The Clone Empire (40 page)

“It doesn’t get much safer than this,” I said. I kept my armor on but took my helmet off. The air in the power station was cold and slightly moist. Once Freeman killed the engine on the truck, I listened for the whir of turbines; but I heard nothing.

Freeman placed his little two-way on the dash of the truck and tapped the button. A moment later, Sweetwater and Breeze appeared.

“I know they’re almost done, but they’re still cutting it too close,” Breeze said without looking into the screen. I got the feeling he was talking to Sweetwater. “The temperature on the planet is fluctuating wildly.”

Hearing this, I envisioned hundred-degree swings with snow falling on burning desert sands and melting into steam, but I knew better. We had just come from the surface.

Sweetwater put the fluctuations in perspective. He turned toward the camera, and said, “We’re seeing ten-degree temperature swings.”

So much for icebergs melting and oceans boiling,
I thought.

“Have you told General Hill?” Freeman asked.

“He says they’re going as fast as they can,” answered Sweetwater.

“Oh my,” said Breeze. “They just had a twelve-degree fluctuation.” Shaking his head with decision, he looked into the camera, “It could happen any moment.” He grimaced. His looked like they were meant for chewing hay.

As it turned out, Breeze was wrong, the
event
did not occur for a long time. One hour passed, then another. Sweetwater and Breeze gave us hourly reports informing us that surface temperatures had stabilized more or less. Strangely, stabilized temperatures panicked Breeze just as much as fluctuations.

Three hours after we sealed ourselves in, Sweetwater called to tell us that the Tachyon D count had doubled over the last hour.

Between calls, I had nothing to do but sit and wait. I explored the power station, examining enormous turbines that reached to the ceiling. At one point, I went looking for something to eat. I found a refrigerator in the employee lounge and stole people’s lunches. Some of them were old, with withered apples and petrified bananas.

Despite the temptation to hoard food for myself, I brought the lunches back to the truck and shared them with Freeman. He chose a plate with several pieces of chicken. I took a sandwich.

“What if the building collapses?” I asked Freeman. “How are we going to dig our way out?”

He took a bite from a drumstick that looked like it might have come off a parakeet in his big hands. He bit off a mouthful of meat and pointed toward a distant wall, where an emergency exit sign glowed.

“Stairs?” I asked. “That’s your answer if the building comes down around us? We can just take the stairs.”

“The rest of the station will collapse before that stairwell,” he said.

We continued divvying the food. Freeman chose meats first. I went with fruits and snacks. By the time we got to the salads, we’d both lost interest.

Another hour passed. I thought about the Double Y clones. Did they know they were in danger?

Breeze called in to tell us that the last of the transports had docked with the barges. He guessed that a few looters might be left on the planet, but not many. He didn’t know that Warshaw was dumping prisoners to be killed. I wondered how he would have reacted to the news.

As Freeman chatted with Sweetwater and Breeze, I found a comfortable curve on the back of the truck and fell asleep against it.

Apparently, I slept right through the event.

“It’s over.”

Freeman woke me from a light sleep. I opened my eyes, got my bearings, and slid off my spot in the back of the truck.

The air down at the bottom of the station was cool. An odd pattern of emergency lights showed from the ceilings. I looked around the shadowy chamber and thought to myself,
It couldn’t have been much of an explosion if I slept through it.

I was still reviewing that thought when an explosion occurred. As cataclysms go, it was not much. The ground did not shake, and the walls did not crumble. An audible thud rang through the underground power station, and that was that.
Shit. If that little thud is all that we get, Warshaw’s going to ride my ass forever,
I thought to myself. The underground station seemed to have survived the
event
without so much as a crack.

Putting on his helmet to seal his armor, Freeman started walking up the ramp. I donned my helmet and followed, scanning for radiation as I went. I used the night-for-day lens in my visor so I could see clearly in the dark.

The top level of the station seemed unaffected by whatever had happened. The structure looked sound, no breaks in the walls, no toppled equipment. As we rounded a turn and started toward the exit, I noticed something on the ground. In the blue-gray graphics of my night-for-day lens, the stuff looked like ice. It had an organic look, like a thick liquid that had spilled on the ground and frozen in place.

I switched the lens in my visor to heat vision. Through this lens, frozen objects appeared blue and humans gave off an orange signature. The stuff on the concrete near my feet was white. Had I stepped on it, my armored boot would have melted.

I started to ask Freeman what it was, but when I looked up the ramp, I had my answer. I saw the night sky. The heavy metal shutter Freeman had lowered to block the entrance had melted soft, then imploded. Its soggy cardboardlike remains still blocked the bottom third of the doorway, but some of the metal had melted to liquid and run down the ramp.

“We might as well blow the rest of it right off its tracks,” I said.

“Once it cools down,” Freeman said.

I examined the magmalike liquid using heat vision. It no longer gave off a glowing white signature; in just those few seconds, it had cooled to the color of butter. The concrete around the entrance glowed a dark yellow. Freeman stood fifty feet back from the entrance; the walls around him barely registered on my visor.

“What the speck happened here?” I asked.

Freeman did not answer.

I asked, “Have you checked with Sweetwater and Breeze?” “Communications are out.”

If a nuke went off outside this station, the shock wave would have sent the door flying, but it wouldn’t have specking melted it. Not a thick metal door like this one. I looked back at the remains, noting the way the top curled in like a badly hung curtain. Above the wilting metal, the night sky looked almost ablaze, the lower clouds glowing an eerie orange.

A moment passed before I realized that I wasn’t looking at clouds; I was looking at a sky filled with steam. The rebreather in my armor would protect me if I stepped out; but without it, that air would have poached my lungs.

Whatever had struck Olympus Kri, it wasn’t just powerful, it was cataclysmic. Did it land on the planet or simply strike from space? The Avatari’s new weapon of destruction had an almost velvet touch. The ground had not shook. Hell, I slept through the entire event.

For now, Freeman and I were trapped in the underground station, not buried alive, but trapped. We could not leave the ramp, there was too much molten metal on the ground, and the concrete around the entrance was burning hot, heated to crystal.

Not daring to step any closer, I stared out through the ruined entrance and into the sky. I saw clouds of steam that smoldered against a dirty black sky. With its roiling orange clouds and its layers of steam and smoke, the horizon looked like it was made of embers.

“What do we do now?” I asked.

“We wait,” Freeman answered.

“How long?” I asked.

“Till the planet cools off.”

Had one of my Marines said that, I would have busted the sarcastic prick in the nose. From Freeman, I smiled and ignored it. He wasn’t capable of sarcasm . . . and I wasn’t capable of busting him in the nose.

So we walked back down the ramp and I found my place on the truck and tried to sleep. I closed my eyes and pretended to drift off, but it was all pretend. The image of a planet burning like a lump of coal in a furnace filled my mind. I thought about Terraneau reduced to a cinder and Ava caught in the blaze.

If I made it off this planet, I would go to Terraneau. I would beg Doctorow to evacuate the planet. I would beg Ava to leave with me. At some point, I slipped into that frenetic state between sleep and consciousness in which I could never tell the difference between dreams and reality. I imagined myself walking through the ashes of Norristown, looking for Ava.

In my dream, the streets had vanished, and all of the buildings had vanished, all but the three towers that Doctorow used as dormitories. The three skyscrapers in the center of town still stood, but they had melted. Their straight edges had melted and they now had curves and convolutions and I realized that they looked like skeletal fingers sticking out of the ground. They were black, like the color of charred bone, and they reached up to the ashen sky, and I recognized them. The finger on the left belonged to Ellery Doctorow and the finger on the right belonged to Scott Mars; and though I desperately tried to deny it, I knew that the finger in the center was Ava.

“Ava!” I shouted. In my sleep, the name came out so slowly that it sounded like a wind that could blow apart rocks.

Freeman woke me from the dream. He tapped on my helmet until I sat up, then he said, “We can get out.” As I stood and stretched my arms, he climbed into the truck and started the engine.

Sweetwater greeted me on both the interLink and the little two-way as I slipped into the passenger’s seat. “Glad to see you made it,” he said, sounding unnaturally cheerful.

“What happened out there?” I asked.

“We were just telling Raymond,” Sweetwater said.

Breeze came on as well. He must have been sitting and Sweetwater standing, or maybe Sweetwater was on a ladder. They looked to be about the same size on the little screen of the two-way.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Breeze said. “We had satellites all around the planet looking for an explosion. From all we observed, it was a spontaneous event.”

Excited by a discovery that seemed to ignore the laws of physics, Breeze no longer stuttered. “The temperature over Odessa rose from seventy-two degrees to nine thousand degrees so quickly that our instruments recorded it as instantaneous. The same thing happened all around the planet—a spontaneous and uniform change in temperature to nine thousand degrees.”

“Which also explains why the Tachyon D levels dropped,” Sweetwater said. “The little devils consumed themselves. They burned themselves up like gas in a fire. Do you have any idea how much energy it would take to generate that much heat?”

The dwarf scientist squared his shoulders, and said, “Here. Here are some of the satellite images. You can see for yourself.”

Sweetwater and Breeze disappeared from the screen, replaced by the image of a city at night. Streetlights shone, but no cars roved the streets. Without lights shining in their windows, the buildings of Odessa hid in the darkness.

Then it happened. The
event
did not start on one side of the screen and move to the other like an explosion; it happened everywhere all at once. The very air seemed to catch on fire.

“Nine thousand degrees,” Sweetwater said. “It’s nearly as hot as the surface of the sun.” Sweetwater, the communicator, used analogies. Breeze, the scientist, spouted data.

The satellite footage showed a car parked along the side of the street. The paint dulled, metal sagged, and the car exploded. It flipped through the air, landing on its roof. It looked like a turtle turned on its shell. Moments later, its tires burst into flames.

Grass, trees, cloth awnings, and signs burst into flames. Steam rose up around an iron lid covering a manhole, then the cover launched and spun through the air like a tossed coin. By the time it hit the ground, the street had melted, and it sank into the tar.

Thick fog rose from the flaming wreckage of a grassy park. The steel cables along a suspension bridge stretched and drooped like melting plastic, finally giving way and dropping the bridge into the river below. The cloud of steam coming off the river was thick as linen.

You can’t fight this,
I thought, as I watched the scene with grim fascination.

I saw cars and trucks sinking into the street below them and thin coils of steam rising from cement sidewalks. I saw concrete shelters collapse in on themselves. Explosions occurred everywhere. A fire hydrant burst, sending a column of steam into the air. The camera focused on a skyscraper, the windows along the bottom of the building melting in their casings.

A counter appeared in the top right corner of the screen. It ticked off seconds and hundredths of seconds.

“Now this is curious,” Sweetwater said, the excitement obvious in his gravelly voice.

The camera panned back, showing more of the street. The windows of several buildings along an avenue exploded, spitting out shotgun bursts of glittering glass shrapnel that turned a fiery orange and melted in the air.

Sweetwater continued to narrate. “You see how the windows are bursting outward? We think it is because the atmosphere is rising. That means the pressure from the air trapped inside the buildings is not being matched by air pressure on the outside of the building. It’s all guesswork, of course, no one has ever seen anything like this before; but we think heat is causing the atmosphere to rise like a hot-air balloon, so the pressure on the outside of the buildings is dropping. Here, look at this!”

The camera moved in on a skyscraper. The building coughed glass out of its windows floor by floor, the damage rising quickly. Not all of the windows shattered. Some had already melted.

The image changed to show a forest, and the timer in the corner returned to zero. At five seconds, the trees in the forest lit up like match heads in a book that had been set ablaze. The trees did not ignite one here and one there, they all lit up at once, flaring into a brilliant orange.