“Second, you could break Copenhagen off from the rest of Denmark, and all Scandinavia from the continent, by bringing down two bridges over the Denmark Strait, north and south of Copenhagen. That would throw all road traffic back onto ferries, and the number of ferries available for that high level of traffic is lower than it was before the bridges, when traffic was much less.
“You could also separate England from Europe with a hit on either end of the Channel Tunnel. If it were in the water at either end, the tunnel would fill with water and be hugely expensive to repair. Same thing for the Japan-Korea rail tunnel, the Bering Strait rail tunnel, and the Denmark-Sweden rail tunnels.
“Let’s see. You could also go after water and electricity. If you broke Hoover Dam, the resulting rush of water would probably also take out a couple of other dams downstream. It would disrupt fresh water and electricity supplies in a large area, all of which have to be made up from other sources. Same thing with the Grand Coulee Dam. Kentucky Dam. There’s a couple big ones on the Tennessee River, I think. That sort of thing. You’d have to look to see what’s downstream, how many people would be killed in the flooding.
“You could disrupt the water supply for southern California with a few well-placed hits on reservoirs there, too. And, of course, there’s Three Gorges Dam in China, but I don’t think you could break that with anything short of full-up nuclear weapons, and the flooding would kill tens of millions.”
“That’s a very interesting list, Professor. What else?” Sigurdsen asked.
“Well, there are locks on the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Seaway. If those were broken, all the commerce on those lakes would come to a halt for years. The locks of the Panama Canal. You might also be able to block the Suez Canal by nudging a bunch of dirt over to block the narrow channel. I’m not sure if you could block the Dardanelles or the Gibraltar Straits or not, but those would be hugely disruptive.”
“Keep going. Anything else, Professor?”
“Well,” Ansen said, “There are very few road and rail connections through mountain ranges. The Alps, for example. The Pyrenees. The Rockies. Hits on tunnel portals of some of the big tunnels would disrupt a lot of traffic and be hard to clear.
“Oh, and oil pipelines. The ones that are very far north, such as in Alaska and Siberia, have to keep flowing to keep them from clogging up. Once the oil gets cold enough, it is impossible to pump and you have a thousand-mile-long yard decoration. It’s impossible to repair, and hugely expensive to replace.
“Other oil pipelines, like the ones from Russia into Europe, and the ones from central North America to the coasts, would be disruptive but easily fixed. There’s no problem of those congealing like the northerly ones.
“Water pipelines as well, I suppose, for fresh water to cities, but those are easy to repair. The better way there is to go after the dam that creates the reservoir. We already talked about those.”
“What about space assets?” Sigurdsen asked.
“I don’t know enough about Earth’s space assets. Give me some examples.”
“Asteroid mining from Ceres. There’s a camp on Ceres, much like we have one on Misty.”
“You would kill all the miners, and space infrastructure of that sort is normally built on the planet in pieces and assembled on site, so it’s easy to replace. Bad target,” Ansen said.
“The base on the Moon?”
“Again, I think you kill everyone in it, when you pop it open to vacuum, but it’s relatively easy to reseal and repump full of air, so too many dead and not enough disruption. Bad target.”
“The Quito Elevator?” Sigurdsen asked.
Ansen looked at the ceiling, taking a drag on his cigar.
“That one’s different. Vastly expensive to replace, but it allows taking a lot of tonnage to orbit cheaply. Arguably of use in a war. It takes a long time to build the tether, because it has to be spun and layered and bonded in place, and because it’s so large. Limited number of people killed.
“Um, that last assumes you break the tether toward the bottom, so the tether and the station continue on into space, rather than you break it toward the top and the whole mass of the tether comes crashing down onto the planet. Thirty thousand miles of anything weighs a lot.”
“Infrastructure in orbit?”
“Depends on what it is,” Ansen said. “A space station full of people? No. A big facility for spacedocking and building ships, including military ships? Sure. The latter is a valid military target, and has relatively few people on it compared to a space habitat.”
“All right. I see the pattern. Most interesting, Professor.”
“I think there’s one thing you’re missing in this discussion,” Kusunoki said.
“What would that be, my dear?”
“We want to be friends with these people afterwards, right?”
“Yes, at least friendly enough to resume trade,” Sigurdsen said.
“But the things you are talking about breaking are likely to make the powers that be very angry, and cost them a lot of money and a long time to fix.”
“Costing them money is the general idea,” Ansen said.
“Yes, but you can do that by breaking things that are easy to fix once the peace treaty is signed. For example, instead of breaking Hoover Dam, you could take out the power lines and water pipes that come from it, achieve the same disruption, but they could be easily fixed once the treaty is signed. That’s a further incentive to sign.”
“Huh,” Ansen said. He took a drag from his cigar and looked up at the ceiling for a moment, then turned back to her. “I think you’re right, my dear, but why did you wait so long to bring this up? We generated an entire list of things that would take a long time to repair, to no end.”
“No, the list of things you could break, and which would take a long time and a lot of money to repair, is very useful. Send it to them once you have proved you can bomb them with impunity.”
“Oh, ho! Break the things that are disruptive but cheap to fix, and then tell them that if they don’t sign, we’ll start breaking real infrastructure.”
“Yes. I think there’s a way to disrupt just about everything you mentioned, but without breaking the big piece. You could halt the Channel Tunnel, for example, by bombing the electric substation that feeds the trains. You could disrupt bridge traffic by bombing holes in the pavement of the approaches. That sort of thing. But then give them your second-stage target list. Tell them you will make that disruption a longer-term and much more expensive problem.”
“That’s excellent tactics, Professor. I like it.” Sigurdsen thought a moment, then nodded and turned from her to Ansen. “Well, I think with that, I have exhausted my topic, Professor. And I thank you for an entertaining discussion.”
“Yes, our discussions are always very enjoyable, Admiral.”
“And what about a follow-up to our last discussion, Professor? The one you called,” Sigurdsen said.
“About founding documents and academic prizes and the like? We’re a few months from being prepared for that discussion, Admiral, but it is surely one we will need to have.”
“Excellent, Professor. I look forward to it.”
After Sigurdsen left, Ansen and Kusunoki were sitting in the living room.
“Did you hear what he said about the ships?” Kusunoki asked.
“Yes, but that was all part of our hypothetical discussion,” Ansen said.
“I don’t think so. Admiral Sigurdsen is always precise. There was no hypothetical, no maybe in what he said specifically about the ships. He said, ‘The warships exist, and they have the capabilities we discussed previously.’ That’s pretty definite.”
“Well, if that’s correct, I feel a lot better about our chances. The big concern is how many people will die before we can prove to Earth’s plutocrats it’s a lost cause.”
“We’ll see,” Kusunoki said. “You and I need to keep thinking about how to convince them. I had one thought in that direction. What if, in addit
ion to the treaty, we offer a free trade deal?”
“What? You mean try to make peace and make friends at the same time?”
“Sort of. What the plutocrats really want is trade with the colonies. They don’t care about actual sovereignty over us as long as they can profit. Of course, they want to do it on mercantilist terms, and we won’t accept that, but offering a trade deal, promising not to become a closed trading consortium that locks out Earth commerce, in either direction, might be enough of a sweetener to clinch a deal.”
“But we would do that anyway,” Ansen said.
“Of course, but they don’t know that. Put it in the deal.”
“It’s a concession that doesn’t cost us anything.”
“That’s the very best kind,” Kusunoki said.
“Happy anniversary. Twelve years,” Orlov said.
“Yes, and still another year until Ansen’s conference even starts,” Westlake said.
“Your conference, you mean. The Westlake Conference.”
“Whatever. It’s Ansen’s ball and he’s running with it. The problem is I can’t see the game clock, so I have no idea when the whistle’s going to blow.”
“Well, we haven’t seen any concerns expressed by Earth yet. At least I haven’t,” Orlov said, and raised an eyebrow at Westlake.
“No, me neither. I just have this feeling like I’m being watched, and I don’t know where it’s coming from. Besides, they’re all taken up by their own internal politics, among the families. The colonies just aren’t that important to them.”
“Understood. Of course, if things kick off early, we’re already in pretty good position.”
“How many of the ships are complete now?” Westlake asked.
“Ten. Two more are being assembled. And that’s just in Jablonka. There are another thirty-four in the other eleven systems in which I have a charter. Four in some and two in others. And my competitors are doing the same thing in other systems. We’ll have a total of almost seventy ships within another six months.”
“That’s remarkable.”
“It’s still only about two per planet, and it’s not that hard to do,” Orlov said. “Oh, it’s expensive, but that’s manageable. What’s hard to do is cover for the fact they never show up back on Earth. These are supposed to be freighters for the Earth run.”
“How are you managing?”
“Various excuses. We ordered a bunch of spare reaction mass pumps and injectors on the grounds there was an unacceptable level of failures in their space trials. And of course those had to be installed and adjusted on every ship. All very complex stuff. All complete bullshit, too, but it bought us time.”
“There’s another two years to go, though,” Westlake said.
“Oh, we bought some other freighters of the same type that we haven’t converted. We’re running them as hard as we can, and rotating transponder codes every time they go to Earth, so it looks like all the ships are cycling through.”
“There’s no problems with names painted on the ships and such?”
“We named them, but never painted the names on them so we could play a shell game with them.”
“One thing I don’t understand. Can’t you still use the converted freighters as freighters? I mean, if you cover up or disguise the weapons systems for now, can’t you still carry all the freight containers?”
“There’s an idea. I like it. It would also get the crews experienced with spacing to Earth and back. I’ll look into it.”
“What about manpower?”
“We’re good there, too,” Orlov said. “We hire new people, then use them for backfill as we crew the ships from more experienced hands. It’s only money.”
Orlov shrugged.
“What do you think their first move will be?” Westlake asked.
“The one that makes the most sense is to send the navy here. Jablonka is the richest, most productive of the colonies. It’s the biggest chip on the table. Take it and the rest fall.”
“They may not, though.”
“In which case,” Orlov said, “if it’s a planet that’s not a hard nut for them to crack, the planet surrenders. Sooner or later they’ll trip a trap somewhere. And then we’ll take out their ability to threaten our planets.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“No doubt. Jarl Sigurdsen went up to Misty for the weapons tests on the first of the ships. He said it was unbelievable. That’s not to say Earth can’t respond in kind, but it will take time, and in the meantime, we can force a treaty by costing them money.”
“How are we doing on target selection?” Westlake asked.
“Ansen was a big help with that. With his and Kusunoki’s input, we’ve been working on target selection. We can cost them money, all right. Lots of money.”
“Enough to force a treaty?”
“Oh, yeah. By the way, in that regard, do you want to exempt your family’s holdings?” Orlov asked.
“No, I don’t think that would be fair. Let’s pick the targets with an eye to what’s best for us, what’s most likely to force a treaty, and without adding any other constraints.”
“Fair enough. And relax, will you? You’re starting to make me nervous.”
Flying Nukes
“You want what?” Ken Prescott asked.
“Flying nukes,” Sigurdsen said.
“I don’t even know what that is.”
“Nukes we can drop, have them brake into the atmosphere, and then we can steer them to target as they fall to the planet.”
“I thought most things you could break with a ballistic drop,” Prescott said. “You know, you drop a container of fernico on it – nine thousand cubic feet of fernico is about twenty-two hundred tons, with a terminal velocity over twenty-five hundred miles per hour – that’s like a three-hundred-ton nuke. That’s gonna break damn near anything.”
“Hoover Dam.”
“Forget I said anything.”
“We’ve been looking into it,” Sigurdsen said, “and there’s actually been a fair amount of work done on what it takes to break a dam. The critical issue is to explode a demolition behind the dam, and up against what you might call the wet side. As water is incompressible, pretty much the entire shock of the explosion is delivered against the dam. In contrast, when striking a dam on the front side, the dry side, the water behind it serves as a reinforcement. So delivering a suitable explosion against the back side of the dam, and at sufficient depth, is the controlling issue.
“Which is why my request for flying nukes. We want to drop a small twenty-ton nuke against the back side of several dams, and break them.”
“Twenty-ton nukes? Not bigger ones?”
“No. We have plenty of the small mining demolitions. Anything like a warhead – kiloton or megaton or anything like that – we would have to design and build. But we bought a lot of the mining demolitions.”
“What if the explosion is insufficient? Twenty-ton nuke isn’t much.”
“Then we’ll hit it again, and again, until we pop it. The nice thing about using water as a tamper is it flows back into the hole after every shot.”
“All right,” Prescott said. “We’ll get right on it. I take it what you want is more of something where you tell it where to go and it goes there, not something where you actually have joystick control.”
“Yes, we don’t need or want the flight control loop going through a remote pilot, but we need to be able to specify the target and modify it as it goes if necessary.”
“OK. So a self-steering directed aerial munition. Assuming we come up with something, how are we going to test it?”
“We’ll try it out on Jablonka. Dummy warhead, and we’ll steer it down someplace empty, like the middle of the Voda Ocean. We can always say we’re trying to develop a new reentry system for shuttles or escape pods or something.”
Ken Prescott, who was the head of the Orlov Group’s research division, was meeting with some of his staff on the flying nukes problem.
> “We looked into this, and it turns out the technology is centuries old. It just hasn’t been used much in the last couple hundred years,” Dave Leigh said.
“Really,” Prescott said.
“Oh, yes. It was common in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Aerial gravity bombs segued into directed gravity bombs. Eventually everything moved on to cruise missiles. By the time hyperspace was discovered and space colonization began, the directed gravity bomb technology was out of use and never came back,” Kirsi Niskala said.
“So are we wrong to use it? Should we be doing something else?” Prescott asked.
“No, I think it’s a good fit for us. It’s cheap, quick to develop, and effective if you have control of the space. That’s why it fell out of favor. You need control of the air space for it to work, whereas with cruise missiles you don’t,” Leigh said.
“All right. Good. So how does it work?”
Leigh and Niskala both looked to Dustin Martin, who had done the detail work on the proposal.
“Assuming you’re in low orbit within some cone of space over your target, you drop the munition – which from orbit means you eject it backwards so it no longer has orbital velocity – and it starts to fall. It has all its steering flaps open, so it’s in a high-drag configuration. When it hits the thin upper atmosphere, it deploys a small parachute for a while, then a larger one. Once it’s safely down into the atmosphere, it sheds the chute and uses the steering flaps to direct itself to the selected target,” Martin said.
“It’s still going to heat up on reentry,” Prescott said.
“Yes, but not enough to affect the munition,” Niskala said.
“How precise do we think we can be in placement?” Prescott asked her.
“We’re not completely sure, but we think we can drop it on target plus or minus a foot or two,” Niskala said.
“Really. And how long will it take to have a prototype?”
“Oh, we weren’t supposed to go ahead on that yet?” Leigh asked with a smile. “The shop is building up half a dozen test units now. This isn’t a final design, mind you, but a test device to gain data from.”
A Charter for the Commonwealth Page 7
