Dadr'Ba (39 page)

The normally crowded Hawaiian beach was deserted, there’s usually a crowd, but the tsunami warning sirens have been sounding for what seems like hours. People are taking this one seriously. The eastward facing beach, is taking the full brunt of the late midmorning sun, but oddly, the southern horizon looks like a sunset, bright yellows, oranges and reds radiating out stretching almost to the zenith.

To the right not far down the beach, a mirage, but not the ordinary mirage like the shimmer you see extending horizontally along a desert plain or a dry Lake bed. This mirage is much smaller and closer, appearing like a miniature dust devil but containing no dust, only twisted shimmering currents of air like those seen above a clean burning fire, but more intense. Further down the beach in the other direction, another twisting shimmering, swirling, pulsating, mirage, then they were gone.

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NASA, the Russians and the ESA (European Space Agency) had all been considering testing a comet and asteroid deflection system on Apophis a small asteroid that is due to come close, but not impact the earth i
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and come even closer with a small possibility of Earthimpact i
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The People’s Republic of China (PRC) CNSA (China National Space Administration), developed their comet deflection system named Tulong
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, and with their burgeoning space program planned to leapfrog ahead of its competitors. Year’s ahead of its competition and using a more aggressive and efficient system, designed to avert a mass extinction event with less than half the warning time required with any of the other systems being developed.

The CNSA decided to test Tulong secretly against a known comet with a well-documented trajectory, one that would be easy to measure Tulong’s effectiveness on, and deployed Tulong to this isolated intercept point on the far side of the sun. The target comet is due to pass through this area of space in only a few weeks. The comet picked for the test of the CNSA system was a zero risk on the Torino
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scale, which offered a wide margin of safety in the event the deflection system had the opposite effect on the comet’s trajectory.

But all that planning went out the window when this new comet appeared, database searches came up blank, this was a new comet. Based on preliminary data, this comet came up a six or seven on the Torino scale. As the telemetry data accumulated the Torino index increased meaning that this comet could become a ten by the time of closest approach/impact. It was about the right size, and in the right place to use the deflection system on. This “test” has just turned into an emergency. And the CNSA’s Tulong system, is humanities one chance at salvation.

A decision had to be made and made quickly, the whole thing was made more complicated by the fact that the comet and the deflection system was behind the sun, making communication difficult and impossible for terrestrial and space-based telescopes to see what was going on.

It would have been so much simpler if they had been less concerned with world opinion and security and conducted this test in the open with the test within direct line of sight of the earth.

The decision makers at the CNSA needed a decision to be made, a decision that could impact not just the people of China but every man woman and child on Earth. By the time the decision package made it all the way up to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, there wasn’t enough time to contact the rest of the nations of the world and explain to them the highly classified program, a program that technically violated the International Outer Space Treaty.

There wasn’t enough time for diplomacy, and if successful the comet would miss by a fair margin and the CNSA and the PRC could claim credit for saving the world, if not, it wouldn’t matter.

Given the little information obtained mostly from the systems’ cameras and radars, the decision was made to attempt the deflection. The comet’s velocity was much higher than typical, meaning that it is either a very long period comet or possibly even a rogue comet. They’re working virtually blind, and to make matters worse, the twenty-two-minute time delay for its transmission to be received near the orbit of Mars meant turning the deflection system on, telling it to execute and then wait and watch, there is absolutely nothing that can be done on earth that would have any impact on the operation. 

The risk of a mistake, if the thing were to shatter into pieces and become the apocalyptic shotgun blast instead of a slug was mitigated by the systems design. The initial “pulse” or “pulses” would be used to clear away the coma and perhaps even increase the pressure on the near side of the comet. The follow-on pulses in quick succession would use the comet surface itself as a push plate in what amounts to be a combustion chamberless rocket engine. The lack of a formal combustion chamber is mitigated by using carefully designed “pulse modules” resurrected from data “collected” about America’s sixty-year-old Operation Plowshare and Project Orion. If the comet breaks up, the system is designed to detonate the pulse modules a little further way so as to have a better angle to push each piece in the same desired direction as if the comet had remained whole.

As soon as the Mission Planners at the Beijing Aerospace Command and Control Center (BACCC), working Projec
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, got the go-ahead from the Central Committee, they went into high gear. BACCC Mission Planners, all skilled professionals, most in their forties with twenty or more years’ experience with the space program had little difficulty making the necessary changes to the Deflection Systems programming; they didn’t have much time, data transmission and acknowledgment was excruciatingly slow. Software testing was completed, and simulations run to eliminate or at least mitigate any possible adverse outcome. In the end, they were confident their efforts would result in a Torino Scale reduction from a six or seven or even ten to a one. And effect a million-fold decrease in the risk of impact, the risk will be worth the gamble.

The location, the far side of the sun, made communication with the deflection system difficult but provided an increased level secrecy deemed paramount for the highly classified project. The events taking place are hidden from terrestrial observation, even imagers on the various planetary probes would have to be queued to what’s going on to take their sensors away from their primary tasking, the planets, moons, asteroids and comets right in front of them.

The events occurring now are in a virtually empty spot in the solar system.

Despite the communications difficulty, having been forced to switch to longer wavelength, lower bandwidth frequencies able to bend around the sun, the Projec
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crew completed the necessary programming changes to Tulong.

The system data was good and transmitted with triple redundancy. The live video however was poor quality, choppy, pixilated and low resolution, but the entire team was confident in Tulong’s, high-resolution optical and multispectral image recording equipment and looked forward to seeing the events in ultra-high resolution as soon as it cleared the blinding glare of the sun. When Tulong would send the triumphant proof that the PRC saved the Earth from the impact of a mass extinction event comet.

The Projec
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control room was alive with activity; every system was closely monitored despite the time delay. The VIP’s up in the darkened windowed command section above and behind the control room floor waited and watched anxiously. Everyone watched the historical events on gigantic screens lining the far end of the large control room. Events that would determine the fate of the human race unfolded twenty-two light minutes away.

Knowing that they are mere spectators watching events from a distance of four hundred million Kilometers didn’t make the Projec
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team feel impotent. Each member of Projec
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had embedded in Tulong a significant part of their intelligence, their strength, their will, their time, their very lives. Each witnessed the events on the choppy, pixelated screen personally, like they were there doing battle against the evil dragon bent on destroying the human race.

With the excitement of sports fans watching their favorite team play against an arch rival, the Projec
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team watched the fuzzy stop action video as Tulong now in fully autonomous mode performed flawlessly.

As soon as the comet came within range, still a fuzzy ball in the distance made even fuzzier because of the poor video quality, Tulong deployed the pulse modules, they looked like a string of pearls on the wide angle camera. Tulong is operating on its own changed the camera zoom and panned over to watch as the pulse modules arched over towards the comet. The camera filters flicked on turning the screen black as the first pulse module detonated the next frame showed a huge dent in the comet’s coma. Then the second pulse module detonated showing a still fuzzy freeze frame image of the surface of the comet glaring brightly in the light of the nuclear blast.

The room gasped, the surface of the comet appeared to be smooth, and one could barely make outlines or structures the third pulse module detonated, and the screen went black, the room went quiet for what seemed like an eternity.

The Projec
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mission commander immediately asked for a status report and as practiced each component system supervisor in priority order began to report. The reports all came back the same, the transmission was terminated, no data was coming from Tulong, and they were attempting to re-establish contact.

What happened next, no one expected, the members of the Projec
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team that witnessed the miraculous events on the big screen were sent to conference rooms. Guards were posted and they were told to wait silently until questioned by investigators. Meanwhile, the CNSA leadership had to decide what to do.

The team members that didn’t witness the “sight” were sent home with instructions not to speak about the events that day to anyone. The project changed completely; itwas no longer called Projec
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it became Special Projec
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. All the members of the original Projec
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were assigned to other projects with orders not to speak to anyone about anything related to the project, not even other team members. Only a few of the original Projec
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members, after being “cleared,” were allowed to participate in the after incident investigation, to try to reestablish communication with Tulong and to figure out what happened.

Slowly and deliberately everything checked out, Tulong deployed the pulse modules flawlessly and was observing from a safe distance.  The first three pulse modules performed correctly, the triple redundant data checked out; radio telescope records were analyzed, and the investigators were able to confirm the detonation of the first three pulse modules but no more.

The investigation also focused on the video, on that image frozen in the flash of the second pulse module blast that showed the surface of the comet. Then the investigation appeared to come to a complete halt.

The Projec
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team with the image of the comet surface burned into their memories in the nuclear fire of the second pulse module feared the worst. Their fears soared when the SOHO, (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) and the STEREO (Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory) spacecraft blinked off line and presumably out of existence.

Weeks later and without warning, a cascade of failures of earth’s satellites occurred. For the first tens of minutes, it was thought to be a massive solar event. But as it was being confirmed that there was no coronal mass ejection in our direction, communication, and all things electronic started to fail. Across the entire planet, power grids failed.

Attempting to work around the communication failures, governments began to declare states of emergency, placing their militaries on alert and activated guard and reserve units. Then centers of government, military installations, bases and command-and-control centers along with the cities and municipalities in their vicinity, disappeared, vaporized in gigantic mushroom clouds. The surrounding areas stretching tens of kilometers reduced to smoldering gravel, further away, blast effects, shockwaves, and thermal radiation, started fires, that turned into firestorms. Nobody seemed to know what to do and even if someone did know there was no way to communicate it. 

The loss of life and property is mind-boggling, rescue efforts, by the few rescue units that survived, were futile, but it didn’t stop them. The rescuers closed their minds to the millions needing rescue and helped anyone and anywhere they could.

There were rumors of massive earthquakes on the U.S. west coast and that the Yellow Stone super volcano was erupting. Many people began to believe the world was coming to an end.