AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Love, give me the dumb fucking idiot explanation, if you please.”
“It pushes shit really hard.”
“There we go. And how do I?”
“It’s just like I showed you, Tschenkar,” Julia said, “now remember how to condense the field?”
I nodded, and gripped one of the condenser rods. I rotated it as slowly as I could—
“Turn it on first,” she said.
I looked down at the base. There was more than one button, but—
Eve reached up and flipped a switch, and the whole thing started thrumming and vibrating, enough that I felt it in my bones.
“Love?” I asked. “Is there any chance this thing might…” Perfectly optimistic. “Just step back. A lot.”
I watched as Eve stepped backat least30 paces. Bloody hell, so that’s how big the explosion would be if this thing didn’t work. Or—judging by how I thought this thingwouldwork, it’s how much area was going to get fucking squashed or ripped apart or crushed by some invisible field that I didn’t really understand. Well, as long as Eve was outside of that area. If I died, the babies I’d surely put inside her would live on, and she’d still have Thuliak. I had no idea how human men, in their strangely possessive 1-on-1 relationships, could deal with that? What if they died in battle? How could they even go to battle knowing that they might leave their woman without any other man? Their kids with no father? We had redundancy. Not that I was fucking redundant, mind you.
“Tschenkar!” Eve shouted. “Come on!”
I pointed the thing. I got the gun-looking end right at the tree as best I could. It wasn’t exactly possible to sight across the barrel of this thing. The best I could do was heft the big box up to chest level, then mostly eyeball it from there.
With the thing pointed, I rotated the rod. Slowly.
And just as slowly, the way the thing vibrated my bones changed. If it had been a low-pitched sound, but it was getting higher now. I could even hear a light ring start in my ears.
I rotated the condenser rod more. The vibration increased, but nothing was happening to the tree.
I frowned, then remembered how to drive the car. This rod was the one Julia had called the “fine-tuning rod.” I needed to up the base power before I messed with any fine tuning.
I reached for the main rod, and I rotated it. Halfway through rotating, it hit me that I likely should have set the fine-tuning rod back to a lower setting. Jacking it all the way up hadn’t done shit when the main rod wasn’t amped up, but it might make a huge—
The snow fell off the tree in a big sheet. The ringing in my ears started to fucking hurt. I turned the fine-tuning rod all the way down in one fluid motion, then gripped the main rod again and continued the gradual increase.
About halfway through the full rotation, snow started falling from the branches and leaves. The trunk itself shook at 75%, and I stopped adjusting the rod at about 80%, when the tree looked like it was experiencing an earthquake that only affected a few square meters.
I started cranking the fine-tuning rod again, and at around 40% the tree started to bend. The trunk was thick as shite, but itbent. I cranked the rod further, and bark started snapping. Sheets of bark popped off and exploded like shrapnel. I ducked down to dodge one particularly thick piece that was coming right for my arm, but moving the weapon hit a different part of the tree, and the field shifting around just shredded the whole fucking drunk down into two pieces.
“It works,” Eve shouted as the sound of exploding bark finally died down. The tree stood in two separate pieces, a massive rip down its center. I’d made the field too narrow.
I turned both rods all the way down, re-aimed at another tree, and was less cautious this time. I cranked up faster, trying to hit the tree hard before it had time to bend.
The moment it shook, I cranked the main rod all the way to 100, and I crouched down and pointed the weapon up.
The big tree, at least 20 meters tall, ripped right out of the fucking ground, roots and all. It flew up, and it looked like it would have kept going for a while, but it slammed into another tree, then crashed to the ground. It was louder than thunder.
I turned the coils all the way down, then flipped the switch to turn the weapon off.
We all stared at each other as the booming sound silenced everything around us. Snow fell in thick sheets and powder all around us, even from trees at the furthest edge of my vision.
It took almost thirty seconds for the sound to die down enough that we could speak, and the snowy silence was much quieter than I’d remembered it being.
“Well,” I said, “that must have scared those pirates shitless, but I guess we’re not sneaking up on them.”
Julia looked at Eve. “Do you think this is why they don’t make cars like this anymore?”
