“If there is a later,” Brad said, unstrapping from his seat and moving back into the troop compartment, where the support crew was already prepping his CID.
“Well, yeah, there is that,” Charlie agreed. “But have a little faith, okay? That machine can take one heck of a lot of heat and radiation and keep on ticking just fine. Trust me.”
Brad nodded, knowing she was right. Five years before, Charlie herself had piloted a CID into a burning federal building gutted by a terrorist’s “dirty” bomb packed with iridium-192. Sighing, he climbed through the CID’s main hatch and squirmed into position in the cockpit, waiting patiently while the robot’s computers synched with his central nervous system.
The hatch sealed.
“Wolf One is up,” he said as status reports, data, and images gleaned by the CID’s sensors began pouring into his consciousness. His audio pickups immediately tamped down the otherwise overwhelming sounds of barely contained chaos — blaring klaxons, sirens, and frantic radio calls from emergency crews trying to cope with a disaster far beyond their training or ability to control.
“Shutting down thermal adaptive and chameleon camouflage systems,” he radioed. There was no point in wasting the limited power stored in his lithium-ion batteries and hydrogen fuel cells. He couldn’t expect to hide from impersonal forces of nature like radiation, heat, and pressure.
“Copy that, One,” he heard Charlie say. Wearing a headset, she stood at the edge of the Sparrowhawk’s lowered ramp, ready to guide him out of the aircraft. “Right, big guy, let’s go greet the puny earthlings. But now that you’re fully visible, try not to scare the shit out of too many of the locals, okay? We’re going to need all the help and technical advice we can get.”
THREE
Cautiously, Brad McLanahan moved into the huge air lock. Ordinarily used to transfer new fuel bundles and other heavy equipment into the containment building, it was just big enough for his CID to stand upright. His radiation and temperature sensors ticked up slightly, but not beyond the expected range. He relaxed a little. The inner containment seals were still holding. For now, anyway.
Behind him, a massive steel door swung slowly shut. It locked into place with a rhythmic, repeated series of solid-sounding CA-CA-CA-CLANKs.
“The outer door is sealed, Wolf One,” a tense voice confirmed through his headphones. Scarcely two hours ago, Vasile Enescu had been at home, comfortably asleep in his own bed. Now, as the senior surviving emergency coordinator, the middle-aged Romanian nuclear engineer found himself neck-deep in a catastrophe no one had ever imagined possible. There were no drills, no intensely rehearsed response plans to fall back on.
The rapid-fire briefing Enescu gave Brad before he entered the air lock quickly made it clear that the Romanians knew next to nothing about conditions inside the containment building or the reactor itself. Without functioning control rooms and computers, they were entirely dependent on readings from a handful of external gauges — readings that seemed to show the unthinkable, a complete failure of both automated shutdown systems and all of the emergency cooling systems.
“I’m ready to open the inner door,” Brad said. “Stand by.”
He moved closer to a keypad set next to the door. Carefully, using his CID’s powerful, articulated metal fingers, he punched in the security code uploaded into his computer — along with all of the nuclear plant’s schematics and operating manuals.
The pad display flashed red: Acces Interzis. Access Denied.
“Swell,” Brad muttered. He tapped the keys again, double-checking the code.
Again, Acces Interzis blinked back at him.
“Either the door motors are on the fritz, or the lock mechanisms are disabled,” he reported. “I’m resetting for manual operation.”
Guided by the CID’s computer, Brad yanked open a wall-mounted panel and quickly pulled several circuit breakers. The security keypad went dark. He moved back to the inner door, gripped the handwheel set in the middle, and spun it counterclockwise.
Slowly, the thick steel door swung away, opening into the containment building.
A blast of hot air roared into the air lock. A graphic flashed across Brad’s display, showing the temperature spiking from a comparatively cool twenty-four degrees centigrade to nearly sixty degrees—140 on the Fahrenheit scale — by the time the door was fully open. At the same time, atmospheric pressure climbed to around 125 kilopascals, a little over 1.2 times the normal air pressure at sea level.
Brad winced. Given the situation, those readings weren’t totally unexpected, but they were still a bad sign. Containment buildings were usually kept at slightly negative pressure, a feature meant to keep stray contaminated particles inside in case of any small leak.
He peered into the interior. It was pitch-black. All of the normal and emergency lights seemed to be dead. His computer compensated instantly, piercing the darkness with its blend of passive and active sensors. He shook his head in dismay, staring at a labyrinth of pipes, pumps, steam generator tanks, electrical conduits, cranes, and other equipment that filled the enormous building almost from floor to ceiling. Steel tracks used to guide new fuel assemblies to the reactor itself ran deeper into the maze.
Warning. Warning. Radiation count rising. Temperature rising. Atmospheric pressure rising. Estimated time to catastrophic suit protection and systems failure: Twenty minutes, the CID reported. A small timer activated at the edge of Brad’s vision, counting down in jumps and skips as the computer continuously reevaluated its original estimate.
No time to waste, he told himself, feeling his heart rate accelerate. His mouth felt dry. He needed to get in, find out what was going on, fix it if possible — and then get the hell out of this deathtrap.
“Entering containment now,” he reported.
“Understood, Wolf One,” Enescu said. He sounded even more worried now. Clearly, the readings echoed from Brad’s CID had him rattled too. “Make for the vault. It is imperative that we discover the reactor’s current status.”
“On my way,” Brad replied. He swung down off the tracks and moved deeper into the labyrinth, heading toward a colossal concrete block at its heart. Twenty meters high and twenty meters deep, this was the vault housing the fission reactor itself. Green arrows lit up on his display, indicating the fastest route to his target, one of the end shields. These steel shields, protruding out of the vault, were the only parts of the reactor not solidly encased in concrete and carbon steel.
He ducked under a set of rails and carriages — part of the machine used to insert fresh uranium fuel bundles and remove spent ones — and came face-to-face with a tall cylindrical shell. Behind this shield lay the calandria, an enormous metal drum containing the intricate assembly of pressure tubes, nozzles, compartments, and control rods that made up the reactor core. Row after row of hundreds of capped metal lattice tubes projected horizontally through the end shield.
Whole sections of pipe fittings and tubes glowed with unearthly intensity. Rivulets of molten steel dripped slowly down the face of the shield, crackling and hissing in the darkness.
Warning. Warning. Rapid temperature increase. Pressure now 200 kPa. Radiation count climbing, his computer reported. The countdown clock blinked bright red and readjusted. Fifteen minutes to protective shielding failure and lethal exposure.