[b]Saint-Nazaire, France[/b]

	Red and blue lights flashed from a police car in the rainy night, the dancing colors illuminating the fog and surroundings. Its siren whooped twice as it slowly crawled forward on the wet road, a convoy of four passenger vans following behind it. It was four in the morning and a sizeable crowd of protestors had gathered around the main entrance to the sprawling [i]Chantiers de l’Atlantique[/i] complex. A line of French [i]gendarmes[/i] wearing riot gear and standing behind plastic shields stood sternly by the chainlink fence ahead of them, watching the crowd that had become a common occurrence in the last few weeks. The police car was blocked by a group of five raincoat-clad protestors locking arms along the road, staring down the convoy.

	“No new Langium ships!” they chanted rhythmically. Others crowded in on the convoy, shouting slogans at the workers inside. Ever since the protests started, the shipyard workers had to be transported in from the nearby city of Nantes with a police escort. Outside the rain-streaked windows of the vans, the workers could see handwritten signs, some bearing the peace symbol and the logo of Greenpeace while others claimed harsh consequences of the shipyard’s work: “Langium ship waste mutates our sea life! Decommission them now!”

	The police car turned on its sirens again, this time in a constant whine. Stuck in position, the driver had shifted it to neutral and revved its engine aggressively in an attempt to scare the human chain away. They stayed put, rightly convinced that the French police were prohibited from actually running into them. The workers in the vans sat silently, observing the situation outside. In the lead, the policemen activated their loudspeaker and broadcasted a message to the protestors: “Please disperse from the road and allow us to proceed. This is your warning.”

	The protestors refused to move and instead more people linked their arms together. The police broadcasted a second message, warning of consequences if they refused to move. The activists instead shouted profanities at the convoy and someone threw an empty can at the police car. The man in the side seat turned to the driver, said something, and got on the radio to the [i]gendarmes[/i] at the gate. Inside a command post within the perimeter of the compound, a police commander relayed the order to two officers who were standing on elevated scaffolding flanking the entry gate. From ammunition belts on their hips, they loaded tear gas rounds into their six-barreled grenade launchers. Each of them aimed into the crowd and fired off a trio of gas grenades.

	The crowd had been through enough of these to know what was happening, and immediately dispersed as soon as the tear gas started billowing from the 40-millimeter cartridges on the ground. Using the opportunity, the police car advanced with the vans in line behind it, accelerating through the gap in the protestors to rush themselves and the workers through the entrance lanes of the gate where a security guard waved them through. The chainlink gate closed hurriedly behind them and the [i]gendarmes[/i] resumed their shield line as the protestors scattered off into the foggy distance.

	The object of the protest, lit by floodlights in a drydock several hundred meters into the compound, was a brand new cargo vessel commissioned specially by the French government. It was unique, unlike anything else that [i]Chantiers de l’Atlantique[/i] had produced in its storied history dating back to 1862. A mix of dry bulk, liquid, and gas cargo, the vessel was designed for one purpose and one purpose only: the transport and safe storage of industrial amounts of Langium and NLC artifacts.

	Many of these ships existed already, becoming routine travelers of shipping lanes across the globe, but this ship was designed to be the biggest. As research and applications required even more expansive stockpiles of Langium, the French needed a way to transport it more effectively than simply repurposing old vessels. Older ships modified with ad-hoc containers and shielding simply would no longer do the job. It was a tough sell to Parliament, but the funding arrived in 1986 for two of these behemoths to be constructed: one by [i]Chantiers de l’Atlantique[/i] near Nantes, and a smaller vessel by [i]Ateliers et Chantiers de France[/i] in Dunkirk.

	Their chosen names, respectively, bore the names of French chemists as the SS [i]Camille Alphonse Faure[/i] and the SS [i]Émile Sarrau[/i]. Faure, known for his work on battery technology, represented the energy generation applications of Langium. Sarrau contributed heavily to shockwave research in the 19th century, so much so that older descriptions of the Mach scale for breaking the sound barrier bore the French name of [i]nombre de Sarrau.[/i] His name symbolized the propulsion breakthroughs that Langium was spearheading throughout industry.

	One by one, the workers exited the vans in front of the main offices of the shipyard and rushed under the awning to escape the worst of the downpour. They wore high-visibility neon yellow raincoats and carried backpacks and lunchboxes with their hardhats tucked under their arms. All looked the same hybrid breed of seaman and construction worker, faces and hands long since worn and calloused by a lifetime of tradesmanship. A trio of other figures emerged from the last van, this time wearing dark trench coats over white shirts and ties. These were the three engineers.

	Paul Bernard, a bespectacled man from Marseille, ran the marine engineering design for the ship. Easily the oldest and most senior of the engineers, he was responsible for the whole-of-construction work on the vessel. His prolific career in the civil shipping industry had exposed him to a wide variety of techniques and designs, each of which was taken into consideration to construct a ship with such sensitive cargo. He was not a formal employee of [i]Chantiers de l’Atlantique[/i], but his firm had been specially contracted to design the project for their shipyard to produce. With a firm demeanor and a reputation as a sticker for exacting specifications down to the millimeter, the engineer ran a tight program with zero tolerance for cost overruns and delays.

	Pierre Laurent was five years Paul’s junior but had an arguably more central role to the project. He was responsible for the design of all Langium-based functions on the ship, to include both the controversial propulsion system and the shielding of all transport compartments. Trained as a petrochemical engineer at the [i]École Centrale Paris[/i], he made a point to retrain himself into the newly developing Langium field during the 1970s as it became heavily apparent that oil was on its way out. While he struggled with the subject matter, the nuclear engineers and chemists had a much better grasp on the subject, he pulled himself into one of the most competitive firms after graduation and built a career designing civilian and military Langium power stations across France.

	The third engineer, tall and slender and darker than the others checked the time on his curiously bulky watch. Somewhere between a calculator watch crossed with a pager and a miniature PDA, the device was strapped to his wrist covering nearly half of his forearm. A small screen displayed tiny text that reflected off his round glasses. His dark brown eyes squinted, remembering something he had to do later. And unfolded a keyboard from its base. He navigated it deftly with his nimble fingers to type a quick note before sliding it back into storage. This was Mohammad Zardani, the sole Lebanese-born electrical engineer on the project.

	With a meeting for the morning occupying the next hour, the trio emerged with refilled thermoses of coffee to review the construction. Final modules were being connected to the most critical pieces of infrastructure inside the ship. Mohammad, chiefly, was the supervisor for this delicate work.

	“So they’ll be hooking up the turbine to the propulsion system today,” he announced proudly as he tapped a pen against the glass of a monitor. It made a tink-tink noise against the thick CRT screen. “This is going to be tricky. I might have to get in there myself.”

	“Why?” asked Paul, pursing his lips as he checked over the blueprints. “It’s no different from a regular ship’s motors.”

	“Well that’s not entirely true,” Mohammad said, turning to Pierre. “What is it about Langium that produces such irregularities in the generation of power again?”

	“It’s the structure of the actual power generation element in the molecule,” Pierre said, arms crossed. He wished he could have a cigarette now, but the French government had just passed a law that January prohibiting smoking in the workplace. Some of the other offices were rather lax on enforcement but Paul, ever the stickler, threatened to move his office furniture out into the cold, often rainy courtyard if he caught the man violating the new rule.

	Paul rolled his eyes as Pierre began the science lesson. The reactor designer had brought his mind back to the topic at hand: “The core, power producing atom of a Langium atom molecule is weird. It’s encased in stuff that we know about, sure, but it appears to be a shell protecting an irregularly shaped and asymmetric atom, kind of like a teardrop. We’ve never seen anything like it, not on an atomic level. The atoms will also only ‘react’ if one side is interacting with the right kind of matter: the strike plates in the fuel rod. The electromagnet in the reactor does its best to pull the Langium into position to strike but there’s more to it than that.”

	He took a breath, putting his hand to rub his chin and then reaching towards the computer’s mouse to drag the blueprint image towards the reactor: a blue box simply labeled as such, as the wiring diagram didn’t care for the specifics of the powerplant, and zoomed in. It showed more detail, with the fuel rods in a hexagon bundle connected to wired baseplates that fed to an intricate-looking series of circuits and wires.

	“The molecule is fluid in its structure when magnetically activated. It all comes towards the source of magnetism like a loose rockslide, not as a whole. We don’t know why, it’s an unseen force that we can’t measure or model. This causes the stuff to get in the way and knock the atom around or jam it up between the strike plate. But unlike nuclear fission, you can’t probabilistically model all this. It’s just too much and too uncertain, all of these alien atoms and molecules just seem to… they just break our rules of particle physics. They should all behave the same all the time as the same molecules, but something hidden just introduces so much entropy.”

“We have no idea what that unknown factor is and we can’t control it,” he admitted with a defeated sigh. “None of this should work, but it does.”

	“We can’t really figure out how to make it consistently hot like a regular powerplant to boil water and turn the turbine like usual. These reactions are odd in that it’s almost like producing electricity via photovoltaics, but Langium directly pumps almost limitless amounts of electrons into our system once it hits the strike plate. And it’s not like beta decay either, where it becomes an isobar and its properties change. Langium never changes… it seems to somehow produce electrons on its own, like a factory. We think that the core atom completes some sort of reaction between our physical matter and whatever energy is causing the weirdness inside.”

	“Just get to the point,” bemoaned Paul. None of this was in his wheelhouse, but Mohammad was captivated. The engineer tapped his pen to the table, listening intently. It was making much more sense to him now.

	“Right, yes,” Pierre stuttered, suddenly self-conscious of his rambling. “The point of this all is we need to directly link the reactor to a gigantic tank circuit that tunes the electrical flow to dampen out the regular variations. Once that’s done it charges a battery, and we make the rate of discharge smaller than the average rate of charge to totally nullify irregularities straight from the generation source. That’s what produces a constant current that is reliable enough to use in electrical systems.”

	“I see,” Mohammad said, nodding in agreement and pushing up his glasses. He turned to the project lead: “The capacitors and the circuit after that are the tricky part with Langium, [i]Monsieur[/i] Bernard. Plus with all the electrical activity and magnets in the reactor, all of the pieces need to be exactly in the right spot to limit their effects on the rest of the system. It’s big, heavy, and expensive. Very delicate work.”

	“Kind of like trying to run a water wheel rain that you can't forecast,” explained Pierre, seeing the visible confusion on the older man’s face. “It either rains or it doesn't, a little or a lot, and you don't have radar or barometers or instruments to tell you when it will rain or how much. You have to make a funnel that will drip consistently in a drought or a thunderstorm.”

	“I see,” Paul replied. He didn’t care much except for the cost and weight factors of the electrical subsystems onboard, but that had already been planned for. He focused on Mohammad. “And you’re going to be going in to supervise this yourself? I’ll have to get the site foreman to sign off and get you gear. Hard hat, safety glasses, a fall harness… the works.”

	“I, uh, need that?” said Mohammad with a nervous chuckle. “Oh. I never have gone into anything that hazardous. Mostly office buildings.”

	Paul pointed out the window at the [i]Faure[/i] sitting in its drydock outside. They couldn’t see much of it besides the hull pressed close by the window, its gigantic frame dwarfing the engineers’ workplace. “These things are hazardous. I’ve seen quite a few widowmakers in my time, especially when it comes to such complicated machinery. It reminds me almost of the old nuclear vessels.”

	The marine engineer shook his head, remembering the early days of experimenting with nuclear-powered vessels. Before Langium’s secrets were unlocked in advanced research labs and feverish megaprojects, nuclear energy appeared to be the future. Now it was relegated to the backwaters of human society, with the small reactors rusting away in unsafe conditions in the third world. If there was anything for the environmentalists to be worried about, it was the hundreds of shoddily-cased, secondhand reactors leaking waste in the backcountry jungles of Africa and Asia. Mohammad knew it himself: Lebanon had just suffered an incident outside of Beirut where a criticality accident at a fuel processing facility killed three workers and sickened eighty-nine.

	“Well, in that case, let’s get you going,” Paul said. They three sat up from their table and made their way out towards the ready room below. They found their gear, stashed in their lockers but untouched aside from rare inspection tours. Mohammad threw together his raincoat, zipping it up to his neck and fitting the oversized hardhat over its hood. He wiped fog from his glasses and made his way out to the exterior awning, where the storm still was not letting up. Pierre followed, hurriedly bringing his lighter to from a cigarette that he pulled from a steel case in his shirt pocket. The thing was alight before he had even left the building. As Paul took his time, the pair stood silently underneath the awning while they listened to the rain plinking steadily on its metal cover.

	Paul joined them shortly thereafter, where they piled into a small electrical shuttle that almost resembled a country club’s golf car. It drove them straight to the ship’s gangway, where the engineers disembarked and climbed aboard the slippery metal ramp to reach the cargo deck of the ship. The deck was festooned with knuckling spots for intermodal containers and specialized hatches leading to Langium containment units, which the construction workers were careful not to trip over as they scurried back and forth in the rain. It took several minutes before the engineers were greeted by a foreman and guided down to the stern of the ship. Passageways and berthing rooms meant for the crew quickly turned to even more claustrophobic hatches and crawlspaces below.

	Mohammad squeezed his small body down a ladder hatch that he used to descend through a nest of cables and electrical systems to reach the main power generation station. Paul and Pierre had opted to stay up top when they realized the maze of tunnels that they would be getting into: Paul had other duties to perform anyways. Mohammad wrestled his way through a series of loose wires, careful not to dislodge them from their junction boxes and connectors. He emerged into a cavernous room where men on hanging platforms delicately directed a massive apparatus in from a hanging crane.

	A cover had been erected to keep the water out, but the wisdom of installing electrical components in a rainstorm eluded Mohammad. He had heard that [i]Chantiers de l’Atlantique[/i] was experiencing political pressure to finish the project quickly, something to do with an uptick in Langium quantities needed for some project. That was beyond his scope, but the work began to worry the engineer. The workers appeared rushed, a supervisor barking orders on a walkie talkie while the crane dropped the battery in. Something wasn’t right.

Mohammad pushed up his glasses and his stomach became twisted into a knot: he saw a sudden drop in one of the crane’s slings and a link snapping on a chain. The battery apparatus came loose, crashing into a series of electrical components on the wall. Something collided with the auxiliary power, sending an arc of electricity flashing across the chamber. The workers dived for cover and Mohammad ducked down right before two components erupted into a brilliant explosion. The young man was knocked to the ground; hitting his head on a bulkhead as a fire emerged in the generator room.

	Topside, Paul and Pierre heard a cascading series of booms from below: they turned to face the stern of the vessel that was rapidly going up in smoke. Electrical fires were raging and lapping at the steel barriers surrounding the generator’s access hatches. They ran, clambering off the ship as alarm klaxons sounded and hurried calls went out for the fire department. Workers and managers fled the accident, abandoning their workstations to seek the safety of land. In the minutes of pandemonium, fire trucks arrived from the shipyard’s station and firemen hurriedly attempted to set up their apparatuses. One after another, streams of foam began to shoot onwards to stymie the damage.

	The reactor vessel, punctured by the falling assembly, experienced a massive overload of power and heat. Test cells containing enough Langium to calibrate and start up the sensitive machine were damaged. These cells were now open to the environment as raging fires encroached into the compartment. Cladding burned and melted as flammable materials combusted: support structures and beams weakened, causing the upper deck to fall inwards on the reactor core. In a haze of smoke and flame, the Langium inside was now at the mercy of an uncontrolled accident.

	The men onboard would have no idea of the accident's scale for many hours.