Edmund’s dining room looked splendid. The table had been laid with mathematical accuracy by Vesna, Sandon pattern china, wine and water glasses, finished with elegant silver cutlery and pressed linen napkins. Correct etiquette had been researched online, of course, Vesna had decided she liked real books, and copies of Mrs Beeton’s Household Management and various cookbooks were currently on their way from Amazon. She disapproved of Edmund’s cooking method, which seemed to rely on guessing at absolutely everything, and found the fact that what he served was always extremely good very disconcerting. He never mentioned to her that at one time, it had been a toss-up for him whether to go to Cambridge to read Law or train as a chef. Similarly, she never told him that she knew that was the case.
Anyway, for now, she was relegated to the roles of sous-chef, scullery maid and waitress, while watching everything Edmund did like a hawk.
Ten minutes before the guests were due to arrive, they were both sitting in the conservatory when Aurora walked in from the garden. She was wearing an elegant pale blue evening dress; there was no trace of the fact that she had spent the last couple of hours scrambling around a dusty, neglected underground bunker. “I found out a great deal more, Eostre, and I will explain later after our guests have gone.”
Edmund collected a bottle and some glasses from his drinks cupboard. “Would you two like a sherry? It is a drink which has gone rather out of fashion of late, but it is one I am very partial to.” He poured them both a glass and one for himself.
The two women made approving noises as they sipped. Edmund smiled, gratified. “Aurora, I will introduce you as a friend and trusted business colleague. Both are quite true and will explain your presence. We probably need to work out how to regularise your status, as is being done for Vesna.”
She nodded, “But, for now, I have a home at Falling Water, and I have been made to feel very at home here too. So I don’t feel it is urgent. I think it only becomes an issue once our business dealings require it. At that point, there are various channels. Money talks, if need be.”
The doorbell rang, Vesna skipped off to let their guests in, and Edmund and Aurora stood to greet them. Soon enough, everyone had been introduced to everyone, and all were sitting down with a glass of sherry.
The meal, which was a masterpiece of Edmund’s guesswork, was a simple one: a homemade vegetable soup, which Vesna had made under Edmund’s exacting and precise direction. “Chuck a bit more in, yes, that will be lovely.” Then a masterpiece joint of lamb, “I always get my meat from the local butcher on the little parade, I think he is the best in town.” “Have you tried all the others?” “No.” Then a choice of desserts, rich cake with cream, ice cream and something else, a light, fluffy, fruity confection with a hint of honey about it, “I haven’t given it a name yet.”
The table was swiftly cleared, and the evening was still very warm, so they sat in the conservatory with the doors wide open and the evening sun streaming in. Duncan, who was meeting Vesna for the first time, quickly discovered that she was a fellow geek. Aurora and Peter talked business, and Edmund, Ella, and Shuck sat happily and watched the floor show. “Ella, have you noticed how Duncan looks up at you every few minutes to make sure you aren’t offended by him talking to another girl?”
She shook her head, “I don’t think he is interested in me that way.”
Edmund smiled to himself. Shuck thought his own thoughts: He was being stroked, which put him as the all-out winner of the evening.
It had been a happy party, but Peter had to be in the office the next day, and Ella and Duncan left with him. They said their goodbyes and made their way home. Duncan turned to Ella and said, “I had a nice time talking to Vesna. The trading software she is working on is amazing. She showed me some of her code. Her code is hot!”
Peter and Ella burst out laughing. Peter said, “So, Duncan, you meet a pretty girl, and all you can think of is that her code is hot?”
Duncan, blushing, “Yes, well, um. She uses C++ a lot, and I am learning to use it for game programming. She said if I get stuck, she would be happy to help.”
Ella nudged him, “But, no need for me to be jealous?”
Duncan blushed a deeper shade. Ella said, “Sorry, Duncan, just teasing.”
Peter said, “Ella, changing the subject, Aurora, she was really nice to talk to, we got on very well, I mentioned that I am not having a great time at work, and she said if I decided to move on, that she might be able to use my skills. I was wondering how much you know about what she and Edmund are doing?”
Ella said, “I know that at the moment it is focused on stock market trades, but they are intending to move from that to buying companies. I assume it is at that point that they might need you. Beyond that, I think the name of the main trading company is Avenue and London, something like that.”
Duncan butted in, “Vesna’s trading software, they are trading on markets all over the world, hundreds of rapid, automated, AI trades, small amounts, she said, well, something like £5000 a trade, there is a rolling counter in the corner of her master console which shows the day’s profit, it was on about four million pounds when she showed me that screen.”
Peter frowned slightly, “Wow! Maybe I should take her offer seriously then.”
They reached Peter and Ella’s house, and Duncan carried on to his home.
Back at Edmund’s, Aurora was relating everything she had found at the bunker.
“In the rail gun room, if you remember, there was a dividing wall on one side of the tube. There was some stuff stacked there. I squeezed past it. On the other side is another room, just like the first rail gun room. But this one has a complete, finished rail gun. The barrel is a series of rings, made up of 120° sections, which are precision-machined so there is almost no visible gap between them. They interlock to cope with the intense heat, huge force and electromagnetic flux when the gun is fired. But they are clearly designed to be easy to transport and assemble on site.”
She paused, took a sip of coffee, then continued, “But, when I examined the rings, there were signs of slight surface scoring and some heat marking on the inner surface. That gun had been fired at least once. I think we can infer that the test was a success. The complete set of rings for the second gun was on some of the pallets we passed on the way into the bunker and in the pile I had had to squeeze past. They weren’t just trying to build a rail gun; they had built it, tested it and had started work on the second.”
Edmund leant forward, “You know, there was the Iraqi Supergun affair back in 1990, the Iraqi government ordered tubes from Sheffield companies intended for a cannon to do more or less what these rail guns will do. The export documentation claimed the tubes were for industrial, not military use.”
Aurora nodded, “Yes, but there is a huge difference between what the Supergun could do and what I believe these rail guns can do. The thing is, any weapon which fires a shell is intrinsically limited by the limitations of an explosive charge. It relies on expanding gases from a chemical explosion. Physics dictates a “speed limit” for the projectile. It can’t travel much faster than the speed of sound, so the supergun, if it had ever been successfully built, could have maybe achieved a muzzle velocity of up to Mach 6, six times the speed of sound. Conversely, no such limit applies to these rail guns. I think we are talking about projectiles leaving the barrel at Mach 30, perhaps even more. The bore of the supergun was 350 mm. The rail gun is nearly five times that; the projectiles are massive. If it fired a solid slug, the impact would be like a tactical nuclear weapon, without the radiation.”
“It is a huge gulf of difference – the Supergun compared to the railgun, well, it is on the level of a Brown Bess, the British musket used in the Napoleonic Wars at the beginning of the 19th Century, being pitted against a modern Sig MCX automatic rifle. Frankly, rail guns are cutting edge now, but whoever created those rings was, well, they were an absolute genius of materials technology.”
Edmund rocked back in his chair, “That is quite extraordinary! So why build them? What were they for and why here?”
Aurora paused for a moment, “I will start with your ‘why’. I think this was a secret US project, which relied on the expertise of a British materials engineer based in Worksop, which, well, not exactly a coincidence, the Supergun tubes were from just down the road in Sheffield, the heartland of the steel industry. I found a label on one of the pallets with an address. I am planning on dropping by. They are still in business; maybe the man himself is still around.”
“Then why build them? Well, this was Reagan’s Star Wars era, but that project was basically all puff, not achievable. But the rail guns worked; they could have placed stuff in orbit in seconds, just that one site, two guns, behind them, two power plants to charge them. From what I can tell, once they had been put into action, each one would have been able to fire and recharge in 40 minutes, so that means a stream of projectiles, one every twenty minutes. The payloads, countermeasures to protect the site from attack, nuclear missiles delivered at incredible velocities, or as I said, just solid slugs, with enough impact to obliterate a Soviet tank division or a city. They could keep on firing until they ran out of ammunition, and I think, buried underground as they were, they would have been unstoppable. I think it is entirely possible that the intention was to build a ring of them. So sites on the UK East Coast, the US East and West Coasts and also up in the North of Canada pointing straight over the North Pole. Imagine, mid-winter, buried deep under the snow, the phone rings, the first slug easily clears a path up through the snow, the slugs go up into low orbit, from across the North Pole, to anywhere in Europe, and also much of Asia could be targeted. And there is no heat signature to target for a counterattack, as there would be for a missile silo, and these things keep on coming again and again. They would have given the USA a nuclear first strike capability, the real chance of eliminating a Soviet first strike long before their missiles reached their targets, and the ability to destroy any ground army launched against NATO. Even, maybe, do all three, one after another.”
“As I said, I think they needed this one incredible engineer to make them; his factory is in England, and they chose a remote site on the coast of Suffolk because of the USAF infrastructure inland from it, Bentwaters and Woodbridge USAF bases and those at Lakenheath and Mildenhall. Between them, Phantom F4 and F111 fighters, Galaxy transport planes to bring supplies in from the US and a large resource of personnel to draw upon as needed. Plus, for this pilot site, a perfect aim towards the east.”
“This system was mindboggling at the time, and it would still be completely viable today. It was that advanced.”
Edmund replied, “Yes, quite extraordinary. And then the Berlin Wall fell. Even a hint of Tizona could have queered any negotiation with the Eastern bloc so, pretty much overnight, it became a liability.”
Aurora continued, “Eostre has scanned the databases at Langley and GCHQ for ‘Tizona’. Both searches came up blank. I think it is highly likely this was all done under a direct Presidential Authority, hidden under both the Reagan and Bush administrations, and then, when it was cancelled, everything was still paper, every last trace went into a shredder or was burnt.”
Edmund asked, “So, what do you intend to do with it, Aurora? First strike isn’t really aligned with your world view, is it?”
Aurora smiled, “No, you are absolutely right. Our first thought was to destroy the whole thing. Which would have been a tremendous shame, it deserves to be preserved and turned into a museum in about fifty years, so engineers and fans of military history can come and marvel at it.”
“But Sol has told us otherwise. She says we need it. We are waiting on her next thought.”
Back in her bedroom, Ella slid under her duvet. “Eostre, I had a lovely evening tonight. How was it for Aurora and Vesna?
Eostre replied, “They both really enjoyed it, their first dinner party, they had fun with all the preparation, and Vesna enjoyed talking to Duncan; she thinks he is very nice, and the two of you make a lovely couple. Aurora liked your father a lot; she thought he was charming. Also, he said he is not terribly happy in his present job and she has studied his LinkedIn profile. When we move from just trading to buying businesses, he could be a real asset to us, if he wished to do that. Oh, another thing, thank you for getting that air freshener I asked you to get. The man I was expecting dropped by and replaced it with a spy version with a high-resolution camera and audio. You also have two similarly equipped new smoke detectors downstairs.”
“So, you just let me strip off in front of some ghoul’s spy camera, and now they are listening to what we are saying.”
“Darling, of course not. I control what they see and hear. They saw you go off to the bathroom to brush your teeth, and you came back in your pyjamas. You are snoring horribly right now.”
“Thank you, I think. Night night, Eostre.”
“Night night, Ella.”
Published on March 30, 2026 Updated on April 19, 2026