"No, that's the city interface," Hiro cried. "I'm against slime-fame!"
Ren giggled, falling to one side to coax his thumb-twitch character through some perilous maneuver.
"What are you laughing at, Ren?" Aya shouted. "You're the one who made me go underwater!"
"I didn't know you were going to talk to some big-face pretty boy on the way home."
"Neither did I!" Aya screamed over the explosions.
"Sure you didn't," Hiro answered. "Just like when we saw Frizz Mizuno's feed yesterday, and you had no idea who he was."
"I didn't know him yesterday. I didn't know his name, anyway. I'd just met him the night before
... at this party."
Hiro frowned, then made a gesture. The wallscreen images froze, the sound abruptly shutting off.
"Since when do you get invited to the same parties as Frizz Mizuno?"
"I wasn't exactly invited," Aya said. One of Hiro's eyebrows rose, and she groaned. "I crashed this tech-head bash, okay? I was looking for the Sly Girls."
"Oh, the imaginary Sly Girls again." Hiro let out a long sigh. "Why are you wasting your time with unicorns, Aya-chan?"
"They're not imaginary. Actually, I joined up with them last night."
"You joined the unicorns?" Hiro asked.
"The Sly Girls, you bubblehead. I even went surfing with them."
"What do you mean?" Ren asked.
"You guys haven't heard of mag-lev surfing?" Aya gestured, and Moggle started loading a stack of shots into Hiro's wallscreen. "Then you need to watch this."
Hiro started to say something, but the wallscreen was already flickering to life. He crossed his arms, staring in silence as Aya's night as a Sly Girl began to unfold.
When it was over, the first thing Hiro said was, "Mom and Dad will kill you."
Aya couldn't argue. Her parents didn't even approve of bungee jumping. She couldn't imagine what Mom was going to say after watching her mag-lev surf.
"Crumblies are the least of your worries," Ren said. "After you kick this, the wardens are going to visit."
"I know." Aya sighed. "That's the bad part about kicking this story. Nobody's ever going to mag-lev surf again."
"That's not what I mean," Ren said softly. "The wardens will forget all about surfing once they spot that mass driver."
Aya glanced at Hiro, but he looked as puzzled as she was.
"What's a mass driver?" she asked.
Ren stood and crossed to the wallscreen, rewinding the images with a twirl of his finger. He froze the shot where Moggle was climbing up the shaft, reached out, and pointed at the glint of metal embedded in the stone. "That's a copper coil, right?"
"I guess," Aya said. "Like in an electric motor?"
"Or a train track," Ren said. "Mag-levs have two kinds of magnets. The ones that levitate the train and the mass drivers."
"Which do what?" Aya asked.
"They move the train. As it glides along, the mass drivers switch from negative to positive - pulling from in front, pushing from behind, sending it faster and faster. You can do the same thing straight up."
"So this shaft is like a mag-lev train that goes up and down?" Aya shrugged. "You mean it is an elevator?"
Ren shook his head. "This could accelerate a thousand times faster than any elevator. You saw that airlock, right? If you suck all the air out of the shaft, you're accelerating through a vacuum. No friction at all - pure speed. With enough juice, a mass driver could throw you into orbit."
"But what's the point?" Hiro asked. "Why hide it in a mountain?"
Ren stared at the image of the copper coil. "That depends on what those cylinders are."
Aya shrugged. "They just looked like big hunks of metal."
"What if there's smart matter inside? They could change shape as they fly, make fins and wings to guide themselves to a target. Maybe even whip up a heat shield as they fall."
"No way, Ren." Hiro sat up straight. "The Nameless One is actually right - our thumb-twitch games have made you war-crazy!"
"Very funny, Hiro." Ren moved the image to a close-up of a cylinder. "Let me do some math.
How big are they, Aya?"
"Um...maybe a meter across the top? And a little taller than me." Aya frowned. "What are you getting so excited about?"
"He's delusional," Hiro said.
"Let's say two meters tall." Ren's fingers twitched and spun, and numbers began cascading across the wallscreen image of the cylinder. "So the radius squared is a quarter of a meter, times pi is about point seven-five. Times two meters tall is one and a half. Hey, room? How much would one-and-a-half cubic meters of steel weigh?"
"What kind of steel?" the room asked.
"I don't care. Just round it off."
"Almost twelve tons."
"Twelve tons!" Ren took a step backward and fell into Hire's feed-watching chair, staring wide-eyed at the screen.
"What's the big deal?" Aya asked softly.
Hiro leaned forward, the amused expression fading from his face. "Hey, room? How much energy would twelve tons of steel have if you dropped it from orbit?"
"From how high in orbit?" the room asked.
Hiro glanced at Ren, who shrugged and said, "Two hundred kilometers? Forget about air resistance and round it off."
The room hardly paused. "The object would land at two thousand meters per second, releasing twenty-four gigajoules, equal to six tons of TNT."
"Okay...that's not good," Hiro said.
"What's TNT?" Aya asked.
"These days, it's a unit of energy," Ren said. "But a long time ago, it was a chemical that Rusties used to make bombs."
"Bombs?" She swallowed. "Like when they used to shoot missiles at each other?"
"Wow, Slime Queen," Hiro said. "You catch on quick."
Ren nodded slowly. "This could be some kind of city killer."
"You're not serious." Aya remembered the Rusty weapons that had destroyed whole cities in seconds, burning the sky and leaving the ground poisoned for decades. "But city killers had warheads.