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Ryan said he'd watch the Harvard video when he had time.
He did not have time.
The day after checking the Crimson Typhoon arm blueprints, he walked into Patricia's office and submitted the fabrication order. When Patricia heard that the component weighed seventy tons and was a single arm for a machine that didn't exist yet, she nearly spit out her water. But the order went up the chain, and the chain said yes.
The following two weeks were a blur.
Ryan shuttled between the two research facilities daily. The plasma cannon project needed his attention as the team prepared for assembly. The drift experiments needed oversight: the three-person connection durations had dropped to twenty minutes after the initial tests, and the pilots needed coaching to push past the plateau. The firefighting mech team kept sending Kyle with questions that only Ryan could answer. Mason's prosthetics team called twice a week for guidance on drive system modifications.
He slept six hours a night and worked the other eighteen.
Then, on a Tuesday morning, Patricia called.
"The plasma cannon components are here. All of them."
Ryan was out of bed, dressed, and walking toward the weapons lab before she finished the sentence. He skipped breakfast.
The parts had been ordered weeks ago, timed to arrive after Ryan had absorbed enough of Thornton's archived data to understand the underlying physics. The timing was perfect. He'd completed his theoretical study of the cannon's design principles. Now he needed to build the thing and test whether theory survived contact with reality.
The weapons lab was packed. Thornton's entire team was present, forty people crowded around the firing platform, watching the technicians unpack crates and organize components on the floor.
"Morning," Thornton said, reaching down to clap Ryan on the shoulder. The height difference made the gesture look like a father greeting a child, which was visually accurate and professionally backwards.
The components were spread across the concrete floor in ordered groups.
The transmission coils: rings of superconducting material shaped like cross-sections of starfruit, each one designed to accelerate the plasma bolt through the bore at tremendous speed. A stack of them, progressively sized, ready to be installed in sequence along the barrel's length.
The flange ring: a massive metal disc that would lock the muzzle assembly in place, providing structural stability for the focusing lens system.
Three focusing lenses: the critical components. Symmetrically shaped, precision-machined to tolerances measured in microns, each one designed to concentrate and energize the plasma bolt at the instant of discharge. When installed, they would encircle the muzzle like the talons of a mechanical claw. On Crimson Typhoon, these would be the three prongs of the left arm's weapon hand.
Various sub-assemblies had been pre-integrated at the factory, reducing the number of loose fasteners on the floor. But the installation was still complex enough that the technical crew spent over an hour studying the assembly diagrams before touching a single bolt.
Ryan retreated to the control room and reviewed the data from the four successful plasma generation tests. All clean. All consistent. The generation chamber produced plasma reliably, heated it to target temperature without instability, and shut down safely every time.
The generation system worked. The question was whether everything downstream of it, the transmission bore, the acceleration coils, the focusing lenses, the amplifier, would work too.
Assembly took days.
The technicians worked methodically, following the diagrams step by step, verifying each connection before moving to the next. Thornton supervised personally, cross-referencing every installation against his own calculations. Ryan checked in twice daily, reviewing progress and flagging any deviation from specification.
When the last component locked into place, Ryan returned to the lab.
The plasma cannon stood on its firing platform.
It was larger than he'd expected in person. The red armor cladding covered the barrel in two sections, upper and lower, designed to separate at the elbow joint during firing to vent waste heat. Massive bolts secured the armor to the barrel structure, visible from outside, industrial and unadorned.
At the rear: the plasma generation chamber, its disc shape now integrated into the cannon's base, feeding directly into the transmission bore.
Along the barrel: the acceleration coils, invisible inside the armored housing, stacked in sequence, waiting to hurl superheated plasma forward at velocities that would make a rifle bullet look stationary.
At the muzzle: the three focusing lenses, arranged in a triangular pattern around the bore exit, each one angled inward, ready to concentrate the plasma bolt at the moment of discharge. The flange ring held them in position, and at the center of the ring, the retractable muzzle aperture waited.
This was where the plasma would emerge. This was where theory became reality.
Ryan had stripped two systems from the original design. The biological skeleton scanner, which targeted Kaiju bone structures in the film universe, was useless in reality. And the mechanism that converted the focusing lenses into spinning blade weapons had been removed. The lenses were too valuable and too precisely calibrated to be used as melee armaments.
Thornton's team spent the rest of the day running manual inspections. Every bolt, every seal, every electrical connection, every alignment measurement. Then a software diagnostic sweep, checking every sensor, every actuator, every safety interlock.
By eight p.m., the inspection was complete. No faults found.
Thornton wiped his forehead. "It's late. Do we wait until morning?"
Ryan considered. Then: "We fire tonight. I don't want to give Murphy's Law overnight to find something we missed."
He walked to the far end of the lab and pressed the door control.
The seaward doors opened onto a tunnel.
Three kilometers long. Straight as a laser beam. Concrete-lined, with overhead lights mounted at intervals. The lights activated in sequence, each one illuminating another fifty meters of corridor, the chain of illumination stretching away from the lab into the distance until the individual lights were indistinguishable from stars.
Distance markers on the walls. Fifty meters. A hundred. Five hundred. One thousand. Two thousand.
Three thousand meters. The cannon's maximum effective range.
And positioned along the tunnel's length, at measured intervals, a series of targets.
Concrete blocks. Steel plates. Composite armor panels.
Each one waiting in the light, motionless, about to learn what two thousand degrees felt like.
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