The Dawn Comes Up Like Thunder - Part 2

Part 1

Bigfoot made an impressive sight. He had gained an extra man’s height standing atop his chariot, and he was even taller than the two cavaliers who met Katherine to begin with. Blond hair rippled from his scalp down his back and his beard seemed to overflow his chin. His torso and forearms bulged with the implied strength of biceps and deltoids. He held a sword in his left hand. What in God’s name for? Katherine thought.

The balloonist observed Katherine’s approach and marked the time that she came face to face with Bigfoot. In the camp the observers donned eye patches. If the device was activated early, it was better to only lose one eye to the terrible light.

Something seemed to move in the mind behind the piercing blue eyes. Bigfoot sheathed his sword and crouched on his chariot. He extended an arm. A gesture of friendship? Katherine considered that for a moment and kept her hands on her horse’s reins. Bigfoot’s face took on an expression somewhere between annoyance and envy. He spoke quietly. Katherine waited for the translation.

“It is rude of you to not shake your conqueror’s hand,” the translation came above the static. Bigfoot’s eyes widened and darted to the speaker. His hand returned to the hilt of the sword.

Katherine’s face remained unchanged. “It is very rude of you to invade my country.” Bigfoot startled again as words he understood poured out of the box. He had heard the stories of witchcraft and sorcery from the Trident Republic but paid them little credence. Many of his advisors urged him to pay closer attention to the signs of the stars and the divination of entrails, but Bigfoot had found that superstition gained little over simple preparation. The strategy had worked well for his campaign so far. From his native shore he had conquered America as far as the continent could take him to the south and east. Perhaps, he began to wonder, the rules were different in the west.

She nodded to him, encouraging a reply. “I am told you are a messenger. What does your king have to say?” Bigfoot asked.

“We ask for very little. You have invaded our country. You have taken from our fields and burned our houses. Our peaceful men and women and children have suffered. But we make no demand of reparations. We wish to live in peace together. Your tribes are an admirable people. You have fought well. We would like to trade with you. There is much, perhaps we can learn from each other. But you must leave that which is ours. Withdraw from our land, east of the Grand Ronde. There my commander, the man Ellis my people chose to lead us, will confer with you on the relations of our peoples. You may all go with good will, but you must leave now.”

For a moment Bigfoot didn’t know what to make of this. He smirked, he chuckled a bit, then he scowled. “Your people are soft. You cannot be victorious against my tribes. At my command 40,000 men will fight and die. With them I have conquered the prairie. I found the mountains in the east. The peoples there I devastated. I laid waste to them in the forest, in the pits, in the valleys. I conquered to the south. Down the mightiest of rivers my men and I took and conquered. The peoples of the south I devastated. We burned the swamp and the women lamented the slaughter of their husbands.” He paused now for effect. “Do you believe your magic makes you special, you people of the west? Your blood will flow as neatly, and you will die as swiftly.”

Katherine was well-versed in the history of physics package diplomacy, as were all Ohio Guardsmen. For a moment she envied Kennedy and Khrushchev. They had no need to convince each other of the sincerity of their threats.

“Your armies are mighty, indeed. I mean no disrespect to you, sir. But you do not understand what it is you now face.” She gestured to the battery and the device, tucked neatly just aft of her saddle. “On behalf of my army I possess a weapon mightier than anything you can imagine. In this weapon, the forces that slay the great civilization that once lived here still slumber. I do not wish to unleash this force. But, if needed, I will die with your 40,000 today to protect my kingdom.”

Bigfoot considered that. He remained unimpressed. “Your machines may dazzle many common men, but your impression of me is mistaken. Your superstition has no place here. Machines that talk, that fly even,” he pointed toward the balloons just visible at the ends of their tethers above the ridge to the west, “will crumble against my chariots, my cavalry, and my infantry.”

The gears seemed to be turning behind the eyes. Bigfoot continued. “You perhaps are mistaken in your understanding of my conquest. The peoples of the east and the south I devastated, but it did not have to be so. I offered a partnership. They might have paid tax and tribute and reaped the bounty of my victories in foreign lands. But they did not accept. They preferred to die. To your people I make the same offer. You may join my kingdom, if you share of your treasure and your charms.” He focused intently on Katherine’s face and for a moment her resolve broke. He went out of focus as her eyes averted, then locked back on him. “You yourself may benefit as well. Come and join my kingdom in marriage to myself, and you will be satisfied. My wives want for nothing. If you wish not to make war, make marriage instead.”

Katherine smiled involuntarily. Bigfoot scowled. This was not going the way she’d hoped. She needed to change tack.

A brilliant red aluminum plate covered the master capacitor arm switch on the pair of lead-acid battery cells on Katherine’s hip. She pulled the cover away and flipped the switch into the arm position. A piercing alarm cut the air three times, startling horses and men in the Hudson camp. Bigfoot had clearly never heard anything like this before. The radio broadcast a sharp tone on the physics package telemetry frequency.

“Capacitor is armed,” a technician reported, her voice sharp and strained. The first step toward annihilation had been taken.

“Understood,” the general Hiro replied. “Observers, don goggles now.” The three members of the camp designated to keep focus on the valley donned opaque black welding goggles. The battery quickly charged the high-voltage capacitor adjacent to the physics package. The electrons accumulated would either need to be bled out through the discharge circuit or would activate the device.

Like Katherine, Bigfoot found this was not going the way he’d hoped. “What is your purpose, messenger? Did you come simply to mock me, or-“

“Look to the Sun!” Katherine shouted. Her cry pierced Bigfoot’s resolve and he quieted. When the translation came through, he glanced upward but a lone patch of cumulus was now obscuring the Sun. He stared again at Katherine.

“Nothing in this world burns like the surface of that Sun. There is no fire so hot even we in the republic can build. The inside is hotter still. Ten thousand times hotter. If I must, I will unleash more might and heat even than that. I repeat. Leave our nation at once.”

Bigfoot kept his cool. He kept his focus on Katherine but began conferring with men next to his chariot.

“Any help on what they’re talking about?” Katherine whispered into the radio.

“He’s asking for options. Sounds like they’re talking about movement.”

“Copy, I’m going to arm the first safety.” Katherine reached into the wire wickets next to the battery and threw the first switch. Another tone chirped on the monitoring frequency.

“Primary safety is disabled,” the technician reported at camp.

“Let me show you something,” Katherine said, reaching into a stowage pocket. Arrows drew back, ready to fly in a moment. She retrieved the book and lifted it into the air.

The founding vessel had carried several texts with useful information on physics packages and their extremely limited use before the American Collapse. Photos of their effect on the cities of Japan and their testing were particularly prized. These had been painstakingly reproduced in exquisite detail by artists serving the Ohio Guard, and were intended to impress on possible foes the seriousness of the threat of device warfare. Katherine approached the chariot and handed the book to Bigfoot.

“Look here,” she said, “and see what it is you face.”

Bigfoot had encountered books very rarely during his life. Like the vast majority of Hudson tribesmen, he was illiterate, though he confided to his advisors that he regretted this deeply. He understood the text meant something to the book’s author, but it meant nothing to him. He saw the drawings and tried to make sense of them. There was something like a village, but stupendously larger and more complicated. People seemed dwarfed by the buildings around them. Then plains and rubble. Bodies burned and broken. There was something absolutely incomprehensible, a jellyfish of light clawing at a tower and steel cables. It was clearly meant to intimidate. Bigfoot scoffed at the bluster.

He threw the book to the grassy ground. “You do not understand. Your arrogance will be your downfall. I invite your people to choose one more time. You will yield and submit to me, or you will die.”

For the first time fear stabbed at Katherine’s heart. Adrenaline flooded her veins and the saliva drained from her mouth. The cavalry were agitating. In a moment one of them could unleash an arrow at her heart. The armor would protect her from the arrow’s cut, but the momentum would knock her from her mount. That might keep her down long enough to be killed before she could activate the device. It was time to take the penultimate step. Katherine reached again into the wickets and flipped the final switch on the battery control panel.

“Secondary safety is disabled,” the tech’s report came on the other side of the radio.

“Eyes down!”

“Eyes down!” The shout was relayed and repeated through the camp 10 miles to the west. Ellis took a last look at the valley, then squeezed his eyelids shut and buried his face in the crook of his left arm.

A new siren wailed at the center of Bigfoot’s camp. This one was more disturbing and more persistent than the first. It rose and fell like a lamentation of sorrow. It shrieked over and over and over again. Some of Bigfoot’s troops covered their ears. Bigfoot himself snarled at the disturbance. Katherine took a sleek black pistol grip from her side and raised it in the air. A black cable curled down to the battery and her index finger rested loose on the trigger.

Katherine considered her options. The worst outcome was to die before she could squeeze the trigger. She felt assured that wouldn’t happen now. The next worst case would be to lose the device in vain. The gift of the founders would not be refreshed, and the Trident Republic was impotent to manufacture new devices. Each was precious could only be used if no other option existed to protect the republic. Each use must be perfect. If she pacified only half of Bigfoot’s forces that was an unacceptable waste of the gift. Protecting her own life would be lovely, as well, but the physics package must be protected and perfected first.

She was well placed to make sure the device’s power would not be wasted. The fireball would utterly consume Bigfoot himself and his most important officers. The light, the blast, and the neutrons would well destroy those more distant. It would be a shame to lose the valley for a generation to fallout, but like a gangrenous limb it could be sacrificed if needed to save the body of the republic.

The Ohio Guradsman selected to represent the republic made one last gambit. “Leave now! Leave now in peace, or we will all die together.” She turned to check the path to the west when she saw the arrow flying.

Involuntarily her brown eyes tilted and focused on the object soundlessly cutting through the air. It was well-aimed and would collide with her in a second. No order had been given to fire, but here it was anyway. There was no time to move. Katherine immediately understood the only option she had and the final choice she must make.

The 24 years of Katherine’s life didn’t flash before her eyes in that moment. She didn’t think of her parents, her childhood, the curiosity and the competitiveness that had driven her accelerating through the stages of life, the rigors of the academy, or the joys of friendship and youth. Instead the moment before her was crystallized in perfect detail. She saw every face and marveled at how fierce and beautiful Bigfoot’s men were. The cloud had just moved from the disk of the Sun, and a male cardinal was now illuminated in brilliant red splendor. She hated that he would have to die with them. A collection of grasshoppers, she counted 11, were gnawing at the strawberry leaves with their swishing jaws.

Instead of recalling her past life, a single thought swirled forcefully into her discursive mind. She thought of Jesus nailed to the cross on Calvary, and how long and horrible his suffering must have been. She felt a stab of sorrow that her own passion would be so swift and so painless. How much she wished she could take his agony instead of her comfort. She thought of repeating his words, then, “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do,” but the training and instinct were too strong. There was no time. The muscles twitched in her forearm and the tendons beneath her sweating palm tensed her finger on the trigger. The circuit closed.

In the space of the same 100 nanoseconds, 192 exploding bridgewire detonators started the chemical change in the hollow sphere of explosive around the device’s pit. Every 50 years that portion of the device aged out and had to be rebuilt, but the supergrade plutonium core itself was virtually unchanged since it was assembled at the factory in ancient Texas. The shockwaves in the explosive developed and coalesced. They stabbed inward and the tamper struck the core, forcing it together into an impossibly small sphere of power.

The triggering charge alone was enough to start disintegrating the bodies of Katherine and her horse. But this was only the beginning. The device was designed to be filled with tritium and used to trigger a second thermonuclear stage. The thermonuclears had been useful in ending the reign of the ancient nations, but they served no purpose on the modern battlefield. The secondaries were removed from the gifts of the founders and the tritium had long since decayed away. Still, the dry primaries were perfectly adequate for the job at hand.

What heat and light developed in the collapsing core? Even to the ancient Americans who first discovered this power, it seemed like something beyond that which could be described in the terms of ordinary life. It was magic, sorcery, Heaven, Hell, the power and knowledge of life and death. What else could it be? It seemed strange that men and women were compelled to explain something concrete with something that would always be abstract and inexplicable.

Perhaps, really, it was something out of ordinary life after all. It was starlight and sunlight. The nuclear chain reaction proceeded exponentially, raising the temperature of the device to the temperature of a main sequence star’s core. It emitted some light and radiation directly, but mostly X-rays. The X-rays struck the air around surrounding the center of Bigfoot’s camp like a sledgehammer. The air furiously heated, transforming into a fireball. The fireball stretched 600 feet across. Within that space the atoms that composed men, horses, chariots, grass, dirt, and weapons were scattered and mixed into one.

Beyond that space the fireball’s glow set grass and cloth afire and singed flesh off the bone. Air shocked and energized expanded in a hemispherical shell, scouring the ground clean of life. Those closest to the device never knew of their own deaths. More distant there was a moment of brilliant surprise, of shock and heat and awe, and then oblivion. More distant still the men died horribly.

In the Trident camp Ellis felt the heat of the device immediately. It felt like what he imagined a Hawaiian sunrise might feel like, all compressed into an instant of pounding pressing warmth. Through his arm and his eyelids, the overwhelming light still shone, illuminating the red blood vessels in his eyeballs. Then, all sensation of the device was gone.

“Eyes up,” the call came out with a vague sense of foreboding. Ellis saw the cloud then.

It was beautiful. He stared at it, transfixed, in awe of the glory blooming in the valley. After a few seconds the convective column began to expand and condense. It took on the form of a mushroom, rolling and twisting languidly. A ring formed where the stem met the cap, rising and wiggling like a serpent. Soon the top of the cloud was above the tops of the eastern range, painted gray and brown in the morning Sun. Ellis took this all in before realizing what death and misery and loss was enveloped in the cloud. He hated himself for finding it so beautiful.

“Should we cover our ears?” Llewelyn asked.

Hiro shrugged. “If you want to.” Llewelyn hesitantly switched off the microphone and cupped his palms over his hears.

No one said anything. It felt like an hour swept through in silent meditation. Then, a minute after the energy of the device burst free, the shockwave arrived. A sudden shattering bang shook the ground and whacked the camp. Ellis felt it in his chest and neck more than he heard it. After the initial shock the echo rolled through. The long thundering crescendo slowly faded.

Kulshan had been watching the scene silently. Now he spoke, quoting an ancient British poet in the original English. “We have the Maxim gun, and they have not.” He shook his head and spoke more plainly. “That’s 27 down. 165 left.”

Ellis nodded. “Hiro, what’s the report from the balloons?”

The call came through the radio on the balloon frequency. “We were well positioned. Smoke is clearing. Scattered grass fires. I’m seeing very little movement. There’s a force departing east.”

“How many?” Hiro inquired.

There was a pause. “Hundreds. Less than a thousand.” The marrow of most of those now limping back to the eastern range was dead already. They would soon follow. Less than a hundred would return to the north shore of the continent and the absence of power that now reigned there.

There would be pressure to follow up, Ellis knew. 165 such devices seemed so vast, as did the continent. There were grumblings always to roll to the east, to reunite the known world as the Americans and Canadians had. But Ellis saw that the time to be bold had passed. The time for caution had arrived. Until the powers of the Americans could be grasped and replicated, and not just metered and dripped out slowly, the power must be conserved above all else. Perhaps, he thought, reminded of the agony with which America died, it was better this way.

Father Paul cleared his throat. “My friends,” he said, “We’ve had our moment of silence. Let us pray for the soul of our beloved daughter Katherine, and the souls of our foes defeated honorably.”

“Amen,” Ellis replied. He thought for a moment, then added “Saint Katherine of the Kent Valley, pray for them.” Father Paul murmured assent.

It was a long time before the eastern border of the Trident Republic was challenged again.