3rd World Products, Book 17 (25 page)

Athena smiled and said, “You know where to find me. Goodbye, Marie,” and then vanished.

Marie looked up from the screen, saw no Athena, and looked at me, then asked, “Ed, how the
hell
are you doing this?”

Uh, oh. How to answer without lying? I placed the operation under the control of my orbital core, then said, “I’m using an AI to control the flitters.”

Pointing at the screen, I said, “They’ll drill until the bottom one is about to punch through. One will stay down there and the others will come back up to shove stuff into the hole. Once it’s all in, the one at the bottom will poke through to the magma and a couple of the others will make sure all the radioactive stuff gets down there.”

Standing up, Marie yelped, “
Wait! Just wait, damn it!
You’re telling me you’re drilling a hole to the Earth’s
core?!
”

“No, just to the magma below the crust.”

“But won’t that let it… let it… ahh, hell… I don’t know, let it squirt out like a damned
volcano?!
”

“Nope. The hole’s too small. The stuff’ll rise a bit, but it’ll cool and make a plug.”

“How the hell can you be sure about that?”

“Because Athena didn’t veto the plan.”

“Athena didn’t…?! That’s all you have to go on?!”

I sipped coffee and grinned. “She’s very safety-conscious, y’know. A real stickler for not getting people killed.”

Apparently frozen in the midst of her objection, Marie seemed to be trying to think of another one as she eyed first me, then the screen.

She turned back to me and stated firmly, “Ed, I think you’d better call Angie about this before you do it.”

“You know better, ma’am. That isn’t why she sent me. What she doesn’t know, she won’t have to lie to deny.”

“That doesn’t make any damned sense! She sent you here to do something about the situation!”

“Did she say that, ma’am? Did she actually tell me to do anything in particular when I got here?”

Marie again stopped in mid-rant. I put up a separate screen to display our brief conversation at Tanya’s place. Marie watched it until Angie signed off, then looked at me.

After a moment, she said, “Nothing ever changes, does it?”

“And by that, you mean..?”

Sitting down, she said, “Deniability, just like you said.”

“Ah. Yup. If you’re all through fussing, I’ll get to work now.”

Marie’s gaze met mine for another moment, then she leaned back in her seat and picked up her coffee mug from the deck beneath her seat. Sipping, she sighed, “Yeah. Sure. Go ahead. I just hope you don’t blow us all up.”

Heh. Right. I set the flitters in motion and sat back to watch. What we saw was an outline representation of their progress. From time to time I tapped each flitter for a real view. We saw nothing but various shades and textures of rock flowing past them. I put up a smaller screen to check email and forums. Marie eyed me briefly, then returned to studying flitter activities.

Time passed and the flitters were nearly finished when Marie asked, “What about the bodies?”

Looking up, I asked, “You mean the heavily irradiated corpses of those in the building when things went to hell?”

She met my gaze and nodded slightly. “Yeah. Those.”

“Without instructions to the contrary, I’m going to shove them down the hole with everything else.”

“Shouldn’t you let the authorities decide what to do with them?”

“The same authorities who created this mess and pretended it didn’t exist?”

Her gaze narrowed. “Ed, they had people who cared about them.”

“So what? If they’d blown themselves up or flown planes into buildings, their families would have just as much to bury.”

Sipping coffee, I asked, “Where’s all this coming from? You never cared about crap like this in the old days. I remember a thug you dumped in a river one night.”

Shaking her head, Marie said, “I cared. Sort of. Differently, but I cared. But it’s been a long time and I’ve had a lot of time to think about some things over the years, Ed.”

Letting the flitter activity screen vanish, I asked, “Regrets?”

As if wincing away from that word, she sighed, “No, not regrets, exactly. Just… questions, I guess. Did we
alway
s do the right thing, Ed? Every single time?”

“Yeah. We got the job done and we got back alive and untortured. That was the right thing to do at the time.”

The vent tube arrived and the flitters stopped digging at almost the same time. I studied their results as pressure within the hole dropped steadily. Good work. Of course. I had one flit remain at the bottom of the hole and spaced two more to make sure debris kept moving, then had the one nearest the surface switch to stealth mode and begin boring upward.

Marie said, “I’m not confused about what these people have been doing, Ed. They’ve been trying to create nuclear weapons. I understand that. But they’re still people, and just shoving them into a… a super-deep hole seems… wrong.”

“Why, exactly? What would happen to them up here? They’d get put in shallower holes. Well, actually, they’d be entombed at great expense in something that could contain hard radiation.”

Wearing a sullen glower, Marie subsided. I put the flitter screen back up and watched the outlines work. The topmost flitter had reached the foundation of the building’s lowest level and bored upward through the radioactive mess.

I had four more flits join it and they began fielding everything into the hole. If something wouldn’t fit, they diced it up. Working their way outward, they cleared the level of radioactive debris and expanded their efforts upward.

After the flitters’ quickly-expanding work collapsed most of the floors of the rooms above the reactor, I killed the building’s remaining cameras. An unexplained collapse was all anyone needed to see.

An evacuation began that quickly became rather frantic. Flitter activities stalled when two elevators failed. Each was packed with people, of course. Forming a flitter for each elevator well, I had them turn the motors to lift the dead elevators to the ground floor and open the doors. People couldn’t struggle out past each other fast enough.

The flitters found a few men left behind. All had received fatal doses and had only hours to live, but their being alive meant letting them leave. Work halted until they’d reached the second level.

Having been instructed to remove the most heavily irradiated materials, the flitters sliced away a goodly section of the building, working around supporting structures until they were all that remained between the gaping hole and the second level.

After making sure the building was empty of people, I had the flits remove the irradiated supports, replacing them with field-generated supports until the job was done.

All that was left to do was to punch through to the magma, shove the debris down into it, and let a plug form in the hole. The bottom flitter reported the presence of fossil water. I checked the hole to find water streaming into the hole near the surface. Not good. Steam can blow things apart.

I had one of the flitters expand its hull field to generally seal the water table region of the hole, then had another flitter form an inverted conical field a mile below it.

Marie had been watching in silence. Now she peered at the screen as she asked, “What are you doing?”

“There’s water in the hole from that leak. I sealed the leak and put a temporary plug below it. Now I’m going to poke out the bottom of the hole and shove the debris into the magma.”

She glanced at me, then continued watching the screen. Sending the bottom flitter downward made all the debris follow it. When the flitter’s nose encountered molten rock, I had it vanish and re-form above the debris to push the mess downward.

I instantly learned that two flitters wouldn’t be enough as pressure forced the entire mass back up the hole almost fifty feet in under a second. Adding a flitter to form another inverted cone plug above the others stopped the rising debris, but it did nothing about moving the mess downward.

Hm. The problem was pressure. All I needed was a plug above the debris and the flitters would be able to move the mess down. But the first flitter plug I installed started buckling instantly. I braced it with two more and had six flitters manifest six miles higher within the rock around the hole. One of them field-plugged the hole there and the others radiated heat above it until the rock around them melted.

The molten rock flowed down to the flitter plug and formed a liquid disk about a hundred yards in diameter and a hundred feet thick. I used the flitters to cool the disk until it had completely solidified, then let them vanish. A few miles later, the upward pressure against the lower cone-flitter eased and the debris mass stopped trying to climb up the hole.

Not long after that, the lower flitters were again able to slowly shove the now-molten radioactive debris downward. Adding what had been the lower cone flitters helped move things along and a little while later the lowest flitter reached magma. I left a flit in the hole to block it and had the first one stir the radioactive stuff into surrounding magma.

When I let both flitters vanish, magma shot up the hole until air pressure above it slowed its progress. Its rush slowed to a sort of hurry, and then to a slow climb up the hole until it almost reached the rock ball. Without the surrounding heat of the magma, the uppermost part of the surge began cooling and solidifying within a few miles.

By the time it reached the plugging disk, the top hundred feet or so of the surge was solid rock. Pressure crumbled the top fifty feet of the surge and forced the bits to spread and fill the softer spots around the disk.

My core said the seal would hold, so I had a look at the rock forming the water table. How to fix that?

Marie said, “This shows blue stuff running down the sides in the hole. If that’s supposed to be water, what’s leaking?”

“The water table. It found new places to leak. I’m looking at ways to fix that.”

“What’ll happen if you don’t?”

“One sec, I’ll find out.” I consulted my core and it said saturation would weaken earth and rock surrounding the hole, causing gradual collapse. Well, that would fill the hole. I had it put a simulation on a separate screen and asked how long that would take.

My core speculated as much as nine years, barring the influence of seismic activity in the region. Hm. Yeah, the place was an earthquake zone. That meant there were likely already plenty of leaks in the water table rock. I had my core display the rock layers and water distribution. Yup. Lots of cracks, some of them huge.

So what kept water in the lake north of Fordow? Answer: the dense soil above the rock filled the cracks. I sent probes to sample it and then had them check the soil under Fordow. Essentially the same. Fill the hole and the local soil should handle water well enough. Cap the hole through the table rock just to be sure.

“Okay, then,” I said, “First we’ll make sure all people and other critters are clear of the area, then we’ll start collapsing the hole. That’ll create a depression that’ll collect water and the surrounding soil will keep it from leaking too much.”

Marie gave me a fisheye and I showed her the info about the lake and local soils. After some study, she nodded slightly.

“Should work. I guess. Hell, I don’t know. How are you going to fill the hole?”

“I’ll start grinding to widen the hole up here. Make a funnel and let everything drop. That’ll create a kind of crater.”

“How long will that take?”

“Good question. Stand by one.”

My core estimated two days. I shared that info and Marie gave me another of her disbelieving looks.

“
Two days?!
We’re going to be up here for
two days?!
”

“Geez, lady, you’re just never happy, are you?”

She backhanded my left bicep and snapped, “Well, I’m
damned
sure not happy about being stuck on this flitter for two days!”

Rubbing my arm, I replied, “So relax. Once I set things in motion, we can leave.”

About to make what would likely have been a scathing reply, Marie stopped, took a breath, and said, “Oh. Well, okay, then.”

“Are you going to apologize for pounding on me just now?”

Eyeing me, Marie shook her head slightly. “No, I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure I owed you that for something.” She shrugged and added, “Besides, you were the one who always said apologies are pretty much worthless.”

“Huh. So I did. Oh, well. Back to the salt mine, then.”

Probes confirmed the Fordow complex had been completely evacuated. I had the flitters remove field supports nearest the hole. The concrete floors above level two began to buckle and crack. Removing a few more supports brought the entire central portion of the structure down. That would keep everybody at a distance while the rest of it collapsed.

I set a dozen flitters to work grinding and shoveling beneath the rubble. Sections of the center of the debris sagged and sank and a helicopter hovered over the activity for a time. The flitters chopped away supports elsewhere and the entire facility collapsed. A huge gout of dust billowed skyward and the helicopter flew away from it.

Leaving the roof in place to cover the operation, the flitters continued to excavate beneath it and dump rubble down the hole. The non-radioactive remains of the building soon rested on what seemed to me to be a rather thin shell of rock forming the roof of a cavern.

Checking the screen, I saw that less than a mile of the hole had been filled. Hm. I’d need a lot more stuff from somewhere to make this look right. Or maybe not. Who cared if the hole was completely filled? All I really wanted was a crater and a functional water table.

The flitters had excavated a cavern. The bottom of it was near the rock of the water table. Scour an area clean and melt rock to form a big capstone. I changed the parameters on the screen and my core agreed it would work. Good enough. I told the flitters to clear a hundred-foot diameter area and repeated the melting process I’d used below. One flitter acted as a drain plug and the others melted rock.