The dwarf scientist squared his shoulders, and said, “Here. Here are some of the satellite images. You can see for yourself.”
Sweetwater and Breeze disappeared from the screen, replaced by the image of a city at night. Streetlights shone, but no cars roved the streets. Without lights shining in their windows, the buildings of Odessa hid in the darkness.
Then it happened. The event did not start on one side of the screen and move to the other like an explosion; it happened everywhere all at once. The very air seemed to catch on fire.
“Nine thousand degrees,” Sweetwater said. “It’s nearly as hot as the surface of the sun.” Sweetwater, the communicator, used analogies. Breeze, the scientist, spouted data.
The satellite footage showed a car parked along the side of the street. The paint dulled, metal sagged, and the car exploded. It flipped through the air, landing on its roof. It looked like a turtle turned on its shell. Moments later, its tires burst into flames.
Grass, trees, cloth awnings, and signs burst into flames. Steam rose up around an iron lid covering a manhole, then the cover launched and spun through the air like a tossed coin. By the time it hit the ground, the street had melted, and it sank into the tar.
Thick fog rose from the flaming wreckage of a grassy park. The steel cables along a suspension bridge stretched and drooped like melting plastic, finally giving way and dropping the bridge into the river below. The cloud of steam coming off the river was thick as linen.
You can’t fight this, I thought, as I watched the scene with grim fascination.
I saw cars and trucks sinking into the street below them and thin coils of steam rising from cement sidewalks. I saw concrete shelters collapse in on themselves. Explosions occurred everywhere. A fire hydrant burst, sending a column of steam into the air. The camera focused on a skyscraper, the windows along the bottom of the building melting in their casings.
A counter appeared in the top right corner of the screen. It ticked off seconds and hundredths of seconds.
“Now this is curious,” Sweetwater said, the excitement obvious in his gravelly voice.
The camera panned back, showing more of the street. The windows of several buildings along an avenue exploded, spitting out shotgun bursts of glittering glass shrapnel that turned a fiery orange and melted in the air.
Sweetwater continued to narrate. “You see how the windows are bursting outward? We think it is because the atmosphere is rising. That means the pressure from the air trapped inside the buildings is not being matched by air pressure on the outside of the building. It’s all guesswork, of course, no one has ever seen anything like this before; but we think heat is causing the atmosphere to rise like a hot-air balloon, so the pressure on the outside of the buildings is dropping. Here, look at this!”
The camera moved in on a skyscraper. The building coughed glass out of its windows floor by floor, the damage rising quickly. Not all of the windows shattered. Some had already melted.
The image changed to show a forest, and the timer in the corner returned to zero. At five seconds, the trees in the forest lit up like match heads in a book that had been set ablaze. The trees did not ignite one here and one there, they all lit up at once, flaring into a brilliant orange.
The image changed again, this time showing a vast body of water, maybe an ocean or maybe a great lake. Then the heat started. Twenty seconds in, steam began to rise off the water.
“We estimate the heat penetrated no more than five feet deep,” Sweetwater said. “Any fish swimming close to shore would have been poached.”
To this point, the video feed did not show anything that might have caused the explosion I had heard when I awoke. Nor had it shown anything that would have caused the shutter at the top of the power station to burst inward.
On the screen, the timer showed eighty-three seconds and froze.
“It lasted precisely eighty-three seconds,” Sweetwater said, the former excitement missing from his voice. “At eighty-three seconds, the heat stopped, and the air temperature dropped sharply.”
The timer started counting. It reached ninety-six seconds, and there was the explosion. Nothing big or fiery, but something powerful enough to make weakened buildings collapse as it flushed enormous clouds of ash and soot into the air.
“What was that?” asked Freeman.
“The heat from the event lifted the atmosphere. We estimate that the atmosphere rose approximately 550 feet from ground level because of the heat. After the event ended, the atmosphere dropped back into place,” said Sweetwater.
Freeman said nothing. He sat silent and unmoving, his helmet hiding his expression. I whispered a constant stream of expletives to myself as I watched the destruction.
The video feed stopped, and the scientists again appeared on the screen. Breeze stared into a monitor on his desk instead of the camera. Sweetwater stared into the camera as if watching us.
Breeze looked up from his monitor and turned to face us. “I’ve reviewed the data again, and I still cannot find evidence of an initial explosion, not even a transfer of energy that might have set this off.”
“The only anomaly is the tachyons,” Sweetwater agreed.
“Does the atmosphere look stable?” Freeman asked.
“Completely stable,” said Breeze.
“Raymond, you want to be careful out there,” Sweetwater said. “We’re tracking movement on the planet.”
“You mean survivors?” I asked, thinking of the Double Y clones and wondering how any of those bastards could have survived.
“Whatever it is, it’s so fast it barely registers on our instruments,” Sweetwater said.
“It’s behaving like an electrical current in circuit,” Breeze said, trying to be helpful but unable to divest himself of scientific jargon that meant nothing to us military types.
“We think it’s traveling a set path, but we only pick it up in certain locations,” Sweetwater said by way of explanation. “We can’t tell if there is a single current streaming around the planet or several separate currents traveling in vectors, but our instruments keep registering it in the same key locations.”
Until that moment, I had taken it as a given that the event had ended—the Avatari had come, they’d toasted the planet, and now they were gone. But maybe my assumptions were wrong. Maybe after toasting the planet, they left something behind to finish off survivors.
“What about the tachyon levels?” Freeman asked, sounding more like a scientist than a mercenary.
“Oh, now that is interesting,” Sweetwater said. “Ninety-nine percent of the Tachyon D concentration was spent during the conflagration. The rest is diminishing quickly.”
“Will the current disappear when the tachyons run out?” Freeman asked.
“Excellent question, Raymond. That is our guess,” said Sweetwater. “Only time will tell if our hypothesis is correct. Of course, we still found a residue of Tachyon D on New Copenhagen, so the assumptions may not be valid.”
“How long before it’s safe out there?” I asked. By this time, I had fished five grenade launchers out of my go-pack.
“At this rate, fifteen minutes,” Sweetwater said. “Perhaps you should stay where you are and wait until the currents runs down.”
The truck was already moving before he finished the suggestion. Freeman asked, “Do you have a fix on our location.” When Sweetwater nodded, he said, “It’s time to run the tests.”
Freeman stepped on the gas, and the truck lurched ahead, growling like a mongrel dog, tearing around corners and speeding up the ramp. As we approached the entrance, I expected him to fire a rocket at the remnant of that steel door, but he didn’t. He pulled to a stop about twenty feet from the top.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m going to set a charge,” he said.