The Great Destroyer

by Jack Thorlin

  A pause. “Good luck, Joseph.” George did not understand the logic of the phrase, but he knew from his readings that it was what humans said in such situations.

  Chapter 36: Takagawa

  “I think they’re far enough away that George and Art ought to be fine,” Peskov said, eyes glued intently to a laptop computer. “Not going to be pleasant for the Igazis though.”

  Takagawa said nothing. Her eyes went skyward, looking for the trail overhead. Director Korzov of the Space Administration had not told her what to expect. He hadn’t said much of anything really. “You might be interested to know that two Ushah shuttles just attached rockets to asteroid ZZ 749 and appear to be nudging it out of orbit. Estimated impact is right at Colony 4. Minimum safe distance one hundred kilometers. Thought you should know.”

  The phone had clicked off abruptly, before Takagawa could ask any questions about the cryptic warning. She had known exactly what Korzov expected her to do with the information, but she hadn’t been sure there’d been enough time to warn the Charlies and get them far enough away.

  Her own safety was not guaranteed, she knew, and the asteroid wasn’t the only danger. Once she, Yazov, Jackson, and Peskov had agreed that the Charlies were in the right, they had quickly decided to find a way to help their creation. It was only a matter of time before the Terran Alliance shut down Project Charlie and seized whatever technology they could to help destroy the Charlies in the field.

  The solution was simple: Project Charlie had gone mobile. The only two truly irreplaceable parts of the program were the talent she had assembled and the programming archives that contained the secrets to Ushah computing, the Charlies’ system architecture, and the like. It amounted to about a hundred computer hard drives and ninety-five people, all of which fit on a single medium-sized airplane.

  She had asked for volunteers, and no one had held back. Project Charlie was more than a livelihood for the people involved. What had begun like a weapons system program from the 20th century had turned into something quite different. They were building something with a soul.

  Many programmers left amorfriends, wives, husbands, boyfriends, girlfriends, and old friends. They chose to embark on an adventure freighted with danger and uncertainty.

  They had flown to Pretoria in what had once been South Africa, the closest accessible airport to the battlefield. With only minimal questioning from the local Safety Ministry officials, they had rented out a warehouse and begun setting up their equipment. Of course, had they known about the asteroid when Takagawa cooked up the plan, they would have chosen somewhere farther away. Now they were only about 200 kilometers from the impact point of the asteroid.

  Though news of the upcoming impact had not leaked to the public, the upper echelons of the Terran Alliance would be preparing for it. The impact and its aftermath would keep them occupied for at least a day or two to come, distracting them from the question of what Project Charlie was up to and why no one was answering the phones in Houston.

  Besides, Takagawa had read a few scientific articles on asteroid impacts over the past several hours. It was hard to imagine a bigger distraction than what was to come.

  “There!” Yazov shouted, pointing to the sky. A fiery streak had appeared moving left to right in the early afternoon sunlight.

  As the asteroid passed 54,000 feet moving at ten miles per second, friction between the rock and ice of the asteroid and the gas molecules of the upper atmosphere was tearing at the object hurtling down from space. Some fragments broke off, and the larger pieces exploded on their own, but the great mass raced on toward the continent that had given birth to humanity.

  Emma briefly wondered what the Ushah at Colony 4 were going through in these final moments. Were they calm and stoic about their coming death? Frantic? Trying to escape against all odds? They aren’t so dissimilar from us, she decided. Some will be brave, some will not. Few deserve the fate coming to them.

  At 3:02 PM local time, the asteroid disappeared over the horizon.

  Though many of the events happened far too quickly for Takagawa to see, she had read enough about asteroid impacts over the past two hours to understand what happened next.

  About 700 million tons of asteroid (fairly dense rock and iron, according to the Space Administration data on near-Earth object ZZ 749) plowed through the atmosphere, briefly creating a vacuum above the impact site. Then, the space rock smashed directly into Colony 4.

  Part of Takagawa’s mind was impressed at the feat of precision targeting, the irregularly shaped asteroid tumbling through the atmosphere exactly as modeled by Ushah engineers.

  Ten thousand Ushah died in the blink of an eye. The tragedy seemed distant, however, as Emma focused on the numbers and science of the event rather than the effect on the sapient beings of Colony 4.

  The asteroid vaporized over one hundred million cubic meters of Earth rock, digging a crater about a mile deep and six miles wide. A tremendous amount of rock was tossed up into the air. Some fragments would escape the Earth entirely, but most stayed in the atmosphere, creating a veil of dust that would later affect global temperatures.

  While that would be a problem, Takagawa knew, there were much more immediate concerns.

  First, there was a fireball. The kinetic energy of the asteroid—about 8,300 megatons of energy, or about 500,000 Hiroshima bombs—superheated the gases of the atmosphere around the impact point until the air ignited and flew outwards. A flash visible to Takagawa announced the beginning of the conflagration, and within a quarter of a second, the visible part of the fireball was seven miles wide.

  A hundred kilometers away from the impact, George and Art registered enough heat to cause second-degree burns on uncovered skin. Takagawa hoped they had warned the Igazis.

  The fireball and its effects lasted for over a minute, and about halfway through, the Earth began shaking. A 7.2 Richter scale earthquake rumbled through the area, not enough to kill, but enough to cause many to get up out of shock and suffer the burns of the fireball.

  The fireball and earthquake had subsided about a minute earlier when the next horror hit George and Art: a shockwave whipping air outwards in all directions. A hundred kilometers from the impact, the shockwave generated hundred-mile per hour winds and an overpressure sufficient to shatter glass windows.

  The shockwave was the reason Takagawa had said the Charlies needed to be a hundred kilometers away from the impact. The Charlies could withstand more heat than a human being, a consequence of their being designed to work in the extreme temperatures of space. But if they had been, say, thirty kilometers away from the impact, the shockwave would be throwing around fragments of asteroid and rock as big as a dishwasher at a speed north of 500 miles per hour.

  Even the more reasonable wind speeds at George and Art’s position were marginally survivable. About a third of the trees in the area and most of the wildlife did not survive the combination of the fireball and wind. Staying behind the hill spared the Igazis the worst of this punishment.

  Five minutes after the shockwave hit George, Art, and the Igazis, it slammed into Pretoria. Over 125 miles from the impact site, the blast of air was still enough to break half of the windows in the city, as well as a smattering of chimneys. Some poorly designed and constructed buildings, most made of wood, toppled, killing their occupants. Luckily, the warehouse occupied by Project Charlie had barely any windows, and its stout concrete construction was barely swayed.

  Finally, after the fireball, shockwave, and larger debris had all tried to kill the Charlies, the lighter dust from the impact began to rain down like thick snowflakes.

  And just like that, the immediate danger was over. Not a single tree stood within thirty miles of what had once been Colony 4. No animals larger than an insect survived out to fifty miles from the impact site. But about sixty-two miles southwest of the crater, George triggered his radio and called to his creator.

  “Dr. Takagawa,” he said simply, “we are still here.”

  The o
ther Charlies reported in over the next several minutes. They had all made it through the event unscathed, their hard composite carbon cases insulating them from the worst of the heat and the high winds.

  “That was a damn close call,” Jackson said.

  “Oh, there’s more to come,” Takagawa said. “One obvious development is the temperature. It’s early spring in South Africa; the temperature is supposed to hover around the 70s or 80s Fahrenheit during the daytime. The dust in the atmosphere is already changing that.”

  Everyone present realized the chill in the air, and Takagawa explained. “Temperatures are down about five degrees Fahrenheit and still plummeting. Some of the articles I read on the way to Pretoria suggest that global temperatures will be down by a degree Celsius, perhaps 3-4 degrees Fahrenheit, for as long as a decade. But the decade of cold will be followed by a much longer period—centuries, maybe—of increased temperatures.”

  “Why?” Yazov asked.

  “Greenhouse effect. Millions of tons of plant life have already been killed by the impact. The current temperature decrease and the lack of sunlight reaching plants will lead to further massive plant and animal deaths. The other big contributor to plant and animal deaths—well, you can hear it outside now.”

  They listened, hearing the patter of rain. “The asteroid kicked up sulphur deposits under the impact site, and that sulphur is now forming nucleation sites for acid rain clouds. The rain coming down now has a very high acidity—not far off from battery acid.”

  “Will it eat through the roof?” Peskov asked nervously.

  She shook her head. “No, people indoors will be fine, but even more plants and animals will die from the rain all over the world, less acidic the farther it gets from South Africa, but still more than many plants can handle. The plant and animal deaths will lead to an increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which will lead to a greenhouse effect. The asteroid was small enough that the effect won’t be catastrophic—maybe 2-3 degrees Celsius.”

  Jackson interjected, “That’s about what was posed by the climate change a few centuries ago.”

  “That’s right,” Takagawa said, resisting the urge to sound patronizing to her non-scientist husband. “Global ocean levels will rise, but the most important effect will be on Africa itself. I’m guessing that’s the whole point of this exercise from the Ushah perspective.”

  “What do you mean?” Jackson asked.

  “The Ushah are terraforming. Well, not terraforming, but making Earth more like their own planet—hotter. Africa in particular is susceptible to increased temperatures from climate change, and the Ushah would prefer the higher temperatures for their new homeland.”

  Everyone present felt fear at the development. The Ushah were changing the very air they breathed.

  Yazov shook his head dismissively. “We’ll deal with that later. For now, we need to make sure our people are safe.”

  It turned out a few members of Project Charlie had cut themselves on broken glass, but no one was seriously hurt. “We need to get the Charlies here before the Terran Alliance thinks to come after us,” Jackson said.

  Takagawa nodded. She had allowed herself to forget temporarily about the relatively petty threat of the world’s government while the cosmic collision had played itself out. She triggered the radio. “All Charlies, congratulations on surviving the impact. Your run to safety has most likely seriously depleted your battery levels. We have recharging stations available in a warehouse in Pretoria, sector BD 413, -25.719705 latitude, 28.318903 longitude. All Charlies acknowledge.”

  The Charlies must have been communicating rapidly, and Takagawa already knew the topic and outcome. Of course the Charlies had to trust Takagawa—why would she have saved them all from the asteroid just to lead them into a trap?

  George answered four seconds later. “Acknowledged. We will be there in six hours.”

  Jackson caught Takagawa’s eye. “We have to assume that the Terran Alliance is going to see them coming. What if they track the Charlies here and have the Ushah use another asteroid to take us out?”

  She had already considered that possibility. “The impact is going to play hell with the weather, and the flash might have damaged whatever satellites were looking in the general vicinity. Usually, the satellites would use infrared to track a target, but the Charlies don’t give off heat like a human does. Between those two factors, the satellites are going to have a hard time tracking the Charlies for at least a couple days, I’d think. After that point, they’d have to get incredibly lucky and look at the exact right place at the exact right time.”

  * * *

  “Hello, George, hello, Art,” Emma said, struggling to maintain a neutral tone. “We have come to join you.”

  The two Charlies had been through hell, but they did not know fatigue. Immediately upon arriving at the warehouse in Pretoria and putting down the Igazis, they had gone into emergency power save mode. Their batteries were nearly totally drained, and any further expenditure of energy might make starting back up difficult. Takagawa and her team had wheeled them inside and hooked them up to a high-voltage charger.

  After twenty minutes, George and Art had enough of a charge to awaken, though their mobility would be limited for several hours while their batteries reached minimum safe levels. The other Charlies also had low batteries, but they had retained enough charge to walk themselves to the charging stations. There weren’t enough of the high-voltage special chargers so that every Charlie could use one, so about a dozen had to make do with a standard wall outlet, which could take as long as two days to fully charge a Charlie battery.

  Now, Takagawa, Jackson, Peskov, and Yazov were in what had once been the warehouse manager’s office. With the two massive robots standing by the wall, the room felt considerably smaller, and the humans all stood as well.

  “Hello, Dr. Takagawa,” George and Art said at the same time. They might be more individuals now, but the Charlies still shared the same basic programming, and the same instant respect for their creator.

  George continued, “Thank you for coming to help us, and for warning us about the asteroid. I don’t know what our next objective should be, but I look forward to discussing it with you.”

  Jackson replied with a strangely respectful tone, “You and the other Charlies have fought magnificently to this point. But now things are going to get much more complicated. The Terran Alliance and Ushah will find out you survived eventually. Our immediate objective has to be to resist any further attempts by either of them to destroy you.”

  Art answered, “We will not be so easy to destroy. If you can secure sources of ammunition and electricity and provide us with basic maintenance, we can’t be defeated on the battlefield.”

  Art’s conversational style was getting more complicated all the time, Takagawa thought. They hadn’t programmed him to learn human speaking patterns, but he must have decided it was a good use of time for his processor’s higher adaptation functions. But for all that brilliance, he had only a limited capacity to understand the bigger picture.

  “Don’t underestimate our enemies. The Terran Alliance will make every effort to destroy us,” Jackson said. “Against the might of two civilizations, we have only thirty Charlies.”

  “The Ushah can rain down more asteroids,” Yazov pointed out. “We must stay hidden until we are sure there will be no more of their damn boulders coming down.”

  “Or we figure out a defense,” Peskov added.

  George said, “But what is our objective?” making the last word slightly louder than the others as a way to emphasize it.

  A psychologist would probably say the Charlies were obsessive, Takagawa thought. The lack of a clear goal would be irritating to them, offensive at a basic level.

  George continued in what to him must have seemed a supremely logical fashion. “Survival is only important if we have an objective.”

  No one knew quite what to say. Jackson temporized, showing a flash of his professorial past. �
��Our survival is a direct challenge to the Terran Alliance’s policies and a caution to the Ushah.”

  Art’s built-in politeness stopped him from interrupting, but immediately after the professor finished speaking, he said, “Yes, sir, but what is our objective? Stop the Ushah spread? Destroy the Terran Alliance?”

  Art and George must have been coordinating via text message who would say what, Takagawa thought. George was more polite, and Art was more willing to issue a direct challenge. Good Charlie, Bad Charlie. My robots have come a long way from telescope maintenance at Luna.

  Takagawa was somewhat startled when Yazov spoke. “Let’s destroy the Terran Alliance. They’ve beaten our strength out of humanity. Once they’re out of the way, we can stop the aliens.”

  Jackson didn’t agree. “The Ushah are a bigger threat. We still don’t fully understand their capabilities. While we’re dealing with them, we can try to exert some political pressure to replace Redfeather as First Representative. We can coexist with the Terran Alliance if their leadership can act reasonably.”