The scene occurred so quickly at the time that it took place in my head as a single blur. Watching from the helicopter, I had only paid attention to the conflagration itself. Now, on the screen, I saw the spheres. In the moment of the explosion, they seemed to dim.
Sweetwater pointed to one of the spheres with his pen.
“It’s getting darker,” General Glade said. “The bomb made it weaker.”
“That was what we assumed, too,” Sweetwater said. The feed resumed. As wind pushed and tore the forest, and the flash fire turned trees to ash, the spheres went dark. Then came the smoke, and the spheres vanished entirely. By the time that the smoke cleared, the spheres were as bright as before but considerably smaller. I had not noticed it at the time because I had been so focused on the explosion and its apparent failure. Now, in the recording, I saw that the spheres could not have even been a full yard in diameter. And there was something else, too—shit gas. A layer of shit gas covered the ground. Now, viewing everything magnified and in slow motion, I saw that the shit gas formed a layer under the smoke.
“The nuclear explosion had a much greater effect than we initially thought. After careful analysis, Dr. Breeze discovered that the spheres had not become darker, they had become coated with tachyons. The bomb both heated or irradiated the gas in the spheres, charging it so that it temporarily attracted tachyons.”
“Do you know if it was the heat or the radiation?” asked General Hill.
“No, we don’t know,” admitted Sweetwater. “But we will only need to run a few quick tests to find out. Once we know, we should be able to adjust the next explosion to maximize its impact.”
“But how does this help us?” asked Newcastle.
“When the Avatari emerge from their spheres, they attract tachyons and bond them together the same way this bomb attracted the tachyons to the sphere. The Avatari bodies are composed of supercharged gas, which attracts tachyons like a magnet.
“If we supercharge a larger source of the gas—”
“Like the gas in the mines,” interrupted General Hill.
“That radio message we picked up from the Thermopolis was received twenty seconds after Raymond and the lieutenant ran the nuclear test. By charging the spheres, they were able to poke a hole in the ion curtain,” Sweetwater said.
“So you are saying that if we charge the gas in the mines, we can get out of here?” asked General Haight. The mood in the room had changed, suddenly the generals sounded excited as they chattered back and forth.
“No,” said Sweetwater, and the room became quiet.
“First of all, gentlemen, understand that we are discussing an extreme amount of energy. If we could tap the energy it takes to create one Avatari soldier, we might have enough power to run a small city for a year,” Sweetwater said. “Assuming we can generate enough energy and we can take that energy to a large enough source of the gas, we might be able to attract the tachyons before they attach themselves to the Avatari. That was what Breeze believed, and it appears he was right all along.”
“How does that help us?” Newcastle asked.
“Because without the tachyons to create bodies and weapons, the Avatari aren’t much of a threat,” General Glade spoke slowly, a man figuring out the answer to a riddle.
“If it works, the next time the Avatari emerge, they will remain in their pure energy form,” Sweetwater said, “as will their weapons. Without tachyons forming a protective shell around their core, they should dissipate into the atmosphere in a matter of minutes.”
“In simple terms?” Newcastle asked.
“It’s as simple as this …The Avatari as we see them are an energy impulse made solid by a layer of tachyons. If Arthur was right, we can block the tachyons from attaching themselves to the Avatari by attracting them to a larger source of supercharged gas—the caves. The key is creating enough energy to attract tachyons.”
“So we need to break into the alien mines and detonate a device like the one you used on the spheres?” asked General Newcastle.
“No, sir, we are going to need something a great deal bigger than that little half-kiloton bomb we sent Raymond and the Lieutenant to explode. According to our calculations, we’re going to need at minimum a twenty-five-megaton explosion in their caves. We assume you have a device that size.”
Several of the generals groaned. Newcastle remained silent as the other generals complained among themselves. When the groaning stopped, he said, “That, Doctor, is going to be a problem. The Avatari just demolished our armory. We had nuclear weapons, but they’re all buried now.”
“Well, that does present a problem,” said Sweetwater. He turned to me, and said, “Raymond will be back in a half hour. Do you think the two of you could dig out one of those bombs?”
“What’s the point?” General Haight asked. “If we stop the aliens from coming back, we’re still going to fry.” This earned Haight a few appreciative nods.
Huhhhhh. Huhhh. “You know what, General Haight, given a choice, I think I would rather die in battle than get fried by an overheated sun,” General Glade said.
“Hear, hear,” said Newcastle. General Hill patted Glade on the back.
“The sun? The supernova? Gentlemen, I should have been more explicit from the start. We have learned a great deal about how the Avatari create a supernova by studying the reaction they caused in the Templar System. If the Avatari were to begin working on Nigellus, it would be at least twenty thousand years before it began to supernova and another ten thousand years before it incinerated this planet.”
“Excuse me?” General Glade asked.
“Twenty thousand years,” Sweetwater repeated.
“Twenty thousand years?” Newcastle asked. “You made it sound like it would happen immediately.”
Sweetwater stifled a laugh. “I believe it was Dr. Breeze who discussed it with you. This is more his area of expertise.”
“What are you saying about twenty thousand years?” General Hill asked.
“I understood what Arthur meant. It never occurred to me that …well, the destruction of the sun in the Templar System took place over a fifty thousand-year period. We’ve documented the entire cycle by observing it from different locations across the galaxy.
“From the far end of the galaxy, one hundred thousand light-years from Templar, the solar system is unchanged. From approximately eighty thousand light-years away, we can detect slight variations in the size of the sun.”
“So much for the goose getting cooked,” Glade said.
“For the immediate future, I suppose you are correct, but they are still saturating the planet with a highly toxic gas. The atmosphere is already permeated. If they continue pouring gas into this planet, we will die.”
Freeman liberated a jeep when he got back to Valhalla, and we drove through the graveyard that had once been the capital city of New Copenhagen.
“You missed all the action,” I said, as we pulled away from campus. Had he known, Freeman might have pointed out that I had spent most of the battle stretched out on a cot. Freeman being Freeman, however, said nothing.
“I heard that Dr. Breeze is missing,” I said, still trying to drum up a conversation. We were driving on surprisingly safe roads—the Corps of Engineers had sent teams out to clear a path between the university campus and the hotel.
“I found him,” Freeman said.
I smiled. “Maybe that’s a good omen.”
“He’s dead,” Freeman said.
“Oh,” I said.
We drove the next two miles without a word. I took in the sights—dunes where skyscrapers and office buildings once stood; parks and alleys filled with bodies; dogs brazenly gnawing at the bodies of the servicemen who used to hunt them.