by John Ringo
“I want Dr. Weaver to have whatever he needs to get this experiment running,” the President said to the secretary of defense.
“I’ll see that he gets it,” the secretary replied. “You’re saying that these things are the equivalent of nuclear weapons?”
“Yes, Mr. Secretary,” Bill said, frowning. “More like nuclear explosive material. That’s why I’ve been pretty careful about spreading the theory around. If the theory is right, making unlinked quarks and then capturing them is going to be relative child’s play. Any decent physicist with access to a boson could make them.”
“Giving every two-bit country on Earth nuclear weapons.” The National Security Advisor winced.
“Close one Pandora’s Box and we open another,” the President said.
“That’s science for you, Mr. President.”
* * *
“Remember Ray Chen,” Bill said as his hand hovered over the initiator.
The base camp had been set up ten miles from the inactive boson. A bunker, constructed of concrete filled sandbags and steel beams, had been built a mere five miles away. Comfortably cooled by an air-conditioning unit, similarly protected, it had independent power and materials to dig out if it were covered by an explosion. It was there that the team had assembled to study the anticipated quark formation.
In the end the muon field plan had been a bust. A brief, and mildly traumatic, experiment had proven that they’d be unable to hold the field closed well enough to capture sufficient quarks. Bill was almost sure that tinkering would fix the problem, but they didn’t have time to play around with the idea so they’d set up the white dwarf bottle instead.
The problem, of course, would be moving it; they were going to be using several megawatts of power just to create the field and about a half megawatt per hour, if they could spin the electrons in a toroid, to maintain it. The Army was trying to find a portable half-megawatt per hour generator, thus far with little success.
Mark was there, having assembled another whatchamacallit device on less than a week’s notice. Bill Earp from FEMA, who pointed out that for once the agency might as well get there before the disaster. Sergeants Garcia and Crichton who had been useful military liaisons. Robin had been writing code, with Garcia’s fumble fingered help, eighteen hours a day for the last four. The only person missing was Command Master Chief Miller, who Bill, after a certain amount of argument, had sent off on a different project. But everything was finally in place and it was time to find out if it worked.
“Let’s see what happens,” Bill Earp said, inserting earplugs. “Everyone got their plugs in? Safety first.”
Bill already had earplugs in and he hoped he wouldn’t need them. If everything went as planned nothing would happen, outside of some changes in very sensitive instruments.
He looked around one more time.
“Everybody ready?” Bill asked.
“Ready, sir,” Garcia and Crichton said.
“Let’s get it over with,” Robin said, yawning.
“Gotta test it sometime,” Mark said.
“Just proud to be here,” Earp intoned.
Bill pressed the button.
Nothing blew up. The lights dimmed rather deeply, though.
He looked over at Garcia who was frowning.
“Something’s happening,” the sergeant said. “We’ve got fluctuations in the magnetic containment bottle.”
“Power’s going somewhere,” Mark added. “Quite a bit. We keep this up and we’re going to start affecting California’s power requirements in a bit.”
“More fluctuations,” Garcia added a few minutes later as everyone was congratulating themselves. He had stayed glued to his monitor, however, his brow furrowed in a frown. “The electrons are starting to slip. I think we’re…”
There was a very slight ground shudder and everyone looked at the external monitors. In the distance was dust rising from a small explosion where their expensive and difficult to build quark generator now appeared to be so much metal and plastic scrap.
“… losing it,” Garcia finished. “Negative signal.”
“Back to the drawing board,” Bill said.
* * *
“It looks like it’s working this time,” Garcia said, watching his monitors carefully. “The Quark Hotel is in operation.”
Analysis of the data that they had gotten before the explosion indicated that some of the quarks, rather than being fully trapped in the bottle, had gotten caught in a magnetic eddy. When their local charge overcame the eddy they reacted, violently, with the surrounding matter and released the rest of the quarks to do so even more energetically.
The containment bottle had been upgraded and redesigned so that, as Garcia put it: “Quarks go in, but none get out.”
It had been instantly dubbed the Quark Hotel.
“Negative radiation emissions,” Crichton said. “But the rate of entry is really low. It looks like only a quark per second.”
“Not fast enough,” Bill said. “We need to increase the rate by a couple of orders of magnitude.”
“Up the power input?” Mark asked. “We need to increase the size of the bottle anyway.”
“Maybe,” Bill replied. “We’re probably only catching a fraction of the potential stream. But we don’t have the generators for that. We’re already pushing a hundred kilowatts through at the moment. To up it we’ll need big power. I don’t think we can do it here unless we can get some really monstrous generators and then we’ll be hauling in diesel so fast the experiment is going to be pretty damned obvious.”
“So what do we do?” Robin asked.
“Shut it down,” Weaver replied. “We can do it, we just need another boson that has access to a lot of power. Set the quarks on battery backup. We need to see if we can move the containment bottle, anyway. I’ll have to kick this upstairs.”
* * *
“So that’s where we’re at,” Bill said. “We can make the material, we can even contain it and move it, with relative safety. But we need orders of magnitude more power. I don’t think the rate of capture will be linear, more like asymptotic…”
“What?” the President said. “You’re usually pretty good about avoiding extreme jargon, Dr. Weaver, but…”
“That means for a little more power we’ll get a lot more result, Mr. President,” Bill said. “But we’re still looking at needing to have something on the order of a megawatt or more of power. We’re going to need to move someplace that has that sort of power available.”
“Savannah River?” the secretary of defense said, looking over at the national security dvisor.
“Oak Ridge, Savannah River, Hanford,” the NSA said with a shrug. “All have secure facilities, all have access to enormous power. Take your pick.”
“Savannah River,” Bill replied. “Mark worked there. He’ll know where to set up and who to see when we need something. And besides, there ain’t much left of Oak Ridge.”
“Get moving, Doctor,” the President said. “We may not have much time.” He looked up as someone entered the Situation Room. The agitated messenger walked up to the secretary of defense and whispered in his ear at which message the secretary’s face suddenly looked every day of his seventy-odd years.
“We’re out.”
* * *
Despite the logistics involved it had taken far less time to set up than the period the gates were destabilized. Collective 47 had a total of nine subcollectives to draw upon, less the late Collective 15379. Bosons were energy intensive to generate but six of the collectives had created at least one, in some cases two. Collective 47 was able to generate three.
In addition each of the collectives had disregarded trade and internal improvements to increase combat unit production. Each of the potential gates, and the three that had previously been opened, now had an overwhelming force stationed by it ranging from class one to class seven ground combat units along with twenty percent more air defense units than standard. The biologicals of the
new world would not be permitted to throw their fission weapons onto the bridgeheads this time.
Last, and certainly least, all three of Collective 47’s subraces had been levied for support. In some cases this included combat units. Primarily it had been contribution of biological materials to be converted to Collective combat units. One gate had been entirely ceded to the subraces and would be assaulted by a combination of Mreee and N!T!Ch, using weaponry the N!T!Ch had obtained from the Slen. They, too, however, would be supported by Collective air defense units.
A new subcollective, designated 16743, had been established at the locus of the former 15379. It was in its infancy, a colony organization rather than a truly functioning collective, but it served to support the forces sent to those open gates by the other collectives. In addition, Mreee biologicals were being added to the subcollective to accelerate its formation; as the holder of two of the open gates it was an important strategic locus and needed the boost.
All was in readiness when the gate fractal stabilized.
“All Collectives,” Collective 47 emitted. “Initiate gate formation.”
Even for the collective this took a few moments. In the interim, Collective 16743 sent a weak emission.
“Fission detonation, Gate 763, Gate 765, Gate 769. Assault formations destroyed. Gates closed. Twenty percent damage to collective. Initiating repairs.”
Best to get this over with as quickly as possible. Collective 47 had considered using the race on the far side as a subrace, but it was simply too dangerous. All would have to be destroyed.
“All Collectives,” Collective 47 emitted as the gates popped open. “Initiate assault.”
* * *
Dave Pearce threw his queen of diamonds on the pile and watched as Jim Horn covered it with a king. That was okay, it was his sole diamond. When somebody brought out that ace they were hoarding they were in for a surprise.
Dave was whistling in his teeth, a sure sign that he was out of one suit, Sergeant Horn thought to himself. He knew the song, vaguely, something about Hallack or Harlack or something. Pearce was always whistling it, to the point that it got on his nerves. Especially when it meant the specialist was out of a suit and waiting to hop on his ace. You’d think that with an ace, king combination, you’d get at least two tricks. But in the last two weeks he swore that he’d seen every possible combination of tricks and rubbers possible in the game of spades. There wasn’t much else to do but play.
The duty was incredibly, unmitigatingly, boring. Hell of a lot more comfortable than Iraq, though. The track three boson had formed in the living room of a suburban home in Woodmere, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. After the danger of the boson became evident, the house, then the surrounding houses, then a good part of the town, had been evacuated. The house, a pleasant single story ranch, had been cleared by moving crews and then leveled, as had several of the surrounding houses and most of their landscaping, creating open fields of fire. Last, defensive positions had been scattered around the boson and units of the Ohio National Guard were established in the positions. Well, were supposed to be established in the positions. There was always one member of the unit on the tracks at all times, but most of the rest of the brigade had settled in the abandoned houses; they were far more comfortable. The local electric company, as a gesture of patriotism, had left the electricity running. So the troops had hot and cold running water, a place to sleep out of the weather and flush toilets. Cots, and then beds, had appeared. Except for the boredom, which was relieved by television and endless games of spades, not to mention Nintendo, Sega and Gameboys and for a fortunate few internet connections, it wasn’t bad duty. Definitely better than the six months the unit had spent in the Sunni Triangle.
They all knew that the balloon could go up at any time and they’d been told it could occur without warning. But they also figured that the big brains would give them a little warning.
So Sergeant Horn was more than a little surprised when he threw his ace down, fully prepared for Pearce to trump the damned thing, and was rewarded, instead, by the explosion of a claymore mine.
Claymores were directional mines, a small box on legs that could be pointed at the direction an enemy was likely to approach from, in this case directly at the inactive boson. Normally they were command detonated, that is a soldier would close a “clacker” which sent an electrical signal to the mine telling it that it was time to perform its function, namely spilling out 700 ball bearings at approximately the speed of rifle bullets.
When the combat engineers set up the defenses for the boson, however, they laid in a rather extensive minefield around the concrete slab that had once been a ranch house. The first line of defense was a series of claymore mines on trip-wires, so that anything coming through the gate, should it form, would be met by a hail of ball bearings.
It also served as an efficient signal that the shit had just hit the fan.
The four card players tossed down their hands and picked up their weapons, rushing to their bunkers as fast as they could. But there were nine people currently in the house and by the time Sergeant Horn squeezed through the press at the door, more mines were exploding. And then the first incoming hit the house.
The plasma weapon hit on the roof and tossed burning debris down into the living room, setting fire to the table where they had been playing and tossing burning cards through the air.
The overpressure from the blast threw Sergeant Horn and Specialist Pearce out of the door in a tangle of limbs. The sergeant was the first to recover, sitting up and shaking his head, then grabbing his M-16 and continuing on to his bunker. Or where his bunker had been. Which was now a hole in the ground.
There was a protective berm that had been thrown up around the boson and Horn crawled to the top of it, looking over the edge. What met his eyes was a nightmare.
The collectives had not bothered with assaulting the gates with low-class ground combat units. Coming through the gate was a segmental class seven combat unit. It was tossing plasma charges off its horns at everything that looked like a threat. Four Abrams were smoking wrecks as were all the Bradleys and most of the bunkers that were supposed to shelter the infantry. And the thing just kept coming out of the gate, like a giant nightmare centipede, pouring fire in all directions.
As he watched, though, the thing hit one of the antitank mines the engineers had installed. The massive explosion punched up through the thing, sending a self-forging round upward through the first segment. The secondary explosion, even at five hundred meters, tossed the sergeant off the berm and down into the grass yard of the burning house.
He shook some life back into himself, again, and climbed back up the berm, wishing that his LBE hadn’t been in the bunker. All he had to fight with was a single magazine for the M-16.
It wasn’t going to matter, much, though. The front segment of the monster was a smoking wreck but it had already been detached and the thing continued to extrude. Now fire was leaping into the sky, intercepting incoming rounds of artillery. There were more antitank mines, but Horn was pretty sure there wouldn’t be enough.
“Anybody got a radio!” Horn yelled. “Call somebody and tell ’em this thing ain’t going to stop any time soon!”
* * *
“This is Bruce Gelinas in Woodmere, Ohio, where units of the Ohio National Guard have again been repulsed from an attempt to retake the Cleveland Gate. Fighting is reportedly heavy and from the looks of the casualties I’d have to agree. Besides the segmented tank there are now rhino tanks and something like large spider tanks, along with large numbers of dog aliens and thorn-throwers. The unit has had to retreat, twice, and now is simply trying to slow the monsters down as well as it can. More units are being brought up but the situation looks very bad.”
“Bruce have you been able to talk to anyone from the National Guard, there?” the anchorwoman in New York asked.
“No, the spokespeople don’t seem to be available,” Bruce said. “From what I heard they were issued weapons a
nd have been sent in to replace losses in the infantry units, which are taking a real beating. I spoke, briefly, with a sergeant who had been injured in the initial assault…”
The scene cut to a recording of a soldier on a stretcher, his left arm in a thick bandage and scorch marks on his uniform. His face was partially bandaged and he could only see out of one eye.
“Sergeant Horn, you were part of the gate defense force?” the reporter asked.
“We couldn’t stop it,” the soldier said, almost incoherently. “It took out the Abrams before we even knew it was there, it was blowing up everything in sight! It took three mines and it didn’t stop it, it just kept coming!”
“We have further reports that an attempt to deliver strategic nuclear weapons was unsuccessful,” the reporter said, again live. “Orders to prepare for a strike were issued and we were warned, then nothing. Heavy fire could be seen from the direction of the gate and it apparently intercepted and destroyed the incoming nuclear rounds. As I said, at this point it looks as if nothing can stop the Titcher. This is Bruce Gelinas, in Woodmere, Ohio.”
“Thank you for that… disturbing report, Bruce,” the anchorwoman said. “Breakouts are reported at all of the formerly inactive bosons, ranging from Georgia to Canada. In addition to Titcher attacks, the gate in Oakdale, Kentucky, appears to be sending out Mreee soldiers and some sort of giant, silver spiders. We go now to Erik Kittlelsen who is reporting, live, from near the front lines. Erik?”
“We’re live in Oakdale, Kentucky,” the reporter shouted at the microphone just as an explosion occurred, very close, in the background. “I’m with Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 149th Infantry Battalion of the Kentucky National Guard!” He looked over his shoulder at the wall of earth behind him and then back at the camera. “The attackers here seem to be Mreee and what the military now believes to be Nitch, the giant spider species we had previously only heard about from the Mreee. It’s clear, now, that the Mreee were allies of the Titcher all along!”
