Road to nowhere, Arc 4 of "Gone with the Sun"

Chapter 48 Overkill

What just happened?

The QEC bubble in Peacemaker went dark. That was one briefing of the Primarch which Garrus wouldn't forget. Slowly, he left the secure bubble and contemplated the bank-and-bell display in the war room. Nyrek entered the chamber.

"Who's flying?"

"Kozlo."

That was acceptable. Peacemaker didn't have a lot to do until Normandy and Nairobi had finished emplacing remote-detonation Sakharov mines at each end of the comatose Collector ship. All the pilots-designate needed practice during slack time.

Garrus and Williams had been all for blowing the Collector dreadnought to Kingdom Come where it stood in orbit, but Shepard had said No. Actually he'd said "waste not, want not" but it amounted to the same thing, and Liara had agreed – if it were mined.

It was acceptable, given the… unexpected power of the small warheads. Actually…

"Equalizer. Did the Alliance ever tell us the rating of a Sakharov mine?"

"Three point five megatons, General." Garrus swallowed hard.

"What is the estimated power, given the recordings, of the missiles used to disable the Collector vessel?"

"One point eight megatons, General."

Bloody hell. Nearly two megatons in a frigate-launched air-to-air missile.

"It was Shanxi that did it, General."

Garrus spun around. His human engineer, Riley, was sitting in a chair behind him; she looked absorbed in the threat map depicted in the Bell. He would have to get used to aliens on a turian warship. Carefully, he asked: "So this is a new development, then?"

"No, sir. We have known for centuries the design tricks. We simply haven't used it since the late twentieth century."

"Why not?"

"For the same reasons you weren't motivated to go beyond sloika-type layered thermonuclear devices at all, sir, except impractical Alarm Clock designs like the city-sized thing you buried in Tuchanka."

"There was no suitable target."

"Yes, sir. Cities are more efficiently obliterated with MIRV'd two-stage devices, of around half a megaton per warhead. But after Shanxi, we did have suitable targets."

"I see." And indeed, that did make sense. By then, Palaven had world government.

Wait a minute. "Come with me."

Boom

The QEC chamber now had Liara on primary and Shepard on secondary. Riley greeted him like an old friend, which come to think of it they might be – both were N7.

"Riley, would you go over that again with Shepard and Liara for me?" Which she did. Liara simply nodded. This was apparently well known. Shepard agreed:

"Right. Given the need to take out dreadnoughts at a distance and pack more power into a single nuclear hit, the Alliance miniaturized existing three-stage device designs within a single beep."

"I'm sorry Shepard, my autotranslator didn't get that and I don't think it was English."

"It's a German word. It means a retaining capsule which confines the radiation for long enough that there's a fusion reaction in the LiD – lithium deuteride. It converts to tritium and deuterium and fuses."

"Right. So you get a mostly fusion reaction." (Liara)

"Actually not quite, in the most powerful airborne twentieth century designs the casing for the LiD was depleted Uranium 238 which ignited when fusion got going. Most of the energy in a so-called fusion bomb of that era was actually from fission of the U-238."

"But that's not normally fissile at all!"

"Exactly. Big saving of fissile material. You can actually use depleted Uranium to make a bigger and much dirtier bomb."

That sat like a depleted Uranium balloon on the discussion. Garrus was still frowning.

"How big did these get?"

"The most powerful was a three-stage Russian design, Big Ivan, nearly thirty tonnes, barely deliverable and not a practical weapon." (Liara)

"Well, actually it could have been delivered by a B-36 quite handily, but the Russian aircraft were struggling. A Convair B-36 was called a Peacemaker." (Big Shepard grin)

"The Americans had another three-stage design about half that yield which they could and did manufacture in bulk. It was only four or five tonnes." (Liara)

"How big was Big Ivan?"

Liara looked testy. "One hundred megatons, design capacity."

"Spirits. Was it ever tested?"

"Mmmm… in effect yes, they substituted lead for the U-238 in the casing. Cut the capacity in half so all but three percent of the energy came from fusion, to get a cleaner bomb. The plane that dropped it barely escaped with its skin."

"The Americans sent a spy plane to watch which didn't escape with its skin, the white antiflash paint blistered." (Shepard)

"A real groundpounder," said T'Soni as though it were the most natural thing in the world. Quarter Krogan, of course.

Boom Boom

Liara did not seem to see a problem here. Garrus did.

"All right. Now, Shepard, stop me if I'm wrong. The ones I fired were tiny."

"Yes."

"But three-stage."

"Yes. And no U-238 tamper, so very clean. Mostly fusion."

"Is there any point to four stages? Five stages?"

"Um… yes. But actually there's no real upper limit to a three-stage design." (Riley)

"All you have to do is add Hydrogen Deuteride. Which is cheap. Plus some Lithium, less so,"– declared Shepard. Now Liara looked like she'd got the point:

"No upper limit?!" Asari had their blind spots.

Shepard sighed. "Look, suppose we took that mid-twentieth Big Ivan design and stuck a couple of them on hard points under the Nairobi's hull. What's the point defence range of a Reaper?

"About five kilometres, normally." (Garrus)

"The Russion 50 megaton test had a fireball eight kilometres wide. Expect eleven for the hundred-megaton version. If we set a Big Ivan to detonate five kilometres from a capital Reaper like Harbinger, then never mind the EMP or the radiation, the entire Reaper would be plasma." (Riley)

"And the Nairobi would still have another shot left," muttered Liara.

"Actually it could probably carry six," observed Shepard, deadpan.

There was a short silence before Garrus put the obvious question: "Why didn't you use these on the Reapers?"

"Mikhailovich wanted to. But we preferred to keep this as a surprise. The Crucible was a better bet for extermination. And besides, most of the stockpile was in silos which the Reapers plastered over, first thing."

"Nuking your own cities wouldn't have worked, anyway." (Liara)

"There was that."

WABABOM

"So this is why, after Shanxi, you were planning to stack your fleets against the hierarchy, which outnumbered you ten to one in dreadnoughts."

"Who said anything about dreadnoughts?"

"Well, how would you have got the bombs over Palaven?"

"Warships are expensive," said Riley. Shepard expanded on that:

"Mikhailovich's Dad had a plan involving cheap high-speed mass-produced VI-guided freighters packed with powerful thrusters. The whole inside would be one big bomb, or lots of escape pods with lots of less humongous ones."

"And if it looked like it would be intercepted?"

"It would go off anyway. Lots of miniature suns going off. He estimated fifteen thousand gigaton events in the skies over Palaven."

It gets better…

There did not appear to be words adequate to describe the atmosphere. Liara looked physically ill. "Why didn't that happen?"

"Huerta vetoed it. It was going to a plenary vote when Tevos brought the cease-fire demand for status quo ante bellum. That was acceptable to Mikhailovich senior."

"So it was unanimous?"

"No. The Chinese wanted to keep going. But they lost the vote."

"I reckon it helped that the Council rep was a hot blue space chick."

"Shut up, Kozlo." (Riley, observing Liara's non-expression)

Sort of.

Shepard eventually signed off, but not before giving Liara a see me look.

"… Goddess. And this species produced Chambers."

"It also produced Lawson," sighed Garrus.

"The father or the daughter?" (Kozlo)

"Yes."

Riley spoke up. "Not fair, Vakarian."

"All right, fine, the father, but I haven't the faintest doubt the daughter – "

"No, not her style. She'd look for something up close and personal, ideally something you do to yourself."

Garrus and Liara both filed that for future reference. Garrus, the 'up close and personal' bit. Liara, the 'something you do to yourself' bit.

"We're not insane, properly speaking…" Riley trailed off.

"But? Lee Riley, you're thinking of something. Tell me." (Liara)

"Ma'am, I hear you're the Shadow Broker."

"Lee. If Shepard tells me something, it's not for sale. You're N7 too. What you say is not for sale."

Riley was clearly considering this carefully.

"We've had time now to manufacture some new designs. There's a five-stage device which fits inside an iron asteroid expanded to an iron bubble. Just saying."

There was another short silence. Then it was Liara's turn to ask the obvious question:

"How big?"

Riley's face had flushed bright red. She had got up and was leaving, but turned and answered: "Tunable, but not less than three hundred gigatonnes."

"What would you use it on!?"

"We're not sure. Piotr says, best to have it and not need it."

The door closed.

Next chapter: #49, "Winter warmth"

Monday, July 26, 2015