Newton’s Fire

by Will Adams

  There were plastic bottles of solvent and sulphuric acid on the floor by the Ark. Rachel picked up one full of acid, uncapped it and swung it in a backhand arc, spraying it over the three men’s throats and faces as Luke rolled away from them. Walters turned his back in time but Pete and Kieran felt the sting of it at once, screaming in pain and rage as it scorched their skin. She grabbed Luke’s hand and dragged him into the hold then tried to slam closed the door behind her. Walters stuck his foot in the gap, however, and hauled it open again, aiming the taser at her. She grabbed a bottle of solvent and squirted it over his chest and face as he fired. The jolt stunned her and flung her onto her back, but what shocked her more was the way the sparks ignited the solvent as it spurted over Walters, erupting into a violent blaze. He shrieked and dropped the taser, tried to slap out the flames on his throat and chin and clothes and hair, but too late, they were already in his mouth, each breath drawing them further down into his chest and lungs.

  Luke shoulder-charged him and knocked him backwards out of the hold. He grabbed the door by its interior handle and slammed it shut. Rachel was still trembling from the jolt, but she struggled to her feet to help him hold it. There was no lock on this side, no way to block it, opening outwards into the main cabin as it did; but there was a length of blue strapping on the floor, and Luke used it to tether the door to the base of the Ark, pulling it as taut as it would go. He found two more lengths of tape among some discarded packaging and anchored the door even more firmly.

  ‘Will that hold?’ asked Rachel.

  ‘It’ll give us time to find something better.’

  ‘Like what?’

  He waved a hand to indicate the whole cargo bay: the Ark, the pallets of supplies, the overhead lockers and the oak chests. ‘I’ll take a look,’ he said.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  I

  Galia Michaeli printed off the flight map and the amended prisoner release document and hurried into the control room. Everyone was far too frantic to pay any attention to someone as lowly as her, however. They all waved her away. Her nerve failed her. These people were experienced journalists, after all. They knew what mattered and what didn’t. She was probably overestimating the significance of her find, she told herself. She retreated and went back out.

  The editor of the morning show was on his mobile in the corridor, bawling out their hapless Jerusalem reporter for letting himself be scooped by Channel 2. He was infamous for his temper, her editor, for firing staff on the spot for the most innocuous offences. For all she knew, he’d seen the extra paragraph when the email had first arrived, had discarded it as nothing. The temptation to pretend she hadn’t found it at all, to keep her head down and not be noticed, almost overwhelmed her. But this was news, she realized; and news was her vocation.

  She went to stand in front of him, nervously held out the two pages. He took them, scanned them, frowned. ‘What the fuck are these?’ he demanded.

  She did her best to explain, though her tongue was a small mammal in her mouth. He glared at her as she spoke; he looked incandescent.

  ‘You’re trying to tell me this extra paragraph was in that fucking email?’ he asked.

  She nodded, aware her eyes were watering. ‘They must have deleted it before they sent it out,’ she managed. ‘But not properly.’

  He nodded. If possible, he looked even angrier. He marched straight into the control room, held the sheets up high. ‘Why the fuck did none of you pricks spot this?’ he yelled.

  ‘Spot what?’

  They checked their own copies of the document as he explained, verified her story for themselves. For the first time, they looked at Galia with something approaching respect. It made her feel ten feet tall.

  ‘I want cameras in the air now,’ the editor said. ‘I want this fucking aircraft filmed all the way in.’

  ‘At this time of morning?’ asked Lev, his deputy, the only one who ever dared stand up to him. ‘Forget anything fixed wing. We’d never get it prepped and up in time. But maybe we could use the traffic chopper.’

  ‘What’s its ceiling?’

  ‘Three thousand metres, give or take. Enough to film their approach.’

  ‘Put them up now,’ he said. ‘I want to skull-fuck those Channel 2 bastards. You understand? It’s payback time.’ He turned to Galia. ‘You’re our new work experience girl, right?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And all the shit we give you, it hasn’t put you off?’

  ‘I want to work here, sir. More than anything.’

  ‘Then congratulations,’ he told her. ‘You’re hired.’

  II

  Croke was checking the latest bulletins from Jerusalem when he heard the commotion outside. He ignored it at first, assuming it would sort itself out. But then came the shrieks. He opened his door to see Walters staggering backwards out of the cargo hold, his whole upper body ablaze. He fell onto his back and lay there screaming, his face charred and flames flickering from his mouth as if from some vanquished dragon as he died. Croke whirled on Pete and Kieran, washing their arms and faces in the galley sink. ‘What the hell happened?’ he demanded.

  ‘Acid,’ said Pete succinctly, turning to show Croke his blotched and blistered face, the frightening red of his corneas.

  The sight shocked Croke into silence. But not for long. ‘Get in there,’ he said. ‘Finish them.’

  ‘You’re kidding, right?’ snarled Kieran. ‘They’ve got acid, solvent and a taser.’

  ‘We can cover up your exposed skin.’

  ‘We can cover up your exposed skin.’

  ‘That wasn’t a request,’ said Croke. ‘That was an order.’

  ‘Stuff it up your arse.’

  ‘Jesus!’ said Manfredo, arriving with Vig at that moment. ‘What happened?

  ‘They’re in there,’ said Croke, nodding at the door. ‘Go get them.’

  ‘No need,’ said Vig. ‘Easier just to lock them in, then depressurize. We’ll starve them of air in no time.’

  Croke frowned. ‘We can do that from out here?’

  Vig nodded. ‘Sure. It’s all controlled from the cockpit.’

  ‘What about breathing masks? Won’t they drop down?’

  ‘We stripped them out last year,’ said Vig. ‘It was too much grief having them deploy every time we depressurized. Anyone who wants air back there has to take it in themselves.’

  ‘And we have enough time before we land?’

  Vig shrugged. ‘You don’t want to hurry something like this, not at thirty thousand. It risks all kinds of shit. But we can still make it nasty back there pretty damn quick. Ten minutes and they’ll be struggling. Fifteen and they’ll be unconscious. Twenty and they’ll be dead. Then we close the vents, pump some air back in, open the door and dump them during our approach. ’ He gave Walters a prod with his foot. ‘But we’ll need to start now.’

  Croke nodded. ‘Then get busy,’ he said.

  III

  Compared to the main cabin, the cargo hold was all functionality. There were bench seats along either side, but they were folded up to make room for the Ark, the chests, assorted luggage and the pallets of supplies. Luke tried the chests first. The end panel of the largest had been removed, leaving its innards exposed; but there was nothing inside. He tried the two smaller ones next. The first contained vestments, including the robe Jay had held up earlier; the second contained some old bottles of liquid, some thin squares of wood and sheets of white linen along with dented and misshapen coils of some soft, grey metal, probably lead to judge from their weight.

  A tarpaulin near the tail had been folded back over itself. The shape beneath was unmistakeable. Luke felt a mix of grief and anger as he pulled it back. He’d already braced himself to find Jay dead, but not for the blotching of his skin or the broken, torn fingernails, nor for the blue strapping around his throat. He couldn’t leave him with that grotesque garrotte, so he found a box-cutter by the pallets and cut it away before folding Jay back beneath his shroud. Then he rumma
ged fruitlessly through the suitcases and the overhead lockers, finding nothing but blankets and life-jackets.

  ‘Was that Jay?’ asked Rachel, when he rejoined her.

  ‘Yes.’

  She touched his forearm. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said.

  Some kind of plan or chart was unrolled beside the Ark, its corners pinned down by bottles. Luke crouched to study it. It proved to be a schematic with a photograph of a Newton text clipped to a corner. Luke freed the photograph and took it to better light. There were ghostly lines beneath Newton’s handwriting, very similar to those in the larger schematic. The implication was clear. The great man had drawn the schematic himself, then he’d erased it and reused the paper for a religious text. Jay must have spotted the faint traces in Jerusalem, enhanced them with modern photographic techniques, then recreated this larger, cleaner version. It showed the Ark from front and side and top, and not as a religious relic, but as some kind of machine. No wonder Jay and his uncle had got so excited. No wonder they’d resolved to double-check every known Newton paper, and find all the missing ones too. He looked at Rachel. ‘Nikola Tesla,’ he said.

  She shook her head. ‘What about him?’

  ‘Jay had a picture of him on his wall. And I studied him as an undergraduate. Your archetypal crackpot inventor. Bankrupted himself trying to invent an electrical super-weapon. He claimed that it would make whole armies drop dead in their tracks.’ He put his hand on the Ark. ‘The thing is, it’s possible he got the idea from this. There’s this bizarre paper he wrote, claiming that the Ark wasn’t a religious artefact at all, but rather an incredibly powerful capacitor.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A capacitor. It’s a device that can hold a huge electrical charge. Like a battery, except designed to discharge in a single great jolt, like thunderclouds in a storm. That’s what would have made it so lethal.’

  ‘The ancients didn’t have that kind of technology,’ said Rachel. ‘We’d have found evidence if they had.’

  ‘What else are your Baghdad batteries?’ asked Luke. ‘It’s the same basic principle, only taken up a few notches. Anyway, I’m not saying he was right. All I’m saying is that maybe Newton came to the same conclusion: that the Ark was some kind of super-weapon, just as the Bible describes. An alchemical super-weapon. Because gold wasn’t merely a metal to people like Newton, remember. It wasn’t even primarily a metal. It was a symbol. It symbolized the sun. It symbolized light. It symbolized the sacred fire itself, which Newton believed was electricity. And what was alchemy, after all? At its simplest, what was its purpose?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Rachel shook her head. ‘I guess to turn base metal into gold.’

  ‘Not quite,’ said Luke. ‘It was to turn base metal into gold by treating it with sulphuric acid. And if gold was really light, if gold was really electricity, doesn’t that pretty much describe a lead battery?’

  FORTY-NINE

  I

  Rachel stared at Luke as if he was crazy. ‘A lead battery? You’re not serious?’

  ‘Why not?’ said Luke. ‘Forget about what the Ark really was, or whether it even existed. That doesn’t matter, not for this. All that matters is what Newton believed it to be. And Newton believed that Moses had been a great alchemist, one with access to all kinds of lost knowledge. So of course Moses would have known the secret of sacred fire; of course he’d have harnessed it in his Ark. And Newton saw himself as Moses’ successor, so of course he’d have set himself to rediscover those secrets, of course he’d have wanted to create his own Ark. And then Ashmole and Wren showed him the panels of wood and the twelve stones for the high priest’s robes and maybe some crude instructions for a Baghdad battery that Tradescant had picked up on his travels. It must have felt like destiny.’

  ‘But electricity was a nineteenth century technology, wasn’t it?’ frowned Rachel. ‘I know Newton experimented with it, but surely a device like this was way beyond even him.’

  ‘Van Musschenbroek invented Leyden jars a couple of decades after Newton,’ said Luke. ‘He coated the inside and outside of a bottle with foil to create positive and negative plates, then he put a metal rod inside them and generated a charge by rubbing glass with silk. They could knock a man out cold. Benjamin Franklin recommended them for killing turkeys.’

  ‘Killing turkeys isn’t destroying armies.’

  ‘Van Musschenbroek wasn’t Newton.’ It hadn’t just been his intellectual prowess that had set Newton apart. He’d also been a fantastically talented craftsman. Sightseers had travelled miles to see his childhood contraptions; and it had been his reflecting telescope, rather than his theories, that had first won him election to the Royal Society. ‘All that effort working out the length of the sacred cubit. Who cares if the Temple’s out by a foot or two? But the Ark was measured in cubits too. Electrical equipment has to be perfect.’ He gave a dry laugh. ‘Think about it: the greatest mind in scientific history working flat out on a single problem for twenty years. Would you honestly bet against him having come up with something of enormous power and originality?’

  ‘He’d have told someone,’ she protested.

  ‘No,’ insisted Luke. ‘He hated sharing his ideas. Every time he did, it inevitably kicked off some new controversy. With Hooke, with Flamsteed, with Leibniz. Besides, he was head of the Royal Mint, remember? And he believed he’d discovered the philosopher’s stone. Imagine the panic there’d have been if word had got out that the man in that job had discovered how to turn base metals into gold. And when he was dying, he went through everything he’d ever written and made a great bonfire of all the papers he didn’t want outliving him. No one knows what they were, but I’ll bet they were about the Ark, about electricity. He’d have been terrified of people using them to trash his reputation and denounce him as a sorcerer and a heretic.’

  ‘But he missed two sets of the papers,’ murmured Rachel, finally coming around. ‘And Jay found the first in Jerusalem.’

  ‘And I found the second in your aunt’s attic.’ He checked the Ark. Its lid looked like solid gold, but it wasn’t heavy enough for that, so it was presumably wood covered by gold leaf. Rachel helped him remove it and set it down on the floor. Then they both looked inside.

  ‘What the hell?’ muttered Rachel.

  But Luke only nodded. It was much as the schematic depicted: a honeycomb of cells separated by wooden panels and fibreglass mats. A lead coil stood on its side in each compartment. He picked one up. Not pure lead but an alloy formed into a thin grid then stuffed with metallic paste and covered with cloth before being rolled. He peered down into the vacant bay. A sheet of wood riven by filaments of gold lay a few inches down, hinting at a second and maybe even a third layer of cells beneath.

  ‘How does it work?’ asked Rachel.

  Luke returned the coil to its berth. He put his finger and thumb on it and its neighbour. ‘Each of these pairs form a single electric cell,’ he said. ‘Combine them with other cells and you have a battery.’ It was actually how batteries had got their name, because they worked so much more effectively in parallel, like cannon. ‘Twenty cells on top. At least twenty more beneath. That’s forty minimum, maybe sixty.’

  ‘Enough to kill a turkey?’

  ‘God, yes. And see these mats? Fibreglass is porous enough to allow liquid to seep through.’

  A wry smile. ‘So Newton had fibreglass now?’

  Luke nodded at the oak chests. ‘There are lots of linen sheets in there. They’d have worked fine. But acid degrades linen pretty quickly, so Jay must have used Newton’s specs to create modern versions of everything. New coils, new dividers, fresh chemicals. But the wiring is all Newton’s.’

  ‘Wiring?’ frowned Rachel.

  ‘Wood doesn’t conduct electricity. Gold is about the best conductor there is. Put the two together and you’ve got wiring.’ He patted the sides of the Ark. ‘I’ll bet there’s more inside these walls.’

  ‘What does it do?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’d
have to strip it down.’

  Rachel touched her forehead, as if she had a headache coming on. ‘You must have some idea.’

  ‘I know how to start it,’ he said. ‘Just pour in sulphuric acid and distilled water and then turn on this electric motor.’ He kicked it with his foot.

  ‘The Ark won’t generate its own power?’

  ‘Capacitors and batteries are typically storage devices, not generators. Newton would have used some kind of friction machine. He had this saying as an old man: if you want to keep your legs, you have to use your legs. So maybe he invented the treadmill or the exercise bike; I wouldn’t have put it past him.’ He frowned, developing a headache of his own now. And each breath was taking more effort. ‘Oh, hell,’ he said, when he realized the implication. ‘They’ve turned off our air.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘They can depressurize back here. They must be doing it now.’

  ‘No!’ cried Rachel. ‘What’ll happen?’

  ‘I don’t know. Altitude sickness, I guess. Headaches. Nausea. Unconsciousness.’

  She gave him a fierce look. ‘Death?’

  He felt wretched. He wanted to comfort her. But she deserved the truth. ‘Eventually,’ he said.

  ‘We have to fight back,’ she said grimly. ‘How can we fight back, Luke?’

  He placed his hand on the Ark. ‘This is a weapon, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘I think it’s time we found out what it can do.’

  II

  Avram glanced down at the remote control trigger in his left hand. It gave him an intoxicating sense of power. All he needed to do was pop the safety catch and press the red trigger and the world would be transformed.

  But not yet …

  Another tour of the walls, exhorting Shlomo and Danel and their men to stay alert for movement outside, for possible counterattacks. Not that they needed telling. They were all pumped up by adrenalin and success. Only Benyamin was looking miserable. ‘Aren’t you glad you came?’ Avram asked.