Mark de Silva - Square Wave

Menar stooped and lifted a seeder up to his chest. It was the height, if not quite the weight, of a dwarf. He cradled it in his arms. The head of the missile, the end of the rocket stage, was ringed by six smaller missiles, copper darts, each about a foot long. The two technicians moved to help him but he nodded them off. He set the rocket roughly on the central steel table in the lab. It clanked and rolled several degrees, planting on a fin. Michael trotted to the back wall and switched on the lights above the table, which were startlingly bright. They turned the silver rocket a watery white.

“It doesn’t take much of a payload to activate clouds, or to dissolve them either,” Menar said, tapping one of the darts. “It used to be thought you needed to dump huge quantities to get anything going. That was actually a mistake. Too much agent retards the reaction. You just need to get the formula right. That, and the mechanism of distribution. My father sent you the specs.”

“Some, yes,” Michael said. “A one-pound charge in each?”

“That’s right. The tiniest warhead. You can launch them from the shoulder too, if need be, when a platform isn’t practical. Easier with two men, but a strong one can do it alone. On-board altimeters activate the charges, and rather than explode, they make the powder, treated antimony, smolder and stream smoke.” He looked at his brother. “So, you’ve got these set to discharge at what, seven thousand feet? Eight thousand?”

“I was going to send them up to six, to eight, and to ten,” Ravan said, “one at each elevation, and then draw them right across.”

“That sounds right,” Menar said. He pointed to the rack of missiles and looked at Michael: “These are based on the latest Starstreak, you know. The Mark III. Can you see the resemblance? I don’t know exactly how much bleed-through there is from military technology to your atmospheric R & D. I’m assuming rather a lot,” he said with a gesture of outspread fingers and tightly closed eyes. “Just like us.” He shook his head with vigor and a smile. “You and the Brits appear to share the Starstreak now. Thales builds them, in Belfast, but Lockheed’s helped tweak it for your army. Actually,” Menar said after a pause, “I have seen quite a lot of them deployed in Kashmir, and in Pakistan, launched by the allies, principally the two of you. More versatile than the old Stinger. Good for striking lightly armored vehicles, low-lying helicopters. Defeats jamming. No infrared needed. And with the darts, the odds of making contact expand.” He caressed one of the darts. “They were certainly effective there, we can all agree, I think.”

Michael looked to one side of Menar and nodded slowly without saying anything. He sucked in his lower lip, drawing the blond whiskers of his mustache down past it.

“And now they’ve proved more versatile still,” Menar said.

Michael smiled and fixed Menar’s eyes. “They have, yes,” he said.

“One more use for them, and again, it’s all in the darts. Did you know any of this?” Menar asked.

“Not exactly, not really,” Michael said. “But what your father has managed to do here is very interesting.” The two techs stirred and nodded along.

“He’s a gift. And it’s much more than interesting.” Menar paused again, a habit of his. “The formulation is mostly his work. Delivery, how to aerate the substance, that was up to me. That’s why I talk of the rockets.”

“Well that’s not really true,” Ravan said. “You’ve done plenty with the formula. And it’s nothing without distribution. It’s really all one thing, not many.”

“Is it?” Menar said. Again there was the suggestion of a smile on his face, invisible to all but his blood, Ravan. “You know, I think it would be possible to do both today.”

“Both?” Michael cocked his head slightly.

“Seeding and dispersal. The same storm, the same patch of it even. We’ve done it in parallel before, at a distance of some miles. We precipitated a cloudbank in one place and vanished it in another. But why not try the very same cloud. Let’s seed this one now. After we have it going, we’ll switch it off, scatter it. We can try, anyway. It’s not foolproof. None of it is, actually. There are definitely still unknown variables in play. But we’ve reduced their number more than anyone. More than the Chinese. More than you too, otherwise I wouldn’t be here. We are far beyond chance now.” He looked at the techs. “Shall we get these outside, then, before the water falls?”

Michael looked slightly confused.

“Before it comes down on its own,” Ravan said, pointing through the opaque roof to the heavily clouded skies beyond.

“Ah,” Michael said.

The technicians each picked up a seeder and headed outside, ducking under the back doors before they had fully risen. Michael and Ravan helped move them while Menar took out a laptop from one of the duffels and logged onto the network. “Oh, good work,” he said as Ravan left with a missile in his arms. It drew a smile from his brother.

The two launch platforms were side by side, just behind the station. They looked like squat traffic lights, but without the lights. There were only holes where they should have been. The wide poles, painted in a textured, heat-resistant green, were moored deep in the dirt, far below the mud tiles, with support struts fanning out from the base along the flats. Thick rectangular panels with three holes, each a foot deep and stacked vertically, hung off one side of the poles. The panels could be remotely flattened out to any degree, and the poles themselves could be rotated.

Low-lying stratus clouds, vertically developed, hung overhead. A tiered deployment of makers, as Ravan had suggested, would be ideal. “So, rotate them out ten degrees each,” Menar said. “That should get us enough of a gap between them.”

Michael and the technicians stood between the launchers while Ravan dialed in the platform angles from his terminal. They whirred in opposite directions, turning the warheads away from both each other and the three men standing between them.

“Better to get some distance for launch, I think,” Michael said, withdrawing into the station, the techs in tow. He positioned himself over Menar’s shoulder, near the edge of the lab table, which Menar was using as a seat. The deployment code he’d been tweaking on the flight over from New Delhi, the algorithms that charted the missiles’ course, the darts’ sub-course, and the moment of payload ignition, flashed across the screen of his laptop. Ravan thought of their father, Menar Sr., as he watched his brother make final adjustments in front of the matrix of data. The other three lab men, just as in Ravan’s childhood, stood quietly awed by the maestro.

Menar scanned the last of the figures. One final look out at the platforms and then a glance at Ravan: “So, here we go.” Everyone but Menar moved to the edge of the station’s open doors.

The tail of the first seeder went a deep, dark red. Suddenly it was orange and shimmering the air as the rocket took flight with a rowdy hiss that quieted as it ascended. They watched the narrow contrail form, lither than any airplane’s, tethering the rocket to the launcher like a harpoon.

On entry its rumble was muffled by the cloud. At just that moment, with another keystroke, Menar deployed the second rocket. It went up just like the first except for the debris that fell from it: a ring of metal, red with heat. “Was that from the platform?” Menar asked.

The second contrail took shape just below the first, which had, owing to the mix of fuel and heavy atmospheric conditions, congealed in place. The final seeder, which was meant to prepare the lower third of the cloud, fired off cleanly and revived the fading hiss of the second rocket just before it too died in the clouds. Menar had adjusted the platform panel so its path fell between the other two, but lower, creating a configuration of contrails that looked, when viewed from the monitor, which drew its signal from cameras stationed beneath the platform, like a V in three dimensions, thousands of feet deep along the z-axis.