Ball Lightning(87)
Kang Ming took out a tiny wireless mouthpiece from his lapel, and the two Dawnlight gunners who had stayed in the hold the entire time lifted the tarp off the thunderball gun, lay down on it, and aimed directly at the cruiser passing ahead of them, tracking it with the launch rail. Kang Ming said in a soft voice, “All fire points, commence firing.”
Ball lightning issued from the tip of the rails, strands of pearls issuing an ear-splitting crackle and lighting up the surrounding ocean with an intensely flickering blue electric light. A string of red thunderballs flew across the ocean, close to the surface, trailing long tails and whistling sharply. Gracefully, they swept by the stern of the first destroyer and the prow of the second, heading toward the cruiser.
Lines of ball lightning shot at the fleet by the other fishing boats looked from this distance like bright rays of light. When ball lightning was fired along an unvarying trajectory, the ionized air formed a fluorescent trail that would continue to glow after the lightning itself moved on. These trails fanned out from each fishing boat and expanded as the ball lightning moved about. The battleground was a giant net made out of strings of ball lightning and their far more numerous fluorescent trails.
They seemed on the cusp of a grand moment in the history of warfare.
But just as the first group of ball lightning was about to reach the target, their trajectories were diverted by a giant, invisible hand. The ball lightning shot up into the air, or plunged into the ocean, or veered off to either side, passing far from the prow or stern of their targets. And when the diverted ball lightning flew near neighboring ships, the same thing happened. It was as if every ship in the fleet was enveloped in a giant glass enclosure that ball lightning could not penetrate.
“A magnetic shield!”
This was the first thought that entered Kang Ming’s mind. Something that had come up countless times in the nightmares of ball lightning researchers had come to pass in the real world.
Kang Ming shouted the command: “All strike teams, abort firing! Destroy your weapons!”
On each boat, a Dawnlight sergeant pressed a red button on the thunderball gun, then, together with the other crew members, shoved it into the ocean. Not long after, the sound of muffled explosions carried up from the depths, and the surface of the ocean roiled, rocking their boats. The superconducting batteries that powered the guns had been shorted out and exploded with a power equivalent to a depth charge. The thunderball guns were now in pieces underwater.
The streams of ball lightning from the fishing boats had been severed simultaneously. Now a large mass of ball lightning floated above the fleet, absent any targets, weaving a shining carpet in the air with their fiery tails. Their sound changed from a uniform whistle to a chaotic buzz or shrill moaning.
Kang Ming saw a flash from a gun on the destroyer, but only in his peripheral vision. When the shell struck the command ship, he was staring straight ahead at the sea, where the ball lightning that had fallen into the water continued to glow faintly, like a school of effervescent fish.
The sound of guns grew thick, and in the ocean on either side of the fleet, huge columns of water bearing pieces of the fishing boats rose and fell. When the firing stopped after three minutes, forty-two of the fifty fishing boats had been taken out. They were so small that most of them hadn’t even sunk, but had been blown to pieces by direct hits from the large guns. The eight remaining ships were locked in a circle of searchlights, as if taking a lonely curtain call at the close of this tragedy on the ocean stage.
The ball lightning released its energy as electromagnetic radiation, and soon went out, ionized air forming a fluorescent canopy in the air above the fleet. The radiation’s effect on the ocean covered it in a layer of thick white steam. Some long-lasting balls of lightning slowly floated away, their sound growing fainter and more ethereal, like lonely ghost lanterns carried by the wind.
*
How the enemy knew of ball lightning’s existence, and how it had built a system to defend against it, were unanswered questions. But there were some scattered clues: at the test target range in the south the previous year, ball lightning shot from the thunderball gun hadn’t entered a quantum state even in the absence of our observers, which meant that there was another observer present. It was known that the nuclear plant operation could lead to a leak, but it was deemed to be worth the risk. The enemy could hardly have learned the fundamental principles of ball lightning or the technical details of the weapon from observing, but they too had been studying that natural phenomenon for many years. They may even have conducted large-scale R&D, like Project 3141 in Siberia, and if so would not have found it difficult to guess the truth beneath those scattered intelligence reports. And the effect of magnetic fields on ball lightning had long been known to science, independent of the nature of ball lightning itself.
*
On the transport plane back to base, Lin Yun squatted silently in a corner holding her helmet, her slender body curled up into a ball, looking alone and helpless like a girl lost in the wilderness in the dead of winter. Ding Yi felt a sudden compassion for her, so he went over and sat down next to her with words of comfort:
“You know, our success has been pretty great. Through macro-electrons, we can view the most profound mysteries of matter on a macro scale, something that was once only possible by entering the microscopic world. Compared to this achievement, the military use of ball lightning is insignificant—”
“Professor Ding, do people burned up by ball lightning remain in a quantum state?” Lin Yun interrupted him with a mindless question.