فصل 64

chapter-64 A Billion volts

In 1945, at an army testing site in New Mexico, the first atomic bomb was tested. The explosion was enormous, its energy equivalent to that released by 40 million pounds of dynamite—equal to all the energy produced and consumed in the United States every thirty seconds: That’s every car, lamp, diesel, dishwasher, jet airplane, diesel train, factory, everything. However, this bomb’s energy was released in a few millionths of a second, and in a volume only a few inches wide.

The resulting explosion was terrible. The hundred-foot steel tower on which the bomb was mounted was completely vaporized. The ball of air formed by the explosion boiled up to a height of thirty-five thousand feet, higher than Mount Everest. For hundreds of yards around the blast site the surface of the desert sand turned to glass.

That isn’t far from what happened that day on Hades. Hatch was still a mile out to sea when lightning struck the tower, or, more accurately, Michael Vey. No one had ever seen anything like it. It was like being a witness of that first atom bomb testing. The lightning hit but didn’t dissipate. Instead, Michael absorbed it. Like the energy of that atom bomb released in a volume only a few inches wide, Michael held all billion volts in a five-foot-six-inch, 126-pound frame.

Michael Vey did something no one had ever done before. He held lightning. Not long, only for a thousandth of a second, but long enough to redirect and amplify the force of the energy. The pulse he created shot outward in a supersonic shockwave that destroyed everything above ground, turning the white, crystal sand of Hades to glass. The flash was so intense that it was seen as far away as Nike and by pilots in Australia and New Zealand.

The few Elgen guards at sea who survived the blast were blinded by the light, and had Hatch not been wearing his special sunglasses, he would have been also.

All of the Elgen boats engaged in the siege either caught fire or were capsized by the resultant waves.

Hatch, with twelve crew members and his personal guards, escaped in one of the Faraday’s life pods, the only one that hadn’t been damaged by the heat. Twelve hours later, he reached Nike broken and ranting. He still didn’t know that the Joule had been stolen.