Yesterda's War 5 - Untimely Conflicts, page 1
Untimely Conflicts
Book #5 of the Yesterday’s War series
By Gerald L. Hall
Dedicated to my wife who is known to all as ‘Rev Bev’. She’s the good Shepherd that this old ‘sheepdog’ has been working together in love with for over twenty-seven years. She has been and continues to be my ‘walking, talking miracle’.
Copyright Pending 2022, Gerald Hall
Image credits: Cover Art by Gerald Hall
Edited by:
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission by the author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.
Prologue:
Cavill Industries Headquarters
Derby, Western Australia
December 23, 1958
“So someone has gone ahead and built one of those damned nuclear bombs. That is what Father was absolutely terrified of.” Sarah Cavill said as she and her sisters sat around a table in Judith Cavill’s office.
They had just learned from their brother James, that he had witnessed an apparent nuclear weapons test. Their brother was in the new Cavill space station and had been casually watching the Earth from orbit when he saw the event.
“Is James completely sure that is what he saw?” Beatrice asked.
“Yes, he is. Father showed us all enough video imagery of nuclear weapons test. So, other than the people who actually detonated the device, we are the only people on this world who knows exactly what a nuclear explosion looks like.” Judith replied.
“What are we going to do then, Judith? I don’t know if we will be ready at this pace.” Sarah asked.
“I don’t think that we have a choice now. We are going to have to accelerate the introduction of certain technologies from Father’s database.”
“We’ve already introduced so much with our rockets, communications and even energy production. Aren’t we risking too much scrutiny by pushing things even faster than before?” A concerned Sarah asked.
“Some degree of additional risk is going to have to be accepted if we are going to ensure the survival of humanity. It will mean a lot more work on our part as we carefully introduce technologies from Father’s database. We will not be making great leaps in technological advances. But we are going to have to advance the state of the art by an average of five to ten years from what it had been in Father’s timeline.” Judith insisted.
“But hasn’t the timeline already been altered enough? The first nuclear device has been detonated thirteen years later than it had been in Father’s timeline. There is no major superpower rivalry to push a massive nuclear arms race either.
America has largely retreated back to its own borders with its usual hemispheric isolationism. It retains the potential of world leadership but is largely interested in taking care of itself at this point. The Soviet Union doesn’t even exist any longer, while Russia is a mere shadow of its former military power and expansionism.” Beatrice argued.
“All of this is true. But Father’s database has shown that even a relatively small regional nuclear exchange can cause massive changes to planetary weather patterns that would amount to a miniature ice age. Hundreds of millions of people would die of the cold and starvation from worldwide crop failures. Even without the sort of superpowers whose economies were so massive that they could build thousands of city-killing nuclear weapons, there are enough nations with the potential of building a hundred or more of these horrific weapons within the next thirty years if sufficiently motivated.
The British Commonwealth has been reduced in size by over two-thirds with the loss of so many of its colonies like India. But its core of the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia can still provide the leadership and economic strength necessary to help us lead humanity into space and also show enlightened guidance on the use of the advanced technology that we carefully share.” Judith explained.
“So you feel that we don’t have a choice here, Judith?” Sarah asked.
“No, I don’t. While events may not be exactly the same as they were in Father’s timeline. They still could end up with a terrible result that wasn’t all that much different. Now, we will try to use our work in space to put effective defensive weapons in orbit. But that is going to be difficult while we have people from outside of our organization working on our space stations with us.”
“Speaking of space stations, it would be a really good idea for us to build a second space station in the near future. This would allow us to perhaps use a different design so that we can focus on different characteristics for different tasks. The current rotating station is not well suited for micro-gravity experiments or use as a spaceborne construction facility for large interplanetary space vehicles.” Beatrice interjected.
“We will look into that, Beatrice. But we need to take more action in any event. I’m sure that if James was here, he would agree with me.
“So, are we in agreement that we need to take action to ensure that Father’s mission is successful, one way or another?”
Beatrice and Sarah both nodded their heads, but Beatrice still wanted to have the final word here.
“What you are saying makes sense, Judith. But I still urge caution. There are going to be people out there who will not be happy about what we are doing. They don’t care about what is best for humanity, only about what fulfils their own self-interest. History is full of examples of such people who will do anything to overcome the obstacles in front of them.
I’m sure that there are people who already consider us to be an obstacle too.”
Chapter One:
Cavill Industries Shipyards.
Derby, Western Australia
June 14, 1959
A cursory view of the shipyards saw that it was extremely busy with all of its drydocks and construction halls being used to produce a variety of vessels, including a pair of Sea Dragon ultra-large space launch vehicles as Judith Cavill got out of her company pickup truck and walked to the satellite office at the shipyard.
Judith entered the office and found her younger sister Sarah standing there looking at a scheduling board for all of the various shipyard areas.|
“Hello, Sarah. Are you still trying to sort out some of our scheduling conflicts here?”
“You think? I really wish that I had access to a computerized scheduling spreadsheet out here. It would make a world of difference trying to squeeze out a few percentage points of additional efficiency out here for our material and personnel utilization.”
“I’m sure that it would. But it will be at least a few more years before we can even consider introducing such an advance to public view.” Judith admitted.
“Until then, I guess that I am stuck with doing things the old fashioned way. But I think that we should be able to provide at least some semblance of computer support for our various divisions in a few years.” A frustrated Sarah remarked.
“Yes, I think that we can too. But it still has to remain separate from Father’s legacy system, no matter what. But we can build a mainframe that will give our people a major advance in capabilities while not revealing our actual capabilities.” Judith conceded.
“I’m looking forward to it. Just making our engineers get away from using slide rules to do all of their calculations will be a major advance.
I’d like to discuss another subject now. A few months ago, we were talking about building a second space station that was not a rotating spoke, hug and ring design, but instead focused on enabling microgravity research and possibly serving as an orbiting shipyard for large spacecraft construction. I still think that it is a very good idea.”
“I had originally wanted to build another rotating ring design for the second space station. It does provide the advantage of providing people living on it with some semblance of artificial gravity due to centrifugal forces induced by its rotation.”
“That same rotation makes it harder to generate power though. We have had to literally line the external surfaces of the rings with photovoltaic panels to generate enough power. That is a lot of mass to put into orbit to power the station because of the number of extra panels that have to be installed to keep a sufficient number pointing at the sun. Putting a nuclear power plant on the station has been looked at, but the shielding and related mass issues come into play there also.”
“So you want a non-rotating station design that will keep a large solar panel array always pointing at the sun?”
“That’s correct. The entire station design will be a lot less complex too. We don’t have to worry about interrupting rotation to ensure that the structure is balanced like we have had to do with Cavill Station One.”
“I see your point. Perhaps the design that you are proposing would be able to use a more modular construction? This could use the smaller launch vehicles that we launch from Kalumburu can play a much larger role in launching the modules for the construction of the second space station. That would take some of the workload off of the shipyard here and the Sea Dragons that it builds.” Judith noted.
“With a modular design, we could make the station a collaborative effort with other nations outside of the Commonwealth. If we did that, we could save a considerable amount of funding out of our own pocket, Judith.”
“We would have to design a common standard interface that nations with a far less advanced electronics capability could still connect to.”
“I’m sure that we could do that. We could just have the interface have additional connections that would be redundant for some elements, but still present so that we could fully employ them when connecting Commonwealth-built modules to each other.”
“That makes sense. But we should be the ones setting up the interface standards so that we can take advantage of our superior technologies when we are connecting our modules, one to another.
Basically, we would be splitting off some of the functions of our current space station to this newer station. We would be using the rotating station as more of a spaceborne habitat. The new station would be a more specialized scientific station. It will eventually gain more industrial functionality, especially when we add shipyard modules to it.” Judith explained.
“That’s the way that I see it also. Speaking of the space station, what are we going to do with James when he returns from his adventure aboard the space station?” Sarah asked.
“He’s going to be a little out of sorts for at least several weeks afterwards. According to the medical files on the database, he’s going to have some health issues that he will have to deal with like bone mass loss from all of the time that he will have spent in microgravity when he wasn’t in the outer rings. So he won’t be doing too much right after he gets back. The rotation of the space station has helped protect him from some of those issues, but not all.” Judith explained.
“The people who will live on that non-rotating space station are going to suffer a lot more from those issues though. Hopefully, the induced gravity in the rings will make a difference with James’ experience. In fact, we should be able to learn a lot from him when he gets his post-flight physical. Our doctors can use that information to help future astronauts.”
“I plan on being up at the rocket launch site at Kalumburu next week for the launch of our space plane on top of one of Doctor von Braun’s rockets. The new crew replacements for the space station will be going up then. James will be coming back a couple of days later on the spaceplane after the crews conduct a proper handover.” Sarah replied.
“Yes. It will be good to have us all back home on solid ground once again. I have to say that I have been a little on edge knowing that James was up there, especially after he spotted that nuclear test. I wonder how many others have also detected that nuclear blast?” Judith asked.
“I don’t know. If anyone has, they haven’t been talking openly about it at all. But I think that we have a party to plan for James’ return. We can’t let him think that he had been forgotten, now can we?” Sarah gleefully said.
“Of course. We all need an excuse to take a real break and relax a little. I still don’t know how Father managed to endure the burden that he carried for so long.” Judith replied.
“Neither do I.”
Chapter Two:
Cavill Industries Headquarters
Derby, Western Australia.
December 30, 1959
Judith Cavill was working in her private office when her younger sister Beatrice walked in and took a seat on the nearby couch. Judith’s office had been upgraded significantly to make it far more secure against any sort of unauthorized surveillance. Now that the world was moving rapidly into the electronics age, there were far more means by which someone could potentially listen in on the conversations that Judith and her siblings had concerning their father’s futuristic database.
So Judith and her siblings each had a private office that had been similarly secured as had their homes and certain other special locations in each of Cavil Industries’ major facilities. This allowed the Cavills to openly speak without fear of their extraordinary secrets being revealed.
“Did you just get back from our space operations center, Beatrice?”
“Yes. Everything is running well. There have been no other ‘incidents’ like what James witnessed earlier. James also said to say hello to everyone from the space station. He is very much looking forward to getting back on solid ground too.”
“That’s good to hear about James. We’ve had enough surprises lately already.”
“We sure have. The big question is who built that nuclear bomb? Somehow, they managed to design and build a fission bomb without us or anyone else in the Commonwealth finding out.” Beatrice said with a very concerned look on her face.
“It’s really hard to say. Every single one of the major combatants; Britain, France, Germany, America, the Soviet Union, Italy, even the Japanese knew the principles of atomic fission before the end of the war. The scientists from those nations with that knowledge are scattered even more widely now throughout the world than ever before. There were atomic fission piles in a variety of locations that we know of. It would not be all that difficult for even more to be built outside of the atomic power stations that we and a few other nations have constructed, especially if the nuclear reactors were built underground.
So, it could be one of a dozen or more nations that could have conceivably designed and built a fission bomb. They have had more than a decade after the war to develop a weapon if they wanted to.” Judith answered.
“At least Father was able to forestall the nuclear arms race for that long. I suppose that we now have to take measures to inhibit others from choosing to build the damned weapons as well. Failing that, we have to help build defences against them.”
“Yes, I realize that. At least, no one has used a nuclear weapon or made their existence public just yet. The longer that their existence remains in the shadows, the longer that other nations won’t begin to develop them as a deterrent that will eventually fail.”
“That’s part of the reason why we went with the molten salt technology for our new nuclear reactor designs so that we and the nations that we sell our reactors to won’t be producing fissile fuel for fission bomb cores with them.”
“We will have to do more, of course. This includes our Lifeboat program to set up permanent human habitations on the Moon and Mars. We have to be ready in case the worst happens.”
“I’m still a bit surprised that no one else has officially noticed the explosion though. There have to be scientists out there who are employing instruments capable of picking up the trace radioactive fallout. After all, this was an aboveground nuclear detonation.” Beatrice commented.
“Maybe someone has picked it up but hasn’t quite figured out what caused it yet. We will just have to wait and see if anyone makes an announcement, one way or another.” Judith replied.
“What’s Sarah doing right now?”
“She’s out at the shipyard checking on progress for our various projects down there. After that, she’s planning on flying out to Kalumburu to talk to von Braun on his latest rocket designs, including the new modifications to the Skyfire spaceplane.”
“I had just come back from the ordnance works when I came to your office. I saw that we finally replaced the old Italian gun barrel production equipment. We have been hamstrung by the limitations of that hardware ever since Father originally purchased it.” Beatrice noted.
“Yes, Father got a raw deal when he purchased it. But he couldn’t afford to replace it with so many other priorities ahead of it. We finally just wore out the hardware after over thirty years of use. We had no choice but to replace it then.
Now, instead of being limited to 10.5-centimeter barrels, we can actually go as large as thirty-centimeter diameter bores. We went with that capability just in case we needed it. To be honest, there is a much larger market for weapons using the 15.5-centimeter barrels. They are becoming the world standard for heavy artillery, even in Germany, which is abandoning their 15 centimeter standard. The only major exception has been Russia. They continue to maintain their standard 15.2-centimeter weapons for their heavy artillery.”
“Well, the Russians have so damned many guns in that caliber left over after the Second World War. They probably don’t need to replace them for quite a while yet. It would not surprise me if they also have millions of rounds remaining for them as well.”
“This equipment came from America. We looked at a variety of suppliers but settled on the Americans. Their price was excellent compared to the equipment from other suppliers. At the same time, the quality is comparable to what even the Germans could provide. We can also produce double the number of cannons that Father produced during the height of the war.”
