Chapter 69 - The Kraken Gate
Jenniver steered us back down beneath the hunting lodge. Obermann brought up the rear, ever watchful with his revolver. Rested and uninjured, I might have contemplated resistance, but I was spent. Instead of turning right towards the control room and portal chamber, Jenniver headed left, towards the spiral staircase and the crypt below.
‘Do you really approve of this lunacy?’ I asked, struggling to reconcile this callous young woman with the one who’d seduced me.
‘Of course I do,’ she replied, glancing over her shoulder. ‘It’s what my research was all about.’
‘I thought you were finding a way to stabilise the field.’
‘I was, at first, but when I ran the numbers the other way, I saw something amazing!’ Jenniver’s hands were moving as she walked, tracing out field gradients, power thresholds or some such boffinry. ‘When those huge energies that we harnessed, allowing us to cross millions and millions of leagues in the blink of an eye, fell in on themselves, they caused a shockwave powerful enough to bounce the gate open again, briefly.’
‘And?’
Jenniver actually laughed, a tinkling, merry sound. ‘Don’t you see?’
‘It took you three years at university to figure this out, so excuse me if it takes me a turn or two to catch up.’
‘Once the distant end of the tunnel has been opened like that, it’s connected to the vacuum of space, so that when the shockwave blasts through it and collapses, it sucks everything nearby into it.’
That explained the missing chunk of Ganessa. I shook my head. ‘This is what you want to harness?'
‘Of course,’ insisted Jenniver. ‘Now there’s a practical application for the theory, one that will help us to end the war.’
Draxil’s Precious Sack! The girl is so bloody naïve. But I had been too…used like a mechanic’s oily rag. I thought back to what Ty had said back in the cave on Ganessa. He’d been nowhere near the gate when it had blown up. Jenniver’s words made it all clear. For three years, she’d been working on a way to turn the Koulomb Gate into a weapon…every waking moment spent trying to realise that goal. She worked out what would happen if the field was catastrophically destabilised. All she’d needed then was a way to trigger it.
Director Harman had shared his knowledge of the failsafe with Jenniver, and she had quickly realised that all it would take was to send someone through the gate with a faulty inhibitor, their wristband with the Malacian shell broken, or substituted for a pebble, or dried pea instead. His insistence that I explain it all to Jenniver that morning after Winslow Hall was an attempt to throw me off the scent. There had been no malfunction. I recalled Ankush telling me that Kandesh had “screamed for the gate to be closed” and Professor Renny had refused because “Porter and Finnian weren’t far behind.”
‘You gave poor Porter a dud wristband, didn’t you?’ I said, relieved that at last I understood. ‘Finnian was one of mine, more likely to spot that fake, so you gave it to Porter. You blew up the gate to test your theory. And that night in my room…what was that? You and your uncle trying to win me over to your cause?’
‘That’s not how it was, Connie. I’d heard so much about you, from that story in the papers about you setting up your own company, and from my uncle. He was so impressed with you, you know. You’re so strong and independent. To be near you is…’
‘Ugh, please!’
Jenniver shrugged. ‘Everything I said is true, but I’ll admit that I also needed something from you.’
I thought back to that night. ‘The failsafe. You wanted to know how to disable it.’ My mind whirred, pushing the pieces of the puzzle around, trying to see how they fitted. And then it was obvious. ‘You’ve found a way to trigger a catastrophic shutdown of the gate without the explosives!’
‘Well done. It’s not much use having a weapon that vaporises the people who wield it, not to mention the expense. It was a part of my thesis that I didn’t have time to finish, that is until I started working full-time on this project with Professor Maddison. He’d been working on a way to save power, tinkering with the coils that surround the portal itself. What I saw immediately was that, if the current on them was cut abruptly instead of powering down gently, the Koulomb Field would collapse and bounce back.’
‘So there’s no damage to the originating site,’ I said.
‘Correct, and since we’ll be opening a portal into highly populated places in Nallia, there is too much of a risk that someone there will get curious and investigate, triggering the failsafe because they don’t have an inhibitor.’
‘Which would put a dramatic stop to your plans,’ I concluded. ‘Good for you, but I didn’t tell you how to disable the failsafe, did I?’
Jenniver stopped at the bottom of the stone steps and smiled. ‘No, you didn’t, but it’s no longer important.’
‘Now I know why I barely saw you again after that night,’ I sneered. ‘You’re a mercenary one, aren’t you?’
‘So speaks the hired gun!’ She shrugged. ‘Anyway, you didn’t come and seek me out either, did you?'
I had thought about it once or twice, but I too had been rather preoccupied keeping Jenniver and her uncle’s engine of doom from being sabotaged, something I was beginning to regret. I changed the subject.
‘Will you sleep well with so much blood on your hands?’
‘We’re saving lives,’ replied Jenniver. ‘Countless lives. Can’t you see that? Surely you want to bring the war to an end.’
‘I do want to end the war, but not at any cost! This is so disproportionate, it’s off the fucking charts!’
‘Connie, please,’ Jenniver implored. ‘You’re not thinking clearly! You know what the Nallians are like, you’ve fought them. We have to think like them if we’re to have any hope of beating them.’
‘No! We’re fighting them because we absolutely don’t want to think like them. We need to be the voice of reason. What’s the use of coming out on top if it results in a perpetual state of terror?’
‘You blazed a trail for me. I thought you were so strong.’ Jenniver pushed her hair back over one shoulder. ‘I thought you, of all people, would rise above pettiness. Join us, Connie’, she implored. ‘My uncle would welcome you back if you agreed to continue, with Lockhouse providing us all with protection.’
‘What I understand, Jenniver, is something like four-hundred thousand people live in Nallaxia.’
Jenniver shrugged again. She turned her back on me as she went to the door to the battery room. Two lamps were all the provided light, casting long shadows towards the distant ends of the corridor. One of Harman’s estate labourers had been given the job of standing watch. He doffed his cap to Jenniver, and as he unlocked the door, she finished off her train of thought.
‘Yes, about four-hundred thousand in Nallaxia, but then there’s almost the same number again in Pramest and Halta combined.’ And there it was. That was the missing piece of the puzzle, the vital part of the strategy that I hadn’t been able to see; could never have imagined.
‘You mean to hit multiple targets!’ I breathed in horror. ‘In the space of a couple of heartbeats, you’ve gone from mass murder to genocide.’
Jenniver waved me through the door while Obermann pulled the trigger back on his revolver, quashing any heroic impulses I might have had.
Jenniver said, ‘You were in the marines, Connie. You trained to fight and kill. We’re just the same. The Director and I have just found a more direct, more successful way to strike at the enemy.’
‘I’m nothing like you,’ I grated. ‘You’re mad, both you and your uncle!’
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