Island in a Sea of Stars (6 page)

Rlinda said, “I'd say once you pass the disaster limit, it doesn't matter how much worse it gets.”

Iswander was normally a reticent man who knew how to keep awkward information confidential, but he was going to have to rely on every possible option now. He turned to the trader woman. “We don't have enough ships for a total evacuation—not nearly enough.” Didn't budget for it, didn't plan for it—but he wasn't going to say that now. “We did not foresee any circumstance that would require an immediate and total evacuation.”

But Garrison Reeves had warned of this. And the other employees knew that Iswander had received, and dismissed, the warning. He had to salvage the situation, or he was going to look terrible. The material tolerances
should
hold, unless the heat grew significantly worse.

“Well, you've got one more ship.” Rlinda activated her comm. “Tamblyn, we need the
Curiosity
. Dump whatever cargo you've loaded aboard and hook up to the Tower One heat tube. Our ship is going to be standing room only.”

Tasia responded, “Heading to the cockpit right now. Looks like everything's going to hell.”

“We started out in hell,” Rlinda said, but Iswander didn't appreciate the joke.

His five enormous smelter barges had the best hull shielding, and he hoped they could withstand the increased heat from the plume. But one was already foundering, suffering a breach in the lower hull. Iswander contacted the other four barge pilots directly. “Do you have room for evacuees? We might need a few dozen people to climb aboard and hole up until this simmers down.”

One of the barge pilots responded, “I don't like the readings from our hull, Mr. Iswander. We're well into the red zone and softening up here ourselves.”

Iswander pounded on the transmit button. “And I don't like the readings from Tower Three! Get over there and rescue as many as you can.”

A second barge pilot broke in. “Will do, sir, but just because these barges look big doesn't mean we have any spare room. Most of the vessel is for lava processing and metal storage. Only a few small chambers on the bridge level are shielded enough for habitation.”

“Understood.” He should have planned better before. He had been angrily reluctant to listen to Garrison Reeves's paranoia, more intent on quieting the rumors and keeping the workers calm than in assessing the problem. When constructing the facility, the structural materials
should
have been sufficient!

The supervisor from Tower Three called in, “We're tilting at an alarming angle here. Our struts are buckling.”

Through the window wall of the admin deck, Iswander saw the cumbersome smelter barges lurch toward Tower Three. He had three hundred and fifty people in that structure, and if each barge could take only a dozen or so refugees …

Maybe it wouldn't collapse. Maybe the material strength and heat tolerance was higher than projected.

Maybe that was wishful thinking.

Tower One began to groan again. A keepsake mug from Iswander's son slid off the smooth desktop and thumped on the floor.

Robb Brindle stepped over to the window wall and watched as the
Voracious Curiosity
lifted off from the raised landing deck and circled around. “Where's Tasia going?”

As soon as the ship was in the air, the lower cargo hatch opened. Pallets of specialized metal products, foams, ceramic alloys, and stacked ingots tumbled out like garbage, falling into the broiling yellow soup of molten rock. The
Curiosity
came back, buffeted from side to side as a thermal hurricane churned the air.

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 and the magma temperatures; materials scientists had approved the tolerance levels of the ceramic-metal composites. This should not have been a problem!

Tasia Tamblyn's voice came over the comm. “I'll land on the deck close to the access tube, but I don't know how long that platform is going to last. It looks questionable to me.”

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. From his desk comm, he switched 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.”

Tower Three transmitted 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.”

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 on 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
.” He no longer had any faith in safety margins.

“Understood, Chief.”

The 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 your 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 second tower's 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!”

“We have twenty special heat-shielded worker compies,” Iswander explained, “mostly at Tower Two for the maintenance of external systems.” He reassigned the small robots to intercept and assist the evac ships, but wasn't sure it would do any good.

The smooth, shielded compies crawled outside the tower and worked their way to the evac hatch. Blunt-headed models designed to survive in extreme heat, they looked more like beetles than miniature humans. The robots scuttled around the hatch, using their specialized tools to attack the controls that had melted shut.

“We're working on the problem,” Iswander said to Tower Two in his cool administrator voice. “Just hold on.” He felt lightheaded, and sweat prickled on his forehead.

A smelter barge finally attached to the evacuation hatch on the bottom deck of Tower Three. The remaining three barges closed in, but one veered off again, declaring an emergency just like the first stranded barge. “Lower hull breach!” the pilot said. “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.

Then Tower Three failed.

10

ELISA REEVES

In the bloater explosion, Elisa's ship screens went blank as emergency filters blocked the overwhelming surge of energy. Shockwaves hurled her ship backward, spinning out of control.

Since she'd been worried Garrison might try to trick her, maybe even open fire with his low-power weapons, Elisa had kept her shields up. That had probably saved her life.

As the cluster of nodules continued to explode in a chain reaction, her ship tumbled away, damaged and blind. Elisa couldn't orient it, couldn't regain engine control. It was all she could do to hold on.

She managed to restore one screen, but the view was haphazard and she couldn't see Garrison's ship in the spreading inferno. The shockwaves rippled farther and farther, and even the outlying bloaters glinted and sparked, as if in alarm. Her screens went to static again. Through the windowports, she could see the blast going on and on and on.

Alarms rang through the cockpit, and her engines sputtered. Life support wavered into the red zones, but secondary systems stabilized the air and light. The chain reaction continued interminably, until the inferno climaxed and finally dwindled as the explosions spread to the diffuse outlying bloaters.

Half-blinded, she tried to catch her breath, astonished to be alive.

With only a few of her sensors still functioning, she searched through the dissipating energy cloud, frantic. Elisa couldn't detect Garrison's ship, not even any wreckage. But if his vessel had been in the heart of those detonating bloaters, it would have been vaporized. That meant Seth was dead!

Anger warred with her grief. Garrison had ripped the boy away from her because he feared
Sheol
was too dangerous a place—and he'd brought their son out here to a cluster of unstable bombs in space. She felt sick inside.

The glare from the clustered explosions dissipated. Her screens remained dark, most sensors non-functional, and she would have to determine how many other systems were damaged. It was going to take all of her resources just to limp back to civilization.

She looked again at the portrait image of Seth she'd placed in the cockpit. She didn't even understand what had happened, refused to believe it. She had just fired a small warning shot with low-powered jazers! She had never expected that reaction.

Hundreds of the bloaters still drifted around her, as mysterious as before. And another question tugged at the back of her mind.
What the hell are those things made of?

11

LEE ISWANDER

Tower Three was located in the most intense part of the thermal plume, and when the thick support struts approached the melting point, the tower's legs began to bend and buckle. In a slow and inexorable plunge, the tall structure folded over and collapsed on top of the smelter barge that had docked to the base to take evacuees. The comm channel was a storm of screams.

Iswander gasped, “I can't fix this—there's no way to fix this!” He wanted to call up the reports, prove that he had done everything prudent to provide a safe environment. This was going to look very bad for him.

“How many personnel are stationed on Sheol?” Rlinda demanded.

He called up the data immediately. “Over two thousand—two thousand seventeen, I think.” Then he remembered that Elisa Reeves had gone off after her husband and son. “No, two thousand fourteen.”

“Too many for the ships you have,” Robb said.

Iswander couldn't argue with that. “We have shielded facilities, heat-resistant smelter barges, bolt-holes in the towers. We did not foresee the need for a full and complete evacuation of personnel.”

“Looks to me like that's what we're going to need,” Rlinda said.

On Tower Two, the heat-armored compies kept working at the evac hatch, while the two large rescue ships circled, looking for a way to retrieve the stranded personnel. Through the magnification screens on his desk, Iswander saw one of the shielded robots spark and collapse, its exterior skeleton melting. It dropped away from the hatch and fell like an insect sprayed with poison. Another compy took its place, working at the same ruined controls.

Half of the geothermal sensors positioned around the sites had already burned out. Through the confusing squawk of alarms, Iswander heard an even more urgent tone: on the warning screen, a spike in the readings indicated an intense heat column rising through the magma near Tower Two.

“There's a new lava geyser forming!” He signaled to the Tower Two supervisor. “Prepare yourselves. There's going to be—” He stopped, knowing there was no way the supervisor could prepare herself.

Yes, this was going to look very bad for him.

Molten rock vomited upward and covered the hull of Tower Two. The spray hammered both of the waiting rescue ships like liquid cannonballs. Lava destroyed the tower's evac hatch, vaporized the compies, and hardened in the air to form an impenetrable seal over the structure.

The two damaged rescue ships reeled, unable to maintain control. One engine exploded, and the first ship tumbled down into the sea of lava. The other ship managed to circle for a few moments longer before skidding to a landing on the access deck of Tower Two, but the weakened deck collapsed and dumped the second vessel down into the magma. Iswander reeled, stunned to think of how many people had just died, but also angry and frustrated that the structural engineers had let him down again. The deck should have been sturdy enough!

In Tower One Rlinda grabbed Iswander's arm, pulling him toward the door of his office. “Come on, we're getting to the
Curiosity
now. You're not going to be stupid and go down with your ship.”

He followed her, surprised by her comment. He had no intention whatsoever of going down with the facility.

The structure shook and slid, and Iswander knew it wouldn't be long before the support struts buckled as well. Captain Kett was right: they had to get out of here.

All five smelter barges had now declared emergencies. Temperatures inside their enclosed chambers were rising, and there was no way they could escape. Every crew member aboard was going to be roasted alive—and the barge crews had to realize it by now.

He, Rlinda, and Robb staggered along uncertain corridors, racing toward the exit tunnel and the waiting
Curiosity
. Rlinda huffed as she ran. Robb touched his comm, “Better not leave without us, Tasia.”