Nightside City by Lawrence Watt-Evans

Author:Lawrence Watt-Evans [Watt-Evans, Lawrence]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: sf

Chapter Twelve

DEPENDING ON WHAT YOU KNOW ABOUT EPIMETHEUS and planetology in general, you may be wondering either why I wanted to shoot her, or, if you're a little more up on the subject, why I didn't shoot her. I'll take the second question first.

I didn't shoot her because I knew that if I did, I would never make it out of the city alive. I probably wouldn't make it out of the house alive. And the idiots at the Ipsy might just be dumb enough to go on without her. I needed a less direct approach.

As for why she deserved to be shot, just think about it for a minute.

Epimetheus is about 9,056 kilometers in diameter, with a density of seven grams per cubic centimeter. A rough calculation on a unit in my head gave me a figure of twenty-six times ten to the twentieth tons for the total mass, but I probably messed that up somewhere. In any case, we're talking about trillions of tons of mass. We're talking about a very thin crust that's rotating at 138 centimeters a day at the city's latitude.

Now, I admit, that's not very fast. If you were in a cab moving that fast, and it hit a stone wall and stopped instantly, you could probably just step out unhurt. The cab would probably be unhurt. But a cab is a solid piece of fibers and ceramics, designed to take a lot of stress and with a mass of maybe half a ton. A planet's a dynamic system, and there's just so much of it.

Let's suppose that they set off a charge designed to exactly counter the momentum of the planet's rotation-exactly the right amount of energy. Where are they setting this charge off?

On the surface, presumably, or just below.

You think it's going to stop the core? Or the mantle, which isn't even completely solid to begin with?

Hell, no; the crust is going to rip itself loose from the mantle and probably come apart completely. The crust is already pretty thin and delicate on Epimetheus, with volcanoes scattered all along a million fault lines; where most planets have maybe a couple of dozen continental plates, Epimetheus, because of its hot interior, has thousands.

If you wanted to stop the planet from rotating, first you'd have to fasten it all together with something a bit stronger than the hot rock and gravity it has naturally. As it is, a big shaped fusion charge is just going to ram one or two plates back against the others and tear a big hole in the crust-if you're lucky.

More likely it would just vaporize a piece of crust. I've never heard that shaped fusion charges are all that reliable to begin with.

And then there's the meltdown factor.

Let's consider that charge again. It's putting out one hell of a lot of energy, very quickly. Theoretically, most of that's going to be kinetic energy, directed against the planetary rotation. Some of it is going to be light and heat, though; a lot of heat.

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