Yael Dragwyla and Richard Ransdell First North American rights

email: polaris93@aol.com 18,600 words

The Eris War

Volume 1: The Dragon and the Crown

by Admiral Chaim G. Resh, USN detached

Book 1: The End of the Beginning

Part 1: Vintage Season

After this I looked, and, behold, a door was opened in heaven: and
the first voice which I heard was as it were of a trumpet talking with
me; which said, Come up hither, and I will shew thee things which
must be hereafter.

Revelation 4:1

. . . [The] Earth that we take for granted today is a temporary

phenomena [sic]: . . . civilization has arisen in a rare respite from the
Ice Age and an odd period of climatic stability, and . . . in the distant
future our planet – unless we change or escape it – will be as bizarre
and hostile a place to humans in the future as it was in its beginnings.
[History] will begin to run backward as Earth’s environment eventually
slips toward the simpler ecology of hundreds of millions of years ago.
This decline . . . is not just coming, it has already started. Biologically,
Earth has already peaked – perhaps as long as 300 million years ago –
and we are already living in a relatively impoverished world. [Our]
planet is approximately 4.5 billion years old and . . . life is at least 3.4
billion years old. [The] last animals on this planet will die out as early
as 500 million years from now, and possibly much earlier . . . [We]
live not in our planet’s youth but in its middle to old age. Our planet is
already in decline.
– Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee, The Life and Death of Planet
Earth: How the New Science of Astrobiology Charts the
Ultimate Fate of our World (New York: Times Books, 2002,
ISBN 0-8050-6781-7 (lib.)), p. 12
 . . . As [Winston Smith] looked at the woman in her characteristic
attitude, her thick arms reaching up for the line, her powerful marelike
buttocks protruded, it struck him for the first time that she was
beautiful. It had never before occurred to him that the body of a
woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing,
then hardened, roughened by work till it was coarse in the grain like an
overripe turnip, could be beautiful. But it was so, and after all, he
thought, why not? The solid, contourless body, like a block of granite,
and the rasping red skin, bore the same relation to the body of a girl as
the rose-hip to the rose. Why should the fruit be held inferior to the
flower?
– George Orwell, 1984 (New York: Signet Classics/New
American Library, 1950, 1981), pp. 180-181

Never forget: beneath your feet,

beneath the rose, below the wheat,
beyond the bastioned granite floor,
lies the ultimate, molten core.
The tides of fire, locked in sleep,
a vigil down the aeons keep.
Across the whirling gulfs of space
the elements of motion race.
The aeons burn; the cycles ebb;
the stenciled stars retrace their web.
Never forget: in the heart of earth
Still licks the fire that brought its birth.
Our calendar of iron and flame
invokes the time without a name,
the days of fire, the final men,
the molten core made whole again.

“Heart of Earth,” by Joseph Payne Brennan

Chapter 1: Auto de fé

§1
March 23, 2022, 11:23:17 UT, ca. 1.95 x 108 kilometers from Sol, R.A. 0:11:59, declination 1°14’ N:

It was, in many ways, a very good year – especially for space, and the development of space
technologies. It was a very good year for astronauts, and hard, star-filled nights, to yearn to join the flights
and head for space, for the human race . . .*

*Paraphrased from the song “It Was a Very Good Year,” written by Ervin Drake and made popular by
Frank Sinatra. © 1961 by Ervin Drake.
 Everywhere in the inner Solar System men and women were busily at work, like some strange variety
of huge, bipedal eusocial insects, building their hives, shuttling back and forth between potential nesting
sites and resource troves, filling the electromagnetic air with the continuous buzz of their
intercommunications. Space-travel had been a done deal since the early 1990s, when the first regular,
routine shuttle-services between Earth and the Moon had become a reality, and, along with them,
construction on the first structures on and below Luna’s surface intended for habitation and daily use by
human beings had begun.
Then, within a couple of years, preparation for the first crude “tin-can alley” flights between the Moon
and Mars, carrying technicians and scientists, construction crews, tools, instruments, food and other
necessities for establishing and maintaining the first permanent human settlements on Mars and carrying
crews whose tours were over and the data and samples collected on the Red Planet back to Mars had begun.
So far, Mars One had already completed been and was now ready for departure, just waiting to be loaded
and sent on her way from the L-5 point in Earth orbit where she had been constructed; Mars Two and
Mars Three were almost completed; and Mars Four, in Earth-orbit at the same L-5 point where her sisters
had been constructed, was coming along nicely and would soon be ready to go herself. The small fleet was
almost ready to depart for the first attempt at building a base on Mars that could support both scientific
exploration and permanent human habitation, including facilities for extracting and purifying water from
frozen Martian tundra and underground, hermetically sealed quarters that would serve for growing food.
In turn, the continuing progress on the Mars project had inspired the beginnings of the manned
exploration of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter as a necessary prequel to the eventual settlement
of the Belt by terrestrial human beings, which began right at the beginning of the new millennium. The
Solar System was now well on its way to becoming fully colonized. Though that colonization would be a
long, slow process, with many setbacks and tragedies, by 2172, all other things being equal, from the
blazing Purgatory of the innermost part of the system to the stygian marches of the Kuyper Belt there
would be successful terrestrial colonies with thriving populations of human beings and the biotic life-
support system they would have to bring with them into space to enable them to survive. From LaGrange-
type inhabited industrial satellites in orbit around Venus and in the fiery spaces between her orbit and that
of Mercury, to permanent scientific stations on Pluto and the trans-Neptunian bodies and the Centaurs, soon
humanity would establish permanent settlements, vast industrial and manufacturing centers employing AI
machinery ranging from giant robotic complexes the size of modern nuclear aircraft carriers to nanobots no
larger than a muscle-fiber in a human arm, “bottled farms” and other food-producing and –storage
settlements, and enormous orbital complexes housing schools, libraries, offices, and even parks and
biological preserves on every possible body of the system.
All other things being equal, humanity was well on its way to becoming the masters of the entire Solar
System, from the Sun’s blazing surface all the way out to the lonely, Stygian abysses of the Oört comet
“cloud” marking the place where the Solar System ended and interstellar space began.
But everything wasn’t equal. In fact, within a short time, things would become catastrophically
unequal in ways very few of Earth’s teeming swarm of humanity had ever dreamed could happen.

§2
On the far side of the Sun, some 50 million kilometers farther out from Sol than Earth, (11,323)
Lugh/NEO 2019-C, a roughly spherical nickel-iron meteor a quarter of a kilometer across, a gigantic
mineral cash-cow ripe for conversion into a host of products which an iron-hungry Earth would happily sell
its soul to acquire, swung round the Sun in tandem with a squat, powerful mining-tug flanked by six
gigantic cargo containers. The tug was there to complete a project begun some years before under the
auspices of UNECOSOC, the United Nations Economic and Social Council and UNILO, the International
Labor Organization of the United Nations. As originally conceived, that project had entailed moving a
nickel-iron asteroid of useful size, say, around 1010 liters in volume, from its home in the system’s main
asteroid belt close to Luna such that it would be captured by Luna’s gravity and go into orbit around her.
Once in such an orbit, the asteroid could easily be explored and tested scientifically and mined for the
minerals contained in it – that close to Earth, transporting supplies and personnel between it and Earth
wouldn’t be a problem, what with the Earth-Luna shuttle runs that took place around every two weeks.
The scarcity of valuable metals – gold, silver, platinum, nickel, tin, iron, copper, chrome, zinc,
vanadium, osmium, the rare-earth elements, and all the rest, including, in ever-increasing amounts, radium,
uranium, thorium, and the other actinides – on Earth wasn’t really that there weren’t lots of them to be had
on the planet. It was that after 4 billion years of tectonic mixing, they had mostly moved down into Earth’s
mantle and core. What little was still near the surface was hard to find and therefore expensive – figure
$10,000 per pound for platinum! But those same metals weren’t hidden on asteroids, where there had
never been any tectonic action, and gravity was close to nil. There were more precious metals in one
asteroid than we could ever hope to mine from Earth’s entire crust, no matter how long we took at it. A
prize indeed for an increasingly resource-poor world, a game worth every candle that the world’s
government could throw at it!
But first, once they found such an asteroid, they had to move the damned thing Solward from its
original position. A slight modification of the original program had solved a number of problems: Lugh
had been picked because, rather than being a member of the main Belt, it was actually a NEO – a Near-
Earth Object, and an Earth-crosser, to boot, a member of the Apollo asteroids, whose orbit around the Sun
ranged from around 100 million klicks out from Sol to around twice that far, in the process crossing Earth’s
orbit at around 140-150 million klicks from the Sun. This would make it much easier and far less costly to
move to its final destination. But, unlike most of its brethren among the Apollos, which were largely
siliceous in composition and thus unsuitable for the experiment, this one was largely nickel-iron and thus
exactly what was needed for the project. It was almost as if it had been designed and put in place by
benefic Gods for humanity to use for its first attempt at moving an asteroid for this or any other purpose,
and the industries who had been awarded the contract for this experiment by UNECOSOC seized on it
ecstatically, steadfastly refusing to look this gift asteroid in the craters for fear it would turn out to be a
Trojan rock that would have to be discarded for some far less suitable object, one likely to crate cost
overruns and even worse trouble for the industries involved. Later, if this experiment proved successful,
they could work on moving asteroids in-system from much farther away, say, from the Belt itself, or even
beyond, among the Centaur asteroid population found between Jupiter and Neptune.
In theory, the operation was quite simple: plant hydrogen bombs made for just this purpose in various
places on the asteroid’s surface and detonate them by timers or remote-control such that the resultant
explosions would kick Lugh into a ballistic which would take it to just the right point near Luna, at just the
right time, for Luna’s gravitational field to capture it. In practice, however, the operation would be a good
deal more complicated. First, since Lugh wasn’t that large, and the thermonuclear devices they would be
planting on it were hefty ones, running about fifty megatons or larger per MIRVed device, the technicians
had to be extremely careful where they planted them on the asteroid to make sure they just kicked the
asteroid into a new ballistic rather than simply breaking it up into dozens of useless and potentially
dangerous fragments. Second, they had to plan the new trajectory such that it would not intersect the paths
of Earth-Luna shuttles or the positions of the numerous new LaGrange habitats, the International Space
Station, or the myriad-and-one other artificial moons now orbiting the Earth in ever-greater numbers on its
way to Luna orbit. And third, they had to make sure that the orbit it took up around the Moon once it was
captured by Luna was neither so far from the Moon’s surface that it wouldn’t take long before the inherent
chaos of its new orbit had it slowly wandering away from the Moon for spaces elsewhere – and, perhaps,
right smack into Earth – or so low that it wouldn’t take long until orbital decay brought it right down onto
the Lunar surface in an equally catastrophic impact there.
And there were other, somewhat less important factors adding to the difficulties of doing the job right.
What it came down to was that there was little room for error. Either they got it just right the first time, or
the little asteroid would either miss Luna and Earth altogether and go wandering away, lost for good in the
outer reaches of the Solar System or even interstellar space beyond Sol’s gravitational hegemony; or it
would impact either Luna or Earth, with catastrophic results for Earth in either case (nothing like a few
zillion ricocheting fragments of the Moon to liven things up on Earth!); or it would head in-system and, if
it didn’t miss the sub-terrestrial planets and the Sun entirely and head back out again toward the outer
planets and the stars, smack into Venus, Mercury, or even the Sun, with results that could only be
imagined. No, they had to get it right in one, and for that the project needed the best technicians it could
find anywhere.
In this case, “anywhere” ranged across the whole world, so that the final slate for the project included
technicians from North America, South America, Africa, India, Europe, Australia, and the Middle East, and
came to about 60 topflight technicians, under 10 hand-picked UN military officers with advanced technical
backgrounds and extensive experience in space, that would be aboard the space tug used to carry the bombs
for injecting Lugh into Lunar orbit. They included experts in electronics, ballistics programming, medicine
(after all, who could guarantee that there wouldn’t be on-the-job accidents or illness among the crew?),
dietetics and nutrition, metallurgy and geology, psychology (for a job as delicate as this, it would be wise to
have crewmembers along who could mediate and help soothe away frictions among the others before they
escalated into explosive social disasters), business management and administration, the military, and
numerous other specialties and skills, many of them overlapping in the same men and women. Among the
crème de la crème of Earth’s teeming billions, if anyone could bring the project off successfully, it would
be this topflight team.
In late Summer of 2020, the Aleph, one of a fleet of ten space tugs built by Mazel Tov Industries of
Israel, a company dedicated to the construction of the large and small workhorses of space, and sold to the
United Nations for use with the ISS and all space-based programs overseen by the UN, left the ISS,
heading with its crew away from the Sun, heading for a point in the plane of the system about 50 million
kilometers farther out from the Sun than Earth-orbit. Powered by a hydroxyl mix heated to extreme
temperatures by an onboard nuclear reactor, it would follow a shallow, economical ballistic to reach its
goal, taking around 10 or 11 months to do so – they could have gotten there much sooner using cutting-
edge technology available since early 2018. But, as usual, “financial considerations” nixed that. So they
were doing it on the cheap – but safely, and with plenty of supplies to last them throughout their passage
outward and return.
Once the Aleph reached its goal, there it would remain until Lugh, following its highly irregular orbit
around the Sun, reached a position close to that of the tug, which would take place the following Summer.
This would give its crew plenty of time to get where they were going and then set up their equipment and
get it ready for sending the asteroid on its way toward Earth-Luna and its final destiny.
The supplies and equipment carried with the Aleph and its crew were more than adequate for a crew
three times their size for at least six years. These were so bulky that they couldn’t possibly have been
stowed inside the tug along with the crew and the mining equipment. Instead, packed in six gigantic cargo
containers attached to the tug’s flanks in a hexagonal array, they were simply towed alongside it – in space,
there is no air to provide drag that would slow down such an architecturally bastardized craft and make it
prohibitively expensive to go any distance at all, so, once the ISS work-crews had attached the containers to
the tug with heavy nylon-cum-steel cables, the tug would take off again, this time for Luna and Lugh, now
safely in orbit around the Moon, to begin work on the asteroid.
In the meantime, during the initial trip outward from the ISS to Lugh, the packing materials used
would protect everything in the containers from accidental direct exposure to the cold and airlessness of
space, occasional flares of radiation from the Sun and even from the much rarer high-energy gamma-ray
bursters, and sudden strong accelerations and decelerations. Of course, unlike the crew, the contents of the
containers did not require exercise, medical attention, social interaction, or any of the countless other things
needed by flesh-and-blood creatures for their survival and well-being. And, as the containers were emptied
of their contents, they could be used by the crew for various purposes, as living and sleeping areas, say, or
for recreations such as space volleyball which would enable them to get all the exercise they needed to stay
healthy, or operating theaters if a crewmember required major surgery. All in all, it was the perfect way to
make sure the crew was properly provisioned throughout the journey outward and back again. The crew
would be out there quite awhile, but, thanks to the careful planning of those at NASA in charge of the
project – which was as much a test of NASA’s ability to provide what the members of such a team would
require during the year or so they would be in space as it was of the crew’s ability to carry out their own
assigned task – they should thrive throughout and return home again in top condition. And the bottom line
was more than acceptable to NASA’s flight engineers – there was even extra fuel packed into special
compartments in each of the sideboard containers, to make sure the Aleph had plenty to carry her to her
destination and back again, with a good deal to spare.
Once Lugh was safely on its way toward the Earth-Moon system, the crew would then follow it back
in the small, rugged space-tug, stopping off at the ISS to pick up prefab materials for erecting a factory
intended to sit on the asteroid so that the material from the latter would easily be extracted and processed in
whatever way was desired. Dropping off the old crew at the ISS, so they could rotate back to Earth for
some badly needed R&R, the tug would then take on board a new crew skilled in mining operations and
ferry them over to Luna and the asteroid, to begin extracting material from it.
On their way, directly behind them, dwindling rapidly in size to a very tiny, pale blue dot flanked by an
even smaller chip out of the darkness, alternating slowly in color between dazzling white and the gray of
shadows at midnight, were Earth and Luna. Ahead of them was a point now being approached by a far
smaller, rather unprepossessing scrap of leftover material from the birth of the solar system, a dingy little
ball of rock only about a quarter of a kilometer wide. It was their task, with the aid of well-placed
hydrogen bombs, to set the little asteroid on a course that would take it inward, toward the Sun, and park it
in orbit around Earth’s Moon, where it could be conveniently raped of the iron, nickel, and other treasures
it contained by an army of men and robotic machines, so that the materials stripped from it could be used to
manufacture things that were in great demand on Earth, above all military parts, tools, and equipment.
If the crew of the Aleph succeeded at that task, then an unlimited treasure-trove of resources would
open up to an increasingly materials-starved Earth: virtually unlimited amounts of iron, nickel, tungsten,
manganese, lead, tin, copper, gold, rare earths, uranium and other actinides, even water and hydrocarbon
compounds would be available for the taking by Earth and any colonies she might establish elsewhere in
the solar system into the foreseeable future, requiring little or no expenditure of nonrenewable resources by
Earth in the doing. The power needed for extraction of the raw materials from asteroids, comets, and other
resource-bases would all come from the Sun on a 24/7 basis, free for the taking, countless terawatts of
power available to anyone at all times just by extending solar panels to capture it. The cost of the power
both to shepherd the asteroids and comets to places in the solar system where they could be worked most
conveniently and to take the finished products to their final destinations, while not quite free, would be paid
for only in the labor needed to generate it from sunlight and hydrocarbons extracted from carbonaceous
asteroids and the dirty cores of comets – and, once the gigantic space elevators, 50,000 miles of braided
cables made of spider-silk and nanotubes stretching from Earth’s surface to the threshold of space, whose
construction in the near future looked increasingly likely were put into operation, got into operation, even
that cost would come down to next-to-nothing.
And from then on, never again would the peoples of Earth have to fight over resources – the dread
demons of war, poverty, and famine would be relegated to the dustbin of history, their deaths heralding the
birth of a true global utopia which, eventually, would spread outward into space, becoming the norm on
every world settled by Earth. The dream of combined universal peace and prosperity first envisioned by
utopian thinkers and given its theory of manifest application by Marx, Engels, and their followers, would
finally be made real. For almost two centuries the capitalist nations had struggled and struggled to bring
about the Age of Space, conquer the Final Frontier – and now the covert socialist government of the planet,
the United Nations, working through the supposedly stubbornly still-capitalist but factually if not nominally
socialist United States of America, was about to do both. Quietly, behind the scenes, in order to avoid
alerting the American, British, and Australian masses, who tended to become quite shirty about even the
mention of such things, not yet realizing that they, too, had been lovingly taken into the fold of the Grand
Collective of Global Socialism, to the fact that the dialectic had finally triumphed, the true leaders of the
world began to celebrate. It wouldn’t be long, now, until all humanity would be the beneficiaries of the
dream of Marx and Engels and their disciplines, and the horrors to which all men had once been heir, war,
famine, disease, poverty, oppression, were finally one with the dinosaurs forever.
And if everything had been as it seemed aboard the Aleph, if all had gone as planned, the asteroid-
mining project would have been an unqualified success, and the grey eminences who were the true
managers of the world government would have had ample reason to rejoice.
But it wasn’t and it didn’t. Not quite. And thereby hangs a tale – a tale of Apocalypse.

§3
Now, a year and a half after the Aleph had first set out from the ISS, during which they had reached the
asteroid’s orbit and taken up station to wait for the asteroid to catch up with them, they could finally
glimpse the ball of rock as it hurried on its way to rendezvous with them. Lugh’s orbit had been so highly
irregular that even the astronomers who had calculated its likely position at this time hadn’t been absolutely
sure of it – there was just too much chaos in the calculations there between Earth and Mars, in a place
where the three-way tug of gravity from Sol, Jupiter, and Saturn was powerful enough to perturb the
asteroid’s motion in all sorts of interesting ways. But here came Lugh, heading neatly home, right into
Poppa’s arms, at speed. Determining that, those working on telemetry and telescope operations began to
cheer, loudly, immediately followed by the rest of the crew.
Most of them might not have cheered so loudly if they’d known that two of their members, Saddam al
Rasuel, an ethnic Moroccan from Paris, and Abdul al Nasser, a Saudi, were not only superb (what else was
new? So was everyone else aboard) electronics technicians, but had advanced degrees in nuclear physics as
well as a startling amount of practical training in demolitions – not to mention at least two decades each of
religious instruction and indoctrination under the auspices of the Organization (a blanket term including Al
Qaeda, Hamas, and several other Islamist organizations, all working in close coordination with one
another), with the proud approval of their families. While they had happily cheered the announcement of
the asteroid’s approach along with all the others, Rasuel and Nasser, slender, compact men whose Middle
Eastern origins were stamped plain on their faces and in their physiques, their reasons for cheering were as
different from those of the others as Hell is from Heaven.
Rasuel, shorter, darker-skinned, and markedly less impressive than Nasser, was the elder of the two, if
only by a year and a half or so, and in fact the other man’s religious and political superior within the
hierarchies of the various organizations that had contrived to get them included in the Alpha’s crew.
Though both men were devout Wahhabists, Rasuel had, early on, so impressed his religious and military
superiors in the Organization with his polymathic scholar’s grasp of the essence and substance of Islam as
well as his scientific and technical acumen that they had advanced him through the ranks rapidly until he
now was the equivalent of a full colonel in Hamas and, for all intents and purposes, an imam, of course
only covertly, and only with respect to the other Devout assigned to work with him by the Organization.
Thought slightly taller and a little more robust than Rasuel, Nasser was, like his religious and military
superior, shorter and lighter than average. This had been a much-needed plus when it came to getting
NASA to include them as crew for the asteroid-moving project – for reasons of national pride at least as
much as security, NASA hadn’t been at all happy about accepting anyone but Westerners as crewmembers.
They’d have happily dispensed with anyone but Americans for the project – after all, it had originally been
an all-American project that had only been subverted to the UN’s and the Party’s purposes by some
judicious behind-the-scenes arm-twisting, and even now NASA and the Pentagon still had enough clout
within the UN, and enough dirt on key Party members, to scotch the whole thing if they should choose to
do so. So the grey eminences in the UN in charge of keeping the US safely on its political tether were
willing to compromise to get their cooperation – a little, anyway. On Rasuel and Nasser, however, they
weren’t at all willing to compromise.
As for why that was so, said grey eminences themselves would have been a bit puzzled. They were in
fact members of a black ops unit within NAMP (North American Mediation Projects). The latter, a special
department in the UN ostensibly involved with soothing tensions among North American nations and
helping all of them maintain similar levels of health, welfare, and education, was actually concerned with
the day-to-day operations of making sure that the innumerable Lilliputian tethers by which the rest of the
world kept the Great Gulliver that was United States of America firmly in its socioeconomic, political, and
cultural place – tethers that included everything from the laws of the UN’s General Assembly to such
under-the-counter remedies as blackmail, extortion, and even, from time to time, a little judicious murder –
remained strong, secure, and otherwise capable of doing the job for the indefinite future. We wouldn’t
want the giant to get loose and go around stepping on the tiny little upstart nations that had dared to try to
make it play by the same rules the rest of them had to, now would we? It was that black ops’ job to do
whatever had to be done to keep the giant in line whenever he came close to breaking free – including some
of the more unsavory things on the above list – and they had done it very well ever since the Clinton
Revolution of 1992 had enabled the Party, however invisibly as far as American hoi polloi were aware of
the fact, to corral that giant at last and make it dance to the UN’s and the Party’s tunes.
But twisting NASA’s and the Pentagon’s arms to make them agree to a last-minute insertion of two
relative unknowns, however well-recommended they came, into a scientific project with the potential,
assuming it succeeded, of putting the whole world into a new Golden Age, didn’t seem to make any sense.
It wasn’t part of their agenda. All they knew was that Orders Had Come Down From On High – exactly
where, they still didn’t, but in trying to find out, they’d gotten their fingers so badly burnt in the process
that it was clear it was Pretty High Indeed – that one Mr. Saddam al Rasuel, A Parisian with Moroccan
antecedents, and his apprentice-aide Mr. Abdul al Nasser, a Saudi, electronics engineers, were to be
included as members of crew to be deployed as part of Project Workers’ Paradise, no ifs, no ands, no buts.
Up until then, as far as they knew, no one but themselves knew the true name of that project, which the
news media and public and everyone else, even the UN’s top honchos, knew only as Project Rheingold. In
turn, they themselves only answered to the Party’s political officers within the office of the General
Secretary himself. So regardless of whoever had issued those orders, they had no desire to buck them.
And it seemed to be such a harmless thing. Probably some Party honcho’s kid needed a job, and
maybe a cousin of his was among the politburo attached to the GenSec, and he had issued those orders to
make his relative happy. So what? Who cared? How could it hurt?
-- And, in fact, it wouldn’t have, if the special ops division of NAMPS had known what it was doing
when it came to astronautics, ballistics, and space technology. Because, several months before Project
Rheingold (WorPar) had been formally initiated and publicly announced by NASA and the (now wholly
owned subsidiary of the Party that was the) White House, they had received an even stranger set of orders
from that same, mysterious agency, to wit: under no conditions was Project Rheingold to have anything to
do with the deviant, revanchist technology known as the Space Tether, an ostensibly extremely low-cost
method of towing asteroids around the Solar System,* rather than the admittedly much more costly but
politically pure and technologically proven method of kicking them around the system like so many
footballs using thermonuclear devices.

*From Mining Asteroids (http://miningasteroids.com/): Precious metals are in fact precious not because
they are scarce on our world, but rather because, after more than 4 billion years of tectonic mixing,
they have mostly become sequestered in the mantle and core of the Earth, pulled there by the relentless
action of Earth’s gravity. What little is near the surface is hard to find and therefore expensive (like
$10,000 per pound for platinum). These same metals are not hidden on asteroids, since there has been
no tectonic action and almost no gravity. There are more precious metals in one asteroid than we could
every hope to mine from the entire crust of the Earth.
Space Tethers, a new technology just now being released, could reduce the costs of getting to Low
Earth Orbit (LEO) to under $100 per lb. From LEO we need about a 5 km/sec delta-V. This same
tether can also toss the payload toward the Moon, where it can pick up speed from a gravity-assist
flyby of the Moon. With the tether and the flyby, there would be less than 1 km/sec to be made up by
ion drives. It will take very little fuel to get to the asteroid.
If we are willing to enter the atmosphere, we don’t need much delta-V on the way back because it
is downhill. Less than 0.5 km/sec for some Near Earth Asteroids. We could have a small tether on the
asteroid that provided that delta-V. If we don’t want to enter the atmosphere fast, we could reverse the
outbound process by doing a Lunar flyby to loose energy and then having the LEO tether catch us.
In any case, a small Space Tug that is like 1/100th the mass of the return cargo should be enough.
These space tugs can go back for another cargo after they bring one in.
On-Earth market: There is a very clear and very real market for gold, platinum, and other
precious metals – not to mention industrially useful metals, especially power-metals of the actinide
series such as uranium and thorium. If you could bring such metals back to Earth, you would find
buyers for them immediately. If you brought back more than a few billion dollars worth every year,
you could seriously impact their price. However, the high price of platinum has made people who
otherwise would like to use it bend over backwards to use something else. If the price of platinum
were to drop, many of these would switch to it. And if platinum were cheaper, fuel cells, which require
platinum, could compete better against batteries, gaining a very large market for themselves. So the
profit to be made on platinum wouldn’t fall all that much even with a big increase in supply.
Off-Earth market: If it costs $2,000/lb to get materials to orbit, then anything in orbit has a
value of least $2,000/lb. If someone was building a space hotel or orbital farm, he would be happy to
get iron, aluminum, water, carbon, and other resources for less than this. So at this time, mining
asteroids for this amount per pound is an attractive proposition. However, if Space Tethers can reduce
the cost to $100/lb and eventually even $20/lb, it becomes harder to make a profit on simple materials
for LEO.
Economics: Some studies indicate that asteroid mining equipment could produce 100 times its
own mass in mined metals every year. An ion-drive rocket should be able to return 20 to 100 times its
mass in metals each trip. With Platinum being 100 times our launch cost per pound ($10,000/lb vs
$100/lb), these numbers seem to indicate it would be very profitable.
Financing asteroid mining: A mining company might well decide to mine asteroids if they
thought it was a reasonable investment. Asteroid mining isn’t that far off, probably no more than 5 to
15 years. Most people reading this probably think that is an over-optimistic estimate, but it could be
that most people are too pessimistic about space development these days.
Asteroids on the Moon: The surface of the moon does not have active tectonic plates to mix in
asteroids that fall on it. So for billions of years it has been collecting asteroids. Asteroids usually
vaporize on impact and mix in with the regolith, which currently may therefore consist of something
like 0.5% asteroid-derived material. So mining lunar regolith might be a good way to recover material
from asteroids.
 From http://miningasteroids.com/

Upon reception of that order, if any of the division’s agents had had even a modicum of a truly modern
scientific education, their collective ears would have pricked up like those of attack Dobermans at the soft
sound of a would-be housebreaker putting the first foot over the sill in preparation to heaving the rest of
himself across it and into the house. It made no sense, either technologically, economically, or politically –
what in the world was revanchist about a technology so new they were entirely unacquainted with it, as it
was? And why use an extremely costly and perhaps unsafe method of doing something, only adding to the
numerous risks already involved with it, rather than a low-cost one that had apparently (one of the agents
took the trouble to read a few articles about it in back-issues of Discover) been shown decades ago to be
perfectly workable and as cheap as they said it would be? And anyway, none of them had ever known a
type of space or any other sort of technology to be deviant – why the hell deviant? Did somebody the
Politburo didn’t approve of have a method of making sex-toys for the bourgeoisie that was a direct spin-off
of this technology?
Yet, upon trying to trace the order and see who had actually issued it, as was the case with the later,
and almost equally inexplicable order concerning Messrs. Rasuel and Nasser, they very nearly found
themselves before a firing squad for “attempting to penetrate the security of State secrets,” ending with
being put under the blazing-hot microscope of the UN’s Internal Intelligence, which was really a covert
arm of the KGB, in an audit that went over their entire lives and those of all their relatives, and actually
provoked fatal heart-attacks in three of the agents before it was all over with.
Sadder but wiser after two such audits of their division and everyone in it, they had learned not to
question orders issuing from even that general direction within the UN. To say that they had been left
badly shaken by the their collective ordeal at the hands of the KGB is to beg the question. The bottom line
was that after two such experiences, never again would they even think of challenging whatever orders
came to them, supposedly from on high. And that was, as it turned out, a pity – one with a global scope.
In fact, both orders had been “issued” not by anyone near the top of either the UN or the Party, but by a
group of Organization “bureau-hackers” who over the years had become skilled at electronically
penetrating huge organizations such as the UN, large corporations, and the governments of various
countries and, once into those organizations’ computers, creating for themselves completely bogus
identities and functions that nevertheless were more than convincing enough to be accepted at face value by
anyone encountering them in the electronic mazes of the organizations in question. The identities and
“jobs” thus created were so skillfully constructed and injected into the electronic life of the target
organizations that they could have stood up under the intensely paranoid scrutiny of any intelligence
watchdogs who might somehow have become alerted that something wasn’t kosher about them. And it was
Organization’s hackers who had created the artificial, electronic “persons” and roles within the UN from
whence had issued those two orders, just for the purpose of a) getting the Great Satan to make the vast
strategic error of substituting for an extremely safe, inexpensive, modern technology for moving large
objects from Point A to Point B anywhere within the Solar System, a much older, unproven, far more
uncertain, and egregiously more expensive method of doing so – one that Al Qaeda could subvert for its
own purposes; and b) inserting two of the Organization’s most able technicians who were also among its
most devout and religiously intelligent members into a project using that unproven, hellaciously risky
technology so that they could transform it from a means of making the Great Satan even richer, fatter, and
more powerful than ever before into one that would cleanse the of it world forever, and thereby bring about
Allah’s complete triumph on Earth.
And so it was that, rather than employing a tried-and-true, if new, inexpensive and safe means of
herding asteroids to places where they could be conveniently mined in their showcase project, Project
Rheingold, NASA was forced to agree to use H-bombs to push those asteroids toward their intended
destinations, a method with an incredible degree of room for catastrophic error associated with it, and two
accept two quiet, rather undistinguished-seeming young men of Middle Eastern origin, Saddam al Rasuel
and Abdul al Nasser, in place of native-born American citizens of proven talent as top technicians involved
in critical aspects of that project. And now, almost three years after the inception of Project Rheingold,
what Rasuel and Nasser were starting to refer to jokingly, in private, as “Project Ragnarok” was about to
unfold.

§4
. . . Thirty-six hours later, at least as far as all the preliminaries were concerned, it was, as the
demented Americans were prone to say, all over with but the shouting. As Nasser took over the job of
ferrying the bodies on a gurney from the Medical closet out to the airlock, dumping them unceremoniously
onto the bare regolith of the asteroid to which they were docked (none of the others had been Muslims, and
almost half of them had been women, so why bother with anything more elaborate? Even taking the time
and effort to enclose the corpses in body-bags would have been a waste, since, on the airless surface of the
asteroid, the bodies wouldn’t rot and would not present them with sanitation hazards), Rasuel continued
work on the timing devices that would trigger the bombs, sending Lugh hurtling toward an unsuspecting
Earth, making sure they would have enough time to get away from the asteroid before the bombs went off.
When the mining-tug had finally docked with the asteroid, Lieutenant Javick, one of the officers in
charge of the team, broke out the magnum of champagne he’d managed to smuggle aboard and let
everyone have enough for a toast. Of course, Nasser and Rasuel had refrained, but no one thought anything
of it – as everyone aboard knew, the religious beliefs of the two men did prohibit partaking of alcoholic
beverages, and anyway, they were more than happy to join in the toasts with glasses of fruit juice provided
by the Stu Ritter, the one currently in charge of the galley. Everyone joined in the celebration exuberantly
– and why not? As soon as they got the bombs properly set up on the asteroid and primed, they’d be
homeward bound. It had been a long, long year and a half out here, so far from Earth and all their families
and friends! Going home – oh, how good it sounded. Jubilation was definitely in order.
Fifteen minutes later, however, many of the crew of the Aleph weren’t at all jubilant. In fact, they
were in a good deal of distress. As their team-mates hovered over them, asking them what was wrong, how
they could help, they writhed and cried out, curling up into balls against the sudden agony that had seized
their guts. “What is it, Leon?” a woman cried, trying to help her friend and lover, a big, handsome
American nuclear engineer named Leon Price who, in addition to making the Dean’s List twice at the
California Institute of Technology and graduating from there maxima cum laude, had financed much of his
college education as a star player for the Los Angeles Lakers. Vainly struggling to help Leon get to a bunk
or some other place where he could at least be sheltered from collisions with others of his teammates who
were also stricken by the same strange ailment, the woman, Caelan Li, an astronomer-navigator, alternated
between trying to get her friend to describe what hurt, how it felt, and shouting for help to those around her.
She might as well have been shouting into the wind, on both counts: neither Leon, now engulfed in the
fireball of pain centered on his duodenum and totally unaware of anything else, nor the rest of the crew, all
of whom now had increasing problems of their own, were listening. Those who weren’t in similar distress
were trying to aid with those who were, and had no time nor opening to spare for anything else, while the
increasing numbers of those who had fallen prey to the mysterious ailment were completely enwrapped in
their agony, shut off by it from everything around them, unaware of anything else.
Whatever the agent of the mysterious sickness was, its primary target seemed to be the gastrointestinal
tract. From the few coherent statements that those who had fallen prey to it were able to force out between
clenched teeth before they were plunged too deeply into the Pit by whatever had attacked them to do
anything but scream, in the beginning it felt as if someone had built a bonfire in one’s stomach and
duodenum and was stoking it with napalm – and it only got worse after that. Within 15-20 minutes after
exhibiting the first symptoms of the ailment, the stricken crewmember, out of his head with the pain, began
to swoon, sinking into merciful unconsciousness, from which none of them ever emerged. By that time,
most of those who had not been among the first stricken were themselves writhing frantically through the
air of the Aleph’s main passenger compartment, the miniscule combined gravitational of the Aleph and the
asteroid insufficient to keep them from cannonballing off the cabin walls and one another and ricocheting
off through the air, only to do it all over again with every twist and turn of their bodies.
At some point, one or two of the crew-members had realized that it was probably something in the
champagne that had done to them all – and that the only two crew-members who hadn’t drunk any of the
champagne, Nasser and Rasuel, so far hadn’t shown any symptoms at all. Their excited yelling got the
attention of the few men and women who weren’t yet convulsed in agony, who immediately began a hunt
for Rasuel and Nasser. But by that point, the two Islamists had managed to conceal themselves in closets in
two of the tiny staterooms off the main passenger compartment. If, perchance, the others found one of
them, the other would probably still go undiscovered until he could exercise Plan B, a backup contingency
plan which, assuming it was properly carried out, would enable both of them to survive the deaths of all the
other crew-members and go on to set up the bombs, arm them properly, set the timers, and get away in
time. According to Plan B, whichever terrorist hadn’t yet been found would pull on a gas-mask he’d put in
a hidden pocket on the inside of his pants a couple of hours before, take out a number of little sleepy-gas
grenades he’d put in another concealed pocket at the same time, and head for whatever stateroom seemed
to house a commotion and was therefore likely to be the place where his accomplice had holed up, and
where he had been discovered by the crew-members not yet stricken with whatever had felled the others.
On the way, he’d prime the grenades, so that they would detonate as soon as he hurled them into the other
stateroom, or even before. Since he was wearing a gas-mask designed to keep out gases like those given
off by the grenades, he himself would be invulnerable to them; but everyone else in the vicinity would be
unconscious within a minute or two. If that happened to include the other Islamist, that was all right; he
also had with him several disposable syringes full of the antidote, which he would give to his brother. The
antidote would do its work within a very short time, no more than 3-4 minutes, so it wouldn’t be long until
the other man was up and moving and able to join him in subduing any remaining members of the crew not
yet dead from the effects of the lethal cocktail of nerve-gases they’d introduced into Javick’s hidden
champagne bottle, just as they had several other bottles full of various ethanol products they’d ferreted out
in a dozen places around the Aleph’s passenger quarters. Clearly at some point these bottles would be
brought out of hiding for celebratory purposes, just as the champagne had a few minutes before. When
they were, it would take at most an hour or so before all those partaking of their contents would have
breathed their agonized last.
In fact, it took considerably less. Within five minutes after someone had figured out that Nasser and
Rasuel had had something to do with the horrifying plague that had struck the rest of the crew, only three
crew-members were still able to try to track down the two Islamists, who by now had split up and gone to
ground in different staterooms. They hadn’t even managed to pinpoint the location of either of the two men
before they, too, had been overcome by the nerve-gases added to the champagne and were rapidly falling
into unconsciousness and deaths. Once those compounds had crossed the gut-wall and entered the
bloodstream, so quickly did they reach and do their deadly work on the central nervous system that even
someone with the constitution of a Rasputin would have been unconscious within at most half an hour, and
dead within 45 minutes or less. Very few have the constitution of a Rasputin; none of the crewmembers
lived long enough to find the two men who had murdered them, let alone capture them.
And then the two Islamists, emerging from their hiding-places into the circular corridor that
surrounded the main passenger compartment of the Aleph, were alone together in a ship full of corpses,
drifting piggyback on the flank of an asteroid through the endless night between the worlds.

§5
After dumping the corpses out the airlock, Nasser turned to the task of turning off all the little tug’s
signaling devices. At that point, of course, Earth had lost all contact with them and everyone else on the
mining ship anyway, because the Aleph and Lugh were, for the time being, on the far side of the Sun
relative to Earth. As close to the Sun, its vast glare of visible light, and its tremendous output of radio-
frequency energy as they were right now, It would take weeks before the UN and related agencies realized
anything had gone wrong with the project. For at least the next month, the Sun’s vast electromagnetic
output ensured that any attempt at radio communication between the Aleph and anyone back at the Earth-
Moon system and its numerous artificial satellites would be a complete failure. This, of course, was
something that had been expected and allowed for; but as the weeks went by and there was still nothing
from the crew of the Aleph, there would be increasing concern over its fate and that of the asteroid it had
been sent to send cruising toward Luna.
During planning sessions back on Earth, Rasuel, Nasser, and their brethren in the Organization had
debated whether to try sending a message back to Earth and the ISS, supposedly from the officers in charge
of the crew of the Aleph, perhaps in the form of a capsule that would broadcast a distress signal in all
directions, saying that they’d had an accident of some sort and would have to crawl home in a low-energy
orbit because of damage to the Aleph. This, thought Selim Yasin, their immediate superior in the
Organization, would temporarily forestall suspicions on the part of NASA and others that the project had
been deliberately sabotaged, which might be followed by actions that could cause the Organization’s
hijacking of Lugh for their own purposes to end in failure.
But Nasser, whose grasp of the logistics of space operations was second to none, pointed out that once
Lugh was on its way Earthward, given its already dark coloration – which would probably be made all that
much darker by the thermonuclear blasts from its hinterside – and the uncertainties, from the point of view
of NASA, of its new ballistic, there really wasn’t a significant chance that anything NASA or anyone else
could do would head it off. At most, all they could do would be to calculate where the asteroid was most
likely to hit and try to evacuate as many people as possible from that region. And since, no matter where it
came down, due to its effects on global weather as well as more localized systems of the planet, the impact
of the asteroid would affect huge regions of the Earth in catastrophic ways, making it impossible to move
more than a relative handful of the population in the potentially affected region to safety.
Further, any message they might send by a method as slow as a capsule, assuming it passed close
enough to Earth for its broadcast to be clearly discernible over the rumble and roar of static from Solar
activity and other sources of radio interference, would take so long to get there that by then the Aleph,
assuming it had in fact suffered an accident of the sort claimed in the message broadcast by the capsule,
should have coasted far enough from its original position that interference from the Sun should no longer
have been preventing simple radio broadcasts sent from the tug to get through to Earth. NASA would
rightly figure that if the crew of the Aleph could make and send a message-bearing capsule from the tug on
a ballistic close enough to Earth to get its message to its intended audience, then they could easily have
made a new on-board radio if their original one had been totaled by the accident, and in any event should
have had no problems directly radioing NASA to tell them what had happened. In any case, the existence
of the capsule would have raised a red flag signaling that there was something very suspicious involved,
hence that things aboard the Aleph weren’t as claimed. Complete radio silence would be far better – not
knowing just what had caused it, NASA would have to adopt a wait and see attitude, at least for a couple of
months, until Lugh and the Aleph had had enough time to emerge completely from behind the Solar shield
and NASA could get more information on what might have gone wrong.
Neither NASA nor the European, Chinese, and other space agencies were involved in operations
anywhere near where the Aleph would rendezvous with the asteroid. They’d all have to rely on whatever
signals they could pick up from Aleph or telescopic observations of the tug and the asteroid for information
on what had happened to them. By the time they could see them at all, it would be far too late to do
anything about either of them. And if, in the meantime, a lack of information from them made the various
space agencies and their governments hesitant to do anything until they knew more about the situation, so
much the better, because that would give them much less time to prepare for Lugh’s arrival and get their
populations out of the way of the coming impact.
Once they’d killed the rest of the crew, planted the bombs, and set them to go off, the best course for
the saboteurs would be to take up a long, lazy orbit that would get them to Earth well after impact,
maintaining radio silence all the way. By killing off the rest of the Aleph’s crew, they would have inherited
all the supplies tethered to the tug in those enormous cargo-containers, which had been meant to last a crew
of far greater size for at least a couple of years. They’d have more than enough to get home safely, alive
and in good shape. All they needed to do was avoid being spotted by NASA or anyone else until after the
impact, after which, of course, no one would do anything to prevent their returning to Earth and the
cheering multitudes of the faithful, to whom the Earth would at last finally belong, free forever of the Great
Satan.
It made sense. It required no extraordinary security risks other than those that were already in the
works. And there was certainly nothing about it that could seriously subtract from the chances of success
of their mission. So, in the end, that was how they decided to do it: after taking care of the rest of Team
Aleph with a subtle mixture of deadly nerve-gases tailored to kill as quickly as possible, dump the bodies
out the airlock, use the big mining machines they’d brought along in the cargo containers along with the
bombs to carry the bombs out onto the surface of the asteroid, carefully plant them there, wire them all to
one another and a computer set up outside for the purpose, prime the bombs, and get the hell out of there
before they blew. Then, coasting on a long, slow trajectory that would keep the Sun between them and the
Earth for quite awhile before letting them begin to spiral in toward the Earth, maintain complete radio
silence, doing nothing whatsoever to draw attention to themselves until at last they made it back home
again. The Organization would take responsibility for the computer programs that would be used to
compute the arrangement of the bombs on the asteroid’s surface to maximize the thrust and the ballistic it
would follow which their detonations conferred on the little blob of rock. Everything should work
perfectly, of course; but if it didn’t, it was Allah’s will, and no blame over it would adhere to Rasuel and
Nasser.
With that decision made, and the kisses of their brethren in the Organization still moist on their cheeks,
the two men left the secret meeting in Al Hamākiyah. From there, they were chauffeured to the nearby
airport in Medina in what appeared to be a government limousine but was in fact one used by the
Organization as a means for camouflaging the movements of their people over the Saudi roads, and there
they boarded a jet – another subterfuge of the Organization, this one actually part of Saudi Arabian Airlines
but made available only to Organization members, thanks to a considerable outlay of cash – headed for
Orlando, Florida. In Orlando, they would be met by USAF personnel and taken, as honored guests of the
Americans, over to Cape Canaveral and the John F. Kennedy Space Center, there to board yet another
flight, this one clear out of the Earth’s atmosphere, all the way to the International Space Station and the
beginning of their participation in Project Rheingold.

§6

“Have you set the timing device?”

“Do you think I’m an idiot? Hell no, not until just before we leave. The margin of safety will be tight
enough as it is, and I have no wish to have my balls toasted – save, of course, as Allah wills it,” he added
reverently, eyes half shut as he said the words.
The two men, regardless of their different nationalities, both now spoke entirely in Arabic, the lingua
franca and liturgical language of the Islamic world. Alone together here at the arse-end of Creation, they
were Muslims among Muslims, with no need to take on any of the affectations of peoples other than God’s
True Chosen Ones, including infidel languages.
Nasser, the one who had asked the question, gestured with the tool he’d been using for emphasis and
said, “Nor I – insh Allah. Let’s not argue, my brother. It just gets in the way. Let’s get this over with and
get the hell out of here. This place gives me the creeps.”
Rasuel, glancing briefly over his shoulder at the endless emptiness all around them and the blob of
nickel-iron, big as a good-sized city back on Earth, on which they stood, turned back to the job at hand,
saying, “I am, as the damned Americans say, with you on that, my brother.” He shuddered slightly, as if in
emphasis. “I am thinking that if Allah had intended us to be here, in the middle of this hellish, endless
emptiness, he’d have built rocket-engines into us. – Never mind, I’m being facetious,” he said, now
applying careful pressure with needle-nosed pliers to the tiny cable, only a millimeter or two in diameter,
that linked the little module that would trigger the simultaneous detonation of the shaped charges
surrounding the plutonium core of the thermonuclear device that was the object of their attention to a hub
linked to all those charges. “–Ah! Good, here it goes . . .” Grunting in satisfaction, the connection
successfully made, he backed away carefully from the device, one slow step at a time.
It wouldn’t do to propel himself farther and harder than he intended. The gravitational field of the
small asteroid, an NEO the Western astronomers called “NEO 2019-C,” and Al-Waajid Alami, the
Pakistani astronomer who’d relayed the news of its discovery and its potential use for a truly devastating
strike on the infidels had privately named “Satan’s Bane,” wasn’t quite nonexistent, but it was so weak that
you had to take great care when moving around on its surface. Any careless move could get you in real
trouble, maybe lethal trouble. You could break bones, say, or tear your spacesuit by falling on a sharp
ridge of space-weathered rock, as a result of forgetting, however momentarily, where you were and what it
demanded of you and moving as you would if you were still on the beloved soil of home. (Alami was also
a stalwart member of the Organization, contributing much of his time, substantial salary from University of
the Punjab, and other resources to the Jihad. Though too old and infirm now to take part in the Jihad
directly, as a soldier on the line, bearing arms against the infidel in the name of Allah, the help he could
give was invaluable – above all (11,323) Lugh/NEO 2019-C, the apocalyptic weapon he had placed into the
hands of the Faithful.)
“What is that you are mumbling, brother?” Nasser asked his superior.
“ ‘—the grass is singing / Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel –’ Uh,” said Rasuel, catching
himself, muttering something blasphemously pungent as he strained to keep from twisting the wires he’d
been working on. “What? Oh, it’s from a poem by T. S. Eliot.”
“T. S. Eliot? An infidel?”
 “Not so much an infidel as you might think. And I’ve always especially liked – uh! There you go, you
little imp of Iblis! There, that’s done. Now for the next one,” Rasuel said. “Come on, time to get back on
board and tell this infernal offspring of a syphilitic tax-collector and a Las Vegas harlot” – meaning the
“walking tractor,” the machine they were using to transport them and the bombs to each of the selected
sites on the asteroid, where, under direction by the driver, it did the donkey-work of excavating a hole in
the regolith and planting a bomb therein; built along the lines of a six-legged spider rather than a vertebrate
animal such as a dog, its center of mass was relatively low and its likelihood of accidentally tipping over in
any direction small – “its next destination. – Mind that step, Abdul, you do not want to take a tumble off
this thing and tear your suit on these rocks!”
Grumbling a little at what he considered his superior’s somewhat patronizing attitude toward him,
Nasser nevertheless took more care as he made his way up the ladder and into the walking tractor. Taking
a seat next to Rasuel, he said, “You know, I’m glad that charade is over with.”
“What charade – oh, pretending to be ‘just one of the boys’ all that time? I agree – it was tiresome as
hell.”
“I think the most difficult thing, for me, was to have to pretend to joy when they finally caught this
asteroid in the optical telescopes, coming toward us,” said Nasser.
Carefully directing the walking tractor toward their next stop with steering-bar, foot-pedals, and some
judicious stabs of his forefinger at the keyboard of the computer, the brain that coordinated the movements
of the big external legs of the machine that enabled it to simply step over obstacles rather than having to
push its way across or go laboriously around them, Rasuel said, “Who had to fake it? That asteroid was
Allah’s great gift to us all – and the means of our deliverance, once and for all, from the Great Satan!”
“Yes, well, I had to avoid showing too much joy. You, my brother, were the one braying like a donkey
over it – good thing everyone else was over by the instrument read-outs or guzzling champagne – otherwise
they’d all have known all was not quite what it seemed as far as you were concerned!”
“That’s all behind us now, Abdul. Let us thank Allah it is now all going as planned, and do the work
we came here to do. – Speaking of which, here we are. Are you ready for another one?”
“Why not? Every one gets us closer to the moment we are to depart this dirtball – not to mention
sending the Great Satan a lovely present from Allah!”
“This is true,” said Rasuel as he brought the walking tractor to a halt so that it squatted over a flat patch
of regolith that was virtually indistinguishable from the rest of the asteroid, which had few distinguishing
landmarks. Lugh’s hills, though the sort of nuisance which the walking tractor had been designed to
surmount, full of minor gullies and an occasional deep, dust-filled crevasse, averaged around three meters
above the flatter regions; its declivities, mostly shallow dips in the landscape crazed with countless small
cracks, the myriads of remnants of impact craters with which they were scored heavily obscured by still
more colloidally fine, sticky dust, were as unprepossessing as its hills. Even so, there was always the
possibility of stumbling across some great crack in the ground and either wrecking the walking tractor in
the process of trying to cross it or else simply falling into it, to be lost forever, without hope of rescue – the
downside of having no one back at the tug to call for help in case of emergency, no one anywhere else in
the Solar System who would know exactly where they were or what had happened to them. The one star of
their mission’s goal was too close, now, to risk failure in its attainment because of some stupid move on his
or Nasser’s part that an idiot could have avoided simply by paying reasonably close attention to his
surroundings and his own actions.
Now properly positioned over the spot the computer had chosen for depositing the next bomb, its feet
set firmly in a way that maximized its mechanical stability, the walking tractor extruded from its underbelly
a compound drill incorporating alternating mining lasers and solid carbon-steel bits, and lowered the tip
toward the ground. Seconds later, rock-chips and fine dust flying away in all directions from the place
where the drill touched the rocky surface below, the drill was boring rapidly into the regolith, the
temperature of the surrounding rock rising rapidly as it penetrated farther and farther into the rocky stuff.
“There – that does it,” Rasuel said as the drilling stopped, the drill withdrew back into the belly of the
beast, and the framework that held the next bomb to be emplaced began to descend into the brand-new
hole.
“So where will you go after this is all over with?” Nasser asked Rasuel, as the other man relaxed a
little, happy to let the walking tractor, which seemed to be competent enough at that sort of task, do the job
of laying the thermonuclear egg in the nest just prepared for it. “Back to Paris?”
“No, stupid – it may not even be there any more! This bastard offspring of ifrits we’re sitting on could
land right on it! No, I’m going to Riyadh. My father wants my help in handling his business affairs.”
 “I thought he was still living in Paris, along with the rest of your family.”
“Years ago, two of my uncles relocated there and started a software business there, Rasuel Software
Solutions. Then they began expanding the business, adding a publishing house, that sort of thing. They
became so successful that they couldn’t handle it all, and rather than bringing in some outsider as their
partner, they asked my father if he’d like to join their partnership. He was more than happy to do so. He
moved there a couple of years ago with my mother and his other wives, a lot of the younger kids, my
grandparents (his parents), and those of his brothers and sisters who hadn’t already relocated to Saudi
Arabia. All the family but me is there, now. So it makes sense to join them – and I can really help with the
firm. Father said he’d like to have me take charge of the entire software division, because that would free
him and his brothers up to run the rest, which is important, because they’re still diversifying and they need
to stay on top of the newer ventures. – Okay, that does it, the bomb’s down. Let’s get down there and
connect it up with the rest of the network,” he said, glancing at the computer screen, which informed him
that the bomb was satisfactorily emplaced.
When the bombs were manufactured, back in orbit around Earth, the cables had been hooked up to
their electronic guts and left sticking out of their casings like the sort of ugly black hairs that you had to
tweeze out of your nose occasionally in order not to present a bad appearance to others. Most of the work
that Rasuel and his assistant were doing now, besides piloting the walking tractor from one prospective
bomb-site to the next, consisted of splicing these into the network of cables which, now covering almost
one square kilometer of the asteroid’s surface, would ultimately be connected with another computer
carried in the walking tractor’s cargo bay. The computer would electronically prime the bombs and then
begin the countdown to detonation; when the countdown reached zero, all the bombs, triggered by the
computer, would detonate simultaneously. The energy thus released, concentrated in a relatively small area
of the asteroid’s surface, would propel the asteroid on its way to impacting the Earth.
Rasuel, well aware that they were trying to hit a moving target hundreds of millions of kilometers
away, prayed that whoever had written the computer programs that were supposed to do this knew what the
hell he was doing. They only had this one chance to accomplish their goal. If some of the bombs did not
detonate, or they all detonated successfully but at a time when the asteroid’s rapid rotation had them on the
wrong side of Lugh relative to their target, so that the asteroid was propelled on a ballistic at right angles or
180 degrees to the intended one, or if everything went almost as planned, resulting in a near-miss rather
than a bull’s-eye – Shit. He had to stop doing this. On top of everything else, I cannot bite my fingernails
through the material of this suit, he thought, giggling nervously – then, hearing the way he sounded in his
headphones, suit material or not, he almost did just that.
He forced himself to take a deep breath, hold it, count four, breathe out, take another deep breath, and
so on, just as he had learned to do in the meditation classes the Organization made them attend. It really
did help. Whether or not such techniques had originated with the Faithful, they were a far better aid to
staying cool under fire than any tranquilizer – they started their work instantly, cleared your head out
quickly, and didn’t fog your reflexes as judgment which chemicals.
– Just in time, too. They were coming up on the next site.
Doggedly the two men worked at their task. The stars wheeled slowly by overhead as another bomb
was implanted, more cable paid out from the big spools in the walking tractor’s cargo bay, and the bomb
was hooked into the electronic network that connected them all up to the computer. Another followed, and
another.
“Are there many more to go?” said Nasser as he helped Rasuel hook the latest bomb up to the network.
“– Er, they aren’t very big, are they?”
“They don’t need to be. It’s so cold out here – the temperature is below 50° Kelvin, so they don’t need
the sort of cooling machines you have to have in guided missiles to make sure the electronics don’t get
overheated by the friction of passage up through the atmosphere and back down again. As for how many
more, I think maybe two, or three. We’re almost done out here.”
“Allah be thanked! This is a terrible place!”
“I think it’s very peaceful, myself. And out here, we don’t have to put up with the stink of infidels,
either,” said Rasuel, grunting as he wrestled with the cable, which was somewhat reluctant to come off the
spool. “I’m not sure,” he added after he finally got enough cable paid out and was splicing it onto the
outgoing cable from the bomb, firmly wedged in its rocky nest just below them, its business end tucked
underneath and the cables sticking up several inches above the regolith, easy to work with, “that I’m
looking forward that much to leaving here, as it is.”
“What?”
 “Think of everything that could go wrong with our return. We could crash there, or crash on the
Moon, or come to grief in any of a thousand other ways. – There, that’s got it,” he said, releasing the
cables, letting them fall down on the regolith. The outgoing cable would keep paying out from its spool in
the walking tractor as they went on to the next site, the machine, reading the tensions on the spool,
automatically adjusting its steps to make sure it didn’t snap a cable before it got where it was going. Only
the outgoing cable, the one that would connect the bomb with the next one in their itinerary, had to be
accounted for; the incoming cable, that connected that last bomb with the one they had emplaced before it,
a bit like the way the bulbs on a string of the lights Christians decorated their homes with during Christmas
festival, was of course not a problem. Topologically, the network of bombs and the computer they were to
connect up with formed a circle. Their last stop would be back more or less at the site of the first bomb,
where the computer that would detonate them all would also be emplaced and tied electronically into the
network. Fortunately, the cable was set up to rig every unit in the network in parallel rather than in tandem,
just the way most of those Christmas lights were – if a bomb proved to be a dud, that wouldn’t keep the rest
from detonating. And even if several bombs proved to be duds, there was plenty of overkill built in to the
network. Before detonation, the computer would communicate with the bombs, checking their electronics,
testing their ability to operate as intended. If all of the bombs were in good order, the computer would
detonate only a few of them, to make sure the asteroid didn’t overshoot its mark. Otherwise, it would
substitute working bombs for the duds in the final firing array, and everything should come off as planned.
As they got back into the “walking tractor,” heading for the next site, Nasser, who was at times a
strikingly dense sort when it came to jokes, said, “But if we stay here, we’ll die when the bombs go off!”
“Oh, I’m sure we could always put out a space-hook or two and hang by it,” Rasuel said dryly, playing
on an old astronaut’s joke. “— Unless, of course, Allah should on that occasion translate us into the
Beforelife.”
“How can you say such things! You should pray to Allah for forgiveness for such heresy!” cried
Nasser.
“Oh, Abdul, lighten up! I was just joking!” Rasuel said, his growing weariness making him more
irritated with his assistant than was perhaps warranted.
“That’s good – I was afraid you had become a follower of the Heresiarch bin Laden, embracing that
most Satanic of the Great Satan’s seductive cults!”
“The so-called Church of the SubGenius? Oh, don’t be silly! Of course not!” Rasuel said as they took
their seats in the machine again. “If I were planning to do something that would merit my spending all
eternity in Hell, surely it would be for something far more temptingly glorious. If nothing else, seeing what
became of bin Laden and Hussein after they tried out that drug so rightfully condemned by the imams as
the very fruit of Satan, LSD, then fell the rest of the way from Allah’s grace into heresy, should serve as the
most convincing of examples for anyone even the least tempted to participate in such lunacy. – Here, let’s
have something to eat,” he said, reaching into a nearby compartment where they’d stowed some energy
bars and a six-pack of bottled juices. Bringing out two energy bars and two bottles of orange juice to go
with them, he handed one each to the other man. Then, making sure first that the walking tractor was
buttoned up tight for the moment, unzipping his headpiece and pulling it off, he popped the cap of his bottle
of juice and drank the contents thirstily.
With a mumbled thanks for the food and juice Rasuel gave him, Nasser did the same. For a few
minutes neither of them said much as they ate their snack. They’d been out here for quite awhile, and were
tired. It would be good to get back aboard the Aleph again, where they could cook a real meal and then
have a good nap – before going on to the next phase of things.
But, once his immediate hunger and thirst were assuaged, it didn’t take long for good old Abdul “One
Track Mind” Nasser to return to the conversation:
“Do you suppose that without the drug, reading Hussein’s grandson’s forbidden trove of SubGenius
literature wouldn’t have tempted them at all?” said Nasser, a suspicious, almost lickerish tone in his voice.
“What are you thinking, my brother?” Rasuel said, frowning, turning to face the other man. “You
suspect me of such insanity, and yet –”
“Oh, let us drop it. Like you, I – I was just, er, being facetious. Come, let’s finish this and get the hell
out of here – I have no fear of Allah’s judgment, but I would like to see the world at last in complete
submission to the will of Allah and the word of the Prophet before I face it myself,” Nasser said, turning
back to finish the last of his juice, which, incidentally, gave him an excuse not to meet his companion’s
eyes. His voice was surly, perhaps reflecting the fact that neither of them had had any rest for a good
twelve hours, nor any food during that time other than a couple of the hated food-bars and some juice.
 Then Nasser dropped it for the time being, for which Rasuel, who just wanted to get the job over with
and leave, was grateful. But the other man wasn’t able to let it alone for very long. As they got to work at
the next site, Nasser once more brought up the subject. This time, in spite of the fact that he knew very
well that Rasuel had heard it all before, Nasser rambled on and on about what had happened to Saddam
Hussein and Osama bin Laden after the two men became apostates and turned to SubGenius. As they were
traveling through Northern Iraq in a jeep, disguised as two merchants so they could get to Baghdad and
transact some business without being recognized, they were stopped at a checkpoint the Kurds had put up,
and their disguise penetrated. The Kurds, who had endless reasons to hate Saddam Hussein, turned both
men over to the Yezidi (a Kurdish people with their own Sunni Islamic subculture), who drew on the lore
of their Peacock Angel to devise appropriate torments for the man who had had so many Kurds gassed to
death at the hands of “Chemical Ali,” Saddam Hussein’s murderous cousin, and for his companion, who
was no friend to the Kurds himself. It took the two men long, agonizing weeks to die. The tortures were
carried out for large audiences made up of all Kurds who wanted to come watch – every able-bodied adult
Kurd who could attended these performances. This definitely was one time when the adherents of “Bob”
fucked up big-time and didn’t make a billion dollars. The Yezidi spent many happy days practicing on
Saddam Hussein the delights which he, his secret police, and his psychopathic son Uday had perpetrated on
so many Iraqi citizens in the dungeons of Baghdad.
Rasuel, his patience now worn very thin, snapped, “Why don’t we talk about something else now,
hmm? The way you carry on about “Bob”, one might think you were a SubGenius yourself!”
“No – no – of course not!” said Nasser, instantly contrite. “I – here, let me take that,” he said, referring
to the pliers Rasuel was holding, looking for a place to the tool down. Seizing on it as an excuse to change
the subject, Nasser said, “You want me to do that?”
“This splice? No, I’ve pretty much got it done. Why don’t you help me this cable, so it doesn’t snag
when we leave here for the next site?”
“Of course.”
And still Nasser wasn’t done with this infernal chatter. As they made their way back to the walking
tractor, making sure not to snag the cable as they went, Nasser said, “We mustn’t screw this up, now – from
what I heard, Uncle Hasan “ – referring to Hasan Taher, head of Iraq’s Baath Party and the dreaded
overseer of Iraq’s secret police – used up at least 200 of their best prisoners making the movies that paid for
this!”
Rasuel, chuckling, not really taking Nasser all that seriously: “There are a lot more where those came
from, you know – and plenty in Damascus, too.”
“I’m not so sure I like the idea of having fellow-Muslims tortured to death in those dungeons, just to
make, what do the Western infidels call them?”
“ ‘Snuff’ films. As in snuffing out a life, like a candle.”
“Yes,” said Rasuel, his voice increasingly troubled. “Those. Those – abominations. To, to make
those, those thrice-damned films, and sell them to rich perverts in order to acquire the money needed by Al
Qaeda and Hezbollah to fund operations like this. What we are doing here is holy – it feels like sacrilege,
supporting this holy work with things like that, things that Satan himself would be revolted by,” he said,
hawking and spitting for emphasis.
“They’re infidels – that’s what they’re for! You worry too much!” said Rasuel, trying to sound casual,
wondering about Nasser’s emotional stability. Out here, lunacy could easily be lethal.
“Most of the – the actors are Muslims,” said Nasser, biting off the words as if they tasted bad.
“Yes – Shia Muslims. Infidels, as I said.”
“Not all of them, they aren’t – some of my cousins in Iraq, the ones on my mother’s side who
remained there after she moved to Paris to go to school, where she met my father, were disappeared last
year, and another cousin, a guard there in the prison under the Old Palace,* told me he saw the disappeared
ones being used to make those films,” he said, his voice strange, brittle.

*Built on order of Saddam Hussein, this building complex was once one of Saddam Hussein’s numerous
palaces. After his apostasy and conversion to SubGenius, however, it became simply “The Old
Palace,” his name stricken from it wherever it appeared; after that it was used as a giant office
complex for the Iraq government’s business.
 “Oh, I’m sure he was mistaken!” Rasuel told the other man. “Look, my friend, they’re all infidels,” he
said, no longer worried about anything but calming Nasser down. “Allah needed them to be infidels, to use
them in this, our great work. If they weren’t infidels, then surely they must have been guilty of great sins –
Allah wouldn’t permit true-hearted believers to undergo such things!”
“Even the children?” said Nasser in a soft voice which, however, contained a hidden edge dipped in
weird poisons.
“Children?!”
“Yes, dammit! Children! Hundreds of them!”
“Surely not!” Rasuel cried, now turning to face the other man squarely.
“Don’t look at me like that, Abdul. It’s true. They were the children of Shia and enemies of the state.”
“Did your cousin tell you that?” Rasuel said, feeling ill. If this was true . . .
“I myself saw several of those films – part of the training in my group, to harden us, steel us to what
we were assigned to do for the glory of Allah. Oh, yes. Children. And – and I recognized two of those
children,” Nasser told him.
“What?”
“Yes,” said Nasser. “One – do you remember my telling you about my sister, the one who went to
help take care of mother’s mother, the one who was disappeared two years ago? Why, I do not know – I
assume she had done something to offend the regime, or became a heretic. But . . . but it was her little girl I
saw in one of those films. Why, Saddam? Why her, my niece? She was so young!
“And then there was the other. He was the grandson of a neighbor of ours! Lived right next door to
my parents in the Kingdom! How he got all the way from Saudi Arabia to Baghdad I will never know. A
little boy, perhaps 5, perhaps 6 years old.”
“Oh, Abdul, this has to be one of Satan’s illusions, used to snare your emotions! Allah wouldn’t
permit such an abominable thing! Or, if he did, then those children are all now with Allah in Paradise, holy
martyrs for our sacred cause, all pain and trouble gone, forever in bliss! – No, listen to me, my brother!
You must believe that you were temporarily deluded, or did not have the correct information about what
you were watching! I have it: it was all nothing but computer-generated fantasy, which they told you was
real, to test your resolve and see if your will was strong enough to do what was needed of you, that’s all.
Don’t listen to the lies Satan tells you – it will destroy your resolve, fill your heart with darkness, so that
you aren’t able to do this work properly. That is what Satan wants, you know. And that is why he tempts
you to believe that Allah could allow evil to fall on the innocent.” Concealed by his orange space-suit, his
hands were trembling like leaves in the wind of an approaching storm.
“Saddam, Allah does let evil thrive – as witness the wealthy monsters who buy copies of those films,
computer-generated or not! What else must those who find such filth so delightful that they are willing to
pay a veritable king’s ransom for one copy of those ghastly films – what else are they capable of?
Anything!”
“But not for much longer, Abdul. Soon it is done, and we are privileged to participate in the sword that
ends such suffering forever! Is that not by the will of Allah, in whose holy name we do this, as well? As it
was in Noah’s day by water, the Earth will be cleansed again, this time by fire. How can you not see the
hand of Allah in this? He does not let such evils thrive – we two are the proof, are we not?”
“That is true,” said Nasser, sighing.
“Come on, now,” said Rasuel, “let’s finish this and get going. The clock is running out. And
remember: however horrible the evil done by the Great Satan and his minions may have been, soon it will
all be ended, along with all the vile drug dealers and addicts, the pimps and sex perverts, the whores and
unnatural women, the things that like to watch those films that bother you so much, who are paying for
what we are about to do in order to feed their foul addictions! Judgment Day is upon the world, and the
suffering of innocents, all innocents, is soon over. A little pain now, bliss forever after for our martyrs and
the pure of heart – and unending, remorseless agony forever for the infidels! – And here we are,” he said, as
the walking tractor came to a halt. “Let me check something – yes. This is the last one. The last of the
bombs. I overestimated. Once this one in place and we hook it up to the computer, we can return to the
Aleph, have something to eat and some rest, then coordinate things with the computer to give us plenty of
time to get safely away before the bombs go off.”
“Oh, thank Allah,” Nasser said, all his agitation suddenly draining out of him like air let out of a
balloon with a pin. “Home . . . I want to go home, Rasuel,” he said, sounding like a small, very tired little
boy.
 “We’ll be on our way home soon, Abdul. Don’t worry,” Rasuel said, reaching out to pat the other
man’s hand gently, surprised at the sudden upwelling of pity he felt for his assistant. Well, they’d both
been through a tremendous ordeal, and, at least so far, had done everything successfully. There certainly
was no shame in honest weariness and the minor weaknesses it brought in its wake. No, in spite of his
sometimes annoying minor personality quirks, and the shakiness he showed now, Nasser had done
splendidly. On returning home, he would recommend to his superiors in the Organization that Nasser be
given special commendation and solid promotion in rank. He’d earned it.

§7
Upon their return to Aleph, before entering the tug, Rasuel and Nasser looked over the bodies of their
former crewmates strewn carelessly over the ground around the docking pier that had been used to tether
the Aleph to the asteroid, making sure that all the crew was accounted for. It wouldn’t do to enter the tug
and find themselves facing even one armed and vengeful man or woman who, somehow managing to
escape the mass poisoning that had killed everyone else aboard, had hidden away until the two Islamists
had left to go about their work, to wait for them to come back to take vengeance. As far as the
Organization’s goals went, of course, once the bombs had been properly deployed and the asteroid had
been moved into the trajectory that would end with its impacting Earth, the death of one or both saboteurs
wouldn’t matter all that much, something with which they themselves, as solid members of the Jihad, fully
agreed. But none of that mattered; the bodies on the regolith included all the members of Project
Rheingold save themselves, so they need take no great care in reentering the tug.
“I told you so,” Nasser said as the two men made their way up the telescoping ladder which had been
extruded earlier to enable them to get from the tug down to the asteroid’s surface without risking damage
from their suits due to a fall. “I checked them all off against the ship’s roster the first time, while you were
getting things ready to plant the bombs,” he said as he and Rasuel, after dogging the outer and inner
airlocks and making sure the onboard atmosphere of the tug was what it should be, pulled off their
headpieces and then the rest of their suits. Was that a sullen note in his voice?
Probably, thought Rasuel. He’d driven the poor guy pretty hard – hell, he’d driven himself hard, but
that was different, wasn’t it? – and nagged him at every turn to make sure Nasser did everything he was
supposed to correctly. I’d be sullen, too, if somebody treated me like that, Rasuel told himself. Vowing not
to be so hard on the man who had been his partner through all of this, and who he hoped would be his
friend now and the future, especially during the long, slow ride back to Earth, Rasuel said aloud, “I know
I’ve been overbearing a lot of the time, Abdul. Please forgive me. It’s a failing of mine – one I must strive
to correct.”
He held out his hand. Nasser, halfway out of his spacesuit, stared at it for a moment and then finally,
grudgingly, took it in his own. Rasuel could feel the tension that had begun to fill the space between them
moments before bleed away, a sigh of the soul.
A little later, as they were both tucking into an excellent meal of halibut, rice, and tender mixed
vegetables, for all that it was one of those infernal ready-to-eat meals that the Westerners seemed to prefer,
at least in war and while they were in space), Nasser said, “It would be a pity if, after all this, the bombs
were duds. Or they didn’t fire properly, and sent this asteroid off on a course that would miss Earth – or,
Allah forbid, hit Earth all right, but came down on Mecca.”
“Don’t say such things,” Rasuel said, wincing involuntarily. He was embarrassed to find himself
making a hand-sign meant to ward off the Evil Eye, something he had learned from his great-grandmother
as a little boy. “Look,” he said, at as much to reassure himself as Nasser, “everything will be fine. Relax.
You ‘done good,’ as they say. We both did. When we hooked up the computer to the network of bombs,
they all tested out fine – remember? The computer will handle everything now – once we pick the
particular departure window we want to use, it will schedule the detonations, trigger them when it’s time,
everything.”
“So when do we leave here?”
“We’ve still got about 48 hours before the bombs must be triggered,” said Rasuel, glancing at his
wristwatch. “We’ve got far more than enough time for a shower and some real sleep before then.”
“About now, I’d kill for a little sleep,” Nasser said, a grin spreading across his long-jawed, narrow
features for the first time in days. “All right, that sounds good to me. When do we radio the bomb
computer about when we want to take off?”
 “Right after we wake up. Let’s allow ourselves a good eight hours for sleep, plus an extra hour for a
nap, nine hours beginning right now – I’ll set my watch’s alarm to alert me, too.”
“I’ll set mine, too. – Who gets to shower first, then?”
“You go first, my brother – you’ve earned it,” Rasuel said, smiling. Maybe this would defuse any
remaining tension between them – and certainly, Nasser had earned it. If nothing else, he’d spent all these
hours putting up with Rasuel’s bossy tendencies with little complaint, and that only a matter of tone of
voice.
“Thanks. I appreciate it.” Finished with his meal, Nasser dumped the plastic container and utensils
into the garbage slot, then headed for the little unit that served as community bathroom. Containing both
toilet and shower facilities, the unit was somewhat confining, but provided everything that was needed.
There was more than enough water for a shower for each of them – Rasuel had checked right after they’d
come aboard after setting up the bombs. And if there hadn’t have been, the flip of a switch would have
refilled the onboard water-tanks with water stored in the cargo-containers tethered to the tug, heating it in
situ using electrical power generated by the onboard reactor that was stored in backup batteries.
After Nasser was finished bathing and had retired to one of the staterooms, Rasuel took his own
shower. It wasn’t long until he, too, was sound asleep in one of the staterooms, his last thoughts before
falling into the depths of sleep on the fact that the two of them had, by some miracle, managed to carry out
their mission, and the hope that some wicked ifrit, seeing their happiness over that, wouldn’t jump in to
cause a disaster.

§8
Upon awakening, some eight hours later, Rasuel’s first action was to go to the operations center and
use the radio to ask the computer hooked to the bombs, which was up on a slight rise in the terrain and only
about a hundred meters away, for the next two windows for detonating the bombs. There couldn’t have
been too much time left before the asteroid, moving along its orbit around the Sun, would pass beyond the
optimal range of points in which the kick applied to its backside by the bombs would propel it in the right
direction to impact the Earth, rather than bypassing it or even passing too close to the Sun, Mercury, or
Venus on the way and hitting one them or taking up an unsatisfactory ballistic due to their influence,
instead. Fortunately Lugh’s original orbit was not only highly eccentric, so that at aphelion it was close to
the orbit of Mars and, at perihelion, not far outside that of Earth; but it also had a whopping inclination to
the ecliptic, not much less than that of Pluto. So it hadn’t been too hard to plan a sheaf of trajectories for
Lugh that would allow it to use Sol’s gravity-well to slingshot it right where they needed it to go.
Anyway, that had all been taken care of before they ever left Earth, the programs used to calculate
everything designed by specialists in the Organization who knew their business inside and out. Querying
the computer on the bomb network, he got a list of windows, optimal times for setting off the bombs.
Picking one about 12 hours away, to give them plenty of time to get away, he told the bomb computer to
use that one.
After that, it was a matter of making sure Nasser was up and dressed, getting dressed himself, making
a fast meal along with plenty of strong black coffee for the both of them, to make sure they were both
maximally alert and aware of what they were doing, eating their breakfast, and then, slowly and carefully,
getting away from the asteroid. Decoupling electronically from the docking pier, with Nasser piloting they
backed slowly and carefully away from the asteroid on attitude jets, taking great care not to foul the lines
tethering the tug to its storage containers. The pier had been sunk into the surface of the asteroid by the use
of a “Quaker cannon,” a gun for emplacing things of that nature in rocky surfaces in mere minutes or
seconds, which otherwise would have taken several crewmembers on a risky EVA long hours to set solidly
where it was needed, right after the Aleph had first arrived there. Tethering the Aleph to it, and, eventually,
releasing the tug when it was time to go, had been made just as easy: at the upper end of the long, slender
metal needle that was the pier was an electromagnetic locking mechanism that matched the “key” in an
extrusible telescoping metal spire in the nose of the Aleph. By simply changing the orientation of the
magnetic field in either or both, they were locked to or unlocked from each other. The entire process was
done in moments via the onboard computer.
Throughout the time it was tethered to the pier, the Aleph’s long axis had been maintained in an
orthogonal relationship to the surface of the asteroid by the electromagnetic bond between the tug and the
pier. This ensured that the cargo-containers tethered to the sides of the Aleph would not come to grief as
the result of an impact with the asteroid. Now that they had separated from the pier, however, until they
got a ship’s-length or two from the asteroid, that same orientation had to be maintained via attitude jets.
Fortunately, after Nasser had entered the few necessary commands, the onboard computer took care of that,
too.
However, once they were far enough away from the asteroid that the tug and their vulnerable cargo-
containers were no longer in any danger of being damaged by impact with the asteroid, Nasser gave the tug
the gun and got them the hell away from the asteroid as fast as he could, following a trajectory that took
them between the asteroid and the Sun, such that the bulk of the asteroid would shield them from the
radiation emitted by the bombs when they were detonated.
Once he got them into the right trajectory, Nasser turned off the power and let them coast for awhile, in
order to save fuel. This also gave them the opportunity to observe what happened to the asteroid when the
bombs went off. Nasser, the eternal worry-wart, was beginning to bite his nails over the possibility that
when that happened, rather than flying off on a brand-new trajectory, as planned, the asteroid would simply
disintegrate under the hammering of the bombs.
But, like all the preceding stages of the operation, this one went off without a hitch, as well. Watching
via the tug’s telemetry, they suddenly saw, around the curve of the asteroid, a tremendous burst of light, at
its heart a black core that was the silhouette of the asteroid between it and the tug. At first a dazzling
Cherenkov blue-white, gradually the light, fanning out in all directions, scaled down through the visible
spectrum from indigo-violet-white through blue, green, yellow, orange, red, and, finally, a fading, sullen
red-black. In the meantime, with the eruption of light on its backside, the asteroid seemed to jump forward
at them – an optical illusion of some sort, certainly, because they were by now around 50,000 kilometers
away from the asteroid, much too far to perceive a jump of anything less than several tens of thousands of
kilometers in an object that was only half a kilometer across and coming directly at them. All the bombs
could have done was nudge it into the new trajectory that had been planned for it; and once the energy
released by their detonation was gone, radiated into space or turned into heat energy, melting the rock on
which the bombs had been sitting, which would have been within far less than a second, it would have
acquired all the change in velocity it was going to from that source. The rest would have to be the work of
the Sun and, to a far lesser extent, Venus and Mercury.
It all looked good from where Rasuel was sitting. Very good indeed. Reaching out from the co-pilot’s
chair where he’d been sitting all during Nasser’s painstaking – if occasionally heavy-footed – piloting,
gently he laid his right hand on the other man’s shoulder, saying, “Beautiful! Absolutely beautiful!”
The look Nasser gave him then made up for all bouts of fiction that had arisen between them since the
beginning of Project Rheingold: a beatific smile of gratitude, like that a boy gives an adored older brother
when the latter praises him for something of great importance. Watching Nasser finally begin to relax, he
felt even better. This had been the hardest job he’d ever carried out, for the Organization or anyone else.
As wearing as it had been for him, it must have been torture for Nasser, at least at times. For once he
wished that the Faithful were not forbidden strong drink – it would have been wonderful to have been able
to wash away all the tensions and worries of the last few months with a couple of bottles of Wild Turkey.
Ah, well, might as well wish for the Moon, while you were at it. “Time to go home, Abdul,” he told
the other man. “We can rest now. Rest, and rejoice in the end of the Great Satan, once and for all.”

§9
March 23, 2022, time unknown, ca. 1.496 x 108 kilometers from Sol, R.A. N.A., declination N.A.

One year passed. More – who knew how much time had gone by? Their watches had long since
stopped working. Probably the cheap Western batteries had gone dead by now – even the batteries were
tainted by the Great Satan. The damned radio was malfunctioning, too – they couldn’t get a time-signal
from the Moon for their onboard clock, which was acting funny as it was. Why, thought Abdul with a sigh,
was he not surprised?
But, by the Grace of Allah and careful rationing of their supplies, originally certified as more than
adequate for at least 20 people for up to six years, they had survived. They had kept themselves reasonably
sane by daily exercise workouts, periods of quiet meditation, and careful study of the Koran. And now they
could see that pale, blue dot dead ahead, getting larger by the day, at the center of which was Mecca, and
which, by now, had surely been made to submit completely to the Word of the Prophet.
 Rejoicing, they broke out some extra rations to celebrate. It would not be long now before they landed
in a world made whole in submission to Allah, and were given the hero’s welcome they deserved.
And what was that great light they could see on the sunlit side of the Earth’s northern temperate zone?
“Perhaps, Saddam, it is a sign from Allah, a sign of welcome,” said Nasser, who was beginning to
exhibit signs of instability again.
“Perhaps, but it might also just be the Sun’s light reflected off the ocean. There’s no way to tell until
we get there. You’ll just have to be patient,” said Rasuel, emitting a mental sigh in the depths of his
psyche, once more feeling the same sort of exasperation that a young mother might feel trying to soothe an
extremely nervous three-year-old that he so often felt around Nasser.
Indeed, without the radio, there was no way to tell much of anything until they got down – no, that
wasn’t entirely true. Using the on-board telescopes, coming closer and closer to Earth, they had detected
not a sign of activity anywhere near the ISS or the Moon, not a sign of the construction projects in the
vicinity of both that had been so evident when they left at the start of Project Rheingold. Something had
happened down there, that was for sure, something big, considering that all of the space-related activity in
Earth’s immediate vicinity had apparently ceased since they’d been gone.
Days went by. Finally they were almost there. Soon they would be taking up orbit around Earth,
waiting for the Organization to send their ride home up to them.
“Do you think they will come to get us in the shuttle, as they promised us?” Nasser asked, as if reading
Rasuel’s mind.
“The Organization? Of course. They haven’t broken a promise to us yet. If they are able to come get
us, they will do so. And I can think of no reason why they can’t,” said Rasuel confidently. He didn’t feel
all that confident, though. Here they were, almost home, waiting for Earth’s rotation to bring Saudi Arabia
and Mecca, the beloved city, before their hungry gaze. And yet . . . and yet, he was beginning to get a very
bad feeling about things . . .
“Allah be merciful,” he said softly, looking straight down at the Earth, now directly below them. In
the middle of the large window, set securely in its steel casement, that had been added to the tug in order to
give the crew the sort of scenic view that a mere telemetry presentation could never hope to emulate, was
the Saudi Peninsula, Mecca in the exact center of the window.
“What is it, Saddam?” Nasser asked him nervously.
“Project Ragnarok, indeed . . .”
“What?”
Absently Rasuel moved aside slightly to let Nasser see the horror, too.
Mecca was in a part of the Arabian Peninsula that was normally well vegetated. Now, however, there
wasn’t a sign of either the vegetation or the city.
Instead, there below them, where Mecca had once been, was a gigantic crater. Earth’s terminator,
which had been nearing that area as they had taken up an orbit around the Earth, was now moving
majestically over the Arabian Peninsula, right to left. To its left, the rays of the setting Sun set the crater on
fire, coating it with rubies, with blood. To its right, where the darkness had fallen, a ghostly glow had
begun to emanate from it, becoming stronger and stronger with every kilometer west that darkness moved,
until, along its eastern rim, it looked as if it had been painted in star-fire by the hand of an angel.
The Earth turned beneath them, west-to-east, and soon Mecca was no longer in sight. For a while the
two men sat there, side by side, each thinking his own thoughts. They should have been doing something
to stabilize their orbit, which was already starting to decay, but neither felt any inclination to move.
Finally Nasser, shaking his head, got to his feet.
“Where are you going, Abdul?” Rasuel asked the other man in a dull voice from which most of the
capacity for wonder or alarm had fled. He was going through the motions, no more.
“I’m going to take a nice walk outside. I’ll see you in Paradise, my brother,” said Nasser, heading for
the inner airlock. He stepped through, and the airlock closed behind him. Rasuel heard the outer lock
cycle open. Then there was silence.
For some time Rasuel sat there, unable to think, unable to decide what to do. Finally, the decision was
made for him by simple orbital mechanics.
Soon the tug’s orbit had decayed far enough that it began to skim the top of the atmosphere. It didn’t
take long before the tug and everything in it were transformed into one big cinder. In the meantime, of
course, it rattled around so much that Rasuel couldn’t have left his seat in time at least to exit the ship and
die as Nasser had – but he didn’t really seem to care. And, soon enough, he and the tug were one with the
dust of Creation, stardust to stardust, amen.
 Far below, 4-year-old Lev Baruch, sitting on his father’s shoulder as they walked along the main street
of Tel Aviv, caught a bright light in the sky and cried happily, “Look, father! A new star!”
Squinting to get a better look at what his son had spied, Aaron Baruch said, “Perhaps. Perhaps not.
But surely a better day is coming, so this might be a mazel tov for us . . . and for all Jews. Your uncle Isiah
told me one day, after work at the state security offices, that someone sent . . . the troubles upon this world,
and that that someone numbered among our enemies. I think this is a sign that such enemies no longer
exist.” And with that, Aaron turned and began walking back down the street, heading for home. “It’s late,
and your mother will want you in bed soon -- she is not happy that I went out stargazing with you this
night.”

And far out in the Atlantic Ocean, Admiral Chaim Resh of the United States Navy, commander of the
rustbucket mercy fleet that was nearly all that was left now of his service, standing on the flight deck of the
big nuclear carrier that served as his command center, watched the bogie descending in fire with a small,
satisfied smile. A mazel tov, indeed.