Valkyrie shook her head. “It’s real. But it’s not an enemy we need to worry about again. When they came the last time, they left markers, to ensure none of their kind wasted effort coming to the same places. To go against that procedure and habit would run contrary to their entire being. It won’t happen.”

“You said these guys are building a giant gun to shoot at things on that scale, and this is the gun.”

“No,” Glines said. “I don’t blame you for getting caught up in the attention-grabbing details, but we didn’t say for sure that this is meant to shoot at anything. The ammo they’re using isn’t sufficient to hurt anything that big. The ammo is the point.”

“What’s the ammo?” the wounded man asked.

“Explain,” Valkyrie said.

“The air.”

“Someone built a fucking thirty-one mile long airgun?”

“Technically, I guess,” Glines said. “Less technically, it shoots all of the air. Each shot is one Earth’s worth of atmosphere, gathered up into a ball and superheated.”

The wounded man was silent, his eyes wide.

“One shot, and Earth whatever this is is emptied in about two seconds, everything dies well before it can suffocate, with the sudden atmospheric and pressure shift. The next shot empties the adjacent Earth, probably.”

“Earth Bet,” Valkyrie said.

“Sure. Home, huh?” the shadow asked.

Valkyrie nodded.

“Then the next closest Earth, or a share of all the connected Earths. Enough to do widespread damage.”

The wounded man sat down heavily on the grass-less hillside.

“You said the ammunition was the point.”

“The best analogy I can think of is the idea we had of putting all garbage on a rocket and shooting it into space, so we don’t have to have landfills. This guy is shooting in the same way.”

“Disposing of atmospheres,” Valkyrie said the thought aloud. “That helps. Thank you.”

“No prob. That’s really all I’ve got. Oh, and if you’re going up, you want to go up through the tower, not outside of it. Most defense is aimed at protecting against external attack.”

“Thank you.” She dismissed the shadow with a thought.

Do you need anything? she thought, pushing the thought into the space where the shadows lived.

No, came the distant reply.

I’ll get to you soon.

I don’t mind. I was never very good at asking authorities for help. I got patient.

“Why?” the wounded man asked.

“I intend to find out. Will you walk with me?”

The wounded man nodded, falling into step beside her. Behind them, the tower continued to bleed out atmosphere, screaming the cry of a hundred thousand metal panels straining to their limits, roaring with the rush of wind and internal tinker technology.

He was the first to say anything, “We’ve got sixteen parahumans and twenty non-parahuman staff at the camp here. Nerves are shot, morale is nil. Nine of them got seriously injured trying to investigate. I need to know what to tell them. Telling them that a team of tinkers or whoever are aiming to shoot all of the Earths’ air into space isn’t going to fly.”