Atomic Strike

CHAPTER 4: INSERTION

"Sparky, match orbits with the mining station. X-5, prep the package for Phase II. I'm going to have a little chat with our hosts."

Betty punched a button on her console, and the image of the armor-clad, frond-shaped V!room negotiator reappeared on her screen.

"As you are no doubt aware, your space support forces have been cleared from the system. I now possess space superiority. Surrender immediately, or face destruction."

The V!room's tone (translated through Betty's Babel Fish) was defiant.

"Your bargaining position is weaker than you think. You may possess the firepower to level this station, but you do not possess the manpower necessary to retake it! Our relief will soon arrive, and you will be the ones facing destruction."

The screen went dark, and Betty smirked.

"Well, at least they can't say we didn't try to resolve this peacefully. X-5, drop decoys and nukes. I want every inch of the surface of that rock hot enough to glow! Laser anything that shoots back!"

"Aye, aye, Captain."

The inside of the cockpit suddenly brightened as the shields glowed with inefficiently redirected energy, and Betty felt the familiar inner-ear-disrupting feeling of inertial compensators under strain.

"Chief, we're taking fire! Nuclear forged-fragment mines, missiles, and bomb-pumped lasers!"

The view out of the cockpit betrayed the tremendous accelerations Sparky was putting the spacecraft under, as the fixed stars bobbed and wove with the motion of the spacecraft. New stars – x-ray lasers and shaped nuclear explosions, attenuated by powerful shields – popped in and out of view.

The fireworks display suddenly died down, and a reddish (formerly jet-black), roughly spherical asteroid, fifteen kilometers in diameter, came into view.

X-5 began his report.

"I have been able to track and destroy over ninety percent of estimated enemy space assets. As you can see from the reddish glow, my preliminary bombardment has increased surface temperatures on the asteroid to over one thousand degrees Kelvin. The flux of penetrating radiations generated by the thermonuclear, antimatter, and matter-conversion bombardment is likely to have rendered inert any enemy munitions emplaced on, or just beneath, the surface of the asteroid."

Betty, impressed with her crew's work (and by the immense power at her disposal), grinned.

"Time to get our hands dirty, boys."

---

In a bunker, buried under twenty meters of (now glowing, radioactive, and half-molten) regolith for radiation protection, a roomful of V!room workers, miners, and their familes – hostages all - released their sphincters, spilling out their literal last meals (along with sizeable portions of their stomach linings).

The moans emulating from the silent tombs reached a crescendo as cells died, immune systems flailed blindly, and neural cells screamed in pain.

The moans slowly died down as overtaxed, badly damaged nervous systems seized, convulsed, and ceased to function entirely.

In another, much more well-equipped bunker, shielded both by regolith and the shields of a small, deployable annihilation reactor, a platoon of armored V!room commandos loaded their weapons, checked their suits, and prepared for battle.

---

Three figures descended onto the glowing regolith of the asteroid. Of the three, two were clad in low-profile strength-enhancing powered armor and the third was equipped with intrinsic armor and weapons systems. Protected by an umbrella of powerful electronic countermeasures, decoys, and overwatch provided by one heavily-armed patrol vessel, the trio proceeded to float silently towards the installation on vector-control packs.

While the enemy had been deprived of large-scale shielding by repeated assaults, enemy teleport denial was still up and running. With the option of blasting the entire installation off the asteroid off the table, a conventional ground assault would be necessary to retake the station. The task of conducting this assault now fell to Betty and her team.

"The Enemy", in this case, was a well-dug-in, lavishly-equipped (albeit with somewhat outmoded weapons), well-trained, battalion-strength V!room combined arms force.

Betty thanked her lucky stars that the enemy had been unable to circumvent the safeties on the mining installation's civilian-rated fabricators, which would have allowed them to mass-produce combat drones, light spacecraft, and even armored vehicles. Nonetheless, she could expect to encounter a very large number of repurposed reconnaissance and mining drones, and perhaps even light security robots.

Betty stopped worrying about enemy force dispositions, contingency plans, and fallback options for a moment, and let herself gaze at the pristine, star-smattered black sky. At that moment, with the noiseless interior of her helmet as a backdrop, Betty remembered why she loved space.

Each and every one of the myriad points in the unfamiliar, alien sky was a star, and most of them had worlds around them. Worlds of unique chemistry and geology, and if you were lucky, biology and history as well, just waiting to be studied and explored...

Each point of light visible through the smart-glass of her helmet represented light that had left the surface of a star, travelled years, millennia, or eons thorough the cold, empty vacuum of space, and finally come to rest on her retina.

It was beautiful.

As the looming arc of the worldlet's miniscule (and glowing!) horizon grew in her field of vision, Betty slowly (and somewhat reluctantly) forced herself back to the task at hand.

"Chief, we're coming up on the surface! Do you want us to start feeding the fabbers?"

Betty put her game face back on. Her team was counting on her.

---

This segment of Atomic Betty was sponsored by the Shock Rocks Candy Corporation.

Cut to color TV image of a subterranean nuclear test.

"3... 2... 1... detonation!"

The ground shakes with the power of a subterranean five-megaton blast.

Cut to two child-sized workers, in full Hazmat gear, entering the newly-created cavern. Steam hisses from fissures in the ground (artistic license; steam in such a cavern would be a Bad Thing, as it would indicate groundwater contamination).

The twenty-meter cavern glitters with green, violet, and blue salt deposits.

A worker takes off his helmet, picks up a violet-colored piece of fused salt...

...and pops it into his mouth.

The worker's faces grimaces as the carbonated candy fizzes, pops, and crackles in his mouth...

...and breaks out into a toothy grin, giving a thumbs-up.

Shock Rocks! A nuclear explosion your tongue can enjoy!

*The nuclear test in question would be most similar to Project Gnome, which excavated a cavern in a layer of salt in the early 60s.