Earth Strike: Star Carrier: Book One

Chapter Twenty-Five

18 October 2404

Inner System, Sol System

1430 hours, TFT

The remainder of the battle was anticlimax…but as Deep Tactician Emphatic Blossom had suggested, it was bitter anticlimax.

Most of the impactors fired by the Turusch hunterfleet were caught in the sandblast, but not all. Hurtling across the Abyss between the thirty-AU shell and the Inner planets, the impactors, each with a warhead massing slightly less than one kilogram, had been aimed with considerable precision; the plasma shock wave of the hivel explosion midway between Green Squadron and the Turusch fleet had deflected most of them ever so slightly…a minute course change that was magnified into a miss by hundreds, even thousands of kilometers twenty-five AUs away.

Most of those impactors that survived the explosion missed their targets on Earth, Mars, and in the spaces in between, but there were exceptions.

A Turusch impactor, a twelve-kilogram projectile traveling at near-c, struck the Martian desert 2200 kilometers north of Aethiopis. Plunging through the atmosphere within a fraction of a second, the mass detonated within the Apsus Valley, liberating an immense flood of melted permafrost surging toward Elysium. The shock wave rippled through the planet’s crust, encountered the deeply anchored cable of the Aethiopian space elevator, and sent a crack-the-whip surge of energy up the ribbon.

Not even the super-tough nanocarbon buckyweave of the elevator’s ground-to-space tether was strong enough to contain and carry that much energy. The cable parted some six thousand kilometers above the surface. The upper part of the cable, anchored in space by a small asteroid, was suddenly released from the planet’s hold. With the anchor moving much faster than the velocity required to keep it in orbit at that altitude, when the tether snapped it took a tangential path outbound, dragging with it some millions of tons of interconnected factories, habs, and shipyards located at the cable’s 17,000-kilometer level. More than eight thousand people lived and worked in those facilities, mostly naval personnel or technicians with the Mars terraforming project.

A few were still alive when SAR craft caught up with the free-flying space elevator fragment days later.

The six thousand kilometers of buckyweave tether still connected to the Martian surface began to fall. Most burned up in the planet’s atmosphere, which fortunately was much thicker now than it had been at the beginning of the terraforming project. What got through, however, added to the destruction on the surface, where some hundreds of domes had cracked or been smashed by the initial shock wave, where tens of thousands of workers were killed when their pressurized habs vented to space, where entire colony domes were overwhelmed by planetquake, by shock wave, by flood, and erased from the Martian surface.

The entire planet would shudder, quake, and in one scientist’s description “ring like a bell” for years after the impact.

Another impactor skimmed past the sun, striking Earth on her morning side, coming down in the Atlantic Ocean thirty-five hundred kilometers off the coast of North America. The effects were less severe than on Mars, for the projectile’s passage within a few million kilometers of the sun had tunneled through the star’s photosphere, slowing it somewhat, vaporizing much of the infalling one-kilo mass, heating the remnant to molten and deformed plasticity. Ten minutes later, the mass struck Earth’s atmosphere and exploded.

The shock wave and the fragments that made it all the way through the atmosphere generated a savage tsunami, a wall of water rippling out across the ocean. Minutes later, the tidal wave surged into shallow water, rearing to a hundred meters in height as it was funneled up the narrow bottleneck of old New York Harbor.

Old Manhattan was all but demolished, the crumbling ruins of buildings smashed and battered, like sandcastles caught by an incoming surge across a beach. Only slightly weakened, the wave slammed north into the New City, toppling the kilometer-high tower of the Columbia Arcology. The strike killed perhaps seventy thousand people for whom, until that instant, the war with the Turusch had been a dim and far-off affair, something mentioned in news downloads and special reports from the Authority…reports that most citizens ignored or shrugged off as of no consequence.

Elsewhere, the wave caused unimaginable devastation all along the continent’s eastern shoreline.

Exact casualty figures were never compiled, but the number of dead was certainly in the tens of millions. The same out-rushing ripple struck the coast of Africa, the Atlantic shore of Europe, the nearly submerged islands of the Caribbean, and the coastline of South America, and millions more perished.

Bad as the catastrophe was, casualties and damage might have been much worse. With exceptions such as new New York, most of the urban centers that had been built during the exodus from the world’s ocean shorelines over the past few centuries had been well inland. Rising sea levels had created a kind of buffer zone around the perimeter of each continent, largely uninhabited stretches of marsh and swamp, of shallow water and estuary.

Even so, millions died.

Potentially worse than the tidal waves were the storms that followed the impactor’s wake, as super-heated air in Earth’s upper atmosphere blasted out in all directions at supersonic speed, triggering a vast swirl of low pressure that swiftly collapsed into a super-hurricane. Storm winds of hundreds of kilometers per hour whipped seas already set in motion by tidal waves into white froth; the storm approached the mainland over the shallows that once had been Florida and blasted its way inland, moving first north, then curving with the mountains and the planet’s coriolis forces to the northeast, pounding and booming up the already battered coast. After inundating Maine and Nova Scotia, it curved back out to sea…but by that time had taken on a life of its own, a hurricane swirl of clouds as large as the North Atlantic, a semi-permanent storm like Jupiter’s centuries-old Red Spot slowly circling from North America to western Europe to Western Africa to the Caribbean and back to North America once more.

The storm would persist for months, until lasers fired from orbit were used to heat the stratosphere and create high-pressure systems that contained, then gradually dissipated the storm.

News downloads referred to the hurricane as the Starstorm, and predicted that the cloud disk would reflect so much of the sun’s infalling light and warmth that it would trigger a new ice age. Winters were cooler for the next five years, but with the Starstorm’s end, the climate returned to what currently was normal for the planet.

Other strikes across the Inner System were smaller in scale, less devastating. An impactor massing several hundred kilograms struck a cluster of manufactories anchored at SupraKenya. Thousands were killed, and other structures anchored nearby suffered significant damage, but the elevator, as some feared, did not fall, and the calamity of Aethiopis was not repeated on Earth. The bulk of the impactor, fortunately, missed the Earth.

At Phobia, the Confederation destroyer Emmons had been in spacedock, preparing for boost to join the rest of the fleet, when an impactor struck the dock facility. The Emmons, the facility gantry, and perhaps eight hundred naval and civilian personnel were instantly vaporized, and thousands more were killed as fragments from the disaster slashed through the delicate web of habs and crew modules in Mars synchorbit…including Mars Fleet CIC.

Among the dead were Admiral Henderson and one of his senior aides, Rear Admiral Karyn Mendelson, killed when the base command hub was torn open and its atmosphere vented into space.

The near-c impactors flashed across the Inner System over the course of some minutes, and then were gone, vanished into the outer depths. Hours and even days later, however, the Inner System was bombarded again by the infalling debris of blasted and shattered spacecraft, both Turusch and human.

A robotic nitrogen freighter, on the long, curved, infalling trajectory from Triton to Mars, was struck by what was probably a large piece of a Confederation fighter-ironically, later identified as Lieutenant Robert Hauser’s ship from VFA-31, the Impactors. The fragment struck with a relative velocity of nearly 90 kilometers per second. The freighter and its cargo were a total loss.

Two emergency-rescue team members were killed at Schiaparelli, on Mars, when a five-kilogram fragment