James Decker - Fallout

I could think of only one thing left to do. I took the gate remote from my pocket, and dialed up the endpoint I’d placed in the sewers underneath Xinzhongzi. I aimed it at the deck of the transport, and opened a gate, small at first, just enough to see through. I eased it open a little wider, until a hole formed in the back of the vehicle, looking down toward the far-off ceiling of the power station on the other side. I saw cascades of flashing lights across banks of equipment, and monitors. I saw workstations, connected with miles of cable, and people. Men and women wearing white jackets, and hard hats. Before I could change my mind I retrieved the bomb, Alexei’s bomb, from inside my Escher tablet.

A woman inside the substation noticed the gate, then. She started toward it to look through, and I threw the harness. I saw it go through, and then begin to fall back toward the gate as it adjusted to the gravity on the other side. The woman watched as two bricks of explosives jumped up from out of the floor in front of her, and her eyes went wide.

I closed the gate.

“Look out!” someone screamed.

Through the windshield, I saw a bright shell of light burst out from the Xinzhongzi tower, then stop, having encompassed the entire campus. A second shell expanded away from the first and as it bloomed, the buildings in its path flickered as if threatening to vanish. They phased out of existence, and for a brief moment, something else, a completely different landscape appeared in their place. Buildings, yes, but not of human construction. They were larger, and towered higher than anything we had ever conceived. I recognized them from the memories Sillith had shared with me just before her death. Not quite the same, but similar.

They’re going to do it, I thought, staring. They’re really going to do it….

Time had run out. The expanding balloon of light had consumed all of Xinzhongzi, it looked like. The strange buildings solidified, becoming real, and I saw something begin to emerge from one of them. Something big, that wasn’t like any haan I’d ever seen.

I put my thumb on the detonator, and squeezed.

The boom rose even above the racket outside, and through the side window, I saw what must have been the substation explode outward from one side. A ball of fire and smoke blasted through the roof of the structure, throwing up a huge plume of concrete, metal, and glass as the entire colony blacked out.

In the newfound darkness, an angry glow crackled from inside the cathedral tower. The light grew brighter until, shaken past its limits, the building began to collapse in on itself, crumbling down onto the campus around it as the twin bubbles of light winked out of existence. As they did, the haan oasis vanished. The colony phased back, but as it did, the buildings all went dark. The lights flickered out, and the buildings themselves grew black, and pitted as if decaying in front of me. Then, all at once, with a boom that shook the transport, the buildings were vaporized altogether.

Blocks and blocks of the colony exploded into rubble, falling down into a growing black cloud that began to swirl like the storm at the Impact rim.

Was I too late? I wondered.

Before I could do more than wonder, the cloud rushed up and consumed us, raining ash over the transport and blotting out the light.

In near darkness, something began to hum.

“Shen, get us out of this,” Dragan called to the pilot.

“I’m trying, goddamn it.”

The aircar engine sputtered, while outside the wind howled and what sounded like rain drummed against the hull.

“Sam?” Vamp said in a low voice. He groped and found my hand as Alexei shivered against me.

“I’m here.”

“What happened?” one of Dragan’s team asked. “What the hell just happened?” By the light of the dash I could make out the name patch on his shirt—Fong. The second man, Kao, shook his head as he stared out the window.

“I don’t know,” he said, sounding confused. “Somebody give me a status.”

“The air filters are gummed up,” a voice called back from the cabin. “The emitters are going into the red, and something fried the GPS.”

“Can you tell where we are?” Dragan asked.

The pilot fiddled with the controls, frowning as the dash lights flickered.

“It’s a mess out there,” he muttered. “I can’t see anything. If the nav logs are right, we should be a half kilometer inside the Xinzhongzi border, near the western gate.”

“Can you keep us in the air?”

“Not for long. I’m taking a straight shot west, away from the tower.”

“It’s the Impact,” Kao said under his breath. “It’s the Impact all over again….”

“Are we going to fall?” Alexei asked.

“We’ll be okay,” I told him.

Grit sprayed against the windshield, and I could see that in spite of him pulling up as hard as he could we weren’t rising much. Not enough to get out of the dust storm.

“Can you find a landing spot?” Shen called.

“I can’t see anything, I need to get us higher.”

“Watch your altitude,” Dragan snapped. “If the emitters fail we’ll drop like a stone.”

The pilot didn’t listen, though. He kept taking us up as fast as he could manage until the smoke sifted away from the windshield, and for just a moment the headlights shined over the surface of the storm. Not long, but long enough.

The bright lights of Hangfei in the distance peeked through the swirling gray. At least part of the city still had power, and it wasn’t that far. We could still escape.

An alarm sounded, and the dash lit up red. The vehicle bucked, then dropped back down into the cloud and lurched to a stop. A chemical smoke smell began to fill the cabin, as Dragan pushed Kang out of the way and shouted into the cockpit.

“The emitters are failing,” he snapped. “Get us on the ground. Xinzhongzi has an airpad near the western gate, take us down there.”

“I can’t see—”

“Do your best; it’s better than free fall!”

The pilot cursed under his breath but he started taking us down. The alarm continued to blare as the cabin grew warm; then the vehicle began to shudder. Through the windows, all I could see were the vehicle’s own lights glowing feebly through the swirling smoke and ash.

Vamp crowded next to the window so that our cheeks were almost touching and I could see his reflection in it. I saw the dread in his eyes as his breath fogged the glass.

“Shit!” the pilot yelled from the cockpit.

“What’s the matter?” I heard Li ask. “Can you get us down or not?”

“It’s not that.”

“Then what?”

“There’s a problem with the navigation system. I’m at the airpad now—”

“Then take us down, what’s the—”

“I can’t, it’s gone.”

“What?”

“The airpad isn’t there. Nothing is there.”

The pilot was hunched over the controls, looking at the display while through the windshield I could make out an expanse of churning black and gray below us.

“What do you mean, it’s not there?” Dragan called.

“The destination coordinates put us directly over it,” the pilot said. “I’m telling you it’s not there. We’re going down, I’m looking for—”

The vehicle bucked again, and I felt it drop out from under us.

“Shit!”

“Can you make it to the wall?” Dragan yelled.

Through the window I saw the broken remains of smashed buildings jutting up out of the haze of black ash. Currents of gray smoke carrying black, burned flakes shrieked through the jagged edges of concrete, steel, and broken glass. What might have been the airpad had been reduced to an expanse of buckled and broken tarmac leading up to the squat remains of a terminal.