strength was magnified by the ball until it was a white streak rocketing across the room. There was a low, quick, whirring noise as the ball came even with the staff and was suddenly flying in a different direction. It pinged off an adjacent wall, crashed through a rack of tools, ricocheted off another bit of equipment, and nearly took my head off as I ducked before it embedded itself in the wall behind me.
“Shit yeah!”
What you said, only eloquently, Paige agreed
“I must admit, Paige, I was skeptical when you came up with this idea, but damn if it doesn’t work.”
The laws of physics don’t lie, Link, even if they don’t make any sense to you.
Despite Paige’s jab, I knew mostly how the staff worked. The mechanism around the Barsoomium used masers—basically a laser within the microwave range of the electromagnetic spectrum—to cool the Barsoomium down to an inconceivably cold 100 picokelvin. At that temperature, matter behaves in a way that’s not at all normal. The Barsoomium, that cold, with just the right current running through it, was capable of warping the higher dimensions around it, effectively altering the plane of any kinetic energy passing through the field.
I couldn’t stop grinning as I released the staff from the vise grip and spun it around before swinging it in a lunging strike. We’d built it with heavy impacts in mind, so not only was it a defensive tool like none other, but it could be used to bludgeon an opponent as well. As though that weren’t badass enough, the extreme cold caused a frosty mist to emanate from the staff’s tip.