Born again humans

4.6 The weakness

The space elevator was indeed a matter of great pride but it was also a great weakness.

The hundreds of cabins which were busy climbing the 26,000 km long space tether were directed by artificial intelligence, like most machines in the Martian world.

Once they received the message from the ambassador, they happily self-destructed all at once. It did not produce any immediate effects onto the most gigantic structure ever built by men. Nevertheless, a few outer cables here and there actually lost their integrity. They eventually snapped and force the inner cables of the tether to accept the additional charge.

The space tether was bound to give way, but it was preceded in the act by the space station which conscientiously had severed its link with the tether. The space station which had pulled straight the tether for ages was suddenly free to roam into space. And the rest of the structure was about to painfully rediscover the harsh truth about gravity.

The tether appeared to fall down – gravity would definitely have a say later on - but it was in fact contracting at an impressive speed, as an elastic band fully extended and then suddenly released rushes to retrieve its minimal shape.

The tether shortened by a several hundred meters out of the initial several thousand of kilometres. The wave progressed along the cables faster than sound but it still took two hours for the shockwave to reach the base on Mars. Under the compounded pressure of both gravity and the elastic backlash, the huge mass in motion was too much for the base, despite its square kilometre of reinforced concrete. The terminal building, as a whole, dug itself into the ground by a good ten meters in a quarter of a second, which is the exactly what describes an earthquake.

The planet Mars thus experienced its first quake for a billion years or so. And it didn't like it. Mostly because its core wasn't melted like on Earth. The shockwave which could have been attenuated by the temporary compression of molten rocks, like on Earth, did go through the very centre and swung through the planet four times before it finally settled down after a few hours.

Meanwhile the tether started to fall down towards Mars pressed only by gravity. The cables gained speed towards the ground, whilst being flexible enough to bend. It was as if the giant tether turned in a matter of seconds from a straight raw spaghetti into a cooked one.

It was only at that moment that the security system that was the pride of the elevator designers deciding to kick in. That was the most advanced distributed system of its time, beside Cerberus, capable of fending off any foreseen aerial attack on the infrastructure. In the past, that system did obliterate a few absent minded or stupidly daring pilots that were judged too close for the comfort of the elevator.

They were the elevator's guardian, a series of independent guns each one able to vaporise a space vessel or a small asteroid on a collision course with the tether. By design, they were not smart, meaning not hosting an AI, otherwise they might have thought twice before dismissing a human kamikaze. So they never listened to the robot ambassador nor executed its self-destruct order.

The guardians as always scanned the space around for potential threats. The first shots were triggered by a loop of the cables that was taking shape as it fall down. A gun had detected that a cable-shape object was closing in on the area it was in charge of protecting. So it fired at the other part of the tether. That happened a few times and resulted in cutting the tether in further pieces.

But at times went, more and more guns realised that a bigger threat was approaching. It was way bigger than the biggest of the asteroid in their scariest simulations. It was moreover accelerating on a direct collision course with the elevator and that required immediate attention. So, in the remote hope of repelling the intruder, they all fired at will at the object violating their safety zone, to name it, the planet Mars.