Ball Lightning(78)
Empty sky appeared on the projection screen. There were lots of clouds, and it looked about to rain. Then lots of small white dots appeared and gradually expanded, as if dripping dozens of drops of milk onto the water.
“Those are the cruise missiles’ explosion points,” the senior colonel said, pointing at the expanding dots on the screen. “What’s strange is that we really didn’t know what the enemy was doing. That white material—”
“Were there any other unusual signs at that location?” I interrupted, a foreboding fear rising in my heart.
“What do you mean? There was nothing that seemed relevant.”
“Unrelated, then. Can you take a look?” I asked urgently.
The colonel and several other officers exchanged glances, and a bespectacled lieutenant colonel said, “An enemy early warning aircraft flew through that airspace. That doesn’t seem unusual.”
“Anything else?”
“Hmm...?the enemy emitted a high-energy laser at that region of the ocean from a low-orbit satellite, perhaps to coordinate submarine detection with the plane....?Is that related to the missile attack under discussion? Dr. Chen, are you okay?”
I hope to God it’s submarine detection. May the lord make it submarine detection. My heart prayed in a panic as I said, “Not really....?That white powder, do you have a rough idea of what it was?”
“I was about to tell you,” the senior colonel said as he flipped the scene on the screen. Now it was an image formed from a small number of brilliant colors, like a well-used painter’s palette. “This is a false-color infrared image of that region of space. See, the explosion points are rapidly turning into low-temperature zones.” He pointed at a patch of brilliant blue, and said, “So we guess that the white powder might be a highly efficient refrigerant.”
I felt like I had been struck by lightning, and the world had turned upside down. I had to grip the table to bring myself to earth. “Hurry! Get the fleet out of there!” I said to the senior colonel, while pointing at the screen.
“Dr. Chen, this is a recording. The event took place yesterday.”
Dazed by the facts, I was struck dumb for a while before I realized what he meant.
“This was recorded on Zhufeng. Have a look.”
Sea and sky appeared on screen. A small escort destroyer flickered in and out at one corner. A thin funnel took shape in the sky, its tail extending down toward the ocean as a long thin thread. Upon contact with the surface, the thread turned white as it began sucking up water. At first this thread connecting sea and sky was narrow, and it rocked and swayed gently, and seemed almost to snap in half at its thinnest point. But it soon grew thicker, turning from thin gossamer hanging from the sky into a towering column standing on the water, holding up the heavens. It turned black, with only the swirling seawater on its surface still reflecting the sun.
I had thought of this before, in fact, but didn’t believe anyone would do it.
The disturbances capable of giving birth to a tornado—the eggs—were very numerous in the atmosphere. The sinking cold air at the heart of the egg could be warmed to stop its descent, thereby wiping out the egg that would evolve into a tornado, like I had seen in Oklahoma. Similarly, if a coolant were used to further chill that mass of air, “incubating” an egg that would otherwise have disappeared, it could be spurred to form a tornado. Since the eggs were so plentiful, under appropriate climatic conditions, tornadoes could be manufactured at will. The technological key was in finding potential eggs, and my tornado forecasting system made that possible. Even worse, the system could be used to find opportunities for two eggs nearby, or even superimposed. If multiple eggs were incubated at once, it could focus atmospheric energy into the generation of super-tornadoes that had never existed in nature.
Now before me was one of those tornadoes, more than two kilometers in diameter, twice as large as any naturally occurring tornado. The largest tornadoes in nature were F5s, and their size had won them the name “the hand of God.” But this artificially incubated tornado was at least an F7.
On screen, the tornado crept toward the right. Zhufeng was clearly executing an emergency turn in an attempt to avoid it. Tornadoes usually advance in a straight line at a speed of around sixty kilometers per hour, or roughly the same as the carrier’s top speed. If Zhufeng could accelerate and turn quickly enough, it had a chance of missing it.
But just then, in the air on either side of the huge black column, two more white threads dropped down and then swiftly thickened and evolved into another two huge black columns.
The three super-tornadoes were separated by less than their diameter, not even a thousand meters. Together they formed a nearly eight-kilometer-wide, slowly approaching earth-to-sky fence of death. Zhufeng’s fate was sealed.
The tornado columns now filled the entire screen. Mist from the roiling waves surged ahead of them like an approaching waterfall, the columns themselves the dark abyss behind. The picture jostled violently, and then cut out.
As the senior colonel explained, a tornado had crossed Zhufeng’s front half, and, just like the lieutenant colonel had predicted on that small island, its deck snapped. Half an hour later it sank, carrying more than two thousand officers and sailors, including their captain, to a watery grave. As the tornadoes neared, the captain had issued a decisive order to fully seal off the two pressurized water reactors to reduce any nuclear leak to the minimum possible, but this left Zhufeng dead in the water. Two escort destroyers and one supply ship were also sunk. When the super-tornadoes had swept the ships, one of them continued onward for two hundred kilometers before expiring, twice as far as any tornado had traveled in recorded history. During its journey, it retained enough power to scour an island fishing village and kill more than one hundred people, including women and children.