President Lanoha tapped his fingers on the table in front of him, “Why didn’t we see the splinter coming down on us?”
The sensor officer replied, “Sir, our space sensors had been turned to look down. We thought we’d seen the end of the rocks and splinters, I don’t know where this one came from.”
Imus shook his head, “When you hit the main rock with nukes you broke a bunch of splinters off of it. Some of these flew ahead of the rock, some followed the rock down. Has anyone checked on the people in Cheyenne? The splinter was large enough to cause a lot of civilian causalities. Burns, buildings and homes collapsing, bridges falling, roads cracked, gas mains broken, and water pipes broken. There could be thousands of injured people in the surrounding towns of the mountain.”
President Lanoha nodded, “Someone get some people out there and provide what help we can.”
The commanding general shook his head, “Sir with the loss of the support troops, we are very short of people to send into the surrounding the towns.”
“Can we talk to them to see how they are?”
“No, sir. We have zero outside communications.”
“We can’t leave these people alone. Get us back on line and then let’s see what we can do for the surrounding people. By the way, I thought we sent these people south because we’re over the freeze line. How many people were left?”
The general responded, “Sir, at least fifty thousand.”
“Shit, did no one believe the damn rock was going to be an end of the world event?”
The only sound in the room was the sound of systems rebooting. Imus smiled, “I’m back, I need a few minutes to see what happened to my data. Crap, I’m going to need to restart my program. When the network went down my program crashed. I thought this place was built to survive a nuke.”
The general smiled, “You’re alive aren’t you? The systems are rebooting. The splinter that hit us did so with more energy than a 50-megaton nuke. If we hadn’t built this as good as we did, you wouldn’t be here. Look at what happened to the Russian copy of this facility.”
“Thank you.”
The main monitor rebooted. It displayed the outside of the mountain. They saw the crack in the mountain and the large chunk of the mountain that was ripped out. When the cameras refocused, they saw the base was burning, and there were overturned and destroyed vehicles. Even 70-ton tanks had been flipped and tossed as if they were toys. The camera showed dense dark smoke over the local towns. President Lanoha asked, “Can we get a better view of the towns?”
“No, sir. I’m sorry, we don’t have any drones or cameras which can focus that far away. I’m sorry. Maybe the next pass of the overhead birds we can get a better view. One will be overhead in 28 minutes.”
“Mr. Imus, how are you doing?”
“Mr. President, just a few more minutes. I’m almost there. The computers are crunching the numbers.”
“Keep up the good work.”
President Lanoha asked, “By the way, did we get hit with any other splinters?”
The general replied, “Sir, the seismographs say there was a strike in the Caribbean, based on the data, the wave most likely washed over all of the islands. There was another in Bakersfield, California, which caused additional earthquakes…”
“Not much left to destroy over there, the last couple of big ones saw to that.”
“Sir, the buildings and bridges which survived the big one, didn’t survive the additional shaking the splinter caused. They’re coming down all along the state. It looks like from Orange County to 50 miles north of San Francisco. Whatever was standing is coming down. We’re also getting a lot of smaller shocks which means many of the smaller faults are erupting.”
“Okay, not what I wanted to hear. Any other strikes?”
“A large one in Italy. It looks like just outside of Rome. The city is destroyed. I hope the Pontiff made it out safely.”
Imus frowned, “Mr. President, I have the data, I want to say there’s a range in the data because I really need a lot more information, and most of it is impossible for us to gather, so based on the numbers we did have, the answer is…” Imus typed some additional lines into his laptop.
President Lanoha replied, “Mr. Imus, we’re waiting!”
“Sir, the range is the debris will circle the northern atmosphere for between 18 and 30 months.”
“WHAT? That’s impossible!”
“Mr. President, I’m sorry but that’s the best estimate I can give you. The debris is so thick extraordinarily little to none of the sun’s warming rays are going to reach the surface. The temperature is already dropping and will continue until the mean temperature reaches minus 32 C.”
“What’s that in Fahrenheit?”
“Minus 25. At that temperature there won’t be much moisture in the snow, it will be very powdery, but the temperatures will be low enough to enable massive ice glaciers to move south from the North Pole. They’ll cover all of Canada, two thirds of America, most of Europe, almost of all of Russia, and more than an half of China.”
Imus put up an image of the white covered planet on the large monitor. “If we looked down on the planet in three to five years, it’s going to look like this. It might happen quicker depending on the local conditions and the winds blowing south from the North Pole.”
President Lanoha asked, “What about the Southern Hemisphere?”
“Sir, the entire planet is going to cool…”
Someone whispered, “Wish we had some of that global warming now.”
The President said, “Enough. This isn’t a joke. Mr. Imus please continue.”
“Sir, they will see more snow and ice in the Andes, but the rest will be cooler than normal, but still close to normal. They will
