The first phase of depositing a satellite into circumgyration involves placing the craft into an elliptical orbit via a launch vehicle, usually a space shuttle or rocket. Because of their location, smaller but powerful rockets were the optimal choice for launching satellites from the ENH Initiative. This was the case with the electromagnetic pulse generator Dr. James Harbash launched.
What he thought he had launched was the basic propulsion trigger system he would eventually develop, but he was surprised to see it already existed in this new version of 1986. His intent was for this satellite to set off a series of EMPs on already orbiting satellites. Based on the fact that the rocket he found at ENH was always intended to be the last rocket launched, the hope was that these other satellites had already been set in orbit before any of them had been transported back to this timeline.
These EMP-enabled satellites were intended purely as precautionary devices in the event of an anomaly such as the ones that had spontaneously increased in size and occurrence over the past forty-eight hours.
Instead, unbeknownst to James, what was launched into set into geosynchronous orbit was a mechanism of deadly intensity that would trigger the EMP-only satellites over one-half of the globe while also intentionally detonating nuclear EMPs - with a much wider destruction radius — via whichever satellites happened to currently orbit over what in 1986 was still known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
But before the trigger would activate, the satellite was first placed into an elliptical orbit with an elevation of around one hundred miles above Earth. The farthest point in the satellite’s orbit from Earth has a projected geosynchronous elevation of 22,238 miles, give or take.
This functionality, secretively implemented as part of a Strategic Defense Initiative government contract with ENH, was courtesy of Dr. Becca Watts more than forty years prior.
Now, at the moment Dr. Becca Watts found herself being sucked into the apex of a black hole for the second time in her life, the rocket launched from within ENH. Instead of a rocket’s deafening roar, as the black hole steadily grew in intensity and power, everything in the silo was silent and muted entirely.
As the rocket climbed into space, it entered the third stage of launching a satellite, where the challenge was to move the satellite from the original elliptical orbit to the apogee orbit at the furthest point of elevation.
To accomplish this, satellites are equipped with an apogee kick motor that does exactly what the motor’s name implies: it kicks the satellite into orbit further than what the initial launch vehicle was capable of, thereby placing the satellite into the necessary geosynchronous orbit to do whatever the satellite was made to do.
In the case of the one launched from ENH, as the satellite smoothly drifted in a pre-programmed trajectory, an onboard computer program tracked the distance from launch, counting down as the distance increased.
This process would have been even more straightforward, accomplished in just two stages, had a space shuttle been available to help the satellite reach the necessary orbital elevation of somewhere close to two hundred miles. From there, it would simply eject the satellite and its final stage assembly from the shuttle’s cargo compartment, following the same steps as before, with the apogee kick motor punting the satellite into the final elliptical transfer orbit.
But even if the Space Shuttle Challenger had not exploded upon takeoff earlier that year in 1986, the chances were slim that Doctors Harbash or Watts could have access to a shuttle to launch private initiative satellites, even though considerable funding came from the government. But had they been allowed to release the satellite from the relative safety of a space shuttle, any astronauts on board would have at that moment been able to look out one of the small windows from the cockpit or cargo bay and seen a sight heretofore unseen by man.
As the satellite steadily drifted, emitting a low-toned ping ping ping like the second hand of a clock pushing forward time, a series of black circles covered large swaths of each continent on Earth far below. All of France and Germany were now swallowed up in a dense black swirl, as was eastern Russia and the entire Korean peninsula. Madagascar and the southern tip of Africa had been carved away, along with all of Central America and Brazil. And while Canada had not yet been breached, three separate black holes grew steadily over the United States — one of each coast and a larger third absorbing the midwest. They were now almost touching and would soon morph and transform into a singular anomaly large enough to engulf all of North America within a few minutes more.
But from space, it was a beautiful sight, like watching oil move within a glass of water, somehow alive yet not alive, irrevocably impacting and changing all it encountered.
As both the north and south poles evaporated into blackness, the satellite reached the optimal elevation of 22,238 miles. Upon doing so, the internal computer completed its final algorithm, which sent a far-reaching broadcast signal in all directions, stretching outward to the expansive network of satellites that had secretively gone through the same launch stages over the previous three and a half years.
Within a minute, the signal reached the first satellites, initiating a secondary protocol and then a third.
After no more than five minutes passed, as the world was utterly swallowed up and engulfed below, leaving in its wake nothing but an enormous absence of substance - of complete and total blackness — the signal reached the final satellite.
And at that very moment, through a network of over one hundred nuclear and non-nuclear satellites now floating in orbit over where the earth had once itself orbited around the sun, warheads detonated over where Russia had just been. Meanwhile, on the opposite side of this intricate network, a series of powerful high-altitude electromagnetic pulses radiated out and downward, showering the atmosphere with a massive, instantaneous, intense field of energy unlike any the universe had ever yet known or experienced.
