The End and Afterwards by Andy Cooke

Author:Andy Cooke [Cooke, Andy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sea Lion Press
Published: 2016-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 19

T-25 minutes

Woomera, Australia.

"Mr Shelton! Danny’s worked out that if we bypass the entire second-order turbojet cycle, we could just launch in rocket mode. We can skip to ramjet mode..."

Shelton cut the engineer off. "What’s the upshot?"

"We’ll burn a lot more fuel on take-off, but we can complete the cycle in the air and still get to orbit. And we save over half an hour. We can get off of the runway in less than thirty-five minutes from now!"

"Start embarking people! I’ll be last to board the last shuttle, okay?"

"Yes, sir!"

***

T-20 minutes

Pasadena, California.

Sheffield was standing directly behind the man from the NSA. It had turned out that there was a detachment of NSA personnel in Santa Barbara, just outside of Los Angeles, in some sort of intelligence convention, and a group of them had arrived ten minutes earlier.

At last, Sheffield couldn’t stand it anymore. "How’s it going?" he asked.

"Very, very close," murmured the man. "Ninety percent of the keys are there; last layer to go."

Ridley, standing next to Sheffield, looked up at the clock and sighed. "Never mind," she said. "It’s probably too late. I think we’re already dead."

"What do you mean?" demanded Sheffield. "There’s still..." he looked up at the digital display, which had been configured to count down to impact, "... nineteen minutes and forty seconds to go. We can still do this!"

"Think about it," said Ridley. "They’ve still got to transmit the course change after unlocking it. Speed of light delay means that by the time our signal gets to the probe it’ll be less than ten minutes from impact. It won't be heading perfectly for a dead centre, so there'll be some offset, but I don’t reckon it’ll be anywhere near enough."

At his expression, she explained. "Think about it. Whoever hacked the probe will have set a target. If it’s in the US, that target’ll be on the wrong side of the Earth, which'll confuse it. It's got error adjustment protocols, but they weren't set up to handle targeting at this speed. So it'll not hit dead centre, but offset to a degree, but that's limited by probability. I ran some numbers earlier and they indicated the offset from dead centre will be maybe a thousand kilometres if we’re lucky. Two thousand if we’re incredibly lucky. So - Earth’s radius is over six thousand kilometres; the best-case offset is two thousand kilometres, leaving four thousand to go; we can boost the probe sideways at three gees max. You do the sums."

Sheffield blinked. "Ah – s equals u t plus half a t squared, so assume initial sideways velocity is effectively zero..."

"Right."

"Assume eighteen minutes and a half left, halve it to get the signal there - assuming the probe is close enough to c for the purpose of estimation, so nine minutes fifteen seconds of boost - times sixty seconds is five-hundred-fifty-five. Square that and it’s – a bit over three hundred thousand, right."

"Uh-huh. Three hundred and eight thousand, twenty-five," confirmed Ridley, who'd always had a reputation as a lightning-fast mental calculator.

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