Piranha: Firing Point

The plasma volume reached outward and upward, reaching the first molecules forming the hull of the aircraft carrier above. First the epoxy resin of the outer layer of paint, then the urethane intermediate coating, and the inorganic zinc primer, all those chemicals disassociated from their complex molecular structure and dissolved into atomic nuclei and electrons. The plasma front reached the next layer, the steel formed of carbon and iron atoms in a matrix called a solid phase, with an elongated grain structure formed by the rolling of the steel plates in the mill at a place called Bethlehem. The steel plate grains melted together from the intense heat of the approaching plasma, the iron and carbon swimming together in a volume of high-temperature suspension.

The rising temperature excited the molecules to the point that they too joined the plasma.

The plasma’s growth soon stopped, the intensely high temperatures unable to be sustained for more than a few microseconds. The cooler temperatures of the surrounding world drew the heat away by radiation, convection, and conduction until the hundreds of millions of degrees had become mere millions. The plasma volume — once at the boundary of the steel hull above, having eaten its way a meter and a half into the ship— collapsed. Though not hot enough to be a plasma, the remaining high temperature was still intensely hot, hotter than all phenomena except a fission-bomb explosion. The thermal energy of the former plasma boiled the water within a hundred meters into an intense volume of high-pressure steam. The shock wave from the steam and vaporized iron slammed upward into the hull. The incredibly high temperatures reached the hull remainder next, hot enough to change the steel to iron vapor. The molecules wanted to fly out into space from their incredibly high kinetic energy, but having nowhere to go because of the surrounding matrix of steel, this caused a soaring pressure wave that blasted through the ship.

The heat, pressure, and blast effect propagated upward through higher-level decks of the ship’s hull, the solid metal continuing to vaporize and add to the pressure wave. The hull continued to disintegrate, the structural steel vaporizing as well as the steel of heavy equipment — catapult machinery, the anchors with all their chains and winch machinery. In addition to metal, there were other atoms in the advancing fireball — electrical cables, plastic insulation, more paint, vinyl flooring tiles, life jacket material, paper, computers, and flesh, the flesh of human beings who had been warehoused in the forward third of the hull in places called called berthing compartments. Row after row, columns and columns, of bunks housed men and women sleeping in the afternoon after having stood their watches through the night.

Some of the people were sitting at tables, playing cards, studying technical manuals, writing letters to wives and husbands and children who slept on the other side of the hemisphere.

The people in the berthing compartments never became aware of the blast of the fireball reaching them.

Their molecular structure was burned and vaporized long before their nerves had time to transmit sensations.

Their brain matter disintegrated into basic elements in the next microseconds, with no time to record or react to the physical phenomenon of the high-temperature fireball.

As the blast wave reached the upper deck, it no longer had the thermal energy to vaporize the molecules it encountered to their gaseous state. It had enough energy, however, to melt the metal atoms it encountered, and was still transforming water molecules to high-pressure, roaring steam. The temperature was still hundreds of thousands of degrees hotter than the blast wave of conventional explosives. The shock continued upward and aft, consuming the ship, the iron atoms melting from solid to liquid, now at a temperature that the iron and carbon combusted in the presence of the oxygen atoms of the air, the ship literally burning like the tip of a struck match. The blast moved on, reaching the upper deck of the ship and violently blowing the deck surface structure high into the sky. Some resolidified iron chunks tumbled end over end two kilometers in the air. The blast roared over the three dozen jets that had been tied down in a ready position, half of them F-22 Dynacorp fighter jets being prepared for the assault on the Asian continent to the west, the other half S-14 Blackboard twin-engine antisubmarine aircraft readied to take flight in the event of a submarine alert. In a flash these advanced jet planes became molten and burned aluminum and carbon fiber and burned plastic, their structure likewise blown thousands of meters skyward.