seawasp | Fenrir: Chapter 10

They had ideas, but putting them in action might be a challenge...

Chapter 10: Publicity Good, Radiation Bad

"What an amazing crash between the NIMBY factor and patriotism," the President said dryly, looking at the summary.

"Isn't it?" Hailey Vanderman agreed.

Ramming through the authorizations and appropriations for the ship – project currently codenamed "Welcome Wagon" by some joker in Congress – had been the hardest fight of Jeanne's political career, not excepting her own election. It had come down to one vote from the opposition party, and she'd had to promise support on a bunch of things that were undoubtedly going to come back to bite her later in order to get that final vote.

But it was starting to look as though that had been the easy part. Every one of the FORT countries wanted to launch Welcome Wagon… and at the same time, none of them wanted a nuclear explosive-driven craft anywhere nearby.

"Okay, everyone. Help me understand the realities before we dive into the politics. Where would we want to launch Welcome Wagon, if we could just choose a spot?"

Everyone in the room looked at Dr. Dobyns, who nodded to Stephanie. The still newly minted Dr. Bronson stood up. "If it was a standard rocket, the answer would be easy: somewhere on the equator, where it could take advantage of the difference in delta-v from the Earth's rotation. But nuclear pulse propulsion is so powerful that a few kps is really no big deal. We could spin it that way, of course, but you wanted the realities, and the reality is that we could launch from anywhere on Earth."

"Ideally," York picked up, "you would prefer somewhere that the prevailing winds didn't carry any fallout to inhabited areas, at least not until it had gone a long way and had time to disperse. The current studies show that the antimatter-catalyzed detonations will not be depositing a huge amount of fallout in the atmosphere – by comparison with prior nuclear tests, anyway – but the typical attitude towards nuclear fallout makes the numbers somewhat irrelevant."

"How safe will it be, really?"

"Assuming it works as planned? Very, if the immediate fallout is avoided. I wouldn't recommend making launches like this every week, the way Young launches his ships, but one or two of them isn't going to have any significant effect on anything not immediately in the area."

"What about things that are in the area?"

Dr. Dobyns failed to repress a laugh. "Destroyed, of course. We are going to be detonating nuclear bombs, and even if they're only in the hundred ton range, that's quite a hammer to be bringing down. The few people saying it should launch in the sight of some major city should definitely be ignored; there will be significant shockwave damage and possibly flash damage for a considerable radius."

"What about the antimatter itself?" asked Admiral Dickinson. "Is that any additional threat?"

"Not at the level we're talking about," said Dr. Filipek. "CERN and the one or two other sites that are capable of antimatter production are being tuned to do so, but even if everything goes perfectly, we might be talking about micrograms. All at once that would make a noticeable boom and kill anyone near it with gammas, but it's far below the level of the actual nuclear detonations."

She grinned wryly. "The real fallout there is from all the people who no longer have accelerator time for their theses and studies. A particle physicist without access to a functional accelerator is just a very specialized mathematician most of the time. Most of them understand the circumstances, fortunately, but we had to agree to support them for the duration and be ready to restore the accelerators to their normal configurations afterwards."

George Green shook his head. "If this works, we might want to keep that capability available. How hard will it be to set that up?"

"Major, major effort, George. Large-scale accelerators are very expensive. Look at CERN's history; took billions of dollars and ten years to build, and the next-gen version they're working on will be close to ten times the cost. Save that fight for after we find out what happens with this project."

"What about antimatter containment?" Stephanie asked. "Making a microgram of antimatter won't help if we can't keep it controlled and extract nanograms of it when we need them."

"A lot of the fusion containment research applies," Eva answered, "and we've released all that we have on that and prior antimatter containment approaches to the design committee. Confining antimatter wasn't a big priority before, but I expect we will see large strides in the next couple of months."

"It will take at least a year to build Welcome Wagon," pointed out Roger. "Dr. Bronson, Dr. Dobyns, isn't Fenrir almost ready to park out there? Can we expect it to just wait?"

Stephanie exchanged glances with York, then shrugged. "Fenrir is choosing to stop way out there for a reason, Roger. If they just wanted to drop in on Earth, they could have come right here. So we're guessing that they want to study our Solar System in detail for a while before moving in-system – and discovering that Earth is inhabited by a reasonably advanced technological civilization has to be a major factor for them to adjust to."

Vanderman nodded, as did most of the others. "Do we have any conclusive reason to believe they're going to stay here a long time?"

"As of last night," York Dobyns answered, "Yes. Steph?"

Stephanie fumbled a bit with the presentation controls, then threw up a series of images showing one very small pixelated blob separating from another. "As we had expected, Fenrir has dumped a very large chunk of mass, what we believe was their shielding mass. It's probably mostly a big, contoured chunk of ice – cheap, easy to shape, really good as radiation shielding for a lot of things. But if they were going to accelerate back to anything like interstellar speed, they'd almost certainly be keeping it."

"Where's that piece going? Do we have a vector?" Green asked.

"Fast hyperbolic path through the system; it will be a very brief comet, so we might get a chance to get a few good spectra from it, but it's going to shoot past the sun and out into interstellar space."

"They could make another such shield, right?" the President asked. "If I recall correctly, there is quite a bit of ice in the outer system."

"Huge amounts of it, and easy to get, yes," agreed Stephanie. "But if they do, that's going to take them quite a bit of time. They can't just grab a random chunk of one of the icy moons, they'd have to shape it, make sure it was really structurally sound, all sorts of stuff to make sure it would do the job and survive for the years they'd need."

"All right," the President said, nodding slowly. "So, what I'm hearing is that we can be as certain as anything can be at this stage that Fenrir will, in fact, stay where it is for quite some time, and so Welcome Wagon will have a chance to be completed before it moves."

Another exchange of glances. "That's our feeling, Madame President," York said. "Assuming FORT gets the go-ahead from the respective nations."

"Well, that's not your problem, Doctor," President Sacco said with a tired smile. "Yours is just to keep giving us the best info we can get on our visitors. If I understand our other discussion correctly, we also have as much latitude as we want with our launch site."

"Pretty much," agreed Stephanie. "Launch it from anywhere you don't mind blowing up and make sure people aren't in the downwind path for, well, a good long stretch. Your military guys," she nodded at George Green, "will be able to tell you exactly how far, once we get the specs of the, well, motive bombs ironed out."

"Already working on that," Green confirmed. "Eva's people are a big help too, of course, but right now if the rough guesses we have are right, it's pretty short, relatively speaking, for any significant fallout. These are going to be pretty small bombs as such things go, and they're not plutonium – thank God – so they just won't be making all that much fallout. I'll get you the numbers once they firm up, but really, a hundred miles is probably more than far enough. Maybe twenty."

President Sacco's eyes narrowed in obvious disbelief. "George, this isn't the 1950s. We can't be cavalier about this."

"No, George is probably right," Eva said, drawing a grateful glance from the Secretary of Defense. "These aren't even conventional bombs, but more like packages of uranium with a mechanism to inject the antimatter. Very low mass overall, and the real bulk of other material is the antimatter confinement, assuming we get that approach perfected."

Stephanie had to admit she was more in sympathy with the President, but they had to assume these people knew their stuff.

The President evidently agreed, because she just sighed and nodded. "Just make sure you triple-check everything," she said after a moment. "This is going to be a big enough nightmare as it is without worrying about irradiating people because we were overconfident."

"Will do, Madame President," Green answered emphatically. "None of us want that."

"All right," President Sacco said. "It looks like we have an outline of a schedule and a reason to believe it. I've got another meeting with the heads of FORT in," she checked her phone, "an hour, and I need to go get a quick lunch, so this meeting's adjourned. Next week, same time, Roger?"

"A half hour later, you have that meeting with the Speaker."

"That's right. All right, next week, half-hour later."

As they left the meeting, Stephanie found herself still in a state of disbelief. "They're really going to do this," she said.

"If they can get past the hurdles, yes," York said, looking more than a touch cynical. "But that won't be easy."

"You mean deciding where to launch a nuclear pulse rocket?"

"That's one large hurdle indeed, but just finishing the project will require…" He made a vague gesture with his hands. "… well, keeping momentum, I suppose, and with something this expensive, this new, and involving so many countries, that's the real challenge. Welcome Wagon, or whatever they end up calling it, will belong to no one country, but a lot of countries are going to be dumping billions into it and spinning it to their constituents as 'their' ship, with the other countries as also-rans. You can see that in our own press releases. It's the biggest and most expensive juggling act you'll ever see.

"And believe me, we really don't want to see what happens if they start to fumble the balls."

No, don't drop it!