Aftershock (2 page)

‘Pete? What's your ETA?'

Tom Erickson's voice resonated in the tiny speakers positioned close to Peter Sherringham's ears. He flicked his gaze to one corner of the holographic image in his headset. ‘Three minutes, 10 seconds, Tom.'

‘Copy that.'

Pete ran his fingers over the plastic control panel in the cockpit of the Silverback jet,
George
, and the plane ascended 400 metres on a sharp incline. At Mach 10, it covered the distance in a fraction of a second. Glancing back at the holoscreen, Pete could see two traces – two planes behind him – another Silverback piloted by Mai Buchanan, and the larger bulk of the Big Mac, the E-Force workhorse, with Stephanie Jacobs and Josh Thompson aboard.

‘Okay, guys.' It was Mark Harrison, the team leader, speaking from where he stood next to Tom in Cyber Control at the E-Force base on Tintara Island. His voice could be heard by all four E-Force members in the three planes. ‘As we have a few minutes before you reach the target, I'd like to bring you up to speed. The BigEyes tell us the situation at St Maria is deteriorating fast.' A schematic of the plant appeared on the team's holoscreens. ‘As you know, Pump Number 4 blew. We're not sure how or why. The engineers on site are unable to increase the flow of coolant to the core. Coolant is getting through from secondary backup systems, but it's way too little, too late. The core housing has ruptured and the outer casing of the reactor itself is exposed. There's been a very small radiation leak from this, but it also means we have a way of cooling the thing externally.'

Tom broke in. ‘The quencher tanks are on “max”, Steph. That means you have 50,000 litres of Quenchex to smother the flames. You then have a further 20,000 litres of liquid nitrogen to dump on the core itself. As you can imagine, you only have a small margin of error. Miss the flames and the liquid nitrogen will be ineffectual. Putting the fire out is only half the job, so both drops have to be within a metre of the target.'

‘So, no pressure then,' Steph, in the Big Mac, laughed. ‘How long do we have?'

‘Tom reckons we have nine minutes until the reactor blows.'

‘Wonderful!' Josh said. ‘Our ETA is six minutes 35, so we'll have no more than two and a half minutes to get the core temperature down.'

‘I know,' Mark responded. ‘Mai and Pete, you should be there a few minutes ahead of the Big Mac. You have to get a clear picture of the critical drop areas. Use the full spectrum analysers that've just been installed. Here's a schematic of the plant.'

A 3D image of the St Maria Nuclear Power Plant appeared on the Silverback holoscreens. Tom described the layout. As he spoke, the image shifted perspective and different parts of it became enlarged to show more detail.

‘There're four pumps,' he explained. ‘In most reactors, failure in one or even two of the pumps would be manageable, but this place is old. In fact, it was due to be decommissioned

a year ago, but the Paraguayans managed to push it back. All four pumps need to be working at a constant 80 per cent plus efficiency rate to maintain stability for the core. Pump 4 has vaporised and the core temperature has risen rapidly. I can't understand how it was left to get so bad. The warning systems must've also been offline. Anyway, the explosion has done us one favour. It just fell short of ripping open the reactor core itself, but it's exposed the housing. This is the primary drop area. There's a serious fire raging all around the Pump 4 module, but there's also a very hot fire all over the core housing.'

‘How hot?' Josh asked.

‘It's a chemical fire, outdated insulation and piping material. We're looking at 6000 degrees in places.'

Josh whistled.

‘And that, my friend, is why we only have...' Tom paused for a second, ‘seven minutes 50 to put out the fire.'

Pete swooped low in the Silverback. Turning a tight circle 300 metres above the gutted building, he could see the extent of the damage. The power plant consisted of a square concrete block, six storeys high. Next to this, on the eastern side, stood a stumpy cylinder with a domed roof – the reactor itself. The entire east side of the main building had been ripped away by the explosion and a great tear was visible in the dome covering the reactor.

As Pete banked around, Mai came into view aboard the Silverback,
John
.

‘Looks so much worse in reality,' Mai commented through her comms.

‘Yep,' Pete replied. ‘I'm running the spectroscopic analysis now.' A moment later, the information appeared on his holoscreen. It was a multicoloured image showing the thermionic conditions 2000 metres below the plane, highlighting the hottest parts in red and running through the spectrum to the cooler green regions. The same images appeared on the big screen on the wall of Cyber Control on Tintara, some 10,000 kilometres away. Tom's voice came over the comms.

‘Josh, Steph. We have the images from the ground.' He sent them over to their holoscreen. ‘The real hot zone is at grid reference 21.456 by 33.788. You copy that?'

‘Copy,' Steph replied.

‘There it is,' Josh said through the comms. ‘We have a visual.'

The Big Mac was a gigantic machine, a heavy plane. But for all its size, it could be thrown around like a conventional fighter plane. It dropped 3000 metres in a few seconds and made a preparatory approach over the burning reactor.

‘Three minutes nine seconds, guys,' Tom said over the comms.

The Silverbacks took up a holding pattern hovering 7000 metres above the nuclear power plant. Pete and Mai could both see the massive disc shape of the Big Mac below. It was turning, getting ready for the first drop.

Banking around to the west, Steph brought the plane down to 700 metres above the building. From this height they could see, unaided, the tangled metal and charred plastic. Intense purple and blue flames rose 20 metres above the reactor casing. Things would have been easier if the Big Mac could have been put into a hover position over the burned-out reactor, but it was too hazardous. Instead, they had to swoop in and get out quickly. Two seconds before they came overhead, the onboard computer systems set the drop sequence in motion and with an accuracy of one hundredth of a second, 50,000 litres of Quenchex sprayed from the underside of the Big Mac. Two sheets of white liquid cascaded down onto the wreckage.

Quenchex was a new material invented by the eggheads at CARPA, the organisation that supplied E-Force with all its hi-tech equipment. It put out fires at least a hundred times faster than any conventional methods. The material landed in a coating several metres square. Spattering onto the superheated metal of the reactor, it instantly sent a grey mist hundreds of metres into the air. The Big Mac banked around and prepared for the second run to drop the liquid nitrogen that would cool the reactor.

‘Nice one, guys,' Tom's voice came through the comms. ‘Direct hit.'

Steph and Josh could see through the windows that almost all the flames had been quenched. A few small fires continued to burn at the periphery of the drop site, but these were far enough away from the reactor to present little danger.

‘We're prepping the liquid nitrogen,' Josh said.

‘Advise using half on the first run, just in case.'

‘How long do we have?'

‘One minute 40 seconds. Sybil reckons you can do two runs with a 45 second margin.'

‘All right, we're going in.'

The Big Mac came around from the west again and the automated systems on board calculated the precise moment to release the chemical payload. Liquid nitrogen, cooled to 50 Kelvin, well below its vaporisation point, streamed out from underneath the mammoth aircraft, dropped the 650 metres to the devastated building and smothered the reactor housing.

Stephanie pulled the plane up and around, racing to prepare for the final run.

‘How'd it go?' Josh asked.

‘Just getting data,' Tom responded. ‘Goddamn it!'

‘What?'

‘It's only lowered the temperature of the core casing by a couple of hundred degrees.'

‘We're ready for the second run,' Steph announced.

Mark Harrison's voice broke in. ‘Hold, Steph. Repeat. Hold.'

‘But time's running up,' Josh blurted out.

‘Just a second.'

‘We have a problem,' Tom said. There was an unnatural silence over the comms. ‘The rip in the roof is too small. The liquid nitrogen only covered about a quarter of the core housing. It's not enough.'

‘You want us to go lower? Swivel the emission jets to get under the remaining roof?' Steph asked.

‘No. Won't work.'

‘Pete? Mai?' Mark called through the comms. ‘Who's closest to the building right now?'

‘I am,' Pete said immediately.

‘Right. I want you to get down to 80 metres above the roof. Use the onboard laser cutters to open up the roof. Get the hell out the instant you have it ripped. Steph, Josh, you need to be a few seconds behind the Silverback and drop the remaining liquid nitrogen into the gap. You got that?'

‘Loud and clear,' Pete responded as he banked the Silverback and plunged towards the earth at incredible speed.

‘Steph, Josh,' Tom said. ‘You'll need to shift the drop site 10 metres north, 6 west.'

‘Affirmative,' Josh replied, and set the controls.

Timing was critical. They had only a couple of seconds between Pete cutting the roof away and the Big Mac coming down for the drop. Then, in the remaining 20 seconds, both planes had to get as far away from the site as possible.

The Big Mac started to make its run. Steph and Josh could see Pete had taken up position ahead of them, extremely low over the flames. From their angle it looked perilous – the flames seemed to be lapping at the underside of the sleek plane. An intense blue beam shot out from the front of the Silverback, a neodymium yttrium-aluminium-garnet (Nd-YAG) laser that could cut through several metres of lead-lined steel and concrete like a hot knife through butter. The laser made contact with the remains of the dome covering the reactor, and the outer shell dissolved, exposing the metal framework beneath. The steel beams crumbled like heated sugar.

One glance told Pete the roof had been split open, and he engaged the forward thrusters. At that precise moment, the Big Mac came in 600 metres overhead and dropped its payload of liquid nitrogen. Pete banked hard, but before he could pull up and shoot off to the east, a geyser of superheated vapour from the reactor housing shot up, cascaded onto the wing of the Silverback, and was sucked into the starboard engine.

The plane rolled 360 degrees. Pete could see the Big Mac high overhead swooping away in the direction he had planned to go. With lightning reflexes, his hands flew over the control panel, stabilising the plane into horizontal flight. Then he pulled
George
around, bringing the nose up. He felt a jolt. The 3D schematic of the plane in his visor showed a malfunction in the starboard engine. A red icon started to flash. The starboard engine exploded and the wing vaporised. The Silverback went into a tailspin. Fighting the controls, Pete tried to bring back the stricken plane, but it was hopeless. He pushed the eject button, heard the canopy of the Silverback rip away and felt himself thrust upwards into the morning sky. In that moment, Pete Sherringham knew it was too late.

On days like today, Madame Zavarelli really hated her job. She knew she was devoid of any real talent. So different to Grandmamma back home in Casoria. She would never forget how the old woman terrified her with her prophesies. There was the time the old man in the village suddenly dropped dead the day after Grandmamma said he would. And then there had been the incident with Maria Bellini's dog. That had been horrible. But no, Madame Zavarelli told herself for perhaps the thousandth time, she did not have ‘the gift' – although that hadn't stopped her. The sad truth was, she had no real talent for anything. If she hadn't become a palm reader in a travelling circus, she would have been forced to sell her body. She didn't even have the looks to snare a decent husband.

Most of the time, things were okay. She made a respectable living, got to see places, had a few good friends and she had long ago accepted the fact that she was merely a performance artist. She had no qualms about it – it was a job. But today she felt uncomfortable and she had no idea why.

Drawing on an illicit cigarette – her employer would have dropped her like a hot potato if he had caught her – Madame Zavarelli saw the flap over the tent entrance twitch. She stubbed out the cigarette and hid the evidence, as a tall, thin, elegantly dressed man in his thirties appeared. He was extremely good looking with carefully sculpted eyebrows, big brown eyes and fashionably tousled black hair. Too handsome to be straight, Madame Zavarelli concluded immediately.

‘Good afternoon, young man,' she said, fixing him with her piercing black eyes. Her voice was heavily accented. ‘You wish to know the secrets of your future?'

The man nodded.

‘What is your name?'

He told her.

‘Well, Jim Kemple, my standard consultation fee is thirty dollars,' Madame Zavarelli said. ‘But you're my first customer in New York, so I will charge you only twenty.'

Jim had been walking through Central Park and had noticed Rinaldo's Circus tents. By serendipity, he had only that morning read an article in the
New York Times
about Rinaldo's, one of the few remaining old-school circuses playing the nostalgia ticket. Jim had almost walked straight past a sign carrying the picture of an elderly woman in gypsy headdress staring meaningfully into a large crystal ball. Inside the orb, strange ghostly shapes were frozen, midswirl. Over the picture was written: ‘MADAME ZAVARELLI – CLAIRVOYANT AND FORTUNE TELLER. BE ASTOUNDED!'

Jim pulled out his wallet and handed over a couple of bills. ‘Believe,' he told himself. He did believe in clairvoyance and prophesy, but he was also aware that most ‘Madame Zavarellis' were little more than vaudeville acts.

‘Sit,' the woman said, and indicated a chair on one side of a small folding table. The table was covered with a purple velvet cloth, and in the centre sat a crystal ball on a wooden stand. Madame Zavarelli lowered herself into a chair across from Jim and indicated he should place his hands on the table, palms up.

The old woman took his hands in each of hers and peered down at the lines and furrows in his skin. ‘You are a happy man,' she said without looking up at Jim. ‘You are balanced. You enjoy your work and your love life is good.' She looked at him, then back down at the hands. She ran a finger along the hollow of Jim's left palm. ‘Your health is also good. But, you have a bad left knee, yes?'

Jim was startled. He had indeed been suffering from cartilage problems in his left knee. ‘Yes,' he said. ‘That's right. How...?'

‘Sssh,' Madame Zavarelli said. ‘You are worried though. What are you worried about?' She traced a finger along a line close to Jim's wrist. ‘Money? No, you're fine there. Ah ... your partner.'

‘Alfred?'

‘He is a lot older than you,' Madame Zavarelli said.

‘Yes. He's 60...'

‘Ssh,' Madame Zavarelli said again. She was on a roll. She had noticed Jim's very slight limp as he entered the tent, spotted his Rolex and diamond ring. He was clearly wealthy. She had taken a punt on the man's partner being older based on the guy's old-fashioned name. Three out of three. ‘You are concerned about Alfred's health.'

‘Erm...' Jim hesitated wondering if he was going to be admonished again. ‘He has been unwell, tired ... But?'

‘You must not worry, Jim. I think Alfred's health will soon improve. You both need a holiday.' And she smiled at him. ‘Now, let me consult the ball. Place your hands flat on the table and pull your chair close. That's it, good.'

Madame Zavarelli leaned in towards the crystal sphere, her eyes narrowing to slits. This was the part of the ‘performance' she enjoyed the most. She could let her imagination run free, make up wonderful scenarios, weave a web of intrigue and mystery that must always be fun, always positive. The last thing anyone wanted was to leave her tent under a black cloud. Sometimes she really did see things in the crystal, images conjured up from the depths of her memory and her subconscious, images she could twist and distort to offer the punter a lively tale.

‘The mists are beginning to clear,' she said, her voice ascending half an octave as she spoke. ‘Yes, yes. Goodness, yes, colours. Orange.'

‘Is that good?'

‘Yes, that is good. A fish. Many brightly coloured fish.'

‘You said I needed a holiday,' Jim quipped.

Madame Zavarelli ignored him. She felt odd suddenly. What was wrong? She was feeling strangely nervous. There was a tingling in the pit of her stomach. It rose up and rippled towards the base of her skull. Something was taking shape in the crystal, but she could not make it out. She could feel it, feel its darkness, its dull weight. She tried to look away, to break this weird connection, but she was held there, gripped by an invisible force.

The blackness swirled and then she saw something unspeakable, indescribable ... and froze. With a huge effort, Madame Zavarelli broke free and pushed herself back in the chair.

‘What's wrong?' Jim exclaimed.

‘Noth ... nothing,' the woman stuttered. She ran a hand across her forehead, it came up wet. She took a deep breath and brought herself under control. Forcing a thin smile, she said, ‘I'm sorry, young man. I feel a little sick. A headache, it's nothing. Now, where was I?'

Jim felt his momentary panic pass. Poor woman. She just had a cold or something, he told himself. ‘Fish,' he said.

‘Ah yes.' Looking back into the crystal ball, there was nothing to see but clear glass. ‘A holiday,' Madame Zavarelli said breezily.

Five minutes later, the old woman had ushered Jim Kemple out of her tent and made her farewells. Then she threw herself onto her sofa, trying desperately to stop shaking and to force out of her mind the terrible thing she had seen in the crystal. ‘That poor young man,' she said aloud. ‘That poor young man.'

Jim Kemple had tried to put the whole thing out of his mind, but the more he thought about Madame Zavarelli, the more he worried about the way the old woman had behaved. At first, he had wanted to take her comments at face value. All was well, and she had merely felt suddenly sick. But maybe there was more to it than that? After all, she had been right about his knee,
and
about Alfred. Maybe she was for real. Maybe she really had seen something – something terrible.

Walking along the path that led to Eighth Avenue, he almost turned back. He stopped on the gravel. Two cyclists passed him. He looked back towards the circus, now lost behind a line of trees, then carried on towards the road, forcing away unwelcome thoughts. He brought his partner Alfred to mind. Then he made himself think about work, and all the things he had to do today. Jim had one of the finest collections of occult books in Manhattan. At 35, he was the most respected arcane book dealer on the East Coast. The little shop he had set up with Alfred in the East Village was a Mecca for anyone interested in any alt-culture subject, from trepanning to alien abduction. Jim's particular obsession was Atlantis, and the concept of advanced civilisations existing before the dawn of recorded history. He had collected over 200 books on the subject including some very rare and very valuable ancient screeds. His most treasured possession was an early copy of Plato's dialogues
Timaeus and Critias
, originally written during the 4th century BC, in which the Greek philosopher made the first known reference to the mythical land of Atlantis.

It was all a long way from the days, almost 20 years earlier, when he had moved to New York. Stepping off the Greyhound from Avon, Illinois (population 915), he had arrived in the Big Apple for the first time as an impressionable 18-year-old literature student. Although he had quickly fallen in love with his adopted city, the Mid-West boy remained buried below many layers of sophistication and education. He had hated Avon, not least for its homophobia. But for all the romance of his first five years in the city – the parties, the clubs, an endless stream of guys – he considered that life had really only begun when he first met Alfred. They had clicked instantly and had remained inseparable.

Back at the apartment on West Sixty-fifth, Jim turned the key in the lock and opened the front door. It was quiet in the apartment. Prada, the cat, brushed himself against Jim's calves and he crouched down to stroke him.

Alfred was sitting, sound asleep, in front of the TV. Jim crept towards him, looking down at his partner's soft features. ‘You're suddenly an old man,' he thought to himself. Despite the age difference, Alfred had always been a catch. Virile. Fit. ‘What has happened to you, Alfred? What's wrong?' he thought.

Alfred stirred suddenly. He opened his eyes, and for a moment he seemed to be in a different world, then he smiled. Jim flicked off the TV and sat in the chair next to his partner.

‘Hey, Jim,' Alfred said, now fully awake and his face alight with excitement. ‘You won't believe what arrived in the post.'

Jim pulled off his coat, placed it over the chair and sat back down. ‘Must be exciting,' he said. ‘I haven't seen you this happy in ages.'

‘Just look,' Alfred said and handed Jim an envelope. ‘Isn't that fantastic?'

Jim said nothing for a moment. He read the note through again, hardly believing his eyes. It was an invitation. It said: ‘You are invited to attend the star-studded Grand Opening of The Neptune Hotel, Fiji.'

‘That's in eight days time,' Jim said, his excitement matching his partner's. ‘Wow! But how come?'

‘I didn't tell you. It was a shareholder's lottery. I put us in for it months ago. Forgot all about it. And we only have a few hundred shares. Can you believe that?'

‘Amazing,' Jim said. ‘We need a holiday.'