Free Blown Circuit by Lars Guignard

it looked like the ball at the top was big. It had to have had a diameter of at least ten or twelve feet. But it was hard to really see what you were looking at until you took a closer look at the picture. Because what had looked like unmelted snow on the ground was, on further inspection, something else. It looked like foam. Fire-retardant foam. And it was there because the ground at the base of the tower had been blackened and burned. When I looked closely, I could see tiny wisps of smoke rising off it. I knew what the picture represented—Wardenclyffe Tower. Like the one in the journal, but a more technologically advanced version.  
    “Tunguska was a wake-up call for the Russians,” Crust said. “Thirty years later, what other governments had believed to be science fiction, the Russian government had accepted as fact. They bought the blueprints for Tesla’s Device in 1938. They then proceeded to refine it over the next sixteen years. This photo was taken in 1954. A short time after it was taken, for reasons as yet unclear to us, the prototype was disassembled and smuggled out of the Soviet Union by the Green Dragons.”
    Crust watched my eyes. He knew my interest was about to get personal. The Green Dragons were, after all, the group responsible for kidnapping my father.
    “And then?” I said.
    “Our sources say the Device never got to its destination. It went missing. From what we can tell, the Green Dragons lost it just as the cold war was heating up.”
    “Then what?” I said.
    “Now, generations later, we hear chatter from our Dragon friends. As near as we can tell, they want to use the Device to destroy a major metropolitan area.”
    “Where?”
    Crust tapped his phone and the photo of the old Tower disappeared to be replaced by a map of the globe, three panels wide. Turkey was represented by a red dot in the center of the map, concentric rings rippling out from it to hit cities around the globe. Almost the entire United States was within range, as was Asia, Europe, Africa, and South America.
    “Even if we use a nominal six-thousand-mile range, like the one achieved when the Wardenclyffe Tower prototype took out Tunguska, Turkey’s central location means that this thing can hit almost anywhere on Earth, including America: New York, Washington, Chicago, nearly everywhere is vulnerable. Add another thousand or so miles, fire it across the pole, and it can hit the West Coast too.”
    Crust tapped his phone again.
    “This is what we predict will happen when the beam hits.”
    The map of the globe disappeared from the screen to be replaced by a sunny shot of the Manhattan skyline. Everything looked fine at first. Sparkling. Happy. Except then a thick bolt of what looked like lightning struck the south end of Manhattan, and I could tell that it wasn’t going to be that kind of movie. The bolt of energy didn’t just strike and disappear like a regular bolt of lightning either. Instead, it hit the ground and thousands of smaller bolts flew out of it like an electric wind.
    The bolts of energy exploded through the trees and buildings in an unstoppable wave destroying everything in their path. Skyscrapers crumbled and taxis and buses flew through the air, people reduced to ashes as the energy storm passed through the city in a raging inferno of sparks. When it was done, nothing was left standing. Buildings were twisted and melted and the ground was burned. People in the streets were vaporized. All that was left was a huge cloud of dust hanging over the charred earth.
    “The guys in tech did up the simulation,” Crust said. “They figure that given its popularity, New York is a likely target. The clip is an accurate modeling of what a directed-energy weapon attack would look like.”
    What I had just seen was no romantic comedy. It was total destruction. It looked like a nuclear bomb had hit.
    “Whoever has this thing has the power to reduce our American cities to ashes. And I’m not just talking about