Not bothering to think through her words, she activated the comm. “Garrison, don’t make this harder on yourself.”
Seth’s image appeared on the screen, surprised and confused. The boy seemed different, but she wasn’t sure how. Elisa tried to remember the last time she had really looked at him. “Mother! You found the bloaters too.”
Bloaters? What were they?
When Garrison came on the screen, he didn’t look angry or frightened, just resolute. “I thought you might be following us. When I found your magnetic tracker, I couldn’t believe it, but after all these years of knowing you, I don’t know why I was surprised.”
“I knew you well enough that I could guess what you’d do. If I’d been more prepared, I would have stopped you.”
Garrison frowned. “I had to get Seth away from Sheol. You and Iswander kept ignoring the warnings.”
“You stole my son!”
“Our son,” he corrected in a calm voice. “I wish you had left with us. We could have stayed together as a family, but you made your choice—and I made mine.”
Having studied the specs en route, she knew that the weapons on her ship were better than those on his stolen vessel. Elisa knew exactly how to cripple his ship. “I’m taking him back with me. You proved you’re an unfit father by kidnapping him.”
She tried to bait Garrison, make him lose his temper in front of Seth, but he wouldn’t rise to it. “Provided Seth doesn’t go back to that place, we can work out a resolution. My priority is keeping him safe.”
“He’s coming with me. That is nonnegotiable.” She nudged her ship closer, trying to think of how she would strengthen her relationship with her son, make life better for him on Sheol, make him love her more. She might even let him have his own compy.
Garrison regarded her on the screen, and for a moment his features looked just like the image of Seth she kept on display. “He’s not a trophy you can claim in order to prove you’ve won something.” His stolen vessel drifted in among the bloated nodules, trying to hide. One of the nuclei flashed, and the sudden flare of light distracted her. “I’m not going to make him choose.”
“I didn’t ask him to choose—he’s going home with me! I warn you, I can damage your engines with a single shot and then take him to safety.”
Two small, defensive jazers would be sufficient to take his stardrive offline. Lee Iswander’s ships had to be able to protect themselves against marauders; as a powerful and wealthy industrialist, he’d learned how to protect what he had, and Elisa had learned from him. Garrison wouldn’t stand a chance.
“We could find a neutral place,” he said. “Seth is old enough to go to Academ. It would do him good to be among other kids his age. We can send him there, work things out.”
“You might want to shirk your responsibilities, but he’s coming with me. I’m his mother.”
He maneuvered his ship through the mysterious bloaters, dodging out of sight. He was trying to lose himself, and Elisa accelerated after him. She tried to lock in on his engines for a disabling strike.
He sounded disappointed on the comm. “I thought that’s what you’d say, but I wanted to make sure I tried everything. We got rid of your tracker—you can’t follow us.” He powered up his engines and began to move, dodging the island-sized nodules as he gained speed.
“Damn you, Garrison!” She plunged after him, looking for a good shot to damage his engines. “I’m warning you!”
His parting message enraged her. “I’ve had plenty of warnings, and I know which ones to listen to.”
He didn’t take her seriously! He was forcing her to do this. She tracked ahead and fired a warning shot across his bow. The jazers lanced out like javelins, magnetically bound high-energy beams.
When the beam struck one of the bobbing globules, the sphere erupted like a supernova. The explosion was more than just an outpouring of fire and energy: the detonating bloater ignited an adjacent bloater, then another one, like firecrackers in a chain-reaction inferno.
The shock wave engulfed her ship.
NINETEEN
LEE ISWANDER
Surging heat plumes turned Sheol’s red magma into an angry yellow-white storm. Iswander stared at the horrific beauty from his tower windows while the harpy song of alarms shrieked from dozens of systems.
Rlinda Kett began heading for the door of the office deck. “I know shit hitting the fan when I see it. You have an evacuation protocol?”
Iswander hadn’t been able to study the cautionary report Pannebaker prepared, and he needed more time to develop a modified emergency response plan. “The situation might be beyond the scenarios we modeled.”
Rlinda looked at him in astonishment. “You live in… this and you aren’t ready to evacuate on a moment’s notice?”
Iswander was scanning the reports on the screens, the stranded smelter barge with the breached hull. He forced down panic. “Let’s not go overboard, Captain Kett. Everything here was built to withstand the heat.”
The structure of Tower One began to groan. As the ceramic-metal pilings were heated beyond their tolerance levels, the deck shifted noticeably. Iswander grabbed his desk for balance and activated the comm. He broadcast over the full-facility loudspeakers. “This is Lee Iswander, activating emergency protocols. Team leaders, get your crews to safety. Take emergency shelter precautions. Go into your bolt-holes if necessary. I want structural integrity reports for Towers One, Two, and Three. We’ll have evacuation ships on standby if this gets worse.”
Iswander knew how to keep awkward information confidential, but he was going to have to rely on every possible option now. He turned to the trader woman. “We don’t have enough ships for an immediate and total evacuation—not nearly enough.” Didn’t budget for it, didn’t plan for it—but he wasn’t going to say that. “We did not foresee any circumstance that would require us to abandon the facility completely.”
But Garrison Reeves had warned of this. All of his employees knew that Iswander had received, and dismissed, the man’s warning. Now he had to salvage the situation, or he was going to look terrible.
The material tolerances should hold, unless the heat grew significantly worse.
His five enormous smelter barges had the best hull shielding, and he hoped they could withstand the increased heat from the plume, even though one was already foundering, taking on magma in the lower compartments. Iswander contacted the other four barge pilots. “Do you have room for evacuees? We might need you to carry a few dozen people until this simmers down.”
One of the barge pilots responded, “I don’t like the readings from our hull, Mr. Iswander. We’re well into the red zone and softening up here ourselves.”
Iswander pounded on the transmit button. “And I don’t like the readings from Tower Three! Get over there and rescue as many as you can.”
A second barge pilot broke in. “Will do, sir, but just because these barges look big doesn’t mean we have any spare room. Most of the vessel is for lava processing and metal storage. Only a few small chambers on the bridge level are shielded enough for habitation.”
“Understood.” He should have planned better, should have paid attention to worse-case scenarios no matter how problematic they might be. He’d been reluctant to listen to Garrison’s paranoia, more intent on quieting the rumors and keeping the workers calm than on assessing the problem. Dammit! These structural materials should stand up to the thermal stresses! It was in the design. He was supposed to be able to rely on his people when they gave him assessments.