ASH Charges and Operation Spider Web

An example of Science Fiction made Real.

Science Fiction authors love it when the real world uses their stuff. The Edwardian style of Science Fiction anticipates emerging technologies and projects their impact on society. Back in 2008, when I wrote Into the Dark: Escape of the Nomad, drone use in the military had just begun to be used in the U.S., but I had personal inside knowledge that they had been experimented with by the U.S. Army as early as the mid-70s. In the novel, I combined that tech with anti-gravity technology to invent the Anti-Gravity SHaped (ASH) Charge.

Below, two individuals from separate alien superpowers talk about and describe ASH Charges…

He produced the strangely shaped device and the stack of documents that went with it, and placed it all on his desk. Fairdock squinted at it, confused as if he had expected something else.

“Ah, I see you haven’t seen one of these before. What it is, is a shaped chemical explosive, but the interesting part about it is that it is self-propelled and uses anti-gravity for its propulsion; can you believe it? Here, let me show you how it works…”

“Oh, we are familiar with these devices already, Mr. Director,” Fairdock interrupted him, seeming relieved beyond measure. “They were invented on Telesia some time ago, four of their cycles as I recall,” he was smiling now. “They're called ASH charges, that one in your hand is manufactured in an area known as Texas, in the United States. The company name is printed there on the side of it.”

Gimlar tried his best to look dejected. “Oh, then it's not as new as we thought.”

“No, it isn't.”

ASH Charges are designed to be used in demolition and…

• Use anti-gravity to fly.

• They contain a small, shaped charge.

• They receive commands from a CAD program that assigns them collectively to mathematically planned locations on a structure that needs to be demolished.

• Commanded remotely, they land, stick to the structure, and then detonate on command.

• I imagine their overall appearance roughly resembles the Slave I spacecraft on Star Wars.

One of the human characters in Into the Dark purchased a crate full of ASH Charges…

“Yep! Better than Clare here,” Jack winked. “All she ever shops for are things that go boom in the night!”

“Hey, there are other things on my list!” Clare said, pantomiming the act of pulling a long, thin, sheet of paper out of a non-existent purse. “Here you go right here; Hairpins. Oh! And there,” she showed the invisible list to Standish, “tight-fitting blue jeans, makeup…oh, and there’s the hairspray, right next to the ASH charges!”

“ASH charges,” Stan chuckled, “the ultimate teamwork between technology and high explosives.”

“Kind of like us?” Clare teased, wrinkling her nose at him.

Clare later installed a launcher for these devices outside their ship. She designed the launcher to function as a PEZ dispenser to launch ASH Charges one at a time and use them as weapons.

Does this sound at all familiar? Last week, Ukraine smuggled remote-controlled, quad-copter drones, each carrying a small brick of C4 explosive, into Russia and dispensed them one at a time from shipping containers disguised as modular homes. They flew them onto Russian bombers parked by the taxiway of military airfields and then detonated the C4. This asymmetric warfare damaged or destroyed many of Russia’s strategic bombers that were used to launch cruise missiles against Ukrainian cities. Ukraine claims to have destroyed 40 aircraft in that attack against four different airfields, but video and satellite imagery have only been able to confirm 14 military aircraft of various types either destroyed or at least damaged (mission killed) enough to keep them out of the war for a while. Whether fourteen or forty, it’s gonna leave a mark.

Very importantly, these aircraft cannot be replaced by Russia right now, and they double as part of Russia’s global nuclear deterrent. One of the aircraft confirmed destroyed appears to be an extremely expensive, currently irreplaceable, tactically important, radar surveillance aircraft used for achieving air superiority over a battlefield and enabling Russia’s fighter aircraft to use long-range air-to-air missiles in combat, the way that Pakistan did against India recently, and defend also against attacks by low-flying aircraft. Russia has many bombers, but they're down to less than a double handful of these AWAKs aircraft.

Just like when Ukraine sank the Moskva, this attack has damaged Russia in a globally significant and irrecoverable way, and they did it with exploding drones that were predicted in 2008 in my novel, Into the Dark: Escape of the Nomad.

If you want to read more about this and other predictive technologies in Into the Dark (such as a very interesting upgrade to the U.S. Navy’s Tomahawk missile), then you should purchase the Kindle version of the book on Amazon.