“What the hell, Ayala?” he said, pulling up his sleeve to touch the tiny wound and looking at the trickle of blood on his fingers afterward. She was already replacing the gun in her bag, making sure it was loaded with another of the many doses she had with her before closing the little pouch it travelled in.
“Stop whining, you big baby.” Ayala had known he would balk at the injection, so she had decided not to negotiate it with him. She would have to find numerous excuses and underhand ways to discreetly inject countless people with the drug over the next two months. She wasn’t about to waste time on a member of her own team.
“Well,” she said, ignoring his hurt face, “I am glad you were here. I couldn’t exactly call in advance, so it was fifty/fifty whether you would be at home. As it is, though, I can go right back to the airport and catch the next shuttle to Boston.”
“Wait, you still haven’t told me what the hell that was.” Neal asked.
“What do you think?” she said, her hand on her hip while she waited for him to figure it out.
Light dawned and his face lit up, “Shit, that’s it! We have it!” he exclaimed, rubbing his arm again, this time with reverence, “That’s awesome!”
Contemplating a troop of those tiny warriors coursing through his veins was strange for him, and he took a moment to think about it. But Ayala was already picking up her bag again. He stared at her. He had been a little thrown by being unexpectedly jabbed, but he had a lot he wanted to discuss with this woman, and information he needed her to share with his colleagues working at Hanscom as well.
“Ayala, wait. I have some materials for Martin in Hanscom. Let me get them together for you. Actually, they are on one of the isolated PCs, so let me put them on a drive.” he walked over to one of the PCs and sat down, quickly inserting one of the many blank flash drives he kept handy for just this purpose.
He carried on talking as he moved files to the drive, “Look, I know you are in a rush, but while I have you here there is something that I wanted to discuss with you.” he paused a moment, focusing on the screen while he dragged the last of the documents he wanted to copy, until all he was left with were a series of time-remaining screens as the bulky files filled the solid state device.
Turning to face her once more, he gathered his thoughts and then said, “I have been thinking about something, and I imagine the colonel will have been struggling with the same thing too, but I think it’s time we got someone more … senior on the team if we are going to get the GBMD system online and prepared for D-day.”
Ayala nodded, she had considered the same thing but had assumed that the colonel had it under control. “I know what you mean, Neal, but I am assuming Barrett’s got that part of the plan under control. I’ll mention it to him, but I think that he probably is the most knowledgeable among us on US military protocols.”
“Of course, of course.” Neal glanced over his shoulder to check the progress of the file copy then looked back at Ayala. “I just, well, I think he may be hesitant to take the cause further up the ranks because, well, not to put too fine a point on it, but I think we all know his immediate superior is a bit of an ass.”
She smiled, even laughed a little. She had heard about General Pickler from Barrett long before Neal had even met the man, but Neal was right, the general was not the right man. Neal saw the last of the copy windows close and clicked on one of the files now on the drive to make sure it had copied fully. Happy with the result, he grabbed it and stood up, coming over to face Ayala.
“Look,” he said, “I absolutely agree that this is 100% Barrett’s call, of course, but maybe we, and by ‘we’ I mean you, could suggest that he think of another senior officer other than General Pickler who might be able to help us.”
She looked at him a moment and he took the hint and got more specific, “I know it will go against the grain for an air force guy to go to another branch, but, well, I think that Admiral Hamilton could be our man.”
She thought about this for a second, then nodded and said, “And who is going to approach the admiral? It isn’t easy to for an air force colonel to get a meeting with a senior admiral without his superiors knowing about it, you know.”
Neal smiled, “True, but a White House science advisor can arrange a meeting easily enough. If the colonel just happens to be at it, then so be it.” he shrugged, then his expression became much more serious and he added, “And if he happens to be carrying a gun …”
He left the thought hanging out there. She did not need reminding about their recruitment policy, she had been ready to kill Shinobu in a moment if their meeting had gone differently. Killing an admiral, however, would be a different matter.
“OK, I’ll talk to him about it. For what it is worth, I think you may be right. But military recruitment is Barrett’s field, and I will go with his decision here.”
He nodded, turning the now full USB drive over in his hand and then handing it to her. She unbuttoned the bottom of her blouse and slipped it inside a nook in her pants, tucking it down before rebuttoning. Neal always tried his hardest not to enjoy seeing her do this, but the truth was Ayala had encountered countless strip searches and worse, including her run in with a veterinary vaccination gun on her all too recent trip to North Dakota, and she was not shy. She didn’t care whether he looked or not. She did enjoy catching him pretending to look away though.
Straightening her jacket, she thought about what Neal had said. She would share his thoughts with Barrett when she got to Hanscom, along with her own recommendation. After that …
She looked at him, “Anything else?”
He shook his head.
“Good.” then more gently, “And you, Neal, are you OK?”
He smiled and nodded. Though her comment may seem cursory, he knew that her concern was genuine. She did not banter or politic, not within the team. Outside the team he was sure very few people saw much of the real Ayala, but once she had told someone who she really was, she had a way of conveying that underneath it all she was a very clear-cut person: an open book. Once she let you see the real her, that was it. After that, what you saw was what you got.
She gave him a quick hug, then slung her bag over her shoulder and left.
“The rivet gun, the large one.” shouted Martin Sobleski from under the mammoth shell.
Captain Toranssen hefted the bulky and lethal-looking device under one arm, using the other to pay out its thick wire, and made his way round to where Martin’s feet were sticking out from the bottom of the missile casing.
The GBMD system that the US had spent countless trillions constructing around its borders was made up of several overlapping and complementary layers. These included various radar and sonic sensing devices, satellite monitoring, and other less advanced but equally important methods of sensing and tracking incoming threats. But while sensing and following incoming missiles was maybe the most technologically complex part, it was relatively pointless without the more tactile side of the system.
The business end of the GBMD was made up of two different but equally deadly missile batteries. The first was kinetic. It relied upon building up a lot of momentum and focusing it into a small point, delivering a crushing impact to an incoming missile. While each one of its warheads had a relatively small area of impact, it used what was called a cluster effect, deploying hundreds of the needle thin projectiles in a destructive maelstrom. This gave it a large chance of interception. Despite this, it was relatively cheap per unit, meaning lots could be launched at a target; the aim was to blanket, to carpet bomb the skies.
The second type of weapon in the shield was a battery of much larger, much more expensive, and much more lethal anti-ballistic missiles. While they were still smaller than the long-range ballistic missiles, they were designed to intercept, and their payload significantly less potent, they were still much larger and more expensive than their kinetic GBMD counterparts.
With the size of the missile barrages in question, it had been clear to the team that they could not hope to manufacture, distribute, and install the one thousand or so missile shields they would need to protect all of the missile battery they would be sending against the satellites. So they had decided to focus on shielding the larger and much more destructive anti-ballistic missiles, with their small tactical warheads.
If all went to plan, the satellites would spend a lot of time trying to take out the smaller and more numerous kinetic missiles before it got around to the larger tactical ABMs. By then, hopefully it would be too late for even the powerful lasers aboard the satellites to penetrate the shielding on each of the remaining missiles, and at least a few would get through their defenses.
Hopefully.
It was from under the disembodied nose cone of one of these tactical behemoths that Martin now lay, requesting that Jack pass him the rivet gun. He was attaching a mock-up of the layered shielding they were designing so they could verify its specifications.
The captain grunted slightly as he lowered the powerful industrial rivet gun into the waiting hands of Martin lying on his sliding palette, ready to roll back under and start riveting the shield in place.
“Holy shit,” said Martin, as he took the weight of the machine off of Jack. He wheezed as he slid back under the big nose cone, the gun’s weight squeezing the air out of him.
“OK, plug her in.” he shouted, grunting as he maneuvered the big gun into place over the holes in the shielding.
The missile casing was mounted on a pallet that held the hefty chunk of steel from the inside, allowing the team to work on its outside. The focal point of the missile’s armor plating would need to be in the warhead case, the very front of the missile. After all, the lasers that would try to destroy each of their missiles would come from their targets, the satellites, and therefore would impact the front of the missile as it approached.
“OK,” shouted Captain Toranssen as he connected the power for the rivet gun. He heard one last grunt from Martin as he pushed the riveting machine into place against the casing and then a rending metal sound that was highly disturbing, followed by a resounding snap as the rivet’s central mandrel broke off. They were unpleasant, but thankfully those were the sounds the gun made when it worked properly.
“I’ll never get use to that.” shouted the captain, shaking his head and walking over to a second layer of shielding that was on a separate pallet to one side. It looked like another version of the structure Martin was under, the same shape. But it was critically different. Martin had just finished riveting a thin ceramic layer to the inner nose cone structure. Now they would overlay that with the composite layer of superconductor that Madeline had fabricated for them.
Due to the size constraints of the resonance chamber Madeline was working with, she had been forced to construct the superconducting sheath in overlapping sections with four shaped plates joined by a central nose cone. These had then been fixed into place on the inside of the standard outer casing of the missile.
Now they were going to bolt that whole structure, case, superconductor and all, over the ceramic insulating layer. The design, which John Hunt had helped them with, was supposed to sacrifice the missile’s standard outer casing first. It would evaporate almost immediately under the laser’s attack, despite its quarter inch of military grade titanium, before the laser came to bear on the superconducting sheath beneath. This revolutionary alloy was held together with chemical bonds that were unlike any material Martin had ever seen before.
Through mechanisms none of the team entirely understood, the material did not absorb energy in the normal way, and within reason did not react to it. This made it tremendously resistant to heat. The plan was that this layer would take the brunt of the laser attack, shielding the warhead beneath for as long as possible. Apparently the material would be able to survive for about forty-five seconds under the satellites’ concentrated glare. Comparatively, the ceramic below would only survive for a fraction of a second longer once the black shielding was finally ruptured. But the ceramic layer was not part of the defense, it was just there to deflect the heat that even the mysterious alien alloy would emit under the magnificent power of the satellites’ attack. Before it eventually ruptured the superconducting material would become phenomenally hot and the ceramic heat tile would protect the warhead within from that terrific heat.
“OK, Jack, might as well slide the outer shell into place and I’ll get this lower bolt in while I’m down here.” said Martin, breathing heavily as he wielded the big rivet gun.
“OK,” said Jack, heaving under the effort as he pushed the big structure of the outer shield casing over the inner shield. He moved slowly, taking guidance from Martin.
“Good, that’s it, OK, now straighten up, you are coming in a bit from the left.” said Martin as the two touched.
They started to squeeze together, the fit necessarily extremely tight. Slowly but surely the inside of the superconducting shell slid over the smooth white of the ceramic heat shielding. It was a strange sound. The superconductor siphoning off the energy as it slid and muffling any scraping sound. They had learned early that this stuff did not behave like anything they were familiar with.
Martin shook his head as he considered the material. “Weird stuff, this,” he said, careful not to touch it as it slid in. It would not hurt him, but it would deliver all of the friction energy it was generating in a static shock to Martin, such was the perfection of its ability to siphon energy.
“OK, nearly there, slowly does it.” said Martin, watching the two big cones come together from underneath. Jack heaved, pushing against the titanium outer shell. The shell alone cost over $200,000, he thought as he heaved. Not something you wanted to dent.
“That’s it,” shouted Martin, and Jack heard him grunt once more as he shifted the rivet gun into place over the next join hole.
* * *