Cloak of Spears, page 29
“Yeah.” I took a deep breath. “Let’s get this over with.”
We crossed the control room. Oddly enough, the double doors to the actual reactor room were unlocked. Probably it was so technicians from the control room could get to the reactor in a hurry if something went wrong.
I hit the door control, the doors slid open, and I saw the reactor room at last.
It was a big space, at least the size of a football field, and the tokamak occupied about half of that space. The tokamak, for lack of a better way to describe it, looked like a massive fat doughnut, albeit one made of metal. Lots and lots of pipes and conduits went into both the top and bottom of the thing, and most of the floor was covered with them, leaving only a concrete aisle about as wide as a city street leading to the doughnut. I only had a vague understanding of how nuclear fusion reactors worked, but I knew the actual reaction was taking place inside the tokamak. The device used a powerful magnetic field to keep the reaction contained, which was a good idea because the reaction was basically a smaller version of the sun.
If the magnetic bottle went away…
Big boom.
No more Genesis Facility. Maybe no more mountain, depending on how the cave-in played out.
It was why the High Queen had decreed that all fusion plants would be built underground, and to the best of my knowledge, no one had ever argued with her.
Dozens of spider drones crawled around the outside of the tokamak and the metal conduits. I tensed, but none of the drones were armed, and all of them had a variety of tools mounted on the undersides of their carapaces. Shooting off weapons next to a fusion reactor seemed like a bad idea for many reasons.
“I think we’re the first ones here,” I said.
“Yes.” I flinched a little as Joanna’s voice came from a speaker next to the door. “I have managed to regain control of the internal surveillance systems from Hood. Your companions are alive and are converging on this room. But you must hurry. Hood and Maestro are brute-forcing their way past my remaining defenses and will arrive at the reactor room soon after.”
“Maestro’s here?” I said, uneasy. I had suspected that she would accompany Hood on this fun little trip, but I had hoped I was wrong.
“There,” said Joanna. One of the spotlights mounted on the ceiling brightened, pointing at a tall metal cabinet that rose about halfway down the aisle to the tokamak. It looked like a transformer cabinet, just a lot bigger. The damned thing was about the size of a garage. “Place your explosives there. If that power converter is destroyed, the magnetic containment on the reactor will collapse within ninety seconds.”
“Within?” I said. “I don’t like that word.”
“Calculations indicate seventy to ninety seconds is most likely,” said Joanna. “You should…”
Static came from the speaker, and then it went silent.
“Guess she’s busy,” said Riordan.
“Looks that way,” I said. “Let’s get ready to blast this place to hell.”
A flight of broad metal steps descended to the aisle, and Riordan and I jogged down them. I glanced back at the doors, but the control room remained deserted. We reached the towering cabinet, and Riordan opened the locks with a slash of his Shadowmorph blade. The metal doors swung open, revealing a row of what looked like enormous fuses.
“A fuse box?” I said. “If the magnetic containment fails, the entire island blows up, and it has a fuse box?”
“I think those are technically power couplings,” said Riordan. He dropped to one knee and shrugged out of his backpack. I watched the doors as I pulled off my pack and handed it to him. We were both carrying explosives, and between the two of us, we should have enough to blow up the cabinet. “They keep the flow of power to the electromagnets stable. If the flow of power gets disrupted and the magnetic bottle fails for even a microsecond…”
“No more Genesis Facility,” I said.
“Yup.” He opened his pack and began applying the plastic explosives with expert skill. “Watch my back while I do this.”
“Yeah.”
I watched the doors as Riordan worked. Nothing moved in the control room. The spider drones kept skittering back and forth along the maze of conduits and pipes. I wondered if they would attack once they realized we intended to blow up the reactor, but they kept going about their tasks. I suspected their programming did not include defensive measures.
“Done,” said Riordan about five minutes later. He had placed all the plastic explosives around the power couplings, wiring the detonator to it. The trigger mechanism, which looked like a miniature remote control, rested in his hand. “I hit this switch, we’ve got ten seconds before the explosion.”
“Why ten seconds?” I said.
“Gives you time to open the rift way so we can escape to the Shadowlands.”
That was a good point.
“How far is the range on that thing?” I asked.
“About a hundred meters.”
“Let’s wait for the others by the stairs.” I pointed. “We’ll see them coming from farther off…”
There was a flash of silver light by the stairs, and Maestro appeared out of nothingness at their base.
A Cloak spell.
She wore similar clothing and armor to what I had seen her wear in Red River – black combat fatigues, a tactical harness, heavy boots, a gun on her hip and a rifle slung over her shoulder. Though this time, her tactical vest had much heavier armor, and she had similar armor on her legs and arms. Neil had said she had been pissed off about getting shot in Red River. The clockwork mechanisms of her eyes fixed upon me, her mouth spreading in a mad rictus of a grin, and she pointed at me and cast a spell.
A Great Elder Word.
DESPAIR.
The magic thundered out of her, a rush of power that would overwhelm our minds and cause us to collapse weeping to the floor.
But I had stolen that Great Elder Word from her mind, and I knew how it worked. I had also stolen the two others that she knew, including its opposite, and I reached for my full power and spoke a Great Elder Word of my own.
RALLY.
The power from the two Words smashed into one other and then promptly canceled each other out, like dumping a liter of acid into exactly the same quantity of base. The backlash from the defeated spell thrummed through my mind, and I saw the same reaction go through Maestro as she staggered and grabbed at the railing for support.
Riordan was already moving, and he sent a volley of five lightning globes at Maestro. But she recovered quickly and made a chopping gesture, and the globes broke against her Shield.
For a moment, we stared at each other.
“Hey, babe,” said Maestro, grinning. “Two Great Elder Words breaking against each other. Hell of a rush, isn’t it?” Her clockwork gaze shifted to Riordan. “You know, I never had much use for men. But you’ve got one that’s good at killing, and that’s what’s important in a relationship.”
I didn’t say anything. My full attention was on her. Well, on her and our surroundings, in case she was talking to distract us from an ambush or a flanking attack or something. Most people had to work themselves up to violence or displayed a tell that indicated they were about to attack. Maestro could attack in the middle of a sentence without the slightest indication that violent magic was coming.
“Tell you what,” said Maestro. “Why don’t you hand the kid over to us? I guess killing Emilia would piss you off, so as a personal favor, I won’t let Hood and the others kill her. She won’t be comfortable because they’ll have to draw blood every other day, but she’ll be alive.” The mad smile widened. “And then, once Spear-2 is done, we’re gonna burn down the world. Come on, that’s what you really want. I’ve seen inside your head. You want to burn things down, too.”
She…wasn’t entirely wrong. The Eternity Crucible had really messed me up. When I got pissed off, when I got really angry, my self-control went out the window, and I started mowing through my enemies like wheat. I had seen some of the surviving video clips of the battle at the Great Gate, and the way I had looked…the mad rictus on my face as I slaughtered anthrophage after anthrophage had been frightening. It had been like looking at someone else.
But I hadn’t been.
I had only been looking at myself.
But there were more important things than rage. There was Riordan. Russell. The Marneys. And kids like Emilia Freeman and all the kids who would suffer if Singularity got to carry out their mad plans.
“Hey, that’s a really great offer,” I said. “Here’s a better one. Go off somewhere and screw yourself, and I won’t finish what I started in Red River.”
I glanced at Riordan. He nodded.
Maestro let out a delighted laugh. “Oh, I knew there was a reason I liked you. We should…”
As I expected, the attack came in the middle of a sentence. I was watching for it, I was waiting for it, and Maestro still almost killed me. She hurled a massive lance of telekinetic force right at me, and she had wound it tight enough that most of the force had been compressed into an area about six inches across. It would have been like getting hit with a giant arrow fired from one of those siege crossbow thingies people built in ancient times.
But I had been expecting it, and I got my Shield up in time. Telekinetic power strained against defensive magic, and both canceled each other out. The backlash from the collapsed Shield rocked me back, but I forced aside the exhaustion and pulled together power for a spell. The plasma sphere blazed to life in my hands.
It occurred to me that if I missed, if the sphere hit the tokamak, it would melt through the metal, and we would all die right now.
Hell of an encouragement to shoot straight.
I sent the first plasma sphere sailing at Maestro and then a second. She had her Shield up, and my first sphere hit it. Sphere and Shield both exploded and vanished, and Maestro got a second up in time to block my attack. Riordan sprinted at her, Shadowmorph blade in hand, and my heart rose into my throat in fear. He couldn’t cast a Shield as powerfully as I could, and Maestro could rip right through it with ease.
Which meant I had to keep Maestro off her balance until Riordan got close enough to kill her.
Plasma sphere after plasma sphere volleyed from my hands, my terror for my husband and my rage fueling my magic. Maestro deflected them all, casting Shield after Shield, though I couldn’t keep up this pace for long. She made a hooking gesture as she cast a spell of telekinesis. I prepared to adjust my spells, but Maestro’s spell was weak, and it hadn’t been aimed at me.
One of the packs Riordan and I had left by the cabinet leaped from the ground and flew to her waiting hand.
Why the hell had she taken the pack?
Riordan was only twenty feet away from her. Maestro stepped back as he raised his sword to strike, and I pulled together power for another plasma sphere. She cast the Cloak spell and vanished in a flash of silver light. Riordan lunged at where she had been standing, but his Shadowmorph blade passed through nothing, and a second later, I heard the metallic clang as she ran up the stairs back to the control room.
I ran to join him.
“Where did she go?” I said, reaching for the pouch at my belt that held the Nihlus Stone. My aetherometer wouldn’t detect a Cloak spell, but the Nihlus Stone would dispel it if Maestro was within range.
“I don’t know,” said Riordan. “Maybe she didn’t think she could take both of us at once.”
That made sense. Maestro was stronger than I was, but I was powerful enough that she didn’t dare take her attention from me even for a moment. That would have given Riordan ample opportunity to kill her with his Shadowmorph blade.
But she had been carrying guns.
Maybe her plan was to Cloak and shoot both of us in the head.
That made a lot more sense, so I cast the Shield spell, ignoring the fatigue in my mind, and angled it towards the stairs. When using the Cloak spell, casting any other spells would disrupt the Cloak, but firing a gun wouldn’t. I expected her to start shooting at any second, but she didn’t.
Then I saw the others.
Russell, Victoria, and Neil emerged from the far side of the control room. They must have run into each other on the way down. Neil was holding Emilia in his left arm, a pistol in his right hand. Carrying a four-year-old child that way for a long period of time had to be tiring, but I suppose it was about time that Neil got some benefits from his augmentation.
All three of them were running.
Fast.
A second later, clone soldiers poured out of the far side of the control room in hot pursuit, firing their weapons. Riordan produced his carbine and started shooting, and I forced magic through my mind and cast a spell. A fire sphere leaped from my hand, sailed across the room, and landed amid the charging soldiers. It exploded in a blast of flame, killing some of the soldiers and setting several more on fire, and I hurled another fireball to the same effect.
Any moment I expected Maestro to drop her Cloak and join the battle.
But she didn’t.
Russell, Victoria, and Neil scrambled down the stairs, Emilia’s face buried in her father’s shoulder. Neil looked like he had gotten the shit kicked out of him, to be honest – there were cuts and bruises on his face, the grayish cast of exhaustion marking his skin.
“We are getting the hell out of here!” I said, summoning magical power for the rift way spell. We had about twenty seconds until the clones got their act together and attacked. “Victoria and Russell, you go first. Then Neil. Riordan and I will go last. Move!”
I cast the rift way spell.
A curtain of rippling gray mist rose from the floor, spreading into a square of pale light and writhing mist. Through it could just make out the starless black sky and the bleak plains of the Shadowlands.
Russell and Victoria dashed through, followed by Neil cradling his daughter. Riordan hit the button on the detonator, and he went through the rift way. I followed him a second later as the cabinet with the power couplings ripped itself apart in a fireball, and the gate snapped shut behind us.
The explosion shook the reactor control room, and Hood realized they had a very serious problem.
Hood suspected that the Worldburner had blown up the main power couplings controlling the magnetic containment field on the tokamak. This suspicion was confirmed a fraction of a section later when his AI was flooded with notifications from the Genesis Facility’s computer system informing him that power had failed to the magnetic bottle and that a containment breach was imminent.
“You failed, Hood,” said Joanna’s voice in his head. “You and my father both. You won’t spread the evil that you had hidden here.”
Despite the urgency of the situation, he permitted himself a fraction of a second of pure irritated frustration. Joanna Starkweather had been a brilliant scientist, but she had unbearably sanctimonious.
The fact that Hood still had to deal with her, two hundred years after she had been uploaded, was egregious.
Still, he could take a small comfort in the fact that the computer housing Joanna’s consciousness was about to be vaporized, along with everything else in the facility.
A very small comfort, indeed.
Nadia had escaped with both Emilia Freeman and the backup drives. Emilia had been the main prize, but the backup drives held valuable information, even if it had been surpassed in Singularity’s research in the two centuries since.
Hood sent commands over the battle network. He was dismayed to realize that he had lost over half the active assets they had kept at the Tower. The automated defenses of the Genesis Facility had remained formidable, especially since Joanna had retained a personal grudge even as one of the Uploaded. For that matter, Salvatore had gotten himself killed, which was annoying. Partly because he had been very good at his job and partly because the augmentations had cost considerable amounts of time and resources.
Hood’s remaining forces moved with alacrity, powering down the Hoplite Mark VII mechs and folding them into travel configuration. The battle robots had been specifically designed to be carried by teams of four soldiers, allowing them to be moved quickly through the Shadowlands while powered off.
Maestro. Where the devil had she gone?
Even as the thought crossed both his organic mind and his AI, silver light flashed, and Maestro stepped out of a Cloak spell.
She was holding a backpack of all things.
“It’s over and we’ve lost,” Hood told her. “Get ready to open rift ways, we can withdraw our remaining forces back to the Tower…”
“No, we haven’t,” said Maestro in a singsong voice, holding out the backpack.
They had maybe fifty-five seconds until the entire place blew up around their ears.
“Why?” he said.
Maestro tapped the backpack. “Tracing spell.”
Hood frowned, and then the comprehension came.
He had been massively annoyed when Maestro had said she was going alone and vanished. She had claimed that they were moving too slow, that the Worldburner would destroy the reactor before they could catch her. Subsequent events had proven her right.
But the backpack…
Nadia wouldn’t have bought her own personal weapons and ammunition, she would have taken them from her armories at Fort Casey. That backpack had been in Fort Casey long enough to have developed a link with the place, one that a wizard could use to trace to a corresponding location in the Shadowlands.
One that Oculus could follow with ease.
Nadia might think she would escape through the Shadowlands back to Fort Casey, but she was in for a nasty surprise.
“Very good,” said Hood. “Now open the rift way to the Tower. We shall need to move in haste.”
“You’re finally talking sense,” said Maestro. If Hood had still possessed organic eyes, he would have rolled them, but Maestro reached into her armor vest and gripped her medallion, casting the rift way spell.
The remaining Singularity forces retreated back to the Tower.
Thirty seconds later, the nuclear inferno consumed the Genesis Facility.
