When you’re putting on a firework display, always open with your biggest, but save the best till last. Control: Bleak Pass picks up in the aftermath of a failed attempt to prevent a theft at the secret Bleak Pass facility. The resident AI uses some very special weaponry at its disposal and still manages to miss the target. This doesn’t cast the hi-tech guns in a very positive light, but they get to make up for it later.
The ‘singularity seeder’ is a weapon system that was developed for ship to ship combat, but the power requirements prevented it from being fully implemented within the fleet. Instead it was re-appropriated for the Bleak Pass facility to offer a last line of defense to the heart of the Coalition’s war effort.
In my first draft of the book’s prologue you got to see the seeder in action, but it was cut out in subsequent drafts as the scene just didn’t fit in with the flow of the book, but I was determined to show the thing off and in the final battle I got the chance to do just that. There wasn’t much tech behind this weapon, just the explosive force of rapidly expanding energy from a single point in space. In a fiction already saturated with old world ballistics (as per my last blog on the subject) I didn’t want the ultimate deterrent to be too obvious, but I wanted it to carry the same kind of punch as a nuclear weapon, hence the rather familiar application.
Basically, a nuclear bomb without the bomb.
The seeder works on the principle of targeting a specific point in space and planting a single particle there before releasing the energy trapped within it and allowing that energy to expand outward, destroying anything caught in its path. The advancement in this principle from nuclear weapons is that it can be used in a controlled manner that allows the AI in control to create an energy event of any size. Without giving too much away, it gets used at the end of the book. A lot.
That’s not the only crazy weapon in the book, though. Oh no. The Tekja Massar, teh Coalition’s alien allies, have a plasma based technology of their own that is the only certain answer to the Vorstaat’s seemingly unstoppable wave of superior weaponry. The ‘pepper spray’ as it’s affectionately known by the Coalition soldiers on the ground, is something like an open topped tank that can melt anything it hits. The tech is implemented on various scales, from the ground up to the orbital fleets facing the indomitable might of the Vorstaat ships where it counts as a very heavy weight in the balance of power.
That said, there never seems to be enough of it to go around and in a war of numbers the Coalition still struggle despite the Tek’s help as they just don’t have the resources, as is borne out in an early chapter of the book when Staff Sergeant Edmunson battles to keep the remnants of his platoon alive long enough to see the Tek reinforcements arrive.
It’s the unstoppable force of the Vorstaat that will feature in the fourth and final part of this series as I explore the weaponry of the seemingly invincible ‘Four States’.
You can read the first chapter here for FREE! https://niallsingers.wordpress.com/2014/07/02/read-the-first-chapter-of-scifi-novel-control-for-free/
Or you can go and buy it here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00K9MAU0Y?*Version*=1&*entries*=0 if you’re in the UK.
If you’re anywhere else – go here
Control 