“Are they in Odessa?” I asked, halfheartedly wondering if perhaps there might be some way to lead them to safety. I would not put my life on the line to save the pathetic bastards, but I might warn them to go underground.
“Jerome, it’s on the other side of the planet,” Freeman said. Jerome was the second largest city on Olympus Kri.
“So it’s out of our hands,” I said.
Freeman said nothing.
Our conversation had hit a stalemate that Sweetwater broke when he contacted us over the interLink. “Gentlemen, you should be aware that the temperature on Olympus Kri has risen by six degrees over the last fifteen minutes.”
Six degrees, I thought, putting the Double Ys out of my mind completely. “That doesn’t sound so out of the ordinary,” I said. It was late in the morning …
“Was that change global?” Freeman asked.
“Global,” said Sweetwater.
“So at this rate, we’ll hit nine thousand degrees in another six months,” I said.
“The surface temperature is unstable; but for what it’s worth, we don’t believe this change is a preamble to the event,” Sweetwater said. “Still, you might want to get to safety as quickly as possible.”
“Have you notified the fleet?” Freeman asked. He meant the Unified Authority Fleet. The Enlisted Man’s Fleet had supposedly come to oversee the evacuation; the Unified Authority had come to conduct it.
“Yes, sir,” Sweetwater said. “They are on the last stages of the evacuation as we speak.”
There were so many transports climbing through the skies over Odessa, they looked like a swarm of flies. How long would it take to lift seventeen million people? At one hundred people per transport, it would take 170,000 trips. How in God’s name did we ever get ourselves into this speck-up? I asked myself. I knew the answer. We didn’t. This one was thrust upon us.
Sweetwater said a quick good-bye and signed off.
Freeman had an all-terrain armored truck waiting just off the airstrip. Without saying a word, he headed toward that truck, knowing that I would follow. And I did.
I walked to the truck and climbed in on the passenger’s side, pausing for one last glance at the metropolis that had been zoned for extinction. The air was still and quiet. The sky was crisp and blue and clear, with frothy clouds floating across it. Twenty miles away, downtown Odessa loomed like a vertical shadow, like a butte that filled the horizon. The thousands of smoke trails rising above the city looked no more substantial than the filaments of a cobweb. They rose in odd angles and twisted into the sky.
“I used to know a girl from Olympus Kri,” I told Freeman. “I met her when I was on leave.”
“So she was scrub,” he said.
“She was my first,” I said, feeling nostalgic. I could not remember her name, but I remembered her smile and her laugh. The truck’s engine growled like some kind of prehistoric beast, and I sat back and closed the door and wondered if the girl had made it off the planet alive. I wondered if she remembered me.
We did not have far to drive. Freeman, as always, considered every contingency when he made plans. We cut across an empty suburb. I had seen many abandoned suburbs in the last few years, but I still got a haunted feeling when I saw them. Driving down avenues in which houses sat empty, the doors of some homes left open, I wondered if I would ever drive down neighborhood streets in which children still played.
Freeman veered toward the mountains, and I saw our destination. We would ride out the event in a power station that had been built into the side of a cliff.
Only the façade of the administrative offices was visible from the street. It was a three-story pillbox made of concrete and steel, with no effort given to ornamentation.
The land in front of the building was parklike, with sprawling hills, a manicured lawn, and a footbridge spanning a man-made river. Freeman drove us across this jade-and-sapphire setting and into a concrete alley that opened to a parking lot in which a fleet of heavy equipment sat unguarded—ladder trucks and cranes and bulldozers. Across the lot, the open maw of a subterranean bunker gaped from the side of a mountain.
“Picturesque,” I said to Freeman, who only grunted. He stopped the truck just inside the bunker, climbed out, and worked some buttons, causing a thick metal curtain to close behind us. Lights bloomed along the ramp leading down deep below.
“Think we’ll be able to exit the same way that we came?” I asked.
“There’s a back door if we need it,” he said as he climbed back in the truck. He had to work to wedge himself in behind the steering wheel. I would have offered to drive, but he would not have accepted the offer. Comfortable or not, he preferred to drive.
We drove down the spiraling ramp, passing floors with twenty-foot ceilings. The walls of the ramp were foot-thick cement. The subterranean structure housed massive turbines and generators. We had entered a shadowy underworld of concrete and steel, driving three floors down beneath the foot of a mountain.
“It doesn’t get much safer than this,” I said. I kept my armor on but took my helmet off. The air in the power station was cold and slightly moist. Once Freeman killed the engine on the truck, I listened for the whir of turbines; but I heard nothing.
Freeman placed his little two-way on the dash of the truck and tapped the button. A moment later, Sweetwater and Breeze appeared.
“I know they’re almost done, but they’re still cutting it too close,” Breeze said without looking into the screen. I got the feeling he was talking to Sweetwater. “The temperature on the planet is fluctuating wildly.”
Hearing this, I envisioned hundred-degree swings with snow falling on burning desert sands and melting into steam, but I knew better. We had just come from the surface.
Sweetwater put the fluctuations in perspective. He turned toward the camera, and said, “We’re seeing ten-degree temperature swings.”
So much for icebergs melting and oceans boiling, I thought.
“Have you told General Hill?” Freeman asked.
“He says they’re going as fast as they can,” answered Sweetwater.
“Oh my,” said Breeze. “They just had a twelve-degree fluctuation.” Shaking his head with decision, he looked into the camera, “It could happen any moment.” He grimaced. His looked like they were meant for chewing hay.
As it turned out, Breeze was wrong, the event did not occur for a long time. One hour passed, then another. Sweetwater and Breeze gave us hourly reports informing us that surface temperatures had stabilized more or less. Strangely, stabilized temperatures panicked Breeze just as much as fluctuations.
Three hours after we sealed ourselves in, Sweetwater called to tell us that the Tachyon D count had doubled over the last hour.
Between calls, I had nothing to do but sit and wait. I explored the power station, examining enormous turbines that reached to the ceiling. At one point, I went looking for something to eat. I found a refrigerator in the employee lounge and stole people’s lunches. Some of them were old, with withered apples and petrified bananas.
Despite the temptation to hoard food for myself, I brought the lunches back to the truck and shared them with Freeman. He chose a plate with several pieces of chicken. I took a sandwich.
“What if the building collapses?” I asked Freeman. “How are we going to dig our way out?”
He took a bite from a drumstick that looked like it might have come off a parakeet in his big hands. He bit off a mouthful of meat and pointed toward a distant wall, where an emergency exit sign glowed.
“Stairs?” I asked. “That’s your answer if the building comes down around us? We can just take the stairs.”
“The rest of the station will collapse before that stairwell,” he said.