The image changed again, this time showing a vast body of water, maybe an ocean or maybe a great lake. Then the heat started. Twenty seconds in, steam began to rise off the water.
“We estimate the heat penetrated no more than five feet deep,” Sweetwater said. “Any fish swimming close to shore would have been poached.”
To this point, the video feed did not show anything that might have caused the explosion I had heard when I awoke. Nor had it shown anything that would have caused the shutter at the top of the power station to burst inward.
On the screen, the timer showed eighty-three seconds and froze.
“It lasted precisely eighty-three seconds,” Sweetwater said, the former excitement missing from his voice. “At eighty-three seconds, the heat stopped, and the air temperature dropped sharply.”
The timer started counting. It reached ninety-six seconds, and there was the explosion. Nothing big or fiery, but something powerful enough to make weakened buildings collapse as it flushed enormous clouds of ash and soot into the air.
“What was that?” asked Freeman.
“The heat from the event lifted the atmosphere. We estimate that the atmosphere rose approximately 550 feet from ground level because of the heat. After the event ended, the atmosphere dropped back into place,” said Sweetwater.
Freeman said nothing. He sat silent and unmoving, his helmet hiding his expression. I whispered a constant stream of expletives to myself as I watched the destruction.
The video feed stopped, and the scientists again appeared on the screen. Breeze stared into a monitor on his desk instead of the camera. Sweetwater stared into the camera as if watching us.
Breeze looked up from his monitor and turned to face us. “I’ve reviewed the data again, and I still cannot find evidence of an initial explosion, not even a transfer of energy that might have set this off.”
“The only anomaly is the tachyons,” Sweetwater agreed.
“Does the atmosphere look stable?” Freeman asked.
“Completely stable,” said Breeze.
“Raymond, you want to be careful out there,” Sweetwater said. “We’re tracking movement on the planet.”
“You mean survivors?” I asked, thinking of the Double Y clones and wondering how any of those bastards could have survived.
“Whatever it is, it’s so fast it barely registers on our instruments,” Sweetwater said.
“It’s behaving like an electrical current in circuit,” Breeze said, trying to be helpful but unable to divest himself of scientific jargon that meant nothing to us military types.
“We think it’s traveling a set path, but we only pick it up in certain locations,” Sweetwater said by way of explanation. “We can’t tell if there is a single current streaming around the planet or several separate currents traveling in vectors, but our instruments keep registering it in the same key locations.”
Until that moment, I had taken it as a given that the
event
had ended—the Avatari had come, they’d toasted the planet, and now they were gone. But maybe my assumptions were wrong. Maybe after toasting the planet, they left something behind to finish off survivors.
“What about the tachyon levels?” Freeman asked, sounding more like a scientist than a mercenary.
“Oh, now that is interesting,” Sweetwater said. “Ninety-nine percent of the Tachyon D concentration was spent during the conflagration. The rest is diminishing quickly.”
“Will the current disappear when the tachyons run out?” Freeman asked.
“Excellent question, Raymond. That is our guess,” said Sweetwater. “Only time will tell if our hypothesis is correct. Of course, we still found a residue of Tachyon D on New Copenhagen, so the assumptions may not be valid.”
“How long before it’s safe out there?” I asked. By this time, I had fished five grenade launchers out of my go-pack.
“At this rate, fifteen minutes,” Sweetwater said. “Perhaps you should stay where you are and wait until the currents runs down.”
The truck was already moving before he finished the suggestion. Freeman asked, “Do you have a fix on our location.” When Sweetwater nodded, he said, “It’s time to run the tests.”
Freeman stepped on the gas, and the truck lurched ahead, growling like a mongrel dog, tearing around corners and speeding up the ramp. As we approached the entrance, I expected him to fire a rocket at the remnant of that steel door, but he didn’t. He pulled to a stop about twenty feet from the top.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m going to set a charge,” he said.
I laughed and handed him a grenade launcher. He didn’t need my weapons, the truck had rockets and a chain gun mounted on its front fender.
Freeman ignored me. He placed charges beside both ends of the door, then came back to the truck. His charges produced tiny explosions, and the door tipped over and fell out of its track.
Using charges instead of rockets struck me as prissy, but it probably saved our lives.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
Freeman’s charges exploded, and the remains of the metal shutter toppled backward in a drunken twist, revealing an altered world. The parking lot had not changed much, but the fleet of heavy equipment was no longer parked in neat rows. A steamroller had simply sunk into the street. Cranes lay on their sides, and a few of the trucks now lay upside down.
“What the hell?” I hissed as I surveyed the wreckage. Having seen the video feed, I should have known what to expect; but I still was not prepared for it. The feed showed me places I had never seen, but I had just driven through this parking lot a few hours earlier.
Stolid as ever, Freeman said nothing.
“Gentlemen, you will want to keep your helmets on,” Sweetwater said.
“If you mean it’s hot out there, I can see that,” I said. Sitting in the truck, eyeing the devastation, I felt overwhelmed.
I looked to my right and saw the remains of a Dumpster. The thin sheet metal of its walls had simply wilted in the heat.
“The temperature outside the tunnel is 126 degrees,” Sweetwater said. “That qualifies as toasty. But the reason you’ll want your helmets is to breathe. You’re in the middle of a fire zone, the oxygen is thin.”
“How thin?” I asked. I thought about lessons I had learned in science growing up in the orphanage. “Does oxygen burn at nine thousand degrees?”
“Oxygen doesn’t burn,” Sweetwater said.
As Sweetwater spoke, Freeman returned to the top of the ramp, where he attached some kind of panel to the wall. A large white light at the top of the panel winked sporadically, and smaller diodes flashed red, blue, yellow, green in no discernible order along the bottom.
“What is that?” I asked.
“Raymond, it is essential we get the meter up right away,” Sweetwater said.
“It’s up,” Freeman said.
“What is that?” I repeated.
“Harris, this little invention just may save your life. It detects tachyon activity. If the tachyons flood into your hidey-hole, we should be able to detect them.”
“I thought tachyons were too small and too fast to track,” I said.
“The meter tracks energy fluctuations along a defined plain,” Breeze explained.
“Does that answer your question?” Sweetwater asked, mostly because he knew that it had not. I decided to move on rather than risk more scientific gibberish.
As I watched the lights on the panel, Freeman walked around the truck and pulled out a black case that looked about the right size to carry a spare set of armor. It did not carry armor, however. When he opened it, I recognized the contents. I had seen him use one of these before.
The head of the robot was a radio-controlled drone with a propeller and wings. The body was a twelve-foot-long train made of a heat-resistant silver material. It reflected the ember-and-smoke sky like a mirror. He removed the “flying snake” from its case, stretched it out, then used his remote to launch it in the air behind the truck.
The snake took off from the ground and swirled through the air like a Chinese dragon. The last time I saw Freeman use one of these remote-controlled robots, he had deployed it like a lightning rod, sending it out to distract motion-tracking robots called “trackers.”
The drone’s terephthalate ruffles fluttered as it sped off, making a noise like a flag in a strong wind. The robot flew out of the underground power station and into the parking lot. It managed an aerobatic loop, then burst into flames. The spontaneous combustion lasted only a second and left nothing in its wake, not even smoke.
“Did you get that?” asked Freeman.
Damn straight I saw it, and I started to say so, then I realized he wasn’t speaking to me.
“Localized ignition,” Breeze said. “Of course, it happened so quickly I can only speculate.”
“Raymond, can you launch the second drone?” Sweetwater asked.
Freeman set off to prepare a second drone without responding.
I eavesdropped as Sweetwater and Breeze spoke privately between themselves, their voices carrying over an open mike as if they were real. They traded scientific jargon, but they could have been speaking some long-extinct language for all I understood of it.
Meanwhile, Freeman returned with another black case. A few moments later, a second silver dragon soared up the ramp, its reflective train wagging behind it. It flew over the top of the truck and into the parking lot, where it burst into flames.
“It appears the tachyons are drawn to movement,” Breeze said.
“Should I run the shield test? Freeman asked.
“Yes, we better move along. The tachyon level is dropping faster than we expected,” said Sweetwater.
Freeman’s next toy was a little robot car, which he placed on the ground beside the truck. He fiddled with a remote, and a bright yellow glow formed around the car. I knew that glow. I’d seen it around Unified Authority ships. It hung like an aura over the new U.A. combat armor. It stopped bullets and particle beams.
Using a remote to guide the car up the ramp, Freeman asked, “Are you ready?”
“Go ahead, Raymond,” said Sweetwater.
Those shields might have been able to stop bullets or absorb lasers, but they didn’t do shit against tachyons. As the car wound its way into the yard, it burst into flames.
Seeing this, I felt hollow inside. “Could they do the same thing to our ships?” I asked anyone who might answer.
Sweetwater fielded the question like a politician. “We don’t see any reason why they would bother attacking a ship.”
Breeze took a more honest approach. He simply said, “Yes.”
We were running out of time. When Freeman asked, “Should I try the weapons?” Sweetwater said, “By all means.”
Freeman pulled a sniper rifle from the back of the truck. He was the finest marksman I had ever known, but in this case it wouldn’t matter. All he had to do was fire a bullet through a thirty-foot-wide doorway at the top of the ramp. He pointed the gun in the right direction and pulled the trigger. A split second later, with the sound of the shot still echoing off the walls, a tiny flicker of flame ignited just outside the entrance to the tunnel. The bullet had combusted, just like the toy car, just like the drone dragon. It disappeared so quickly, I barely saw it.
“Six feet,” said Breeze.
“Six feet?” I asked.
“The bullet traveled six feet out of the station before it caught fire,” Sweetwater said.
Breezed corrected him. “It might have caught fire the moment it entered open air, but it traveled six feet before it disintegrated.”
Freeman removed a particle-beam cannon and started toward the top of the ramp.
“Are you sure you want to do that?” I asked, knowing that if its ray superheated, the gun would explode.
He did not answer. As he moved up the ramp, I watched the light on the sensor. It stayed mostly white, with an occasional flick of yellow. As Freeman got closer, the light turned yellow. The tachyon activity had shot up; they might even have homed in on him.
“Ray, stop!” I yelled.
He saw it, too, and froze, but the light remained yellow.
“What do I do?” I asked Sweetwater and Breeze.
“Raymond, stay perfectly still,” Sweetwater ordered.
Sounding calm as ever, Freeman asked, “Should I run the test?”
Sweetwater did not even consider the question. “Stay still. According to our latest readings, the tachyon concentration will drop to a safe level in two minutes.”
Freeman chose that moment to do something that was absolutely insane. Instead of concentrating on standing as still as possible, he fired the cannon. The glittering green beam of the particle beam traveled in a perfectly straight line the rest of the way out of the power station and out, into the yard.
My eyes switched from the particle beam to the meter warning panel and back. I had already slipped into the driver’s seat of the truck and started the engine. If the meter turned orange or green or black or any color other than white, I would launch the truck up the ramp to try to distract the tachyons.
Unlike the bullet, the shielded robotic car, and the drones, the beam seemed not to interest the tachyons. The meter flashed orange for a millisecond, and I stomped down on the gas, stayed behind the wheel just long enough to guide the truck around Freeman, then jumped from the cab. Trying to run straight up a spiral path, the truck bumped one wall and skidded across the ramp, a shower of sparks trailing behind it. Armored or not, the truck burst into flames the moment it entered into the yard. The explosion that followed launched the truck fifteen feet in the air. It spun like a corkscrew as it flew ass first, then landed nose down, three-foot flames dancing on its engine and all four wheels.
Freeman said nothing. His silence was icy.
“Sweetwater,” I said. “How much longer?”
Nothing.
“Breeze?”
Nothing.
“They’re gone,” Freeman said. “We were linked to them through the two-way communicator.”