Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

“Never mind that. So without the sea water flow there’s no way for heat to get out of the system?”

“And on top of that we had a total loss of power. The cee-oh-two pumps failed—”

“Shit, man, you must have backups.”

“Oh, yeah. We draw power from the National Grid to keep the coolant pumps going. And failing that we have eight diesel generators on site. But the quake was too severe. We lost everything. Even so there are failsafes. When the power failed, the damper rods should have fallen into the reactor cores by gravity.”

“Don’t tell me. They didn’t.”

“The core was distorted. We couldn’t get the rods in. And we had carbon dioxide trapped in the core because the pumps had failed, and the gas got hotter and hotter, until there was an explosion that disrupted the pressure vessel—”

“Hold it. What exploded?”

“Reactor Number One.”

“Oh, Jesus…”

There was a small fire team here, Debbie learned, but only one of them had worked for the Fire Service.

There were two nurses on site. Nobody knew where they were.

The chief was still arguing what to do with the station manager when the one experienced firefighter tapped a couple of buddies on the shoulder, pointed, and ran towards the big central building, which was still burning.

Debbie hesitated for one second, then followed.

The leader took the crew up an appliance ladder to the roof of a building which, Debbie learned, was the turbine hall. Here, a couple of crews were already plying hoses onto the burning building below.

It looked — to Debbie, in her ignorance — like the central reactor hall itself.

The central building was just a shell of metal and glass, pretty much blown apart, a shell that had been wrapped around a massive concrete cube: the reactor block.

She was looking down at the roof of the block, which was littered with equipment and protective clothing, hastily abandoned. There were three big discs of black tiles, set in the block roof. The centremost of these covered a store for spent fuel, and the two others were the two reactors themselves, in their forty-feet-high pressure vessels of concrete and steel, buried inside the block.

There was a huge lime-green crane-like machine which ran on rails along the roof; this was the fuel charging machine, designed to lug seventy-feet-long fuel assemblies to and from the reactor cores. But the charging machine was crippled, its iron frame bent out of skew.

Number Two Reactor, to her right, looked intact. It was Number One which had suffered the explosion.

Its massive lid had been blasted off — black tiles were scattered around the building — and its concrete shell was broken outwards, reinforcing bars flailing upwards wildly. She could actually see into the heart of the reactor, the exposed core, which was a mass of flame and smoke.

The firefighters were hesitating before this, arguing about what to do.

To Debbie it was obvious. The fire in that reactor core had to be put out, before any more radioactive products were vented into the atmosphere.

And there was only herself and the other firefighters to do it, by hand if necessary.

She’d heard about Chernobyl, the heroism of the firefighters there. The casualty rate later.

She’d never expected to encounter such a situation herself.

When she looked into the exposed core, she felt its warmth, on her face and chest and legs. She wondered if she ought to ask for a dosimeter badge.

She fixed her helmet and oxygen mask. With the others, she pushed forward, into the heat.

The traffic crawled through Dunbar, and beyond.

Further east, there was something going on. Jane could see a pillar of smoke, blowing inland. Helicopters were flapping over, dumping tons of what looked like sand.

Five miles past Dunbar, close to the source of all the smoke, somebody came blundering into the road in front of her, and Jane braked sharply. It was a fireman — no, a woman — singed donkey jacket, blackened hair, what looked like a bad case of sun-tan darkening her skin. She looked around blearily, focused on Jane, and came staggering to the passenger door.

“Please,” she said. “Help me.” Her voice was a hissed whisper.

She was just a kid.

Jane nodded. She got out of the car, and bundled the firefighter into the back. The woman lay down, her legs drawn up to her chest, shivering. Her face looked swollen, and she seemed to be trying to protect her hands. Around her neck, her skin had burst and was hanging in strips. She was bleeding through her nose, perhaps haemorrhaging. There was a name badge on her jacket. STURROCK.

Jack just stared.

Jane realized where she was. Torness. Jesus. I should have thought of this. I have to get Jack out of here —

There was a thunderous roar overhead, startling Jane enough to make her brake. “Jesus Christ. What now?”

She looked out of the window. Planes: fleets of them, huge black shapes, sweeping in from the north.

“They’re coming from RAF Leuchars,” Jack said.

Jane stared at him. It was the longest sentence he’d uttered in days.

“There are Vulcans. See, the British ones. And B-2As. The Americans. Look, that’s a B-52. And I think that’s a Tupolev, the white one. Russian…”

The sky was black with the bombers, the growl of their jets filling the air. All around her people were climbing out of their cars to see, or peering out of their windows into the sky.

They were whooping, clapping. One woman was crying.

Henry had told her about this. The start of the counter-measures. Now we fight back, Jane thought brutally.

In the car, the firefighter groaned.

Jane pulled onto the road’s central reservation, and put her foot down, ignoring the blaring horns around her, putting as much distance between herself and Torness as she could manage. She tried not to hunch her shoulders against the invisible radioactive sleet that must be drenching them both.

In the back, Jack gave the firefighter water.

From the heart of Scotland, behind the fleeing car, came boiling clouds and a continuous roar of thunder. More planes flew overhead, and she imagined the fight against the Moonseed, all over the suffering planet.

Garry Beus stepped out into the flat California sunlight.

Edwards Air Force Base was a chunk carved out of the western desert, marked only by Joshua trees, twisted and arthritic and sinister. The land that time forgot. It was early, but already heat haze was shimmering off the flat, pale salt lakes on the horizon, obscuring his view of the giant aircraft hangars here.

And there was a muddy brown colour to the sky. Volcanic shit. The reason he would be earning his hazardous flight pay today.

It had started off as a normal morning. Shower and shave, a pass on breakfast. But when he climbed into his flight suit, an ugly sonofabitch in olive green with a zipper from balls to neck, and he took his wallet and log book, and he pulled on the thick socks he always wore in case of a cockpit heating failure — well, his heart had started to pump.

Edwards had always been the place to be for a pilot, a place you could come burning down out of the sky and always find a place to land on those broad salt flats, where you could touch down faster than some airplanes could fly. Chuck Yeager flew here. This was the home of the X-15. They even landed the Space Shuttle here. But in truth Edwards was a place for test pilots, like Garry himself.

Today, though, Garry had some real work to do here.

He walked to the squadron building. Here was the ops desk where he had to check in to confirm his mission, and his wing man for the morning’s two-ship flight, Jake Parrish.