“Billy, I’m going for a walk,” she said, picking up her armor and throwing it on.
“I thought you were supposed to stay here,” the boy replied, watching as she loaded up.
“Well, I’ve got something I have to do,” Cally said with a frown. “Girl stuff.”
“Oh.” Billy frowned in turn as she locked and loaded her weapon. “Girl stuff. Okay.”
“I’ll be back before the grown-ups,” Cally added. “If anybody comes by, get in the GalTech cache and close the door. Nothing can get through that.”
“Will do,” Billy replied.
“Bye,” she finished, stepping out onto the ledge. The Posleen were halfway across the ridge. If she was going to get into a good position she had better hustle.
Whistling quietly, she started off along the narrow ledge. She didn’t know the name of the song that she whistled, but if her grandfather was around to hear it he would have recognized it immediately.
“Fight the horde,” she sang, sliding down the slope towards the lower ridgeline, “sing and cry, Valhalla I am coming.”
“The system consists of fifty-five sub-projectiles with an Indowy initiator in each,” Dr. Castanuelo said, pointing at the diagram on the screen. “After firing, the system reaches its target point and begins to spread projectiles. It doesn’t just drop them, which would cause massive overlap, but lays them down during its flight. Each projectile has slowing fins. These have been shown to not “trip” Posleen defensive systems. This system lets all the projectiles attain complimentary altitudes. At a preprogrammed height above ground, which is determined by radar altimeters in each sub-projectile, the Indowy containment field releases a burst of anti-protons into the fullerene matrix which then sustains a rapid chain reaction.”
Jack looked at the presentation as the projectiles fell out of the back of an imaginary artillery shell and scattered across a wide area. The effect looked similar to a cluster bomb until you realized that what looked like gullies and small hills in the background was a backdrop of the Rocky Mountains.
“What’s the footprint?” Horner asked. He had commandeered a shuttle and flown down to the university as soon as he got the word. He still didn’t know if he had the answer to a maiden’s prayer or the worst nightmare since the word of the invasion.
Dr. Castanuelo cleared his throat nervously. “Thirty-five miles deep, fifteen miles across. It’s the equivalent of a one hundred and ten megaton bomb, but with significantly different gross effects. For example the thermal pulse is equivalent to a two megaton.”
“And you built this on your own?” Jack asked quietly. “Without authorization? Or even mentioning it? One hundred and ten megatons?”
“Well, I had the hyperfullerene and the initiators just sitting there,” Dr. Castanuelo said hotly. “I thought it might come in handy.”
“You thought it might come in handy. Just how much of this… hyperfullerene did you make?”
“Well, once we got the production model worked out it seemed reasonable to continue production,” Dr. Castanuelo said defensively. “I mean, we had the power plant and the materials. After that it was easy.”
“How much?” the general asked smiling faintly. The question was nearly a whisper.
“Well, as of yesterday, excepting the material in the bomb, approximately one hundred and forty kilos.”
“Of hyperfullerene?” Jack asked, taking a deep breath.
“No, we generally refer to it in terms of anti-hydrogen atomic mass rather than the…”
“You have one hundred and forty kilos of antimatter sitting around on my planet????”
“I thought it would come in handy,” the doctor said lamely.
“Sure, for fueling Ninth Fleet!” Jack shouted. “Tell me about the radioactive effects of this bomb.”
“Very hot, unfortunately,” the scientist sighed. “It’s one of the reasons it’s useless for an energy source. But very short-lived as well. In a day or two the area is down to high background and in a month it would require sophisticated sensors to tell it has been hit. But not the sort of thing you want running your car. Fortunately, it’s readily detectable.”
“Sure, with a Geiger counter!” President Carson said.
“Oh, no, there’s a visual chemical cue,” the professor said. “It was the suggestion of one of my grad students and it made sense. The truly ‘hot’ areas will be readily detectable visually and the cue will fade as the radiation does.”
“But the entire system has not been tested,” Carson pointed out with the sort of quiet calm used when an emergency happens during brain surgery.
“We fired a mockup with transmitters in duplicate Indowy containment fields,” the scientist said. “They all survived. If they survived, the containment works. And hyperfullerene has been tested against every kind of shock imaginable. Unfortunately, the problem is not it detonating prematurely but getting it to detonate at all.”
“And it is armed,” Carson said, accusingly.
“Well, yes, that follows.”
“Positive action locks?” Jack asked.
“Not yet,” Castanuelo admitted. In other words, the bomb could be detonated by anyone with rudimentary technical skills.
“Guards? Electronic security? Vault safety?” the general asked furiously.
“Well, we’ve got it in one of our mines,” the professor said with a shrug. “And I’ve got a couple of students watching it. Look, it was a crash project!”
Jack glanced at his wrist where his AID used to be and then at his aide. “Jackson, get on the phone. I want an outside expert in here, one on antimatter, one on Indowy containment systems and one on guns and submunitions. I want a company of regular troops around wherever this thing is in no more than an hour and I want them replaced by special operations guard units by the end of the day.”
He looked at the scientist and nodded. “Dr. Castanuelo, you’re right, we did need it. I’m pretty sure that that is going to keep your bacon out of the fire. As long as it works. If it doesn’t…”
“Sir, if it doesn’t, I’ll never know it,” Castanuelo said. “If it, for example, detonates on launch, there won’t be a Knoxville left.”
“And if the rest of your material sympathetically detonates, say goodbye to Tennessee!”
CHAPTER NINE
Rabun Gap, GA, United States of America, Sol III
1522 EDT Monday September 28, 2009 AD
Mike didn’t have to look at his readouts to see how bad off the battalion was. Most of the suits were laid out flat on the log-covered hillside. Part of that was fatigue — even with the suits, being in combat was murderously tiresome — but the greater part of it was experienced troopers trying to conserve every erg of power. Some of the suits were down to one percent power and when it dropped to zero the suit would pop open and “decant” the Protoplasmic Intelligence System out onto the cold, wet ground. Not a happy prospect.
Together with the loss of Gunny Pappas, it was a pretty bleak and depressing situation.
There were other problems. He still had nearly two companies of troops, but he had lost Captain Holder in the landing and Charlie Company was looking pretty ragged as a result. And he was short on officers except on staff, where they were doing less and less good. At this point he didn’t really need an intelligence officer. The Posleen were right there and there and there and… On the other hand, he also didn’t need an operations officer. The Posleen were going to come on in the same old way and they would fight them in the same old way. Hell, this battalion didn’t even need a commander.