“The guns were only as powerful as the person pulling the trigger?”
“Exactly,” Luke said. “It was clear that the weapons were not going to be cost-effective for military or intelligence use.”
“No kidding.” Bruce nudged her hand. She looked at him and saw that he was gazing down at the console with a rapt expression.
“I store the treats inside the console,” Luke said.
“I get the message.”
She opened the console and fished a couple of snacks out of the bag of dog treats. Bruce accepted them with gracious enthusiasm and rewarded her with an adoring look.
“You are a manipulative little hellhound, aren’t you?” she said.
“Hellhound?” Luke asked.
“Never mind.” She closed the console and sat back.
“Before abandoning the Kaleidoscope problem, Tobias and Xavier decided to take one more stab at it,” Luke continued. “The theory was that they could make the guns more user-friendly and scale up the size and power of the weapons if they figured out how to fire them remotely.”
“If the person pulling the trigger did not have direct contact with the weapon, the psychic recoil issue would no longer be a problem.”
“That was the plan,” Luke said, “but they ran into one of the most fundamental roadblocks in paranormal engineering—the battery problem. They needed to come up with a material that could be used to store large amounts of paranormal energy and release it on demand. The third engineer in the lab, Maxwell Coburn, was a materials expert. He worked on that end of the project.”
“Even if you found a way to store serious quantities of energy, you’d have to figure out how to channel it, not only to charge the batteries, but to focus it so that it fired the weapons. You would need crystals. Very powerful crystals.”
“You may have missed your calling,” Luke said. “You would have made a good para-engineer.”
“Nope. I don’t do math of any kind. I am a Harper, however, so I know something about crystals.”
“Tobias and Xavier developed six lab-grown stones they believed could handle strong energy—assuming Coburn’s batteries worked. That’s when they started having second thoughts. They worried that the crystals might fall into the wrong hands. As a precaution Tobias Harper tuned each one so that only someone with a special psychic talent could unlock the stones.”
“A talent that is strong in the Harper family bloodline,” Sophy said, not bothering to conceal her pride.
“Apparently your great-grandfather did not make that small fact entirely clear at the time,” Luke said.
She shot him a warning look. “Don’t go there. It wasn’t Tobias Harper’s fault that your great-grandfather lacked the talent required to unlock the crystals.”
“Xavier didn’t like the idea that only Tobias or someone with his talent could unlock the crystals, but there was no other option. They stashed the crystals in a glass box and stored the box in a safe in the lab. They were the only ones who knew the code to open the safe.”
“What about the other engineer? The one working on the battery problem?”
“Shortly before the Fogg Lake disaster Harper and Wells became suspicious of Coburn,” Luke said. “They thought he might be a Communist spy. In those days everyone was looking for Communists under the bed. Xavier and Tobias did not give him the code to the safe. Then the explosion occurred.”
“I know this part,” Sophy said. “In the chaos that followed the disaster, our great-grandfathers grabbed the two prototype Kaleidoscope weapons and some of the classified documents associated with their project. But when they unlocked the safe they discovered that the six crystals were gone.”
“They assumed Coburn had managed to open the safe and steal the crystals, but there was no time to search for him. They had to run for their lives like everyone else. Later they were told that Coburn had died in the explosion. But who knows? After Fogg Lake, whoever was in charge of the Bluestone Project couldn’t move fast enough to shut down all the labs and destroy the records.”
“Tobias and Xavier agreed to hide the weapons and documents in the Wells family vault,” Sophy said. “They told themselves that even if Coburn had faked his death and managed to steal thecrystals, he wouldn’t be able to do anything with them because he couldn’t unlock them.”
“And then they made the truly disastrous mistake of going into business together,” Luke concluded. “Within a year they were at each other’s throats.”
“Xavier bought out Tobias’s share of the company, got married, and went on to build an empire. My great-grandfather got married and went on to become a failed inventor. End of story.”
“Except for the part where your great-grandfather claimed it was one of his designs that Xavier used to launch the business into the big time,” Luke said.
“And the part where your great-grandfather said that they had agreed on a deal back at the start and refused to renegotiate after the company went big. And thus, a half-baked feud was born between the Wells and Harper families. Ridiculous.”
“Probably the defining attribute of a feud,” Luke said.
