About a year ago I had these two scenes as the skeleton of a plot for
"Farewell to Night City," but by the time I wrote the first chapter, it
was no longer what I had in mind. I have no plans to use this anymore,
so I thought I'd put this up and see if anyone wanted it. Consider it up
for grabs.
<1st Scene>
Sylia removed the blindfold.
"We're here," she said.
Klein saw that he was in a small chamber made of cement. A single
fluorescent light illuminated the room. On the far wall was a steel
door with a heavy duty padlock over a reinforced hasp.
"Is it in there?" he asked, gesturing towards the door.
Sylia nodded.
Klein slapped his hands together and took a deep breath.
"Okay, let's go to work."
He reached down into his cases and retrieved a device resembling
a phasor from the old 2D science fiction videos. It had a meter long
flexible probe projecting from the device's front.
"We already surveyed for radiation," Nene said, recognizing the
device.
Klein performed his routine checks on the device.
"I'm sure you did, but I'd prefer to do my own survey anyway."
"That's fine," Sylia said. "I find it comforting that you don't
take things for granted. Especially in your line of work."
"So what was it you do again?" Priss asked. She wasn't keen on
bringing in an outsider to this mess, no matter what Sylia felt on the
matter.
"Consulting mostly," Klein replied. He walked over to the door.
"Consulting, huh," Priss said. "I didn't realize there was that
much work for an outside contractor."
"You'd be surprised, really," Klein replied. Sylia removed the
padlock from the door while Linna slid it open slightly. "A lot of
countries want nuclear weapons but can't afford all of the
infrastructure and skilled technical base required to keep it running."
He slid the end of the radiac probe through the opening and
consulted the meter.
"So they hire guys like me to evaluate their delivery systems,
storage, handling, and some of the nastier aspects of their program.
They look for the best deal of reliability, safety, and security
versus cost. I help them find the balance they can afford."
"You don't have a problem with that?" Priss asked in an acid tone.
"You're helping a bunch of third rate dictators maintain *nuclear*
arsenals, for chrissakes."
Klein stowed the radiac.
"Nukes have been around for almost a hundred years. The last time
they were ever used in anger was also the only time they were ever used
in anger."
He turned to Sylia. "Initial general area survey looks normal, but
I'd like to do an air sample survey next."
He turned back to Priss, who was trying to come up with a rebuttal
to his last statement. "Face it, everyone wants nukes that doesn't have
them, they're considered a symbol of prestige. But no one wants to
actually *use* them, and everyone who does have them is too chickenshit
to get rid of the ones they have. Since these things aren't going to
just go away, I'd rather be the one making sure they're being handled
properly."
"And making a quick buck off of it," Priss shot back.
Klein grinned. "Of course. Fees commensurate with the level of
knowledge and expertise. Just like any other person with highly
valuable skills."
"That's enough of that, Priss," Sylia admonished. "Let Mister
Klein do his job."
"It's okay," Klein said. "I enjoy a good debate on the subject, it
helps keep the tension down."
Linna made an aside to Nene while gesturing to Priss. "I don't see
how that's possible with her." Nene giggled in response.
Klein took an air sample and surveyed it for radioactivity.
"A little radon, but that's normal. Everything looks good so far.
If there is any contamination, it's a low level leak."
He reached into his cases again and put on a yellow cloth suit
that covered his entire body save for his face. Orange rubber gloves
and yellow rubber boots went on after. Nene set down a sheet of yellow
plastic in front of the door and held it in place with yellow and
magenta tape.
"Okay, I'll go in and inspect the device."
Klein stepped through the door. The device sat on a table inside a
large plastic tub. The ghost grey paint gleamed brightly in the light.
"Looks like a MIRV," he announced.
He raised a large device that looked like a big black plastic ball
and ran it over the weapon.
"Pretty good neutron count; we've got a live one, that's for
sure."
"That was our estimation," Sylia responded. "Can you tell whose it
is?"
Klein stepped closer and inspected it. "Hard to say just yet.
MIRVs are all about the same, really. Offhand I'd say it was American
or British from the paint scheme. Russian devices are olive colored,
Chinese and others are usually white."
He looked it over a little more.
"It's American," he announced suddenly. "A W-99 if I'm not
mistaken."
"Which means?" Priss asked from the other room.
"A standard implosion type warhead for a Trident III or one of the
older Neptune series SLBMs. Yeah, the fuzing mechanism in the base is
electrical, to backfit on the guidance bus of the old Trident IIIs. The
W-101 on the newer Neptunes is photonic."
"So what's the damage?" Priss asked.
Klein shrugged. "Maximum rated is fifty kilotons." He didn't go
on to say that it was the equivalent to about three of the bombs
dropped on Hiroshima, as it was a still sore subject with the Japanese
even ninety years later. "What it's set for is anyone's guess right
now. The W-99 is what is known in the biz as a 'dial-a-yield' weapon."
"Meaning?" Sylia asked.
"You can vary the fission yield of the warhead by preset amounts
by adjusting the firing sequence of the conventional explosive booster
charges."
He saw that he wasn't getting anywhere with his explanation, and
so went on in detail.
"Basically the warhead is a plutonium 'pit' of subcritical mass
surrounded by a beryllium sphere that acts as a neutron reflector and
"source" neutron supply, and a sphere of precision formed high and
low explosives sandwiched between the reflector and the plutonium.
When you detonate the weapon, the conventional explosives burn at
differing rates, which create 'lenses' of compressive force on the
plutonium; collapsing the fuel into a critical mass long enough to
support fission for a nuclear yield.
"All 'dial-a-yield' means is that you can vary the efficiency of
the conventional explosive train by sending detonation impulses to
fewer charge elements. The less efficient the conventional explosives,
the less efficient the nuclear yield. You've really got only a few
nanoseconds of optimum fission density before heat and pressure effects
force the fuel atoms far enough apart to stop the chain reaction."
"Why would you want to do that?" Linna asked. "It doesn't make
sense to waste all that plutonium."
Klein reached down with a special wrench attachment to the base of
the warhead. He gave it a solid jerk that popped the warhead open with
a hiss. The Knight Sabers each jumped in surprise at the sound.
"It was a concept most of the advanced nuclear powers latched on
to around the turn of the century. Sometimes you really don't need to
turn ten or twelve square kliks into a radioactive smear, when only a
klik or two will do. You could adjust the yield of the W-99
electronically while it was already loaded onto the missile, so you
could tailor your strikes whenever the tactical situation dictated
without having to second guess how much nuclear force you needed
beforehand. -It takes a lot of time to load specific warheads on
missiles, and what happens when you get caught with the wrong loadout?"
"Sounds great," Priss said. "So what?"
"It's a great tactical aid in theory," Klein replied. He leaned
over to look inside the warhead. "Only problem with dialing your yield
down to minimum, say in this case about five kilotons, is that your
plutonium usage drops to about thirty percent. The W-99 carries about
twenty kilos of plutonium, so you'd be scattering about thirteen kilos
of the stuff as fallout."
"God..." Sylia breathed, understanding the implications of Klein's
statement at once.
"Exactly," Klein affirmed. "They get pretty goddamned dirty. You'd
kill more people with the fallout contamination than the blast itself.
Back in '07 the American president issued an executive order directing
that all the 'dial-a-yield' weapons be set to their maximum yields.
They're actually quite efficient at their maximum, very clean as far as
fission weapons go."
"2007 was the year the Islamic Jihad poisoned Tel Aviv's aquifer,"
Sylia said. "They used four kilos of finely ground plutonium shavings
to contaminate the water table. They killed about thirty thousand
people before anyone caught on. Tel Aviv's been using desalinization
plants in the ocean for their water ever since. The aquifer is
effectively poisoned forever. It's cost Israel billions to build the
plants and come up with ways to minimize the contamination plume."
"You got it," Klein affirmed. "Plutonium is a lot more dangerous
as a terror weapon when used as a poison rather than as bomb fuel."
He reached in and slid the control package from its shock mounted
rails. He studied the weapon's status with a small palmtop computer
plugged into the bus interface.
"I've got good news," he announced. "The weapon hasn't been armed,
so there's no fear of it going off just yet."
"Well that's a sigh of relief," Nene sighed for effect.
"I've got some really disturbing news, too," Klein continued.
Nene groaned.
"What is it?" Sylia asked.
"This warhead wasn't taken from storage."
"Oh?"
"Nope, the W-99 has three gamma ray windows along the nosecone
assembly. The warhead takes 'sightings' on known cosmic gamma ray
sources as references for its position data. It can then make midcourse
corrections after release from the missile bus using a small reserve of
hydrazine gas ported through tiny thrusters in the afterbody. The
windows have special shields in place to protect the sensors when the
warhead is in storage. They get removed when the warhead is mounted on
the missile bus assembly, because the missile itself will provide the
necessary shielding while it sits in the launch tube. There aren't any
shields on this warhead."
"You're saying this warhead was removed from a missile?"
Klein nodded slowly.
"Stealing nuclear weapons from a western power is damn near
impossible, but doing it during the missile assembly is absolutely
unheard of. Unfortunately, I don't have any explanation for this."
"There have been enough Russian and Ukrainian warheads stolen
in the last three decades," Sylia noted. "Why got to the trouble of
stealing one of these?"
Klein nodded. "That's all very true, but Soviet designed weapons
had serious reliability problems. A lot of them drifted to Israel,
Iran, and Pakistan, where they had their plutonium pits removed and
placed into more reliable weapons built from stolen western designs.
That was China's biggest technology export, next to ballistic missile
production, from 1996 until 2006."
He consulted his palmtop once more.
"This thing is set for maximum yield," he said slowly.
<2nd Scene>
"You know that research project you had me working on?" Nene asked
Sylia.
She looked up from her tea.
"You found something?"
Nene nodded gravely. "Oh yeah."
"Go ahead."
"This stuff was once classified Black, as in, it never happened,"
Nene began. "It's been downgraded to Secret since then, but don't ask
me why."
"Get to the point, Nene," Sylia scolded.
Nene smiled weakly. **So much for showing off.**
"Well, It turns out that the USS _Alabama_, an old Ohio Class
submarine, experienced a missile emergency on October 17th, 2008."
"What kind of missile emergency?"
"The _Alabama_ was the lead boat for the Trident III missile. It
was supposed to have another 1000 kilometers of range, and the ability
to be launched from extreme depth to limit the ability of satellite
blue-green laser detection. To do this they had to redesign the gas
generator that ejects the missile from the launch tube prior to main
motor start."
She could see that Sylia wasn't interested in her trivia, and
decided to step it up.
"Anyway, the new gas generator design turned out to be a lemon.
_Alabama_ had an electrical short and fire in their Number 18 gas
generator; pressure and temperature in the tube were starting to build
up, and so they were forced to eject the missile in Tube 18 before its
solid fuel exploded and took them to the bottom.
"The missile sank in four thousand meters of water after it was
ejected, and the _Alabama_ returned to port. The incident was never
reported to Congress or the public because at the time the United
States was under START III Treaty limitations that put the bulk of its
warhead allowance into their submarine force. Reporting the incident
would have amounted to admitting that their entire strategic deterrence
force was impotent. With so many new players in the Nuclear Club after
the turn of the century, a lot of them openly hostile to the U.S., you
can see why they kept their mouths shut."
Sylia nodded as Nene continued.
"The U.S. Navy contracted through a subsidiary of Hughes
Industries to come up with a salvage project that could retrieve the
entire Trident III missile intact. Hughes had done some bang-up work
in the seventies for a project known as 'Red September' -the retrieval
of a downed Soviet sub within 200 miles of Hawaii- and the expertise
was still there."
"That subsidiary of Hughes Industries," Sylia began, "It wouldn't
happen to be--"
"--The same," Nene finished with a nod. "The company that later
grew to become the GENOM multinational."
"So," Sylia said evenly. "Did they succeed?"
"No," Nene replied. "The problem with the gas generator was soon
fixed, and the U.S. defense budget for the next several years was
strapped to support a massive modernization program. There wasn't
enough money, and no real concern about anyone going down there to
retrieve it -if they even knew it existed and where it was. Anyone
who could afford to salvage the missile intact could likely build
their own already. They left it down there and forgot about it."
"Somehow I don't think everyone forgot about it."
"I think you're right," Nene agreed. "After some digging through
related files that have been recently declassified, I found that the
father of our man Quincy was on the original project staff for the
'Red September' recovery. Quincy himself was on the _Alabama_ project.
He knew where the missile went down, and its condition on the bottom."
"Interesting," Sylia whispered.
"I think it's a safe bet that GENOM went back to its roots and
recovered that missile, or at least the warheads," Nene concluded.
"They certainly have the technology to attempt something like that."
"That only leaves the question of why," Sylia said. "GENOM could
*buy* black market nuclear weapons, and it certainly wouldn't be too
much trouble to put together the assets to make their own. Why go to
all of the trouble and expense to recover a missile with warheads that
might not even be functional after so many years?"
A moment of silence passed between them.
"Here's a thought," Nene said at length. "What if they recovered
the missile before they were so rich and powerful?"
Sylia's face suddenly darkened at the possibilities that swam
through her mind.
"You mean before the Great Kanto Earthquake, don't you," she said.
It was certainly not a question.
Notes:
Basically I'm saying that the Great Kanto Earthquake was no act of god,
and that Genom was responsible for it so that they could expand into
Japan with a virtual monopoly on reconstruction. The warheads, buried
deep into the unstable strata of the vulnerable tectonic plates, caused
the earthquake. The one recovered by the Knight Sabers was intended as
a backup measure to cause a massive underground explosion close to a
smaller, more localized fault line, and damage to Tokyo, in case the
earthquake didn't quite happen as planned. When everything worked out
perfectly, it was abandoned and forgotten for some time.
Only years later, when construction threatened to reveal the warhead,
did Genom move in to recover it. The Knight Sabers intervened, and
ended up with the weapon. Now Genom wants it back, because an
investigation into the warhead's origins could prove their culpability
in the earthquake.