Stray Cat Strut chapter-twenty-nine-successfully-participated

Chapter Twenty-Nine - Successfully Participated

"The era of participating trophies is over!

Now, now is the era of participation demerits!"

--Gerard "the Teacher" Teach, During the 2029 Capital Riots

***

"So, give it to me straight," I said as we slipped into an elevator. "How hard is this gonna be?"

Grasshopper raised a hand to rub at her chin. Her other set crossed and another set of hands settled on her hips. "This is probably significantly more complicated than you expect it to be, Catherine."

"Uh-huh," I said. "But you're good at making this kind of thing simple, aren't you? So simple away, please."

Grasshopper giggled faintly before nodding. "I'll do what I can. First, let's start at ground zero of the project. We're going to need a wide open space regardless of which method we pick for the delivery."

"We have options?" Sam-O-Ray asked.

"Oh, yes. There's more than one way to skin a cat. No offence meant!"

"None taken?"

Grasshopper started to gesture as she spoke. It was a wonder her arms weren't clacking against each other. "So, my personal favourite method would be a very large gun. Something that can put a small payload out into orbit. Any sufficiently large cannon could probably manage it, but ideally we'd use something that doesn't use an explosive propellant."

"Like a railgun?" Rac asked.

"Oh, very well done!" Grasshopper said. She idly reached into one of the many little pockets on her armour and tugged out a small roll of paper. It was wax paper, covered in hundreds of little stickers. She fumbled with it for a moment before finding a sticker of a raccoon. It was promptly pressed onto Rac's chest, like a medal on a general. "A railgun," she continued. "Would be a very effective way of propelling something at the speeds we need, but it might also limit what we can send up."

"And a normal big gun?" I asked.

"Also doable. But that'll be a lot of firepower. Lots of smoke, a larger, louder explosion. We can forget any amount of subtlety unless we build around that issue. It also means housing and working with heavy explosives, which is somewhat more dangerous."

Sam-O-Ray hummed. "A normal rocket? Not as reusable, but it could be relatively cheap. It's propellant in a tube. Basically a single-use cannon that just burns longer."

"That's a slight oversimplification of rocketry," Grasshopper said.

"Yeah, I know. I do have some background in engineering," Sam-O-Ray said. He grinned huge. "Got a Masters in it. Not rocket-science, mind, but I get the basic principles."

"Oh, forgive me," Grasshopper said. "But yes, rockets are a viable idea, I just find them somewhat wasteful. In any case, once we've decided a way to get into orbit, we need to find a way to go from orbit to Phobos."

I frowned. "Can't we just shoot it from here?" I asked.

That got me some looks.

"Yeah, I know the planet's spinning and shit, so we'll have to wait for, like, the right window, but... what?"

Grasshopper peeled off another sticker and pressed it onto my chest. I looked down until my chin was buried in my neck to read it. 'You Tried!' it read in glitter-covered script.

"We could bolo it," Sam-O-Ray suggested.

"Oh! That would be very interesting!" Grasshopper said. She clapped two sets of arms.

"Bolo?" Rac repeated.

Grasshopper nodded. "A bolo is an ancient weapon of sorts. It's made of a rope or cord with two or occasionally three weights on the end. Some have even more! A bolo would be thrown so that the weights spin around, and when they strike something, the weights make the cords wrap around whatever they've hit."

"Okay... you want to bolo the moon?" Rac asked.

"Oh, not quite. In terms of space-travel, a bolo-system is essentially a somewhat stationary device in orbit that has weights and counter balances. An object flies in close, gets hooked on, then whipped out into the distance. It's a fantastic way of transferring energy to something in a close orbit so that it's flung out into a further one."

"I thought you were gonna suggest flinging a bolo at Phobos," I said. "I've got mono-wire stuff, that could do a number on a big rock."

The elevator eventually dinged and we were let out. I wasn't sure what floor we were on, but I trusted Grasshopper and kept following her. She was walking at a very slow pace, actually, so it was less follow and more... amble along.

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"That actually segues well into our next major choice. How do we want to harm Phobos?" Grasshopper asked.

"Slice it apart and nuke the rest?" I asked.

"I don't think you're quite comprehending the size we're dealing with here," Grasshopper said. "Phobos is a moon. A small one, relatively, but it's nonetheless a moon still. More, Phobos is a moon that the Antithesis have inhabited. It was thrown across part of our solar system at great speeds."

"I hadn't considered that," Sam-O-Ray said.

"What?" Rac asked. I was happy she asked because I was about to have to myself.

"If the moon was moved that way, then the organics inside of it would be thrown around quite badly. Unless they were designed to resist that kind of motion. We're either dealing with a moon that's filled with pockets of antithesis, or a moon that's filled with organic slurry, or one that's filled with high-tier antithesis who might be able to resist conventional arms," Sam-O-Ray said.

"There are a lot of other options," Grasshopper said. "But yes, those three are where I'd put my money if I were a gambling woman. Which I'm not, because I know how statistics work. It's entirely possible that Phobos could just resist any attacks, and might have ways to counter some."

"They can parry nukes?" I asked.

Grasshopper shook her head. "No, of course not, but resist the radiation? Temper the blast? Heal afterwards? That's all very possible, and likely, even."

"Shit," I muttered. "How big of a bomb would we need, then?"

"Huge," Sam-O-Ray said. "I've pulled it up. Phobos is, at its widest, twenty-seven kilometres in diameter. The biggest nuke ever dropped on Earth was... lemme look at it... the blast radius was thirty-five kilometres wide."

"I'm not great at math, but the second number is bigger than the first."

"Blast radiuses would be much smaller in space, and their impact would be greatly diminished," Grasshopper said. "The main reason I'm worried about using nuclear weapons is just how.. Imprecise they are. We'll be hurling bits of the surface all over. One nuclear detonation won't be enough, not if they're just on the surface. We'd need a deep-penetrating shot first."

"So, other options?" I asked. "We mentioned mono-filament stuff."

"Some models of antithesis have organic mono-filament," Grasshopper said.

I stared. They had what? No one told me that. "Does it counter things?"

"Somewhat," she said. "Cluster munitions? Certain chemicals will burn at incredibly high temperatures for a very long time, even in a no-oxygen environment. We could cook the moon's surface."

"Slow," Sam-O-Ray said.

Grasshopper sighed. "That's true. And it wouldn't stop the moon from crashing into us."

"That should be our first priority, yeah," I said. "If we chop off chunks of it, will we fare any better?"

"Yes," Grasshopper said. "Pieces only a few metres across will burn up in our atmosphere. If they're brittle they'll come down as small chunks. Still dangerous, but less so than larger stones. This will, of course, be terrible for any orbital or satellite infrastructure. Smaller stones will get caught in Earth's orbit."

"Do we care?" I asked.

Grasshopper made several so-so gestures all at once. "We do, but on the scale of things to care about, the extinction of all things on Earth measures higher than orbital debris cleanup by several orders of magnitude. It would be nice to do a good job of things, of course."

"Right," I said. "So, what do we use as a payload? And do we only need one?"

"More makes sense," Sam-O-Ray said. "I like the cluster idea. Cook them while we can. My own speciality is lasers. I'm pretty sure I could get a small enough platform that if we get it caught in Phobos' orbit, it would be able to snipe down anything that pokes its head out of the rock. But when it comes to destroying the entire thing... some sort of shaped nuclear charge?"

Grasshopper gasped, then clapped all of her hands while doing a little bouncy step. "A Casaba Howitzer!"

"A what?" I asked.

"It's a conceptual weapon. You use a nuclear explosion to direct a high-velocity jet of plasma towards a target! Like a gun, but instead of gunpowder pushing lead down a barrel, it's a nuclear detonation pushing plasma towards a target!"

That sounded... cool as fuck. "I'm down for that one," I said.

***

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