Chapter 8

Because I had been at Vandenberg on Thursday, plus with the missile attack ruining things, we celebrated Jasveer’s birthday on Sunday. Even though it was two weeks early, we celebrated Saryu’s as well, just in case things went screwy with Juan. It was just as low key as the one in September for Sukhjeet, simply because with school in session, there wasn’t really enough time to do anything fancy.

Juan did end up turning into a full hurricane, taking a strange path, first coming ashore and then turning around and going back into the Gulf again. Saryu remained in constant contact with her teams, but other than helping with the immediate aftermath, opening roads and the like, there wasn’t much rescue work that needed doing. That made her incredibly happy.

Marcia and I flew back down to Vandenberg on Wednesday. But instead of being in the back of one of our C-130s, we were back-seat in a pair of Tomcats. The US Navy had ‘given’ us two hundred of them. The C-130 still flew down there, but it was a decoy. There were four A-10 Warthogs loaded with lots of air to surface missiles just waiting for a chance to tear up some more terrain, especially as we’d found out the French freighter had dropped off three of the SAM launchers.

Larry, Jerry, and Robert were surprised that we’d come back after what had happened last week.

“Come on, if we didn’t, then they’d win. What’s the status?”

Bob said, “Wiring was complete yesterday. They’re doing circuit checks today. The cap is on the far side of the clean room, over there. Once that’s in place, the steel plates are sitting in trailers outside, and we’ll unload them and install them this weekend.”

“Good,” I said. “Here, I brought something for you to look at.”

I opened up a case I’d brought with me, setting a large rod on the table. It was three feet long, two inches in diameter, and narrowed on one end to a dull point. The other end flared out to a six inch in diameter pancake that was one inch thick. It looked remarkably like a giant roofing nail.

Jerry picked it up, giving off a little grunt as he did so. “That’s lighter than I was expecting.”

“It’s an alloy. Titanium would be twenty-two pounds. Stainless steel, forty-one. Welcome to right in the middle at thirty pounds. Melting point for this is well above that for pure titanium, even more than tungsten. My calculations show that by the time the heat from the eight perimeter warheads gets through the steel plate and melts that, they will have pushed these far enough away the six inch bottom plates won’t melt through until after the first twelve to eighteen inches of the rod have penetrated the comet surface. Then the rods will simply be a spike driven at twenty-two thousand miles per hour into an ice rock, except because of the hole behind it, and the fireballs coming down those holes, they’re just going to keep getting shoved in further and further.”

Larry frowned, then went over to a whiteboard.

He started making drawings, along with material sizes. Pahto rolled over to watch. Jerry pulled out the newest Hewlett Packard pocket calculator, then joined his writing compatriot at the whiteboard.

Robert chuckled slightly, then whispered, “I think they just figured it out.”

“That is the problem with smart men, isn’t it?” I replied. “The nuclear warhead guys and the rocket guys are each experts at what they do. But they don’t do a lot of cross work in each other’s specialties.”

After fifteen minutes, Jerry just shook his head.

“It won’t work.”

I stood up and walked over to the whiteboard, to examine their work. Marcia came with me, while Bob simply stayed in his chair.

After a few seconds of looking at their calculations, Marcia said, “Well, do you guys want the good news or the bad news first?”

Jerry tilted his head. “Um, good news first.”

“The good news is, you’re pretty good at figuring explosive charges. The bad news is, you’re not as good as I am, because you’re failing to take into account the warhead damage because it’s a shaped charge propelling the spikes,” she said. “You’re correct in that a nuclear shockwave normally only propagates at about three hundred meters per second. The shaped charge effect should multiply that by about thirty, to between nine and ten thousand meters per second.”

Jerry punched some more numbers into his calculator.

“Okay, that’s great, if it travels for a full second, that’ll punch through six miles of the comet. What about the other three miles? Even if you peel off two-thirds of the comet, that still leaves ... about a hundred thirty mile wide crater if it hits us.”

“Hey, that’s only an eighty-one million megaton explosion at that point, right?” I said with a grin.

“Yeah, well, that’s still forty-two times bigger than our hot fudge sundae!” Larry exclaimed.

“True, but that also presumes it only penetrates for a full second at that speed. It’s actually going to be a decaying function. These penetrators are a hell of a lot stronger than ice. They’re stronger than granite, even. I figure ten thousand meters per second for the first three-tenths of a second, nine for the next two tenths, then eight, seven, and six for each of the next two tenths. The same for five, four and three. Then it’s going to drop off drastically. I’m figuring eleven five to twelve thousand meters. That’s basically going to leave your hot fudge sundae.”

“Which is still going to suck dramatically, with a thirty four mile wide crater,” Jerry countered.

“How big was the peak of Machapuchare?” I asked.

“Excuse me?”

“Now, we’re down to a ballpark figure of four hundred sixty million tons of ice. The peak of Machapuchare was hit with six one megajoule planetary defense beams at the exact same instant and blew up. That was seven hundred million tons of rock. Pahto, how many six megajoule planetary defense beams will we have available by March?”

“Four, plus eighteen two hundred fifty kilojoule beams,” she answered.

“And that’s why I want to blow up slightly more than two thirds of Halley’s Comet in February. So we can hit it with seven megajoules of energy and blow the living shit out of the rest of it, because we don’t have enough beams to take out the whole thing all at once. It’ll make one hell of a fireworks show, that’s for damned sure, and I’m quite certain some of the pieces will still be large enough to cause damage. A ten meter chunk of ice will still make a seven hundred yard wide crater, with a hundred fifty kilotons of damage. Sucks for whoever is under it, but not a danger to the planet. Water strikes will cause waves, but Tambora was a thirty-three thousand megaton explosion, so not much, comparatively. In ‘A View to a Kill,’ they were going to set off explosives in a mine on the fault line. Wouldn’t have done squat. These might cause some of the more sensitive fault lines to let go, depending upon how close they hit and how big they are when they hit.”

I smiled. “So, gentlemen? Questions answered?”

“How far from Earth can those beams fire?” Jerry asked.

“It’s going to be point blank range. Four thousand miles. Keep in mind that Pahto and Mycroft will be doing the target selections, as well as assisting the actual control systems for those beams. Once the remaining bit of the comet is blown to pieces, they’ll be able to switch targets and shoot twenty-two different rocks at a time, starting with the bigger ones that are on course to hit Earth. If it’s going to miss, or they project it’ll burn up in the atmosphere before doing any damage, then they won’t shoot at it. Yes, I know at cometary speeds, four thousand miles means they’ll only have a two minute window to shoot as many as they can. That’s probably not going to be enough, but ... it beats the shit out of pasteurized planet, as you guys called it.”

“That, um, sounds...” Larry started, then stopped again, looking at Jerry for help.

I beat him to it. “Sounds harsh? Yep. That’s just reality. If ... well, if only twenty million people die to permanently defeat Shiva, that’s a win for our side. You guys have written about massive deaths in your books. This is reality, where I have to make the command decisions about who lives and who dies. Yes, I’m seventeen, so incredibly young. No, I don’t particularly like it one damned bit. But it’s my job, my responsibility. And no, you’re not cleared to know anything else. By April of next year? Sure. Then it won’t matter, one way or the other. We’ll have either defeated Shiva, or I’ll be dead.”

“Jesus Christ!” Jerry said with vehemence.

I shook my head. “No. Wrong Guardian of the Planet. Nice guy, though, from what I’ve heard.”

At their surprised looks, I chuckled, then said, “Gentlemen, you know that souls can stick around after death. Don’t look so surprised. I’m the reason the Punchbowl lit up like a Hollywood movie premiere. The Federation Vice-President is Israeli and a Jew. So are two of my wives. I’ve met plenty of artifacts with souls in them. Is it so surprising that one of them knew Jesus?”

Pournelle looked upset. “I was raised Unitarian in Louisiana, then converted to Catholicism at college in Tennessee, but now I’m Anglican because of the Catholic Church’s views on birth control. I’m not sure I know how to take your comments regarding Jesus.”

“Do you know who Bernardin Gantin is?” I asked.

Jerry shook his head.

“He works for Karol Jósef Wojtyla, Pope John Paul the Second, as Prefect of the Congregation of Bishops and President of the Pontifical Commission on Latin Americas. I’ve met him, talked to him several times. I have been charged to defend this planet to my death if need be, and found to be pure of soul and Holy, in a state of Grace, and incapable of sin. That is the official position of the Roman Catholic Church. I say this because I was raised as an atheist, not believing in any religion at all. Then, I became agnostic on my own. Now? I’m not Catholic, or Christian. I’m ... well, not Church of All Worlds, but with what I know to be factual, I think this old fart got more right than he anticipated.”

Robert Heinlein laughed then. “Guilty as charged, as you like to say. I hadn’t intended to be right, in talking about what happens after discorporation. I really didn’t know souls continued to exist. It’s an interesting world we live in, where fiction becomes reality, isn’t it?”

Larry looked at me. “You’re not from Mars, are you?”

That proved too much for Marcia and me. We both broke into laughter at that.

“Sorry, we had to laugh at that,” Marcia said after a moment. “You have no idea how far up the national and Federation chain that’s been asked of Cal. I think the last time was when Presidents Reagan and Mondale came by for a visit. No, everything Cal can do is simply because he’s been chosen as the Guardian of Earth.”

Larry shook his head, a slight grin on his face. “Sorry, it’s just...”

Bob laughed then, said, “Been there, done that. Now, let’s go check what’s going on. I’ve still got one more shuttle launch to supervise early in December, before Ticky and I go to Japan and China in January to discuss space station module components.”

“Ticky?” I asked, puzzled.

“That’s my personal nickname for Ginny,” he explained.

“Oh. Didn’t know that.”

He laughed. “I gave that to her while we were building our first house, because every day, when we were done, invariably I’d have to pick a tick or two off her.”

I helped find one small wiring error that they’d missed, but other than that, they’d done a good job. Pahto was using her camera at the highest magnification as well. During the week, she’d found a couple of solder joints that weren’t quite right.

Two of the engineers told me that they’d start using magnified cameras after this to check every solder joint they made. Even though they’d been doing this delicate type of work for years, this showed them it was still possible to make a bad one without realizing it with the naked eye.

Thursday morning, we were outside, checking out the main rocket and what was going on there when we heard some explosions from the north. General Fitzsimmons filled me in later that afternoon on what had happened.

“That noise you heard while on the gantry was termination of the two Osa units. From what we were told by the survivor from last week, these two were to be backups. There was concern that ‘eyes only’ might fail, so one of the two was radar guided. We decided to give them something to practice on, by sending some slow movers up the coast daily since Monday, making it look routine, having them fly every three hours. That way it looked like training flights. These guys were the backup, and not as well trained, so we figured – hoped, really – that they’d turn their system on before the C-130 that was supposed to have you in it would head north, and practice getting radar lock.”

He smiled, then. “They did. What they didn’t know was we’ve had an AWACS orbiting at forty thousand feet doing ESM – passively listening for radar – every day as well. You can pick up an active radar signal from a hell of a long way away. Once they fired it up to practice on our slow mover, we vectored in a couple of your fast movers since we’re not allowed to do the things in the US your forces can. You have AGM-45 Shrikes in your inventory – which I find interesting, of course – and one of those took out the radar Osa. Choppers loaded with troops were on scene less than two minutes later, and captured the other one and the crew.”

“Thank you, General.”

I mentally called Margie. ‘Hey, sweets, can you check to make sure we’re in the clear to fly home in the C-130 tonight? The General said we’re good, but he doesn’t work for me.”

She chuckled. ‘You’re fine, we’ve already heard from them, but ... you might want to check with the fighter pilot wanna-be before you put her back in a trash hauler. She’s not pregnant now.’

She heard my mental laugh, while Marcia heard my physical one. General Fitzsimmons gave me an odd look.

“Don’t worry about it, General,” I said. “We’ll fly home the same way we got down here.”

Marcia’s smile lit up the room.

She was incredibly giggly and horny when we landed at Moffett. Before we’d taken off, I’d talked with our pilots, both of whom had served with the US Navy. They didn’t have any issue with going about ten miles out to sea for twenty minutes of aerobatics. Dave had to stop at our Moffett field offices, so Marcia could have her wicked way with me before we could even make it home.

When we finally did get home, Margie was waiting with her hands on her hips.

“Okay, we’re even! You’re an evil woman, linking with me!”

Marcia smiled at her sister-wife. “Yes, I am. Have I mentioned to you lately just how much I love him, love you, and love our lives together?”

Margie smiled back, her eyes twinkling. “We all do. But we can’t abuse him tonight. He has to leave tomorrow.”

I stopped. “I do?”

“Yes. Your kickoff is at twelve thirty on Saturday, so the team is flying up Friday afternoon. Don’t worry, we’ll be there Saturday for your game.”

My nostrils flared slightly. “I didn’t doubt that. But we were at Vandenberg for too long to go trick or treating with Toby tonight, so I was planning on making it up to him tomorrow.”

Jennifer stepped up next to Margie.

“You’re a good dad. But last year, he didn’t have three girlfriends. He went with two of them, instead. Sorry, Dad. Hormones take precedence over familial relationships.”

“Fine. Then take me to bed and comfort me in my sorrow.”

Jennifer shook her head. “Seriously? Just get your ass in here.”

They all laughed then, taking me in for an evening of gentle lovemaking.

Dora took me to the chemistry lab Friday morning.

“I thought you’d like to see this, mi amor.”

I looked at the end product that was slowly dripping into a collection beaker. There were about a hundred milliliters collected in it.

“Okay, I see it. What am I looking at?”

Cody got off his stool, where he was monitoring the process, and flipped over the whiteboard that was standing behind him. “What is it that magicians say? Ta-da!”

“Um ... hang on. I recognize the base formula. Well, isn’t that interesting! How’d you get it to ... oh, there it is. Well, fine, be that way. Nothing like taking what I had as an idea and turning it into two products at step four in the production phase, is there?”

“We thought you’d like that,” Cody said. “Makes it fairly elegant, at least at lab scale production levels. Pull that grid work of glass out, put this one in, and you’re either making a fungus cure, or you’re making a male pattern baldness cure.”

I held up a finger. “Let’s go with the word ‘treatment’ instead of cure, shall we? At least until we’ve done enough testing. Men that are in their sixties that are totally bald and have been for twenty years may not see any grow back, because their follicles are dead.”

“Actually, that’s fair,” Cody replied. “That’s why we’ll be interested in testing this. It should be a cure for any fungus, though. It won’t prevent you getting infected again, of course.”

I started to answer, then stopped. “Hang on. You meant any topical fungus, like yeast infections, athlete’s foot, or ringworm, right?”

He shook his head. “No. It looks like it’s going to mimic or beat fluconazole for internal fungal infections, and we’re going to have to do other testing to see how effective it is on the regionally specific fungus infections. At least on the fungus spores we’ve got growing in the hot lab right now, there’s not a single one of them it doesn’t eliminate. For topical stuff, yeah, it’s as safe as distilled water, and it should be one treatment and done. John and Jim want to take internal testing a bit slower, and so do Doctors Fallow and Blau.”

I blinked. “When did you start calling Doctors Ross and Spudich by their first name?”

Dora laughed. “When you gave your graduate assistants real jobs, as it were, working for you. John and Jim realized that since everyone is in this for the long haul with you, everyone may as well be friendly.”

I nodded and said, “Well, that does make a certain amount of sense. I’m quite certain that Stephen and Helen aren’t going to quit Stanford when I’m finally done here.” Then I frowned. “Speaking of everyone else, where are they today?”

“Oh, they’re over at the SPF,” Cody said.

“And that is?”

“Stanford Production Facility,” he said. “That’s the formal name for the building where we’re working with chemical engineering to try to make the antiviral outside of a lab environment.”

I started to say something, then just shook my head. “Good. The sooner that works, the better for humanity.”

“Indeed,” Dora said, then smiled. “Hey, Cody, we’ll leave you alone to watch the dripping. Don’t put any bowling balls under there!”

He laughed. “That’s an old joke. And I don’t have to put my palms under there, either.”

I’d actually heard that one, so I joined Dora in laughing.

She took my hand in hers as we were walking down the hall, leaving the building.

“Sometimes, mi amor, I wish I didn’t have the abilities I do. I have seen you give five very lucky women five very beautiful babies, and I know your sixth wife will also give you a beautiful daughter.”

“Adorable, I can take away the abilities you have now, if you want. I have that much skill with the shivalingam, and more than enough power.”

She shook her head sadly. “No, mi amor. It is October now. I can wait, I am willing to wait, until Easter. That is the last Sunday in March next year. Perhaps with our baby conceived on the date of Jesus’s resurrection, he or she will be born on the day we also celebrate His birth. I know from talking to Karen what those dates really are on our calendar, but ... that would make me very happy.”

“Then I’m just going to have to send Shiva a stern message to leave us the hell alone, because I simply can’t have anything interfering with my Dora’s happiness!”

Then she laughed. “I know you had a thought of the three of us walking across the stage with our bellies bulging when we received our degrees. They’ll award degrees earned in the fall quarter in early January. I think if I walk across the stage carrying our baby, that’ll be almost as good, don’t you think?”

“I do, my lovely wife.”

That caused her to stop and pull me in close for a tight and fierce kiss.

When we got home for lunch, I noticed Eve was missing.

“Basketball practice,” Beth said. “You remember how you had Friday practices before football season? Their season starts November 22^nd, the Friday before the Big Game, with a game down at San Jose State. It’s just a four game tournament. We’ll play Hawaii Friday early evening, then Arizona will play San Jose State after that. Then they’ll do tip-off for the loser’s game about five, with the winner’s game after that. That’s probably the only tip-off time for their whole season that’s not already set. Well, there may be a conflict in January, because they’re supposed to play on the same day you’ll be playing in the Championship game.”

She stopped. “Shit!”

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“The women’s NCAA tournament. It’s supposed to start March 14^th.”

I opened my mouth, then shut it, then opened it again when I saw what time it was.

“Oh, Diana!”

She looked up from where she was feeding William. “Yes, dear?”

“As the Spatial Defense Minister for the Terran Federation, I hereby delegate to you the task of mentioning to Walter that there are going to be a shitload of national and international sporting events in March of next year. Mostly because I have to leave for the airport in an hour. You might let him know that in my official capacity – especially since we won’t know until early February what effect, if any, the rocket is going to have on Halley’s Comet – that they plan on shutting every damned thing on the planet down starting March 13^th, and keeping it shut down until the 18^th. Then we can figure out what the damage is, where it is, and deal with it. A simple, ten foot diameter chunk of rock that makes it by the Planetary Defense Units and then past Dora, Eve, and Beth, is going to make a three hundred yard crater, and be the equivalent of a five kiloton explosion. And there will be rocks that are missed.”

Beth and Dora both got faraway looks in their eyes. Not the look from when they were talking to one another, but from when they were both doing mental calculations.

After about a minute, Beth looked at Dora with a troubled look on her face. “Spic, I can’t see any way around it.”

Dora shook her head. “No. Marcia replayed the conversation you had with Niven and Pournelle for us, because it was funny with them asking if you were from Mars. So, we heard exactly what you plan – or at least hope for – with the rocket launch next Sunday. Even with all eighteen beams hitting and blowing into little pieces the remainder of the comet, we saw what happened at Machapuchare and how many billions of pieces that turned into. Some of them were easily the size of our home, some of them were barely the size of pea gravel. And every single one of those pieces will still be traveling at fifty meters per second towards Earth.”

I said with a sad smile. “I have to plan for the worst case situation. Hannah, what’s that?”

She didn’t raise her head from where she was watching Michael, feeding at her breast. “He’s not planning on hitting the Earth. That would make a crater a hundred seventy miles in diameter, crack the Earth’s crust, and penetrate the upper mantle. He’s insane, but he’s not crazy, so he’s figured that out. So he’s planning on either hoping for a direct hit or at least a grazing hit on the moon. A chunk of ice a kilometer in diameter makes a forty kilometer in diameter crater when it hits at cometary speeds. That same chuck would only make a four kilometer crater if it was a chunk of the moon falling off and hitting here, and a lot of smaller stuff would burn up in the atmosphere, it’s going so slow. But it’ll still be like he shot a giant shotgun all across the face of the Earth, with ten thousand craters. Seventy percent of them are in water, so three thousand four kilometer craters, with nineteen kilometers in diameter destruction zones. Then you have not just the Ring of Fire cut loose, but all the tectonic plates everywhere on Earth breaking loose? He’d find the bands of survivors and offer them his aid as a god, if only they’d worship him. And then the Sacred Souls destroy the planet, to prevent that.”

“That’s ... a rather gruesome worst case scenario,” Diana said.

“Thank you. I did my best to think of just how bad it could be, and then made it a hundred times worse,” Hannah replied.

“Blow the fuck out of his comet! We’ll destroy as much as we can, and if a rock hits New York and wipes it off the face of the Earth because we were just overwhelmed, then so be it,” Beth said with anger.

“That’s the plan.” I sighed. “Well, on that rather depressing thought, I’m going to grab my overnight bag, and head over to Moffett. I’ll stop in over there and give my wives that are working kisses. Can I get some from all of you?”

That made Hannah look up. “Yes, but Michael is still hungry, so you’re going to have to kiss both of us sitting here.”

“Of course, my love. Just so long as there’re no corn cobs growing while you’re seated.”

“Uh, no. One nice thing about the girls. They’re able to help with hemorrhoids. Those are such a pain in the ass.” She smiled sweetly. “Maybe they can help with you?”

I blinked. “I’m not sure, but I think I’ve been insulted.”

Diana, Beth, and Dora all laughed, with Diana finally saying, “I’m sure. You have been!”

I grinned at all of them, then gave everyone that was home a kiss. Dave drove me to the CEDEM offices then, where I gave the rest of my wives, and the children that were in bassinets in their offices, kisses as well.

We only had to wait by Pacific for about five minutes before the buses with the team pulled in. The troops that were going with us were already loaded, and the two C-130s with ground vehicles had left an hour before.

We arrived at Seattle about an hour and a half after we took off. Everyone had jackets, to deal with the wet cold. It was also misting a little. Instead of unloading at the terminal, they had us park, with portable stairs and buses for us. A cargo loader was waiting and the baggage handlers quickly got our gear down. We put it under the buses that we’d chartered to get us to the hotel. To make things easier for us, we were staying at a hotel less than a mile from the stadium.

“Gentlemen, we flew up here this afternoon, so you will all be rested tomorrow morning. Welcome to fall and winter ball. It was seventy and sunny when we left home. It’s fifty and a seriously wet cold here. Tomorrow it’s going to be the same. This is going to be our first game in really adverse weather. That means you’re going to be dealing with wet balls both in your jocks and in your hands. You’re going to get cold on the field, because we’ll be dealing with ninety plus percent humidity and eight to fifteen mile per hour cross winds. That means you receivers and defenders will have to watch and pay close attention on those pass routes. The ball will be pushed to the north-east by the wind. The Huskies are used to it. We’re not.”

Coach looked at all of us, gathered in the conference room of the hotel.

“We’re still the number one ranked team in the nation. Washington finished last year at number two after beating Oklahoma in the Orange Bowl. That’s not going to happen this year for two reasons. One, they’re not as good as they were last year, and two, they’re going to lose to us today. If you pay attention. If you’ve come to play ball. If you’re ready to show the Huskies they’re good dogs, then pat them on the head. No, that does not mean you’re going to do anything tomorrow. Let’s just get a good meal this evening, and get our minds in the right places for the game tomorrow. Room checks at nine, lights out at ten.”

“Coach, are we eating together as a team tonight?” Jeff asked.

“No. Having said that, buddy system. There are plenty of restaurants and other things to see near here. No alcohol, no fights, and just go get acclimated to the weather. We’re literally less than half a mile north of the stadium. You have four hours. Go check the campus out.”

Greg, Fred, and John decided to go with me for a walk and to get something to eat. The minor detail that we had an armed detail walking with us meant none of us were too concerned about any crime. Of course, since the students at the University of Washington weren’t used to seeing men walking around with guns, that also meant someone decided to call the Seattle PD. A squad car quickly arrived.

Eddie looked at them rather calmly as they got out of their car.

“Salthawk Security International, Officers. May we help you?”

“Uh ... we got a report there were armed men walking around on campus.”