Vernian Space Gun by Kal Spriggs

Author:Kal Spriggs [Spriggs, Kal]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sutek Press
Published: 2020-03-14T22:00:00+00:00

“Senator!” General Juknellis smiled broadly as our latest group of VIPs came down off the charter bus. Up until a few hours earlier, there had still been debate over whether to fly them directly to the site by helicopter or to land them at Leadville and bus them up.

I’d been told by Captain Leopard, who had been assigned as a Military Liaison Officer, that certain Senators who had houses in Vail had decided to make it a policy to fly them into the Vail airport, instead, and set up charter bus transportation up the highway from there, instead.

Good work if you’ve got it, I suppose, I thought, even as General Juknellis shook hands and smiled with various politicians as they came down. The media was present in force, but General Juknellis had his public affairs officer managing them like an orchestra, moving them to particular locations for photos and keeping them so busy giving them approved information that they didn’t have time to wander off and try and dig into anything on their own.

The Senators and handful of congressmen and -women were more of a gaggle than anything else. I’d formed up some of my people to greet them, but General Juknellis kept them more or less in a group and ushered them over to the central work site, where they were beginning to build up the outer support structure for the ignition chamber. It was pretty damned impressive, I knew. The ignition chamber, or the milk jug as we’d taken to calling it, was going to be over a hundred meters across. The concrete foundation had dried and we had already started building the steel support framework for the milk jug itself. A couple hundred welders were at work and we had four cranes going at a time, lifting steel support beams as big as a meter across off the back of trucks and then lowering them into place.

“So where is the rocket going to launch from?” the Senator from New York asked.

General Juknellis didn’t miss a beat, “Well, Senator, I’m glad you asked that question. This is the ignition chamber, where the capsule will receive its initial push. After that, the ignition process will shove it up the tube and then further ignition will launch it up the side of the mountain in the launch tube.”

“I thought rockets had to go straight up?” The Congresswoman from California asked, pushing aside her sequined hat to scratch her head in confusion. “Why is it going at an angle like that? Why not just build a really tall tower?”

“The orbit is angular,” General Juknellis told her with a friendly smile, “so our capsule needs to go sideways a bit as well as up, ma’am. Now, I’m sure you all would just love to see our demonstration capsule. They’ve just delivered the first prototype…”

Colonel Elliot came up next to me, “I think General J has them well in hand, Jack. You can let your folks get back to work.”

“Thanks sir,” I gave a sigh of relief and turned to my guys.

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