The business of humanity is never finished. The Master Blasters are looking at another Contract, bigger than anything they’ve tackled before. Once, Earth was an iceball, frozen right down to the Equator. It thawed out again. There’s a world beyond the Portal in the same condition. The Ishanageri want it thawed out. In less than millions of years, thank you very much.
This time they actually have a choice. The business of saving worlds has become – well, normal. There’s a lot of credit to be had on this one, and a step toward the big time which will make Earth a little safer against all the possible disasters the blind malice of the universe can concoct.
For the people with the boots on the ground, it’s a job. They’re there to get it done, blowing shit up with nukes to save worlds. They trust the higher ups to know what they’re doing. The Negotiators trust the Contracting Entities to play according to the rules. Everyone trusts the PAR to enforce those rules.
To start, of course, it’s a day on the job …
Chapter 1 Drilling
If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something.
8th Corollary of Murphy’s Law
Tsunami Planetary Surface, The Can
Contract Deployment Day 33
Tommygun started talking, watching for signs of people not keeping up. Everyone told her she talked too fast. As a Deputy Chief of Surface Operations for Master Blasters, she could tell them they listened too slow.
She started with the map up on the smart board. “Here’s the Contract, people. We’re here, North-East shore of Alfa Continent, rocky desolate place, pretty much uninhabited. The offshore area along this part of the coast, about 150 klicks each way from our location, is like a big trough full of mud, the outer edge of which is held in place by a ridge of rock right at the ridge of the continental shelf.”
Running the cursor along the ridge, she outlined it in red. “The rock ridge is unstable, like a house with a bad foundation. Shake it hard enough, it comes loose and falls down to the ocean floor, three or four klicks down, followed by close to ten thousand cubic kilometres of mud. Instant mega-tsunami, add water and stir. They’re estimating max wave height of 250 metres, or 800 feet when it hits shallow water.”
Next, she moved the cursor across Ocean 2 to the low-lying area along the coast of Delta Continent. “That’s the gun, here’s the target. This area here, about the size and population of Japan, we’re calling Lowland. Primo real estate for the locals. Apparently they’re semi-aquatic.”
She brought up a picture of a local alien. It looked like the mutated first cousin of an otter, with weird eyes, six-fingered hands and dark blue fur.
“Kinda cute.” One of the younger guys commented.
“Cute is as cute does.” Tommygun had been on Sanctuary when a bunch of cute teddy bear scruffies had held the Number One Drill Crew hostage.
Princess had never recovered from it. Last she’d heard, he was living in Florida on his disability pension. The big guy from Brooklyn had been a rock for his crew during the Contract, but after he got home it had all caught up to him.
She brought the cursor back to the red lined area. “This area here is tectonically unstable, like California. It’s due, Hell, overdue, for a big quake. When it hits, the ridge goes, the wave rolls across the sea, and Lowland gets scrubbed off the map.”
Flicking away the map, she replaced it with a cross section of the island they were on, called Horsetooth because it was kind of shaped like one. “So, here’s how we stop it. We drill down to the base of the island, here, right at where the mud bottom is.”
She added the overlay of the path the nuclear drill had to follow, giving them a minute to soak it in. “The end of the drill hole has to be exactly right, depth, angle, azimuth. When that’s done and I’ve signed off, not before, you can pull the drill and case it.”
She watched Jello, the Driller of the crew, for his reaction. He was a young guy, not long out of university, and this was his first time at bat as Driller. He gave a short, measured nod. “I’ve got this.”
She took a step to one side for AA, as Arthur Alfven, Lead of the Hot Crew, was known.
He took his cue. “Okay, once you’re done we emplace the nuke. 3.5 megaton device. It will excavate a tunnel right through the base of the island, on a down angle to give a good flow.”
He tapped his finger on where the drill path ended. “The seismic data on this site looks good. Hard, tough solid rock. Seismics never tell you the whole story. The imager on the drill has much better resolution. If you see any indication of a fault or crack in the rock, call me, RFN. The Contract is for a nice clean tunnel. There will be a small amount of scaling off, which is fine. More tunnel for our bang. Too much of that is not good. The tunnel has to be stable, through solid rock, so the mud doesn’t run through too fast. There’s a Hell of a pressure differential pushing it, like an eighteen wheeler on a tube of toothpaste.”
“Excuse me, sir, but what about radiation?” The young woman who asked was the paramedic for Shift B.
Tommygun frowned but said nothing and let AA handle it. New and nervous was one thing, phobic was another. The shrinks did their best to weed out people with that phobia, but no screening process was perfect.
“Cracker and the crew in Device Design build very clean devices. What little there is will be washed down to the bottom of the deep ocean and buried under kilometres of mud. Disposing of radioactive materials safely is a standard clause in the Contract.” He kept it even and factual, to Tommygun’s approval. The mantra of the Company was “Knowledge drives out fear.”
The mantra doesn’t always work. Tommygun made a mental note to have a word with the Driller. The Company was growing fast, as companies in the Risk Enterprises empire tended to do. Veterans of major Contracts could move up fast if they had the moxie for it. A big line in the job description was to pass on their experience to the newbies and weed out the ones who couldn’t cut it.
Tommygun took the stage again. “Sparky, once we do the shot, you’re on deck. We need to know the flow rate of the mud and the exact dimensions of the tunnel. Get your drones down there and get us hard data. This is how we decide if we’ve met our Contract deliverables. If we’re good, great. If not, we have a Plan B, alternate site, not as good but good enough. Your data have to be diamond hard, you hear me?”
“Copy.” Sparky was a skinny black-haired guy in cargo pants, a VR helmet ready to his hand from just completed equipment trials. His t-shirt read, “Whoever Dies With The Most Toys Wins … And I Intend To Win.”
He pointed at AA. “How long after the shot before the scaling is finished? Like the boss said, it has to be right. If I put the drone through and the chunks of rock fall off after, it’s not going to be right.”
AA frowned. “Give it twelve hours. That gives a good margin.”
Tommygun dealt herself in. “Do two passes. One after twelve hours and another after 24.”
“Copy, boss. No such thing as too much data. We’ll be monitoring the flow rate by imaging sonar, how long through the tunnel gives a check on that.” Sparky got the picture.
Tommygun smacked her hands together. “Questions? Issues? … Go do it.”
Tommygun saw them out to the rig. Eleven shifts, all being well. She looked for the next thing that could kill them. She didn’t see anything, which didn’t mean it wasn’t out there. She checked the mask radio channels, checking the chatter. There was some, not too much.
She took a deep breath of the air in the Can, parsing out the smells that would tell her almost as much as the detailed inspection she didn’t have time for. 40 people were crammed into a space so cramped that they were hot-bunking, one rack shared between two people. They were clean people, and the Can was clean, too, as the smell of soap and disinfectants attested. There were only two steady states there. Everyone helped keep it clean, or nobody cared and it degenerated into a pigsty.
Jello was being watchful about safety, which was essential. Tsunami was less hostile than most cough Earth-like cough planets. Carelessness still got people killed.
Tsunami Planetary Surface, Drill Rig
Contract Deployment Day 35
Tommygun was out at the rig for the shift turnover four shifts later when the anomaly showed up.
This was one of the few times in the schedule when both crews were awake and in the same place, so she could track the morale of the crews as well as the progress of the job.
It was, as it happened, local daytime, which was always a crapshoot and didn’t really affect the work schedule. The shifts ran on Earth’s Greenwich Mean Time because they were humans and aliens were alien, living on alien worlds. The sun was hot on her back and she was sweating in spite of the cooling system in the mask. They were close to the local equator and Tsunami was slightly closer to a slightly hotter star than Earth’s, which made for a dense oxygen rich oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere. Being close to the local equator didn’t help.
There had been one case of someone ignoring a high-oxygen alert because he figured it was a bad sensor, and another of someone letting himself get dehydrated. Jello had caught both of them and dealt with them harshly, which got him another good mark in Tommygun’s mental evaluation.
Auger, the drill operator on A shift, brought up a vertical density profile from the drill’s imaging capability, as was SOP.
She ran the cursor down the image. “Because we’re drilling close to the rock wall on the landward side of the island, we’re getting a profile of the mud next to the rock. We’re just over a kilometre down at this point, this just showed up at the end of the shift. We’ve got mud, mud, mud to here, with the occasional rock. Right here, the density drops to 0.9 grams per cc.”
She tapped the lighter grey of the profile. “That’s a gas pocket. 80% water ice and 20% methane. I called Jello as soon as I saw it, he made the call to keep drilling.”
Tommygun cocked an eyebrow in Jello’s direction. He took his cue. “20 metres of solid rock between the gas pocket and the drill. I assessed no hazard, ordered her to keep drilling. My call.”
“Good call.” Tommygun gave Jello a good pass mark on the decision. Right balance between safety and schedule, hadn’t gone ‘Mother, may I’ to her for a call he could and should make himself.
AA frowned. “Auger, what can you tell me about these gas deposits?”
“They tend to form along the continental shelf, on Earth anyway, and they’re normally stable as long as they’re under pressure. Drill into one, and it simultaneously dumps a bunch of heat into it and takes the pressure off. Big bubble of gas up the drill path, gas explosion. That’s what happened at Hole 3 on Fimbulwinter.” Auger said.
AA’s expression went tight. “Tommygun, we have a problem. If drilling into one of these pockets is bad, I’m pretty sure the blast of a three and a half megaton device into it is going to be worse. We’re using a shaped charge device pointed into the rock, but that’s still a lot of energy.”
The next thing that could kill us is now inbound. “How big can these pockets be?”
Auger shrugged. “You’ve got what I’ve got, boss, what they taught us in training. This is what it looks like, if you drill into it bad shit goes down.”
“Copy. Dump all the data to a stick. This one goes Earthside. Jello, keep drilling for now, but stand by for a change of plans.” Tommygun was talking a little faster than usual.
“Copy.” It was a chorus, and two minutes later she was headed for the Can with the thumb drive zipped into a pocket of her blaze orange boiler suit.
Locked in and unmasked, she sat down on the folding chair in front of the rugged WRAITH laptop. Thumbprint to unlock the keyboard, irises and long password from memory to actually log in. Air gap data transfer, done.
RFI, Requirement For Information, to PortalNet Liaison, CC’d to the Point Negotiator and to Ariel Wilson, commanding Swagman in high orbit.
Separate notice to the Point Negotiator. “I am not doing the shots without good data and modelling on the effects. The locals did not even see this, so I am not going to trust their data.”
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