the hastily erected work area. He found himself growing exasperated to the point of boiling anger, what with their lack of plausible scientific explanations, but realized, under the circumstances, he needed them more than they needed him.
The good news was that the laser field, a reverse electromagnetic barrier, as he understood it, held back the undefined particles that created this purported antigravity. With the extended poles rising forty feet high, laser beams interlocked at the speed of light, the abominable stench of sulfur was held in check, but the unreality of the moment was still there for his eyes to behold. Unable to look at the frightening spectacles farther down the gorge and just inside the laser wall, he watched his eight best and brightest, still donning hazmat suits, while striding closer to the banks of monitors, his science detail having informed him the lethal doses of radiation were cocooned behind the bars of blue laser light and presently dying off at an inexplicable rate. Only flaring back to life, fusing together again, they told him, at a speed faster than light, mounting in hyper-strength, though giving off no measurable radiation! Impossible, he decided, would be the most preposterous understatement he’d ever heard. Moscow would never buy it.
Geiger counters, he saw, were hooked into a radiation monitor, the clicks no longer audible, but Kolinko stole a read on the digital screen just the same, confirming he was in no danger of coming down with cancer in the near future. The last problem—no, the last nail—he needed was another Chernobyl in what was, essentially, a militarily occupied Russian protectorate. His own anger and mounting fear fusing like those particles they mentioned, Kolinko looked at their dark baffled faces inside the bubbled helmets as several of the geniuses filled test tubes with white crystals collected from the ground near the field station, then mixed them with a clear liquid. With syringes, they extracted the concoction, squirting drops on Petri dishes, sliding them under microscopes.
“It makes no sense at all how this could be happening.”
“But it is happening, Comrade Bukov!” Kolinko snapped, forcing himself to not even glance at the figure no more than twelve feet in front of him to confirm the terrible truth. Should this happen again, he dreaded, and in a heavily populated area…
Kolinko keyed his com link, scoured the skies with an anxious search. When informed by his flight crews that soldiers were now on the ground and securing a wide perimeter, erecting more laser walls, he turned back to his scientists. Two of them were hunched over the control panel of a solid aluminum cylinder they called a gravitational wave detector. When he saw them shaking their heads at each other, he nearly erupted, aware the mystery was only growing as they appeared to understand less with each passing second.
“I want answers, and within the hour, do you understand me, Comrade Bukov?”
“Then we’ll need to return to our laboratories for further and more accurate testing, Comrade Colonel. I am thinking this substance will first need a laser burst of at least a hundred picoseconds…”
“Picoseconds?”
“Measurements of trillionths of a second, done in a laser fusion chamber, therefore determining, if we are lucky, if these nuclei of atoms initiate fusion on their own, which, I already fear, they do.”
“You fear? What do you mean by that?”
Bukov went on as if he hadn’t heard the question. “Beyond that I am afraid that what, or part of what we are looking at, judging the previous samples and testing is an ongoing, unexplained fusion-fission reaction, but far more fusion than fission.”
The enormity of what he believed Bukov implied left Kolinko speechless for a long moment. “You are telling me that what is inside this force field is…that what came from deep space is…”
“Yes. We are perhaps looking at the possibility of a thermonuclear explosion. Developing critical mass as we speak, from, as you said, the far reaches of the galaxy.”
Kolinko swallowed his terror, wondering how long he could keep this from Moscow. The truth, of course, would get buried, but if Tajikistan was wiped off the map in a nuclear mushroom cloud with its unknown origins from deep space, there would be no way to hide it from the rest of the world. There would be international outrage. There would be sanctions. There would be much threatening noise, to say the very least, from the Americans. There would be fallout, and clear up the Ukraine, depending on the prevailing winds, with thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands dropping dead in their zombied tracks from radiation poisoning so high it would be off the charts of gigajoule and human-sievert measurements. There would be…
Numb, he was about to turn away, return to his chopper, when he found Dovkna pulling his visor away from his microscope. “What is it?” he barked.
Dovkna muttered something, shaking his head.
“Speak!”
Dovkna pointed a rubber-tipped finger at the crystallized rock formations on the ground, where the snow was still melting to puddles, a faint trace of sulfur still lingering in the air. “This white substance?” he said, and paused.
“Yes?”
“It’s sodium chloride.”
“Salt? You are telling me, comrade,” Kolinko said, throwing an arm at what was at the deep end of the pass, “that those men were—what? Turned into pillars of salt from outer space?”
Dovkna nodded inside his bubbled head. “That is precisely what I am saying.”
Kolinko staggered back a step, then froze, aware of the pleas and pitiful cries he’d up to then forced deaf ears to. Now, his mind tumbling with questions and fears holding no foreseeable answers or solutions, he stared up at the Tajik rebel, hovering some twenty feet in the air.
CHAPTER TWO
Nuclear power was a disaster begging to happen. Off the top of his head, he thought of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, the most notable of grotesque nuclear reactor accidents, or the ones at least known to the world at large. Where they were concerned, he pictured—from an educated guess based on experience and access to classified intel—their reactor cores blew, most likely, due to incompetence, quasi-ignorance of the volatile nature of fission reaction under extreme stress, and the brazen zeal of self-proclaimed genius in search of the next quantum leap, that bold but proved foolish notion that Science Man adhered to the belief they could learn more about nuclear power through trial and error. Tell all that, he scoffed to himself, to those dying in protracted misery under radioactive clouds that were most likely still spreading to God only knew how far and wide.
Madness, he decided, and for what? All in the name of progress? The advancement of civilization or global annihilation? Either way, Man may prove someday to be his own worst enemy, but he hoped he wasn’t around to see it, though his three children might. No tree-hugger or global-warming doomsayer, he was an ace Stealth pilot of two Gulf wars, in fact, who’d churned up whole square miles of earth into smoking craters where not even a dandelion could sprout in the next foreseeable generation. But he still believed Man either took care of Mother Earth, or Mother Earth would take care of Man. That in mind, nuclear-powered submarines and battleships, he weighed, were nightmare scenario enough, but easily dispensed with as far as cover-ups went. Scuttle the works and the truth sank to the bottom of the ocean, where only a few in the loop were the wiser.
All those potential catastrophic voyages, but vessels chugging along over vast stretches of empty ocean?
No sweat.
Try flying,
