Roth watched in amusement as the clone gave a frightened stare towards the shielded humans, perhaps trying to ask his superiors why. When none of them gave any reaction, the clone turned his head forward again.

He knows his only option is obedience. Poor guy.

The clone ran for about ten metres, weighed down by his excessive array of weaponry, before passing between the two stone pillars.

He didn’t live long enough to notice what happened next.

The slow-motion replay would later show the air rippling around him, as if he had run through a vertical surface of water. The previously blank space between the pillars turned crimson and wavy when touched. The clone’s head, the first part of him through, was unaffected by the waves. But his fate was sealed as his metal equipment followed.

The space between the stone pillars burst into action. Tiny lightning shards attacked the metal in the clone’s grasp: his assault rifle and handguns, his grenades, the belt buckle and hunting knives, and the fronts of his steel-capped boots.

But at that moment, Oliver Roth could only watch at regular viewing speed. To him the dozens of explosions seemed instantaneous, as every metallic item around the clone’s body was detonated by the red barrier. The shrapnel from the firearms and blades ripped through his limbs, sending his extremities across the room and his artificial blood splattering across the chamber floor. His right hand slapped the bullet-resistant glass in front of Iain Marshall, causing hysterical laughter from Roth. As the clone’s torn remains fell to the ground, nothing more than visceral chunks of carved meat, the rippling red curtain faded back into invisibility as if nothing had happened.

Bloody hell, thought Roth, grudgingly impressed. As much as he despised Nathaniel Pearce, the Chief Scientist had surpassed himself this time. Atmospheric Metallurgic Excitation had once been a crackpot idea from the depths of Nicholas Grant’s imagination, but somehow Nathaniel Pearce had brought it into the realm of reality: an invisible wall of energised air that destroyed anything forged from metal.

‘Sir,’ Pearce asked into the phone, ‘are you happy?’

Nicholas Grant’s discreet laughter answered the question for him. As Roth started to bounce on his toes with an excited smile, he looked to his side and found even Marshall smiling. Pearce rested his smart-arse mug at the side of the control panel and started to applaud himself.

‘Happy is one word for it, certainly,’ Grant said. ‘Nat, can you confirm that AME can be reproduced on a much larger scale?’

‘Everything we understand about the laws of physics tells me it is now possible,’ Pearce replied. ‘If it works for a square metre, it’ll work for a square mile. And if it works for a square mile—’

‘And are we still on target to achieve this within four days?’

Grant’s attachment to May 20th continues to make his decisions for him, Roth thought to himself.