Chapter 30
Then it was back to work.
Agamemnon next stopped by the asteroid belt again, this time to prepare 18 special rocks.
But first, they took a moment to make use of a couple special asteroids they happened across. These were iron asteroids with a high Chromium content, which they could quickly and easily make into more mirrors for Mars' L4 and L5 La Grange Points.
Chromium made for a nice shiny mirror, and the more additional sunlight they could reflect to Mars, the better.
One asteroid was 38 feet long and the other was 102 feet long.
Both were the usual irregular potato-shapes they often encountered with asteroids.
First, they shaped them into 3 separate blobs, each as big a load as Agamemnon could tow.
Those blobs included all the Chromium, though they left a little iron behind, in a small 4th blob, which was beyond their towing limit.
Ron got a repair robot to shape the 4th blob into a statue, nearly ten feet tall, of E.T. from the movie of that name. They left that behind as a prank to confuse anyone who found it.
Then they made three trips - two to L4 and one to L5 - towing the blobs to Mars' La Grange Points.
There, they shaped them into large circular mirrors, 3792 feet in radius, or about 1.6 square miles in total area, with all the Chromium on the side facing Mars.
The iron in the blobs was enough to make the mirrors a sixteenth of an inch thick - as thick as you can buy sheet-metal off-the-shelf in some hardware stores. That's fairly tough sheets, though a sheet this big would certainly collapse on itself if there were any significant gravity involved.
They set them in place 'tidally-locked' so they'd always face the same way, reflecting sunlight at Mars.
Then it was back to the asteroid belt again, for regular rocks this time.
These were just going to be dropped onto missile silos, so didn't need to be any special material.
They gathered a few uninteresting chunks of silicon and shaped them into one big ball - so they could grip it with telekinesis - with a radius 56.66 feet in diameter.
They they towed that ball of rock to a point near Earth's moon. There, they felt far enough from Earth to give them plenty of warning of anything the Earthlings may try, so they could work in peace. But that spot also put Earth in range of their teleporter.
Ron and Abe got busy making teleportation portals. Their new crew from Abe's old VFW post had contacted their friends, some of whom now also wanted to join the ship's crew.
After collecting them, they would get to work collecting more trees, for which Mars One had found a very good lead.
Others got going shaping rocks, and re-checking the orbits they would have.
Soon enough, they had formed 18 perfectly spherical asteroids 21 feet in radius, with no cracks or fissures in them.
The spherical shape is 'aerodynamically neutral' so would be easier to aim. Also, it had the least possible surface area per volume. That, plus the lack of irregularities, fissures, or cracks, would make re-entry go easier, both being more predictable, and doing less damage to the rock as it fell.
Smarter people back on Mars had done the calculations for them, So none of Agamemnon's crew, who were not experts in orbital mechanics, had to do the really hard math. They just had to measure exact weights and sizes, plug those into equations that had been provided for them, and then tow a particular stone sphere to a particular decaying orbit around Earth.
They did that 18 times - once for each rock they would drop onto an enemy missile silo.
Then they signaled Mars with the information about the timing of it all, so that a Martian broadcast could be sent to Earth to arrive at just the right time - just before the rocks were likely to be detected, but well after it was too late to stop them.
There had been debate about giving any warning at all, since warning the enemy is one of the best ways to help him foil your own plans. But the 18 missiles in the targeted silos were liquid-fueled, and liquid-fueled rockets are stored empty, since the fuel is corrosive. Fueling them up takes a lot of time, so there was no chance these rockets could be launched before they got taken out by rocks falling from orbit.
The Chief High Imperial Martian President would make a broadcast and explain the strike, and the reasons for it, to Earth, asking uninvolved countries to remain uninvolved and reassuring them they were not the targets. He would also assure the target country that this strike settled things between them, and that Mars would take no further actions against them after the strike, unless they attacked Mars again.
That 'after the strike' was a key clause there, because they did intend to take a couple other actions. They'd just make sure to do it before the meteor strike on the silos.
The enemy leader must be held accountable, and that must be in public so that all would know it.
Not coincidentally, that leader was scheduled to give a public speech shortly, and he'd be doing it outside in a public square.
While he was on live television giving his speech, Agamemnon would burn him down with a laser from orbit.
It was felt that that would make it clear to other leaders that they, personally, would be held accountable for their actions in relation to Mars.
The Martians hoped that the event would not alienate the people of Earth towards Mars.
There was some risk either way, but life was like that.
And it was pointed out that Earth had already tried to nuke Mars, so there was no use pretending that just being nice would make everything be OK
In the meantime, while waiting to 'zarch', as Ron put it, a world leader from orbit, Agamemnon was busy with other things.
By the time they'd put all 18 stone spheres on the right paths, Abe and Ron had collected all 64 additional VFW 'Old Codger' crew mates
They had a while to wait while the rocks' orbits decayed, so they set about collecting more trees.
First they made a teleportation portal to the garden center they'd purchased.
While they had already taken all of it's inventory to Mars, they'd only taken a little bit of it's landscaping - just the half-dozen best trees growing there.
Now they took the rest. They collected every tree, bush, and shrub, plus all the grass, and even a few feet of topsoil.
They shrunk it all and stored it in a shipping container on deck.
Then they did the same with the landscaping at the factory they'd bought.
Then it was time for 'the jackpot', as Ron put it.
The folks working at Mars One company had seen a news story and had followed it up and, finding it to be true, had made arrangements.
The state government of California had decided to severely restrict water to some farmers in their central valley. They'd made that decision in hopes that the water not taken from the rivers would raise water levels there and benefit certain fish in those rivers.
The farmers had been used to receiving that water, and had been doing so for decades. Many of them had planted orchards - primarily almond orchards - whose trees depended on that water.
Many of those trees would now die.
The state's actions had guaranteed financial problems, and even ruin and despair for some humans, on the hopes that maybe a few fish would benefit. That got a lot of people upset.
All efforts on the part of the farmers to save their trees had failed.
So when Mars One representatives called them up asking about the trees, many farmers were willing to sell for cheap, or even give them away. Some just sold a portion of their trees, hoping that they'd still have enough water to keep the rest alive.
But in any case, there were plenty of trees - mostly almond, but some citrus trees of all varieties too - for Agamemnon.
First they collected a few shipping containers' worth of dirt from a construction site, where California was building a new highway. They shrunk those containers by a factor of twelve and stored them on deck.
Then they followed the procedure they'd used before - shrink a tree to a twelfth it's height, put it in a Replicated pot full of dirt, store that on the ship and repeat.
While they were at it, they also got a few rabbits, chickens, and sheep, donated by a farmer who didn't expect to have enough water for them.
They got just over a thousand trees before it was time to return to their duties as duly deputized Little Green Men.
-0-0-0-
The next thing for the teleporter was Boz's idea. He wanted to 'clean up, in advance', and prevent radioactive material from the 18 nuclear silos from being scattered around after the stone spheres hit those with a force very similar to that of nuclear bombs.
The stone spheres had no radioactivity, but there was Uranium in the warheads of those missiles, and the Agamemnon's chemical sensors had verified that.
That Uranium, powdered and scattered by the blast, would be a hazard.
But Boz had a way to prevent that.
So a teleportation portal opened from the Agamemnon to the inside of one of the 18 silos, right by the nose cone of the missile therein.
The moment the portal opened, 2 waiting repair robots, each standing by the battleship's end of the portal, and with a small pile of packages next to them, used their own telekinesis to move one of their 18 packages through the portal and into the missile silo at the other end.
One package got super-glued to the missile's nose cone, and the other got similarly attached to the bottom of the silo door, directly above the missile.
That operation took just seconds, and then the portal closed.
They did that 18 times, once for each silo.
The packages would stay in place for mere minutes - until that country's leader got zarched at the public speech.
At the same moment, the 18 packages attached to 18 missile nose cones would detonate their special payloads - Replicas of special bombs made by Bakuda, that turned any non-living matter in a 6 foot diameter sphere into water.
So the nose-cones, their warheads, and the radioactive stuff within them, including the Uranium, would all turn into harmless inert water, and stay that way.
One second after that, the packages on the silo doors above the missiles would release themselves, drop down onto whatever was left of the missile, and detonate on contact, turning another 6 foot diameter chunk of it to harmless water, just in case anything got missed by the first one.
By the time they got all the packages emplaced at the silos, it was time for the ship to zarch a world leader.
With a laser, that was easy. No calculations were necessary - just point and shoot.
One of the VFW Old Codgers begged to be allowed to be the one to pull the trigger, since he'd had conflicts, both professional while in the military, and personal, with that country before.
They let him.
He shot, hit, and was done in under a second.
The crowd around the podium all screamed and ran for cover. That had been expected - they'd just seen a man burned from orbit and didn't yet know why.
But at least there would be no covering up the incident, or pretending, as governments often do, that something else had happened.
Visual scanners showed that all 18 Bakuda bombs went off on schedule and successfully turned the front 6 feet of missiles into water.
Then the next 6 feet of those same missiles got similar treatment when the second group of 18 bombs triggered too.
All eyes on Agamemnon watched as the 18 spherical stone meteors started leaving bright fiery trails through Earth's atmosphere as they descended towards their targeted silos.
Well, most eyes.
Ron moved his eyes sometimes, to check on the progress of the 2 robots he'd directed to gather more orbital space junk.
One used the Gravity Control Console to sharply increase the gravity of an area before the ship, and effectively 'sweep' all the debris, large and small, into one 'pile', which the other scooped up with a shipping container held by telekinesis.
Thereby, he was doing two good deeds at once - helping out Earth, by cleaning up their orbit, and helping our Mars, by providing already refined rare elements.
They had to interrupt Ron's efforts a couple times, in order to nudge a stone sphere back onto it's proper course.
Sure they could 'miss' by a fair amount and still take out their targets, since the rocks would hit so hard as to be comparable to nuclear blasts.
But they didn't want to miss at all.
And the initial rocks were generating a surprising amount of turbulence for the rocks that followed.
It shouldn't have surprised them - hitting the atmosphere at speeds over 20,000 miles per hour will do that. And they'd known that. But in practice, the effect worked out to be a bit bigger than had been expected.
Still, it wasn't too hard to nudge things back on track using telekinesis.
The stone spheres, in a line one after another, fell through the atmosphere in a very dramatic way. Air friction heated them to extreme temperatures very quickly, and the burning, glowing, incandescent balls of fire, trailed by smoke, continued inexorably down towards the ground.
The anti-air defenses at the military base housing the silos were alert. They fired both missiles and auto-cannons at the incoming meteors. But the meteors were going too fast - well outside what the targeting software had been written to expect. So almost none of their fire hit any meteors. And when it did, the sheer mass of the meteors - each weighed over 3200 tons to start with - was too much to be materially affected by the comparatively puny cannon rounds or the relatively small amounts of explosive.
So the meteors continued down, effectively unimpeded, until they impacted their targets.
The first impact threw such huge clouds of dust into the air as to make the others hard to see directly. But the flashes of light they generated when they hit were quite visible. They contained no explosive, but you could not tell that from watching what looked very much like colossal explosions.
Each would leave a large crater in the ground where its target missile silo had been, though you would not be able to see that for a while until the dust settled - possibly days.
There was only a few seconds between each impact and the one following it.
So, soon enough, all 18 falling rocks had hit their targeted silos.
Then it seemed like the whole world got very upset.
This too, was expected - people saw cataclysmic events and were terrified, and scared people often react with anger. Their terror would fade as they realized the danger was past, had never been aimed at them anyway, and was justified. Then, hopefully, the anger would fade too.
-0-0-0-
With it's cloud of obscuring dust active, HMS Agamemnon could not be detected directly by radar or infrared - two of the most common detection methods.
But the people who work at NASA and similar places are generally very intelligent. They found ways to detect Agamemnon anyway.
One of those was to get a full radar sweep of the whole sky, then analyze that for blind spots - places where they could not see anything, even though they knew, from their database of navigational hazards, what space-junk should be there. Such blind spots do not occur naturally, so when they found a nice, regularly-shaped one that measured a thousand feet bigger than the battleship's own dimensions, they were pretty sure it was artificially-generated and therefore the battleship was likely creating it and hiding within it.
Then the various governments that figured they had a beef with HMS Agamemnon worked on ways to attack her.
Some had worked on that earlier, and so were ready to launch.
Agamemnon was collecting a few more trees from low orbit, only a hundred miles up, and they didn't recognize the attack until some of what had appeared to be airliners, flying higher than usual, altered their flight paths towards Agamemnon, then launched modified anti-ship missiles.
Thirteen combat aircraft launched 2 missiles each, then turned away to head back to base.
The 26 missiles ignited their rocket motors and headed for Agamemnon.
Abe said "I got 'em. Shooting down 2 dozen or so will be nothing compared to the hundreds they fired at us the last time we took off from Earth's surface."
"No, wait," Boz said hurriedly. "this may be an opportunity, give me a second to think..."
He 'thought out loud', both because he was stressed by the time pressure, and as a way to inform the others and solicit their feedback.
They were familiar with this approach, and so did not interrupt.
"The world is mad at us and typically, folks remain mad until they feel they have successfully struck back."
He started pacing, which he rarely did. "Further, they've already been leaning on Mars, and anyone associated with it, to get at us - at this ship."
He picked up a pencil and started fidgeting with it as he paced. "All of that is not likely to stop while they still have a hope of getting control of us. But if we're destroyed, they have no such hope anymore."
Ron started to joke about not wanting to die, but a restraining hand from Simon made him think better of it. A minor joke was not worth derailing Boz's thoughts when he was reasoning out important decisions under a time-crunch.
Boz continued, not even noticing Ron or Simon, "Those are Kh-22 variants with an extra rocket stage attached so they can reach us. They have a 1.1 ton warhead - easily capable of sinking almost any ship, and of hurting us, I don't know how badly, so they don't know that either. 26 of them should be plenty though."
The pencil in Boz's hands broke.
He didn't notice that either. "They've seen us shoot down so many missiles that they'd never believe we shot at them and missed. But they could believe we didn't notice. It is human nature to get distracted, especially by momentous things, some of which just happened."
Boz suddenly turned to Ron and asked "Ron, can you use that Illusion Console - you know: the entertainment center with the funny headset - to make a convincing, life-sized illusion of this battleship. And, more importantly, can you make it look like it is getting hit by missiles and taking damage?"
"Yes" Ron was quick to reply.
"With high confidence of getting everything right?"
"Yes." Ron replied again.
"Do it!" Boz ordered, then turned to Abe, "Abe, we need you to use the star drive to get the ship well clear of the missiles - say most of the way to the moon - and do it just before the missiles get here. Coordinate with Ron so the illusion of us will replace us as seamlessly as possible."
He turned to Simon, "Simon, use lasers to make the missiles detonate, but do it exactly at the moment each missile reaches the hull of the illusory ship. OK, that'd be hard. So I'll use the Obscurement Console to manipulate our dust cloud to degrade but not eliminate any image they get of us. That'll give us some wiggle room - hopefully enough."
He clapped his hands sharply, "let's go, we have just under a minute before the missiles arrive and it is show time!"
Ron, already settling the elaborate Illusion Console headset onto his head, said "we don't have to wait on the battleship illusion - I'll just make it's dimensions a couple inches bigger than the real battleship, with the real battleship inside it. Even if they could see through our dust-cloud, they'd probably never notice it."
"Great," Boz agreed. "While you're at it, make an illusion of our dust cloud too, then we can move the ship away now..." he stopped himself, then resumed "no, the actual dust cloud blocks vision, radar and infrared. Your illusion would just block vision. They will see and notice when radar and infrared come back, and will need a reason why that happened."
"Make those illusions and move us back 900 feet," Simon urged, "that will still put the illusionary battleship just inside our real dust cloud, so there will be no change in the radar or infrared picture, but we'll be a lot safer. Then, when the first two missiles appear to hit our illusionary battleship, we can move further away and make it look like the missiles damaged our ability to make the dust cloud, so we show up on radar and infrared, and the visual obscurement is impaired and variable."
"Do it," Boz told everybody. Also, Beth, have your team figure out a course we can take to leave the area - going towards Venus if possible - which will not have us obscure any stars from the Earth's perspective as we travel, so we don't create a flicker in them that might give us away."
He said that while moving to the Probability Control Console. "Simon, I'll help your shot timing from here. And the first two do not have to be perfect, since they'll occur within our obscuring dust cloud. After that, Ron can make his illusionary dust cloud waver in ways to hide any mistakes you may make, plus you'll have the best possible luck locked in."
As he spoke, the first two missiles entered their illusionary dust cloud and Simon fired to detonate them.
They went off, but it wasn't perfect, with both detonating early, before they ever 'hit' the illusion.
"OK, no worries, they couldn't see that, so we're still fine. Move back at least a few miles now - more when you get Beth's course - and Ron, it's your show now. Make us look pretty beat up so they aren't sure if we're destroyed or not. And with that, I'll shut up so I don't distract you."
The second pair of missiles 'hit' the illusion and these blew up under Simon's laser beams with the right timing, so they looked like real impacts.
Ron made big holes appear in the superstructure and hull of the illusion, to match the 2 already there but in different places to make it clear they were new hits.
After that, Boz had the original 6 Old Codgers, still with only a little familiarity with the ship's systems, take over control of the particle beams that faced in the right direction, and start shooting things down.
He turned off the computer-aided aiming to those particle beams too, to simulate having taken damage.
He wanted it to look like they'd been caught off-guard, then had their targeting systems damaged, to make it believable that they were getting hit by missiles when they'd shot them down easily before.
The Old Codgers blasted away merrily, hitting a few incoming missiles, while one of them dedicated himself to taking down the planes that had launched the missiles.
Planes are much slower than missiles, and much bigger targets too. So pretty soon he'd gotten them all.
While more missiles 'hit' the illusionary battleship and damaged it, Ron had it turning, then starting to move away.
When the 13th and last pair of missiles - which Boz had said to shoot at with particle beams but not hit - approached the illusion in the stern, Ron had just been having the illusion rapidly pick up speed towards Venus.
So as that pair of missiles impacted the stern of the illusion and blew up, Ron made a great flash of light, so observers would have a hard time telling if the last pair of hits had caused the whole battleship to explode, or if they'd just detonated an ammunition magazine or something while the damaged ship escaped.
The real Agamemnon and the illusionary Agamemnon both headed on a course that took them towards Venus, and also did not pass between any stars and Earth. So, since they were already past the range of any Earth-bound radars by that time, anybody on Earth would have a very difficult time observing anything of use to them.
That suited the crew of Agamemnon just fine. While the show had been going on - with missiles still blowing up on the illusion, they had been observed to head towards Venus. Then the Earth would probably have 'lost them' in that last explosion and not know their fate.
Just in case Earth got lucky and happened to have an infrared telescope pointed at Agamemnon, they'd pick up what they expected to - a damaged ship on intercept course for Venus.
It would take them years of effort for a special space mission to go to Venus and check if Agamemnon had ended up on the surface under all those clouds.
So they'd stay uncertain about Agamemnon's destruction until then, unless Agamemnon did something to prove she still existed, like another mission to Earth, which wasn't something they were planning to do anyway.
And while those on Earth were unsure whether Agamemnon still existed, they probably wouldn't pressure anybody to try to take control of the battleship.
Which was just fine by Boz and the crew.
They reached Venus, moving only at a leisurely half of light speed, then Ron dropped his illusion.
Then they circled back around to Mars.
Once there, the first thing they did was to caution the Martians not to give away the fact that the Agamemnon was still intact.
The CHIMP congratulated them on a duty well done, and released them from being deputy Little Green Men. He praised the way they'd left, speculating that the uncertainty about their destruction would probably lower tensions considerably.
But he also had one gripe about it, saying "this does cut off further immigration - except maybe a trickle by rocket eventually - and I'd really hoped that you'd find me a high-level priest who wanted to colonize, so I'd have someone here with an official title of Primate, the way the Catholics do."
They'd all laughed.
Then they spent a while unloading trees and planting them, as well as the other things they'd collected, like bushes and sod, in the park.
They spent a little extra time, getting it right, even though that made them about a day late for the scheduled food pickup in Brockton Bay in dimension 29.
Boz had warned the relevant locals - Lisa and Ed - that he might be late in coming back, and Ed had agreed to hold the shipment for when Boz did return.
That was one of the benefits of doing favors for people - they did favors back.
When they finished at Mars Colony and prepared to switch dimensions, Boz was quite cheerful. He had feared they'd have a crew of just 4 - himself, Abe, Simon, and Ron, or in other words his old gaming group.
But others had decided that danger wasn't so bad, once you got used to it.
The whole Astronomy Club was coming along - all 8 members.
And ten of the guys from the Gun Club were coming too, including Big Tom.
That, plus 2 miscellaneous friends and 26 Mars Colonists who'd decided they liked combat better than colonizing, would have been it, except for the Old Codgers.
The 70 Old Codgers really filled out the crew, and would make all the difference manning consoles, even during battles.
If they needed someone to do physical activities beyond what the Old Codgers could do, they had a few people and a lot of robots to take care of it.
So they felt well-prepared as they headed back to dimension 29.