Ariel laughed. “It’s an exotic water supermolecule that can be used to heal the sick and build über-strong bridges and things,” she said. “As a powerful magical Water elemental, I figured I owed it to myself to master its many uses.”
“The main problem being that it only exists in a beloved interactive from their childhood,” Aunt Agñasta said.
“Lady Jangles and the Piccolo Prince,” Ash reminisced.
“It doesn’t really matter,” Ariel insisted, “since like I said, nobody keeps resolutions anyway. I’ll just keep trying to be a water witch if it’s all the same to you.”
“Fine,” Gabriel looked across at Roon. “What about you?”
“Ooh,” Ariel said, “Roon can resolve to say at least two words every day.”
“Why bother?” Roon said into the expectant silence.
“You know, I had a feeling she’d say that,” Gabriel remarked.
ASH, WORKING
Two days to wheels-up.
The Americans were getting tired of her rejections. They thought she was being racist. At this point, seven hours and thirty-one gung-ho, trigger-happy, balls-or-ovaries-out fuckwits later, Ash wasn’t even sure she wasn’t.
And she had a splitting headache from the night before, a headache that no amount of general-consumption medication seemed to want to shift. She didn’t want to dose herself with anything too extreme, since even now it was imperative that she remain as clearheaded and clean-blooded as possible. The sooner her bodily functions ran their course and cleared the alcohol from her system, the sooner she would be at her sharpest. The drugs available to the special forces would only draw that out.
Besides, she was already sufficiently sluggish from the suite of inoculations and vaccinations she’d been hammered with since the preliminary call on Christmas Day. You didn’t go into the Floods without enough shit in your veins to kill a mosquito at fifty paces.
“Alright,” she said, managing a smile for the earnest, too-young soldier sitting across the table from her in the virtual interface. She reminded herself that she was a senior sergeant at only twenty-three, so the accusation of too young couldn’t really be thrown around here. “Okay, Group Leader … Lunwood. How do you feel about cooperating with the ASEAN Union Special Forces on this mission?”
“Feel good about it, Senior Sergeant Vandemar,” Group Leader Percival Lunwood said, painfully formal. The virtual link-up only made the eyes-front stare-into-nothing of the at-attention soldier that much more robotic. “Confident we’ll keep the civilians safe and get them the help they need. Hope we don’t get in your way too much, Senior Sergeant,” he added after a moment.
Ash blinked, had to stifle a grin. About time. “What is your specialist unit bringing to the party, Group Leader Lunwood?”
“Knowledge of the local area, familiarity with the residents to help allay suspicion and paranoia, assistance with the language and customs, and two dozen extra pairs of carryin’ arms,” Lunwood replied, “Senior Sergeant.”
Again, a textbook correct response, with an additional human element. “What sort of people do you think we’ll be encountering up there under the cell, Group Leader?”
“People up against the worst of it, Senior Sergeant,” Lunwood replied immediately. “People the whole damn world’s trying to reduce to animals,” he hesitated. “People who might be lettin’ it.”
“At ease, Group Leader,” Ash reached forward and tapped the tabletop in front of her. She was not in fact tapping anything in particular, but the virtual wouldn’t pick that up. “You can speak freely. Do you have any concerns about this mission?”
Lunwood relaxed microscopically. “Plenty of concerns, sir,” he said. “But … my team’s a good team, Senior Sergeant, and they’ve held it together in crazy control before.”
“Oh, you’ve heard it called that, have you?”
“Sir,” Lunwood relaxed still further, “that’s all it’s called.”
“Carry on.”
“That was it, sir. I know my team is good, I damn sure know your team is good, and we’ve got experienced leadership on this one. Doesn’t mean I don’t have concerns, Senior Sergeant. But I think concerns come with the territory.”
Ash nodded. “The military are pretty unpopular at the best of times,” she said, “and that counts double in times of hardship. How do you feel about people who protest military intervention?”
“That depends, sir.”
“Depends on what?”
“On whether they’re trying to kill me.”
She hid another smile. “Alright, Group Leader,” she said, “you want to unpack that a bit for me? I’m sitting off a happy new year on this end.”
“Look, Senior Sergeant,” Lunwood said, “we all know nobody likes it when the army turns up. Even if they’re after the bad guys – you know, the ones the regular folks think are the bad guys and the media – even if they’re bringing food and clean water, they’re also bringing the guns.”
To the average person, there are good guys and bad guys, Ash thought in her sister’s voice. “Go on.”
Lunwood grimaced, verbally picking his way through philosophical territory he’d only ever explored in his mind before. “It’s fine that folks don’t like that about us. You’re not supposed to like it, are you? When it’s army time, things have gone seriously wrong. Like … it’s not really the army they’re pissed at, it’s the need for the army. It’s the guys who sent the army. I don’t … there’s a big difference between a civilian protesting against interventions and military spending, and an armed lunatic taking pot shots at me from the back of a Husky van. Sometimes, they’re the same dude. Just separated by…” he struggled. “By being desperate,” he waited a while, thinking, and Ash let him think. “But if you’re asking whether I like pacifists…”
Ash leaned forward. “Well, do you?”
“Sure. They’re ahead of their time, but that’s no reason to hate them, is it? Maybe they’re way ahead of their time, so far ahead that they seem like kooks, or, or naïve, but … that’s the aim, isn’t it? For the armies to be gone, and the pacifists to rule the world? For there to be something left for them to rule? Otherwise why do we do this?”
Fucking finally. “Alright, Group Leader,” she said, and tapped the table again. “Let’s talk about your past engagements…”
She went back to normal questions for a while. Group Leader Percival Lunwood, once again convinced he was back on the record, donned his crisp and robotic professionalism and responded with efficient, perfectly acceptable, perfectly military answers. After an obligatory period of time, she prepared to sign off.
“Thank you, Senior Sergeant Vandemar,” he said in closing. “It was … a privilege to talk to you.”
Ash shook her head, once again struck by the surreality of it all. This man was a solid five years older than her, even if he’d only had a fraction of her experience. “I think we understand each other, Lunwood. Look forward to working with you.”
Lunwood blinked. “Senior Sergeant,” he said again, recovering quickly from his surprise. It was a moderate-to-middling breach of protocol to imply that their teams would be linked on the up-coming mission, since it technically wasn’t her call to make. “Safe flight. See you at the Advent staging area.”
She nodded, deactivated the connection, and sighed, angling her head side to side, working discomfort out of her neck. It did nothing for her skull, but it was a start. She looked around at the other senior personnel and logistics officers who’d been watching the exchange. Several of them were tight-lipped – they’d noticed the breach of protocol too – but they didn’t say anything. It was their call to make, and they would back her decision. That was why she was there, after all. Because when it came to crazy control, there were special forces units … and then there was the Balrog’s team.
You couldn’t interview every member of every group, every grunt and officer. But a Group Leader with that level of faith in his people – and more importa
ntly, a Group Leader with Lunwood’s attitude who was still a Group Leader – yes. That’d do.
“Him,” she said.
ROON, WORKING
It had been two days since Ash had taken off, and of course there had been no word. Not even her immediate family would be told where Ash had deployed and what she was doing, or whether she was even alive.
That was standard procedure, of course – at least this time they knew roughly what part of which continent she was on, and what the general outline of the mission involved. It was a bit difficult to make a typhoon cell collapsing into a single superstorm top secret.
Roon did what she always did when Ash was on an engagement, which was keep herself busy with an assortment of design and engineering projects. Of course, this was what she generally did when Ash wasn’t on engagements as well, so it had the benefit of not requiring much change in her daily schedule. She was getting closer, she thought, to perfecting the design of the ‘converters’ she had been working on for a while.
She now knew – or at least had been told from a compelling source – that the converters weren’t actually drawing energy from an exotic interplanar gravity intersection and turning it into electricity. They were in fact receiving energy from an ancient defence platform out in the vicinity of Jupiter, which was channelling it from some source on the other side of an invisible barrier. The energy was coming from reality, which was what they’d sort of been assuming this was, since they hadn’t had anything else to go on until now.
Except they weren’t receiving the energy. The whole thing had never been more than a hypothetical exercise, all numbers and extrapolations, because the connection between the converters and the Godfang had never been established, the Godfang was asleep, and the actual processing of energy from outside reality into their little bubble of exiled space-time had not been initiated yet. She’d barely even made a start on making any of those things happen, to be fair, because she’d been unaware of them.
It was at once vastly reassuring to have such a simple explanation, and terrifying to have an explanation of such fantastical origins. Still, it gave her a different angle to work from. If it turned out to be a dead end or some ludicrously convoluted practical joke, she could put the idea back on the shelf until further inspiration came.
She turned over the heavy piece of machinery in her hands. As she did with so many of her prototypes, she reminded herself that the first working models were always going to be unwieldy, inefficient and way bigger than they needed to be. In that way, curiously enough, her creations reflected her own apparent state of imperfection. They needed time, and incarnations, in which to focus. Within a half-dozen generations, the blocky amalgam of solid-state processing and compensating electronics in her hand would be a sleek little button the size of a peach stone. And capable – as long as she actually got the prototype to work – of the same energy output as a middle-of-the-range Synfoss plant.
At least now she knew why it had transmission and receiving structures. She often built things with features and had no idea why she’d done so, feeling simply that they belonged, and this had very much been one of those situations. In this case, she’d assumed it was because the energy source was a gravitational distortion some millions of kilometres separate from Earth. Which, indeed, it was. Sort of.
As she had also taken to doing with her prototypes in recent days, Roon tried to get a deeper feeling of the matter of which it was made. Some sort of connection to her own innate power as Earth Disciple. It really just felt silly, though, to sit and stare at the inanimate mass when deep down she was convinced she would never gain any insight that way. It didn’t work with the converter prototype, and it didn’t work with the rock she’d brought in from the garden. She obviously still had a long way to go.
While this particular reinvention of the energy-from-nowhere wheel had been a collaborative effort between Roon and Harlon Berkenshaw, based on the strange series of dreams and inspirations Roon had gathered on the topic, it hadn’t really started there. One of the first iterations of the system had been pioneered by Professor Gorman Lundell in the late Twenty-First Century. He had gone beyond theory, but not very far beyond it. And of course his warehouse-sized prototype receiving and converting station hadn’t worked.
Nevertheless, Harlon was convinced that his great-grandfather, Derek Berkenshaw, had seen something in the research, and had it destroyed. Roon, familiar with how the super-corporations did business, tended to believe him – which was why the safest way to continue any such work was to do it for the enemy, at least in a certain sense. To act in a spirit of cooperation, rather than the idealistic ‘let’s put the monsters out of business’ spirit of Professor Lundell,62 was just common sense.
It didn’t matter to Roon whether Synfoss stayed in business and its executives made more money than they could possibly spend in a hundred generations – as long as the company cut its dangerous waste emissions and ensured that those generations actually happened.
She was mostly just grateful she hadn’t lived in Professor Lundell’s time, although she supposed if Gabriel was to be believed then she actually had, in some body or other. The early days of Synfoss had been the latter days of the fossil fuels that had been the corporation’s predecessor, as well as the twilight of what many considered to be the last great golden age of human civilisation. And to be reasonably objective about it, things had basically gone downhill since then.
Scientists had tried. Lundell had been one of the last, a quite literally dying breed. Faith in science had taken an undignified beating in the middle of the Twenty-First Century, replaced with … well, just faith, really. Not that faith had gotten anyone very far, but it was part of the human condition, especially when everything else failed. But yes, scientists had tried. They’d tried and they’d failed.
Solar power, wind power, geothermal and wave power … all of these things had been attempted, and they might have worked. They certainly spurred innovation and massive industrial development, setting infrastructure in place that Synfoss – the last great hope for the human race, and the frantic fistful of grass at the edge of the cliff for the scientific community – was able to take into use.
The so-called green energies had all been fine, but they’d met with ruthless smears from the established industries, and an ignorant, media-dependent, change-fearing public had helped with the metaphorical – and sometimes not so metaphorical – torches and pitchforks. One company at a time, one nation at a time, the industry collapsed.
The weather did its part too. As the climate went into apparent extermination mode it served the purpose of proving that renewable energy was a better choice than flaying the planet to dig up oil and coal, and simultaneously tore the fragile new energy infrastructure out by the roots. It was hard to build a solar farm on a plain that was suddenly six feet underwater, and all it took was one freak hurricane flinging a dozen wind generator fans through a suburban community at a hundred and fifty kilometres per hour to make everybody terrified of the technology.
That problem had never gone away. Any chance that they could cut a significant fraction of Synfoss’ pollutant output was worth exploring. Even if it was a crazy idea based on the possibility of an ancient spaceship on Europa.
Roon was still concerned about the actual source of the energy – not the spaceship, but the source the spaceship was tapping. The fact that there was a glib explanation that dealt with some of the mysteries really did nothing for the fact that there were still considerable mysteries. For example, energy simply didn’t spring into existence out of nowhere. That had been a problem when she’d thought she was working on converting gravity-folded intersectional energy, it had been a problem a hundred and ten years ago when Gorman Lundell had first wrestled with the question, and it was a problem now.
Yes, it was possible – in fact, it was obvious – that they just weren’t seeing the source. If all you had was solar panels but couldn’t actually see the sun, you could only extrapolate
that some source of energy was up there, being collected. Well, in this case, the Destarion was the solar panel, and the sun was on the other side of the veil. Except it wasn’t a sun. A sun couldn’t possibly have an energy output of this level. If it did, it would be almost infinitely more destructive than beneficial. Orders of magnitude more destructive than the difference between nice clean solar power and raw solar radiation.
Gabriel wasn’t much help. He just said vague things about a ‘Power Plant’, and ‘beams’ of ‘energy’ that spanned the ‘urverse’ and provided power to – apparently – the very laws of physics themselves. Sort of like a basic background current that had kicked off all the other laws of energy and matter and entropy, time and space and … well, everything. The idea of tapping into something like that in order to light your house was absurd. It was like plugging a cable into thin air and expecting it to power an appliance.
But then, when you plugged that same cable into a socket, you were getting electricity that was generated from a Synfoss plant a few hundred kilometres away, and that was making power by a variety of electrochemical processes and the burning of compounds, all of which took advantage – if you chose to look at it that way – of basic physical laws and principles of combustion, reaction and molecular rearrangement. And that was all pretty absurd, wasn’t it? When you split an atom, or fused one, the energy released was nothing short of sorcery … if you didn’t know where it came from. And even when you knew, it was staggering.
She wondered what sort of byproducts this ‘Power Plant’ had. And what was fuelling it, since the whole ‘primordial original energy signature of the urverse’ was a clearly insufficient answer. She also wondered if she was even thinking about any of it in the correct terms, or if she was looking up at the underside of an entirely different echelon of scientific knowledge, and making a damn fool of herself for trying to describe what little of it she could see in terminology specific to this one.
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