Rise of the Beast (63 page)

“Still, it would be nice if we could somehow hedge our bets,” said Kurt, looking toward Nikola Tesla. “How is that teleporter concept working out? Could we move the population of Refuge to some other Earth-like planet in the universe, start all over again there?”

Nikola shook his head. “It’s an enormous problem. There are just so many variables, so many hurdles to overcome. It’s not like teleporting from one place in Hell to another. The physical laws that govern matter in this place are different from those on Earth or any other planet in the known universe. The bodies we have here wouldn’t survive out there. They need to be conditioned, altered on an atomic level. We have the whole science team working on it, but it’s going to take some time. For the present, we are stuck here.”

“And, from what the Father has told Abaddon, we can’t trust General Krell,” said Eleazar, one of the dark angels. “I question if we can even trust Cordon.”

“We can trust Cordon,” said Nikola. “Trust me on that one.”

“I don’t believe that he would purposely mislead us,” said Abaddon. “Even
my children are comfortable around him and his lieutenant, Rolf. He burned Satan’s bridge behind him during the closing days of the war in Heaven. He is no friend of the Prince of Darkness. In fact, if Satan was to return here, and it looks as if he might, Cordon and Rolf would be among the first to feel his wrath, even before us.”

“Back to the original point,” said Tim. “You want me to gather up all of my creatures, these ACs, and send them through my ring on a few days notice.”

“Yes,” confirmed Abaddon.

“We only have a handful of particle rifles and pistols,” said Tim, “and a hundred or so armed swordsmen and women who can command the power of a demon’s sword. Our creatures are our best defense. If we sent them through the ring, we would be almost helpless if the demons attacked us.”

“I realize that,” said Abaddon.

“If I’m going to agree to this, I need something in return,” continued Tim. “I want one of those machines that makes stuff by just thinking about it. I also need someone to teach my people how to use it.”

“I think that could be arranged,” said Abaddon.

“And I want enough particle weapons to arm all of my people,” continued Tim, “and plenty of ammo for them too.”

Abaddon nodded. “Of course.”

“OK,” said Tim. “I’ll help you. I need to talk to Goliath, figure out how we could get all of his friends to my cavern when you ask for them. You just get us what we need and we’re with you all the way.”

Megan nodded approvingly, but said nothing.

Around the table there seemed to be a general agreement. This had gone better than Abaddon had dared to hope. When the time came, they would be ready.

By the time June rolled around on Earth, the political climate between the United States and the European Union had gone from chilly to downright
frigid. Russia had signed a military alliance pact with the Union even as China signed a similar pact with America.

Few expected the political conflict to turn into a military one, but the two sides had practically irreconcilable differences. The Divine Light Church, as it was now called, had become the official church of the European Union. Neither the United States nor China could endorse such a move, though their reasons for opposing it were different.

In Latin America, a strange melding of Lusan’s faith and Catholicism was taking shape. The church did not officially sanction this sect of Catholicism, but seemed unable to squelch it.

All the while the comet that continued to bear down on Earth had grown strangely quiet. It hung high in the evening sky, its bright and somewhat foreshortened tail pointing to the east. It was easily visible, even from city locations, and it was growing bigger and brighter by the day.

Minor gas eruptions continued on its surface, but no more than were to be expected. For the moment, the comet was behaving itself. The comet’s tail was bright and full of debris, but Earth was not going to pass through the tail. Scientists were once again hopeful that Earth would experience nothing more than a day or so of minor satellite disruption. Still, plans were underway to evacuate the space station and ground all civilian and government spaceflight for the two weeks around the comet’s closest approach in October.

Then on July 30, Sam came into the planetary science center to discover that the violent eruptions had begun anew, this time from the eastern edge of the rift. Concern for the safety of Earth’s satellites was in the news once more.

The team carefully monitored the eruptions as tons of dust and debris were again injected into the comet’s coma. Still, many hypothesized that, like the previous set of eruptions, this one too would subside. Once the venting released sufficient subsurface pressure, venting would cease and the solar wind would drive the dust in the coma back into the comet’s tail and from there into the depths of space.

For weeks they monitored the venting. Its source seemed to be a vast chamber of liquid nitrogen and methane trapped some distance below the surface. As the comet had traveled from the frigid depths of the solar system ever closer to the sun, the growing heat was vaporizing this liquid, and the vapor was seeping through fissures in the icy crust, carrying ice and rock with it. Upon reaching
the surface, it exploded into the vacuum of space. But now, after three weeks, the eruptions were subsiding once more. Perhaps the reservoir of volatile material deep within the comet was being depleted.

Then it happened. With but five weeks to go to closest approach, the fissure literally exploded. From Earth the brightness of the comet doubled in a matter of minutes as a great cloud of debris erupted from the sunlit side of the comet. Within an hour, all of the comet’s surface was enshrouded within the dense expanding cloud.

It was only the quick response of mission controllers that had saved the Herschel Spacecraft once again from annihilation. It took much of the remaining fuel in the main engine to propel the spacecraft out to a safe distance.

Now they were operating blind. Astronomers resorted to using radar to penetrate the debris cloud. What they discovered made them cringe. They were picking up multiple echoes within the dense haze surrounding the comet. It became obvious that at least a part of the comet had been fragmented. Then the objects which would come to be known as Florence B, C, and D emerged from the cloud. The largest one, Florence C, measured nearly three miles in diameter.

Scientists scrambled to calculate the mass and trajectory of these new comets. The prognosis was not good. Florence C and perhaps Florence B were on a course that would bring them frighteningly close to Earth. Then there were the several dozen smaller fragments blown out from the explosion, any one of which had the potential to wipe out a city if they survived their plunge into the atmosphere.

It was at a closed-door session five days later that the verdict was finally announced. The science team sat anxiously in the lecture hall as the project science director, Clyde Mayfield took the podium. “I have some disturbing news,” he announced. “Comet fragment Florence C will impact Earth. The impact will occur in the Eastern Pacific on October 9 at 22:16 hours universal. Seven other significant fragments are projected to impact Earth as well. Most of these impacts will also occur in the deep waters of the Central Pacific. However one impact may occur in Alaska, and two along the Western Pacific rim, perhaps in China. Florence B has a trajectory that makes it too close to call. It might bounce off of the top of our atmosphere and head out into space if we are fortunate. But the consequences of the impact of Florence C will be catastrophic. We might well be looking at a tsunami wave a thousand or more feet high, sweeping inland hundreds of miles, and a blast wave that would destroy all life
for a radius of a thousand miles. Cities like Mazatlan, La Paz, Tijuana, and San Diego may well be within that blast radius. I suspect that Los Angeles will fare little better.”

Dr. Mayfield paused to give the group a moment to digest the information they had just heard. “General Cutler, who headed the development of the propulsion system and the section of the craft housing the classified payload, has a few words for you.”

The general took the podium. He gazed out onto his audience of scientists and engineers; they seemed visibly shaken. “Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve heard what our situation is. Can we destroy this comet fragment? Can we deflect it? Given all of the resources of our military, what can we do? Give me some options.”

“Options, what options?” blurted out one of the engineers near the back of the room. “The world’s arsenals of ICBMs are old and antiquated. They were never designed to reach that far out into space; they were designed to destroy targets on the surface of the Earth. Look if you retargeted them for a point in space, depending on the launch point, I seriously doubt that they could reach a point more than five or six hundred miles out.”

“And that is if they could get through the debris field that almost certainly surrounds these larger fragments,” said another.

“Deflection is out of the question,” said yet another. “We’ve thought about that. Even if you had a heavy launch vehicle on the pad today with a massive nuclear device in its payload, you couldn’t launch. You don’t have a good launch window. The comet is currently behind us in its orbit. By the time a launch window opens it would be too late.”

Others nodded in agreement. Still others talked among themselves.

“You might be able to destroy the smaller fragments,” suggested still another. “If you could set off a nuclear detonation directly in their path, maybe three or four hundred miles up, you might vaporize them into so many fragments that most if not all would burn up in the atmosphere.”

“But you’d end up with serious nuclear fallout,” objected another. “Those smaller particles would be contaminated with radioactive decay elements from the bomb.”

“I disagree,” said the first.

“What we need is to deflect Florence C now, while it is still relatively far out,” interjected Sam. “That is the only real hope.” He hesitated. “But we don’t have that capability, do we?” He looked at the general intensely.

“What could you do with four 100 kiloton nuclear devices and a delivery system, if you had them?” asked the general.

“Devices on the Herschel Spacecraft?” asked Sam.

“Yes,” confirmed the general. “Would it be enough?”

“Describe them,” asked Sam.

“We call them moles,” said the general. “They were originally designed to deliver a bomb to an underground bunker. They can be dropped from a plane or, in this case, a spacecraft. They rocket into the surface at a moderate rate of speed, secure themselves, and start drilling. They have enough power to drill full bore for about an hour. In tests, they penetrated about 200 feet into cold Antarctic ice. You could detonate them in space or deep within the comet, whichever you choose.”

“Yeah, but would four be enough?” asked another. “That is a mighty big object, over seven cubic miles of ice and rock. It weighs about 12 billion metric tons.”

“It has to be,” said the general. “It’s all you’ve got.”

“We’d need to detonate them just below the surface,” said another. “Fifty to a hundred feet down would be good. The vaporized rock and ice would act like a powerful rocket engine. If we were to detonate them on the leading edge of the Florence C, one at a time, we might be able to slow the comet down enough to allow Earth to slip by in front of it.”

“Suppose Florence C fragmented?” said another. “We’d be worse off than before.”

“It won’t fragment,” objected another. “It survived being blasted off the surface of the parent comet; it’s a solid ball of ice. It has to be.”

“You hope,” said yet another.

“Whatever we do, it has to be done soon,” noted Sam. With every passing minute, it takes more thrust to make this work.”

Under Mayfield’s direction, they broke up into workgroups. They were given 48 hours to develop a plan. No one got very much sleep.

Meanwhile, the public gazed in wonder as the now fragmented comet grew ever brighter. Even a small backyard telescope revealed what had happened. The government did their best to keep a lid on it, but inevitably the word was out; the largest of the new fragments was on a collision course with Earth.

To stem the rising panic, the Herschel Spacecraft team released the details of their plan. Now the public also knew that the craft had been equipped with a series of four nuclear warheads. Two of those warheads would be placed 50 feet below the surface of the comet, some two miles apart. They would be detonated three hours apart, imparting a thrust to the comet to throw it off course. The remaining two warheads would be held in standby should the first two fail to produce the desired effect.

As a last backup, a battery of Earth-based nuclear missiles would be used to pulverize whatever was left of the comet just an hour before it hit our atmosphere. Officials spoke confidently of success, yet they had grave doubts.

Just 11 hours after the finalization of the plan, the world watched as the Herschel Spacecraft moved into position to launch the first two moles. The spacecraft’s own cameras captured the launch. A mere four hours later, the moles were in place.