Termination Shock

“There’s available water in your lungs,” Saskia explained, “so if you inhale sulfur dioxide, next thing you know you’ve got sulfuric acid in a place where you really don’t want it.”

Bob raised one eyebrow and nodded.

“So what have we established?” T.R. asked rhetorically. “T.R. owns a fuck ton of sulfur. Sulfur can easily be made into a liquid. Sulfur burns. Does that put y’all in mind of anything?”

He had begun leading them toward a rusty galvanized steel warehouse a few dozen meters away. Parked near it were a few newish-looking cars and pickup trucks. Saskia observed parking stickers for White Label Industries LLC, and sure enough the distinctive white-rectangle logo—just a blank sheet of printer paper—was taped to a door that led into the warehouse.

She was also noticing an abundance of orange wind socks, such as were commonly seen around airports. These people very much cared which way the wind was blowing.

The building was a lot more spruce inside than its exterior would lead one to expect. Of paramount importance to them, it was air-conditioned. For all purposes it was an extension of White Label headquarters a few miles away. This, however, had more in the way of safety gear and other real-world operational features.

They were ushered into a control room separated from the building’s cargo bay by a wall of windows that seemed inordinately thick. In spite of that, they were each given full-face respirators and taught how to put them on when and if a certain alarm were to sound. The previous conversation about sulfuric acid in the lungs had left little to the imagination and so all of them paid due attention. In the meantime, on the other side of the glass, workers in white bunny suits and respirators were working on a system that, to the eyes of a layperson, consisted entirely of plumbing. At the end closest to the open bay door, basically outside the building, was the object that seemed to be the point of it all, tended to by the bunny-suited priesthood on the far side of the glass. But even this was just plumbing. It was a pipe on a stand, aimed out at the world.

“Your Majesty,” T.R. said, “will know more than anyone else here—with the possible exception of the Right Honorable the Lord Mayor—about the V-1 buzz bomb.”

“The Farting Fury!” Bob said with surprising relish. “My granddad used to talk about them. He saw—and heard—one pass over him in Kent.”

Saskia knew the term at least as well as Bob. She was slower to respond, though, since she had been trained to think hard and choose her words carefully when any topic related to the Second World War came up in conversation. “One of Hitler’s advanced superweapons. The Nazis launched some of them from my country. They had some kind of a special engine. A primitive jet.”

“Pulse jet, it’s called,” T.R. said agreeably. “The pulsing style of operation is why Bob’s pawpaw referred to it as the Farting Fury. Absolutely terrible design for anything other than our exact purposes.”

Technicians here in the control room had been talking to the bunny suit wearers on the other side of the glass. These had been opening valves and checking gauges. On a signal, they all vacated the bay. Some kind of extremely well-organized procedure ensued, similar in its emotional arc to a rocket launch countdown. As such it dragged on for a few minutes. T.R. killed a little time by stepping up to the window and using a laser pointer to draw their attention to some details that might otherwise have been lost in the welter of pipes and cables. First was an ordinary white plastic five-gallon bucket, sitting on the floor, half full of sulfur. “Our high-tech S transportation modality. Totally human-powered,” T.R. explained, with the deadpan style that Saskia was coming to recognize as a hallmark of his personality. Near it was a rolling steel staircase, currently positioned so that it ran up to a platform at about head height. There was a vertical glass tube maybe a hand span in diameter and an arm’s length in height, mostly full of sulfur. Its top was open, presumably so that more sulfur could be dumped in from the bucket. Its bottom was swallowed in a stainless-steel fitting. “Fuel tank.” From there, things got hard to follow until T.R.’s laser dot tracked down the length of a pipe—or at least one could assume the existence of a pipe—jacketed in a tubular blanket of insulation and helpfully labeled S (MOLTEN) WARNING HOT. This led directly to the big pipe aimed out the door. “Fuel line,” T.R. explained. “Liquid sulfur’s flowing down it right now.” The laser dot terminated its journey on the device. “To the combustion chamber.”