Лю Цысинь - Ball Lightning

“Now we can be certain that, so long as we use charged macro-electrons, the problem is unsolvable,” Lin Yun said.

“That’s my opinion, too,” Ding Yi said. “Recently I’ve been trying to use the motion state of macro-electrons to locate the nucleus of the atom they belong to, but the theory is extremely knotty, and there are certain obstacles that are practically impossible to overcome. It’s a long road, and I fear that humanity won’t make any breakthroughs this century.”

I looked up at the stars, thinned out now due to the full moon, and tried to imagine what an atom five hundred to a thousand kilometers in diameter would be like.

Ding Yi went on, “But on second thought, if we can find a macro-nucleus, that would mean we can obtain chargeless macro-neutrons, which would be able to penetrate EM barriers.”

“Macro-neutrons can’t be excited like macro-electrons, and don’t have energy release. How would they be weaponized?” Lin Yun asked the question I was about to.

Ding Yi was about to answer, but then Lin Yun put a finger to her lips. “Shh—listen!”

We were walking next to the ball lightning excitation lab. Before the advent of spectral recognition, it was here that large numbers of animal tests were performed with select weapons-grade macro-electrons, turning hundreds of test animals to ash. It was the same building that Lin Yun had taken me to on my first visit to the base to demonstrate the lightning weapon. Under the moonlight it looked like an enormous shadow, without definition. Lin Yun motioned for us to stop, and when our footsteps ceased, I heard a sound coming from the lab.

It was the bleat of a goat.

There were no goats in the lab. Animal tests had stopped two months ago, and during that time, the lab had been sealed.

I heard the sound again, unmistakably a goat’s bleat: faint, and a little bleak. Oddly, the sound reminded me of ball lightning explosions, since the two shared the same quality: even though a listener could determine the direction of the sound’s source, it nevertheless seemed to fill all space, and sometimes seemed to be coming from inside your body.

Lin Yun headed toward the lab entrance, Ding Yi following close behind, but my feet were like lead and I stood rooted in place. It was the same old sensation, a whole body chill, as if I were in the grip of an icy hand. I knew they wouldn’t find any goat.

Lin Yun pushed open the lab door, and the heavy iron rumbled loudly as it rolled back on its track, drowning out the faint bleats. When the door sound had subsided, the goat’s bleats were gone as well. Lin Yun turned on the light, and through the doorway, I could see part of the building’s vast interior. A square pen formed from two-meter-high iron fencing had once held the targets for excitation experiments. Several hundred test animals had been incinerated by ball lightning there. Now, the space was completely empty. Lin Yun looked inside the huge lab for a while, but as I had predicted, she found nothing. Ding Yi stood at the entrance, the light casting a long, thin shadow behind him on the ground.

“I clearly heard a goat!” Lin Yun called, her voice echoing in the cavernous interior.

Ding Yi didn’t respond, but turned and walked toward me. When he reached me, he said softly, “Have you come across anything in all these years?”

“What do you mean?” I said, striving to keep my voice from trembling.

“Some… things it would be impossible for you to encounter.”

“I don’t understand.” I forced a laugh, which must have sounded ridiculous.

“Forget it.” Ding Yi clapped me on the shoulder. He had never done that before. The action gave me a smidgen of comfort. “In the natural world, the unusual is just another manifestation of the normal.” As I was considering this, he shouted toward Lin Yun in the lab, “Stop looking and come out!”

Lin Yun turned off the light before she came out, and just as the door was closing, I saw a shaft of moonlight from a high window light up the now-dark lab, casting a trapezoid of light on the floor, right in the center of the pen of death. The building felt cold and sinister, like a long-forgotten tomb.

Actual use of ball lightning weapons took place much earlier than we anticipated.

It was around midday that Dawnlight received an emergency order for immediate departure, fully equipped for combat. The order added that this was not a drill. One platoon carrying two thunderball guns left by helicopter, and Colonel Xu, Lin Yun, and I went along. After a short flight of not much more than ten minutes, we landed. It wouldn’t have taken much longer to go by car on a convenient highway, so this was clearly an emergency situation.

We disembarked and realized immediately where we were. In front of us was a white complex gleaming in the sun, one that had appeared countless times on television. An enormous columnar structure stood conspicuously in the center of the complex. This was a large-scale nuclear reactor, newly built as the largest nuclear power plant in the world.

From our vantage point, the plant appeared exceedingly calm and devoid of people. But our surroundings were bustling. Groups of heavily equipped People’s Armed Police leaped out of the military vehicles that had just pulled up. Three officers next to a military jeep peered in the direction of the plant through binoculars for quite a long while. Beside a police car a group of police officers were putting on bulletproof vests, their submachine guns lying in disarray on the ground. I followed Lin Yun’s gaze to several snipers on a roof behind us, rifles trained on the reactor.

The helicopters had landed in the yard of the plant’s guesthouse. Without saying a word, a PAP colonel led us to a conference room inside that evidently served as the temporary command center. Several PAP commanders and police officers were clustered round a black-suited official looking at a large paper chart that appeared to be an internal blueprint of the plant. Our officer guide informed us that the official was the operational commander. I recognized him from his frequent television appearances. That such a high-ranking official was here indicated the gravity of the situation.

“What are regular troops doing here? Things are getting overcomplicated!” a police officer said.

“Oh, I asked GSD to bring them in. They’ve got new equipment that might be useful,” the operational commander said. This was the first time he had raised his head since we came in. I noticed in his expression none of the tension and anxiety of the military and police officers around him, but rather the faint fatigue of routine that, in this situation, was an expression of inner strength. “Which of you is in charge? Ah, hello, Colonel,” he said to Xu Wencheng. “I have two questions. First, can your equipment destroy a live target without damaging any of the facilities inside the structure?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Second… hmm, why don’t you take a look at the site conditions first and then I’ll ask you. Let’s continue,” he said, and he and the group around him turned their attention back to the large chart.

The colonel who had led us in motioned for us to follow him, and we went from the conference room to the door of an adjacent room. It was ajar, and a large number of temporary cables were running through it. The colonel gestured for us to remain in place.

“There’s little time, so I’ll give you only a brief rundown of the situation. At nine o’clock this morning, eight armed terrorists took over the power plant’s nuclear reactor. They entered by hijacking a bus taking elementary school students on a plant tour, and in the course of occupying the reactor, they killed six plant security guards. Now they have thirty-five hostages: twenty-seven students and teachers from the bus, and eight plant engineers and operating personnel.”