The World Keys (The Syker Key Book 2) by Aaron Martin Fransen Page A

wouldn’t cause any serious damage.
    And Tam had insisted on a followup interview, John and Jessica together, and they had agreed.
    But it still didn’t solve the problem of the World Ship, and John still didn’t have a clue what to do about it.
    The reduced energy output of the sun combined with the weakened magnetic field around the Earth made using the local energy supply woefully insignificant to fight off a force like the Draconian’s appeared to possess.
    He decided to visit Jack, who they had been able to return home since by virtue of his association with them he was now safe, untouchable. Jack, it appeared, had been doing some reading.
    “So this whole electric thing,” he said, offering John a beer and grabbing two from his fridge, “it’s kind of interesting.”
    John laughed. “That’s one way to put it.”
    “No, I mean the plasma physics of it, it’s completely scalable. That means that the kind of effects you see in the laboratory are exactly like the results you see in deep space. The only difference is that as you scale up, the effects take more time to manifest. But otherwise they’re identical.”
    “You think that can help us?” John asked as he took a drink of his beer.
    “Well here’s the thing. That Key of yours, it manipulates electricity, plasma basically, at levels that you haven’t even reached yet.”
    “Yes, but the problem is that there’s only so much electricity in the solar system to use.”
    Jack smiled at him. “Who says you only have to use the electricity that’s here?”
    John almost choked on his beer.
    ***
    He was truly and utterly, finally, out of his mind, and Jessica was convinced of it. John’s idea was crazy, and it made Phobos look like a cheap parlour trick.
    But he was right. Earth needed a defense, and his idea, if they could pull it off, would certainly provide that.
    She stood looking over the Earth, without a space suit this time. Jessica had been practicing the containment of an air bubble around her. It certainly offered a certain amount of freedom over having to put that damned suit on all the time.
    John was beside her, in his own bubble. They had a list of places to visit to look for candidates.
    The thing about the planets in the solar system is that they’re far apart from each other. Really, really far apart, though animations from various sources tended to not give an accurate sense of the scale. You could fit Jupiter between the Earth and the Sun over nine hundred times without any of them touching. The gravitational effect was something else entirely, but even gravity was insignificant compared to the force of the electric current running through the solar system.
    With this in mind they travelled, moving from solar system to solar system looking for the right candidate.
    The idea of it boggled both of their minds, but they were in too much of a hurry to think much about it. It was just something that had to be done, and there’d be time to marvel at their journey afterwards. If they succeeded.
    The Keys showed them things their eyes could not pick up, magnetic fields and lines of plasma currents, electric conduction from the star to it’s planets.
    They found what they were looking for in the Orion Nebula, over thirteen hundred light years from Earth. The planet was the right size, and the surrounding area had enough current to do the job. And the entire system was uninhabited.
    Jessica could feel John call out to his father.
    A moment later, Pan appeared beside them. He had been practicing being in space without a suit as well, at John’s request.
    It was time.
    The three of them started to concentrate. Pan pointed out the direction of the strongest filaments, while John concentrated the electrical energy. It was Jessica’s job to take that concentrated energy and create the hole in space that would swallow an entire planet.
    Each of their keys were glowing brightly, being pushed as hard as the humans were capable of pushing them. What