Landings
Copyright© 2015 by Gina Marie Wylie
Chapter 9: The End and the Beginning
The situation lasted another eight months.
We did an amazing amount of preparation and Colonel Mendoza was a godsend, prioritizing everything like he was loading a combat transport.
Claire and Alistair worked yeoman’s hours developing ways to transport tons of material an unknown distance as fast as possible.
Claire explained some of the problems. “The weak link is the platform. We are replacing the original steel girders with some new carbon stuff that is ten times as strong — but it is still going to be a problem. The load that the platform can bear declines rapidly as you get further from the wormhole. We can’t make the supports any thicker, because we are limited to just three feet as it is.
“There are a couple of hundred people cutting things up to fit through; there is going to be some wastage. We will have a lot of scrap metal for smiths to work on.
“Back to the load on the platform. We should be safe with eight tons load on the platform — it screams we have to cross the platform quickly, carefully, and onto something that will support more. Alistair designed a series of trestle bridges of varying lengths and varying heights. We are making those bridges as we speak, getting them staged with everything else...”
And there was a lot of “something else.”
Outside, the world tottered along, with the rhetoric steadily increasing and steadily more bellicose. Old alliances fragmented and then reformed, sometimes overnight, with different players and different leaders. Then one day Dr. Chou came into my office and closed the door behind him, something he had never done before.
“Fifteen minutes ago, national technical means detected six ICBM launches from Iran, with predicted impacts in the continental US. Five minutes later, the Iranians announced they would fire the self-destructs if we would agree to let them occupy the New Earth wormhole site.
“Five minutes later, five minutes ago, the President said that when the first bomb detonates in the US, three missile subs will fire their 32, five-MIRVed weapons at Iran and erase it from the map. A 160-forty-kiloton nukes. The Iranians were smug, saying the President didn’t have the stones, and the Iranian people were willing to become martyrs for Allah.
“The one piece of good news — the weapon aimed at Miami decided the weather was nicer on the moon, and headed in that general direction — the guidance failed.”
“I am amazed you can joke at a time like this,” I told him.
“It’s that or go insane. What have I done? Wormholes are the end of the race.”
“Dr. Chou, that is a question that isn’t answerable except in the negative. You didn’t make the bad choices, the politicians did. Now those decisions come home to roost. You are in no way responsible for the bad choices made in the last quarter century, the last time we had a balanced budget.”
He pulled himself up. “Like wishing on flying to the moon, Colonel. At the current time I’ve told my son to standby ... but not to start yet. There are no targets west of the Mississippi. At least so far.”
“You know that Colonel Mendoza and I have an absolutely last-ditch plan? We have enough parachutes for everyone. We throw five hundred tons of supplies off the edge at first, then we start the people. We’ll lose as many as half ... but the alternative is everyone dies.”
“Are you comfortable with that kind of risk for Claire?”
I’d learned many things from my wife. This was one of them. I lifted my chin and looked Dr. Chou in the eye. “She has a better chance than I do ... she’ll be one of the first to go, on an ultra-light. I’ll be one of the last — I’ll have to live with all the broken bodies of those that couldn’t fly as well as I did.”
He stood there looking at me for the longest time. “I’ll order Operation Omega at once. We’ll go as soon as possible.”
I sighed. Well, what else was there? The last, best gesture of the US Army — run and hide and pull our hole in after us. “If we do, it was best done quickly. Whatever happens, don’t look back and second-guess yourself with ‘if only I had done this and not that.’ Hindsight is the provenance of Monday morning quarterbacks, not leaders.”
He nodded and gave me the last, worst duty. “You tell them, I can’t face them.”
We had long since installed loudspeakers everywhere — and if you wanted to use them, you had to get through me. I took up the microphone and thought for about thirty milliseconds about how I wanted to do this.
“The shit has hit the fan, my friends. Iran has launched six ICBMs at America. One has malfunctioned and will hit elsewhere. Our President has promised massive retaliation if one bomb detonates here. We have started Omega, our escape plan. The missiles are targeted east of the Mississippi, but if even one detonates, hundreds of thousands will die and a million or more.
“All we can do is pray for our fellow countrymen and turn to our jobs. There is no immediate threat to this facility, but it is still the early minutes of the first nuclear conflict fought with ICBMs.”
I placed the microphone back where it had come from and sank into my chair, put my head down on my desk, and I did cry. In an hour, likely, there would be a hundred million fewer people on the planet. Equal to the casualties in the Second World War — but in an hour, not six years.
We did this to ourselves, I thought. We let politicians become unaccountable, and when the bureaucrats saw their supposed masters were unaccountable, that’s what they sought for themselves. Government jobs and payrolls skyrocketed, like in a third-world country.
Alistair came rushing in. “I boosted the signal of a ground-penetrating radar, Tom. Some of those trees are four hundred bleeding feet high. But I had to knock off.
“What on Earth for? Didn’t you hear the SHTF announcement?”
“I heard that’s when I cranked up the juice on the radar. Now, this wormhole has been open for three years and some — today is the first time we are going to take a direct hit from a towering cumulus. I have everyone back a distance; the boffins say it will handle lightning strikes, but I couldn’t get any volunteers to measure the wind speed on the other side.”
I forced my mind off of the impending Holocaust and focused on the wormhole. “If the wormhole is killed, like as not we will be as well.”
“The boffins say it’s a sure thing. It’s grounded like nothing has been grounded before. When asked if they tested, they get pained expressions on their faces. Likely, we’ll be okay ... but maybe not.”
Claire came in and stood waiting for Alistair to finish. He grinned at her, tipped an imaginary hat in her direction, and left with the words, “You’ll be among the first to know.”
The results of the nuclear exchange were awful for everyone. New York, Washington, and the New Earth wormhole were defended. We lost Chicago and New Orleans. Iran lost everything; 158 60 KT nukes exploded in the country, as promised, erasing it from the map.
Lucky us, the Chicago bomb landed in the lake — tough on Michigan’s upper peninsula, the tip of Maine, and Nova Scotia in the path of the fallout ... but that wasn’t a patch on what the Asians faced. The President had decided on “ground pounders” — he didn’t want to waste salt on making the land permanently infertile — so we soaked it in radiation.
Pity about the fact we couldn’t keep the fallout in Iran — we took out a large part of Afghanistan and the former Soviet ‘Stans. The Chinese were badly hurt; the Japanese not as bad, but it was still serious. Pity about Alaska...
To the critics of the American response, the reply was “Tough, we were attacked. They were your neighbors; you should have dealt with them. Now we have, and we aren’t sorry we did. We gave them every chance to change their ways, and they never did.”
For a few months, the US was the bully on the block, making it very clear that anyone else who attacked us would get the same treatment. We had already alienated all of our usual allies with the New Earth wormhole. They thought the bellicosity and belligerence were “excessive.” Of course, they didn’t have smoking craters in two of their larger cities.
Then the President announced, when threatened by an attack from Russia, that sorry, the SALT talks — they were all lies, and we had reassembled twenty-five thousand warheads and were distributing them down to the theater level. So, essentially, any four- or five-star American general could launch a nuclear war without referring the decision to Washington.
In Umatilla, we had stayed the experiments with the wormhole, but with the world situation deteriorating rapidly, I finally gave the nod to Harold Junior to start the tests. His explanations might have made sense to an expert in the field, but all I heard was a lot of Greek.
There were a half dozen of us assembled at the wormhole before he began. He explained dryly that he had a hand-held controller that he was going to take with him through the wormhole, which was linked wirelessly and by cable through the wormhole. He also had a laser rangefinder, and he was wearing a wireless headset where he could hear and talk to us.
The two Chous exchanged hearty hugs, then the young man crawled through the wormhole on his hands and knees. Claire watched him go and looked at the older Dr. Chou. “I never imagined going through under my own power. Suppose he hits the wormhole?”
Dr. Chou, at least, was on familiar ground. “We ran all kinds of tests when we first opened wormholes. The ‘edges’ of a wormhole aren’t sharp like you think. The ‘wormhole’ itself is something like three and a half inches long — not withstanding the popular characterization of a long, thin, twisty object where you shoot through from one end to the other. No — it feels solid — we’ve run tests and not the sharpest drill or the strongest acid affected it. We have, however, put sundry vegetables — mostly melons, but a few pumpkins — in the wormhole when we shut it down.
“There, the results are extremely unhappy for the produce — it gets lopped in two.” He tapped his earpiece. “He’s in place, Brian Grunewald hooked up a speaker so we all can hear.”
“I am standing at the edge of the platform. I assure my father that my safety belts are in place, both of them. The range finder says it is 22,211 feet to the tree tops, assuming no penetration of the laser beam. That is the shortest distance measured; it changes as I move the range finder around.
“I did not tell my father ahead of time, but when I start the experiment, there will be about a three percent chance that the wormhole will cut off the platform. I’m wearing a parachute in case of that, because I am an optimist — and the controller has a line-of-sight range of ten miles.
“I’m starting the maneuver now.”
After a few seconds, he spoke again. “I can feel the platform descending, and since I’m not falling free, the experiment works. Now passing through 20,500 feet.”
After nearly a minute, our intrepid explorer said, “I am descending about five hundred feet a minute. I think I am slowing. I am going to increase the rate of descent.”
There was a pause, and the young man said, “Now fifteen hundred feet a minute. I have tried to go even faster, but that seems to be the upper limit. I am definitely slowing. Now fourteen fifty feet per minute.”
Somebody asked, “How is he figuring the rate of descent? A range finder doesn’t do that.”
His father chuckled. “His ‘range-finder’ is a police speed gun.”
A little later, Harold Junior spoke again. “I’ve slowed to a crawl, barely a hundred feet a minute and slowing very rapidly. We’ll end up maybe a hundred feet above the canopy. I’m sorry, father.”