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  “We should upgrade the coastal evacuation efforts to mandatory orders and consider expanding the evacuation zone,” Caroline added.

  “I agree,” the Director of FEMA said. “We’re activating large-scale temporary shelters in key inland locations. But we don’t have nearly enough capacity. And the transportation systems are already strained. Expanding the order may lead to chaos.”

  “You’re likely right but I don’t see how we have a choice at this point. We need to get everyone away from the coasts and we have just over three days to do it.”

  “We’ll do our best, Caroline. But we never anticipated this scenario.”

  “Thank you, Laura. Please make sure our partners on both sides of the Atlantic are aware that we’re making the announcement. I know rumors are already flying on social media but once it’s official it’s going to be far worse, especially if it’s not coordinated.”

  “If anyone has better ideas, please speak up.”

  Caroline waited but nobody spoke.

  “In that case, we proceed with mandatory mass evacuations. We don’t give up on looking for other options but we need to proceed with the situation at hand. Time is running out.”

  There were dozens of nods from the grim faces on the video conference call.

  “Thank you, everyone. We reconvene at noon Washington time.”

  Thirty-Five

  “A mandatory evacuation order is in effect! Make your way to higher ground!”

  Ricky ignored the recorded message blaring from the NYPD patrol car and concentrated on getting his bike up the gentle incline of Pulaski Bridge. As he reached the highest point of the span connecting Queens to Brooklyn he pedalled harder and picked up speed. There weren’t many vehicles or pedestrians along Franklin Street. Apparently most of the people living in this low-lying section of Brooklyn that faced the East River had evacuated already. With less than three days before impact that seemed like the sensible thing to do.

  Ricky’s phone buzzed in his pocket but he didn’t bother to take it out. It was probably his mother asking him yet again how he soon he would be joining the rest of his family staying at his Aunt’s house near Albany. He’d tried explaining to her that he had work to do but she hadn’t understood. So he’d lied and told her he was coming up on a bus tonight. But even if the Port Authority Bus Terminal wasn’t overrun by an angry mob of desperate New Yorkers, Ricky knew he wouldn’t be there. Not while there was still a chance. The regular MTA bus routes had stopped running but Ricky could get around on his bike and he knew his friends were counting on him. They were a team. So he pedalled faster.

  They wouldn’t give up and neither would he.

  “We’re giving up?!” Ricky spluttered. Ricky and Mike sat in the small conference room of Jovian Resources. One of the glass wall panels was still cracked from where Jessica had shot it just a few weeks earlier. The flat panel display on the wall showed Dennis and Molly’s faces, neither of them happy.

  “We’re out of options, Ricky,” Molly explained again. “We just don’t have enough thrust to make the asteroid miss Earth entirely. At most we can shift the impact location by a few hundred miles, probably less.”

  “And no matter which way we push it,” Dennis added, “it just gets closer to a populated area. The current impact point looks like the least terrible option.”

  “But it’s still terrible!” Ricky exclaimed. “I was here for Hurricane Sandy and this is going to be a thousand times worse!”

  “That’s why you and Mike need to leave,” Dennis replied. “There isn’t anything more we can do. Just get out of there while you still can.”

  “That’s not going to be easy,” Mike said. “Busses and trains are jammed and traffic is a disaster. The National Guard is out but I’ve seen looting already. Things are starting to break down. I don’t know if everyone’s going to make it.”

  “All the more reason to leave now,” Dennis insisted. “Or, if you can’t, gather supplies and get to high ground.”

  “How high is that wave going to be here in New York?” Mike asked.

  “We don’t really know,” Molly answered, “The inner harbor and city should be sheltered a little but the shape of the outer harbor may actually funnel more water in depending on exactly where the asteroid hits and how the wave forms. We’re just not sure but you might see a surge that’s ten or fifteen meters above high tide.”

  “Jesus,” Mike said. “That’s like two or three stories.”

  “The other factor is how the asteroid interacts with the atmosphere,” Molly continued. “If it stays in one piece then more of it will survive to impact with the ocean. If it breaks into smaller pieces when it contacts the upper atmosphere then more of it may burn up before it reaches the surface.”

  “Dammit, I’d like to just rip that thing into a million pieces!” Ricky exclaimed in frustration.

  “Me too,” Dennis assured him. Molly also nodded silently on screen.

  Mike was quiet for a moment as well but then he spoke up.

  “What if we could?”

  “Huh?” Molly asked. Dennis just tipped his head to one side.

  “If we had a way to break the asteroid apart into smaller pieces, that would reduce the impact effects, right?”

  “Well, sure,” Molly replied. “That was one of the effects we were hoping for by nuking it. But the rocket carrying those bombs blew up.”

  “And nobody seems to have a big enough rocket ready to launch,” Dennis added. “We’re out of luck and out of time.”

  “But what if we didn’t have to nuke it,” Mike asked. “What if we just spun it?”

  “Spun it? Huh?” Dennis asked.

  “Oh, that’s interesting!” Molly responded at the same time.

  “Huh?” Dennis repeated.

  “Spin up the asteroid!” Molly exclaimed. “I’ll have to check but it might work.”

  Dennis suddenly sat up straight.

  “Oh shit!”

  He thought for a minute. Molly looked away from the camera.

  “Um… what?” Rick started to ask.

  “If we can spin the asteroid fast enough,” Mike explained, “the centrifugal acceleration will exceed the local microgravity and the asteroid may come apart.”

  “But the pieces would still hit the Earth?” Ricky asked.

  “Yes, but instead of one big mass it would be a bunch of smaller fragments. So a lot more of it would burn up in the atmosphere and the tidal waves would be a lot smaller and spread out.”

  “Do we have enough time to make it spin fast enough?” Dennis asked.

  “I’m just running the numbers now,” Molly replied. “I think we might just make it. We don’t know what the interior composition of the asteroid X is - whether it’s a gravel pile like 207302 or if it’s a solid mass. But if it’s a gravel pile we can probably break it apart.”

  “We should alert the folks at NASA and STETSON right away,” Dennis said. “I’ll do that while you start the script to reposition the driveships.”

  “Already on it,” Molly answered. “Unless I hear otherwise in the next fifteen minutes, I’m going to command the driveships to revector thrust. We don’t have any time to spare.”

  “We’re still going to need some way to cut the carbon fiber netting once we’re up to speed,” Dennis added. “Otherwise it might hold the asteroid together even while it’s spinning.”

  “We’ll start on that,” Mike answered. “You guys get the rock spinning, Ricky and I will find a way to cut it loose.”

  “Sounds good - monitor the chatroom for updates,” Dennis instructed. “And good work, team!”

  “They’re proposing to do what?”

  Caroline O’Rourke looked intently into the video camera. An older man with close cropped hair and a military uniform swallowed and replied.

  “Spin the asteroid, ma’am. If it spins fast enough it may come apart.”

  “And how does that improve things?” the STETSON director asked.

  �
�It increases surface area. As asteroid X enters the atmosphere, some of it will be ablated by atmospheric friction. If it enters as many fragments rather than one large mass more of it will burn up. Probably. That would likely mean a smaller tsunami.”

  “Right now we expect asteroid X to land in the North Atlantic. What is the risk that if we break it up some of the fragments will land closer to the coast? That we might have an impact near a population center?”

  “We believe the risk is small, ma’am. Larger fragments are likely to stay close to the asteroid’s current track due to their momentum. Anything that diverged by much would probably be a smaller fragment. But there is some risk. We just don’t have time to run a full set of simulations. NORAD was set up to monitor missile threats, not asteroids. As it is, we don’t even know if there will be enough time to spin up the asteroid. We’re just sixty-five hours out.”

  “I understand,” Caroline replied. “And your assessment is that this course of action is likely to reduce risk?”

  “Probably, but it required further study to be confident. At this point it’s a gamble.”

  “But by the time we know for sure it will be too late.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Then we take the gamble. General Meyers, I’m authorizing you under executive order 14088 to spin up the asteroid and attempt to fragment it before it reaches the atmosphere.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” General Meyers paused.

  “Was there something else?” Caroline asked.

  “Ma’am, the Jovian team have already started the spin operation. They notified us but… they didn’t ask for authorization.”

  “Well,” Caroline replied drily with the briefest hesitation, “we’ll worry about that later. Right now we prioritize that asteroid and anything that might stop it. Please provide them with whatever support you can. If you’ll excuse me, I’m due to brief the President.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” General Meyers replied.

  Thirty-Six

  A shrill alarm rang out in the Jovian Resources office in Brooklyn. It was far louder than the music playing from small speakers at Ricky’s desk. But it was no match for Mike voice.

  “Aw, dammit! Ricky, can you silence the smoke alarm?”

  “Yeah, on it.”

  Mike looked down at the spattered drops of black resin cooling on the surface of the main workbench next to two strands of smooth black ribbon. A wisp of smoke curled slowly from the metal tip of an instrument that was pinned in a vice on the edge of the table.

  “Well, that’s gonna be hard to get off…” he mumbled. “But it looks like the soldering trick will work.”

  “Awesome!” Ricky exclaimed. “I’ll get Dennis and Molly on the line and tell them.”

  A few moments later, Dennis, Molly, Ricky and Mike were on a video conference with several additional people. Mike and Ricky sat in in Jovian’s office. Molly, Dennis and three NASA engineers had joined from an conference room at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

  “Why were the Excelsior driveships equipped with soldering irons?” one of the NASA engineers asked.

  “They’re not soldering irons, exactly,” Molly explained, “but they’re similar. They’re heating elements designed for joining the long carbon-fiber ribbons after they’d wrapped them around the asteroid. They carried over a hundred kilometers of very thin, very strong ribbon up there and then wove the net by flying one craft around the asteroid trailing the ribbon while the other end was anchored by a second ship anchored to the surface. Kind of like winding yarn around a ball.”

  “That’s pretty clever,” the engineer observed. “Probably a lot easier than trying to deploy a kilometer-wide pre-woven net around the asteroid and getting it folded up correctly.”

  “Yeah, it was pretty clever,” Molly agreed. “Dennis thought of it.”

  “Technically, my cat thought of it,” Dennis corrected, “But those assholes at Excelsior didn’t give credit to either me or Mittens.”

  “Um, I see,” the engineer answered. “That’s unfortunate, but let’s talk about how we cut the netting.”

  “We can use the same tool they used to join the ribbons,” Mike explained. “The ribbons are coated with a thin layer of resin. To join them they used a heating element on the end of an articulated probe to make a pattern of hundreds of tiny little spot welds between two overlapping ribbons. To cut it, we just heat up that whole section of ribbon while it’s under tension and the resin will melt allowing the ribbons to separate. I just, ah, confirmed that hypothesis experimentally here in our lab with a soldering iron that has a similar heating element.”

  “And how many places do we need to cut the ribbon before the net will collapse?” the engineer asked.

  “That was the beauty of the ball-of-yarn technique,” Molly explained. “If you did it right, you only needed one really long ribbon wound around and around many times and then attached to itself. So there’s only one place we need to cut and there’s already a driveship right there.”

  “It sounds pretty straightforward, I guess,” the engineer allowed.

  “Well, except that the asteroid is spinning,” Dennis rebutted. “Once it’s spinning fast enough to exceed local escape velocity we’ll probably see chunks of the asteroid start to break off. Those chunks could collide with the driveships before they spin the asteroid fast enough for the bulk of it to come apart.”

  “We might also lose the driveship that we’re counting on to cut the ribbon,” Molly observed.

  “Or the driveships themselves might come loose,” Dennis added. “They weren’t designed for being anchored to a rotating surface.”

  “What happens if we spin up the rock but can’t cut the ribbon?” Mike asked.

  “Our best guess is that the extra rotation would probably cause at least some additional dispersion of the asteroid as it entered Earth’s atmosphere,” one of the NASA engineers explained. “But to really increase ablative effect we’d need the fragments to be fully separated before atmospheric entry.”

  “Ok, let’s try to start melting that ribbon once we’ve spun up enough to detect chunks of the asteroid leaving the surface,” Dennis concluded.

  The other participants on the call nodded.

  “We’re less than two days away from impact and at the current rate of acceleration we’ll only reach escape velocity a few hours before atmospheric entry,” Molly added. “It’s going to be tight so let’s keep a close eye on it.”

  “I’ll set up some more tests with the soldering iron,” Mike offered. “We’re going to need as much practice as we can get. We’ll only get one shot when the time comes.”

  The others nodded and disconnected from the video conference.

  “What do you need me to do?” Ricky asked Mike as they both stood up to leave the conference room.

  “I’m not going to be able to talk you into leaving town, am I?” Mike asked rhetorically.

  “Nope.”

  “Then we’re going to need to gather more supplies. Water and non-perishable food mainly. Some basic hygiene stuff like soap.”

  “The stores are all out of bottled water. I checked this morning on my way it.”

  “See if you can find some watertight containers. We still have water flowing from the taps right now that we can use to fill them.”

  “Got it,” Ricky replied. He put on his hoodie and left through the office door.

  Mike sat down at the main workbench, unspooled some more of the thin black carbon fiber ribbon and switched on his soldering iron. A thin wisp of smoke rose from the tip as it heated up.

  “This had better work,” Mike mumbled to himself.

  Thirty-Seven

  “There goes another one!”

  Dennis looked up from his monitor. It had been two days since he’d last slept. Or showered for that matter. And he felt the ache deep in his bones that matched the stale sweat smell that wafted up from his t-shirt every time he moved his arms. But he also felt the burn of adrenaline, knowin
g they were so close to the moment of truth.

  “Size?” he shouted back.

  The NASA engineer on the other side of the row of workstations and monitors at the improvised mission control at Goddard Space Flight Center typed quickly and then waited for a response.

  “At least thirty meters in diameter according to NORAD’s radar. And moving away from the asteroid at a speed that confirms we’re above local escape velocity, just barely.”

  “Ok, that’s a good sign,” Molly replied from her seat next to Dennis, “but we’re going to need to see more fragmentation than that before we cut it loose. There’s too much risk that the core is still being held together by frozen water or methane ice that won’t come apart until we’re going faster.”

  “We’re less than six hours away from atmospheric entry,” one of the NASA engineers observed. “How much longer can we afford to wait?”

  “If we can break the asteroid apart, we’ll need less than an hour for the fragments to separate enough for the atmospheric effects to work on them separately. Right now the bigger risk is that we can’t break the asteroid up into small enough chunks - so as long as we can, we keep spinning it.”

  “That makes sense.” the engineer replied. He paused before continuing. “I know the Director made it clear this is your call but it seems like we’re cutting it dangerously close.”

  “There isn’t a version of this that isn’t dangerous,” Molly replied, “and your concern is noted. But with all due respect, there’s no script here. And nobody has more experience with wrangling asteroids than we do.”

  “Understood,” the engineer grunted and turned back to his workstation.