Up Against It - M. J. Locke [10]
But Shelley, facing the opposite direction, gasped. “The ice.” She was pointing over his shoulder.
The ice? Sean turned and looked where she was pointing. His view had been obscured by his visor and the outcropping, but from this vantage point he could see it. Interior areas in the ice mountain were glowing. Jets of steam spewed out. He could feel the heat of reaction on his face, even through the visor. Clouds billowed all around. The ground trembled.
Terror surged in him. Three megatons of methane and water—the air, water, and fuel for over two hundred thousand people—was going up in wafts and jets of superheated gas.
“It’s a runaway. The reaction has outpaced the bugs’ half-life. We’ve got to stop it.” Sean sprang upright. “Let’s move, people! Move!”
Everyone hustled inside, two technicians carrying the body of Carl Agre. His brother, the young rocketbiker, and his friends followed behind.
Before he moved Upside and became Phocaea’s deputy commissioner of stores and warehousing, Sean had spent fifty-five years in the military. And if there was one thing he had learned, it was how to move fast in a crisis. Within minutes he had a command center set up, designated lieutenants, established priorities, and enacted communication protocols. He organized a team to pump neutralizer out to the ice, a team to check the bulkheads and seal off breaches, and a team to rescue those stranded in the other damaged warehouse. People were bringing in the injured; he assigned the medical techs to set up triage and first aid. Everyone scrambled. Then he and his engineers laid down maps and piped in live images of the ice.
Sean swore. The damned thing was nearly seven hundred feet on a side, and in the twelve minutes it had taken to set up command and lay the hoses, the ice was over a third gone. We’re screwed.
“Shelley, the hoses are way too slow. We have to get that bug-killing juice out there now. And the reaction is occurring in the core, where the heat is trapped. Not around the bottom edges.”
His chief engineer frowned at the images. “All our mobile equipment is down in Zekeston. Everything out here is on tracks in the domes.” She shrugged, looking grim. “There’s not much we can do but lay hose and pump.”
“We’re dead, then,” Cal, a disassembler programmer, said. “We can’t stop it. We’re dead.” His voice rose at the end to a shriek. Heads turned.
“Calm down,” Sean snapped, angry that Cal said what he had been thinking. “I need ideas. Not hysteria.”
“We can dive bomb it,” someone said. “Hit it from above.”
Sean did not recognize the voice. He looked around. It was the kid, the one whose brother had just died. He stood at the opening to the triage area, helmet tucked under his arm.
“Who let him in here?” one of the engineers asked, but Sean felt a tingling in his scalp. The rocketbikers and their nets, the kid meant. They could dive-bomb the ice, kill the reaction. “Go on.”
The teen lofted himself over. His friends hung back.
He was tall and gangly, straining his suit at the wrist and ankle joints. He had black hair in a longish cut that looked like an afterthought. He was talking in a monotone. Sean could not believe he was able to form coherent sentences at all. “The gang is all out there right now. Right?” He glanced over at his friends. “Right?”
The young man’s companions moved closer, outside the ring of engineers. The young woman nodded slowly. “It could work, I guess.”
“How many?” Shelley demanded. “How many are there?”
“Fifty,” Carl’s brother said. “Maybe more. We have our own comm frequencies.” Smart kid. He had realized how critical communications were—and how long it took to set them up if you didn’t already have a system in place. “We’re used to moving fast. To get the first ice, you know.”
He leapt up again, and floated above the maps, spread-eagled. Finally he settled onto the table cross-legged, and eyed the map from all angles. “Take a look,” he said to his friends. “What do you think?”
The engineers made room for the other three. “Our ramps are over here, on the other side of the lake,