The Radiant War

Chapter 24a

     “What are you doing?” asked Andrea McCrea impatiently. “Have you given up, is that it? The alternator’s too difficult. You're getting bored with all the different variations and you've gone back to messing about with...”

     She strode across the laboratory towards him, past guards that glanced at each other in amusement. I leave for five minutes, she thought, and he does this! From now on, we either go to eat together or we have the food brought to us.

     “I haven't given up,” said Shanks, looking annoyed but not taking his eyes from what he was doing. He was working by the light of an electric candle that hung by its cord from the ceiling. It cast a puddle of light about him in the dark room. “I had an idea, that's all. I think I might know what we've been doing wrong.”

     Andrea reached his side by the little table and took a closer look at what be was doing. In amongst a clutter of tools, ceramic spacers and little off cuts of wire, her assistant was cutting the rubber and cloth coating from a length of wire to expose the bare copper, which he then twisted around the contacts of a capacitor. Her eyes scanned rapidly across the other contents of the table, and her brow furrowed in confusion. “You're just connecting a capacitor to an inductor,” she said staring into his face. “Why? This better not be one of your little side projects. You do know we're supposed to be...”

     “It's a sort of...” Interrupted Shanks, but then he paused uncertainty. “Well, I'm not quite sure what you'd call it. It is for the alternator, though. If we wire it into the primary circuit, I think it'll resonate, force the current to alternate. I think that's what's been missing; an outside stimulus to force the current to flip at regular intervals.”

     Andrea closed her eyes, tried to picture in her head what would happen if they did what he suggested. The capacitor would charge and discharge at regular intervals, she decided. How long an interval would depend on how much charge they wanted it to hold, and the inductor would...

     She opened her eyes again, stared at Shanks in astonishment. “You're tuning the primary circuit!” she said. “That's what you're making, a sort of tuning circuit! Those Above, that’s brilliant!”

     Behind her, the prisoner chained to the wall perked up and stared across at them, suddenly interested. His guard watched him warily, while making sure to keep out of touching distance. The man was an adoptee. The leader of the Carrow cell of spies and assassins one of whose members had tried to kill the scientists a few days before. His covering of skin powder hard been removed and his skin glowed with a greenish light bright enough to cast shadows in the dimly lit room. He'd been placed there the day before, at the scientists’ request, when his interrogators had gotten everything they thought they could get out of him. The two scientists had been fascinated by him when he’d first arrived, but he'd said nothing in reply to their questions and now they just ignored him.

     “Well, we'll see if it’s brilliant when we wire it into the apparatus,” said Shanks, looking across at the large tower of coils, batteries and cooling pipes standing on the main table amongst the clutter of wires and components they'd tried adding to it and discarded in frustration. “An extra capacitor might make it overheat, catch fire. We might need to increase the flow of water, and space the components further apart. Allow the air to circulate between them. Perhaps add a fan. I was just trying to think of something we hadn’t tried yet...”

     “And this just came to you?”

     “Well, yes.” Shanks rubbed at the bandages covering his hand, which was bothering him despite the poppy oil the doctors were giving him for the pain. The full dose had left him feeling a little light headed, he'd told Andrea the day before, so he'd let it wear off and was now taking it at half the previous dose. It had cleared his head, he said, but it meant that the pain of the knife wound had begun to return. Still, pain is a good thing, he'd told her. It tells you you're alive.