Three Days After the Michigan Avenue Proclamation 

Circuit

After all the prep, the pursuit and the press, I’d finally achieved a lifelong dream: Exposing the existence of unusual talents to the world at large. Naturally, once we’d shaken off pursuit I decided to repair to my evil villain’s lair and plot my next diabolical move. Also, since the place had been under construction for nearly a year and I hadn’t visited in three weeks, there were a lot of things to check up on. Being a conscientious evil mastermind I immediately set out to bring myself up to date in a fashion most likely to be unpleasant for all involved. Which is to say, I scheduled a meeting.

There were no donuts involved.

And, since it was my meeting, I dispensed with an agenda and skipped straight to the questions. “Status of the maglev relays?”

Davis waved his hand over the northern section of the map of the Chainfall site we were gathered around. “The last quadrant has the system fully installed and connected, but the reserves aren’t charged yet. You can only expect fifteen to twenty minutes of use right now. We won’t have the full hour and a half of reserves until tomorrow afternoon.”

I nodded. “That’s acceptable. What about the Empion grenades and their launchers?”

“They’re all up and running,” Wallace said, rapping his knuckles on the table and sending pens and pencils jumping. “You have full coverage of the base and we’ve done a couple of test detonations. We don’t know how well they handle, since the maglev system works best in your hands, but the basic principles are sound.”

“That leads us to the ground situation.” I glanced at Heavy and Grappler. “How prepared are we?”

Heavy laughed. “You know us, boss. We got flypaper and glue out everywhere you want it and a couple of places you didn’t think of. But the guys you got here? They ain’t pros. Not like the Army, not like the cops. When the hammer comes down, they’re only gonna buy you so much time.”

“Not to worry,” I said with a half smile. “Chainfall isn’t a permanent site, it’s just a temporary production facility.”

“Which raises the question,” Davis said, “of what, exactly, you need that would require you invest almost fifteen million dollars of time, effort and material in building this site.”

“Only fifteen million?” Hangman asked, glancing at Davis.

“You save a lot when you don’t need permits, zoning adjustments, board of health and safety inspections and the architect does the work free of charge,” Wallace said.

“The answer,” I said, a bit louder than the byplay going on, “is this.”

I took a small stretch of bronze colored wire out of a box that sat on one side of the table and set it on top of the map. It was about the thickness of the wide rice noodles you find in Chinese cooking, coiled into the rough shape of an electromagnet. For a moment the rest studied it, as if there was some great significance hidden in its coils. Which there was, although I could tell from their expressions they didn’t know what it was.

Finally Wallace said, “We’re making copper wire?”

“Not copper,” I said. “Cuprate-perovskite ceramic wire.”

Davis made a sound somewhere between a whimper and a squeal of glee and snatched the coil up to inspect it more closely. “A high temperature superconductor. And you made this here?”

“For a quarter the cost buying it on the open market, to say nothing of the cost of buying it through the black market. Assuming there was even enough of the stuff in the world to meet our needs.” I folded my arms over my chest and turned my smile up to full strength. “Worth those fifteen millions to you, Davis?”

Hangman waved her hand a bit to catch our attention then asked, “Excuse me if I scroll back a bit, but, what’s so special about this cupping ceramics?”

“It’s cuprate-perovskite ceramic, and when-”

Letting Davis try and explain would take all day so I jumped in and intercepted before he could work up too much of a head of steam. “Let’s just call them CPCs and say the short answer is, they can function as superconductors without having to be frozen all the way down to near absolute zero.”

Her eyebrows shot up in surprise. “Room temperature superconductors?”

“Liquid nitrogen baths are still required,” I said. “The phrase ‘high temperature’ is extremely relative in this case.”

“Ah. I see.”

“But if we’re going to finalize the Thunderclap array,” I continued, “Davis is going to require a great deal of CPC electromagnetic coils. We’ve known that for more than five years, thus the necessity of adding the Chainfall operation to our long term strategy.”

“The what?” Heavy asked, sounding a little confused.

I glanced at my senior engineer, who was still studying the coil with something approaching reverence. “Mr. Davis? Would you care to explain the purpose behind that invaluable piece of wire you’re holding?”

“I would be delighted,” he said, slowly lifting the coil up until it was at his eye level and rotating it for the whole table to see. A few of the other hands in the ops room glanced over from their monitors to see what there was to see but, for the most part, the people Simeon had found to staff Chainfall were maintaining a professional interesting in their equipment. Just as well. Davis, oblivious to the interest or apathy of his surroundings, went on. “A superconductor has a number of unique properties but, from the moment I was hired, Circuit and I have only been interested in the way they can hold current for a near infinite length of time.”

“You mean it’s like a battery that never runs out?” Grappler asked, sounding interested in the conversation for the first time.

“More like a flashlight that doesn’t actually use any electricity,” Davis said. “It took a year of research to determine the best way to exploit that. It all ultimately hinges on the fact that electricity and magnetism are the same thing.”

“Right,” Heavy said, nodding. “Even I get that much. With a the maghand the boss can reach out and flip switches or mess with power lines he’s not touching. Why’s the superconductingness of the magnet make a difference?”

“Because the nature of a superconductor is such that a fusebox like Circuit can tweak the resistance just enough to get slightly different shapes of magnetic fields.” Davis quickly but gently set the electromagnet coil back down on the table while continuing to talk and motion with his other hand. “Before you ask, that means one electromagnet, cooled to superconductivity and attached to the right computer equipment, can do triple duty, serving as a ‘maghand’, as you call it, a maglev relay and a lightning funnel all at once. Put enough of them in a city and a fusebox at the center and you know what you get?”

“Anything you want,” I said. “This is the age of information, and CPC superconductors are the secret to exploiting it. Hijacking any security system, manipulating traffic flow, shorting out substations and using the resulting current both offensively and defensively via the lighting funnel effect, it’s all possible once we have the tech in place. And that’s just scratching the surface.”

“Which is swell and all,” Hangman said, “but kind of raises the question, where are you going to install this Thunderclap array? I know you have property holdings all over the nation but a magnet that size isn’t going to cover a whole city block. Will it?”

“One of the bright sides of using superconductors is that they use so little current to keep running, so even a small coil like this will make a bigger magnetic field than you might think.” I picked up the wire and tucked it back into it’s box. “But that was just a test product. The real things will be several times bigger and should cover at least a half a dozen city blocks.”

“Again,” Hangman countered, “You don’t have the real estate to make that practical. What are you going to do with all-”

“Hangman, my dear, you underestimate Simeon’s ability to play the great game.” I pulled two sheets of paper, folded into thirds, from my jacket’s inner pocket and slid them across the table to Wallace. “Three years ago I left the country in order to set up a financial network in southern Europe and northern Africa. The incredible mineral resources of Africa, in particular, were of interest to me as a place to acquire the raw material to build the Thunderclap array, but Germany and Spain both served as conduits to funnel money back through dummy corporations and silent partners, some of whom aren’t even aware of what they’re investing in. When you run it all together we have more than enough access to turn not one but three cities into test sites for Thunderclap.”

“Always good to have options,” Wallace said, picking up the papers and flipping them open. “But I assume you already have your heart set on one?”

I nodded in confirmation. “The others serve to distract Project Sumter and, as you say, provide us with fallback sites if the first implementation doesn’t go well.”

As he read the first sheet of paper Wallace’s eyebrows rose until the practically touched his hairline, which takes some doing when it’s receded that far. “You’re setting this up in your own back yard?”

“Talented people exist in the public eye now,” I said, holding up half a dozen newspapers from across the country with front page stories on the subject. After my initial interview revealing our existence it sounded like most publications had more than one person in their local community volunteering to give an interview of their own, complete with demonstrations and, in one case, a fanciful costume to protect their identity and cause unfortunate misconceptions. All in all, it was about as expected. “Sooner or later, and I suspect it will be sooner, Project Sumter is going to put itself forward and try and assert control. But they’ll lack credibility and trust from the public, most secretive government branches do. After they flail about for a while, we can step in and pick up the pieces. And what better place to do it than right under the nose of one of their biggest offices? Plus, the fact that we’re operating in the same city we chose to reveal ourselves in will emphasize that we’re confident and in control.”

Glances passed back and forth around the table, and I saw one or two skeptical expressions warming to cautious enthusiasm. Heavy actually laughed and said, “Ballsy, boss. I like it.”

I offered a slight bow from the waist, then said, “Any other questions?”

And of course Davis had one. “How long?”

“Before we’re ready to use the array? Maybe a year. Six months if all goes smoothly.”

“Not what I was asking.” He leaned forward and gave me a hard look. “I just remembered that the method we devised for manufacturing cupra – excuse me, CPC materials involved the direct involvement of a fusebox. You were supposed to hire three for the occasion.”

Grappler saw where this was going quickly. “But one of them got arrested in that arms sting that went down while the rest of us were out around the country. So now we got two.” She glanced at me. “Unless you’re filling in?”

Wallace shook his head. “Not a good idea. A lot of our defenses only work at top efficiency if there’s a fusebox at the controls. For example, the maglev system can only throw an Empion grenade straight up, if we want to actually get a target in range of it’s pulse we’re going to have to be able to move it horizontally as well as vertically, and for that we need Circuit. And it’s less likely to work if he’s exhausted after spending a bunch of time fabricating electromagnets.”

Davis scowled. “I said in the past that making too much of your stuff dependent on your talent-”

“Relax, people,” I said, making a hushing gesture. “We’ll just have to make some concessions to the timetable. I had originally hoped to have things done in five or six days with our three other fuseboxes working around the clock. As it is, we’re probably looking at a week to ten days. Hangman? How long until we’re likely to be spotted?”

She spared me an arch glance, then turned her attention back to her laptop. “The next satellite overflight will be in one hour and sixteen minutes. I don’t know how many passes it will take for them to actually notice that dam you’re building outside, but I’m guessing it won’t be that many. The whole country’s probably on alert at this point.”

“Every second counts,” I said, running numbers in my head. “Wallace, that means you should be able to grab the first batch of finished CPC coils and head back to the city with them before anyone is paying attention. Use the Chinatown safehouse and start building the array based on the blueprints I gave you. There’s a list of preliminary locations to install them at as well. See Simeon before you leave, he’ll provide you with documentation on what kinds of cover stories to use.”

“Just as a helpful reminder, I did live in town for several years,” Wallace said. “There’s a chance someone’s going to know who I am. Might raise questions.”

“An acceptable risk, at this point. Anyone have a point they’d like to raise, now is the time.” I glanced around the table but no one looked like they had anything to add. “In that case, get settled and stay sharp. It all comes down to how the other side reacts now.”