They’re light enough at this size that they can drift in the air like a speck of dust. Anytime one of them crosses the path of the beam, it refracts the light away, breaking the amplification and disabling the laser.”
Shaw found himself marveling at the ingenuity, the creativity. To disable the weapon from within … brilliant.
“I guess the raiders figured out they can use the spheres for something more than just communication,” Yang said, apparently thinking along similar lines.
“If they can teleport a sphere in here, they can teleport one anywhere,” Iverson said.
“I wonder why they didn’t take out the space lasers, too,” Yang said. “Are their orbits too fast?”
“They planned on harnessing their energy, remember?” Iverson said. “It gave them a boost of speed.”
“No … I agree with Yang,” Shaw replied. “They might have adapted the hovercraft to absorb the laser’s energy, but it would have been a lot easier to just take them off-line like these here. There must be a reason they couldn’t pull the same trick in space. Dillon told us these spheres are growing at a molecular level. Maybe there are no building blocks in the vacuum of space.”
“I’ll have some jumpers check out the idea. They might be able to test for it,” Iverson said.
Shaw nodded. He remembered what Ellie had said last night at dinner. Why go through all the trouble just to invent this new technology, and only use it to communicate? That was clearly incorrect. These raiders had found a whole new host of uses for these spheres. Shaw had the feeling he’d just scratched the surface of what they could do.
As the bullet train between Shanghai and Hefei slowed down, Shaw shook his head at the massive city that was passing by his window. Twenty-five million people lived in Hefei. Shaw generally had trouble remembering the names of Chinese mega-cities like this one, and he wondered how many of them had heard of St. Louis, Missouri. Certainly more than Missourians had heard of Hefei. It was a lingering cultural chauvinism left over from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but it was still hard to shake this far into the twenty-first. The world only got to globalize once, and when it did, the U.S. had been at the forefront. Its fingerprints were on the world now in the same way that Europe’s had been for centuries beyond its colonial days.
Shaw and Yang got off the train and began walking down the platform toward the grand station. The swell of people was hard to take, and they had to fight to keep together. Shaw hadn’t been to Asia in ages, not since college, and he had forgotten what it was like to feel so alone and so different from everyone around him. And how close everyone around him was.
Yang nudged Shaw’s elbow and pointed ahead. A woman was watching them intently. Shaw realized he had just seen her face on his wrap during the flight to Shanghai. She was the chair of the School of Experimental Physics at the University of Hefei, she spoke English, and he had picked her as his most likely point of contact to meet with when he arrived. That had been less than two hours ago.
“Good evening,” she said in clear English, extending her hand. “I’m Professor Dao-ming Wu. The feeds said you were coming to see me.”
Wu guided Yang and Shaw through the train station and down to Hefei’s old subway line. As they walked through the crowds, she described how much she and her colleagues in the school had been following the news about the nitrogen spheres.
“To be honest, I don’t pay much attention to stories about attacks on the Lattice anymore,” Wu said. “This last one got a little more notice here because they actually penetrated the defenses with an imposter.” Her eyes flickered to Yang. Shaw was glad to see he didn’t flinch under it. “But I didn’t really understand that it was so serious until I heard about the spheres. We were following along when suddenly the university and my name
Shaw found himself marveling at the ingenuity, the creativity. To disable the weapon from within … brilliant.
“I guess the raiders figured out they can use the spheres for something more than just communication,” Yang said, apparently thinking along similar lines.
“If they can teleport a sphere in here, they can teleport one anywhere,” Iverson said.
“I wonder why they didn’t take out the space lasers, too,” Yang said. “Are their orbits too fast?”
“They planned on harnessing their energy, remember?” Iverson said. “It gave them a boost of speed.”
“No … I agree with Yang,” Shaw replied. “They might have adapted the hovercraft to absorb the laser’s energy, but it would have been a lot easier to just take them off-line like these here. There must be a reason they couldn’t pull the same trick in space. Dillon told us these spheres are growing at a molecular level. Maybe there are no building blocks in the vacuum of space.”
“I’ll have some jumpers check out the idea. They might be able to test for it,” Iverson said.
Shaw nodded. He remembered what Ellie had said last night at dinner. Why go through all the trouble just to invent this new technology, and only use it to communicate? That was clearly incorrect. These raiders had found a whole new host of uses for these spheres. Shaw had the feeling he’d just scratched the surface of what they could do.
As the bullet train between Shanghai and Hefei slowed down, Shaw shook his head at the massive city that was passing by his window. Twenty-five million people lived in Hefei. Shaw generally had trouble remembering the names of Chinese mega-cities like this one, and he wondered how many of them had heard of St. Louis, Missouri. Certainly more than Missourians had heard of Hefei. It was a lingering cultural chauvinism left over from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but it was still hard to shake this far into the twenty-first. The world only got to globalize once, and when it did, the U.S. had been at the forefront. Its fingerprints were on the world now in the same way that Europe’s had been for centuries beyond its colonial days.
Shaw and Yang got off the train and began walking down the platform toward the grand station. The swell of people was hard to take, and they had to fight to keep together. Shaw hadn’t been to Asia in ages, not since college, and he had forgotten what it was like to feel so alone and so different from everyone around him. And how close everyone around him was.
Yang nudged Shaw’s elbow and pointed ahead. A woman was watching them intently. Shaw realized he had just seen her face on his wrap during the flight to Shanghai. She was the chair of the School of Experimental Physics at the University of Hefei, she spoke English, and he had picked her as his most likely point of contact to meet with when he arrived. That had been less than two hours ago.
“Good evening,” she said in clear English, extending her hand. “I’m Professor Dao-ming Wu. The feeds said you were coming to see me.”
Wu guided Yang and Shaw through the train station and down to Hefei’s old subway line. As they walked through the crowds, she described how much she and her colleagues in the school had been following the news about the nitrogen spheres.
“To be honest, I don’t pay much attention to stories about attacks on the Lattice anymore,” Wu said. “This last one got a little more notice here because they actually penetrated the defenses with an imposter.” Her eyes flickered to Yang. Shaw was glad to see he didn’t flinch under it. “But I didn’t really understand that it was so serious until I heard about the spheres. We were following along when suddenly the university and my name
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