SODIUM Trilogy Part One

by Stephen Arseneault

  I was thrilled the design was holding together as I peered at the power meters we had rigged to it. A full charge was achieved in less than ten seconds. My immediate thoughts were that we could have a weapon we could fire multiple times in short succession.

  I turned and hustled my way over to Bubba and the others, who were now well off to the side. I gave David a grin and a big thumbs-up to let it fly. At that moment, I was glad I had the forethought to not park us directly behind the weapon.

  As David flipped his RC trigger, the truck lurched violently backward, and the gun itself broke loose from its mooring and shot across the ground behind Mike. At that same instant, the mighty oak blew apart about twenty feet up, sending splinters and wood shards flying.

  The ground shook, and the sound of the exploding tree was deafening. The limbs and foliage on the surrounding trees were stripped bare from the shrapnel. Bits of wood flew everywhere, including the stripped remains of a branch that made its home right in the center of Bubba’s radiator.

  I was in awe of what we had created. The force delivered surpassed my wildest dreams. The towering, three-foot wide, mighty oak was reduced to a ten-foot-high, shredded stump. The surrounding trees were now stripped of their foliage and all but their largest of branches. Mike’s bed had a slight bow to it where it had given way just before our anchoring for the gun failed.

  And the gun was a total loss, having dug a thirty-foot trench in the ground behind Mike before coming to a stop. With my ears still ringing, I stood for nearly a minute just taking in the destruction. We had managed to inject the energy from nearly ten seconds of the high-power line into that little BB. I was actually still slightly in shock when Rachel put her hand on my shoulder and turned my gaze toward our new radiator problem. Bubba was not going far without a radiator.

  We began salvaging what we could of the gun, which was very little. It took us the remainder of the day to get our truck back to the compound, where we could initiate repairs. We wrapped the hose back around, bypassing the radiator. We then drove for five minutes and followed that with parking for twenty-five to allow a cooldown.

  It made progress slow, but we managed to get back before dark. We still would not dare drive with headlights at night for fear of being detected. It was difficult to get to sleep that night while thinking of the day’s accomplishments, but sleep came soon enough within the cool, quiet haven that was our bunker.

  Chapter 17

  * * *

  The following morning, we turned our attention back to our daily survival chores. Once in good shape with those, we had to go out looking for a new radiator for Bubba. The four of us gathered our normal allotment of several days of food and other assorted survival gear, and made our way out in Mike and Suzie.

  It had been several months since I had last started Suzie, and it was somewhat comforting that she started right up as always. We never traveled without the whole group and never without two vehicles.

  There were many things in the new world we did not have control over, but keeping close together was not one of them. After our experience with the looters, we would not break that rule again. Even only going as far as the Kendalls’ or Haywards’ was unnerving enough that we rarely did it without a minimum of two of us. My snake encounter had reinforced that train of thought.

  It took two days of searching before we found a suitable replacement. Since we always traveled with our wish list, we also managed to scrounge several other items while out. Five hundred feet of PVC pipe would take water over to the Kendalls’ garden from our water pump, replacing our leaky hose setup. A toaster oven and a blender would be big hits for preparing our daily meals as well as for making snacks.

  It was strange to think that there would be no replacements as we went further into the future, but we were thankful to have what we did, when we did.

  With our new finds in tow, we returned home and got to work on replacing Bubba’s radiator.

  Once the repair was in place and functioning, David and I turned our extra time toward figuring out how to counter the tremendous kickback of the coil gun. After several weeks of failed ideas, we decided to try firing an identically powerful gun in the opposite direction with the hopes of the two forces canceling each other out.

  This brought on another problem in that, if we aimed one gun up, the other would be aimed down, and there was no way the setup would survive a blast into the ground right below it. The debris flying back out of the inevitable crater that would be formed would certainly cause major damage of its own.

  We decided if we could point the second gun at an angle just above horizontal, we would be able to handle most of the kickback without a problem. We would need to have the section where the two guns adjoined sitting on the ground, since there would still be a tremendous downforce created because of the angle. But it was doable.

  We got to work the following day on gathering the resources to build our two guns.

  The new effort took three months of scavenging supplies and another three months to produce. David also had to rework his computer program to run two guns at once; they both required precise timing for their firing.

  During our months of work, we made several trips back to Daytona to spy on our enemies. The one water ship remained out of commission and under repair. The status of the other ships remained the same except for one very interesting discovery.

  On one of our trips, we saw the functioning water ship move over land, and more specifically, over the power substation we had found in Daytona. From a good distance, we watched as it hovered over the substation, it had several large cables dangling down and connected to the electrical supply.

  Were the ships drawing power from our grid? Were they recharging? There was no way for us to know from the outside what was really going on, but it did give us a leg up on where the water ship might be at a given time, if it was repeating that process.

  That giant fact of knowing where they would be was not lost on us as we were finishing work on our second version of the large coil gun. Eight months after the firing of our first full-scale gun, we had a new model ready to try. After our last experiment, we decided to not risk Mike and instead built the new gun mounted on one of our trailers.

  We had welded the axle to a lever arm that would allow us to lower the trailer base to the ground when we were in firing position. As we rolled back up to the power substation, we were awed all over again by the destruction we had caused with our previous test.

  This time around, we selected a tree that was almost twice the distance as the first. The secondary gun had a clear shot behind us of several hundred yards; wherever that reverse BB ended up would not be an issue.

  After several hours of setup, we were ready to test the new rig. Mike and Bubba were parked a good distance away and behind a berm, where they would be protected. With a push of my fuse pole, the power-meter needles moved to the right as the transformers gave out a hum.

  We had added about 20 percent to the size of our original gun, and the combination of the two guns took nearly thirty seconds to fully charge. I ran back to David and the girls feeling all jacked up. Even though Rachel and Janie had not participated in the design and manufacture of the weapon, it was every bit as much their accomplishment as it was ours, and they showed equal excitement.

  There is something very powerful about having the ability to defend oneself. For several years, we would have been at the complete mercy of the invaders had they chosen to seek us out. We hoped we might finally be able change that. We looked at each other with anticipatory grins as David readied the trigger.

  Three… two… one…

  Seemingly simultaneously, the target tree in front and an equally unfortunate tree a quarter mile away behind us, exploded. This time we all had our ears covered, which was good because the concussions rocked us first one way and then the other.

  The five-foot-diameter oak in front was now a stump just a few feet off the ground. It looked a lot like one of those onions that
had been chopped, breaded, and deep fried in oil as it spread out from the ground. The next tree behind that oak met with a similar fate, as well as part of the one after.

  The results were far above what I had ever dreamed of accomplishing when I had first contemplated a coil gun. Janie then grabbed my shoulder and turned me toward the back oak. Not only had it exploded, but it had cleared a wide path of devastation deep into the trees behind it. And the stump was on fire like a giant torch.

  David and I rushed over to the trailer to inspect the guns. Our initial inspection could only find a few minor broken welds and a now slightly warped trailer body that had sunk about four inches into the ground, things that could easily be fixed and reinforced. Rachel drove Bubba over, got out, and began talking about the torch tree.

  The fire was starting to belch out a lot of smoke, and the smoke would be a sure sign of activity from the air for miles around. At that thought, we scrambled to get the gun unhooked from the power and to get the trailer back on its axle. Ten frantic minutes passed before we were headed back toward camp, the drivers trying to make their best time to get out of there while the passengers’ attention was turned toward the skies.

  Only when the vehicles had been safely parked and stowed, and we were in the security of the bunker, did we finally let out yells in celebration. We now had a weapon we felt we could do substantial damage with. Mankind would rise from the rubble, or at a minimum, exact some toll from the invaders before perishing.

  Three days later, we returned to the substation site to conduct more testing. The gun now had several new modifications, and we desperately wanted to try it at full power. We made our way from the substation out to the high-power lines, where we had a clear distance of close to a mile in front of us.

  With the gun in place and powered up fully, we let loose the iron BB round. The impact was nearly a half mile away. The projectile had flown in the form of a fireball. The impact wasn’t as impressive looking as our prior test, but we chalked that up to possibly being the distance we were viewing the impact from.

  After a two-minute drive in Bubba, David and I were at the impact site. We had a direct hit right at the base of a palm tree. The tree had not splintered like the oaks, but had instead been sheared off.

  Beyond the palm there was other visible damage, but it was nothing compared to our previous tests. I was baffled at how there appeared to be so much less carnage. As I inspected the site further, it hit me like a bucket of cold water.

  The BB had been given so much energy that it had turned into plasma and had essentially been burning up before it reached the palm, losing much of its energy over the half-mile distance as it traveled as a fireball.

  We needed a projectile that could withstand the heat.

  For some reason, a memory from back in college, when Pete and I had taken the metallurgy course, had stuck with me over the years and returned to mind at that moment. One day, he had droned on and on about tungsten.

  At the time, I had laughed uncontrollably at how much of a nerd he was, and he had ranted on and on about the melting point of tungsten. It seemed my good friend Pete had one last gift for us.

  We had tungsten back at the compound; we had scavenged numerous tungsten rods along with other materials for our various welding needs.

  The following week, we returned to the power lines, and the results were similar to our initial trials. The first strike was over half a mile away, and the devastation was tremendous.

  We now had our weapon, we had ammo, and we had jacked-up attitudes. All we needed was a real target. We returned to the compound with our heads high and egos swelled.

  The Haywards’ orange grove had several lime trees, and I just happened to have some tequila stashed away. As the elder of our little family, I decided a celebration was in order and margaritas would be made. The girls and David prepared a small feast while I made the ’ritas.

  Since they were still underage, I substituted sugar water for the tequila, and the girls were none the wiser. I wouldn’t let them near the alcohol on their own, and they showed no desire to try it, so I thought it was a worthy substitution.

  Even though I had let David have vodka for his eighteenth birthday, he didn’t seem to know the difference. We all had a great time faking our drunkenness, which made our little celebration all the more fun. We stayed up late and slept in. The following morning I had to chuckle at the girls and their supposed hangovers.

  After the celebration, we took another three months to put the new gun and trailer back in top shape. During that time, we made repeated visits to the Daytona area and discovered that the water ship recharged for almost a full day about once a month.

  That’s when Rachel came up with the idea of building a number of permanent guns at the substation that would be aimed straight up. We could then blast the water ship when it came for a recharge. After all, we had plenty of power available and could allow any number of guns to sit fully charged while we waited on our targets. Once again, these young kids had blown me away with their fantastic ideas.

  During our observations of the craft, we noticed five large circular sections equally spaced around the bottom of the water ship. It was pure speculation, but we believed they were the mechanism for the ship’s propulsion, and as such, they would be primary target centers for our weapons. If we could somehow bring this mighty ship down, it would perhaps tempt the invaders into leaving our planet.

  For close to three years, they had been harvesting our natural resources—resources we probably would have shared. But after taking the lives of millions if not billions, sharing was no longer an option.

  As we planned and schemed, I began keeping logbooks of all we were doing. I hoped future generations could one day use the knowledge, if we were to perish. At the time, I could only hope there would one day be such people.

  Chapter 18

  * * *

  The girls took over virtually all the daily chores, which allowed David and I to put full time into our arsenal. Over the next six months, we worked long into the night building five large vertical coil guns. Since each one would be placed at a different location, we also had to somehow scavenge five computers as controllers.

  We happened on a collapsed retail store and managed to salvage twelve gaming consoles from the rubble. The cardboard boxes they were housed in were damaged, but the plastic wrapping within had remained well sealed.

  From further scavenging at the same site, we also came home with a half-dozen games. They would be a good distraction for relaxation, but I would have to keep an eye on my young family to make certain they did not become addicted to play. We had much too much work to get done, so I was eager to avoid any large distractions if possible.

  As it turned out, David had hacked that exact version of the game machine just before the invasion and had managed to take control of much of the hardware on board. He felt confident he could adapt those boxes to be controllers for our guns.

  After seeing what this kid was capable of on a computer, I could only imagine he would have either been very successful in the programming business or he would have gotten locked up for hacking into someone’s network. Even the second scenario would have probably landed him some cushy computer-security job with the government. Either way, I was happy to have him on our team.

  An excursion back to a previous hobby shop site yielded the goods needed for our remote radio controllers. We needed the RC so we could fire the weapons all at the same time, and from a distance. If we got lucky enough to bring down a ship, we didn’t want it falling on our heads.

  After much planning, we decided to move each of the completed vertically aimed weapons into place all at once. We needed to not only disguise them so they fit in with the surroundings, but to also run the necessary high-power lines to them for charging. The high-power lines would need to be disguised as well. The last thing we needed was to arouse suspicion, which would not only blow our entire plan, but also alert the aliens to our presence.

/>   It took us another six months of building and planning before we were ready to prep the Daytona substation site. We camped out for three days before the great ship was next due to visit the substation. A day later, it moved back out to sea and we moved in. During our previous recon mission, we had mapped out where we thought the propulsion discs might be. It took two weeks for us to carefully move the first three guns into place and camouflage them. The final two were in place the following week.

  The ship was not on an exact monthly schedule, so we had to be extremely careful going into week four. We used the four-wheelers to drag our cables around, as each was nearly two hundred yards long. We had to rely on many splices in order to string the cables out that far, but we had no choice with the target being almost half a mile in diameter.

  We had our first cable in place and sufficiently hidden when our friend decided to pay the substation another visit. David was caught flat footed at one of the guns connecting cables when it started toward the beach.

  Fortunately, we had planned for just such an event. David had a small stash of food with him and several camo covers for himself and his four-wheeler. A large part of the cable he had just finished dragging lay in plain view, so we hoped desperately that, having been here for several years with no incidents, the aliens would keep their security level at a minimum.

  As part of our camo, we had placed several large potted plants around each gun with hopes it would make them blend in better. We chose potted plants because we did not want to take the time to actually plant them, and with a little watering we could keep them healthy for months.

  In the time since the invasion, there had been a great deal of overgrowth covering almost every spot of barren ground. Even the rubble now had a nice covering, so our guns blended in well. Nature was slowly reclaiming its territory.