The Radiant War

Chapter 6a

     “Thomas Shanks?” said the man in the expensive business suit.

     Shanks was sitting up in his hospital bed, trying to recreate the sketch of the piece of electrical equipment he'd discovered on the back of a letter from a colleague. The sketch that might have been an early idea for a high frequency alternator that the Radiants seemed so afraid of. The original had been destroyed during the attack on Adams Valley, but the scientist was pretty sure he remembered how it went. There were only one or two details he was unsure of, and so he'd drawn several variants of the design, all of which were being sent to electrical engineers up and down the country, in the hope that one of them would be able to recreate the machine that Maxine Hester had built. The machine that the Radiants seemed willing to go to any lengths to prevent ever being built.

    He put the pencil and paper aside as the man in the expensive suit stood in the doorway. “Yes,” he said. “Are you a doctor? How's Andrea?”

     “I'm not a doctor,” the man replied. He closed the door to the small room, then reached into an inside pocket and produced a tin badge. “Morris Tyrell, Ministry of Intelligence. I'd like to speak to you for a while.”

     “Andrea’s the head scientist, I'm just her assistant. She's the one you want.”

     “No, you're the one I want.” He sat down on the small chair that stood beside the bed and picked up the circuit diagram he'd been working on. “This is the thing that might save us?” he asked.

     “We think so, yes. If someone can finish it.”

     “I'm told that you and Andrea McCrea are the best in the world. What are the chances, really, that some common engineer who only knows how to lay copper wires will be able to recreate Maxine Hester’s genius?”

     “Small, maybe, but if there’s any chance at all we have to take it.”

   “Yes, of course.” He laid the diagram aside on the small bedside table, next to a vase containing a few shrivelled cut flowers placed there by some caring relative for the previous occupant of the room. “How are you feeling, by the way?”

     Shanks looked down ruefully at the bandages covering his arms. “It looks worse than it is. The doctors say I'll heal. I'll have a few scars to remind me of what happened, but they expect to be able to discharge me in a few days.”

     “Yes, I know. I've spoken to them. You blew up a Radiant by running at it with a hot electric candle, igniting the hydrogen leaking from the bullet holes in its buoyancy sacks. Pretty gutsy. You saved Andrea McCrea. She's still in a coma, but the doctors say she has an excellent chance of coming out of it soon. You're a hero, Mister Shanks.”

     “I did what I had to do.”

     “A modest hero. An enigmatic hero as well, it seems.”

   He reached into an inside pocket and produced a small envelope from which he pulled a folded sheet of paper. He opened it and read from it. “Thomas Shanks, raised from a cat by parents Samuel Shanks and Martha Shanks who live in Hapsgood, Westsylvia. Declared human on the 23rd April 729 by the town wizard Simeon Aldercott. Attended Hapsgood primary school and secondary school, then enrolled in Dulchester Technical Academy in spring 740. Graduated with a degree in science and engineering five years later and took a position as assistant to Andrea McCrea a year after that.”

     He folded the sheet of paper again and put it back in the envelope. “That's it. That's all we know about you. We sent a man to Hapsgood to try to find out more. He discovered that Simeon Aldercott had never heard of you. What's more, no-one in the town had any memory of anyone called Samuel Shanks or Martha Shanks, and nobody with your name ever attended either the primary school or the secondary school. They do have a record of you attending Dulchester, but as far as the rest of the world is concerned it’s as if you just appeared out of nowhere the day before. As if you just fell out of the sky, a full human.”