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Chapter 1321: High-energy Experiment (Part 2)

Fifteen kilometres away.

The steel-framed tower stood alone in the middle of the white plain, conspicuously out of time — its girders dense and rigidly organized, icicles hanging from the beams and cables like teeth, layers of barbed wire coiled around its base with the painstaking neatness of a craftsman’s work. It did not belong here. It looked as if it had been dropped from some other century into this one and had not yet decided whether to stay.

Hundreds of workers moved around its base, making the final preparations before the explosion.

The entire apparatus weighed nearly ten tonnes, and because Hummingbird had been deployed to the front lines, there was no way to assemble it in Neverwinter — each part had been hauled to the test site separately and put together on-site. Fortunately, the design had anticipated this. Its structure was simple, and the requirements for the assembly crew were not demanding.

This was one of the ways “Glory of the Sun” differed from every other weapon: even now, with the site prepared and the equipment in place, another day or two of final work remained before they could proceed.

At this moment Roland and Anna stood at the top of the tower, calling down instructions for the assembly below.

“Next is the No. 3 core component — watch the direction of the connector, do not bump it!”

“Everyone follow my command! Three — two — one!”

At the construction captain’s call, a long silver-white cylinder was pushed slowly into the apparatus.

Only after this step was completed did Roland allow himself to breathe.

Inside the cylinder was the test explosion’s primary energy source: two separate Uranium-235 cylinders, each weighing twenty kilograms — forty kilograms combined. They had to remain below fifty-three kilograms, the critical mass. In theory, no extreme fission reaction would occur — but the result would resemble what he had described before. Critical mass was not a fixed number. Shape, temperature, and pressure all shifted the threshold, which was why a nuclear weapon assembled by simply stacking material together had essentially no military value. A spherical fifty-two-kilogram mass of Uranium-235 might appear stable; in reality it was a volcano trembling on the lip of its own caldera. Even a small jolt could push it over.

Equally, several small separated pieces were safe enough, but that arrangement multiplied the difficulty of triggering the reaction enormously. The pieces would briefly exceed critical mass the instant they merged — but the immense heat produced by the fission would cause the Uranium to expand immediately, reducing its own density, and the violence of the explosion would scatter the material outward, terminating the reaction before it could sustain itself.

The goal, then, was a configuration that not only brought the Uranium to supercriticality but held it there long enough to release the full power of the reaction. The gun configuration borrowed its principle from an old-fashioned cannon: an explosive charge drove a Uranium projectile violently into a stationary Uranium target. Under that immense pressure, density spiked. Even a mass fractionally below the threshold could achieve supercriticality in the instant of impact.

When the outer shell was closed, Anna personally inserted a canister bearing a radioactive warning label into the designated tail port. It was the last essential component.

There was a moment — brief, irrational — when Roland felt something prick the skin of his face. He forgot to breathe.

Polonium-Beryllium neutron source.

As the name described: a dense supply of free neutrons for the fission reaction, the most direct means of lowering the critical mass. Inside the metal canister — it resembled an oversized ring-pop tin — was a row of hollow spheres, each roughly the size of a table tennis ball. At the core of every sphere sat a marble-sized polonium ball wrapped firmly in gold foil and surrounded by a lattice of honeycombed beryllium sheets.

When the Uranium pieces collided, they would also crush the small canister at the bottom of the barrel. The detonation gases would compress every hollow sphere to paper-thinness. The gold foil would rupture; the beryllium sheets would press against the polonium balls and absorb their alpha particles, releasing many times more neutrons in return.

Those neutrons would seed the Uranium-235 fission reaction, and if conditions held, the system would consume more material before the reaction ended — dramatically increasing the weapon’s yield.

Because Polonium-210 had a half-life of only one hundred and thirty-eight days, a replaceable port had been a mandatory feature of the design. Leaving an active neutron source inside a weapon for too long was also dangerous in its own right; polonium shed neutrons on mere contact. A single crack in the gold foil would make the consequences unthinkable.

With the neutron source loaded, the apparatus crossed a threshold. It was no longer a machine. It was something that could devour everyone present, at any moment, without warning.

Roland knew perfectly well that what he felt was only imagination — the human body could not sense the change in neutron density within a room. Even so, his lungs relaxed, slowly, against his will.

All pre-detonation preparation for the experimental device was now complete.

Anna took his hand firmly.

“You can pass the command now.”

Under her steady gaze, Roland gave a single small nod.

Whatever the result — the “Glory of the Sun” plan had come this far. And having come this far, humankind had already advanced to the edge of a new frontier.

He turned to his personal guard. “Pass my command: notify the command post that the six-hour countdown to ignition begins now.”

[6:00]

“Wu — wu — wu — wu —”

“Unit One has entered the firing stage. I repeat, Unit One has entered the firing stage. All personnel at the site — pack your belongings and evacuate as practiced in the drill. This is not a drill. The test explosion site will close in one hour. All personnel must reach the safe region within one hour.”

Evacuation announcements and sirens cascaded through the site. Voices barked across the open snow:

“Hurry — everyone gather in the open area in front of the tower! Leave no one behind!”

“Construction Team Two, sound off! One — two — three —”

“Locking the main gate of the test explosion site!”

“All members of the God’s Punishment Witch team present — beginning group evacuation.”

The silent snow plain turned loud and urgent with overlapping voices and repeating alarms. The atmosphere that had settled there, cold and empty, was gone. Everybody present understood what was about to happen. No one had seen anything like this before.

[3:00]

Inside the command post, Roland and Anna produced their two keys together and opened the lid of the console.

They depressed every switch in sequence. Green lights lit across the board.

“Sending power from the main cable!”

“Mystery Moon No. 1 operating normally — load rising stably.”

“Switching to Line One.”

“Understood. Line One connected — current flow to device is normal.”

Observers called out the status of the detonation system in rapid succession until the last green light came on, confirming that current had passed through several booster cycles to the platform fifteen kilometres away.

[1:00]

An alarm sounded over the command post itself. One hour to detonation.

All doors and windows of the bunker were sealed. Candles were snuffed one by one to prevent accidents from the shock wave. The senior officers of Neverwinter moved to their designated observatories — trapezoidal in cross-section, Roland had specified, to deflect the shock, with the interiors deepened to accommodate the bulk of the original carriers. Pasha and the other Taquila witches had already been waiting there for some time.

[0:15]

The sky had dimmed.

The final urgent warnings arrived.

From senior officers to ordinary soldiers to construction workers, everyone followed their earlier training and pulled on dark-tinted sunglasses — though many were quietly baffled by the instruction to obstruct their vision on an overcast, snow-heavy afternoon. They obeyed regardless.

The world went dark.

[0:05]

“Five-minute countdown.”

At the announcement, everything fell quiet. Conversation ceased. Every person fixed their gaze on the murky blackness before them and held, without deciding to, very still.

“Three-minute countdown.”

Roland’s palms were damp. Anna glanced across at him, smiling faintly, and closed her fingers around his.

“One-minute countdown.”

Another hand reached from his other side. Fingers interlaced with his.

“Ten-second countdown.”

“Nine!”

He could not press the button himself — a small regret, duly noted and set aside. The long road of history, he knew, was only just beginning.

“Three!”

“Two!”

“One!”

“Detonate!”

The snow plain in the distance held its silence. Nothing happened. Time felt as though it had simply stopped — a long stillness that was also, impossibly, only an instant.

Then a streak of blue light tore open the horizon and ripped the darkness apart.

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