EMPIRE: Intervention (EMPIRE SERIES Book 13)

by Richard F. Weyand

  “The basics. Corn, wheat, and soybeans.”

  “Is that all that’s on that freighter for us?”

  “No. She also has the generating plant and the water treatment plant on board.”

  “Nice.”

  Turley rolled over toward him and placed one hand on his chest.

  “I hate to admit this, Mr. Gulliver, but all this discussion of infrastructure makes me horny.”

  “So that explains it, Madam President. I was wondering.”

  Einar Henriksen had gone to Julian as a young man with the idea of having his own farm, rather than farming as someone else’s employee. Cheap open land was a big draw. He had selected Julian because, with zero axial tilt, the whole year was a growing season if you were in the right latitude. He hadn’t had much to complain about until eight or nine years ago.

  After the disappointments of the last nine years, Henriksen wasn’t sure he believed what he was hearing now. He wasn’t going to miss out for not applying, though. He logged into the Ministry of Agriculture and it directed him to the right person.

  “Location?”

  Every farm on Julian had a number. Every farmer knew his by heart.

  “Fourteen-twenty-seven.”

  “Corn or beans?”

  “Been in clover this long, I oughta do corn.”

  “You got it. How many acres ya got?”

  “Fifteen hundred.”

  “OK, that checks. Around here, you oughta be planting thirty-five thousand seeds an acre on thirty-inch rows. There’s eighty-thousand seeds in a fifty-pound bag, fifty bags on a pallet, and you need seven hundred bags, so I’m thinking fourteen pallets of seed. Sound right to you?”

  “Yep. I’m good.”

  “And that should come to a couple gallons an acre. You got three thousand gallons of storage for diesel there?”

  “Sure.”

  “Is Tuesday good for you?”

  The gigantic tractor, planter, and combine had sat unused for more than five years. Einar Henriksen simply couldn’t afford to run them.

  That didn’t mean they hadn’t been maintained, however. That wasn’t how farmers worked. You didn’t know what the future held, so one needed to be prepared. He had kept on top of the big machines, starting the engines on the tractor and combine every three months, to keep oil in the cylinders and top off the batteries.

  He took the battery tender off the battery on the tractor. He got in and fired it up, then let it warm up a bit. He got down and hooked up the hitch of the planter, a big ungainly contraption that would plant thirty-six rows at a time. He eased the rig out of the equipment shed and headed over to the fuel pump.

  “Ma’am, Mr. Gulliver is here,” North said. “He doesn’t have an appointment.”

  “That’s OK, Tom. Show him in.”

  North waved Paul Gulliver in. Gulliver was visibly excited.

  “Madam President, I need to show you something.”

  “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “Log in to VR channel, uh, 382.”

  Turley logged into VR channel 382 and had a moment of vertigo. She had plenty of experience with aerial surveillance drones, but she hadn’t been expecting it. She was out in the country, miles from Monroe, and farm fields dotted the landscape. Directly in front of her and below, a big tractor was pulling a planter through a field, raising a tail of dust that blew off to one side. She looked out over the landscape in a three-hundred-sixty-degree view and saw a dozen such dust tails.

  She logged back out of VR into her office, where Gulliver was watching her intently. She had tears in her eyes.

  “Mr. Gulliver, that’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

  Ballistic Demolition

  The dam site was also bustling during this period. The first order of business was to expose the rock of the base and the headlands. The next would be to sink anchors into the rock to give the dam something to hang onto when the water pressure started building up against it.

  Paul Gulliver drove out to the site early in the week after President Turley’s speech. The entrance guards told him Mr. Gordon was up on the western headland and which road to take to get there. When he got up on the headland, there was a guard on the road who directed him to park off the side of the road there.

  “You’ll have to go the rest of the way on foot, Sir. Do you have a safety helmet and ear and eye protection?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “You should put them all on here, Sir.”

  Gulliver put them on and walked up the road. It broke out of the low trees after about a hundred yards, and he saw Kyle Gordon and another man standing on the top of the hill looking the other way, out over the site. As Gulliver crested the hill, he could see M15 tanks arranged on the slope below them.

  “Hi, Gordy,” Gulliver said as he came up to Gordon.

  Gordon didn’t hear him, and Gulliver touched his arm. Instead of trying to talk, Gordon sent him a call request in VR.

  “Hi, Paul,” Gordon said over the VR.

  “Hi, Gordy. What’s up?”

  “You’re just in time. We’re gonna make some boom-boom on that headland over there.”

  Gulliver looked at the far headland. There were large spots painted on the hillside, four across and three rows high, on sixty-foot horizontal spacing, maybe thirty-foot vertical.

  “The tanks are gonna fire on them?”

  “Yeah. This’ll be way cool. Uh, cover your ears and lean into it.”

  “I’m already wearing ear protection.”

  “Cover ‘em anyway.”

  Gordon patched Gulliver’s audio into his command channel so he could hear what was going on.

  “Company A. Report readiness,” Gordon said.

  There was a bunch of background chatter, and then the command tank answered.

  “Company A ready.”

  “Confirm your marks.”

  More chatter.

  “Marks confirmed.”

  “Fire one round, each tank.”

  Twelve tanks fired nearly simultaneously. Despite being a hundred yards behind them, the backwash almost knocked Gulliver down. And the sound was beyond deafening. With ear protection and his hands over his ears, it was still loud, and felt as much as heard.

  Twelve H-E rounds impacted on the slope opposite, a grid of destruction, blowing vegetation, dirt, and gravel out from the slope of the hill.

  “On your marks and twenty feet to the right,” Gordon said.

  “Twenty feet to the right. Company A ready.”

  “Fire one round, each tank.”

  Again the backwash and the deafening roar. This time Gulliver was ready for it, and had one foot braced behind him. Again the twelve impacts opposite. Not halfway between the prior rounds. More like a third of the way.

  “On your marks and twenty feet to the right,” Gordon said.

  “Twenty feet to the right. Company A ready.”

  “Fire one round, each tank.”

  Again the backwash and the deafening roar. Again the twelve impacts opposite. The grid was now three parallel lines scarred across the hill. And then the slope started to sag and gave way. The whole hillside seemed to move, as the side of the escarpment collapsed in a landslide to the floor of the valley, leaving a rock wall behind.

  “Yes! Perfect, you guys. Company A relieved. Return to barracks. Company B. Move to your positions.”

  The tanks in front of Gulliver gunned their engines and rotated ninety degrees on their tracks, then headed in single file around the top of the hill to the road back down to the camp. Gordon took out his earplugs and let them hang by the little cord around his neck and turned to Gulliver, who followed suit.

  “Wasn’t that something?” Gordon asked. “I love that shit.”

  “Well, it was loud, I’ll give you that.”

  “Yeah. Now for some gentle diesel music to sooth the nerves.”

  Gordon stood and watched the tanks until they disappeared around the hill.

  �
��Paul, this is Ian McLeod. He’s out here from Hydraulix to build the dam for us. He’s the actual site manager.”

  “Ian. Paul Gulliver. Good to meet you,” Gulliver said.

  “And you, Paul. Though I’m not sure Gordy needs a lot of help building a dam this size.”

  “Paul is the sales rep from Galactic Equipment Supply on Julian,” Gordon said.

  “Oh, so you’re the guy who gave our friend here all the playtoys.”

  “I’m afraid so,” Gulliver said.

  “Ian, you gotta admit. That was really cool.”

  “Yes, though I’m more used to carrying the demolitions to the site where you want the explosions, not shooting them there.”

  “Nah. This is much more fun. And we gotta use ‘em up anyway. Come on. We need to get down from here.”

  “What about Company B?” Gulliver asked.

  “Oh, we don’t want to be up here for that,” Gordon said. “They’ll be on the other side shooting in this direction.”

  “I think I’ll watch that one from below,” Gulliver said.

  “Suit yourself, Paul. But it’s not as much fun.”

  Gordon and McLeod drove down to the base camp and then back up the other side of the headlands to watch Company B firing. Gulliver followed them down the road to the base camp, then found a good spot to watch the action from a hill on the road to town.

  Company B fired three times as before, and then the face of the western headlands collapsed into the valley below. Now, with the rock walls of the headlands exposed, and the trench down to the rock layer, across the valley where the base of the dam would go, Gulliver could visualize the dam there. He saw now what Gordon had seen when he selected the site months ago.

  The next time Gulliver was out to the dam site, about a week later, he found Gordon in the camp headquarters.

  “Paul, you always pick the good days to stop by.”

  “Really? What’s going on today, Gordy?”

  “We’re dropping GDPs today.”

  “Multiple GDPs?”

  “Yeah. We did a test shot yesterday, and it’s perfect.”

  “So how many are you doing today, Gordy?”

  “Nineteen.”

  “Nineteen?”

  “Yeah. It’s two thousand feet across at the base. I think we should tie in to bedrock every hundred feet or so, don’t you?”

  “Well, yeah, but isn’t that a lot?”

  “We brought a bunch along, in case we had to take down all of Government Center. Don’t wanna leave ‘em layin’ around, do you?”

  “No. I don’t. You have that right. So when’s the action start?”

  “About fifteen minutes. The shuttles are already in the air. Come on.”

  They went outside to a good viewpoint, on a little hillside that was the north bank of the valley as it turned to the east away from the city. That the city was not in the path of a dam break had been one thing recommending the site. Monroe was actually uphill from here and sixty miles away.

  “Look up there,” Gordon said, pointing. “Here they come.”

  Five five-ton tungsten cylinders came in at over four times the speed of sound. The scene was completely silent, the cylinders outracing the noise of their own passage. They hit the bare rock in the wide trench cut for the base of the dam, which had since been cleaned out of the debris from the headlands demolition last week. The impacts were not that big, as the cylinders penetrated before exploding deep in the holes they had made. And it was all in complete silence.

  For several seconds anyway. Then the ground shook, followed by a triple thunderclap, the double-tap of the sonic boom followed by the noise of the impacts.

  “I love it!” Gordon shouted over the echoes bouncing around the valley and the hills.

  Five more followed, then five more, then, for the final round, only four. Inexorably, the multiple explosions marched along the path of the dam, penetrating deep into the rock.

  When it was over, Gulliver asked, “So what happens now?”

  “We go in and mount pilings in those holes – multiple pilings in each, actually – then we pump epoxycrete into the holes under pressure.”

  “And then?”

  “And then we weld a base rail – a big steel beam – across all the pilings.

  “And then?”

  “And then we march all those M15s down into the trench, upstream of the base rail, and weld them to the base rail and each other, then fill ‘em full of epoxycrete.”

  “Do the tankers know you’re going to do that, Gordy?”

  “I mighta sorta forgot to tell ‘em, come to think of it.”

  Gordon’s tank commanders were not amused.

  “We’re gonna do what with ‘em?”

  “Think about it,” Gordon said. “You can’t take ‘em home. The Emperor’s got real strong opinions about that, right? And we can’t sell ‘em, ‘cause they’re used, and by the time we interstellar ship them somewhere, we’d owe them money. And you can’t sell ‘em to just anybody, either. The Emperor’s got some pretty strong opinions about that, too. So what’re we gonna do? Leave ‘em here, and maybe have Mieland’s people get a hold of ‘em? I for one don’t want to have to come back here to do the job all over again, and be up against armor when we do it, do you?”

  “No, when you put it like that, Sergeant Major. But still, it seems wrong.”

  “Look. We came here to bring peace and prosperity to these poor bastards. One way to bring peace is not to leave heavy weapons lyin’ around for future troublemakers, and one way to bring prosperity is to build this dam. It’s a twofer.”

  “All right, all right. We get it. But we don’t like it.”

  The next time Paul Gulliver made it out to the dam site, Kyle Gordon gave him a tour of what was going on. They drove up to one of the headlands so he could see the overview.

  “OK, so you see all those spikes sticking up out of the patches in the ground?” Gordon asked.

  “Yeah. Looks like your building a rail fence or something.”

  “Right. Those verticals, those are the pilings. They go down a ways, because those GDPs went in pretty deep. So we dropped the pilings down in there, a couple in each hole, and then we poured hydraulic epoxycrete in there and then covered it with quick-set epoxycrete.”

  “Hydraulic epoxycrete?” Gulliver asked.

  “Yeah. It expands a little bit when it sets. The quick-set stuff set up hard and corked the hole, then the hydraulic stuff tried to set up and expand. It couldn’t come out the top, so it got pushed into any gaps in the rock by the pressure.”

  “OK. I see.”

  “Yeah,” Gordon said. “So then we welded those cross pieces on. Three feet up, six feet up, nine feet up. All the way across. Then we started driving the M15s in there, upstream from the fence.”

  “What’s going on with all those pipes? The ones you’re putting in between the M15s.”

  “Dams silt up, right? That’s what they do. So we don’t want that. Most of those pipes are for keeping silt clear at the base of the dam. We can open them once in a while to clear it out. We’re also gonna use them for diversion once we block the main channel, which we have to do soon. The exception is those two big pipes. They’re for the generating station. We don’t want silt getting into those, so they pull water from the top of the lake, not the bottom.”

  “Which is what those pipes sticking up there behind the dam are for,” Gulliver said.

  “Right. Those are the intake towers. Now, in a tall dam, some big epoxycrete job a couple hundred feet tall, we could just put the intake in the dam itself. But in something this shallow – about a hundred feet – on an earthen dam, I want the intake back from the dam.”

  “What’s going on over there?” Gulliver asked, pointing to some construction going on over on the other ridge.

  “That’s the spillway. Lowest spot in the rim of the basin. So we’re epoxycreting the crest of that, and down the other side. Worst comes to worst, the lake will overflow the
re.”

  “And down there, those three clear areas on the other side of the dam?”

  “The closest two are for the generating station and the electrical substation,” Gordon said. “The far one is for the water treatment plant. It uses the downstream water from the generating station.”

  “Well, Gordy, it sure is coming along. Looking good.”

  “Yeah. I’m not sure the guys’ll ever forgive me, though. We start filling the M15s with epoxycrete tomorrow.”

  Gulliver made it out to the dam site one more time that first month after Turley’s speech, after the generating plant and the water treatment plant arrived on the Jason B. Montgomery. Gordon was excited about the progress. They went back up to the overlook.

  “OK, so you need a lot of fill, right?” Gordon asked. “Mostly big rocks and such. So where do we get it and how do we get it? That’s always the problem. You need like a quarry operation, or a buncha demolition, or something. At the same time, you don’t want shallow spots in the lake that are gonna interfere with boats and stuff, at least not in the main part o’ the basin. You with me?”

  “Sure.”

  “And then I got the Ordinance disposal guys wanting to know where they can blow off a bunch o’ shit we don’t want to leave behind, including a bunch more o’ those GDPs. So Ian McLeod, he’s really got into the spirit of it, he says, ‘Why don’t we use all the leftover ordinance to clear out the basin, maybe expand it a bit here and there?’ Brilliant. Just brilliant.”

  “So that’s what’s going on down there?”

  Big dump trucks were driving along the floor of the basin, then angling up the far side headland to the current top of the dam, dropping their loads over the upstream side, then continuing across the dam to the western headland and angling back down to the floor of the basin to return whence they came. Looking up the valley, Gulliver could see where bucket loaders were filling dump trucks with the remains of a hill they were whittling away at.

  “Yeah,” Gordon said. “So there was this big hill in the middle of the valley. Still there ‘cause it’s solid rock. So we’re chewing it up for the dam.”

  “Solid rock. Was that tough to break up?”