Plague Wars 06: Comes the Destroyer

Unlike the launch of
Orion
, this sendoff seemed muted, almost routine, despite being only the second of its kind. Without the pressure of immediate alien invasion, it had taken on the ho-hum character of just another space shuttle firing – at least to the layman.

For the myriad experts sitting in front of their control boards, it was anything but.

Most of those men and women were engineers of one kind or another – mechanical, electrical, aeronautical, propulsion, nuclear – and with that expertise came the exquisite torture of the knowledge of just how much could go wrong. Because of that, and the innate conservatism of space controllers everywhere, they had used the tried and true. What worked with
Orion
they figured would work with
Artemis
.

Thus she also sat atop thousands of tons of high explosive to provide that first, all-important push upward. Like an aircraft carrier’s catapult prior to the kick of afterburners, the chemical explosion gave the engineers a measure of confidence and control before lighting off that first nuke.

Many people thought nuclear weapons engineering was an exact science, but it was not at all. Precisely because of the extreme accuracy and precision necessary, atomic bombs never quite exploded the same way. The tiniest fraction of difference in the machining, a nanosecond’s alteration in the timing of the initiation sequence, and the yield could vary by thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of kilos of TNT-equivalent force, so it was much safer to have the ten-million-ton
Artemis
and her mountains of cargo already heading in the right direction before the first real firecracker lit under her tin can.

James Ekara, Australia’s Senior Under-Minister for Production, had seen
Orion
’s ascent from an even closer bunker just months ago, and was happy to be present for this one. A more insightful man than some gave credit, he realized that his presence there heartened his team, increasing their work output and job satisfaction – which in turn translated to more productivity. General Nguyen had made that principle quite clear to him, and he had taken it to heart: happy workers were successful workers, and successful workers made for successful, wealthy and powerful management.

Therefore he made sure to factor in organizational psychology to his meticulously constructed plans.

The countdown slipped under one minute, and Ekara checked his nails for the umpteenth time, a nervous habit. Last time he had pressed the launch button himself, at Nguyen’s direction. This time he had followed his master’s example and had given away that privilege to one of the control room crew, a name drawn randomly from a hat. The nervous young woman who’d won looked from the big mushroom-shaped initiator to him and back every few seconds as the numbers crossed ten and falling.

“Three…two…one…fire in the hole,” the counting voice droned, and she mashed her hand down on the red plastic plunger. Of course, the thing did exactly nothing, but as long as she pushed it within parameters, no one would ever know that the computer actually fired off the explosives.

An engineer like she should be the last one to expect a manual start,
Ekara thought,
but people tend to believe what they want to, not what makes sense.

Rumbling shook the bunker and the direct visual blurred in a cloud of dust cast into the air by the explosion. A synthetic aperture radar picture, as well as screens showing several other spectra, provided the data the crew needed as the great ship lifted off its resting supports and annihilated them in the process.

Half a second before the first nuclear bomb blew, the bunker’s external covers snapped shut, sealing them in and all electromagnetics out. The shutters blocked all view by eyes or machines, leaving those watching on the ground in the dark.

For the next minute or so their screens snapped to several external feeds from hardened sensors tens and even hundreds of kilometers away, watching from mountaintops and flying airplanes well outside the blast radii. These awesome and magnificent images were broadcast around the world, of the largest and heaviest thing humanity ever sent into space.

Ekara gazed at his Rolex, watching the seconds pass as those around him stared at the long-range pictures until the one minute mark – or rather, until the sixtieth bomb exploded. “Open the bunker,” he ordered, confirming what they had already planned, and immediately some of the screens shifted to show the view from below as nuke after nuke, approximately one per second, forced the mountain of metal that was
Artemis
into the air.

He breathed a silent sigh of relief; despite his apparent confidence, it had always been his nightmare that the launch would fail and the whole damned thing would collapse atop their position, killing everyone inside and out. “Well done, everyone. How is the telemetry looking?”

Data relayed up to a satellite, then out to a ground station and back to the control bunker – the exploding bombs completely jammed any possibility of line-of-sight communication with the spaceship – provided his Chief of Flight Operations with the confidence to say, “All systems nominal, sir. Everything is five by five.”

Ekara clapped his hands together, rubbing them theatrically. “Then I believe you ladies and gentlemen can handle it from here. I have a press conference in less than two hours back in Sydney, and I suggest that those of you who can spare the eyeballs watch it. I believe you will hear some good news.”
A monetary bonus for everyone involved will further motivate them. Cheap at twice the price.

With that, he took his leave, judging the moment right. Besides, the private jet waiting for him on the other side of the mountain was very private, and had entertainments aboard to which he eagerly looked forward.

He kept his eye on the master helmsman’s shaven head and snake’s nest of wires protruding from it, as if that would somehow tell him something sooner or better than simply watching the displays. Most of those snowed out, overloaded with the electromagnetic pulse of their own drive or simply shut down. Right now
Artemis
was nearly blind, relying on the finely honed instincts of her astronaut-pilot and the chips in his brain.

Almost thirteen interminable minutes after launch, the rhythm of the blasts changed and the waves of pressure abated, slowed to one every few seconds, eventually diminishing to just a blast here and there. Finally the ship fell silent and the helmsman opened his eyes to turn them to his captain. “We have achieved minimum stable orbit, Captain. Fusion engines are running hot and nominal.”

That meant the four cloned Meme bio-fusion motors installed in universal mounts at the cardinal points of the ship’s waist were now providing thrust, just a twentieth G or so. “Excellent. Secure from hard acceleration and begin standard routine.”

As the ship settled and the creaks and groans abated, Huen could feel the slight pressure of the small, powerful engines sending them spiraling forward and upward. Eventually they would rise into a nice comfortable geostationary orbit and dock with the first of the tamed comets, dubbed Atlantis, to offload the initial part of the enormous load of supplies.

Two naturalized satellites now orbited Earth, with more on the way, sent there over the last months by the former Meme scout ship
Alan Denham.

Their target ex-comet was one of them, forty kilometers across and full of ices of H20 and methane and other volatiles. They would be cracked for their elements – oxygen and hydrogen especially – as well as the water itself for use by human workers.

The second satellite, a former asteroid called Hiera after the island supposedly containing the god Vulcan’s forge, was over eighty kilometers long and shaped like a lumpy potato. It would be mined for materials such as iron, nickel and silicon to provide a stepping stone to build further facilities as humanity marched outward into the solar system.

One part of Huen sighed with regret, as the weapons
Artemis
had been designed to carry made way for innumerable cargo holds and passenger quarters. He had been reduced from the expected command of a warship to the skipper of the biggest freighter ever built.