Lacuna: The Ashes of Humanity (26 page)

Rain hit her face again, and for a moment, she thought she was back in Operations. The chirping of songbirds, however, dispelled that illusion almost immediately.

"Where are we going?" Liao asked her again.

["I do not know."]

Liao looked up at the night sky, at the huge moon that shone through a break in the clouds. She could not see the ship that had fired at them—at this distance the ships were far too tiny to be seen—but a brief flash of light like far away lightning lit up the clouds. It had to be a nuclear blast. Several, in rapid succession.

["Spread out!"] said a Toralii voice, too masculine and far away to be Saara's. It was Jul'aran. ["Move away from the vessel!"]

"Everyone with me!" shouted Shepherd. "Carry those too sick or too wounded to move! We're making for the mountains!"

The voices were too quiet. Too many Humans, too many Toralii. Only handfuls would hear the orders in the confusion. A bright red light lit up the area; someone had ignited a flare, waving it around as a beacon.

Shepherd was cleverer than she had given him credit for. The crowd of people, numbering in the tens of thousands, began to follow him—a wave of humanity moving away from the doomed
Beijing
.

Liao kept her eyes on her ship, looking over Saara's shoulder as her Toralii friend carried her past the tree line. The huge billowing pillar of smoke poured out from the top of the vessel, and the ominous red glow from within shone up to the night sky, tainting the lowest of the clouds a faint crimson. Beyond the clouds, a white flash in the sky—similar to the nuclear fire, but different—heralded the activation another Toralii worldshatter device, but this time she did not have a ship to hide within.

They would not get far enough.

Reactor Room 2

TFR
Beijing

Summer chewed on the end of her pen until she tasted ink in her mouth. She spat onto the deck, fascinated by the splatter pattern, a Rorschach blot on the otherwise clean deck that bore an uncanny resemblance to two beetles attacking each other with their giant horns.

No. She couldn't get distracted. She worked on a thousand things at once. Trying to remain calm and control her breathing to prevent her asthma from escalating, to focus her mind in the face of so many distractions and intellectual curiosities that could soak away her attention like a sponge, on keeping her foot from tapping endlessly as it did when she was excited.

And, well, keeping Reactor 2 from exploding and taking all that was left of her species with it.

"Coolant level?" Rowe asked to nobody. She was alone, working beside the last barrier that kept the volatile nuclear reaction in check. It was quiet. No alarms here. She had shut them off.

No distractions.

"Coolant level, coolant level, coolant level…"

Rowe dragged her finger across the touch screen, bringing up a stream of numbers. Her eyes fed them to her brain as fast as they could, mentally drinking from the fire hose as numbers flew across her console's screen.

She could handle it. Remaining in an upright position helped keep your breathing steady. It wasn't as good as a shot from an inhaler, but it was something. "Coolant level six percent. Fucking hell, fucking God damn it, we can't replenish that shit. But with no ship left, well, there's no point in having coolant, is there? Shit."

Rowe talked to herself more when she was alone. Normal people would think she was crazy, and she had long ago trained herself out of that habit. But when she was alone, stressed, her old habits came back in force.

"This piece of shit's going to shit. Going to go critical. And I gotta stop it. Gotta make it good. But there's not enough coolant. Coolant, need coolant. Some kind of coolant. Anything to take the heat away."

Thermal properties ran through her head, a lifetime's worth of information absorbed at the prestigious University of Sydney, knowledge crammed into her mind with energy drinks for mortar. She knew so much more than everyone around her, and people often mocked her for it, but her brain was her most valuable asset.

Distractions.
Distractions
. She needed to clear her mind. Think only of coolant. Not of video games, or college life, or Alex Aharoni.

Only of coolant.

The Cracker had consumed a chunk of their liquid nitrogen. It could be replenished, of course, but it took time. Time. Time was something they didn't have.

"Temperature. Temperature. The hotter it gets, the weaker the containment. Reactor meltdown. That would be bad."

She could fire the ship's emergency core ejection rockets, blast the reactor chamber free from the ship, but they only had eight. To lose one would be an irreparable blow. They couldn't just fabricate more nuclear reaction chambers—

Or could they? They had the constructs now, wherever they were. Rowe had named them Gypsy, Darkhorse, Sparrow, Willow, Stinker and Roadrunner. She hadn't thought of a name for the new one. Maybe Porcupine, or something cool like Snake or Viper or Killer or—

He brain was doing it again. Rambling things, irrelevant things, unable to keep itself focused.

She used to take Ritalin for it. Amphetamines under a different name, used to control adult ADHD. Hyperactivity disorder, it was called, but it was a strange name. That state was normal for her. Manic in a way, getting forty hours of work done in twenty-six with no breaks, her only enemy the constant side-tracking. Thoughts. Ideas. Too many ideas, spinning around in her head. Sometimes Ritalin took the distractions away.

But Ritalin made her a zombie. A predictable, flat, hollow shell of a person.

"Bad. Reactor meltdown bad. Shit, fuck, shit, shit, shit. Sum', get it together. Fucking hell."

Her fingers flew over the console's keyboard at manic speed, hundreds of words coming out per minute, her commands pouring out at a frenzied pace. She diverted coolant from all the other reactors, giving the chamber before her a short shot of each. Minimal effect. She tried inserting the control rods to stop the cascade, but the mechanical arms controlling them were a pile of molten slag. Fortunately, the damage had not breached the core itself.

"Why didn't they make these things pebble-bed reactors? That shit doesn't melt down, just fucking
doesn't
. It's completely un-fucking-possible. Typical Chinese fucking garbage, just trying to make everything as cheap and dodgy as possible, fuck. This is why the Australians should have overseen the fucking reactor construction, except those pussy shitfuckers will never embrace nuclear power. Fucking hippy bullshit."

External sources of coolant. The river was an obvious answer, and it was not far away. But they could not port enough water here in time. No way. Water was too heavy. One litre of water weighed a kilogram. They would need thousands of litres of water to cool a reactor like this. She had no time.

The core ejection button was right in front of her. It shone with a red light, mocking her, teasing her.

You failed
, she could imagine it saying, a voice as clear in her head as the corporeal one she used to speak.
That reactor's about to blow. No bonus round. No 100% completion. Life's not a video game.

Video games were poor teachers. Not everything in life had a perfect completion rate, but video games assumed everything was perfect, always. There was always that one fucking mission in a game that would kill you the first time around. Sometimes there were two or three, and they were deliberate. The game didn't want you to finish without experiencing some loss. Some defeat. You had to lose before you could win.

But video games allowed you to reload. They would crunch you up and spit you out, but you could try again. Would take hours, days, or weeks of practice to beat, but you could always win with enough repetition. Experienced gamers knew the first time they engaged the boss was just a trial run. To see how the scripts played out, so you could find the chinks in their armour, beat them, and win.

"Fucking hell, fucking reactor. I just want to save here. Lemme save. Save the game. Reload if I fuck it up. Gotta save the reactor."

Maybe she should have saved sooner. She considered venting a small amount of superheated radioactive material into the atmosphere. Velsharn was a big planet, a windy planet, and the prevailing winds would take that over the ocean where it would be absorbed into background radiation.

Possible. Might work. Might buy her some time. Enough time to find a solution, but how long until the Toralii shot their deathbeamlaserthing at them again?

Rowe looked up to the ceiling, some part of her mind unable to shake the expectation that death was only moments away. She imagined the ceiling glowing again, another beam of white blasting through the ship like it was nothing, blowing her to dust. Just like what had happened in Operations.

Her console had protected her from the blast, but it had been loud as fuck. Painfully loud, as much as the time she had been crushed up against a speaker at a death metal concert, the volume so loud it made her whole body vibrate.

That concert had probably damaged her hearing, and the blast in Operations had probably done so again, but she had no time to dwell on that. Her body was stuffed anyway. A lifetime of sleep replaced by energy drinks and exercise replaced with
Mario Kart
had seen to that. Despite bragging about wanting to live forever, her entire retirement plan was to die before she got old.

Fuck. The reaction was getting stronger. The digital temperature gauge on her console climbed. If it got too hot, it might ignite the gunpowder in the rockets that functioned as its emergency override, except the mooring clamps would still be attached. Instead of propelling the dangerous nuclear device away from the ship and to safety, it would tear its guts out as it did, or fail to go anywhere.

Or explode. Explosions or explosions. Not much of a choice. Nobody knew what it would do; nobody had dared test it, and their theoretical projections had been ambiguous.

"Everything's always ambiguous. Everything's always…
bendy
. Fluid. Changing. Fluid. We need fluid."

Water from underground? No, she'd thought of that already. Not enough time to get enough.

But what if she moved the ship? Could the ship even take off in this state? It was unlikely, given it had a huge hole through the middle. That would do hell for its structural integrity, and the
Beijing
was not designed for atmospheric flight at the best of times. It would probably just break in half.

And it was probably still full of people.

And she couldn't steer it anyway.

She couldn't debate any more. Rowe ordered the ship's computers to vent material into the atmosphere, ejecting it out the bow port, down the valley and towards the ocean. It would buy her three or four more hours, and hopefully anyone outside wouldn't get too irradiated.

The console lit up with red lights and a speaker emitted a faint, sad warble. The port was damaged. It wouldn't vent material, not even to the other reactors. She was running out of options.

Think, think, think,
she urged herself. There had to be a way out of this; there was always a way out. She had once nearly failed an exam in university because she hadn't studied, but by borrowing a friend's cheat sheet and chugging enough of the hated Ritalin to turn herself into a shuffling brain-dead dullard, she had managed to pull enough marks to get a supplementary exam. Desperate measures.

"Yeah, desperate a'right. If the Toralii don't fuck me, then the nuke reactor fucks me…"

She inhaled, her air coming in a faint wheeze. The beginnings of an asthma attack.

"Or my lungs fuck me. Fuck me."

Rowe snatched the asthma inhaler from her pocket, typing with one hand as she jammed the vent into her mouth and depressed the trigger.

Nothing happened. No puff of lung-relaxing chemicals. Nothing except the pressure on her finger.

Empty.

"Well, fuck," she wheezed, throwing it over her shoulder. No time to deal with it. She had to find a way to get herself out of this problem—the ship was going to go nova. Everything was dependant on her. Everything. Not just something as petty as her academic career, or any number of mundane trivialities that clogged up her life, stealing her focus away from where it should have been.

Like on Alex.

Alex Aharoni filled her thoughts as she considered her third option: cracking open the ship's reactor and flooding the inside of the ship with radiation.

It would kill her. Of course it would. But so would the resultant explosion. The others would be okay. The sealed internal bulkheads on the ship would absorb most of the radioactivity and then, using expertise and material from the
Tehran
,
Washington
and
Madrid
, radiation suits and the like, they could clean the ship up. It would be restored to operating levels, eventually.

Eventually.

It wasn't a bad plan. She almost impulsively executed it, but then a thought occurred.

The ship was evacuating. The bulkheads weren't sealed.

No third way existed. No other option. The temperature rose to critical levels; it was now or never.