Fallout

by Ariel Tachna

  The power plant came into view, the three units easily visible. The first two stood silent and still without the usual white smoke from the water vapor. Shutting down those two plants had clearly gone according to plan, just as Kenneth had said. The third unit, though, belched dark gray smoke constantly. The pilot put the copter down near the troubled unit.

  “Turn the engine off.”

  “Look, Mr.—”

  “Turn the fucking engine off,” Derek shouted through the headset. “You want to get out of here, so turn it off, let me get my supplies unloaded, and then you can get the hell out of Dodge.”

  Derek took the headset off rather than listen to the pilot’s vitriol. After a moment, the engine noise faded, leaving only the sound of the rain on the metal frame. Derek hopped out and unfastened Fido. Then he hoisted his gear. “Come on, Fido,” he said, walking toward the power plant as fast as he could under the weight of his equipment.

  He was halfway to the only entrance he could see when the door opened and a man stepped outside. From what he could tell through the gray drizzle, the man was, like himself, in his mid-thirties, although the dress shirt buttoned all the way to the top was something Derek wouldn’t be caught dead wearing outside a business meeting with the NASA directors, and even then he usually lost the tie and opened the top button when they got down to serious business. “Here, take this.” Derek passed the bag with his clothes to the other man. “I’m soaked through, and some of this equipment is moisture sensitive.”

  The man, Indian or Pakistani to judge by his coloring, scowled but took the bag. “The dog can’t come inside.”

  “Then I’ll take my bag and head home. I already told my boss I wasn’t abandoning him after his previous owners left him alone in the storm.”

  “Fine,” the man said with a huff, “but keep him out of my way.”

  “Look, bud—”

  “Sambit,” the man interrupted. “My name is Sambit Patel.”

  “Look, Sam,” Derek said, not even trying to pronounce the foreign name, “I’m here with my robot out of the goodness of my own heart, so get rid of whatever bug crawled up your ass and died and tell me what needs to be done. Fido and I would like to go home.”

  “First, my name is Sambit, not Sam. Second, Mr. Marshall, I suggest you leave your attitude at the door. I’m here out of the same goodness of heart, as you call it, as you are. The employees of the plant who were on duty are either dead or in the hospital with injuries from the tornado that struck along with the hurricane and flooding. The off-shift workers were evacuated along with the rest of Bay City, and no one knows where they are at the moment.” Sambit must have gotten a more thorough briefing than Derek had if he knew Derek’s name. Derek wondered what else he knew that Derek didn’t.

  “So if I’m the robot guy, then who are you?”

  “The nuclear engineer,” Sambit replied. “I teach in the nuclear engineering department at Texas A&M.”

  “So you don’t know any more about this plant than I do.”

  “I know quite a lot about nuclear power plants.” Sambit crossed his arms over his chest, the posture so defensive Derek nearly laughed in desperation. They were so screwed.

  “So what’s the status of the core?”

  “It is compromised,” Sambit said. “Beyond that, I don’t know. The power went out ten minutes ago.”

  “There has to be a backup. A system this critical would have a UPS backup system—uninterruptible power source,” he added for Sambit’s benefit. “Plus separate backup generators in case the UPS fails.”

  “I know what a UPS backup system is,” Sambit snapped. “I may deal with theory more than practice these days, but my students have to be prepared to work in plants just like this one.”

  Derek resisted the urge to roll his eyes, and set down his gear. “Come here, Fido.” He ignored Sambit while he petted the dog’s head a few times, settling it in yet another new location in a matter of hours. “Stay here, okay? Sam and I are going to find the light switch, and then we’ll come back for you.”

  The dog circled twice and curled up in the corner of what was clearly the break room. “Do you at least have the passwords for the computers once we find the backup power?”

  “What passwords?”

  “You don’t seriously think a system like this one is going to operate without password protection to keep terrorists from hacking into the system and causing a meltdown, do you?” Derek rolled his eyes at the other man’s ignorance. “Once we get the power back on, we’ll call the plant managers and see if we can get the log-on information. You’re the nuclear engineer. How long do we have before it gets critical?”

  “It depends on how badly the core has overheated,” Sambit replied. “Without the computers, I can’t tell for sure.”

  “Well, fuck,” Derek muttered. “Is there anything you do know?”

  “I know you have a bad attitude and a foul mouth.”

  “Like that’s news. Is there anything you do know about the status of the plant?”

  “Not much, but hopefully we will get the computer system online soon.”

  Derek cursed again and dug in his bag for a flashlight. “Do we need to worry about radiation?”

  Sambit handed Derek a dosimeter. “The levels are safe here. Whether they are safe elsewhere….” He shrugged as he trailed off.

  Derek clipped the device to his belt. “If I were a backup generator, where would I be?”

  “Why are you asking me?”

  “I’m not,” Derek said. “I’m thinking out loud. Stop distracting me.”

  He walked out of the staff room and searched for a stairwell. Once he found one, he headed down. “That explains the backup power being off,” he muttered when, after four steps, he hit water. “Who puts a basement in a building a few miles from the coast? If the generators are down there, we’re fucked. Where the hell are the schematics for this place? The backup generators should be in another building entirely, but I’d expect there to be controls around here somewhere.”

  “I don’t have them,” Sambit said. “I already told you that.”

  “It was a rhetorical question,” Derek snapped back. “Look, why don’t you go hang out in the staff room? When I get the power on, we can figure out the rest.”

  “It’s not safe to be here by yourself,” Sambit insisted. “What if you get hurt? I won’t even know where you are.”

  “Fine, but shut up so I can concentrate.”

  They headed back into the corridor and worked their way through the rooms in the control section of the power plant. Not finding anything, Derek headed to the outlying buildings, searching each one until they found the backup generators. Derek studied them carefully, resisting the urge to look at his dosimeter every few seconds to see if the numbers had changed. Based on the systems at NASA, he would have expected them to turn on automatically when the battery system failed, but this wasn’t NASA so maybe the protocols were different. Or maybe the generator was faulty and they were totally screwed. There was only one way to find out.

  He checked the dials and gauges, fiddling with the diesel intake until the first generator sputtered to life. “Maintenance protocols are there for a reason,” he muttered at no one in particular. “Okay, Sam. Let’s get the computers on so you can tell me where to send my robot and what to do when he gets there.”

  They went back into the main monitoring room. Sambit turned on the central computer and waited for it to boot up. It powered up willingly enough, but the moment it came online, it demanded a password. “We could try calling the hospital,” Sambit suggested. “The plant manager was in serious condition, but he did survive the storm, according to my briefing. He might be in good enough shape to help us.”

  “Call and see if you want.” Derek cracked his knuckles and started typing. He’d have liked to think the security software for the plant would require the users to have a strong password, but he’d seen that fail too often at NASA to be confident of it. He might get
lucky.

  Sambit came back a few minutes later. “The plant manager is in surgery.”

  “Well, fuck,” Derek said, ignoring the way Sambit flinched at his cursing. The man could just get over himself. “Okay, look, if you could see what was going on inside the plant, could you shut it down?”

  “In theory,” Sambit said, “but we don’t have the schematics.”

  “I’m aware of that fact,” Derek snapped, “but we’re wasting time here, time we don’t have and time that’s letting the situation get worse. We need to find the shutdown or the safety valve, whatever that looks like, and we aren’t going to do it standing here.”

  “We can’t go in there. The heat and radiation would kill us long before we found what we were looking for.”

  “I wasn’t planning on going in there,” Derek said. “I’m planning on sending Number Five in there.”

  “Shouldn’t we call the NRC or—”

  Derek ignored the other man’s cautions, and walked back to the break room. He patted Fido’s head a couple of times and set out a bowl of water for the dog. Then he unpacked Number Five. “Time to go to work, baby. We’re going to show that ignorant asshole in the other room what we can do.”

  He powered up the robot and turned on the controls. There where he could see what was in front of Number Five, he didn’t bother with his laptop. Later, he would connect the robot’s cameras up to the laptop remotely so he could see the robot’s surroundings and guide him.

  “What is that?” Sambit asked when Derek guided the robot back into the room.

  “This is Number Five,” Derek said proudly. “You tell me where to send him, and he can go anywhere we need him to go and do anything we could do with our hands.”

  “That would be great if I knew where we needed him to go.”

  “Look, Sam,” Derek said. “We could spend hours trying to find out the password for the computer. We could make phone calls and maybe get answers, or we can send Number Five exploring, make the maps as we go, and maybe find what we’re looking for faster.”

  “Without the computers, we have no way of monitoring the system to make sure it cools down correctly. We could make matters worse.”

  “If we do nothing, we could both be dead. Yes, it’s a risk, but it’s one I think we have to take.”

  “You haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Maybe not,” Derek said, “but it’s got to be better than sitting here waiting for the core to melt down and the heat and radiation to kill us both.” He opened up his laptop and activated the remote viewing and controls for Number Five. “I don’t know what he’s looking for so you’re going to have to come help me here.”

  “This is a bad idea.”

  “Dying is a worse one.”

  Chapter 2

  SAMBIT scrubbed his hands over his face. His head hurt, his eyes stung from staring at the laptop screen for what seemed like hours, and his stomach was growling, when it stopped churning long enough, but they couldn’t stop for food yet. Sambit’s experience might be more theoretical than practical, but he knew what could happen if they didn’t get the reactor under control. He’d studied Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima. He didn’t want to add Bay City to that list with his name attached to the failure.

  The man sitting next to him, with his foul mouth and brash manners, worked Sambit’s last nerve, but this was the robotics engineer NASA had seen fit to send him. Not that he was all that fit for the job either. He hadn’t done any practical work with nuclear reactors since he’d taken the teaching position at Texas A&M, but there hadn’t been anyone else to call. Not anyone close enough to get here as fast as Sambit could. The only thing that had gone right since he’d gotten here was the little robot Marshall called Number Five. Sambit didn’t claim to know anything about robotics, but he knew a useful tool when he saw one.

  Number Five was definitely useful. Its track roller let it move over uneven surfaces, but Marshall had also fitted it with a lifting mechanism that allowed it to “climb” stairs. The cameras took video in three hundred sixty degrees so anyone looking at the computer screen could see everything around the robot. Its sensors detected temperature, radiation, and a score of other measurements that Sambit hadn’t bothered to track because they didn’t matter at the moment. Even better, the built-in GPS linked to a program on Marshall’s computer that created a map as Number Five moved through the corridors. It wasn’t quite as useful as the full schematics of the plant would have been, but Sambit was beginning to get a feel for the layout of the plant. It didn’t match any in his eidetic memory, but he saw enough similarities to draw conclusions based on everything he’d studied.

  “Turn right there.”

  Marshall backed Number Five up, guiding the robot with a joystick controller in one hand and another remote in the other hand with a dozen or more different buttons that told the robot to do a variety of different things. Sambit hadn’t tried to figure out what. He doubted Marshall would let him anywhere near those controls anyway.

  They followed the progress of Number Five down the side corridor Sambit had indicated. The robot advanced about fifteen feet according to the GPS, turning another corner only to encounter a huge pile of concrete and rebar.

  “Guess we can’t go that way,” Marshall said, starting to turn the robot around.

  “Wait!” Sambit pointed at the screen, ignoring Marshall’s hand batting the finger away before it could make contact. “Can you get readings from up there near the top of the rubble?”

  “I can try.” Marshall fiddled with the controls, and Number Five extended an arm, stretching toward the spot Sambit had indicated. The temperature spiked nearly off the charts.

  “If it’s that hot back there, we’ve got problems. If there isn’t a leak, there will be soon. We have to find the HPCI pumps and get some coolant into the reactor, or we’re going to have a meltdown even with the control rods in place,” Sambit said. He knew the control rods were in place. He’d been able to access that much of the data on the plant before the power shut down the first time, but while that had stopped the nuclear reaction inside the core, it wouldn’t be enough to take care of the decay heat. That was where the HPCI pumps came in. Their coolant would help neutralize the stray neutrons in the core and lower the temperature and pressure enough to avert a meltdown.

  “Fabulous,” Marshall said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “So tell me where to find the pumps.”

  “I would have said down this corridor,” Sambit replied. “That’s why I sent you this way in the first place.”

  “Number Five is good, but that’s a nearly vertical climb. I’d never keep it balanced to the top, much less down the other side. And that’s assuming it would survive the heat. I didn’t put the kind of heat shielding on Number Five that I’d use for a robot or robotic parts we planned to use for a space mission.”

  The robot was, as far as Sambit could tell, Marshall’s one weak spot. Any slur, however implied, about the ability of his robot resulted in immediate defensive action. “I wasn’t suggesting that you should have. You asked where the pumps were. I told you where I thought they should be. There might be another access route from a different direction.”

  “What are we waiting for?”

  Marshall spun Number Five around and directed him out to the main corridor again. “Back the way we came to check out the side halls we skipped, or forward?”

  “Forward,” Sambit decided after a moment’s consideration. “The heat is there, which means the reactor is there. The pumps go directly into the reactor so they should be nearby too.”

  Marshall turned Number Five in the indicated direction. Sambit moved closer to peer over his shoulder. He caught a whiff of sweat and alcohol, a combination that usually turned his stomach, but either his stomach was too far gone from nerves and hunger to react or something was different about Marshall.

  Sambit had known he was gay fairly early in high school, but in India, he had
not dared tell anyone. Once he’d moved to the US, he’d gotten so used to keeping that information private that he didn’t think twice about continuing that way. He’d had a few relationships, but nothing worth “coming out” for. It wasn’t anyone’s business anyway. Marshall clearly didn’t share that opinion to judge by the rainbow bracelet around his wrist. It was his choice, of course, but it was one Sambit had never seen the sense of.

  Forcing his mind back to business and away from the ill-timed shiver of awareness, Sambit focused on the screen in front of him. “Try that corridor.”

  Marshall turned Number Five down the corridor as indicated. The temperature rose almost immediately. “How hot can it get before it damages your robot?”

  “Hotter than this,” Marshall said. “I have spare parts. If I can limp it back here, even damaged, I can repair it. What am I looking for?”

  “That,” Sambit said, pointing to the HPCI pumps. “We have to figure out why they aren’t working and get them on.”

  “Number Five can do what needs to be done, but you’re going to have to figure out what that is because I don’t know anything about this kind of pump.”

  Sambit nodded. “Take it around the pumps slowly so I can see what damage there might be.”

  Marshall directed the robot as Sambit indicated, circling the machines, zeroing in on this dial or that gauge.

  “They seem to have power,” Sambit said, “so the problem must be that they haven’t gotten the command to turn on because the computers are down.”

  “Is there an On switch?” Marshall asked.

  “Nothing quite that simple,” Sambit said, “but we can activate them.” He talked Marshall through the process of setting the pumps in motion.

  “Now what?” Marshall asked when the gauges indicated that coolant was moving through the system to the core.

  “Now we get the computers back online so we can see what else needs to be done,” Sambit said firmly. “And don’t argue with me. The HPCI pumps needed to be turned on. But now that they’re working to cool and depressurize the core, we need to see what else is going on, and I can’t do that remotely with a robot. I couldn’t do it in person even if it were safe. I need the data from the sensors inside and around the core to know what’s going on.”