The sickly green glow was born in an instant. It was not the clean, warm light of a lamp, but a vile, cancerous luminescence that pulsed from the simple glass beaker at the heart of Dr. Chen's monstrous creation. It was the color of poison and deep-sea decay, and it painted the laboratory in hues of nightmare. Accompanying the light was a low, pure hum—the clean, resonant note of a perfectly struck tuning fork the size of a mountain.
For a single, glorious second, Dr. Chen felt a wave of transcendent, intellectual ecstasy. It was working. The complex mathematics, the years of obsessive theorizing, the derided papers—it was all real. She had created a stable resonance field, tuned with impossible precision to the unique energy signature of the Emperor himself. She had reached across a continent and laid a metaphysical finger on the very essence of a god.
"Incredible," Donovan breathed, his fear momentarily forgotten, replaced by a raw, primal awe at the sight of pure, controlled power.
Then, the perfect note began to waver.
The hum faltered, developing a discordant, ugly tremor. The clean green light flickered, the pulse becoming erratic, frantic. Dr. Chen's expression of triumph instantly collapsed into one of sharp, professional alarm. She saw her mistake immediately. The unshielded copper coils, her desperate improvisation, were not robust enough. They were creating a feedback loop. The resonance wasn't just being broadcast; it was echoing back, amplifying itself with every pulse.
The hum deepened into a physical pressure, a gut-wrenching infrasound that vibrated in their bones and made the very air feel thick and heavy. The green light intensified, becoming a furious, boiling sun of emerald poison. Around the beaker, the air itself seemed to shimmer, and a faint, ethereal blue glow—the ghostly signature of Cherenkov radiation—flickered into existence.
"Shut it down!" Donovan screamed, his awe turning to abject terror. He stumbled back, a wave of intense, debilitating nausea rising from his stomach. His vision swam, and the world tilted on its axis as his inner ear, assaulted by the violent frequencies, surrendered. He felt a strange, tingling heat crawl over his exposed skin, an invisible sunburn from an impossible source. The air was thick with the metallic taste of ozone, of atoms being torn apart. His training, his experience, his instincts as a field agent were utterly useless. He was a Stone Age man caught in the blast of a particle accelerator.
Dr. Chen, closer to the maelstrom, was hit with the full, unshielded force of her creation. But her agony was twofold. As the machine shrieked, she felt a phantom echo of the psychic blow she had just delivered to the Emperor. The resonance chamber was a two-way street, and the backlash, a wave of pure agony, shot back through the connection she had forged and slammed into her own mind.
A hot, sudden gush of blood poured from her nose, and she cried out, a sound that was half pain, half fury. The world dissolved into a smear of green and blue light. She staggered back, her hand flailing, knocking a rack of glass test tubes to the floor as she grabbed the edge of a workbench to keep from collapsing. Her body had become the weakest component in her own perfect machine.
"I can't!" she managed to gasp, her voice a strangled wreck. "The main circuit has fused! The governors are melted! It won't stop until it burns itself out!"
The apparatus, now completely out of control, began to tear itself apart. With a sharp, explosive CRACK, a large vacuum tube on the primary focusing coil detonated, showering the room in a spray of molten glass and white-hot filaments. The shriek from the core rose to an impossible, ear-splitting crescendo. The main power conduit, a cable as thick as a man's wrist, began to glow a hellish, incandescent orange. It sagged like hot taffy for a horrifying instant before it silently, completely, vaporized with a blinding flash of blue-white light that bleached all the color from the world.
And then, silence.
A profound, deafening, and absolute silence descended upon the laboratory. It was more shocking than the noise had been. The only sounds were the faint, metallic ticking of cooling metal, the drip… drip… drip of blood from Dr. Chen's face onto the dusty concrete floor, and their own ragged, desperate breaths.
The room was a ruin. Wires dangled like dead vines, the floor was a treacherous carpet of shattered glass, and the air was a choking, acrid soup of burnt electronics.
Donovan, his head spinning, pushed himself up. He stared at the dead machine. The glass beaker and the uranium salts within had ceased to exist. In their place was a single, gnarled, slag-like lump of twisted, dark green glass, fused directly to the tabletop. It still emitted a faint, ghostly luminescence, a malevolent ember in the gloom. The solid oak of the workbench beneath it was charred pitch-black in a perfect, deep circle, yet there had been no fire.
His gaze traveled to the brick wall behind the device, and his stomach turned to ice. Permanently etched onto the bricks were faint, dark gray outlines, like ghostly photographs. He could clearly see the silhouette of a wrench that had been left on the bench. He saw the shadow of a three-legged stool, and the spectral image of the power cable that had snaked across the floor. They were atomic shadows, images burned onto the wall by the intense, invisible storm of particles that had erupted from the core. He had read about such phenomena in the most theoretical, speculative physics papers. He never believed he would see it.
He turned to look at Dr. Chen. She was slumped against the wall, her fine dress stained with a gruesome spray of her own blood. Her face was ashen, her body trembling with the aftershocks of the ordeal. But as she looked at the wreckage, at the impossible evidence of her success, her expression was one of wild, agonized, and terrifying victory. She had her proof.
It was then that the first, thunderous BOOM shook the entire building. Donovan spun around, his heart seizing. It was the sound of a heavy battering ram striking the lab's barred iron door.
BOOM!
The hinges groaned, the metal of the doorframe screaming in protest.
BOOM!
A voice, amplified by a speaking trumpet and backed by the full authority of the state, roared from the other side, the words vibrating through the thick metal and into their very bones.
"IN THE NAME OF THE EMPEROR, OPEN THIS DOOR! YOU ARE SURROUNDED! SURRENDER NOW!"
The net had not just closed. It was now breaking down the door to drag them into hell. Donovan looked from the splintering door to the woman who had just nonchalantly broken the laws of nature, and a single, hopeless question escaped his lips as a dry whisper.
"What have you done?"