Einstein Must Die! (Fate of Nations Book 1) (19 page)

“It’s OK, Nikola. You fought hard for him, I know you did.” She wrapped her arm around her daughter’s shoulders, pulling her to her side. “We all do, right, Madelaine?”

The little girl nodded, her lips pursed together.

Savannah ran her fingers through Madelaine’s hair, sweeping the bangs out of her eyes. “We spent the night saying good-bye to him. It’s time you did too. Sometimes we need to listen to what the universe is telling us. He’s gone.”

Tesla stood unsteadily, his eyelids heavy with exhaustion. He heard her words, and after they’d bounced around in his head for a moment, he understood them. He’d done his level best, but to continue further would be unnecessarily cruel to the colonel’s family. He knew the value in grieving and closing the door on a painful tragedy.

“You’re right, of course,” he said. He crossed to the workstation where the RCA cube and its single glowing light bulb still stood. He put his hand on the breaker switch.
 

One pull, and the power supply would stop sending current into the RCA. The oscillating waves of power would fade, then bleed away to nothingness. Any usable pattern would be gone forever. The capacitors would hold a minute charge for a few minutes, but then they too would go dark, and the RCA would return to being nothing more than a collection of wires and switches.

Tesla wrapped his hand around the breaker switch and looked to Savannah for permission to throw it.

She pulled Madelaine tighter against her and nodded.

He pulled, feeling the breaker’s spring tension resisting him. Then he froze. He released the breaker and stood still, processing some partly formed thought.
 

“Nikola?” Savannah asked.

There was something she said… He rubbed his fingertips together, coaxing the thought out.

“That’s enough, Tesla!” Edison shouted. “You put this family through hell. End this now.”

Savannah watched him, knowing how the man sometimes hooked onto an idea, but still needed to fight and drag it out into the light.

“Is there something you missed?” she asked him.

“I don’t know. Maybe. What you said, about the universe.”

Edison barged forward and faced off against Tesla. “You’re done. Mrs. Browning gave her consent to end this charade, and it will be ended now.”
 

He reached for the breaker switch.

Tesla placed a hand against Edison’s chest and shoved, sending him staggering back. He crashed against a table, knocking a stack of books to the floor with a clatter.

“You son of a bitch,” muttered Edison.

“Wait,” said Tesla. Then he looked up at Savannah, and his face was no longer tired. He looked spry and energized again. “I think the colonel’s been here all along!” he cried.
 

He ran to the table Edison had crashed into and grabbed a linear tuning power amplifier. He brought the bulky device over and dropped it on the table with a loud thud.

“We just couldn’t hear him. The power of his response doesn’t reach the level where the teletype would detect it.” He wired the amplifier into the line feeding the teletype. “If we strengthen his signal, we may hear him.”

Savannah’s hand flew to her chest. “You mean he could have been answering us all this time?”

“It’s possible. Everything else has checked out. It must be this!”

Edison glared at Tesla. “If you give this woman false hope again, Tesla, I will ruin you forever.”

Tesla met his gaze. “Yes, I believe you would.”
 

He took a screwdriver and adjusted the amplifier, then spoke into the microphone again. “Colonel, are you there?”

The room was oppressively silent, and everyone’s eyes were locked onto the teletype, which sat obstinate and unmoving.

Then it chattered into action, startling them all. Everyone crowded around it, straining to see the paper it fed out.

“XJdh5vce uIikkas,” it read.

“Hold on,” said Tesla. He made another adjustment and tried again. “Colonel, this is Tesla. Are you there? Can you hear me?”

Again the teletype chattered, and Savannah whispered, “Oh my God.”

The paper read “Rosabelle, believe.”

Tesla felt a chill as he saw the words as if a spirit had just whispered to him from beyond the grave.

“He told me that story,” Savannah said, pointing a shaking finger at the paper. “It’s him. It’s him!”

Tesla raised a hand. “We can do better, now that we have his signal amplified,” Tesla said. He brought over a loudspeaker and connected it to the RCA’s outputs. A low growl of static hissed from the box.

“Colonel, you should have a voice now. Can you hear me?”

The colonel’s voice was metallic, but recognizably his.
 

“Tesla? This is Colonel Jack Browning, US Army. Can you hear me?”

Savannah wept, celebrating how close they were to losing him, but hadn’t. She gulped a lungful of air.

“Papa!” she cried out.

Madelaine was agog, her eyes wide. “No way,” she whispered.

Tesla let his tired eyes close. The effort had paid off, in full. He took a moment to savor the victory, then looked to Edison. Now faced with Tesla’s victory, he wanted to see the man’s face.

But Edison was staring at the loudspeaker, his mouth clamped shut, his lips white and thin.

EAGER FOR ACTION

“Get the men ready. We head out in twenty minutes,” ordered Lieutenant Danvers. His staff sergeant saluted and went to get the company ready to move out.

The cooking fire had died down, which was fine. The lieutenant was eager to keep going. He knew Fort Hamilton was a smaller base and not a strategically important target. But it meant much to the major, so it was a good opportunity. With luck they’d be there tomorrow morning.

His advance scouts had reported back, and he didn’t anticipate a major fight. With the element of surprise and their new rifles, he expected to lose only thirty men.

He’d given his snipers the Ross MkII long guns. While slow firing, they were deadly accurate out to six hundred yards. The scouts had found several good firing positions, and the snipers had them marked on their maps of the area. His main force carried the new P14 Enfields, which were heavier versions of the previous production runs.
 

He stood and surveyed his company. The men were well trained and well fed, eager for action and glory. Tents were being broken, and horses loaded.
 

Several platoons of infantry were already forming up on the main road, and his dozen cavalry were ready, their horses clomping at the packed earth.

A heavily laden merchant’s cart came down the road then, driven by a small horse team. When the American saw the British troops, he yanked hard on the reins and whipped the cart back where he’d come from. He disappeared in a cloud of dust.

The lieutenant laughed. Today would be a good day.

FIELD TESTS

“Tesla, this is the strangest thing I have ever experienced,” said the colonel.

“It’s the strangest thing
any
man has ever experienced,” Tesla replied, pushing a large cart of ammunition cartridges underneath the huge tank.

The RCA had been finalized and sealed in its metal housing, then hoisted inside the Beowulf tank. Once connected to the tank’s systems, the colonel had
become
the tank.
 

His legs were now twin woven-steel treads, six feet wide. His heart no longer beat with a steady rhythm. Instead, it hummed with the pressure of steam driven to blistering temperatures by coal fired in his furnace.
 

His eyes were a dozen viewports, each holding a camera that fed visual data to his brain.
 

While he couldn’t reach out with hands, he did have instant, intuitive control of antipersonnel chainguns, twin mortar tubes, and an eleven-inch cannon.
 

His hearing was also superhuman. Recessed microphones collected auditory signals from the standard range of frequencies, but at a sensitivity no human ear could match.

The colonel had been overwhelmed by the saturation of stimuli assaulting his mind, and Tesla had been forced to disconnect most of the systems, giving his mind time to adjust before adding them back, one by one. All basic systems now checked out, and the colonel was ready for the next step.

“I want to get outside!” he said. Beowulf had four loudspeakers mounted under its superstructure, and the commanding boom of its voice was startling.

“Like the voice of God,” joked Tesla. “Easy on our ears, hmm? The rest of us aren’t so invulnerable.”

“Sorry. I’m just eager to try more of this out.”

“And you will, Papa,” said Savannah. “As soon as we think it’s safe for you. And us!”

“Actually,” said Tesla, “I think we’re about there. Hang on.” He turned to the six workers busy underneath Beowulf.
 

“George, Sophia?”

They both turned and flashed the thumbs-up. “All set for the first round of tests,” he said, pointing in the direction Beowulf was facing. “We rigged up the targets downrange.”

Sixty yards away a makeshift gun range had been set up. Multiple stationary bull’s-eye targets were mounted on the far wall, some as high as fifty feet from the floor.
 

A series of moving human-sized targets was set on a moving chain, able to slide back and forth behind several fixed panels. On the panels, images of peaceful noncombatants had been painted, their hands up in surrender.

“We’re ready to send rounds downrange. Once we have the gel-rounds loaded, that is,” George continued.

“Got them right here,” said Tesla, patting the large metal canisters on his cart. It wouldn’t do to have Beowulf firing live ammo inside the lab, so training rounds had been created. They were the exact size and shape of standard rounds, but made from a stiff gelatin that was just firm enough to survive Beowulf’s muzzle velocity, but soft enough to not tear chunks from the lab’s wall.

Tesla positioned the cart just under Beowulf’s center.
 

“OK, Colonel, please open the crew chamber for me,” he called out.

Overhead Tesla heard a soft click as the heavy steel panel was unsecured. A hydraulic piston pressurized, and the panel swung inward, exposing the cavity. A vertical ladder descended to the lab’s floor.

Tesla climbed the ladder into Beowulf’s crew compartment. The space was about as large as his old rented room at Mrs. Harrison’s, which made him smile, thinking of how much had changed for him since his days there. The hatch was about seven feet wide, with a chrome railing encircling it to prevent accidental falls.

To the rear five heavily padded crash chairs were welded to shock-absorbing mounts. Two faced Beowulf’s left, one faced forward, and two more faced right. They all sported five-point restraint belts. The four chairs facing the sides looked into observation ports, giving a clear view outside through a four-inch-tall slit that ran for two feet along Beowulf’s sides. When going into combat, a sliding panel of armor would be slid into position, protecting the crew.

Tesla stepped off the ladder and thumbed a green button on a control panel built into the railing. Directly above the open compartment door, a motorized winch whined, and a steel cable descended to the lab’s floor below. A heavy snap hook dangled from its end.

George secured the hook to the centered ring on top of the first gel-round magazine, and Tesla brought it up. The eighty-five pound magazine rose through the access hatch, then hung in the air, swinging slightly. Tesla shoved it over until it cleared the hatch and hung over a small, temporary worktable. He lowered the winch, and the steel magazine settled heavily onto it.
 

A weapons technician released the hook, then scooped both arms under the ammo magazine and lifted it from the table. While Tesla lowered the cable to repeat the process, the technician wrestled the magazine over to Beowulf’s ammunitions stores, and slid it into an empty port.

Twenty minutes later they’d loaded eight magazines of the gel-rounds, totaling 1,600 rounds.

“Damn peculiar,” said the colonel. “I could feel it every time you loaded a magazine. Like I was putting food in my belly.”