Chapter 34

Bombs Away

Studio technicians at Volgograd were feeding a split-screen image combining the Ocean Endeavor's camera view of Mount Siple with a succession of satellite still images of the volcano and the island. Viewers would see side-by-side views, one from the ocean and another from high overhead.

"The next satellite is due in fifteen minutes," Steve instructed. "Lee, swing the camera to the east of the volcano and be ready to zoom in. That's where we expect to see the snow eruption. The second spy satellite will be seeing the island in fifteen minutes, and will begin feeding the link at that time."

Steve turned to the camera and explained to the viewing audience what they were about to see.

"The Masi'shen have prepared their ship to clear away the estimated six hundred feet of ice and snow-pack that covers their ship. Jon'na-ren, a senior member of the ship's leadership council, tells me the ship is now beginning the operation. Our camera will zoom onto the section of the island where we expect to see the results."

A low, rumbling sound came from the island. It grew in volume. Mike watched through binoculars. He saw a section of the island surface begin to lift as though some huge creature stirred underneath the ice. It swelled up, splitting open in zigzag seams. Gouts of ice fragments and snow spewed out of the cracks. The noise grew louder and higher in pitch with a throbbing, rumbling vibration.

Lee's ship-mounted camera captured a wide-angle view of the upheaval, showing the sixteen-mile long center section of the island heaving as though a whale were using its back to thrust up through a thick blanket of snow. The ice split apart; Lee zoomed the camera tightly on the up-thrust center crack as it gaped open. A churning, swollen surge of shattered ice and steam burst out! It spewed hundreds of feet into the air, arching over in great swathes to each side. As the massive eruption grew and expanded, Lee zoomed back to widen the view. The eruption grew until the entire island became the base of a massive, boiling maelstrom thrusting up and out for thousands of feet.

Everyone on the ship looked upward into a towering, billowing cloud of ice debris. The sound was deafening! They felt the vibrations through their feet as the ship's deck plates resonated under them. They stood in awe! Never had they seen such a display of force and energy. Mike swung his binocular view to the mountain itself. It was covered with boiling avalanches.

"Steve, look at this!" he exclaimed, thrusting his binoculars forward. "The entire volcano snow cover is being shaken loose!"

The process took nearly ten minutes. No one believed such a continuous expenditure of focused energy possible, short of a nuclear detonation. At the end everyone could see a double ridge of ice and snow piled high down the length of the island. It extended for many miles, laying open the island's center. Their sea-level angle of view from the ship allowed no look into whatever lay between the ridges, but they assumed some great trench must be exposed to the sky.

All that remained of the eruption was a slowly-dissipating anvil-shaped cloud of vapor and snow crystals rising three thousand feet into the Antarctic sky, drifting over the continent on a five-knot northwest wind.

Jon'na-ren, Mike asked, is the ship now in the clear?

Yes, Michael-ours, I am told that the clearing was successful, as expected. Our technicians are very pleased with the result.

"Everyone, Jon'na-ren reports that the procedure was a success. The ship is now completely free of the overburden. The crew is pleased with the results," Mike repeated for the world audience.

Scientists around the world were frantically keying in the parameters of the Masi'shen effort. They had cut open, broken into small fragments, lifted, and piled a mass of ice estimated to be six hundred feet deep, by two miles wide, by sixteen miles long. The calculated energy required to do that left them with their mouths hanging open.

"That was no explosion!" one leading physicist exclaimed in disbelief to his team. "That was a carefully controlled application of energy! It was focused along multiple lateral planes, over a sustained period of several minutes, with total directional control! We have the video recording, but I still cannot believe it! It's impossible! It's absolutely impossible! There is no amount of energy available to us on earth, that we could apply and control in that fashion, over such a sustained period!

"We don't have the technology to do it!"

President Stinson sat with his military team in the war room, watching the video feed. The bombers were minutes away from the island. His face was flushed with anger. The others around him sat with their mouths open in disbelief. That view was available to the entire planet!

"Those bastards!" Stinson shouted. "They're trying to escape! General Babcock, how much longer? How many more minutes before our bombers reach them? And those damned bombs! The penetrators—will they work against an exposed target, without the hundreds of feet of overburden there?"

"Mr. President, the flight commander reports they are four minutes from target. And we've already issued orders to the flight crews to reset the bombs' parameters. They're being reprogrammed to explode on contact. The moment they strike whatever is in the bottom of that trench, they will detonate. Sir, their effectiveness will be less than a third of the deep-impact results, but that will be more than sufficient to destroy any exposed target.

"We should have our own video feed from the aircraft cameras when they reach the target area, sir. It will be about the same quality as the Volgograd video, coming through a communications satellite link."

"Excellent, General. Let's hope the bastards are slow to get out of that trench. If we're lucky, it will be their coffin!"

General Babcock sat with a perfectly expressionless face, showing nothing of his deep apprehension. He'd viewed the glowing figures on the television interview. He'd just witnessed the most unimaginable display of controlled energy he'd ever seen. He'd studied the classified reports of SeaVire's encounters with the alien beings and their undersea technology. He had nothing but bad feelings about dropping bombs on them.

Are we about to provoke a gentle giant? he wondered.

"T-minus-three minutes," a disembodied voice reported. "Three minutes to target."

"Sir! The screen! The Volgograd link, sir!"

All eyes swiveled to the huge wall-mounted video screen showing the side-by-side views. The left side showed the dissipating cloud over the island. The right view came alive, displaying a slide-show of still images, one rapidly following another. In the center of the view lay a huge trench, flanked on either side by high ridges of ice and snow. The trench contained a ship at rest. Dull gray, featureless, and rounded at each end, it was a flattened cylindrical form. A dome sat atop one end, apparently the housing for the device that had beamed upward through the ice, the opening in the ice targeted by the failed ground assault force.

Most shocking to everyone was the obvious damage to the ship, the missing sections along the ship's central spine. Fully a third of the ship's structure had been ripped away. The high-definition photos showed some shredded remnants still attached, dangling on either side of the ship's spine.

"Are we recording this?" someone demanded.

"Yes, sir!" a technician reported. "We've been recording everything since the feeds began.