“Tin, if we need to do this up close and personal, then we needed something more substantial than the ten of us with whatever guns we can carry. Let’s cut to the chase, how are we going to win this?”
Tin’s mouth curled down slightly, but he nodded. “Excellent question, Guardian. And I guess it might help you to know the end game. So…” He whistled and raised his eyebrows, then looked over us toward the kitchen. We turned to follow his gaze as a low-slung plonk entered the room. It looked like a millipede carrying an overlarge insulated water bottle tipped on its side.
“As I said before, the base is down deep and not even dropping nuclear bombs would do much damage in the time we’d have for that. So, we sneak in, we lay an egg, then we sneak back out before the egg hatches. It that up close and personal enough, Guardian?”
I shrugged and he gave us a cheeky smile. “Any thoughts on what the egg might be?”
I took it upon myself to talk my way through the options. “The water bottle is obviously the egg, but unless you’ve rewritten the laws of physics, Tin, it’s too small to be a nuclear bomb.”
I did not say it, but there just wasn’t enough fissile material there to set off a chain reaction and a dirty bomb would not damage Colossus, not unless up close and personal meant setting it off right next to Colossus and I wasn’t even sure that was possible.
“I’m not sure you can build a wormhole bomb, but if you’ve managed that the war would be irrelevant. You’d not be waiting here. You’d be opening wormholes all over the place, and nobody would be able to catch you out.”
Tin nodded, “That would indeed be amazing, Guardian, but the resources to open wormholes, no matter the size, is well beyond us.”
“Yeah, I figured. Then there’s only one other thing I can think of, and I am not even sure I want to be right. You’ve created an antimatter bomb, Tin.”
It was half a question, but Tin’s eyes lit up and I knew I was right. The mere thought was triggering informational alarms; even a tiny amount of antimatter was extremely dangerous and while it would pack enough punch to do serious damage to Colossus, it would do even more damage to us. I did not try and hide my concern.
“You don’t look happy, Guardian. Yes, it is antimatter, that was clever of you, but rest assured, it is well contained. Very well contained. I am not inclined to blow myself up any more than you would be, I’d guess.”
The others looked confused, but I ignored them. “Exactly how much antimatter is in that bomb, anyway?”
“Five grams.”
Five grams. About a heaped teaspoon of sugar, yet it would release enough energy to challenge most nukes. It was impressive as such things go, but the details bubbling up into my memories told me there was a problem.
“Tin, antimatter annihilation releases lots of gamma rays but not much in the way of an explosion. That base in New Zealand is extensive, so how is your egg going to do any real damage?”
“You need to brush up on your physics, Guardian. Each gram of antimatter releases about twenty kilotons of energy. It is mostly gamma rays, true, but they heat the surrounding area, creating a shock wave as the very bedrock the base is built into liquefies and then explodes from the pressure. But just in case that is not sufficiently destructive, they also provide the energy to fuse an outer layer of compressed tritium, which is guaranteed to make a bang. You are looking at what I am sure is the very first antimatter atomic bomb, a marvel of technology weighing a mere six kilograms.”
I wasn’t skeptical, not really, but it seemed overly complicated. “And you’ve tested this?”
“Of course. There is nothing casual about this, Guardian, all our lives depend on my device being stable for transport, and then going off as planned. I’ve spent years developing this, the bomb works, let’s just leave it at that,” he said, sounding peeved.
Once again, I was left wondering what he was leaving out. You don’t need a physics degree to know that antimatter is dangerous, so bringing it along as some kind of ultimate hand grenade seemed suicidal. Even a nanosecond glitch in the containment field would turn us all to radioactive waste, and Tin knew it. Something about his too smooth delivery rankled, but I couldn’t put my finger on it, so I merely shrugged.
FTR I have never been able to finish a Brown novel.
(And I'm now on a tangent looking into these, just for fun.)
