The Tower Three supervisor called in, “We’re tilting at an alarming angle here. Our struts are buckling.”
Through the window wall of the admin deck, Iswander saw cumbersome smelter barges lurch toward Tower Three. He had 450 people in that structure, and if each barge could take only a dozen or so refugees under the best circumstances… Maybe it wouldn’t collapse. Maybe the material strength and heat tolerance were higher than projected.
Maybe that was wishful thinking.
Tower One began to groan again. A keepsake beverage mug from Iswander’s son slid off the smooth desktop and thumped on the floor.
“You’ve got one more ship.” Rlinda activated her comm. “Tamblyn, we need the Curiosity. Dump whatever cargo you’ve loaded and hook up to the Tower One heat tube. It’s going to be standing room only, but we’ll get all the people aboard that we can.”
Tasia responded, “Going to the cockpit right now to prep. Robb is over there—make sure he gets aboard.”
Standing near the windowport, Iswander could see the rippling surface of the landing deck. Blistering heat radiated through the special insulated glass. Three empty company ships were in shielded structures on the landing platform, along with his own private cruiser. He switched his desk comm to a secure channel. If the disaster grew worse, he had to set priorities. “Mr. Pannebaker, get my wife and son to our cruiser and take off. Once I know that they’re safe, I can better deal with the crisis here.”
Rlinda added, “If you don’t have enough lifeboats for everyone, you’d better cram your cruiser as full as you can. That’s another twenty people? Thirty? We’ll need every spot.”
Iswander was more angry than panicked. This wasn’t supposed to be happening. His engineers had guaranteed him that these structures were safe! Geologists had analyzed the tidal stresses, the magma temperatures; materials scientists had approved the tolerance levels of the ceramic-metal composites. This should not have been a problem!
Tower Three transmitted dozens of alarms, and the supervisor grew more panicked. The first smelter barge approached the distressed tower, positioning itself so it could link with the access hatch and take on a group of evacuees.
The Tower Two supervisor called out, “Save room for us! Our systems are already failing.”
Robb Brindle rushed in from the records vault, breathless. “What’s going on?” At the window wall, he watched the Voracious Curiosity lift off from the raised landing deck and circle around. “Where’s Tasia going?”
As soon as the ship was in the air, the cargo hatch opened. Pallets of specialized metal products, foams, ceramic alloys, and stacked ingots tumbled out like discarded garbage, falling into the broiling yellow soup of molten rock. The Curiosity came back, buffeted from side to side as a thermal hurricane stirred the air.
Tasia Tamblyn’s voice came over the comm. “I’ll land on the deck close to the access tube, but even the platform looks questionable to me.”
Iswander sounded a full-fledged evacuation. Personnel in Tower One were to fill the ships waiting on the landing deck. It was complete chaos.
The facility comm lines were a chatter of overlapping queries, shouts, and contradictory orders. On the private channel, Pannebaker broke in, “Londa and Arden are aboard your cruiser, Chief, and we fit twenty other people aboard. If we stick around, I could maybe take five more, but—”
“I want them safe now.” Iswander no longer had any faith in safety margins.
“Understood, Chief.”
The private cruiser lifted off into the smoke-stirred sky just in time for Tasia Tamblyn to land the Curiosity on the open grid next to the access tube. “All right, we’re open for business. Get people aboard.”
Iswander dispatched a pair of large company ships over to Tower Two to rescue maybe a hundred more workers. It wouldn’t be enough, but he had no more ships to give. He promised to send more nevertheless, reassuring the doomed people.
When the first vessel landed on the Tower Two access deck, though, the evac hatch wouldn’t open. “It’s fused shut!” the pilot cried.
The tower supervisor yelled through the static-filled comm, “We have to get out of here!”
“Send your compies to assist the evac ships,” Iswander said. “We’ve got twenty of them outside now.” The special heat-shielded robots were designed for maintenance of external systems and they should be able to withstand the conditions. He just didn’t know if they could do any good.
The smooth, shielded compies crawled outside Tower Two and worked their way to the fused evac hatch. Blunt-headed models manufactured to endure extreme heat, they looked more like beetles than miniature humans. The robots scuttled around the hatch, using their specialized tools to attack controls that had melted shut.
“We’re working on the problem,” Iswander said to Tower Two in his cool administrator voice. “Stand by.” He felt light-headed, and sweat prickled on his forehead.
One of the smelter barges finally attached to the evacuation hatch on the bottom deck of Tower Three. As the remaining three barges closed in, one veered off, declaring an emergency just like the first stranded barge. “Lower hull breach! Lava flooding the lower chambers. We’re going to get cooked in here.”
Iswander didn’t know what to do. “Your habitation chambers are insulated. Just hold on.” His hopeful words sounded empty, but the desperate workers clung to them because they had no other choice.
Moments later, Tower Three collapsed and came crashing down into the lava.
TWENTY
GENERAL NALANI KEAH
It was just a routine patrol for the Confederation Defense Forces. The Juggernaut Kutuzov led a battle group of ten smaller Manta cruisers. General Nalani Keah sat in the command chair on the flagship’s bridge—her bridge. Her battleship.
She’d even given the big vessel its name after Field Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov, one of the military heroes she’d studied in the history of warfare. Whenever someone asked, Keah would give a full description of Kutuzov’s military career, his suppression of the Bar Confederation uprising, fighting in three Russo-Turkish wars, and of course his battles against Napoleon at Borodinō and Austerlitz. She could give many colorful details, story after story of Kutuzov’s career and exploits, but very few people were actually interested in old military history.
Those who did study the records were interested in more recent events, such as the Elemental War and the Klikiss invasion, but Keah had lived through those events herself when she was an up-and-coming officer in the Earth Defense Forces. She had been there at Earth facing off against the Klikiss swarmships when sabotage ripped through the new EDF battleships, destroying the human defensive line and killing half of her crewmates.
That wasn’t history to her; she wasn’t that old! She preferred her military history to involve sailing ships, cannons, horses, and cavalry.
“Arriving at Rheindic Co,” said Lieutenant Tait, at the helm.
“Right on time,” Keah said. “Check with the transportal transfer station down there. Make sure all is well.” Rheindic Co served as a hub for those using the alien transportal network to travel among the connected planets.
“Yes, General. That’s the reason we’re here.”
She was sure the crew didn’t believe it. They all kept up the polite fiction, played their roles, did their duties, and got high marks in their personnel files when each mission was over.