Ball Lightning(67)

On the motherboard, two-thirds of the chips were gone.

The gasps continued. In the MBT 2005, the observers saw that the communications equipment and the radar had more than half of their chips burned to ash. When we finally opened up the nose of the surface-to-air missile, the gasps reached a crescendo, since the missile’s guidance module had been turned into a reliquary for cremated chips. The two soldiers from the missile corps in charge of removing the warhead looked up at Lin Yun and me with fear in their eyes, then looked through the gaps in the crowd to the distant thunderball weapon, looking like they’d seen a ghost.

The lieutenant general declared, “It can take out the main strength of an entire army!”

The observers applauded enthusiastically. If ball lightning weapons were to have an advertising slogan, there was nothing more appropriate.

*

After returning to base, I noticed a loss of my own: the notebook computer I had taken with me to the exercise wouldn’t turn on. I took it apart, and discovered its insides were covered in a fine white ash. I blew on it, and it took flight and sent me coughing. Taking another look at the motherboard, I saw that the CPU and two 256 MB sticks of ram were missing, turned into the dust now drifting about me. During the firing demonstration, I was in a position half the distance from the ball lightning ignition point that the others were so as to observe and record, but I was still much farther than the customary fifty-meter safe distance.

It should have occurred to me before, really. The chips were so small in size that each could absorb only a small amount of the energy discharged by the ball lightning, leaving the remainder to act at a much larger distance. For tiny targets such as chips, ball lightning’s threat radius was greatly expanded.





Strange Phenomena III


One night under a brilliant moon, Lin Yun, Ding Yi, and I strolled easily along a path on base discussing how the ball lightning weapon could defeat the magnetic defense problem.

“Now we can be certain that, so long as we use charged macro-electrons, the problem is unsolvable,” Lin Yun said.

“That’s my opinion, too,” Ding Yi said. “Recently I’ve been trying to use the motion state of macro-electrons to locate the nucleus of the atom they belong to, but the theory is extremely knotty, and there are certain obstacles that are practically impossible to overcome. It’s a long road, and I fear that humanity won’t make any breakthroughs this century.”

I looked up at the stars, thinned out now due to the full moon, and tried to imagine what an atom five hundred to a thousand kilometers in diameter would be like.

Ding Yi went on, “But on second thought, if we can find a macro-nucleus, that would mean we can obtain chargeless macro-neutrons, which would be able to penetrate EM barriers.”

“Macro-neutrons can’t be excited like macro-electrons, and don’t have energy release. How would they be weaponized?” Lin Yun asked the question I was about to.

Ding Yi was about to answer, but then Lin Yun put a finger to her lips. “Shh—listen!”

We were walking next to the ball lightning excitation lab. Before the advent of spectral recognition, it was here that large numbers of animal tests were performed with select weapons-grade macro-electrons, turning hundreds of test animals to ash. It was the same building that Lin Yun had taken me to on my first visit to the base to demonstrate the lightning weapon. Under the moonlight it looked like an enormous shadow, without definition. Lin Yun motioned for us to stop, and when our footsteps ceased, I heard a sound coming from the lab.

It was the bleat of a goat.

There were no goats in the lab. Animal tests had stopped two months ago, and during that time, the lab had been sealed.

I heard the sound again, unmistakably a goat’s bleat: faint, and a little bleak. Oddly, the sound reminded me of ball lightning explosions, since the two shared the same quality: even though a listener could determine the direction of the sound’s source, it nevertheless seemed to fill all space, and sometimes seemed to be coming from inside your body.

Lin Yun headed toward the lab entrance, Ding Yi following close behind, but my feet were like lead and I stood rooted in place. It was the same old sensation, a whole body chill, as if I were in the grip of an icy hand. I knew they wouldn’t find any goat.

Lin Yun pushed open the lab door, and the heavy iron rumbled loudly as it rolled back on its track, drowning out the faint bleats. When the door sound had subsided, the goat’s bleats were gone as well. Lin Yun turned on the light, and through the doorway, I could see part of the building’s vast interior. A square pen formed from two-meter-high iron fencing had once held the targets for excitation experiments. Several hundred test animals had been incinerated by ball lightning there. Now, the space was completely empty. Lin Yun looked inside the huge lab for a while, but as I had predicted, she found nothing. Ding Yi stood at the entrance, the light casting a long, thin shadow behind him on the ground.

“I clearly heard a goat!” Lin Yun called, her voice echoing in the cavernous interior.

Ding Yi didn’t respond, but turned and walked toward me. When he reached me, he said softly, “Have you come across anything in all these years?”

“What do you mean?” I said, striving to keep my voice from trembling.

“Some...?things it would be impossible for you to encounter.”

“I don’t understand.” I forced a laugh, which must have sounded ridiculous.