is a wizard at finite element analysis and engineering design, so we expected his part to be ready long before the manufacturing facility was running full speed.

Jim and I had completed our warp system detector. We tested it against a small prototype set of coils that we had rigged on the fly and it worked great. In fact it worked so great, that the first time we tested it we detected four other systems being tested. I can't tell you where they were being tested—that's classified. This meant that they had at least four missiles getting close to launch ready! I immediately ran down the hall and found Tabitha.

"Where are they?" she asked.

"Here. I wrote down the GPS coordinates for you. They're in four separate locations. Smart. That means it would take four missiles to take them out. Let's hope they can't find us like we can find them."

A few minutes later, she brought satellite photos of the area and pointed out the buildings that were the entrances to the Chinese warp missile manufacturing centers.

"Measures are being taken," is all that she said.

"What does that mean?" I asked.

"Just meet me down the hall in about three hours," she said as she turned and walked away. Everybody was busy and she had taken on the role as boss. I guess that made her even busier.

A bit later Tabitha returned and asked, "When you said I hope they can't find us, were you serious? Do you think they can detect us this far under ground?"

"Ground doesn't have that much to do with it. The gravity waves, for the most part, will only be attenuated by Beer's Law due to the ground. Distance helps on a much greater scale."

"Well, how far then? I mean, how far away do you need to be to hide from your detector?"

"Uh . . . haven't really thought of that. Give me a bit to turn the old crank on that one." It was a good question. I needed a whiteboard. After a few hours at the whiteboard, I had figured out that the Dark Side of the Moon was not only a good album but it was the place we needed to hide. Well, Farside, anyway.

Al found me staring at the whiteboard in the makeshift lab conference area. "Doc, you all right? You seem a bit upset."

"I was just trying to figure out where we could safely hide from the bad guys. We're in trouble I guess. We would have to hide—at the minimum—on the far side of the moon. I guess we'll just have to work in fear and from a defensive posture."

I was a bit frustrated, not to mention tired and sore. I hadn't had a good night's sleep in five weeks. Although my wounds were mostly healed up, I still had occasional aches with them. Tabitha was in the same boat. Her ribs still hurt her some.

"The far side of the moon, huh?" Al looked thoughtful. "What about—nah skip it. The general sent me to get you. You're supposed to meet her in ten minutes."

"I've been in here for three hours?" I must have completely zoned out on this problem. I do that sometimes. Most engineers do. I remember hearing a story about when Wernher von Braun first got to Huntsville. One day some cops found him at a stop light in what seemed to be a trance. He had apparently come up with an idea and just stopped where he was driving and started working out the concept in his head. It was after that incident that he was given a driver to chauffer him anywhere he went.

Al laughed. "Well almost three hours. Hey Doc, I'm through with the missile design. Is it all right if I think about this moon thing for a little while?"

"Hell, Al, take a break or something. You've been working hard."

"Right," Al said and drifted off into the engineer's stare. I knew I couldn't stop him from thinking about it now. If you aren't a problem solver it is hard to explain the feeling. It's sort of like looking at a picture on a wall and realizing that the picture isn't hanging level. If it nags the hell out of you that the picture isn't hanging level, well that's the beginning of the feeling.

I left Al to think about whatever it was he was thinking. It was an exercise in futility though. There was no way we had time to develop a spacecraft that could get us to the moon. Maybe it would give him a break to do something fun. Who was I kidding? We were all scared shitless and at the same time still thrilled to be doing what we were doing.

I signed in and picked up my badge. As the guard let me into the secure area I noticed that Tabitha was sitting in the room with the lights dimmed and it was very quiet.

"The general is getting very tired, sir," Steve the guard whispered to me. I nodded that I understood. He pulled the door to, locking Tabitha and me in the room.

I slipped in behind Tabitha and was planning to rub her shoulders.

"Have a seat, Anson," she said, startling me.

"That's okay, gorgeous," I told her and started massaging her gently. "You're overworking yourself, General. When was the last time we had a good night's sleep?"

She rolled her head and stretched her neck. "Don't get me wrong, Anson, this feels great. But right now we don't have time. Sit down for second."

"Okay, what's up?"

She slid a panel open on the table and pressed a couple of buttons. "I wanted you to see this. In about three minutes two of the enemy warp development facilities will be in view of a couple of our spybirds in LEO. About four minutes later, we will pick up the other two facilities. Operations have been planned to take out those facilities. We're going to watch."

"Wait a minute. That would tip the world off. If they captured an American soldier, our meteor story is screwed." Images of a Chinese television broadcast of a beaten American soldier popped in my head.

"Don't worry, Anson. No ground troops will be involved. In fact, special black bag teams have taken over Chinese airfreight planes. These aircraft are going to fly into each of these locations. As far as anyone can tell, these were terrorist acts, accidents, who gives a damn what. We will have deniability."

"Who is going to fly those things? Will they be able to bail out in time? Then how do they get home?" I was upset. I hope these soldiers weren't asked to volunteer for a suicide mission.

"That isn't your concern, Anson." I could tell that this weighed heavy on her as well.

I hoped that if this was a suicide mission that there was a way to use soldiers that have been diagnosed with something terminal, who were going to die soon anyway, to conduct these types of missions. I guess generals have been ordering men to their deaths for thousands of years. That's something I'm not sure I could do. It takes some real balls to be a general. I'm glad Tabitha has the biggest set I've ever seen. Don't get me wrong. Tabitha is all hot-blooded American woman. She just must keep her balls somewhere besides a scrotum.

"Tabitha, are you sure that a plane crash will do enough -damage?"

"These will. Our guys have made sure that there are some extra parcels on board." She nodded and sort of smiled, although she seemed too serious for it to be a real smile. There was a sadness and a no-nonsense down-to-brass-tacks air about her.

I reached over and held her hand as the view panel went from a blue screen with "unusable signal" bouncing around on it to four split panels of static. Then the static cleared into two separate images in grayscale. The images were of very normal-looking manufacturing type districts.

After a few seconds, an area that looked to be the size of a city block in the lower left quadrant of the screen turned bright and saturated the camera. Some software took over and adjusted the image somewhat.

I didn't see the aircraft but obviously, it hit. Then I saw a streak across the top left quadrant and a second explosion. I couldn't take my eyes off the screen. I remembered how I felt back in '01 watching a similar incident live on television. It is an eerie feeling. But for these soldiers on these planes my heart swelled. I felt a sense of sorrow and pride for them.

"Godspeed boys," Tabitha whispered. I noticed tears running down her face. I swallowed hard to keep from crying myself. Just because she has big balls doesn't mean she doesn't have a big heart also.

Tabitha squeezed my hand. I squeezed back and nodded to her. The American people would never know what had happened during the last six weeks. It would all be covered up to the point that even the people who were part of it would be confused as to what really happened. I just hoped that the families of these poor soldiers were well compensated and were told that their sons or daughters, whichever the case may be, died as great American heroes.

"Three minutes or so more to the next target," Tabitha informed me.

We sat in silence for the next three minutes. The two quadrants on the right side of the panel went to static and then an image of similar industrial areas. We watched for a few seconds in silence. Then on the upper right corner of the view screen a streak appeared and the center of the screen lit into a great bright spot. The attenuation program adjusted the scene and we could see that there had been another direct hit.

Almost immediately following the third crash, the center of the lower right quadrant exploded. All four targets had been hit. I assumed that not only were there extra parcels on board these aircraft, but that they were also full of fuel. It was my guess that these facilities would be on fire for hours if not days. There would be no more warp experiments conducted there. Tabitha watched until the screens faded to static, then automatically switched to the "unusable signal" blue screen.

"This is hard, Anson." She pulled me to her and I hugged her with all my heart.

"I know." I tried not to cry either.

We both had been accepting things too quickly and then being forced to move on to the next obstacle. We had had zero time for reflection, contemplation, or mourning. First there was the Shuttle explosion, the narrow escape from dying in space, fighting terrorists, the tornados and ECC explosion in northern Florida, escaping Huntsville by the skin of our teeth, 'Becca's flubell virus, an entire state with over fifty million American citizens destroyed, and now ordering at least four people to their deaths. We both needed to cry for a while. We hadn't even been able to attend the memorial service for our fellow astronauts on the Shuttle and now there were millions to mourn.

I held Tabitha for several minutes, both of us crying. I wiped the tears from my face and then hers. "We will make it through this, the United States of America will prevail. Besides, you still owe me a honeymoon." I smiled at her—turtle-up and focus, this fight ain't over yet.

She slugged me on my shoulder right were I had been shot. "Oww!" I laughed and rubbed my mostly-healed shoulder.

"Okay hotshot, we just bought us some time. Now get me some warp missiles before the Chinese get back on their feet," she ordered.

"Yes ma'am, General ma'am!" I saluted.