The Marx Generator

So what to do next?  The numbers are not in our favor.  There are 12 billion people on Earth.  1.2 million on the Moon, 2 million on Mars.  A few thousand scattered through the asteroid belt.  About 30,000 in the Europan colony.  Maybe 500 at the launch base being constructed in orbit around Callisto, another of Jupiter’s moons.

And three of us.

We were back at the nickel asteroid, continuing our mining operations.  While we figured out what to do next, we will make some money.  We’ll need more than clones.  We will need weapons and ships.  What we can’t buy, we will take by force.

We need to start thinking bigger.  We will not live long enough to build an army one or two clones at a time.  A story on the Net about a colony of disgruntled naturals caught my eye.  About 200 free men and women, with an equal number of clones. 

The naturals were dissatisfied with the rules and the taxes of the Interplanetary Federation.  They had set off on their own and were building a station orbiting Titan, Saturn’s largest moon.  They named it the Bounty, after the ship whose crew mutinied in 1789 and ended up going native on a tropical Pacific island.

Technically, they were violating Federation laws by building a colony without approval.  From a practical standpoint, it was unlikely Earth would dispatch a military ship to deal with the renegades.  They were more than a billion miles from the home planet.  The handful of small naval vessels at the Callisto base could make the round trip to Saturn, but that would take four years.  The Federation would never leave their new and very expensive jump ship unguarded for that long. The rogue colonists assumed they were safe from the rest of humanity.  They didn’t know about the three exceptions.

But three people with two mining vessels pose little threat to a colony with superior numbers and equipment.  We would need overwhelming force, and a rock solid plan.  Getting weapons is no easy task.  Civilians are allowed to purchase small arms and defensive weapons.  But nothing military-grade like missiles or high powered lasers.

We were going to have to be creative. 

We needed weapons.  We didn’t have any.  We needed a plan.  We didn’t have one.  That frustrated and terrified Eve and Michael.  All I could say was, “We’ll figure it out as we go along.”

It would not be simple.  The station was built on a 400 foot long external truss.  Dozens of odd sized modules were attached along the truss and joined together with airlocks.  One end of the truss served as a dock.  The other end was heavily reinforced and housed the nuclear reactor that provided the station’s power. 

We estimated there were three dozen ships in their fleet.  And we knew they had several decommissioned military vessels.  The weapons would have been removed prior to their sale.  I had no doubt the first thing they did was to retrofit them with whatever weapons they could buy or manufacture.  That was typical in the lawless environment of deep space.

If our goal was to destroy the station, that would have been simple enough.  One well-placed homemade bomb could create enough hull penetrating shrapnel to destroy most of the station and kill or disable the occupants.  But we were looking to build an army.  We needed clones, ships, weapons, equipment and supplies.  Unharmed and intact.  In the event we kill any of the naturals in the process, that would not be a problem.

So bombs were out.  We could not achieve our goals by simple destruction.  We began researching the development of an electromagnetic pulse weapon.  The technology had been around since the days of Edison and Tesla.  A tiny electrical pulse can fry unprotected electronics, even one too small to pose a threat to humans.  All stations, ships, and electronic devices are designed with EMP suppression in mind.  As with anything else, the suppression capability is finite and can be overwhelmed with a sufficiently large pulse.

Earth’s military forces possess very powerful EMP devices.  Certain types of nuclear bombs can generate a pulse capable of destroying the electronics of even the largest city.  Getting our hands on a military device was out of the question.  And they didn’t post their plans on the Net. 

But there were civilian uses for EMP machines as well.  A Marx generator is a device that can be used to store a large amount of electricity, and discharge all of it in one burst.  They are used to simulate lightning or other electrical discharges, for testing power line equipment, airplanes or space stations.  And they are not hard to build, in theory anyway.  They are mostly composed of capacitors, connected in a specific manner.

A capacitor is a simple device.  Two electrical conductors separated by an insulating material.  A common method of constructing a capacitor is to sandwich a layer of plastic film between two layers of foil, then roll the combined material into the shape of a cylinder.  A small Marx generator can be built with a handful of tiny capacitors.  They are scalable.  That means they can be built as many small, identical modules, then connected together to make a machine of any desired size.  More capacitors, larger pulse.

Think of a row of water buckets, connected together.  They are arranged so the spout of one bucket hangs over the lip of the next.  When you fill the first bucket with water, it will overflow into the second, and down the line until all the buckets are full.  It may take a while to fill all the buckets.  But once full, they could all be emptied at the same time, by turning them over together.

That is how a Marx generator works.  Capacitors are connected in parallel, meaning, end to end.  When supplied with an electric charge, the first capacitor will begin filling.  The electricity will flow through each capacitor to the next as they fill. 

Another type of electronic component, resistors, function as a valve and prevent the system from discharging until the charging is complete.  When the last capacitor fills, the master resistor will open and every capacitor will discharge at once. 

Capacitors and resistors are off the shelf electronic components.  We would just have to buy a lot of them and assemble them correctly.  There were two sticking points in our plan.  First, figuring out how to make a generator big enough to cause the level of destruction we would need.  Then, not killing ourselves while building, testing, or using it. 

Any device that can store a lot of electricity and discharge it at one time is dangerous.  Even a generator small enough to fit in the palm of a hand can kill a person.  Ours was going to be unstable as it approached a full charge.  And we would only be able to test it in sections.  When we use it for real, the amount of electricity that is released will burn up much of the circuitry.  It will be a one-shot weapon.

 

My idea of leading an army of clones would fall apart if we blew up the Avenging Angel, and us with it, while testing our new weapon.  It didn’t matter.  As we made our plans, we realized there were many potential points of failure.  We would have to be better, or luckier, every time.  Our enemies would only have to be better or luckier once.

To our advantage, Marx generators can be built on any scale, small or large.  We became proficient at tabletop sized models before we scaled up.  It was going to take us a while to purchase all the components we needed anyway.  We did not want to raise suspicions, so we ordered the capacitors and other materials in small lots, from different sites on Earth, and anywhere we could find them in the colonies. 

It took two years to do the design and testing, not to mention logging millions of miles picking up components.  There were regular supply runs from Earth to each colony all the way to Jupiter.  Once we had purchased enough materials, we began the long journey to the Bounty.  We continued testing and building while we travelled.

We’d assembled small Marx generators, tested them, and proved they could generate an EMP.  We had guesstimated how large one would have to be to overwhelm the built-in defenses on the Bounty and cause catastrophic electronic failure.  The full scale machine will be almost big enough to fill the cargo bay of the Avenging Angel.  We faced a practical limitation.  The small devices could be recharged and reused.  As we built larger models, the amount of energy that was released tended to fry the components. 

Only one test could be done on a larger device, then we’d have discard it and rebuild from scratch.  Testing got more expensive, labor intensive, and time consuming as we scaled up.  We realized a full scale test would not be practical.  It would mean building two full sized devices, one to test, one to use for real.

We settled on doing our last test with a 1/10 sized device.  The final design would be ten machines just like it linked together.  We were confident the machine itself would work, and discharge its electric load.  We also needed to find out if the other components of the plan would work.  And get a better idea of how much electricity could be transferred from the generator to the steel frame that served as the Bounty’s skeleton.

The station used standard docking ports, our ships were fitted with the same.  A three foot diameter metal ring on a ship mates to a corresponding ring on the station.  The ship’s computer bounces laser pulses off mirrors mounted on the station for alignment.  Continuous, precise firing of the maneuvering jets allows the approaching ship to gradually line up with the dock, even as both objects are hurtling through space.  A series of latches snap closed when proper contact is made.

The surfaces where the ports make contact, and the latches, are coated with non-conductive materials to electrically isolate a docked ship from the station.  We would get around that with a magnetized metallic arm.  It would telescope out from the Avenging Angel after docking, and make metal to metal contact.  The magnetized end would bond securely to the scaffolding.  The arm would function like an extension cord, plugging our Marx generator into the Bounty.

We had built our 1/10 scale test machine.  We fashioned a 20 foot long metal frame, complete with docks, to simulate the Bounty.  We added extra insulation to the port on the Avenging Angel to prevent the pulse from flowing back into the ship.

The telescoping arm made a pinging sound when it contacted the frame.  Michael increased the charge to the generator.  We waited.

There was a distinct popping sound.  The ship vibrated.  The sensors on the scaffolding measured a discharge of 8000 amperes in 90 nanoseconds.  Nothing like a bolt of lightning, or the 18 million ampere output of Earth based machines.  But when scaled up to full size, we were confident.  Our device would deliver an overwhelming blow to the Bounty, and destroy enough of its electronics to create havoc.  We had our weapon.

While we conducted our testing, we had been in communication with the Bounty.  Posing as Randleman, I had inquired about joining with them.  In the years before I dispatched him, he had gotten in drunken fights at most of the ports in the solar system.  He was a well-known troublemaker.  Just the kind of outsider that would spend two years in deep space to get away from the rest of humanity.  The colony had plans to mine the surface of Titan.  A man like Randleman and an experienced clone would be a welcome addition to their team.

At the start of our trip, Saturn was nothing more than a bright spot in the endless darkness of space.  Now, the beauty of its rings and the intense colors of the planet’s surface were gradually coming into view.  Soon, the tiny dot that was Titan would grow into an orange hued sphere.  Work continued on the Marx generator. We refined our battle plans.  The Bounty would not know what hit them, until it was already over.