George Martin - Busted flush

The setting looked familiar. Feeling as if her blood had been replaced with liquid nitrogen, Hei-lian said, "Where?"

"From the Nigerian coast, near Brass. France 24 TV's sending it real-time."

Li turned beside her. "Wait, Brass? Isn't that-?"

Hong nodded. "Ground zero's the head of the invading PPA army."

"Still getting no readings," Tom's voice said. His voice crackled over the radio. A storm had gathered over the blast site with unnatural speed. Lightning laced the clouds and raked the ground.

"That is not possible," said Professor Evariste Tiwari, from Kongoville's Liberation University. An internationally known physicist who had worked with UN antinuclear proliferation teams out of Los Alamos, he was a small, stooped Congolese with a big bald head and a round belly pooching out the front of his rumpled black Western-style suit. "Even if it was an airburst, it must have left a plume of fissile material not converted to energy by the reaction."

"No joy, Doc. Geiger counter barely registers a peep."

A dozen people crammed the room where the Committee aces had been debriefed. The smell of nervous sweat almost overpowered the smell of Alicia Nshombo's violet soap. The wide-screen monitors mostly showed various satellite news feeds endlessly replaying the France 24 video, which had started right after the detonation's distinctive flash drew the cameraman's attention. A couple, muted, showed live debate from an emergency session of the UN Security Council, where Russia and China furiously demanded sanctions if not worse be imposed on both Nigeria and its sponsor, the British Empire, for crimes against humanity. It was sheer formality: the Empire held a veto.

Glancing that way occasionally Hei-lian gathered that the U.S. ambassador sat and said nothing to defend Great Britain. Which might mean his own government was none too pleased with its old ally for letting loose the nuclear demon.

Mostly she, like the others-her crew, President Dr. Nshombo, Alicia, Professor Tiwari-focused on the monitor showing the feed from the video camera strapped to Tom's chest. What it showed horrified even Hei-lian, accustomed as she was to the endless iteration of sorrow and atrocity that comprised modern Central African history.

In this land frost never touched, the green grass had gone winter gray. Skeletal trees smoldered beside the bent and burnt-out wrecks of a Simba Brigade armored column. The chassis of some Russian-made tank cradled upside-down in the branches of a stout tree. It had shed its massive turret somewhere as the blast flipped it through the air like a tiddlywink.

"I see something moving down there," Tom said. "I'm going down for a look."

"Be careful," Nshombo said. It was a measure of the strain he was under that he consented to sit in a chair. His hands grasped the arms so hard Hei-lian half expected he'd leave grooves in the hard wood. Standing beside him, Alicia reached down to pat one hand reassuringly. "Your instruments might be malfunctioning. There might be fallout anyway."

"No sweat," Tom came back. "A little radiation doesn't scare me."

Hei-lian kept her face impassive at the implied slap at the People's Republic. After some quick satellite consultation between Hei-lian and her superiors Tom had used his gift of hyperflight to bounce to orbit and then down to Beijing, where he picked up hastily gathered radiation-detection and air-sampling gear. He now wore it on a makeshift harness along with the video camera and a Guoanbu satellite-link radio.

Hei-lian caught Hong's eye. He monitored the telemetry from Tom's sensors. He gave her a scarcely perceptible headshake. No malfunction. He might have a weak stomach, but he was shaping up well under stress.

The camera's eye angled down. The scorched earth swept up. Tom leveled his flight off at perhaps thirty meters' altitude.

Six figures shuffled toward him along the road. They had a mottled reddish color.

"Closing in," Tom reported.

"Mon Dieu," Alicia said, choking.

For a moment Hei-lian's brain resisted making sense of what her eyes saw. Then she could no longer hide from it. Their clothes had been burned or blasted away. Their skin was gone. Their eyes were shiny tracks glazed down flayed cheeks. One cradled coils of his own intestines in stubbed arms. A purple greasy tail trailed in the white dust behind him.

"Use the wastebasket, Hong," Hei-lian said through teeth clenched so hard they squeaked. The tech caught it up just in time. The room filled with the acid reek of vomit.

Hei-lian barely noticed.

"Going back up," Tom said. If the horrific and pathetic sight affected him his voice gave no sign. Hei-lian wondered what went through his mind.

"I can see a crater ahead of me now," he said. "Not very big. Maybe fifty-sixty yards across."

"This cannot be!" the professor exclaimed. "A crater would mean the fireball came in contact with the surface. Vaporized soil and rock would be sucked up and mingled with unconsumed radionuclides. It would produce substantial fallout."

He took off his glasses and polished them furiously with a handkerchief. "Substantial."

But the instruments continued to show radiation levels scarcely more than background. Something strange was going on here. Hei-lian felt relief at having a mystery to distract her from the images that kept shambling through her mind.

"I'm coming up to the crater," Tom said, in effect narrating the action they saw on the screen. "Wait-there's something down there in the middle of it.

"It's-a kid. A naked kid. In the middle of the fucking crater."

Tom Weathers touched down. The heat from the lumpy green glass walls baked his skin and forced him to squint his eyes to prevent their drying out. His Geiger counter chattered; the voices from Kongoville assured him he could endure it for a few minutes without permanent harm.

The boy lay sobbing in the midst of a patch of unaffected sand.

"Hey," he called. "Hey, kid." The boy was white-fish-pale all over, in fact, and jiggling chubby. Maybe he spoke English.

The kid had his head on his arms. He kept crying.

"Listen," Tom said. "It's okay. I'm gonna get you taken care of."

"Go 'way!" the boy shouted with a wave of his arm. English. Cool.

Tom squatted down at the edge of the patch of sand. "You want me to just leave you here to the mosquitoes? Not a good plan, man."

"I-killed them. I kill everybody. I shouldn't be around people. I didn't want to do it. I want to die!"

"Hey, buddy," Tom said. "Just take a deep breath and tell me what happened."

The boy sat up. His pale belly spilled sadly over plump thighs. "I didn't mean to. I never mean to. But the Highwayman shoved me out of the truck and drove off and then he was gone and these tanks were coming down the road. They started shooting at me. I got scared, and-" He drew in a big shuddering breath and waved his hand around. "This."

"You did this?"

He nodded. "It always happens when I get scared."

"Let me get this straight," Tom said. "You cause nuclear explosions?"

"Yes! Haven't you been listening? When I get real scared I fucking blow up. Are you some kind of 'tard?" The spasm of anger passed and his eyes gushed tears again. "I wish I was dead. I'm too dangerous to be around!"

The voices in Tom's head were going ape-shit now. He ignored them. The warm feeling-like the aftermath of a good fuck; that three-way with Hei-lian and Lilith, say-spreading up through his belly from his loins told him what he was dealing with, and what he had, at any cost, to do.

"What's your name?"

"Drake." He sniffled and dabbed tears from his eyes. "Who are you?"

"Pleased to meet you, Drake. I'm Tom Weathers. Locally I got hung with some unpronounceable handle. I used to go by the Radical."

"The revolutionary guy on the posters."