Free Lethal Circuit by Lars Guignard

let your dad use the space down here. This Ethernet port is hardwired into the T4 that runs the internet café across the street. In this part of the world, it makes this connection as close to anonymous as you can get.” Kate hunched down on the floor and pulled out her pistol. “As you probably figured out, the backpacker thing is a cover.”
    Removing the clip from her Glock, she emptied the bullets into her lap. She reached for the final bullet to fall and held it between her fingers. It was a 9mm hollow point. Standard issue. Or at least it seemed to be until Kate proceeded to unscrew its base revealing a tiny USB plug. Michael watched with interest as she plugged it into a second port on what was obviously a highly modified iPhone. A photo of a daisy came up on the iPhone’s screen.
    “Pretty flower,” Michael said.
    “You have no idea,” Kate said, tapping the screen. After a few seconds, the image of the daisy began to resolve itself into the finer lines of a blueprint. “Your dad and I were here in China looking for a very specific piece of machinery. A piece of machinery dating all the way back to the Second World War.”
    “I’m listening.”
    “There’s more to this than just your dad’s whereabouts. If we can find your father, I hope to God he’ll lead us to this.”
    Kate turned the iPhone’s glossy screen to Michael. The image on the screen could be described simply enough. It was an airplane. A bat winged airplane that looked more like a modern stealth bomber than a Messerschmitt, but an airplane nonetheless. It had a wingspan of twenty meters which Michael calculated would be about sixty-five feet. What looked like jet engines were integrated into both the leading edge of the wings and vertically mounted under them, the cockpit forming a low bulb where the two wings met. The blueprint was monochromatic, and there was only the single page, no section, no schematics, but just in case there was any doubt as to who built it, each wing was adorned by a single Nazi swastika.
    “You’ve heard of the Horten 2-29?”
    “German plane, right? Didn’t National Geographic run some kind of documentary on it?”
    “The Horten 2-29 was a Nazi stealth bomber. It never went into production, but the folks over at Northrop Grumman were recently able to build a mock up of it from a surviving prototype.”
    “Okay. Pretty plane, but who cares?”
    “This is the Horten 21. Big brother to the 2-29.”
    “Again. Not following.”
    “Hitler’s people were supposed to have built as many as fourteen working Horten 21s sometime during the last years of World War II. Like the 2-29, the 21 was an experimental stealth jet. Unlike the 2-29, it was designed to be capable of speeds in excess of Mach 1 and perfect vertical takeoff and landing. They wanted to use it to drop the bomb on New York.”
    “The bomb?”
    “Yeah. The atomic bomb.”
    “Brutal.”
    “True, but that’s not what makes it interesting. The Nazis were having a hell of a time with their jet engine design. To get around this problem and still generate the thrust for vertical takeoff, the Horten 21 was equipped with two propulsion systems. Both a conventional auxiliary and a primary system that was entirely unique.”
    “So it was a Nazi hybrid?”
    “Basically.”
    “Let me guess, they ran it off of breakfast cereal. Soy milk and Franken Berry.”
    “Close. Cold fusion.”
    “Cold what?”
    “Fusion. The Nazis were said to have pioneered a working cold fusion reactor to power their plane. Something that to this day hasn’t been done in the lab, let alone in an airplane.”
    “Do you really want me to believe that this thing is from World War II and no advances have been made since then?”
    “Believe it, don’t believe it, I’m just laying it out. The Nazis were somehow able to engineer a cold fusion reactor. They figured out a way to fuse hydrogen atoms at near room temperature releasing an enormous amount of energy. The basics are that