He had been at the Oilstar town meeting, one of the loudest voices opposed to the spraying of Prometheus. He had managed to get a temporary restraining order from Judge Steinberg—and with his network Jake could have filed appeal after appeal to stall the cursed spraying forever. He had held the court order in his own hands while his people stormed the Oilstar pier, waving it and demanding that the helicopter land and obey the law. The Law! But the helicopter had sprayed the deadly microbe anyway.
Now the whole planet was paying for it.
Curses erupted around him. Jake drew in a monumental breath and shouted, “Burn Oilstar to the ground!”
The refinery complex was a nightmare of fractionating towers, piping, valves, ladders, and catwalks. Small white Cushman carts sat abandoned next to enormous metal contraptions. The admin building and research facilities stood in the center of the complex, like an oasis surrounded by the industrial no-man’s-land.
Huge natural gas, crude oil, and gasoline storage tanks rested on the sides of the hills, great metal reservoirs closed off by metal caps. No doubt some of them still held viable fuel—it would have been a precious commodity if the petroplague continued to devour only octane, but with other long-chain polymers falling to pieces, no engine culd still function even if it did have uncontaminated fuel.
But the gas could still burn. Oh yes, Jake thought, it would still burn.
Inside the bioremediation wing of the Oilstar complex, Mitch Stone stared helplessly at the scrawled notes in front of him. He had used a metal bar to break open the locked drawers of Alex Kramer’s desk, ransacking the original lab books and notes the microbiologist had left behind. The official data and quarterly reports had already been copied and sent to the plague research centers around the country, but there had to be more. Mitch went straight to the source. There had to be more!
“Dammit, Alex! Are you doing this to me on purpose?”
Mitch stared at the handwritten comments. Kramer’s computer—nothing but warped circuit boards, wires, and glass CRT—sat on the desk. The diskettes lay dissolved in unrecognizable piles. But Mitch knew that the old-timer kept actual logbooks. Mitch had teased Alex about it before, but now he blessed the old man for his prehistoric ways.
As he flipped through the pages and stared at the data, despair poured through him. He held the lined paper up to the light from the window. The other pane in Alex’s office had fallen out, dropping three stories to shatter on the ground below. Wind whistled into the room.
Emma Branson paced in front of the desk, waiting for him to answer her. “Stone, are you even more incompetent than I thought? We’ve got to give them something! You were involved in this from square one, don’t you remember anything?”
Helpless, Mitch wanted to shrug and make some excuse, but Branson looked ready to claw his eyes out. She would see right through any patronizing explanations. “I was involved with it, but… but I worked mainly on the management end of things. I attended the meetings and took care of public relations. Alex was the one doing the work!” He swallowed, realizing how stupid he sounded. He ran a hand through his itchy hair; he hadn’t had a trim in over a month.
“That’s not the way you made it appear in your reports,” Branson said with ice in her voice.
Mitch averted his eyes and looked again at the scrawled data. It took a while, but once he recognized the pattern, he felt too sick and embarrassed even to point it out to Emma Branson.
“Well, what is it?” she demanded.
“Uh, it appears that Dr. Kramer faked his data. He wrote incorrect results in his notebooks.”
“Are you sure?” she said.
Mitch jabbed his finger at the columns of numbers. She could see it for herself. The figures were simply placeholders, taking up space; Kramer had jotted down the square root of two, pi, and others. Branson’s eyes widened, and Mitch wondered if she was going to fly into a rage or break down and cry.
Before she could react, the sound of an exploding natural gas tank shook the room. The thwump came first, loud enough to rattle the other window in Kramer’s office. Booms echoed around the refinery complex.
Branson dropped the notebook and pushed toward the window. “What the hell is going on out there?” she said.
Outside, a towering ball of blue-orange flames roiled to the sky. Flaming, molten shards of metal clattered to the ground. One of the fractionating towers buckled from the explosion.
A crowd roared below. Tiny forms, people, scrambled on the gasoline reservoirs and the crude oil storage tanks. Were they going to burn those, too?
“Son of a bitch! Peasants bearing torches, can you believe it?” Branson said. “Come on, we’ve got to get back to the Admin building. I’ve still got my own private guards there.”
Flustered, Mitch said, “Yes, Ma’am.”
He followed, leaving Alex’s doors open. Gunshots rang out as Branson’s guards responded to the assault, but their guns fired only a few times before the weapons seized up. The shouts grew louder.
Before he and Branson made it down the three flights of stairs, they heard breaking glass below. “Oh, shit!” Mitch’s voice wavered.
Branson looked ready to dive into the fray herself and start tearing the saboteurs limb from limb. “Up the stairwell. We’ll go to the second floor and down the back. Maybe we can get out the emergency exit.”
Mitch ran after her, pursued by the sounds of smashing and yelling. When they reached the other stairwell and hurried down, the bottom door burst open. Four people charged in.
Mitch froze, hoping the intruders wouldn’t look up. But his luck didn’t hold. One of the women glanced up the stairs, spotting both of them. Her face ignited with glee. “There they are! Two of them!”
Mitch whirled and scrambled up the stairs, leaving Branson behind. The old woman came panting after him.
Mitch’s mind whirled. He had seen plenty of those stupid suspense movies where the victims continued to run up the stairs while being chased. But what other choice did they have? The people were below, swarming up.
“Floor four,” he said. “There’s the vault! I think it’s open—I cracked it this morning to get at Alex’s records. If we get in there, they’ll never be able to reach us.”
Branson stumbled beside him. Below, the attackers had reached the second-floor landing.
By the time he got to the fourth floor, Mitch had gained a good lead on Branson. He ran down the corridors, ducked through an open typing-pool complex of dissolving cubicles, toward the document vault in back. The heavy steel door stood partway open.
He glanced behind him and saw Branson turning the corner, her arms outstretched, gasping. Her hair had come undone, and she had flung off both shoes as she stuttered forward. Fewer than ten steps behind her, came the roaring mob.
Mitch ducked into the vault; a dim, battery-powered emergency lamp flickered from the ceiling. If he waited for Branson, he would never get the heavy steel door closed before the others wrenched it out of his hands. He couldn’t hesitate. He tugged at the handle and hauled the door closed, digging his feet into the floor.
Emma Branson reached the vault just as it shut. She screamed at him through the tiny gap before the pursuers grabbed her shoulders. Mitch jerked the vault door closed with the last of his strength. The combination would reset itself automatically, and none of these people would ever get inside. He heard muffled screaming, but he could make out no words.