"Triptych" - by Adam Carlton

"Triptych" - by Adam Carlton

1. Fourteen

She is sitting at the very back of the chemistry lab: on the left hand side, by the aisle, her best friend Jeanette to her right. She has her hands on her lap, below the level of the worktop in front of her. She’s surreptitiously painting her nails while the teacher drones on at the front.

Miss Dawson is in her late forties and severe, spinsterish. She is speaking to the whiteboard on which her laptop has projected today's experiment. It's almost impossible to see in the glare but it appears to involve copper sulphate, zinc and redox reactions.

The lab consists of rows of lengthy workbenches with the usual gas outlets and power sockets. The students are perched on bar stool seats. The benches are ancient wood: flat and dark, stained with chemicals and gouged with graffiti - a hundred years of romantic entanglements, eroded and barely legible.

Three rows forward, at the front on the right hand side is Robert  the class bad-boy. His golden locks run over his shoulders. He's slim and wears tight jeans. Although he's only just fifteen he sings with a local rock band. He's good.

Robert is not popular with the teachers. Though bright he underperforms - they think he's ‘cocky’. He's sitting next to Melissa who's the top girl here. On a slight cue from Miss Dawson, Melissa languidly rises from her seat and begins to collect maths homework books. How traditional.

Her skirt is just a little shorter than any of the other girls, her hair a little longer and blonder, and she sways as she walks, like a model.

Robert turns to gaze back across the class, smiling at the girl at the far end of the back row, shrugging his shoulders in mock helplessness.

“He likes you,” says Jeanette, “He really wants to come to your birthday party tonight. Thing is, his mother and Melissa's are like that," She links her fingers, "They fixed up that date for tonight.”

Jeanette continues in a low hiss, “Trust me, she knew what she was doing.”

She's talking about Melissa who has approached and is holding out her hand. Jeanette passes her own book: homework neat and tidy, all done.

Nothing from our girl. She couldn't be bothered. She'd figured out simultaneous quadratic equations two years ago.

Melissa's smile is pure malice as she carries the pile of books to the front, ready to place them on the teacher's desk.

Several things happen very quickly.

Melissa is standing with her back to the class, looking for space to park her load. Since nothing is apparent, she starts to force a gap, pushing the books diagonally forward like a wedge. The beaker of copper sulphate wobbles, a retort stand drops in front of Melissa and she makes a frantic grab for it.

Fatal.

Legs tangled up, Melissa falls onto her back surrounded by tumbling homework books. The glass of blue liquid totters and topples, its trajectory bending towards Melissa’s small but perfectly formed breasts, so almost on show.

And then the scream.

The books are ruined. Melissa is the colour of a smurf and the ambulance is already on its way. The class, prematurely dismissed, makes its way into the yard.

Robert ambles across: very casual, very assured. He brushes behind her, uses the tips of his fingers at her waist to pull her in against his chest. She can feel every contour of his body. He whispers: “Happy Birthday, babe. We’ll catch up at your party tonight.”

A tiny squeeze and he detaches, strolls off.

She permits herself a knowing smile. 

---

2. Twenty One

Speaking just to myself, to no one else, I would say that she was common. Common but sexy. A party girl (very different from the Party girls of my acquaintance).

Appearance. Curvaceous, big breasts, about five feet six. Her face was oval, full cheeks and lips, plenty of make-up and lippy. Her black hair cascaded over her shoulders.

Personality. She was lively, animated, lived in the moment, was unserious, always with a smile on her face, always up for a good time. Open, warm, a yes-person. Prepared to play a trick on you. Did not hold a grudge. Flirtatious, disinhibited, promiscuous even.

Friendly. Sexy.

I was not besotted with her but it was hard to say no. She borrowed my car, mentioned she needed it to pick up some sailor who had picked her up in town. I lent it with ill grace; got it back hours later: the engine did not sound right and the steering was tracking left. How amusing!

We went drinking once in an almost deserted, almost derelict pub near the docks. We sat on a bench seat by a window, snogging for what seemed like an hour or forever. She was a girl who liked to kiss, who liked to be cuddled.

I was in her attic bedsit, in her bed, late one evening. She was hedonistic, no big thoughts, no worrying about ‘how is it for you?’ - just enjoying every second. In the aftermath the fire alarm went off. I hastily dressed and was hurrying down the steps from her room when I encountered the landlord coming up to check on everyone. A unique look of suspicion and worse on his face as he paused to check me out, then passed on to her door.

But surprisingly, there were no consequences.

Once, when I was being more than usually pompous and overbearing, she surprised me. She looked at me intently and said, “Sometimes the art of concealment in plain sight is to give people what they expect.”

And then something new: an enigmatic smile.

---

3. Twenty Eight

When they eventually noticed her they gave her the usual training plus total immersion in Russian. In a breach of security they just translated her English name for her cover: Eva (Ива).

There was speculation about entanglement. The unconscious manipulation of amplitudes was championed by a follower of Penrose. ‘Like quantum suicide?’ someone suggested. But nobody knew. Useless to ask Eva - she just said she ‘got lucky’.

She's bouncing along in the back of an electric jeep, its balloon tyres scrunching on the gravel track under a dome of stars. It's cold. This is one of the ‘stans, where a group has stashed its stolen-or-donated nuke, prior to transhipment for practical use in the West.

The SF troopers, four of them, think they are the forward reconnaissance team, a stealthed insertion before the bunker busters rain in.

Oh yes, the terrorists are far from stupid: they're squatting with their prize in an old nuclear command bunker, buried in the heart of the mountain. Intelligence estimates put its yield in the low Megaton range. 

They think she's the translator, although like all of them she has useful backup skills.

They are wrong on pretty much every count.

It’s true that the American B2s are already prepositioned on their ocean island runways, tooled up with GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators, 30 tons apiece. But that’s the mandatory contingency plan: insanely high-risk.

---

Twenty kilometres out the SAS captain calls a halt. They're ordered to hunker down in a depression, out of line-of-sight of the target, which climbs like a tooth three kilometres from the desert floor.

After surveying the scene with his binoculars he shakes his head doubtfully and beckons Eva over.

“I'm not a happy camper,” he says, “I don't get our value-added here at all. That -” he indicates the target - "has been designed to survive sequenced nuclear penetrators. We're not telling anyone anything they can't already see from space and aerial assets.”

The captain's communicator vibrates softly. Suddenly more alert, the captain relays orders to hunker down for an incipient nuclear strike. The exfiltration vehicle will be with you once conditions are flyable; destroy all your equipment as you go.

Eva also gets a call. She moves a little away from the quiet bustle of activity around her, pulling up her screen.  Her controller's voice hisses through the earpiece. GCHQ has tapped the fibre link tunnelled out from the bunker. They have decrypted real-time video. Another of our deep penetration operatives has been captured and is being interrogated inside the mountain as we speak, they’re streaming the results back to their HQ. Here it is. We have no way to rescue her. It's imperative she doesn't break. Anything you can help us with? Please?

To her shock and then horror, it's Melissa. She had no idea she'd also been recruited to the service. They're still working on her - aroused grunts from the men, whimpering from their broken victim. A stray thought crosses Eva's mind, a gibe against progressives:

Fundamentalist muslims sure know how to treat their women.

Her guts spasm as they react to what she's seeing: the red hot implement drawn from the fire. Her vision contracts to a point; her stomach heaves; an internal scream: make it stop! make it go away!

The screen abruptly goes blank. The captain, eyes glued to the mountain, swears under his breath, shouts “Get down! All of you!”

At the first millisecond following detonation there is an intense pulse of gamma and x-ray radiation. Plasma temperatures are in the millions of degrees. Yet all this ferocity is entirely contained by the millions of tons of rock. It takes half a second before the growing fireball breaches the integrity of the mountain.

The captain sees a sudden flash as the mountain bulges from its lower slopes, searing light erupting from cracks that tear down its face. The entire rock formation ripples and a massive fissure opens, belching smoke and debris high into the sky. The ground beneath the small team shudders violently, the shock wave tearing across the landscape with a sound like rolling thunder, building to an ear-splitting roar.

The captain continues watching, his binoculars automatically managing the glare, as the mountain collapses in on itself, sections of rock vaporising or blasting outward in jagged arcs. An enormous cloud billows upward, the unmistakable shape of a mushroom, churning and darkening against the sky. The desert has transformed momentarily into an ocean: he can see s-waves propagating across the desert floor like an oncoming tsunami.

He feels the blast wind next, a wave of force that presses against his chest and whips through his clothing. Rock and dust fragments begin to fall, a grim reminder of the mountain that just ceased to exist.

In the subsiding roar she can just hear the growing whup-whup of the exfiltration machines, coming to take them home.

Melissa was never recruited to SIS. She was not being tortured in that mountain fastness, GCHQ did not tap terrorist communications and the video was entirely contrived. It was cut-off at the precise moment of the detonation, when the neutrino burst was detected at the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE), a facility operated by the US and UK governments.

In the stress of the moment, ‘Eva’ was always going to believe… and subconsciously act.

---

Author’s note

This is a story about a young woman who has the power of magic, although she doesn’t know it. We can hand-wave some speculative physics (Penrose) to save us from Fantasy, but in the end it doesn’t matter because we’re interested in how she sees herself and how others see her - and make use of her.

Hi Ива, hope you liked it.