“This bulb,” says Prathda, unceremoniously dumping it in a trash can, “should have been capable of handling 110 kilomundes. It’s an electrical term. Enough to light up a goodish portion of your average city park, I should say. So the fact that the thinadeskite was able to blow that out is…significant. However, we did use a very refined portion of thinadeskite in these cables. If you would, General—I have a few more interesting things to show you.”
He walks out the door without looking back. She starts to follow, then stops and picks up the battery. It’s warm. She turns it over and sees a label on its bottom reading 90 KM. KM standing for kilomundes, presumably, a terminology she’s never heard of before, but then she’s no scientist.
“Hm,” she says. She replaces the battery and follows.
Nadar stands outside with a smile on her face. “Still have your eyebrows, General?”
“I kind of wish we’d gone with the charts,” says Mulaghesh.
“Trust me,” says Nadar, “you don’t.”
“As you can see, its conductivity is staggering,” Prathda is saying as he walks ahead. “Simply staggering. The Department of Reconstruction is very interested in this, as are countless industry representatives, though we’ve only been allowed to give them very limited reports, of course. Just think of every power need of all of Ghaladesh, met by one centralized little plant—or even distributed plants! Imagine miles and miles of wiring and cabling, made of thinadeskite! Imagine a whole factory powered by a piece of wire no thicker than your finger!”
“It certainly is a lot to think about,” says Mulaghesh. They pass by a window looking into a strange laboratory with lots of microscopes. Lots of lenses, lots of bulbs, lots of wire, lots of refining. She takes a careful look at the raw material itself in one glass tank: it looks a little like ordinary graphite to her. “How does the stuff work?”
Prathda coughs, suddenly awkward. “Well, that is a subject of some controversy. There are a lot of theories. The right one is currently being determined.”
“You don’t know?”
“We’re working on it. We think it might be an alteration to a commonly found dielectric compound, or it might have something to do with oscillations in the spin of certain subnuc—”
“You don’t know.”
“Um. No. We don’t. Not yet, anyway.”
Mulaghesh knew all that, of course. But it’s quite something to see Prathda collapse so quickly.
“Prathda and the rest of our science department here are working away on that,” says Nadar.
“Sure, but that must put a kink in your production plans,” says Mulaghesh. “You can’t build a completely new power system out of shit no one understands.”
“It’s true that, like any good scientist, we need to be thorough,” says Prathda. “And we are trying to be. I know what Ghaladesh is concerned about, and”—he shakes his head, laughing in frustration—“and we have confirmed, repeatedly—repeatedly!—that it is of no concern: they are worried that this material is Divine, somehow.”
“I guess I can see why they’d be concerned about that,” says Mulaghesh, as if she’d only just heard the idea.
“But, it cannot be. Not only because the Divinity of these lands, Voortya, is most certainly, undeniably dead—Saypur would not be a free state if the Kaj had not struck her down at the very start of the War, of course—but also because we have conducted numerous tests endorsed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs itself to ascertain the Divine nature of a substance or event, and each test has come back irrefutably negative. The Ministry’s own tests!”
“Okay, but…to be clear, thinade…What is it, again?”
“Thinadeskite.”
“Right. Beyond the conductivity, thinadeskite doesn’t do anything else inexplicable, right?”
“Well. That…depends on your definition of inexplicable.”
“I would define it,” says Mulaghesh, “as something you do not know how to explain.”
He pauses. She watches as his eyes search the upper left corner of the room: a habit, she’s learned in her time, of someone trying to navigate a difficult truth.
What Mulaghesh really wants to do right now is, as it is delicately expressed in reports, “apply the full measure of her authority”—that is, get right up in Prathda’s face and chew him out at maximum volume until he’s good and rattled. This is often the simplest way of dealing with a soldier tiptoeing around a hard truth, she’s found, and it’s definitely what she would do if she were in Bulikov with the full backing of the polis governor’s office.
But she doesn’t do that. Mulaghesh forcibly reminds herself that she is not in command here, and she isn’t here to clean house, to take command, to report back to any oversight committee on the workings of Fort Thinadeshi. She’s not here to be a commander, but an operative, a spy. And these people think her to be no more than a tourist, someone here for a month or two before saying farewell and sailing off into obscurity.
A molar on the right side of her jaw pops as she grinds her teeth. I cannot think of someone more ill-suited to this task.
She asks herself—what would Shara do?
She’d keep him on the hook and string his dumb ass along.
So instead of physically assaulting Prathda and bellowing questions at him, she slowly asks, “Would it have something to do with how your 110 kilomundes bulb got blown out by a 90 kilomundes battery—20 kilomundes less than what I’m guessing is the full capacity of the bulb?”
Prathda looks at her with the face of someone who is slowly realizing that this person is much smarter than he gave them credit for. Captain Nadar tenses up slightly, surprised at this turn in the discussion.
“Does thinadeskite conduct electricity, Prathda,” Mulaghesh asks, “or does it generate it?”
He thinks for a long time. “We…haven’t determined that yet.”
“Okay.”
“But in a refined state, it…amplifies the charge. Considerably.”
Mulaghesh is silent. Prathda shifts on his feet, uncomfortable.
“Should that be possible?” she asks.
“Well. No.”
***
“This subject area,” says Nadar, “is a little…sensitive, General.”
“I can understand that,” says Mulaghesh. “I don’t like the impossible more than anyone else does.”
“It does defy our current understanding of physics,” Prathda admits. “Electricity cannot just come from nowhere. It has to be generated from some phenomenon. But our understanding of physics is changing all the time. We learn new things every day,” he says as he leads them back through the labs. “This is the goal of Arc Lightning. Science is like a glacier: slow and indomitable. But it will get to where it’s going.”
“Thank you for that eloquent speech, Prathda,” says Nadar curtly. “And for the tour. Very informative, as always.”
Prathda bows expansively, thanks them both, and returns to his work.
“He’s a nice enough guy,” says Nadar as they exit. “But it’s hard to get top-grade scientific talent out here.”