“You seeing what I’m seeing, Vasile?” Brad asked, staring up at the luridly glowing end shield.
“Affirmative,” Enescu said, horrified. “Lisus Hristos! Jesus Christ! The damned thing really is melting down. We are losing whole fuel assemblies!”
“No kidding,” Brad snapped. He swallowed hard, trying to stay calm. “So tell me what I need to do first.”
“The secondary cooling system!” the other man said, after a moment’s thought. “We need to buy time by dumping as much water as we can into the reactor as fast as possible.”
“I thought all your pumps were off-line,” Brad said, puzzled.
“They are,” Enescu told him excitedly. “But there should still be a very large quantity of water left inside a big reserve storage tank at the very top of the containment building. Our high-pressure cooling system is disabled, but we can still use gravity to get water into the reactor!”
Brad’s CID highlighted the water tank the other man was describing. “That’s your dousing tank,” he realized, studying the data flashed by his computer. “Isn’t that supposed to tamp down some of the pressure buildup in here? Before the building blows apart under stress? I mean.”
“Ordinarily, yes,” the Romanian said, almost stumbling over words in his haste to explain. “But with the internal atmospheric pressures your machine is reporting, the dousing system should already be in action. So it must be off-line, too.”
“Along with everything else in this joint,” Brad growled.
“You must make cooling the reactor your top priority,” Enescu said. “Unless you can do that, nothing else ultimately matters.” Keys clicked as he typed furiously on his laptop. “I am transmitting a list of the valves you need to open, and those you need to shut off, now.”
Green and red dots suddenly blossomed on Brad’s display, each matching one of the valves on the list the Romanian had sent by data link directly to the CID’s computer. They were numbered in order of priority — stepping down in a sequence from near the ceiling to a group of valves just above the top of the reactor vault.
“Wolf One copies,” Brad said. He moved fast through the complicated jumble of pumps, generators, and other machinery, dodging and ducking to avoid smashing into pipes and conduits. He came out into a relatively open area near the edge of the huge reactor assembly and looked straight up. Reaching the catwalk leading to the first valves he needed to open meant climbing at least eleven flights of narrow, steep metal stairs.
Warning. Warning. Time to suit breach now ten minutes, thirty-five seconds.
“Screw taking the stairs,” he muttered, shaking his head. Instead, he leaped straight up, grabbed a railing, started swinging back and forth, and then flung himself upward again — just as the railing crumpled and then tore away under the CID’s weight. Up and up he went, twisting and curling from handhold to handhold as though the robot were a circus acrobat rather than a fighting machine.
One last jump took him onto the central catwalk. It shook, swaying under the sudden impact.
Brad bounded over to the first valve, spun it open, and turned away, ready to move on to the next one in the preplotted sequence.
WHIRR.
He whirled back and saw the valve closing again, driven by a power-operated actuator. Frowning, he cranked the valve open again and watched it closely a second time. “What the hell is this, Vasile?” Brad asked.
“That should not be possible,” the Romanian said, stunned.
“Possible or not, it’s damned well happening,” Brad snapped. “What’s the procedure here?”
Enescu hesitated, clearly thinking it through. “If you unscrew the access plate on the left side of the actuator motor, you should be able to uncouple the—”
Warning. Temperature now eighty-five degrees centigrade. Pressure at 225 kilopascals. Radiation rising. Hydraulic system function degrading, now at eighty percent. Sensor function partially impaired. Time to fatal suit breach now seven minutes, forty seconds.
“No way! I don’t have time for anything complicated,” Brad interrupted. He could actually feel the CID growing stiffer and less responsive to his commands. His visual displays flickered slightly, dimming just a bit as some of the robot’s sensors failed.
Sweating inside the cockpit, he grabbed the actuator motor and ripped it off the valve. It sailed away into the darkness in a shower of sparks and torn metal.
“Or you could just do that,” Enescu admitted.
Brad gritted his teeth and swung over the edge of the catwalk. In a blur of motion, he guided the CID downward through the tangle of piping and machinery, opening some valves and closing others. Crumpled actuators were hurled aside, clanging and clattering down to the floor far below.
He reached the last set of valves and cranked them full open. Pipes above him were humming, vibrating, as thousands of gallons of water poured along the path he’d opened into the reactor. He dropped the rest of the way, landing heavily on top of the vault.
WHUMMP. WHUMMP. WHUMMP. WHUMMP.
The massive vault shuddered beneath his feet. Four huge plumes of superheated steam erupted on all sides, hissing and boiling higher and higher. Immediately the CID showed external temperature, radiation, and pressure readings jumping dramatically.
Warning. Warning. Time to suit failure now five minutes, ten seconds. Brad swore under his breath.
“Those are pressure relief ducts,” he heard Enescu babbling. “Temperatures inside the core must be so high that our cooling water is flashing into steam on contact. If the disks sealing those ducts had not ruptured, the calandria itself might have fractured!”
“No, to pięknie,” Brad snarled. “That’s just swell.” He sighed. “What’s next? I’m running out of time real fast in here.”
“You must manually release the SDS-1 rods,” the Romanian said, referring to a group of thirty-two cadmium rods that should have plunged into the core the instant the reactor began running wild — shutting it down automatically. “With so many fuel bundles already damaged or destroyed, some of the rods may not be able to fully deploy. Even so, any rods that reach the core should greatly slow the fission reaction.”
“Okay,” Brad said. He scrambled toward a shallow rectangular gap on the top of the vault. That opened onto a concrete-stiffened steel box called the reactivity mechanism deck. Row after row of shutdown rod drives protruded above the deck.
He crouched down, ordering the CID’s display to zoom in on those drive mechanisms.
“Isus,” Enescu said, seeing the images he sent. “The clutches between each motor and shaft have been de-energized, locking them in position. But this should only happen after a reactor trip, not before. This is—”
“Impossible,” Brad finished for him grimly. “Yeah, I get it. Look, I’m starting to sense a really bad pattern here. How about you?”
“Yes,” the other man said simply.
Suit failure in four minutes, the CID’s computer reported calmly.
“Moving now!” Brad snapped. Hunched over, he scurried across the deck, systematically tearing away cables connecting the shutdown rods to their control units and motors. Freed from the locking mechanisms holding them in place, rod after spring-driven cadmium rod fell away — plunging deep into the steam-clouded jumble of twisted pressure tubes and molten uranium fuel slurry inside the reactor.
Radiation levels decreasing, the CID told him. Containment building temperature and pressure still rising. Hydraulic system function down to sixty percent. Estimated time to catastrophic suit failure now less than two minutes.