Ball Lightning

by Cixin Liu

  “Those rules may apply to lieutenant colonels and higher ranking officers, but the soldiers executing this mission are just thunderball gunners. They don’t know much. I’ve made inquiries, and the higher-ups have given their tacit permission. I’m telling the truth. Please believe me.”

  Lin Yun was correct. In the early stages of Dawnlight’s training, Kang Ming had wanted to conduct all-round training in both operation and repair of the thunderball gun, but she had staunchly opposed the idea, and had pushed successfully for the strict separation of personnel for weapons operations and engineering services. The thunderball gunners were not permitted to dismantle the weapons, nor did they have any opportunity to come into contact with the principles of the weapon or other technical information. Their only concern was its use. Up until they boarded the fishing boats, none of the gunners knew that what they were firing was ball lightning. They believed, as the commander had told them, that they were firing EM radiation bombs. Looking back, Lin Yun’s decision was made not merely for confidentiality purposes, but also out of kindness.

  “This kind of mission is seldom seen in modern warfare. If the attack fails, we require nothing from these soldiers other than the immediate destruction of their weapons,” she said urgently.

  Lieutenant Colonel Kang hesitated for a few seconds, then waved a hand at the unit. “Very well. Put these uniforms on at once. Be quick about it!” Then he turned toward Lin Yun and extended a hand. “Thank you, Major Lin.”

  *

  Ding Yi interrupted his story to remark, “You can see where she had become fragile.”

  *

  The following account Ding Yi pieced together after the fact.

  Ten minutes later, the fifty fishing boats filed out of the harbor, a classic scene of fishermen heading out to sea at dawn. No one would have imagined that the humble craft were en route to attack the most powerful fleet on the planet.

  After leaving the harbor, Kang Ming and the naval commanding officers—a lieutenant commander, a lieutenant, and two junior lieutenants—held a meeting on a larger fishing boat that served as a command craft for the hundred-odd helmsmen and engineers piloting the fishing boats.

  The lieutenant commander said to Kang Ming, “Colonel, I suggest your people stay hidden belowdecks. You clearly don’t look like fishermen.”

  “We can’t stand the fishy stench down there,” Kang Ming said with a grimace.

  The lieutenant said, “Our orders are to pilot the fishing boats to the designated region, and to accept your instructions only when enemy ships appear. Our superiors said this mission is extremely dangerous, and asked for volunteers. That’s highly unusual, you know.”

  A junior lieutenant said, “I’m the navigator of a Luda-class destroyer. It would be more than a little pathetic if I sank on this leaky boat.”

  “Even if this leaky boat is headed to attack a carrier battle group?” Kang Ming asked.

  The junior lieutenant nodded. “That would be more heroic. Yeah, back in school, attacking a carrier was our biggest dream. The second was to be a ship captain. The third was to find a woman able to put up with us being at sea all the time.”

  “We’ve been tasked with targeting a cruiser. If we succeed, the enemy carrier will be sunk in a matter of minutes.”

  Four naval officers stared in astonishment. “Colonel, you’ve got to be kidding!”

  Kang Ming said, “Why act so surprised? Have you lost the courage of your predecessors? Back when the country was founded, the navy once sunk a destroyer with wooden boats.”

  “Sure, and we ought to do them one better and assault a mobile offshore platform with surfboards!” the lieutenant commander said.

  A junior lieutenant said, “Even so, we’ve got to have weapons, right? All we’ve got aboard this vessel are a few handguns.”

  Kang Ming asked, “What do you think that equipment on board was?”

  “Those are weapons?” the lieutenant commander asked, looking at the other three officers.

  The lieutenant said, “It looks like radio or radar. Isn’t that an antenna there on the deck?”

  “That, I can tell you, is the weapon we’re going to use against the carrier group,” Kang Ming said.

  The lieutenant commander laughed. “Comrade Colonel, you’re making it hard for us to be serious.”

  A junior lieutenant pointed at the two superconducting batteries and quipped, “I’ve got it. Those are depth charges, and the two iron frames are launch rails.”

  Kang Ming nodded. “I can’t tell you the weapon’s real name, so let’s just call them depth charges.” He showed the officers a red button on one of the batteries, and said, “This is the self-destruct button. If things get tight, the first thing we’ve got to do is press this, and then toss the thing into the ocean. Whatever happens, we can’t let it fall into enemy hands.”

  “Don’t worry, our superiors have stressed that repeatedly. If there’s nothing else, then we should get to work. This old boat leaks oil all over.”

  *

  They reached the ambush point around noon and began a long wait, during which Kang Ming had little to do apart from scanning the ambush line and checking the state of each vessel’s thunderball gun. The boat he was on had a radio, which he used to contact headquarters just twice, once to report that all vessels were in place, and a second time to resolve a technical issue: he had reservations about the plan’s stipulation that all boats operate under a blackout after dark. He felt it was pointless, and would only serve to raise the enemy’s suspicion. Headquarters concurred, and instructed all vessels to run with normal lighting. No information was provided about the enemy’s movements.

  Their anxiety and excitement quickly burned away in the blistering sun, and they no longer trained their binoculars constantly on the northern horizon. So as not to attract attention, the vessels occasionally moved back and forth in a small area, futilely tossing the nets out and bringing them back in again. The lieutenant was skilled at this, and managed to catch a few fish. Kang Ming learned that he hailed from a fishing village in Shandong.

  More of their time was spent on the deck, playing cards or chatting about all sorts of topics with their backs to the sun. The only thing they didn’t mention was their mission, and the fate of the tiny ambush fleet.

  By nightfall, the team had grown a little lax, after so long a wait. It had been over eight hours since their last contact with headquarters, and since then there had been nothing but static on the radio. Kang Ming had not slept well for several nights, and the monotonous rhythm of the ocean waves made him drowsy, but he fought to stay awake.

  Someone nudged him gently. It was the lieutenant commander. “Look ahead to the left, but don’t be too obvious,” he said softly. A reddish moon had just risen over the horizon, rendering the ocean surface clear. In that direction, Kang Ming first saw a V-shaped wake, then, at its head, a thin black vertical rod with a spherical object at its tip. It reminded him of a photo he had seen somewhere of the Loch Ness Monster, its long neck extending from the murky water.

  “Periscope,” the lieutenant commander whispered.

  The thin rod moved quickly. As it cut through the water’s surface it whipped out an arc of spray that was audible as a light whoosh. Then it gradually slowed, and the spray lessened and vanished. The periscope, now directly ahead of their vessel around twenty meters away, was motionless.

  “Ignore it,” the lieutenant commander said, a slight smile on his face, as if he was absorbed in conversation with Kang Ming.

  Just before he turned away, Kang Ming clearly saw the glint of light reflecting off the glass spherical object at the top of the rod. Then the lieutenant and the two junior lieutenants emerged from the cabin carrying a netting shuttle, and sat right on the tarp covering the weapon’s launch rail to mend nets under the moonlight. Kang Ming watched the captain’s skilled hands and followed his movements, but his mind concentrated on the strange eye behind him that was staring at them from the ocean, stabbing in
to his back.

  The lieutenant said, “I’ll throw this one over, and with any luck it’ll get tangled in their damn propeller.” He wore an expression of lazy fatigue, as if complaining about having to work so late at night.

  “Then toss over those two depth charges,” a junior lieutenant said, chuckling. Then he turned to Kang Ming. “Say something.” But Kang Ming couldn’t come up with anything.

  The lieutenant pointed at the net and asked him, “How’s my mending look?”

  Kang Ming held the mended section up against the light coming from the cabin, inspected it, and said to him, “Let’s give them a look at your handiwork.”

  The lieutenant commander said, “It’s moving again.”

  The lieutenant warned Kang Ming, “Don’t look back.”

  After a while, they heard the whooshing sound again, and when they looked behind them, the rod was heading away from them at increasing speed, lowering as it went, until it was entirely underwater.

  The lieutenant threw down the net, stood up, and said to Kang Ming, “Colonel, if I were commanding that sub I’d have seen through us. You held the net all wrong!”

  Then the radio received a short message from headquarters telling them that the enemy fleet had reached the ambush area, and to prepare for attack.

  Before long, they heard a faint rumbling sound that quickly grew loud. They looked off to the northern sky and saw a line of black dots appear—five of them, one smack in the middle of the moon’s disc, so its whirling rotors were visible. The five helicopters came in fast and rumbled overhead, red beacons flashing on their bellies. One dropped a long object that hit the water not far from them in a plume of white; a short distance later, another helicopter dropped another long object. Kang Ming asked what they were, and the lieutenant commander’s voice answered from the cabin: “Sonar buoys for submarine detection. The enemy takes great care with its antisubmarine measures.”

  The helicopters soon vanished into the southern night sky, and stillness returned once more. Now Kang Ming’s micro-earpiece, tied in to the radio in the cabin, chirped with a voice from headquarters.

  “The target is approaching. All vessels to shooting state. Over.”

  The moon was now blocked by clouds, darkening the ocean surface, but a glow had appeared in the northern sky, the same glow that was visible from the base each evening in the direction of the city. Kang Ming raised his binoculars, and for a moment had the impression he was looking at a glittering shoreline.

  “We’re too far forward!” the lieutenant commander shouted, putting down his binoculars and dashing into the cabin. The fishing boat’s turbines rumbled to life and it reversed course.

  The glow in the north grew brighter, and when they turned back to look at it, the “shore lights” on the horizon were visible even without binoculars. With them, they could make out individual ships. The voice in Kang Ming’s earpiece said, “Attention all vessels. The target formation is basically unchanged. Proceed according to original plan. Over.”

  Battlefield command, Kang Ming knew, had now been transferred to their vessel. If everything had developed as expected, they had only to wait for the cruisers at the head of the enemy fleet to advance directly in front of their small craft, then give the order to fire, since they knew from their intel of the enemy’s fleet formation that the fleet would be entirely encircled at that point. Now they made their final preparations before firing: putting on life jackets.

  The fleet approached quickly. When individual ships became visible to the naked eye, Kang Ming looked for targets he could identify only to hear the lieutenant shout, “That’s Stennis!”—perhaps because the ship’s shape had been imprinted in his brain at the naval academy. As he shouted, he looked at Kang Ming with a challenge: Let’s see what you do now. Kang Ming stood at the bow, silently watching the swiftly approaching fleet.

  Enormous ovals cast by the fleet’s searchlights danced chaotically on the water ahead of them. Occasionally the beams caught a fishing boat in a beam and threw a long shadow onto the surface, but they soon moved away. The small boats apparently did not attract attention. The enormous fleet now filled their whole field of vision. Details of the two cruisers at the front were clearly visible under the moonlight and the ships’ running lights, while the six destroyers on either side were black silhouettes, and the enormous bodies of the three carriers in the center of the formation cast giant shadows on the water. The sailors on the fishing boats heard a sharp, scalp-tingling whistle overhead that grew dramatically louder, as if the sky were being cut open. They craned their necks upward in time to see four fighters pass by. And then they began to hear the rolling crash of surf, the sound of those metal hulls plying the waves. The thin white cruisers passed by, followed by the gray iron destroyers—which, though smaller than the cruisers, appeared much larger, since they were on the nearer side of the formation. They dazzled with intricate superstructures and towering antennae. A few sailors were visible moving about on board. Soon the carriers were in front of them, partially obscured by the destroyers: three nuclear-powered floating cities, three death-bringing iron mountains whose outlines seemed beyond the work of human hands. For the troops on the fishing boats, this massive fleet was a surreal sight, as if they had suddenly landed on a strange planet whose surface was covered in enormous iron castles.

  Kang Ming took out a tiny wireless mouthpiece from his lapel, and the two Dawnlight gunners who had stayed in the hold the entire time lifted the tarp off the thunderball gun, lay down on it, and aimed directly at the cruiser passing ahead of them, tracking it with the launch rail. Kang Ming said in a soft voice, “All fire points, commence firing.”

  Ball lightning issued from the tip of the rails, strands of pearls issuing an ear-splitting crackle and lighting up the surrounding ocean with an intensely flickering blue electric light. A string of red thunderballs flew across the ocean, close to the surface, trailing long tails and whistling sharply. Gracefully, they swept by the stern of the first destroyer and the prow of the second, heading toward the cruiser.

  Lines of ball lightning shot at the fleet by the other fishing boats looked from this distance like bright rays of light. When ball lightning was fired along an unvarying trajectory, the ionized air formed a fluorescent trail that would continue to glow after the lightning itself moved on. These trails fanned out from each fishing boat and expanded as the ball lightning moved about. The battleground was a giant net made out of strings of ball lightning and their far more numerous fluorescent trails.

  They seemed on the cusp of a grand moment in the history of warfare.

  But just as the first group of ball lightning was about to reach the target, their trajectories were diverted by a giant, invisible hand. The ball lightning shot up into the air, or plunged into the ocean, or veered off to either side, passing far from the prow or stern of their targets. And when the diverted ball lightning flew near neighboring ships, the same thing happened. It was as if every ship in the fleet was enveloped in a giant glass enclosure that ball lightning could not penetrate.

  “A magnetic shield!”

  This was the first thought that entered Kang Ming’s mind. Something that had come up countless times in the nightmares of ball lightning researchers had come to pass in the real world.

  Kang Ming shouted the command: “All strike teams, abort firing! Destroy your weapons!”

  On each boat, a Dawnlight sergeant pressed a red button on the thunderball gun, then, together with the other crew members, shoved it into the ocean. Not long after, the sound of muffled explosions carried up from the depths, and the surface of the ocean roiled, rocking their boats. The superconducting batteries that powered the guns had been shorted out and exploded with a power equivalent to a depth charge. The thunderball guns were now in pieces underwater.

  The streams of ball lightning from the fishing boats had been severed simultaneously. Now a large mass of ball lightning floated above the fleet, absent any targets, weaving a shining carpet in th
e air with their fiery tails. Their sound changed from a uniform whistle to a chaotic buzz or shrill moaning.

  Kang Ming saw a flash from a gun on the destroyer, but only in his peripheral vision. When the shell struck the command ship, he was staring straight ahead at the sea, where the ball lightning that had fallen into the water continued to glow faintly, like a school of effervescent fish.

  The sound of guns grew thick, and in the ocean on either side of the fleet, huge columns of water bearing pieces of the fishing boats rose and fell. When the firing stopped after three minutes, forty-two of the fifty fishing boats had been taken out. They were so small that most of them hadn’t even sunk, but had been blown to pieces by direct hits from the large guns. The eight remaining ships were locked in a circle of searchlights, as if taking a lonely curtain call at the close of this tragedy on the ocean stage.

  The ball lightning released its energy as electromagnetic radiation, and soon went out, ionized air forming a fluorescent canopy in the air above the fleet. The radiation’s effect on the ocean covered it in a layer of thick white steam. Some long-lasting balls of lightning slowly floated away, their sound growing fainter and more ethereal, like lonely ghost lanterns carried by the wind.

  *

  How the enemy knew of ball lightning’s existence, and how it had built a system to defend against it, were unanswered questions. But there were some scattered clues: at the test target range in the south the previous year, ball lightning shot from the thunderball gun hadn’t entered a quantum state even in the absence of our observers, which meant that there was another observer present. It was known that the nuclear plant operation could lead to a leak, but it was deemed to be worth the risk. The enemy could hardly have learned the fundamental principles of ball lightning or the technical details of the weapon from observing, but they too had been studying that natural phenomenon for many years. They may even have conducted large-scale R&D, like Project 3141 in Siberia, and if so would not have found it difficult to guess the truth beneath those scattered intelligence reports. And the effect of magnetic fields on ball lightning had long been known to science, independent of the nature of ball lightning itself.