The Juggernaut — Chapter 4

USA

Richard Atherton had thought that he had been prepared for the duties of a US Senator, though he hadn’t really settled in to that job, but now he was President, he realised that he really wasn’t as ready as he had thought. Not only was he now the President of the United States, but he had to do the job without the support of the White House staff or Congress — with the exception of Julie, and Warren Zeeman, who was still in Alaska, and would remain there until his wife recovered from giving birth to their first child, a daughter.
More Secret Service agents showed up to form Julie’s protection detail, despite the fact that she and Rich weren’t yet married. Given the dearth of surviving members of Congress, apparently the Secret Service had taken it upon themselves to protect all of them, and weren’t taking ‘No’ for an answer.
“It’s a good thing I’m a bit of an exhibitionist,” Julie commented a little sourly. “Since we’re never going to get any privacy ever again.”
Rich and Julie also had to do without their own staffers, who had all been in DC for the inauguration despite the absence of their employers. They had had to make phone calls that usually only military and police officers made, to offer their condolences to the surviving families of their deceased staffers — those whose families lived outside the DC area, of course.
New staff had to be found in short order, and were drafted from federal law enforcement — a number of senior officers stationed in New York had been in DC, some of whom had secretaries who could be drafted to serve the new President, however the transition was proving to be awkward.
Then there was the matter of emergency management. The attacks had left millions dead and — more importantly — injured, and the majority of the injured were in areas that had been set aflame by the thermal radiation of the blasts. Emergency services were inadequate to deal with the sheer scale of the calamity, and it would take weeks for them to penetrate the affected areas and search for survivors in the face of burning buildings.
Thankfully, American cities had too much metal, stone and ceramic in their construction for the myriad fires to join up into a single conflagration as had happened to cities such as Dresden and Tokyo during WWII, but it was bad enough. Given that many local firefighting services were victims themselves, it was a regrettable fact that most of the fires would simply have to be left to burn themselves out.
President Atherton had to make a media appearance, of course, to let the American people know that someone was in charge despite the tragedy, and arrangements were made for him and Julie to appear on prime-time TV in a couple of hours. However, in the mean time, the newly-appointed president met — and spoke in a conference call — to a number of America’s surviving senior military officers. Despite the destruction of the Pentagon, Vandenberg and Peterson, there were still a great many of them.
The President and his fiancee were bundled into a huge chopper which didn’t land on the cluttered roof of their apartment building, followed by their Secret Service details and a couple of senior military officers, while conducting a conference call through a bluetooth headset. If he hadn’t been so busy, he might have been a lot more concerned at stepping off the edge of the roof of his apartment building, across a one-yard gap many stories high and onto a hovering helicopter, even though he — and Julie — were each assisted in turn by four men.
As the helicopter headed off toward the television studios, it briefly struck the President that this was an awfully wasteful way of travelling, but he had been assured that New York’s typically bad traffic was almost more appalling than ever before, in the wake of the attacks, and this was the only way to go.
The question on the President’s lips for the surviving US military commanders was “who, and why?” This was a question that Rich was sure that he’d be asked during his interview.
The response was an unequivocal “We don’t know.” All the members of the Nuclear club, as those nations with atomic weapons were nicknamed, had been attacked, their capitols and a few other places of significance destroyed by atomic weapons of a yield never before seen, and only the Soviet Union had ever contemplated building anything larger. Their largest weapon was the 50MT Tsar Bomba, and while they had contemplated a 100MT version, had never constructed any as far as anyone in the US military and intelligence communities knew. Then there was the point that all of the weapons had been delivered by missile, and had all detonated within a second of one-another. That, along with the size of the blasts, displayed a level of capability far beyond that available to any terrorist organisation, and beyond even the capabilities of most of the Nuclear club’s members.
“To be honest with you, Mister President,” one of the generals on the conference call said. “We don’t have this capability. It’s far more effective to deploy lots of smaller weapons — which is why our missiles carry multiple independent warheads — and while we could manage a simultaneous time-on-target attack, we’d have to stagger our launches, which would give our enemies time to launch a counter-battery attack, and we wouldn’t achieve this kind of synchronisation — the best synchronisation we could achieve over these ranges would be to within less than a minute, not to within less than a second. That’s why our policy is for a single simultaneous launch.”
“Then there’s the issue that the missiles all seem to have come from some place in the North Atlantic,”, another general said. “but despite the degree to which the launches must have been staggered in order to arrive at all those places at the same time, we didn’t detect any launches.”
“It’s looking even worse, Mister President,” a third general said. “We’ve been in contact with the Russians — all this happened without any signs of a developing crisis, and our people and theirs couldn’t resist asking each-other ‘What the fuck?’ — thank God — and they say that they launched counter-missiles against the missiles inbound on them, but not only did the inbounds have ECM — electronic countermeasures — beyond anything they’d ever seen, the inbounds shot down some of the russkie CMs!”
“What does that mean?” Rich asked. “That the Russian counter-missiles were shot down, I mean?”
“We don’t put point-defence on our missiles, and neither does anyone else we know of — ballistic missiles are a bit too obvious to try to hide entirely, though they can carry decoys, and we don’t have the payload to spare for point-defence that probably won’t work anyway, when we could use that mass to lift another few K-T of warheads. However, whoever launched these fuckers doesn’t think the same way we do. They must have used a whole lot of mass lifting the ECM and point-defence gear just in case they needed it, and still had the payload to carry an eighty-effing-megaton warhead. That suggests to me that they have a limited supply of the buggers, and wanted to be sure that they’d count, regardless of whatever we used to defend ourselves.”
“Wait a minute,” Rich interrupted. “Where did ‘eighty megatons’ come from?”
“Sorry, Mister President,” the general apologised. “We can see the destruction on satellite images, and it’s not too difficult to estimate a yield from that. Most of the detonations were air-bursts, at an altitude intended to cause maximum destruction of nearby infrastructure, and fit well within the 75 to 85 M-T range, though the numbers are less certain at those sorts of yields, since no-one has ever detonated one this big before now. Colorado Springs looks like a 37 to 43 M-T yield, though it’s complicated by the fact that another warhead in the 35 to 45 M-T range seems to have gone off inside the Cheyenne Mountain complex. All the other nukes that detonated on foreign soil were in the 75 to 85 M-T range too, including the ground-penetrating detonations at Mount Yamantau and Kovinsky Kamen in Russia.”
As the big helicopter approached the television studios, the conference call was interrupted by a newcomer. “Sorry to interrupt, Mister President, but FBI SAC Denver, Michael Olsen, has news that you need to hear,” the lady’s voice said.
“Thanks, Alice,” Rich said, recognising his new secretary’s voice.
“Mister President, Mike Olsen, SAC Denver FBI,” he introduced himself. “As you might know, the FBI works with the NEST teams from the NNSA in situations like this.”
“I do seem to recall something like that,” Rich said after a moment.
“Good, I’ll get to the point, then, Mister President” Olsen said. “We’re getting reports from the NEST teams in Colorado Springs already, and they’re unusual enough that I think you need to hear them.”
“Okay, go ahead,” Rich said.
“Sorry, Sir, I’m not sure I understand it all well enough to pass it on to you,” he said. “I have Doctor Linda Erris, who’s leading the Colorado Springs NEST team, on the line, and she can tell you herself.”
“Okay,” Rich said again.
“Mister President?” an older woman’s voice spoke. “Linda Erris here.”
“What do you have for me, Doctor Erris?” the President asked.
“We have some very unusual readings from the Colorado Springs and Cheyenne Mountain sites, Sir,” she announced. “These were fusion weapons, and we’ve found plenty of Helium and residue of the Lithium Deuteride and Lithium Tritiide fuel, but there’s practically no fissionables here at all, and we’d expect a shitload of them, or at least fission byproducts.”
“Yes?”
“However, we’ve also found quite a lot of Hafnium, as well as Tantalum, Silver, Holmium and Lutetium. That’s what worries me.”
“I’m sorry, Doctor, I don’t follow you,” Rich was confused.
Doctor Erris sighed. “What do you know about atoms, Mister President? Their internal structure, I mean.”
“They’re a bunch of protons and neutrons surrounded by electrons,” the President said. “That’s about it.”
“Okay, I can work with that,” she said. “You know that when you add energy to atoms, they move faster, which is to say that they get hotter, and can change from a solid to a liquid or a gas?”
“Yes. I understand that part.”
“You can also add energy and bump electrons into a higher, more energetic state.”
“Okay.”
“Well, there’s another way that you can add energy to atoms,” she explained. “Usually the protons and neutrons in the nucleus are neatly arranged, but if you hit an atom with enough energy, you can disarrange the nucleons and knock the nucleus into another state that contains more energy, even while the atoms themselves may effectively be quite cold.”
“I think I understand that.”
“Okay. Most atoms decay back to their ground state quite quickly, in a tiny fraction of a second, but Hafnium, Tantalum, Silver and Lutetium amongst a few other elements can remain in an excited, metastable state for much longer than usual — for days or years, not nanoseconds.”
“All right…? Where’s this going?”
“Don’t worry, Mister President, I’m almost there. These elements — especially Hafnium-178 — can contain a lot of energy when their nuclei are in their excited states. Hafnium-178-m-2 can contain so much that one ounce of it would contain as much energy as over twelve-hundred pounds of TNT, and it has a half-life of 31 years. Tantalum-180 can remain in its excited state effectively forever, though it doesn’t hold as much energy.”
“Okay, so they can store lots of energy…?”
“They can also be made to release it on demand — by hitting them with the right amount of energy in the form of x-rays, they can be made to release all this energy in the form of gamma rays. Hafnium in particular can be made to release its energy very quickly.”
“So?”
“So, Mister President, the presence of so much Hafnium — and so little of it in its metastable state — and the absence of any significant amount of fissionable material suggests to me that it was being used to trigger a fusion detonation in the absence of a fission bomb. That’s what worries me, but it’s also a relief.”
“Can you explain that, Doctor?” the President said. “How is that worrisome and also a relief?”
“Well, it’s a relief in that so little Hafnium seems to be left in its excited state, meaning that these blasts were remarkably clean — there’ll be some fallout, of course, but very little, far less fallout than a bomb like the Russian’s Tsar Bomba in its 100 megaton configuration might have produced, and quite a bit less than any other warhead I’ve ever heard of either.”
“That’s some good news,” the President said. “So, what worries you about it?”
“We can’t make a bomb like this. No-one can yet as far as I know — and it’s my job to know. Not us, not the Russians or the Brits or the French… No-one. In theory, we could make a pure Hafnium-178-isomer bomb, but there’d be a whole lot of metastable Hafnium spread around, making it quite dirty — people in the area would be gamma-irradiated for years afterwards. However, that over 99 percent of the Hafnium here in Colorado Springs is ground-state Hafnium-178, not metastable-two Hafnium-178, means that whoever made this bomb can effectively trigger almost all of it to release its energy simultaneously. The quantities involved suggest that they can put a very powerful warhead into a very small volume — like perhaps the size of a football or a bit bigger.”
“So where the hell did these bombs come from, then!?” the President asked grumpily. “How am I supposed to get the American Armed Forces to go tell these people to stop what they’re doing if we can’t even identify them?”
“Sorry, Mister President, I just provide the analysis,” the Doctor said with an edge of grim humour in her voice. “Policy is your department.” She paused, then continued. “I should add that this Hafnium isomer doesn’t occur naturally in any significant quantity. The energy it contains all has to be put there, and that would require something like a cyclotron, a large power supply, and quite a bit of time to obtain the quantities we’re seeing here. Not something that could be pulled off in someone’s back-yard, no matter how big.”
“All right, Doctor Erris,” the President said. “Do you have anything else I need to know?”
“No, Mister President.”
“Thank-you Doctor.”
“Thank you for listening, Mister President,” the Doctor signed off.
“So, who the hell do I say did this?” Rich asked. “Grey aliens? Nazis from the far side of the moon? The Daleks? El Chupacabra?”
“You just say that ‘the investigation has only just begun,’ honey,” Julie said. “‘It’s far too sensitive a matter to speculate about at this early stage,’” she suggested. “‘Speculation in the absence of evidence could only lead to an unnecessary further increase in global tensions.’”

The television interview went well — as well as could be expected, given the circumstances. The President offered his condolences to the surviving families of the millions who had lost their lives, both in America and around the world. He praised the militaries of the world for thinking before reacting as they had been trained, and not adding an all-out nuclear exchange to the world’s problems. He promised to do everything in his power to see that assistance was delivered to the survivors of the blasts, both in America and abroad. However, the one thing he could not do was answer the inevitable questions, ‘Who?’ and ‘Why?’

New York became the de-facto capitol of the United States, and the President’s Fifth-Avenue apartment building became the new White House, the American Government buying out the other residents at premium prices, paying perhaps twenty to fifty times what the other apartments in the building were worth, and yet not actually obtaining title to the building or apartments; since the building wasn’t suitable to be the President’s dwelling long-term, the original residents would eventually be permitted to return. The figures were astronomical to the residents, yet were insignificant when compared to the US’ annual budget.
A week passed. Emergency crews gradually penetrated the blast-affected areas and tales of survival, heroism, cowardice, villainy and tragedy emerged. Certain images became iconic, such as a photo of badly-burned pit-bull-terrier named Sula who had been found trying to dig her owners out of the rubble of their collapsed house that had trapped them. Fires still burned, as there were not enough fire crews or water tankage to fight them all, and much of the burning areas would have to be effectively written off anyway, given the destruction the blasts had wrought. Those fire crews on site had to concern themselves with saving people, not property. Images from the inauguration were found, taken just prior to the detonation of the warhead and propagated away from DC with the speed of the internet. The incoming missile featured in one video sequence, and was analysed in excruciating detail by national intelligence agencies, the news media and civilians alike, yet little could be discerned from it, given that the missile was surrounded by superheated air and ablated heat shielding that effectively obscured its details.
A blizzard was forecast for the evening of the 26th for the north-east coast. Rescue crews had to race to reach survivors before the blizzard further endangered their lives, but it was also welcome, in that it would finally extinguish the fires that had continued to burn through a week of calm, clear weather.

New York sea approaches

The automaton had made its way from its mid-Atlantic launch-site toward the US coast, travelling slowly in order to reduce its acoustic signature, which wasn’t particularly large at all, considering its size. It had taken a local week to make the trip, quickly at first in order to get clear of the launch site, and then slowly the rest of the way. Given its size, its acoustic signature was very low-pitched, and was mistaken for seismic activity by the operators of submarine- and shoreside- based sonar. Several US fast-attack submarines passed directly over it without even noticing — the Atlantic sea floor was far below the usual operating depth of any human military submarines, and while civilian subs existed that could descend that far, their range on batteries was pitiful in comparison to the nuclear-powered attack subs, and deployment of any of them wasn’t even contemplated.
During the trip, the automaton’s nanites had devised an attack plan, and when the automaton reached the US coast, they put it into action, reconfiguring into a hoop in order to cover the remaining distance to shore as quickly as possible before unrolling again so as to remain submerged until as close to land as possible.
The automaton revealed itself to humanity for the first time at 02:49 AM EST on January 27th, 2017, surfacing above the Hudson Channel, about a hundred and twenty miles from New York city, raising its head into blizzard conditions and pointing it inland to begin its preliminary fire-plan.
Even as it continued to make its way toward shore with serpentine motions of its immense body, it began to belch forth huge rail-gun rounds, each over 6.9 metres long and 28 centimetres in diameter, typically weighing nearly 3.4 tons, with muzzle velocities of around seven kilometres per second, launching one each second and a half. They were all directed inland, toward locations that the nanites considered significant. Unlike the relatively gentle missile launches of a week ago, these launches were painfully obvious, with huge plumes of white-hot vaporised metal erupting from the mouth of the rail-gun behind the projectiles, the projectiles streaking upwards like bolts of lightning as they carved incandescent trails through the air.

The weather wasn’t quite as bad as the “Juno” storm of January 2015, but the snowfall was still heavy enough and the wind strong enough to reduce visibility to around a quarter mile. The snow also dampened the sound of the automaton’s rail gun and hid the flashes, but the snow wasn’t sufficient to conceal the projectiles zipping overhead, and the flashes of light from superheated air and the crash of the hypersonic shock-waves were dampened but not entirely eliminated. However, distance also contributed to concealing the automaton’s shots, since it had surfaced 120 miles from New York, though it fired its shots at a relatively shallow angle.
Still, the automaton was pressing inland as fast as it could go, at nearly thirty miles per hour, assisted by the buoyancy and lubrication that the water gave it, firing its large rail-gun non-stop.

New York City

Secret Service Special Agents June Rijke and Darren Hillcrest were on duty outside the President’s bedroom. That Congresswoman Winchester was the President’s fiancée and slept with him was a bonus as far as the Secret Service agents were concerned, in that they only needed two agents to stand guard outside the door, and not four as might have been the case had the President and the Congresswoman slept separately. However, each protectee still had their full protective detail, but the protectees’ joint sleeping arrangements allowed two of the agents who might otherwise be standing post to sit out their watch in a nearby room in a little more comfort.
It was difficult for the two agents to stay awake, especially as the presence of their protectees — who were new to having a protection detail, and might wake if the agents spoke unnecessarily — sleeping nearby precluded any unnecessary conversation. However, the agents standing post could drink strong coffee while another agent relieved them for the minutes that would take, so it wasn’t too bad…
There was a muffled ‘thump’ as one of the automaton’s rail-gun rounds sped by overhead, its sonic boom muffled by the mass of snow in the air. The next several rounds went too far wide of New York to be heard or seen through the snow, but then another round streaked over New York at relatively close range, visible as a dull glow passing rapidly across the sky from east to west, followed by the ‘thump’ of its shock-wave some seconds later. More of the huge rail-gun rounds went wide of New York before another passed close enough that it could be seen and heard.
However, the blizzard was dying down, the worst of the winds and the heaviest snow-falls having passed some hours previously. This was noted by the two Secret Service agents standing post.
“What was that?” Special Agent June Rijke murmured as another round crashed past overhead.
“Lightning, perhaps?” Special Agent Darren Hillcrest replied.
“You’re not from New York, are you?”, June asked.
“No, I was transferred here from Miami last year.”
“Then you might not know that lightning in a snowstorm is very unusual,” she said. “Even more so when the storm’s nearly over, as this one is.”
Another rail-gun round sped by overhead, the glow of its passage passing rapidly from east to west, followed by a louder ‘thump’ than before, given that the snowfall had lightened significantly.
“There’s another one!” June exclaimed quietly. “Don’t tell me that was lightning!”
Darren went over to the window and peered out through the frost, ice and snow that rimed it, and then gave up and unlatched the window and slid it up a little. He knelt down and peered through the gap, the icy wind in his face waking him up as effectively as a mug or two of strong coffee. He saw a distant streak of light through the thinning clouds, then another and another, then a forth, and fifth, each coming a little closer than the last. He didn’t hear the first two, but he did hear the last three, “Whump… Thump… Bang!” the last one louder than before. As the snowfall passed east of the automaton, the sounds of its rail-gun firing were no longer muted by the snowfall either, and Darren could now hear a distant, rhythmical “Booom! Booom! Booom! Booom! Booom!” like the slow beat of some immense drum. A chill ran through him that was unrelated to the chill wind blowing through the open window as he began to realise that this was no natural phenomenon, and probably not a welcome one either.

New York sea approaches

The automaton ran through its fire-plan, its head swinging back and forth as it launched its large rail-gun rounds, bringing its launcher to bear on its targets in reverse order of proximity. It wasn’t a true time-on-target attack, as that would have involved pausing between some of its launches and firing others at an interval shorter than the big rail gun and its feed system allowed, but its fire plan still minimised the time between the first and the last impact, before it had run through its target list and began again with the most distant target that its bird spies reported as having not suffered incapacitating damage.
In flat-world ballistics, maximum range is achieved with the launch trajectory 45° from the horizontal. For relatively low launch velocities, this is also a reasonable approximation on a spherical world the size and mass of Earth, however, at the velocities at which the automaton’s projectiles were being launched, this approximation no longer holds true. At around seven kilometres per second, maximum range — of about 7600 kilometres — is achieved at a launch angle of around 30°. As velocity increases, maximum range increases and the launch angle required to achieve it decreases, and at around 8.5 kilometres per second — the maximum launch velocity of the automaton’s rail gun, the theoretical maximum range is around 40,000 kilometres at a launch angle of 0°, effectively sufficient to orbit the globe, and at 20°, sufficient to hit a target on the opposite side of the world, around 20,000 kilometres distant. However, as launch angle decreases, atmospheric drag becomes a greater factor, and eventually line-of-sight obstructions also become a factor, so it is almost paradoxical that a higher launch angle and a slower launch can become a better choice to hit a closer target, despite the lower impact velocity. With these launch velocities, the automaton could easily hit any place in the world, making it easy to hit any place in the US.

USA

The automaton’s targets were sites of strategic and tactical military importance. Places where atomic weapons were manufactured, factories where aircraft and ground vehicles for the military were manufactured, munitions factories, naval shipyards and navy ships at anchor, as well as military airfields and army bases.
The huge rail-gun rounds travelled to their targets in a mostly ballistic arc since they didn’t carry much in the way of propulsion. However, the little propulsion they did carry, in combination with their fins, allowed them to correct for errors in launch trajectory, and once out of the bulk of the atmosphere, the nanites aboard each projectile could sight their intended destination and correct the initial aim.
As was the case with nuclear weapons, a single projectile could do immense damage to a single target, but at seven or more kilometres per second, that was overkill for the majority of the automaton’s targets, and would actually leave many of them easily repaired. That was why for the most part, the automaton’s rail gun projectiles were designed to disintegrate into a cloud of smaller projectiles shortly before impact. Each one, moving at around six kilometres per second at impact after aerodynamic drag was taken into consideration, would still do immense damage, and the sheer quantity of them would multiply the damage that could be done, much like the difference between a slug and a shot round fired from a shotgun.
The clouds of railgun submunitions crashed into their targets, smashing them to pieces and killing anyone present there — thankfully fewer than might have been the case during daytime when workers were on-shift. The white-hot metal fragments set fires in any flammable materials they came to rest upon.

New York City

The last targets on the automaton’s list were the Boeing E-4A NEACP and the Boeing VC-25A Air Force One aircraft, both stationed at La Guardia airport for the use of the President. That round had been fired almost directly upwards at around two kilometres per second, and descended almost vertically, but despite its lower velocity, its submunitions still pulverised the entire airport, all the aircraft present — grounded due to the inclement weather — and the skeleton staff and the few passengers who hadn’t gone on to more comfortable lodgings when their flights had been cancelled. The runways were also pulverised and turned into rubble. The crews of ‘Kneecap’ and Air Force One didn’t even have time to realise that they were under attack before they and their commands were turned into burning piles of scrap.

New York sea approaches

The automaton continued to fire, working its way back down its target list again where its bird spies reported that the targets remained functional, and incidentally killing any people who had come to rubberneck or deal with the fires the first wave of white-hot steel fragments had started, delaying the spread of news about the new round of attacks. The automaton fired for over three and a quarter hours before exhausting its immediate target list.

The first humans to see the automaton were the crew of the Seoul Express, a German-flagged container ship which had taken the opportunity afforded by the improving weather to get under way to its next port of call. The ship had been ready to go when the blizzard had descended, and Captain James Wolverton — a British citizen — had been minutes from ordering lines to be cast off when the order had come down closing the port. As the weather had improved, he had pestered the port authority for permission to depart, and eventually there appeared to be no good reason to delay departures any longer, and another pilot was sent to facilitate their departure.
On the way out of the harbour, at 6:49 AM, the ship’s radar seemed to malfunction; several vessels waiting off-shore for clearance to dock appeared to vanish from the scope then re-appear some minutes later. When the radar operator informed his captain — and the harbour pilot — of this fact, the pilot looked puzzled and the captain took up a pair of expensive image-stabilised 12x40 binoculars and stepped outside into the freezing wind to scan the horizon. He saw the running lights of several ships right where he expected to see them, before some large, dark shape moved in front of one of them, white breakers visible where it disturbed the water. It was very large, towering far above its wake, and the captain was momentarily disoriented, unable to reconcile the presence of something apparently that large and its distance.
“Hey, Paul,” the captain called in through the door to the pilot in his British accent. “What the hell do you think this is?” he waved the binoculars.
As Paul went out and took the binoculars, the captain called, “Sven! Get a spotlight trained out to ten degrees starboard from our course!”
Sven Nyland, a Danish national, brought out a hand-held spotlight, a million-candlepower xenon unit, and trained it out where his captain indicated and turned it on.
A one-million-candlepower spotlight has an impressive range, however the automaton was several kilometres away, and the bright light served to illuminate it only dimly.
The harbour pilot peered at the dark shape through the binoculars, getting the impression of something so vast that it completely filled his field of view, and looked… scaly, that tapered back into the sea, with a dark void at its front. The spotlight seemed to be having less effect than he thought it should, since he too was underestimating the range to the automaton.
However, while the sun was rising to the east, the receding blizzard had kept things dark for some time, but when it finally rose at 7:10 AM, the overcast sky seemed to brighten from near-pitch-black to dull daylight in the space of a few minutes, and suddenly the spotlight wasn’t necessary any more.
The automaton became clearly visible, its vast, dark-shadowed mouth swaying from side to side above the waves as its black, scaly, serpentine body propelled it at nearly thirty miles per hour over the sea bed toward New York city, though it appeared to be swimming. Despite the blizzard, there was no snow or ice on its body as there was on the Seoul Express, and its body steamed visibly, despite the distance of several nautical miles that separated it from the container ship.
“What the fuck?!” the harbour pilot swore, lowering the binoculars and passing them back to the captain.
Captain Wolverton put the binoculars to his eyes. “It looks like a dirty great snake!” he exclaimed. “Where the hell did that come from?”
The pilot was talking on his radio, “New York Traffic, New York Traffic, New York Traffic, this is Seoul Express Delta Hotel Bravo November on channel fourteen over.”
“Seoul Express, this is New York Traffic, switch channel seventy-nine, over,” was the reply.
“Switching seventy-nine, over,” The pilot adjusted his radio. “New York Traffic, New York Traffic, this is Seoul Express Delta Hotel Bravo November on channel seventy nine over.”
“Seoul Express, this is New York Traffic, over.”
“Hi, Art,” the pilot said, recognising the speaker’s voice despite the poor sound quality. “It’s Paul here, over”
“Hi, Paul, I thought I recognised your voice, lousy reception and all. What’s up, over.”
“I have a… navigation hazard over here, bearing two-fifteen to two-nineteen degrees magnetic from my position, range unknown but maybe three miles, inbound toward New York at unknown speed, over.” The pilot was being cautious in his reporting style.
“I got nothing on my scope but you anywhere near that position, Paul, over.” Art sounded sceptical.
“It ain’t on our radar either, Arthur Park, but we’re looking at the bloody thing through binoculars and our damn eyeballs, and sure as hell it’s there. We spotted it when the S-E’s radar officer kept losing traffic further out to sea, over.”
“You were losing radar returns?” Art asked, sounding more interested. “We’ve been losing em’ too, since around 0300. Do you have any missing blips right now, over?”
Paul went back into the bridge and looked at the scope. “Any missing blips, Karol?” he asked the bearded Polish second officer.
Karol pointed with one thick finger at an empty spot on the scope. “Here,” he grunted tersely. “C-S-C-L Europe, Papa three Victor Zulu nine.”
Paul repeated this to Art.
“Okay, Paul, gimme a minute, I wanna plot something, over.” In his dirt-side office, Art used the mapping software on his desktop computer to draw a couple of lines extending from the Seoul Express’ position, at angles of 215° and 219° from magnetic north, then drew another couple of lines extending from the position of New York Traffic’s radar toward his own inexplicably missing blips, then sat and stared at his screens for a few seconds before reaching for his microphone again and depressing the transmitter key. “Paul, my plot puts that radar black hole at about six nautical miles from your position, over.”
The captain was listening to this exchange. “Fuck, that’s big!” he swore, doing some quick calculations in his head. “That thing’s beam would have to be bigger than our length, then!”
“It’s a good thing that we’re coming up on our turn toward Nova Scotia, then,” the pilot replied to Art. “I don’t wanna get much closer to this thing if I can help it, over.”
“Hey, Paul, wanna tell me just what this ‘incoming navigation hazard’ is, now? Over.”
“Hell if I know, Art…” Paul began. “It looks like a bloody big black snake maybe five hundred yards across…”
“Jörmungandr,” Sven cut across the pilot’s transmission. “The Midgard serpent, so big that it could encircle the Earth and bite its own tail, that even Thor, strongest of the gods, could not lift even using his magical belt and gloves of strength.”
“…Ah… well…” Paul stopped and let Sven speak, and struggled for words when he finished. “What Sven just said, I suppose,” he said. “Except I’m not sure its anywhere near that long, though, over.” Paul finally let up the transmit button on his radio.
“If this is a joke, I ain’t laughing,” Art said grumpily. “There are penalties for giving false reports, and I’ll see that you’re charged if this is a joke, over.”
“No bloody joke, Art,” Paul said seriously. “I’ll swear on the Bible and my parents’ graves that there’s a bloody huge black snake, with a body thicker than the length of this vessel and God only knows how long, but more than a couple of miles, coming toward us both at a pretty good clip. If we had any reception out here, I’d pull out my cell and send you a shot of it, but right now, I’m just glad that the autopilot is due to start our turn for Halifax in a minute, otherwise I’d be leaving the navigation channel and damn the consequences, over!”
“Well… Okay… Shit! I suppose I can treat it like an out-of-control vessel. Seoul Express, you’re instructed to stay clear of it, you have clearance to manoeuvre as necessary and safe, without respect to established channels, over.” Art concluded formally.
The Seoul Express began to turn to port right on schedule, the automaton appearing to swing around to the ship’s starboard side.
“We’ve begun our turn,” Paul said in relieved tones. “I’ll be happier when I’m back on the pilot boat though, over.”

The automaton’s committee of nanites considered the container ship’s change of course. Over the nearly four hours during which it had been firing, it had expended over thirty-two thousand tons of ordnance, most of it being constructed from a heavy steel alloy for no reason other than the relative abundance of Iron in the planetary crust and its corresponding abundance in human construction. Despite the automaton’s huge size, this represented a significant percentage of its ammunition bunkerage, and the nanites’ consensus was that it should be replaced expeditiously. The nanites had intended to collect steel from demolished buildings, but the cargo ship ahead represented sixty-six thousand tons of material, much of it steel, that could be more readily broken down and converted into ammunition than a ceramic-encased skyscraper. Given the vessel’s internet-listed maximum speed and its proximity, the nanites agreed that the maximum detour necessary to seize and consume the ship was an acceptable deviation from its mission, and changed the automaton’s course to intercept. It would be interesting to see when the human crew abandoned their vessel, if they did so at all.

When Jormungandr’s head swung around to put it on an intercept course with the Seoul Express, a chill ran through the men standing outside the bridge. Paul depressed the button on his radio again. “Pan-pan, pan-pan, pan-pan. Jormungandr has altered course to intercept us, over.” He announced to Art.
“You’re calling ‘pan’, Paul?” Art replied. “If that bloody great snake was chasing me, I’d bloody well be calling ‘mayday’, not ‘pan’, over.”
Paul glanced at the suddenly pale-faced captain, who nodded mutely and rushed into the bridge.
“All right, then, Art: Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! We are under attack!” The sound of the captains voice announcing orders to abandon ship, followed by the warning klaxon suddenly sounded throughout the ship. “We’re preparing to evacuate, Seoul Express out!”
“Acknowledged and good luck. We’ll send help, New York Traffic out.”
“Karol, count the crew onto the lifeboat while I keep an eye on things up here,” the captain instructed his second-in-command. “Give me a call when everyone else is on board, but keep in mind that if I arrive without being called, it’ll be because Jormungandr over there is on right top of us and if we don’t launch straight away, none of us will survive. Either way, I’ll be the last crew member to board the lifeboat, and anyone not on board or right on my heels will be left behind.”
“Yes, sir,” Karol acknowledged, then pulled out his own radio and began barking further orders for the crew to drop what they were doing and get to the lifeboat.
“I’ll stay and watch, if you don’t mind,” Paul said to Jim.
“Your choice,” the captain replied. “Just remember that when I start running, you’ll have to keep up or you’ll get left behind.”
“Sure. I got it.”

Jormungandr grew ever closer and larger, and it was only a few minutes before the huge black snake loomed above them like a skyscraper, while the captain’s radio sounded with Karol’s voice urging various crew members to greater speed. Evidently, some crew members had been attending to some broken gear near the bow, and it had taken them a while to extract themselves from the confined space in which they had been working. Sven stayed also, filming the approaching monster with his smartphone.
“Time to go, I think,” Paul said nervously as the huge ‘O’ of Jormungandr’s mouth loomed over them.
“Oh, I’d say so,” the captain agreed. “Let’s go.”
The three men ran to the lifeboat, where Karol was waiting at the hatch.
“We’re missing George and Slavka,” Karol said. “George has had a sprain trying to get here.”
“There’s no fucking time to wait!” the captain swore as Jormungandr’s black head loomed above the containers to either side of the lifeboat ramp. “We have to go now!”
The three men piled into the lifeboat while Karol spoke on the radio again. “George? Slavka? Where the fuck are you, we have to abandon now! Over.”
“Karol, go, we can’t get there in time,” came the response. “We’ll go over the side, out.”
Karol slammed the hatch closed and pulled the launch handle as he jumped into the helmsman’s seat, and Paul’s stomach dropped as the lifeboat slid down its precipitously steep ramp, splashing down into the water and submerging completely before popping back to the surface like a cork, its engine already roaring.
As the lifeboat shot away from the Seoul Express as fast as it could go, Sven was still filming through a porthole. The captain opened the hatch so that he could watch as Jormungandr’s head reared back then dipped toward his vessel, its mouth’s lower edge dipping below the waves, then the whole head tilting back as it came up beneath the ship. There were two deep booming sounds as the ship made contact with the conical inside of the giant serpent’s mouth. Mud and water cascaded from the lower edge of its mouth as it rose from the waves, and the ship’s hull groaned with the stresses of being supported only at the bow and stern. Dozens of long, thin-seeming black tentacles erupted from the back of Jormungandr’s throat, but given the size of the beast, they must have been as thick as the trunks of sequoias. They whipped around the Seoul Express as the head continued to rise, crashing and shrieking noisily as they impacted and scraped across the hull. The head rose further, more muddy, oily, diesel-fuel-contaminated water gushing from between the scales beneath the head, and the ship was lost from sight, but everyone could hear the metallic groans, bangs and shrieks as the tentacles drew in the ship, crushing and breaking open the hull and spilling containers into the vast maw. Then came a rhythmical roar as the serpent devoured the ship, crushing and breaking it up into fragments that could be ingested. Miraculously, two men plunged from the lip of Jormungandr’s maw into the sea, falling feet-first dozens of metres into the icy water, apparently having been beneath the giant serpent’s notice. Then, Jormungandr turned back to head directly toward New York, the terrible sounds of the ship in its maw being devoured continuing as it went on its way.
“All right, Karol, let’s circle around and see if we can pick up George and Slavka.” The captain said when Jormungandr had moved away.
The small lifeboat was not the best platform from which to conduct a rescue, since it had little in the way of a deck on which a rescuer might stand, but the crew of the stricken Seoul Express managed to locate and recover their last two crew members before they became fatally chilled in the icy water. As they stripped the freezing wet clothes from the two shivering men, they were shocked to see that both men had the reddened skin and blisters of first and second degree burns on their bodies, particularly on their hands and knees, but also on their torsos.
“How on earth did you two get those burns?” the Captain asked after the men had been wrapped in insulating blankets and had been given positions seated over the hot engine compartment below the deck.
“How?” Slavka coughed a bit, having inhaled a little of the diesel-fuel contaminated water during his time in the water. “The fucking beast was hot!” He didn’t add any more, as his body was wracked by a violent fit of coughing.
“It wasn’t boiling hot, but it was close to it,” George added. “I could see the bubbles on its skin just like you get on the sides of a pot just before the water in it boils. We didn’t realise what that meant until the water drained out from beneath us and we found ourselves lying on it and getting burned.”
“That’ll get you on your feet quick,” Slavka added between bouts of coughing. “Sprained ankle or not.”
“I could feel the heat from it right through the soles of my boots,” George went on, gesturing toward his steel-toed thick-soled work boots discarded on the throbbing deck. “I tell you, you’d get burned feet too if you stood on it for more than a minute or so. It made all this icy water down here seem downright inviting!”
“What was it doing to the ship?” Sven asked.
“I looked back, and I’ll never forget it,” George answered, closing his eyes and shuddering. “We were inside its mouth, but these tentacles that would make a passenger train look tiny came out of the back of its throat, whipped around the Express and began pulling her in, folding her up just as if we’d wrapped a wire noose around the middle of a can of soda. Containers were breaking free and falling all over the place, and even if the beast hadn’t been as hot as the devil, that would’ve made us hoof it all by itself. As the Express was being pulled into the throat, I could see something starting to chew it up as easily as we’d chew up a ball of alfoil. While we were running for the edge, I kept expecting some of those tentacles to come for us and pull us in or smash us flat.”