Omega

“There was some sort of eruption,” he said finally. “It was like an earth tremor. The entire ground moved. It knocked me over. At the same time we were being shelled. Earth and shrapnel flying everywhere. The rest of the men were gone, dead. I didn’t hang around.”

His brother had paused to listen. Now he resumed eating.

His movements were delice and precise; he made frequent use of his napkin to swab food or wine from his lips. Owain breathed steadily, waiting.

“What device?” he finally asked again.

Rhys eyed him with scepticism. As if coming to a decision, he picked up the menu card and cleared a space in front of him. After glancing around to check that no one else was looking, he proceeded to fold the card.

Owain watched as he brought its top and bottom edges together and pressed the two end creases flat. He raised both flaps and pushed them down until they sat flat on the tabletop and the central section of the card bulged up. He began to slide both flaps in towards each other so that the dome in the middle became increasingly rounded. He continued narrowing the distance between the folded edges, finally pushing both creases together.

“Voilà!” he said.

In three dimensions the two closed edges shut off a cylinder with the cross section of an inverted teardrop. Rhys held it up so that Owain viewed it edgewise.

“Omega,” Rhys said softly.

TWENTY-NINE

Rhys had the smug air of a conjuror who had just successfully completed a trick.

“Of course on the ground it actually works the other way around,” he told Owain.

He turned the card over and held it up at both edges so that the central section sagged a little. Checking that no one was watching them, he asked Owain to dust some pepper into the middle.

Owain’s patience was rapidly evaporating again.

“Listen,” Rhys said, “I’m only doing this because you claim you can’t remember anything. I’m trying to get you to understand.”

Owain hefted the pepper mill and gave it a vigorous twist, speckling the hollow.

“Those,” Rhys said, referring to the dark grains, “are enemy forces.” Again he glanced around to ensure that no one else was looking. “Which side do you want to be advancing from—left or right?”

“Does it matter?”

“No. The principle’s the same in either direction. Assume you’re attacking from your left.” Rhys tapped his right thumb on the appropriate flap. “Enemy divisions are directly in your line of advance. Naturally you want them out of the way. CommandCom agrees to Omega activation at the target area. It’s a remote weapon, its power transferred via a satellite. The system is initiated. This happens.”

Again he slid both end flaps together so that their folded edges met. The central section had now been warped from sight.

“Gone,” Rhys said. “Taken out.”

Owain tried to match the demonstration to what he had witnessed from the ridge. Tried and failed.

“Not just your enemy,” Rhys was saying, “but the whole section of terrain they’re occupying. You continue your advance not only with them out of the way but also with your lines shortened. And without a single man or piece of equipment having been sacrificed.”

The waiter appeared again to remove their dishes. Owain hadn’t even tasted his soup. He waved it away.

Rhys refilled his glass and asked the waiter for another bottle of wine. He had slipped the folded card onto his lap at the man’s approach.

Owain contemplated all the light leaking out of the unshielded windows of the restaurant. In the square below a Stalwart APC was slowly patrolling under the starless night.

“It’s done by satellite, you said.”

Rhys shook his head. “The business end’s at home. Here. The satellite’s just the relay. We call the process T.”

“T?”

“T-E-E,” Rhys spelled out. “Short for Topographical Enfolding and Excision. You understand that I’m not at liberty to go into all the gory technical details.”

“We were field-testing it?”

After a moment Rhys nodded slowly. “Are you telling me you still don’t remember?”

Owain was too incredulous to be angry. He was being asked to deny the validity of his own experience, to bolt on a memory and submit himself to a fantastical truth that carried no more weight of evidence than his private certainties. And who better to demand this leap of faith than his own brother?

“The larger the area taken out,” Rhys was telling him, “the deeper the cut, so you have to be prudent.” He gave a conspiratorial chuckle. “We thought of suggesting that the code for activation should be Time for TEE’ but it was decided that our continental cousins wouldn’t get the joke.”

You smug provincial bastard, Owain thought.

“We?”

“Well, the team who developed it. A mongrel bunch, but a lot of them Brits. Not surprising, given that the whole thing evolved here.”

Brits. That smarmy, good-or-nothing appellation. Was Rhys doing it deliberately to enrage him?

He forced himself to drink some water. “And you were in the thick of it?”

Rhys smoothed out the menu card and set it aside.

“More an administrator than a boffin,” he said. “But, yes, I played my part.”