Pantheon 00 - Age of Godpunk

by James Lovegrove

  He filled in the rest. “Which is not far from Cape Irago, which is where a GloCo nuclear power plant sits. Shit. How severe’s the damage?”

  “Unclear. The site manager’s running an inspection right now. He seems to think it’s just superficial, a few cracked walls here and there. But of course he’s shut the reactor down and evacuated all non-essential personnel, as a precautionary measure.”

  “No radiation leaks?”

  “None detected so far.”

  “Thank fuck for that.” Barnaby paused to give himself time to think. “Okay, Veronica, contact Hayashi at GloCo Japan and tell him to get his arse out of Tokyo pronto and head down to Atsumi.”

  “I believe he’s already on his way, sir.”

  “Good. Then put me through to his mobile, so that I can tell him I want him smiling and shaking hands with every technician at the plant, and I want photographers taking pictures of him doing it, and I want that reactor back online by close of business here in the UK.”

  “Right away, sir.”

  Barnaby spent much of the rest of the day on the phone, marshalling resources halfway across the world. It was evening in Japan, but GloCo employees there responded admirably, working into the small hours to establish the plant’s integrity and make sure full safety protocols had been adhered to. The plant operated a third-generation advanced pressurised water reactor, generally held to be the most efficient and securest of its kind, equipped with countless passive safety features and a plethora of active failsafe measures to contain meltdown. According to the seismology department at the nearby Aichi Prefectural University, the quake had been low on the Mercalli intensity scale, registering as a ‘Five – Rather Strong,’ a category in which the worst that could happen was slight damage to buildings. All that the Cape Irago plant suffered was the odd bit of broken plasterwork and the collapse of the Styrofoam-tile false ceiling in the staff canteen. By mid-afternoon GMT, past midnight Japan Standard Time, the reactor was up and running again, churning out its customary two thousand megawatts of power.

  In the wake of the Fukushima disaster, the Japanese were understandably paranoid about a repeat incident, but Hayashi, as GloCo’s national head of operations, did a bang-up job reassuring the media that there was nothing to worry about and never had been. Barnaby himself conducted a couple of Skype interviews with BBC World and NHK’s News Watch 9, calmly allaying any lingering fears.

  All in all, a good day’s work and a well-executed exercise in crisis management and brow soothing. Barnaby went home pleased, and that night manacled Lydia to the bondage table in a prostrate position, face down, backside aloft, and whacked her with a wooden spanking paddle until her buttocks glowed red.

  THE GLOCO BYZANTIUM

  TWO DAYS LATER, a GloCo TI class supertanker foundered on shoals one hundred miles off the coast of California.

  The GloCo Byzantium was transporting its cargo of light crude from the La Plata terminal in Argentina up to the Port of San Francisco when extreme weather, coupled with some calamitous navigational decision-making and a glitch in the automated course correction software, saw it deviate out of the shipping lanes and stray onto the Cortes Bank. It struck the Bishop Rock, the highest peak of the undersea basalt ridge, which at low tide lay only a few metres below the surface. The Byzantium’s double hull was torn open like tinfoil, and oil began gushing out. Within moments the supertanker was listing horribly and the captain had no alternative but to give the order to abandon ship. The twenty-man crew all made it safely into the life rafts, but had to endure several hours of being tossed about on heavy seas before a coastguard helicopter located them and a US Navy frigate arrived on the scene to rescue them.

  Meanwhile the Byzantium, battered by hundred-mile-an-hour winds and thirty-foot waves, was dragged further across the Cortes Bank, spewing oil helplessly. Compartment after compartment ruptured into a relentless cascade. Soon the ship was semi-submerged, sinking into a brown sludge of its own making, an emulsified mix of oil and seawater which foamed over its bows and onto its decks. The keel succumbed to the strain and, back broken, the fatally wounded 450-metre-long leviathan plunged under, tumbling to the seabed, still bleeding as it descended.

  With a deadweight tonnage in excess of 440,000, the Byzantium could hold three million barrels of oil at full capacity. On the trip up from Chile it had been carrying approximately two thirds of that, but two million barrels of oil was still a huge amount. Conditions at sea were too rough for it to be worthwhile sending aircraft out to spray detergent onto the slick, but luckily the prevailing wind and currents carried the oil west into the open Pacific rather than east onto the Californian shoreline. Within three days the slick had dispersed naturally and the nightmare scenario of oil-blackened beaches at Malibu and Baja did not come to pass.

  Barnaby, nonetheless, had an uncomfortable time of it. The press and news media did not give GloCo an easy ride, either at home or in the States, where he was vilified by CNN and Fox News and ridiculed on The Tonight Show and The Daily Show. The Byzantium incident was agreed to have been the worst supertanker disaster since the Exxon Valdez, and vied with the Amoco Cadiz for being the worst ever. Had oil reached US soil, the cost of cleanup and compensation would have been astronomical. As it was, Lloyd’s of London fulfilled its duties as maritime accident insurer, but the premiums on the rest of GloCo’s shipping fleet immediately went through the roof, so Barnaby was still left significantly out of pocket. GloCo’s share price also took a hit.

  To add to his woes, the Seagull Movement returned to plague him. People dressed as birds once again littered the concourse in front of the GloCo Tower, sprawled on the paving stones like the aftermath of some mutant avian massacre. Rather than pick his way through or around them each morning and evening, Barnaby was obliged to use the entrance in the tower’s below-ground parking garage when he arrived and left each day.

  It had always been a source of great satisfaction to him that he could walk through the revolving front door of his very own skyscraper. He enjoyed seeing the building stretching above him: his palace, seat of his empire. He loved the feel of the spacious main lobby, with its marble walls and its soaring atrium that reached all the way to the hemispherical skylight at the top and which had, as its centrepiece, a giant sequoia transplanted from the slopes of the Sierra Nevada. He preferred to come and go like a king, not skulk about in sublevels where the lift doors were utilitarian steel and the floor was nothing but concrete. But for the time being, the bird-costumed protestors had made it impossible for him.

  CANE

  “I CAN UNDERSTAND if you don’t feel like it,” Lydia said, that Friday. “If you’re not in the mood.”

  “No,” Barnaby said. “I need this. I need you.”

  “It’s been a bad few days for you. Nobody could blame you for wanting nothing more than to put your feet up and have a quiet night.”

  “I need the release. I’ve been thinking about nothing else all week. Let’s go.”

  “If you insist.”

  “Oh, I most definitely do.”

  In the basement, Barnaby instantly felt on top of things again. Nothing outside these four walls mattered any more. The real world could not impinge. He could forget the earth tremor and the GloCo Byzantium. There was only him and Lydia, and a range of toys to use and games to play.

  He spreadeagled her on the St Andrew’s Cross frame. He spent a long time pondering his choice of beating implement, eventually settling on a plain bamboo cane.

  He relished the swissshh the cane made through the air and the neat red line it left on Lydia’s pale skin with each stroke. He swung it at her until his shoulder ached. Several shrill yelps came from her, but never the safeword. Soon she was striped from shoulders to knees in an overlapping crisscross pattern that reminded Barnaby somehow of kanji script, as though he had inscribed a secret message on her flesh in a language he couldn’t read.

  He chose a thick, knurled dildo to insert into her. It slid easily into place. He chose
a second, smaller-calibre one and, having applied lubricant copiously, found a berth for that too.

  Finally he finished himself off, exploding all over Lydia’s hips and spine.

  To leave the basement after that was a heavy act, like rousing himself from a rapturous dream. Barnaby couldn’t help wondering if the world had any further shocks in store for him and GloCo – and dreaded that it might.

  CAVE-IN

  AT 11.36AM, INDIA Standard Time, the cave-in struck.

  Seventy-three coal miners at the GloCo colliery just outside the town of Talcher in Odisha province were trapped underground, four miles from the entrance to the pit. A section of ceiling in a newly excavated tunnel that had shown no sign of instability gave way suddenly. Two miners were killed outright in the collapse.

  The rescue operation began immediately. Expert volunteers went down to ascertain the precise location of the cave-in and see if it was possible to establish communications with the survivors. They quickly determined that there was no way they could dig through the rubble to free them, or even shout to them. They estimated the cave-in to be at least a hundred feet long, and the tunnel remained in a dangerously unstable condition, so precarious that even reinforcing the ceiling with additional braces or shoring it up with roof bolts might have the reverse effect, bringing more of it crashing down.

  Exploratory boreholes were sunk from the surface, seeking the spot where the survivors were likely to be, two thousand feet below. One drill bit eventually returned with a scrap of cloth tied to it, the material torn from a miner’s overalls.

  The borehole was painstakingly widened until it was large enough for food, water and a two-way shortwave radio to be passed down through it on cables. It also brought the trapped miners much-needed ventilation.

  The seventy-three men were stuck in a chamber little bigger than two train carriages. They had been down there for almost a week when the hole was made that promised them salvation. Eleven were badly injured, and most of the rest were afflicted by respiratory ailments as well as eye trouble owing to the acrid clouds of coal dust still swirling in the air after the cave-in. They were beginning to suffer from intense claustrophobia, too, and there were several cases of dysentery arising from the cramped, unsanitary conditions. Their desperate pleas for the rescuers to hurry up were transmitted over the radio and relayed to a watching world by local broadcasters. The miners begged to be reunited with their families, asked for forgiveness from loved ones they had wronged, and prayed to the gods to be delivered from this hellhole they were in.

  The only possible way to get them out was to create a two-foot-diameter escape borehole and extract them one by one in a purpose-built metal capsule, the method famously used in 2010 after the accident at the Copiapó mine in Chile. But time was pressing. It was plain that the miners were in bad shape mentally as well as physically. Some of them were starting to crack up. The escape borehole would take days to drill. The miners might not be able to hold out that long. Their foreman was one of the pair who had been killed by the cave-in. A respected and charismatic figure, he might have been able to keep his men’s spirits up, had he still been alive. As it was, a kind of grim anarchy was evolving among the survivors. They were squabbling and fighting down there in the dank, foetid dark, battling over how the food was portioned out, turning on one another like animals over perceived or actual slights.

  Barnaby arrived on the scene three days after the initial disaster, and stayed for the next fortnight. Ostensibly he was supervising, but in truth there was nothing practical he could do. The rescuers and the drillers all knew their jobs and didn’t need some expensively-suited CEO on hand to give them instructions. Mostly he just hung around the site, giving interviews to journalists and speaking to the miners’ families, repeatedly expressing his great concern for the men’s wellbeing and his hopes for a successful resolution to a terrible predicament. He dismissed accusations that the colliery was notorious for its lax safety record and higher-than-average level of injuries and deaths. He pointed out that coal mining in India was a vast industry, meeting the energy demands of a billion-strong – and fast-growing – population. Some of the largest reserves of coal in the world were to be found on the subcontinent, and India used more of the stuff per capita than any other nation save for China. Naturally, then, there were likely to be more mining accidents here than elsewhere, thanks to the sheer scale of the business and the numbers of people involved. It was pure statistics.

  Then a reporter from an Odisha province newspaper asked Barnaby if he was aware that children as young as fourteen worked at this particular mine. Barnaby pooh-poohed the idea – “Absurd!” – until he was brought face-to-face with proof: a couple of colliery employees who were clearly adolescents and ought to have been in school. He was then informed that one of the seventy-three trapped men was in his teens. It was quite common for minors to be miners here, he was told. Kids were shorter and skinnier than adults, and therefore able to worm into narrow crevices inaccessible to their grown counterparts. India’s labour laws prohibited anyone under eighteen from working in a mine, but under-eighteens routinely applied for jobs, lying about their age, and colliery managers routinely ignored the obvious falseness of their claims and hired them.

  Barnaby was ill for the next few days. He confined himself to his hotel suite, and for much of the time he genuinely was unwell – the inevitable digestive complaints brought on by the local cuisine – but he was sick at heart, too, sick to the soul. There was a teenager underground, in peril of his life. A boy. How had GloCo’s own CEO not known what was going on at the colliery? How could one of his companies do such a thing?

  He re-emerged from confinement just as the borehole was due to break through to the tunnel. Once that happened, the capsule would be readied and would begin shuttling back and forth within the next twenty-four hours. The miners’ ordeal was near its end.

  Jakob was with him as the truck-mounted Schramm T130XD air core drilling rig augered down through the last few feet of unconsolidated regolith. Already the ground had ruined three tungsten-bladed drill bits, and the fourth was growing blunt but looked likely to last out the task. Compressed air, blasted down the hollow rods, brought the pulverised cuttings spewing back up and out.

  The sense of hope and expectation was immense. A crowd of fellow miners and relatives of the trapped men looked on, beneath a ferocious, beating midday sun and a sky like a magnesium flare.

  GloCo was bankrolling the rescue effort, and Barnaby had no idea exactly how much it was costing – it had to be nudging eight figures – but he honestly didn’t care. All he wanted was a positive outcome, every single one of the miners hauled to the surface alive and well.

  A deep rumble underfoot was the first hint that all was not as it should be. The Schramm T130XD shuddered. The drill accelerated to a tremendous pitch, over-revving shriekingly like a car suddenly thrown out of gear. Then the entire rig jerked downwards, canting the front of the truck into the air. People screamed in alarm. Circuit breakers kicked in, the drill motor cut out, and an unearthly hush fell. Then came further subterranean rumbling, as though some gigantic, terrible gate was being rolled shut. Another hush followed, this one interspersed with frantic sobs and gasps from the crowd. Everyone sensed that something had gone horribly wrong. No one was quite sure what or how.

  In fact, it was simple. The drill, on the point of penetrating the roof of the tunnel, had hit the same geological flaw that had been responsible for the original cave-in: a jagged air pocket between two strata. In attempting to save the miners, it had instead finished them off, triggering a second cave-in. Their meagre, sordid refuge had become a tomb.

  Radio silence from underground confirmed the awful truth. Several of the rescuers sank to their knees, overwhelmed with shock and dismay. Others took off their safety helmets as a mark of respect, tears rolling down their cheeks.

  Barnaby, numb, decided to approach the crowd and offer condolences. Barely had he begun to speak, however, when
a woman in a saffron sari shouted, “Murderer!” The rest of the crowd joined in, calling him all the worst words they could think of in English, and countless more in Hindi, Urdu, Bengali and the regional language Oriya. Then rocks and stones were thrown: a few at first, but swiftly becoming dozens.

  Jakob hustled Barnaby away, shielding his boss from the rain of projectiles with his own broad back. The crowd gave chase, a mob howling in grief and outrage. A few frontrunners caught up with the fleeing plutocrat and his bodyguard, but Jakob despatched them easily with backhand blows.

  The bulk of the crowd gained on them; they were mere metres away as they reached their hired Tata Safari VX. Jakob bundled Barnaby into the passenger seat, then vaulted over the bonnet and dived into the driving seat, locking the doors. As he gunned the engine, people swarmed around the 4x4 and began hammering their fists on the windows and bodywork. Jakob floored the accelerator, powering through the throng. Bodies scattered. Anyone who didn’t leap out of the way was knocked aside. The Tata veered away from the mine, fishtailing on the gravelled approach road. The crowd receded behind it, still pursuing, a wall of waving arms and fury-etched faces.

  Jakob didn’t bother stopping at the hotel in Talcher to pick up their belongings. He headed straight for Biju Patnaik Airport near Bhubaneswar, ninety miles away. Their luggage and other paraphernalia could be sent on later. Jakob’s priority was getting Barnaby onto the Gulfstream and in the air. He phoned ahead as he drove, and by the time the Tata pulled up on the tarmac beside the runway, the pilot had the turbofan engines cycling and had obtained clearance for immediate takeoff.