Ben Bova - Able One

“Very well, then,” Levy said stiffly as he pulled out a handkerchief and mopped his brow, “let’s get down to business and show the general what our COIL can do.”

One wall of the concrete building had been punched through and a long window of thick safety glass looked out on the laser itself.

The COIL sat in its own open shed beneath a flimsy roof of corrugated metal supported by four steel beams. Pete Quintana picked up a cordless screwdriver and stepped through the blockhouse’s steel door, out into the shed.

“Where are you going, Quintana?” Levy demanded, frowning.

Harry thought maybe Pete went outside because it was cooler there—at least a little breeze was blowing, unlike in here with this crappy air-conditioning.

But Pete answered softly, his voice muffled by the thick glass of the safety window, “Tightening up the mount. Keep the vibration level down.”

“You shouldn’t be out there when we’re counting down,” Levy yelled.

“I’ll be back inside in a minute. Start the countdown, it’s okay.”

Levy frowned but turned to Harry and said darkly, “Start the countdown.”

Harry glanced at General Scheib, then shrugged. Turning to Delany, he said, “Start the sequence timer, Monk.”

The target sat half a mile out on the desert: the sawed-off end of a cargo plane, its fat round fuselage and big tailfin sticking up into the cloudless blue sky. There were several pinpoint holes in the plane’s aluminum skin, blackened from the heat of the laser’s beam.

General Scheib came up beside Harry and looked out at the laser assembly. “We can’t have fussbudgets tinkering when we’re flying that dingus. It’s got to work without last-second adjustments.”

“It will,” Harry said tightly.

“Of course it will,” Levy added. But the slight lift of his brow told Harry he was not happy.

Harry picked up the intercom microphone. “Hey, Pete, you’d better cut it short and get in here.”

Still with his back to the safety window, Quintana hollered, “Yeah, yeah. I’m coming.”

“Now,” Harry said. “We want to start her up.”

“So start her. I just want to check the vibration absorber on the optics platform. I’ll be inside before you get her warmed up.”

Harry looked at Levy, who frowned but said resignedly, “Get on with it.”

Scheib shook his head slightly and thought, These civilians like to play with the equipment.

Engineers—they fall in love with the hardware. But they’ve got to make this beast foolproof, so that tech sergeants can run it without a half dozen geeks tinkering with it all the time.

He heard the whine of the electrical power generator starting up as he peered through the window. Quintana straightened up and planted his hands on his hips, as if admiring the equipment he had helped to build. The COIL looked to Scheib more like a miniature junkyard than a flight-weight laser system. Scheib knew the numbers and understood that these engineers had sized the laser to fit inside the capacious frame of a modified Boeing 747. Barely. But in the eyes of the newly minted general those pressure vessels and pumps and all that piping certainly didn’t look like something that could ever get off the ground.

“Congratulations on the star.”

Startled, Scheib turned to see Hartunian, one of the engineers, standing beside him.

Scheib was tall and trim, his body honed by a daily regimen of exercise and tennis. His face was lean, too, and handsome: sandy brown hair that was just starting to show some gray at the temples, light brown eyes that crinkled when he smiled. Women found him attractive, even out of uniform, something that his stylish, upscale wife didn’t seem to mind in the least. Harry was roundish, almost pudgy, his wispy dark hair terminally unruly. But Scheib thought that Harry was sharper mentally than anyone on the laser team. He was just too self-effacing to push his advantage. Except on the tennis court. Harry beat the general at tennis whenever they played together. Brains over brawn, Scheib thought, although he would never admit it aloud.

“It’s about time the Air Force gave you some recognition,” Harry went on, his voice low enough that the rest of the people in the blockhouse couldn’t hear him.

Almost flustered, Scheib replied, “Thank you, Harry. I didn’t know you cared.”

Harry grinned at him. “If they passed you up and you got reassigned, we’d have to break in a new blue-suiter.”

Scheib nodded, thinking, It always comes down to what’s best for numero uno. Well, I’ve got my star. Now if these clowns can make this contraption work I might even get a second star, eventually.

“Input power ready,” called one of the technicians.

Harry turned away from the general and gave Levy a questioning look. “We’re ready to power up.”

“By all means,” Levy said.

“Pete, get the hell in here,” Delany thundered.

“On my way,” Quintana yelled back.

“Initiate power sequence,” Harry said, plucking his sticky shirt away from his chest.

“Initiating power sequence.”

“Iodine pressure on the button,” one of the technicians called out.

“Electrical power ramping up,” another technician said.

“Optical bench ready.”

“Atmospheric instability nominal.”

“Adaptive optics on.”

“Iodine flow in ten seconds.”

“Oxygen flow in eight seconds.”

“Pressurizing iodine.”

“Pressurizing oxy.”

Pete Quintana opened the door to the blockhouse.

Harry thought that Pete was cutting it awfully close. If anything goes wrong with—

The laser blew up in a spectacular blast that ripped the roof off the test shed. The explosion knocked everyone down; Harry smashed against the back wall of the control room, shattering his ribs against the gauges mounted on the concrete. A jagged piece of metal crashed through the safety window, shattering it into thousands of pellets as a hellish fireball billowed up into the cloudless blue sky. Pain roared through Harry while the heat from the oxygen-fed fire poured through, hot enough to melt the gauges on the back wall.

In the partially open doorway Pete Quintana was enveloped in the flames, screaming, gibbering, flailing in agony. Harry tried to reach out to him, but his own pain was so intense that he blacked out.

Groggily, General Scheib got to all fours, glass pellets crunching beneath his hands and feet. A twisted piece of pipe had embedded itself into the back wall of the blockhouse like a red-hot arrow.

Christ, Scheib thought, if the blast hadn’t flattened me that thing would’ve torn my head off.

Levy and the engineers were all on the floor, knocked flat by the blast. They seemed dazed, in shock, faces and hands burned raw by the heat of the explosion. Hartunian looked unconscious. Scheib got to his feet slowly. The guy who’d been outside lay on the floor of the shed next to the burning, twisted shambles of the laser, a huddled lump of blackened flesh.

Slowly the others got up, coughing, dazed. Somewhere a fire siren was wailing, coming closer. Two of the engineers were helping the woman to her feet. Her face was burned; a trickle of blood ran down her cheek from her scalp. Levy pushed himself up to a sitting position, his shirt and trousers covered with grit. He looked angry, resentful, as if his beautiful machine had somehow betrayed him.

“It shouldn’t have done that,” Levy muttered through chipped teeth.

Yeah, right, Scheib thought.

Through the shattered window Scheib saw what was left of the COIL: twisted, blackened wreckage, wisps of dirty reddish smoke wafting into the sky. And the body of Pete Quintana, burned red and raw.

Hartunian moaned and opened his eyes. “What the hell happened?” he croaked.