Ball Lightning(71)

“Lin Yun!” Colonel Xu snapped.

“Let the major finish speaking,” the operational commander said, unperturbed.

“I’ve finished, sir.” She dropped her gaze and retreated to the back.

“Very well. Apart from the emergency command center personnel, the rest of you comrades can wait outside,” the commander said. He dropped his gaze too, but he wasn’t looking at the blueprint any longer.

We came to the roof of the guesthouse, where the other Dawnlight members had convened. Two thunderball guns had been set up on the edge of the roof, each covered by a green tarp. Near them were four superconducting batteries, two charged up for the immense power required to excite ball lightning, and the other two containing two thousand anti-personnel macro-electrons.

Two hundred meters away, the huge column of the nuclear reactor stood quietly under the sun.

When the PAP colonel left, Colonel Xu said to Lin Yun in a low voice, “What are you up to? You’re well aware that the main risk of ball lightning weapons right now is that if there’s a leak the enemy can easily build effective defenses against it. Then where’s our battlefield advantage? With tensions as high as they are, the enemy’s surveillance satellites and spies have their attention focused on anything unusual in any part of the country. If we use it—”

“Colonel, this right here is a battlefield! The reactor has a volume ten times that of Chernobyl. If it’s blown up, you’ll have a no-man’s land hundreds of kilometers in diameter. Hundreds of thousands of people might die from the radiation!”

“I’m fully aware of that. If the higher-ups gave the order to use ball lightning, I would resolutely carry it out. The problem is that you shouldn’t have overstepped the scope of your position to influence the director’s decision.”

Lin Yun remained silent.

“You really want to use that weapon,” I said, unable to hold back.

“So what if I do? There’s nothing abnormal about that attitude,” Lin Yun said quietly.

Then we all stopped speaking. The hot wind of early autumn blew across the roof, and the sound of cars screeching to a halt came up from the foot of the building, closely followed by the rapid footfalls of soldiers exiting the vehicles, and metallic clashes of weapons against armor. Apart from a few short commands, there was no talking. But within these sounds I sensed a terrifying deathly silence overwhelming all the other sounds striving madly to escape, and crushing them in its giant palm.

Not much time had passed before the PAP colonel came back. Everyone on the roof stood up, and he said simply, “Would the military commander of Dawnlight please come with me?” Lieutenant Colonel Kang Ming stood up, adjusted his helmet, and followed. The others barely had time to sit back down before he came back in again.

“Prepare to attack! We will determine the number of shots ourselves, but we must ensure that all living targets inside the reactor structure are destroyed.”

“Let Major Lin decide the number of shots to fire,” Colonel Xu said.

“Two hundred dissipative shots, one hundred from each gun,” Lin Yun said, evidently having thought it over already. All of the macro-electrons currently loaded in the weapons were dissipative. Once all of the targets in the structure had been destroyed, the remaining ball lightning would drain their energy in the form of EM radiation, going out gradually, no longer destructive. Other varieties of ball lightning would release excess energy as an explosion, causing random damage to targets other than their selective target type.

“First and second shooting teams, come forward,” Lieutenant Colonel Kang said as he pushed through the group. He pointed ahead and said, “The PAP squad will advance on the reactor, up to the hundred-meter safe line. They will stop there, then we will commence firing.”

My heart seized up as I looked out at the huge nuclear column reflecting the blinding white light of the sun, preventing me from looking at it directly. For a moment I heard voices, as if the sound of the children was being blown over the roof by the wind.

The tarps were taken off the two thunderball guns, and the metal shells of their accelerator rails gleamed in the sunlight.

“Allow me,” Lin Yun said, taking the shooter’s seat at one of the thunderball guns. Lieutenant Colonel Kang and Colonel Xu exchanged a glance, but did not oppose her. I saw in her expression and movement an excitement she could not suppress, like a child finally getting her hands on a coveted toy. It gave me the chills.

Down on the ground, the PAP’s skirmish line had started moving toward the reactor. It already seemed tiny against that massive structure. The line moved quickly, rapidly approaching the reactor’s hundred-meter safety line. Then the thunderball guns ignited the excitement arcs in their accelerator rails, the crisp crackle turning heads down below the building, and even causing the PAP troops to glance backward.

When the line was a hundred meters from the reactor, they halted, then two lines of ball lightning flew off the roof toward the reactor. The deadly hurricane whooshed across two hundred meters. As the first ball lightning struck the reactor structure, more ball lightning was issuing in an unending stream from the accelerator rails, joined into a continuous thread by fiery tails that connected the guesthouse and the reactor with a river of flame.

I watched a video recording afterward of what happened in the control room.

At the time the ball lightning flew in, the teacher had already stopped her class and was stretched across the control station messing with something, while the children, still clustered together, were being guarded by an assault-rifle-wielding terrorist. The ball lightning was unobserved for a short time after it entered the structure and entered a probability cloud state. By the time the reappearance of an observer caused the probability cloud to collapse, the ball lightning had lost its speed and now drifted slowly on a random path. Everyone looked up in fear and confusion at the wandering fireballs, which screamed the cries of a multitude of ghosts as their tails painted a complicated, shifting picture in the air. In the images recorded by the cameras in the control room, the teacher’s face was the clearest. Her glasses reflected the yellow and blue of the ball lightning, but, unlike the others, there was no fear in her eyes, only confusion. She was even smiling, perhaps to let herself relax, or maybe because she genuinely found the fireballs interesting. That was the last expression she wore in this world.