#no you cannot shoot an h-bomb 'backwards' and make a tokamak

[originaldetectivesheep]

A Life of Riley Part 3: The Very Last Place On Earth ch 4

Chapter 3

IV

I woke up to the warmth of the sun on my face.  It wasn't much, not more than just you get from being outside around here, but you can tell – you can tell, and this was a new thing, and it was a good sign.  There were clouds gathering, you could see them way out from how high up we were, but it was the morning and the sun was out, and everybody was in one piece and was on board with going over the other side of the mountain – like we would find Riley's plane, and everything would be easy and simple, and we would stay good with each other for another couple days in paradise.  And then we ate breakfast, and then we strapped up with the stuff we'd need to go through the denser jungle over on the other side of the ridge, Riley loading up with a Geiger counter and a couple other monitors or weird probes that I didn't even recognize, and then we went over and down into the middle of it again.

Whatever we thought, about how the jungle was on this mountain, from climbing the trail, from going down over on the eastern side where, if Riley was telling the truth, everything had gotten crushed with bulldozers and torn out years back, we had to forget it on the western side.  There was tall trees as well as the thick brush, and long Tarzan vines hanging down in between with plants climbing up them to block the way; I could clear those out with my machete, but it was extra time to cut, something else to pay attention to, and you couldn't tell what was behind them right away.  The ground under our feet was soft and crumbly – like with every step it might just cave in and you'd fall down a ravine that you just cut your own self.  There was some of this on the other side, but I guess with so much of the jungle ripped away that time, more of the bad soil got washed out, and it hadn't here.  It was hot, and stressful, and dark – and then the rain started.

I thought yesterday's rain was bad – I thought I knew what bad rain was before I came out to this place.  But it was like the world had it in for us, after a clear night and a sunny morning, and even though there was like a canopy up over us, the rain came just slamming down through it like it wasn't even there.  There was a rumble in the distance – like lightning out over the ocean – and a hiss that came up on us from over the top of the mountain, and suddenly we were all soaked again, the water falling in torrents all around us, puffing out like steam from the ground as it hit, or as raindrops exploded off leaves.  I could still see – see as long as I could keep my eyes open with the ocean pouring down over my head all of a sudden – but I couldn't see far, and the waterlogged ground was more spongy than it was before, and everything was slick and slippery and that much more dangerous, especially when I had only one hand to hold onto stuff with, and the other one had to manage a foot-long chunk of sharpened metal.

"Stop!" Riley shouted, from somewhere in back of me; it hadn't been so long since we crossed over the trail, but already we'd gotten separated. "Everybody stop – everyone stay where you are!"  I stopped: I'd stopped before, right when the rain started, just to get my bearings, and if Riley was that concerned I didn't need to be told twice.  "Everyone, wherever you are, put a hand up – put a hand up with your machete or a tool in or something if you can.  If we just let ourselves spread out, we're going to get lost here – signal, and if I can't see you I'll yell for you to call off!" I braced a hand against a tree and lifted up my machete hand, waving it over my head; if there was a way for this morning to get worse, it would be Riley thinking I was lost because I was too far ahead of everyone and only this tall.

"Right – that's – Yuping, Yuping, move a little bit away from Simon, you're too bunched up.  Like – like ten meters right.  Keep going – keep your machete up, I'll tell you when to stop.  Nice and easy – watch your footing.  Okay.  Okay, right there – just stick right there for a second."  Riley paused, and I looked up behind me, to see if I could see where anyone else was, make out what we were going to try to do here.

"All right – shit – give me a second and think this out."  I could barely even hear Riley over the hammering noise of the rain on the leaves. "From where you're at, we're gonna play friggin Red Light Green Light across the mountain.  When I yell Green Light, you go straight; when I yell Red Light, you stop and signal, and I'll move you around if we're in the wrong place.  We oughta be covering most of the places a part of the plane could be – if we don't hit anything by the time we get to the other ridge, we'll regroup and I'll think of something.  Dammit!"  Riley was stressed out, and it was obvious that there wasn't a lot of prep put into this plan – so we had really come out to this island for Simon, and to get away, and this thing wasn't just a setup from Riley first to last.  But we were still on this side of the hill on purpose, and not having the right equipment or enough people or a solid plan didn't make what we were about to do any easier.  "Green Light!"

If it was hard to go through the jungle, through the brush and the rain and every second, you're afraid the slope is going to collapse under you, it was harder with having to listen every second for Riley yelling at you to stop, stop in mid-step, stop your machete in mid-swing.  At least I got to keep going on my line – the others kept having to get turned around or shifted as we went, and there was a big kickup when Riley tried to move Sajitha left through a fallen tree trunk she'd gone around, and that didn't work out at all.  The yelling, the stop and go, only hearing other people as Riley yelled at them, it all made it feel worse than it was – like we were lost and getting loster, like everything we were doing was just getting us in worse and there wasn't going to be a way back from it.  It had to be getting about noon, but between the trees and the rain it just kept getting darker, all around us, and it felt like we were sinking down into the jungle, into the mud and tangled brush, and we wouldn't ever come out, much less find anything else lost down here.

"Hey!  Hey!  I got something!  I got something!  Riley!"  I stopped, even without being told, and looked around, trying to see where Remy was yelling from, what he might have found.  I couldn't see him – I wasn't thinking about where he was, and I couldn't tell which way the sound had come from.  He was somewhere – at least he was in one piece – and if he'd found the plane, we wouldn't need to be splattered all over the mountain like this looking for it any more.

"Jesus, what?!" Riley wasn't any longer on patience than when we'd started.  "What do you got – the plane?  A wing?  A tire or something and you don't know if it's a landing gear?  Hold on a second – let me get up!"  There was more noise from uphill – that had to be Riley coming up to wherever Remy was.  I stayed where I was, listening, waiting.

"All right – right, shit, that is definitely something.  Everyone, bring it in – follow the noise!"  There wasn't any noise to follow for a couple seconds, but then there definitely was – a strange, hollow rattle, someone banging on sheet metal on the weirdest possible way. I listened, squinting around uphill, for the best way towards it: whatever Remy had found, there was a big chunk of metal lying around the jungle that way, and if that was enough of a clue for Riley, it was enough of a clue for me.  Making sure I didn't catch my feet as I changed direction, I climbed carefully up the rain-slick slope towards the sound.

Somehow I was the last one to get there; everyone was standing around soaked and exhausted and breathing hard around a giant shelf of a wing lying toppled over among the trees.  Riley saw me come up and stopped whacking the aluminum panel.  "All right.  We're all here; if the wing's here, the rest of the plane can't be far.  There's dead trees around here that there shouldn't be – something came down on this heading and lost half its wing – if we keep following the dead trees, we'll find where the rest of it came down."  Riley nodded off into the jungle; now that I knew what to look for, I could see them too: slick, rotting black spires that hadn't collapsed quite yet, dead trees with new growth at their feet.  I let the others lead and followed after; whatever plane it was, it couldn't've gone that far with that much of its wing gone.

It hadn't; the jungle had grown in thick around it where the plane had ripped its path into the mountain, but not thick enough that we could miss the chunks of the other wing underfoot – nor the tall  chunky tailfin sticking up out of the mist.  Riley kept on going for it, unaffected, but the rest of us just stopped and stood and stared: this giant skeleton of a dead plane lying in the jungle, new trees growing up through the holes in the wings, gaps where panels fell off like windows in a deserted house.  It was too dark, and the rain was coming down too hard – you'd talk a good game back somewhere dry and lit up, but standing there and looking at it, thinking about how it might be carrying something almost kind of like a nuclear warhead, and you couldn't not get the creeps.

"Look, hold on for a second," Riley said, scrabbling out the Geiger counter again.  "If this is our plane, I've gotta go in first and check it out; there may be active sources in this thing, probably not, but someone's gotta go and I'm not gonna make you pull straws. This is my deal and it's my responsibility.  Just wait out here a second while I check it out."  Riley turned back to the plane and started to stalk around it, looking around for a way in, some way that wouldn't involve just chopping a hole in the side.

It was nice and all in theory for Riley to volunteer to go in and check the plane for radiation, especially if there was like an atomic bomb in there that had been rotting in the jungle for sixty years, but for us outside, that also meant we were standing around in the rain, wondering whether it was okay for us to stand under the tail out of the wet, whether Riley was going to come out screaming at us to clear out, whether Riley might have walked into a heavy gamma emitter and might be just silently dead inside.  Something creaked from inside the plane, creaked or groaned or chittered like there was something else alive in there, and I couldn't blame Sajitha for grabbing for Remy's arm, Simon trying to stand behind Yuping.  I gritted my teeth and kept a hand on my machete – it wasn't going to do nothing against a radiation source, against a mutant fruitbat or whatever, against a goddamn hydrogen bomb going off, but it was something. I couldn't be the one to go and freak out here.

Something thudded inside the plane, banging off the fuselage sides with a whong!, and I jumped half a mile.  There were a couple other thuds, and then a keening, grinding whine, another thong!, and a chunk of aluminum fell out of the side and bounced off the wing root with a clang.  Riley's head poked out where the panel had been. "Hey!  Yo!  Carolína! Come up here, I need help planning the extract.  The rest of you, you guys just sit still for a second, okay; we'll come get you in a minute or two once we get this planned out."

I carefully made sure my machete was back all the way in its sheath and came up, picking my way through the brush and climbing up the tattered and twisted metal of the wing root.  "So, you find it? You get this 'equipment' you were after?  You gonna explain the rest of it now?"

Riley smiled as I came through the hole in the side of the plane.  "Yeah – yeah, but you got to see it first.  And it's nearly all here – the only part that's missing, trust me, we wouldn't want to find. Check it out."  Riley turned with a sweeping hand: whatever it was, it was right here, and it was immense.

I walked around it, as much as I could manage; they'd put it right over the wing root to balance, and whatever this device was, it filled almost the whole plane side to side, floor to roof.  It was some kind of squat cylinder, mostly, with protrusions on it stuck over with faded and peeling labels: a giant weird hatbox made out of metal, with empty threaded holes for hoses, rusty shield covers where cables would plug in.  "It's… real big," I said at last.  "Riley, I don' know what this thing is or what you want to do with it, but I do know it's gonna be a real pain to move outta here with just the six of us."

"I'm not so sure," Riley said, squatting to look at something behind the lump-thing.  "The plane's pointed downhill, thank god, and there should be a cargo elevator on the back that'll have an emergency crank like a car jack.  It'll take forever, but I want to crank it up, push up the tail as much as we can get it, and slide Ceiba here forward onto the front cargo doors.  We'll have to take the friggin cargo ramps out chunk by chunk to get it down, but the doors are intact for the most part, and we can cut them out of the frame – the hinges are a weak point – and then we've got a ready-built metal sled to shove this thing down to the beach on.  Shit's probably rusted together, but we've got a shovel to whack stuff with, and there should be a separate hydraulic reservoir for the ramp that might not have gotten ruptured out yet; if not, I guess we've got to use banana skins."

I was still confused; the plan made sense, but Riley had kind of skipped the part about what this thing even was. "Okay; okay, I kinda get that.  But Riley, excuse me, 'Ceiba'? What even is this thing?  It's not a tree, that's for sure."

Riley stood up, looking off into the side of the plane like it wasn't there, like we were standing out on a cliff completely somewhere else.  "Well, it is and it ain't.  Strictly, yeah; but this is Hardtack Ceiba – all the first-tranche Hardtack shots were named for trees.  Including this one – this one that got forgotten and not fired."

I got the 'Hardtack' part – the Operation Hardtack nuclear tests. "Hardtack – so this is a bomb."

Riley leaned back, sighing.  "Again, it is and it isn't.  Look, I dunno how much you know about what was going on with Hardtack, but you look it up, and you get a sense like people were in their own goddamned world back then.  There was a moratorium on nuke tests, and then the Russians blew something up, so we had to blow up a bunch of shit, but the politicians were putting the lid back on, so everybody in the military and the physics establishment just grabbed all their shit, every warhead or bomb config or other friggin nuclear thing that they thought they might be able to test, and ran like fuck out here to the Pacific Proving Range to get all of them shot off before they banned testing again.

"I mean, shit, you look at the energy budget on just the first phase, and you lose your goddamned mind.  Like thirty-five devices – and that's the ones that got shot off, we got at least one more just from the one that's in the plane with us here – for like forty friggin megatons anticipated yield.  Like, fuck – don't let anyone tell you nobody ever fought a full-scale nuclear war, we fought the shit out of a nuclear war against a bunch of sandbars in the Marshalls and the Marianas. And you dig in, and like I said it is the most randomest shit getting lit off, the stupidest most immature ideas, because nobody knew when they'd ever get the chance again.

"And that was kind of what happened with this thing."  Riley laid a hand on the shell of the test shot.  "This baby here was Hardtack Ceiba, a kind of prototype reactor based on the idea of shooting one of the hydrogen bomb designs from that time backwards; they were going to produce a containment on startup with a static plasma rather than compressing through, sort of like what you want to do with a tokamak.  The design's kind of iffy, but the math on it at least ought to work; I'm not a big fan of dragon's-tailing a thermonuclear, but when you can get yourself a fusion powerplant, you don't go looking a gift horse in the mouth."

This wasn't helping.  I didn't know a lot about the Dragon's Tail experiments at Los Alamos, but I did know that they tended to kill a lot of the physicists who worked on them: almost-not-quite making a critical mass on your workbench was bad enough when it was a fission thing – and back in the fifties, nobody knew how to start a fusion reaction without setting off an actual atomic bomb for the sparkplug.  "I… I mean, I can understand it, but I don' know why they were doing this with a nuclear test.  If this is a reactor, why don' they test it at like Hanford or Oak Ridge or wherever, somewhere that you build reactors?"

Riley grinned.  "Because of the one part that ain't here.  Like I said, the Hardtack tests were full of bad ideas – they couldn't come up with anything better to start off Ceiba than plugging in a Davy Crockett warhead and using that for a sparkplug."  Riley saw what my face was doing and hurried to correct the entirely reasonable misapprehension.  "No – no, we don't need a bomb to start it up if we're gonna use it; these idiots didn't have the next sixty years of high-energy physics and materials science to get them to their ninety gigajoules startup energy.  It's the friggin law of the instrument again – if you've got atomic bombs coming out your ears, everything needing a lot of instantaneous energy input looks like a problem for a nuclear warhead."

I squinted, head rattling, trying to wrap my brain around that tremendously stupid time in American science where anything about this could have pretended for a second to be a good idea. Backyard-deliverable cobalt bombs, Project Orion, the frigging Davy Crockett to start with, and now this thing.  It fit.  It didn't make any goddamn sense, but it fit.  "All… all right," I said at last.  "If we don' have to set it off with an atomic bomb, maybe this isn't any more crazy and super dangerous than any of the other stuff we build."  I looked around again at the inside of the plane, at the coffin around the bomb-reactor.  "But if it was part of Hardtack, why wasn't it a bigger deal that it wasn't shot?  Didn't someone want to test it?  And like what was this thing even for?"

Riley shrugged.  "Look, all I know – all we know – is that at least this one Hardtack shot didn't make it.  No idea how many other shots mighta gotten lost or canceled. There were a bunch of fizzles at the end, like the stuff that went last wasn't ready, and maybe whoever built this wasn't sure about it and didn't want a bad mark on their record.  And close as I can tell, the idea behind the Ceiba reactor was for the nuclear airplane and that was already canceled anyway, so maybe someone decided to just scratch it as a total loss.  And if there's no sparkplug warhead in here, this thing ain't even immediately dangerous – no wonder the government didn't really move heaven and earth to find it."

I nodded.  "Okay; 'not immediately dangerous', I'm sure that'll help when we get everyone else in here on this.  Are we good, or is there anything else I ought to know?"  I had the basic plan, I had an idea of what this "Hardtack Ceiba" was and wasn't.  But with Riley, you made sure to check all the way down, and make extra sure of the details.

"No; just get started.  I'm sure you've got it – I've got a couple things to check up topside, but you can bring the rest of the guys in and start working on getting the plane tipped up as much as we can. I'll be able to take care of myself."  Riley hadn't even turned around, grabbing up for a narrow and rusty-looking ladder that had to be going into the cockpit.  I nodded and leaned back out the hole in the fuselage to call the rest of us in.

Chapter 5