revised scene: gravel boats

This is one of my favorite scenes in the book. It didn’t require too much cleanup in this pass. Not like the following scene (the raid on the PK detention facility in Nan Garde Hait, which was a MESS despite a lot of earlier work).

Anyway, enjoy (I hope!).

== 29 aug 2064: Nan Garde, Haiti

John looked around at the team. His team. The faces that looked back were serious, competent – and enthusiastic. They were all volunteers, and none of them liked the PK, or the way the alliance with them had corrupted the ideals of the US and the US Army. What had George Washington said to his men when he’d taken command of the troops during the siege of Boston? How had he motivated the former loyal British subjects to open fire at their former countrymen?

John had no idea, and went with a joke. “Gentlemen, synchronize your watches.”

It fell flat.

“Huh?”

“It’s a joke – an old movie thing. Back in the day watches – they were like phones that just told time – weren’t synchronized.”

“Are you serious? What a fucking retarded system.”

“Yeah.” He shrugged. So much for his stand up career. “Anyway – everyone good to go?”

There were nods around the room. They stood as one, each grabbing a surprisingly heavy duffel bag and heading out to the rented minivans. Even for the short walk to the vehicles they were dressed in their tourist clothes. Here on Earth there were eyes everywhere.

Their IDs, carbon ration permits, travel vouchers – none of it would stand up to inspection if they were stopped. Which was why, in case they needed to bribe any local officials, they had pockets full of old fashioned paper money and food ration chits. Which were just as fake as the IDs.

The vans started up and pulled away, heading in two different directions.

* * *

Overhead the gravel boats continued their approach.

At a preprogrammed time the AG drives in each turned on, breaking some of the kinetic energy and storing it in the flywheel batteries, but not nearly as much as one would expect for a usual Earth reentry. The programs had been hacked together out of off-the-shelf components: some of Darcy’s open-sourced navigation package here, a physics simulation engine originally from a game involving rabbits throwing pine cones at each other there, some almost-century old GPS drivers there bolted on. But it worked. The drives sucked up enough velocity to exactly counterbalance the accelerating tug of gravity. That was key: hitting the atmosphere too fast would ruin everything.

A few moments later each boat started emitting nitrogen puffs from small cold-gas maneuvering rockets. One by one the cargo containers finished their maneuvers – each was now oriented small-end downwards.

The nosecones welded to the leading edges were crude: the level of precision involved was only a bit greater than that achievable by a shade-tree mechanic banging a recalcitrant car hood into shape with a slap hammer and a leather bag filled with shot. Each cone was fabricated from standard Aristillus deck planking – a steel alloy of no particular account from one of the solar furnace lunar refineries. Each nosecone was laminated with a carbon phenolic – the sheets served now as ablative heat-shields by had originally been brought to the colonies by a motorcycle enthusiast who had planned to use the carbon fiber sheets to make “Manchurian style” street bike fairings by had soon found more lucrative work in the atmosphere processing trade and auctioned off his stock on moonlist.trade.

As the gravel boats – spaced out roughly in a circle – entered the troposphere the first wisps of air started whipping over the nosecones. Moving at over Mach 20 it took just seconds for the boats to punch through the upper atmosphere. A moment later they were down into the stratosphere. The resistance wasn’t nearly enough to slow them down – in fact, the AG drives were forced to ramp up to max to fight the gravity-induced acceleration and keep them from going past a leisurely 23,000 km/hour. The air was dense enough that the flap maneuvering vanes near the rear of the boats were getting some bite and the servos began to click-click-click as they adjusted the fins. Ten seconds from ground.

The hypersonic impact of air on the carbon nosecones was intense enough that the air molecules themselves started breaking apart. Subtle luminous hints in front of each gravel boat soon grew and brightened to become fiery disks just millimeters in front of each nosecone. Inside each boat, one by one, the software noted that the rate of successful radio packet transmissions had fallen from “six nines” to fifty percent, and then below a key threshold. The ionization blackout caused different subroutines to be loaded and executed – each boat switched from GPS to inertial navigation. Ring laser gyros that had been designed fifty years previously, open sourced a quarter century ago, found in archives two weeks ago, and fabbed, tested, and installed a week previously were now directing the gravel boats as they fell. Nine seconds from ground.

On one of the gravel boats – the one aimed for guardhouse 3 – a wrinkle in the hastily applied heat shield resulted in an uneven flow of superheated air over the nosecone. The uneven force applied by the air on the small irregularity tugged harder and harder and then a fingers-width of ablative panel pulled away from the underlying metal.

With the carbon laminate gone the underlayment burned through nearly instantly. Once the underlayment was gone a pencil thin jet of 6,000 Kelvin ionized air began burning through the steel nosecone, quickly vaporizing the metal and contributing traces of lunar iron and to the emission lines of the blazing glow. Six seconds from ground.

Once the superheated jet burned through the nosecone the destruction snowballed. The hole in the heat-shield exploded from pencil sized to fist sized as the nosecone crumbled from within and the heat shield edged rolled back into the hole. The rapidly growing hole in the nosecone created turbulence, which created drag, which caused the boat to lean to one side during its fiery descent.

Maneuvering vanes automatically fought to adjust the gravel boat’s angle, but as the hole grew they lost the battle. The boat pitched sideways and then started rolling. The air resistance and AG breaking had slowed the boats to less than Mach 15, but even at that speed the intense heat from the ionized air was more than enough to weaken the ship. The gravel boat tumbled and cargo containers tore apart, throwing AG drive bits, half-melted container pieces and more than a ton of lunar gravel in all directions. Three seconds to ground.

One large chunk of battery pack hit another gravel boat which was plunging through the atmosphere encased in its own pillar of fire. The second gravel boat teetered and swam for a moment before righting itself and again riding its shield of fire down. Another piece of debris, a large segment of cargo container wall, hit another, less lucky, boat. This third boat rolled but unlike the first victim it was quickly torn apart by the far-hotter-than-a-blast-furnace ionized air. Gravel and drive parts sprayed in all directions. One second to ground.

Before the propagating wave of destruction could continue, though, the process ended.

Traveling many many times the speed of sound the boats hit their targets.

Guardhouses three and four didn’t get their allocated deliveries, but the eleven other targets – everything from the armory, the main gate, the electric transformers, and the motor pool, down to the bridge that provided the shortest path from the barracks to the prisoner cells – took immense impacts. The energy delivered as the 160 ton containers hit at Mach 15 was almost precisely a kiloton per strike. The crisp equivalence to a measure of nuclear yields was an accident of math – fill a container that’s THIS long with an AG drive and associated hardware and then fill the rest with gravel, and cancel its orbital velocity so that it falls towards the Earth from a height of 400 thousand kilometers, strip away a bit of the energy in the atmosphere, and what’s left just happens to be around four thousand million Joules.

Whatever the math, the gravel boats struck like nuclear bombs. Small ones, to be sure – each only a sixteenth of the yield of the Little Boy device that had exploded over Hiroshima a hundred and twenty years earlier. But like nuclear bombs, none-the-less.

John and Sergeant Harbert were prepared – as were the men at the other entry points. Each had shaded goggles, earplugs, helmets, body armor and pads, but this close to the impact sites they were still buffeted and thrown off their feet by the ground wave that hit them. After a few seconds, when the rumbling stopped, Sergeant Harbert stood and brushed himself off. John followed, then pulled his goggles off and looked at the sky. Fourteen bright pillars connected the earth and the heavens. As he watched they faded from white to yellow to red.

A moment later the atmospheric shock wave blew past them, blowing leaves off of trees, setting off thousands of car alarms and causing ten thousand birds to take flight.

John leaned into the wind, and checked his phone, confirming what he already knew by heart.

They had exactly one hour.