Лю Цысинь - Ball Lightning

“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.

“Was Jiang Xingchen captaining Zhufeng ?”

“Yes. Did you know him?”

I didn’t speak. I was thinking more of Lin Yun now.

“We asked you here firstly because you are the most successful tornado researcher in the country, and secondly because the attack on Zhufeng was carried out by a meteorological weapon system code-named Aeolus. Our intelligence indicates it is related to your research results.”

I nodded heavily. “That’s true. I’m willing to accept responsibility.”

“No, you’ve misunderstood. We didn’t ask you here to assign blame. And you don’t have any responsibility. The Lightning Institute’s publication and transfer of the project’s results passed through multiple levels of review by the relevant departments and was entirely legal. Of course someone must be held responsible, but it isn’t you. We’re not as sensitive about the use of advanced technology as the enemy.”

I said, “The weapon can be defended against. All you need to do is link up the fleet’s missile defense system with our atmospheric optical detection system. I’ve seen how a missile shooting an oil firebomb can wipe out a tornado, but there’s an even faster and more effective method: use high-energy microwaves or lasers to heat up the descending cold air mass.”

“Yes, we’re putting all our energies into developing that kind of defensive system. And we’d like your full assistance.” The senior colonel sighed gently. “But, honestly speaking, it will probably have to wait until the next war to be used.”

“Why is that?”

“The loss of the Zhufeng carrier battle group was a huge blow to our sea power. For the rest of this war, we no longer have the ability to engage the enemy in a large-scale sea battle. We have to rely on shore-based firepower for coastal defense.”

After I left the Naval Warfare Center, shrill anti-aircraft sirens sounded in the air above the city. The streets were empty, and I walked through the emptiness with no particular destination in mind. A civil defense warden ran at me shouting something, but I pretended not to hear him. The wardens came over to grab me, but I shook them off unfeelingly and continued to sleepwalk along, and they left me on my own like the lunatic they imagined I was.

Now all of my hopes were dashed, and I ached for a bomb to bring my tormented life to an end. But the explosions remained distant. Nearby, the silence only grew.

After I’d walked for I don’t know how long, the sirens seemed to have stopped, and people gradually returned to the streets. In total exhaustion I sat down on the steps of a city garden, and realized that my empty brain was now occupied by a feeling, the feeling of understanding someone at last.

I understood Lin Yun.

I took out my mobile and dialed the number of the base, but no one answered. So I got up and looked for a cab. They were rare in wartime, and it took half an hour before I found one, then we drove off to the base at once.

It was around three hours later that we arrived at the base, only to discover that I had wasted my time. It was completely empty, personnel and equipment removed. I stood on my own for a long while in the center of the excitation lab, a shaft of weak light from the setting sun piercing the broken window to illuminate me, gradually fading until night descended. Only then did I leave.

After returning to the city, I made inquiries into the fate of the ball lightning project team and Dawnlight, but no one could tell me anything. They seemed to have evaporated from the world. I even dialed the number that General Lin had left, but there was no answer there, either.

There was nothing I could do but go back to the Lightning Institute and start researching the use of high-powered microwaves to dispel tornadoes.