Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

But even the tsunami would not be the end of it, no matter how destructive.

A major earthquake was, said some of the experts, overdue for Japan. Statistical projections said it would be on the scale of the great 1923 quake which killed a hundred and forty thousand people. Hitting modern, crowded Japan, such a quake would destroy industrial production, and lead to a massive worldwide recession.

That was the projection, the common understanding. Declan knew that the calamity that was coming would far exceed such measly predictions.

Perhaps the approaching tsunami would trigger it. Or perhaps it would be the destruction of Nantai, fed by the Moonseed: perhaps it would be necessary for the Moonseed to work deep into the magma under Earth’s skin here, as it appeared to have done in Scotland. Perhaps, even now, other great calderas — even Fuji itself — were opening up, feeling the ghost touch of the Moonseed, the stirring of the magma in the deep chambers within.

Eventually, though, it would all let rip.

He imagined the near future, when the whole ring of fire went up: tracing down the western seaboards of North and South America, scrawled over the ocean past China and Japan and Australia, almost a perfect ring around the Pacific. What a sight it would be, from space! It would be as if the Pacific, the world ocean, was trying to pull itself free of the poisoned and battered Earth which spawned it, perhaps to sail free into space to join the Moon.

He would like to live long enough to see that. But it wasn’t essential.

Probably Declan hadn’t needed to do anything to speed the decline of Japan. It was all, really, inevitable; you only had to glance at the polluted sky to see that, the poison that had wrapped itself around the planet.

But it pleased him to have played his part.

He was destroying his home by his own actions. Just as he had destroyed one earlier home, lost his wife and baby daughter because of what he’d done, and the awful revelations he hadn’t been able to forestall or buy off.

But this time, he would have nowhere to flee. Nowhere to shelter his sorry soul; nowhere to eke out the days, as he imprisoned himself.

He smiled. Call it time off for good behaviour.

There was a wind from the ocean. A spattering of rain. It was salty and muddy.

Declan Hague laughed, celebrating his freedom. He let the salty rain run into his open mouth.

Scoured down to the bedrock.

Debbie Sturrock was actually coming off duty when it happened; that was the irony of it. And strictly speaking she wasn’t even a firefighter at all, since she hadn’t yet completed her training in the Scottish Fire Service Training School, down the road at Gullane.

She just happened to be in the way.

Torness, the modern nuclear power plant just outside Dunbar, meant little to Debbie. She drove past it every day on her way to her training assignment at the fire station in North Berwick. Torness was just an anonymous, slightly sinister collection of blue cylinders and boxes and piping, hiding behind a row of immature fir trees.

But today, as she drove towards it on the crowded road, alarms were sounding, and people were fleeing out of the gates, and there was black smoke billowing from the big structure of steel and glass at the heart of the compound.

She pulled over to look more closely.

A pillar of flame. Sparks. Bits of concrete, metal structures, tumbling in the air.

She drove up the broad main drive and got out of the car. She had her yellow hard hat and her jacket in the boot; she pulled them on, running to the gate.

A security man was here, holding his position despite his obvious fear, directing others, office workers and engineers and managers. Debbie approached him.

“I can help. Which way?”

He looked her over, evidently recognized her as a firefighter, and pointed. She hurried into the compound.

The big, box-like building at the heart of the compound seemed to have exploded; the thin metal frame was ripped open at the roof, like a tin can. Above the damaged building there was a bluish glow, and pockets of fire on the surrounding buildings.

She found herself walking across a neat lawn that was littered with glowing debris.

Despite herself, her pace slowed. This was, after all, a nuke plant. Dear God. What have I walked into here?

Well, she’d already been in a lot of fires, and she’d never hesitated before.

Without thinking, she pushed herself forward, towards the blue glow.

The heat was enormous, like a wind, crowding through the layers of her clothing.

She came to a maintenance crew, trapped in a tool bunker maybe five hundred yards from the explosion’s core. The bunker wouldn’t last long; Debbie Sturrock could see a blood-red liquid seeping from the walls as they started to melt in the massive heat. The maintenance guys had no protective gear.

A fire crew was pushing in towards the tool bunker with a fire hose. They were trying to keep the water playing on the door.

Debbie joined them. The crew leader waved at her, miming at her to piss off out of here. She ignored him, and lent her strength to the efforts of the crew as they kept the hose directed at the door.

When it was cool enough, the door was opened from the inside. The workers there threw out singed sandbags, which they’d evidently been using to seal the door, and made a run for it.

By the time they were gone, Debbie was vomiting. But still she held onto the hose.

The ground shuddered.

Earth tremor?

She wondered if that was what had triggered the explosion. She knew the two reactors here were cooled by pumped carbon dioxide gas. What would happen if a tremor knocked out the coolant pumps, or broke a feed line, or…?

Really, she knew nothing about nuclear plants. Nothing, except that you shouldn’t go near one at the best of times. And this was not the best of times.

When the maintenance guys were out, under the leader’s gestured command, the fire crew dropped the hose and ran towards the centre of the blaze. Debbie followed.

Her vomiting was over, but she was still dry-retching even as she ran.

There were fires everywhere. It looked to Debbie as if the stuff raining down from the central explosion — the reactor? — had ignited whatever it could find, like the tar on the roofs. She had some breathing apparatus now, dropped by an injured firefighter, but as they worked to the centre of the complex she found it progressively more difficult to battle through the intense heat, the acrid air, the molten tar which stuck to her boots, a black graphite dust which seemed to be everywhere.

She felt hot, inside and outside, a feeling she’d never known before.

They were met by a man in shirtsleeves and a Scottish Nuclear tie. He was the deputy station manager; he was wearing a badge that turned out to be a radiation dosimeter. His boss, the station manager, wasn’t here; she was crowning the Gala Queen in Dunbar five miles away. Local-friendly PR for the area’s biggest employer.

Gradually, as the deputy manager and the fire chief argued about what to do, Debbie figured out what had happened here.

“We’re protected from quakes here. The founds go down to bedrock. But we’re designed to withstand only up to a certain Richter. When the big tremor hit, the sea water conduits cracked…”

“What does that mean?”

The manager struggled to explain. “The reactors are cooled by carbon dioxide gas. The hot gas is passed through a boiler that turns water to steam, and the steam runs the turbine. The steam is in a closed loop. It passes through a condenser, where it’s cooled by sea water.”

“What happens to the sea water?”

“It’s dumped back in the ocean. The radiation levels are low, and we monitor—”