grimace. “I must admit it’s a little different than the last time I was on one of these things. It felt like we were barely moving then.”
“Yeah. And to add to our woes, the rest going up with us are mostly media,” Sihota said. We all gave looks of distaste at that.
We spent a while getting to know each other. To say the situation was bizarre was an understatement. The major powers hadn’t had a hot war between them since that particularly nasty proxy conflict in Siberia, which had finally ended a decade ago. That didn’t mean that they got on well with each other, though. The nations and corporations pumped a hell of a lot of time, effort, and money trying to get one over on each other. These guys were all professionals, though. It wasn’t anything personal between them. They were all quite happy to have a companionable drink with one another. Undoubtedly, they were hoping to pick up some snippet of useful information, but at the moment, they were content to just get a feel for each other. After all, we were all here for the same purpose.
Cheng, Vance, Sihota, Agapov, and Drayton were all clearly alpha types, something that I imagined would get pretty tiresome. Metaphors about too many chefs and not enough cooks sprang to mind. I quickly got the impression they were all go-getters. Definitely no connections had got them here. These folks had all earned their rank, despite Sihota’s apparent youth. I sent Giselle a request for information by HUDmail as we were chatting. It would be nice to know a little more about them.
Frampton was different from the others. I found him the most fascinating to talk to, and I was relieved when the others, one at a time, excused themselves for one reason or another and left us to chat over my second attempt at lunch.
He was, in his own way, as chest-beatingly patriotic as his boss Vance, but it occurred to me that out of us all, he was the only one who had some serious idea of the sheer destructive energy that Magellan would have unleashed when it struck Io.
“Basically,” Frampton said as we were eating burgers in our seats by the picture window, stars twinkling by the millions outside, “it’s relatively simple math that describes what actually occurred. A mass damn near two hundred thousand tons struck the moon at half the speed of light. The side with all the damage of the moon is essentially the exit wound. Magellan created a relatively small hole where it entered on the other side. The ship drove through the core of Io, and the sheer bow shock of its passage blasted a massive chunk of the opposite surface of Io away.”
“I get that. It’s not dissimilar to a regular, conventional bullet hitting a body. The entry wound is normally tiny. All the damage is on the other side.” I nodded.
“Yeah.” Frampton spoke around his mouthful of burger. “Although the majority of the moon is actually intact, internally it’s all churned up. Again, to take our bullet and body example, it’s the same as the hydrostatic shockwave that does the majority of the damage in the body.”
I remembered this from my firearms courses. Shooting a person normally killed someone in one or a combination of four ways: hitting something vital, which actually rarely happens; infection from the gunshot wound; blood loss from the injury; or, finally, hydrostatic shock. The bullet’s passage would create a shockwave that propagated throughout the body, pummeling the major organs. If I got what Frampton was telling me, it was the two last ways that had caused all the damage to the moon. Except instead of blood leaking out, it was the mantle material of Io, and instead of hydrostatic shock, it was moonquakes ripping through it.
“Anyway, it’ll be pretty interesting to see what the end result is. As Io continues in its orbit, it’s going to be pumping out all of its insides, its core of iron, the mantle of iron sulfide, everything. Eventually it may completely disintegrate. Jupiter’s
“Yeah. And to add to our woes, the rest going up with us are mostly media,” Sihota said. We all gave looks of distaste at that.
We spent a while getting to know each other. To say the situation was bizarre was an understatement. The major powers hadn’t had a hot war between them since that particularly nasty proxy conflict in Siberia, which had finally ended a decade ago. That didn’t mean that they got on well with each other, though. The nations and corporations pumped a hell of a lot of time, effort, and money trying to get one over on each other. These guys were all professionals, though. It wasn’t anything personal between them. They were all quite happy to have a companionable drink with one another. Undoubtedly, they were hoping to pick up some snippet of useful information, but at the moment, they were content to just get a feel for each other. After all, we were all here for the same purpose.
Cheng, Vance, Sihota, Agapov, and Drayton were all clearly alpha types, something that I imagined would get pretty tiresome. Metaphors about too many chefs and not enough cooks sprang to mind. I quickly got the impression they were all go-getters. Definitely no connections had got them here. These folks had all earned their rank, despite Sihota’s apparent youth. I sent Giselle a request for information by HUDmail as we were chatting. It would be nice to know a little more about them.
Frampton was different from the others. I found him the most fascinating to talk to, and I was relieved when the others, one at a time, excused themselves for one reason or another and left us to chat over my second attempt at lunch.
He was, in his own way, as chest-beatingly patriotic as his boss Vance, but it occurred to me that out of us all, he was the only one who had some serious idea of the sheer destructive energy that Magellan would have unleashed when it struck Io.
“Basically,” Frampton said as we were eating burgers in our seats by the picture window, stars twinkling by the millions outside, “it’s relatively simple math that describes what actually occurred. A mass damn near two hundred thousand tons struck the moon at half the speed of light. The side with all the damage of the moon is essentially the exit wound. Magellan created a relatively small hole where it entered on the other side. The ship drove through the core of Io, and the sheer bow shock of its passage blasted a massive chunk of the opposite surface of Io away.”
“I get that. It’s not dissimilar to a regular, conventional bullet hitting a body. The entry wound is normally tiny. All the damage is on the other side.” I nodded.
“Yeah.” Frampton spoke around his mouthful of burger. “Although the majority of the moon is actually intact, internally it’s all churned up. Again, to take our bullet and body example, it’s the same as the hydrostatic shockwave that does the majority of the damage in the body.”
I remembered this from my firearms courses. Shooting a person normally killed someone in one or a combination of four ways: hitting something vital, which actually rarely happens; infection from the gunshot wound; blood loss from the injury; or, finally, hydrostatic shock. The bullet’s passage would create a shockwave that propagated throughout the body, pummeling the major organs. If I got what Frampton was telling me, it was the two last ways that had caused all the damage to the moon. Except instead of blood leaking out, it was the mantle material of Io, and instead of hydrostatic shock, it was moonquakes ripping through it.
“Anyway, it’ll be pretty interesting to see what the end result is. As Io continues in its orbit, it’s going to be pumping out all of its insides, its core of iron, the mantle of iron sulfide, everything. Eventually it may completely disintegrate. Jupiter’s
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