“Yes, Cap.”
“Everyone eat before coming into work? You’re all good and hydrated?” Banderas looked satisfied at their answers. “Good, good. This is going to be a long night. Because we’re lead team, we won’t be able to leave when our shift normally ends. Lars, Lizzie, Cameron, Noriko, when you’ve dug out the survivors, check in with Jack. If there’s no other emergency, talk to me. We’ll work in shifts on the ley lines in the area until things are back to being stable.”
Even as Noriko gave an affirmative, she noted that the captain had never once suggested that the engineers and techs running the test might not have survived the explosion. Hopeful thinking on his part? Or maybe he didn’t want to think about loss of life if he didn’t have to. She personally hoped that people had survived. This would be her first major job, and having it end in tragedy was something she didn’t care for.
The AI system in the van had been set to maximum speed, and it flew along the desert highways at nearly 120 miles an hour. Fortunately, most of the drive was straight roads. Otherwise, at that speed, they’d be taking curves on two wheels. Banderas spent most of the ride reviewing investigative procedures with Noriko and Cameron. They had taken a crash course on it in their boot camp training, but that had been over a month ago, and they had no practical experience in it, just book learning. Jack was right about their arrival time, and they came to the Lab’s front gate at just under twenty minutes.
All bunched up against the gates were security vehicles, reporters and their vans, a fire truck ahead of them trying to get in without running anyone over in the process, and military personnel of different types. The gate wasn’t a very large opening to begin with, so having fifty or sixty people all try to cram through at the same time made it feel like a circus. Or it would if not for the smell of burning metal that hovered in the air.
One adventurous reporter wrenched the back door open and stuck her head inside with the microphone attached to her hand. “Are the Gældorcræft Forces—” Someone grabbed her by her collar and jerked her back out before quickly slamming the door shut again.
There was no guard on duty, the gate set up for remote control, with a large screen above several different diagnostic tools and an emergency override control panel. The screen showed a young lieutenant that was crisply dressed but harried. “Identify yourselves.”
Jack leaned out the window enough to flash the badge at one of the scanners, which gave a happy beep and a green light. “Jack Torstein, Pathmaker Team, Tehachapi Station.”
“Confirmed, sir. We’ve been expecting you. Both Lab and Main Base’s Fire Departments have gone ahead of you. We have a six-man team on site controlling entry and exit. Their squad captain is Holstein. Go through!” the gate guard ordered sharply.
Jack lost no time in obeying the command. He switched immediately over to manual override and aside from dodging a security jeep, they drove straight through, took the first road to the left, and came to an abrupt stop at a gate. Two guards were on duty there and they also checked in with everyone in the van.
Jack flashed his badge at them and introduced himself, “Jack Torstein, Coordinator for Team Pathmaker. Gentlemen, the only authorized personnel for this area are now GF from Main Base, firemen, paramedics, and whatever analyst they send to investigate this explosion. All other personnel, including Lab people, are not to enter. Clear?”
“Crystal clear, sir,” one of the guards assured him with a smart salute.
Jack returned it and sat back in his seat. The gate was opened with a swipe of the card and they followed the curve in the road toward the test cell.
Explosions of this magnitude did not leave a single tidy hole. The area around them looked pockmarked, having had so many different pieces of debris torn through the landscape. It was just as well that Jack manually drove the van, as the road was not free and clear. He had to weave around smoking hunks of metal, and several times had to slow to an almost dead halt in order to maneuver around the larger pieces.
When they finally did get all the way around the bend, Noriko could see a gigantic hole in the side of the hill.
The area crawled with people in hazmat suits, SCBA, and protective gear. Lars popped open the door only to quickly shut it again, gagging. Thick smoke and chemical residue clogged the air so much that it was beyond difficult to breathe. Noriko reached into her bag and immediately put on a face mask to help filter the air, but even though she’d reacted quickly, she still had an acrid taste in her mouth from the terrible air quality. Despite the poor visibility, she could see that a few places had been taped off with red tape, and there were water hoses and lines crisscrossing in every direction as the firemen fought pockets of fire. The largest stack of debris, near the cliff side, was in full blaze. There must have been at least five water hoses pointed directly at it and all it was doing was sizzling. She didn’t even want to think of what it would take to put that out.
Everyone was better braced this time when Lars opened the door and stepped out. With the door open, Noriko could hear someone on a bullhorn shouting above the confusion, “Get me more portable lights over here! Williams, I need three over near the control bunker, we got GF people here that need to see!”
Power sparked in bursts, spider webbed along the ground, and sometimes arced in the air. The bursts were as brightly lit as firecrackers strewn across the ground, but with far more destructive power. They were nauseating to look at, and Noriko had to swallow several times to keep the contents of her stomach down. She managed to follow Cameron out readily enough, strapping on her backpack as she did so, but she had to pause when her feet actually touched ground. If looking at it was bad, actually being in contact with it was a hundred times worse.
Cameron was more than green around the gills but he managed a smile somehow. “Dying request, Spidey.”
“What’s that?” she gasped, still fighting her nausea.
“Don’t spew on me.”
Somehow the line made the situation a little more bearable and she grimaced at him. “I won’t if you won’t.”
“Deal.” He put a hand on her shoulder, grip firm but not hard, and shucked the power away from her like a mini-forcefield.
She drew on a proper breath and felt her stomach settle. “Thank you.”
“Can’t do that for long, so take advantage while I can.” Cameron twisted his torso, looking about while still maintaining a grip on her. “Where do we even start?”
It was a good question. Despite the portable lights and the pockets of blazing fires, the lighting was beyond poor. They were, after all, on the top of a large hill in the dead of night, and whatever exterior lighting that had been up here before was nothing more than smoldering hunks of metal now. The lights and shadows flickered and reflected on the pieces, casting the area into a macabre chiaroscuro.
Jack came toward them, speaking as he did so, “We’re dividing the area into zones. I’ll put up flag markers so you know where the zones end. Lars, Lizzie, do you remember enough of this side of the Lab to know where the control center for the test cell was?”
Lizzie shook her head in immediate denial. It was Lars that pointed toward their left, although the frown on his face was uncertain. “Over there, I think.”
“You think correctly. Four hundred feet from here, there was a slight upslope, and the control building was in there.”
Noriko couldn’t see a trace of it left. The area around them was so piled up with smoking rubble, remains of metal and the like that there was nothing in the topography to suggest where buildings might have been. Smoke still smoldered in the air as well, obscuring her sight, although fortunately the man with the bullhorn was making sure that portable lighting was set up in the area. The extra lighting was making things better and worse all at once. She didn’t have to worry as much about tripping over things, but it was highlighting the destruction in gut-churning ways.
“Four hundred feet dead ahead?” Lars repeated, looking to Jack for confirmation. “Then we’
ll go in and start digging things up. Cam, you’re majoring in Geology, right? You got any experience discerning rock from people?”
“Some, yeah. I interned with a Search and Rescue group last summer.”
“Good, in that case, you start on the right side, I’ll start on the left, and let’s see if we can’t dig us up some survivors.”
“Remember,” Jack continued, nearly vibrating in place with his need to be in about three places in one, “that the 2A block house only has the door exposed. They also have a tunnel leading out to 1A. If you can’t readily find the door here, try the 1A exit.”
Banderas, who stood behind him, inserted, “I will check 1A and radio in if we can reach the survivors through there. You focus on this side. We want this place cleared before the fire can spread over here.”
“Roger that,” Lars acknowledged with an analyst’s salute.
The men led off, with Noriko and Lizzie hot in pursuit. As they climbed over the rubble, Noriko asked the other woman, “Where can I pull power from? Is it safe to take anything that’s around me?”
“It’s actually preferable for you to do that,” Lizzie answered, pausing in between words as she focused on climbing the trickier sections. “It calms the area down, makes it less dangerous, but it’s understandable if you choose to find a more stable force and channel from that. It’s hard to take all of this power lying about and make it usable after all.”
Certainly it would be more challenging, but Noriko preferred it over trying to take power from a ley line and channeling it to Cameron while fighting off errant sparks of power. The area was so unstable that she didn’t even want to stand on it for long.
Cameron paused in front of her, offering a hand over a gap of rocks, which she thankfully took. His long limbs had no trouble crossing that kind of distance, but she would have had to find another way around without his assistance. As he pulled her into him, he asked quietly, “Which way do you wanna go? I’m good if you want to pull from a ley line.”
So he’d heard that, huh? She shook her head. “Let me try to get power from our immediate area first. It’s dangerous to work with power scattered around like this. If it’s not usable enough for you, then I’ll look for another source.”
He seemed relieved at her answer and he gave her a swift smile before letting go and continuing on.
What should have taken a few minutes to walk took them nearly fifteen minutes to climb over. Lars finally lifted a hand, calling them to a halt, and signaled Cameron and Noriko with two fingers to go right. They split up, balancing their weight precariously on the shifting debris as they moved.
Navigating this potential hotbed while gleaning power from their surroundings was tricky at best, but she focused and fed a steady stream of 10 kilomerlins to Cameron. “Is that enough?”
“A little more juice, Spidey.”
She gathered up more, focusing on their immediate area first, then spreading out in a spiral pattern. “Good?”
“Great. Keep that up.” Cameron focused away from her, hands lifting as if he were conducting an orchestra. Rocks rose at his silent direction and shifted off to the far right, stacking up neatly into chunky pyramids. Noriko was relieved he wasn’t just chucking things to the side, as that would cause an avalanche later.
Not knowing if it was safe to talk to him as he worked, she kept her mouth shut and focused on her own job. The ley line directly under them felt highly unstable but very drained, so she had high hopes that it wasn’t in any danger of setting off an earthquake. It would take a while to feed more power into it and make it stable again, though. That would not be a job a single team would want to tackle, either. The line under her feet was the size of a river and it stretched out for miles in both directions. This would take dedicated personnel and time to recuperate.
“I’ve got people under me,” Cameron announced suddenly. He stopped dead and lifted his head. “LARS!”
The other pairing wasn’t far off, so they heard the shout and immediately scrambled to Cameron.
“You sense anyone?” Lars demanded as he moved, only pausing to give Lizzie a hand as she needed it.
“I’ve got seven down here,” Cameron informed him. “At least three alive, as they’re moving a little. You feel ’em?”
Lars’s eyes went blind to his immediate surroundings as he used his magical sense to see below the rocks. “I feel them. I think you’re wrong, though, I think we have seven alive. But I’m not sensing much air down there.”
“No, they’re in a small pocket,” Cameron agreed. “Which makes me wonder about the tunnel.”
As if in answer, Banderas’s voice came in over their channel. “1A’s tunnel is trapped on this side by debris. It’s all on fire and we’re having a hard time putting it out. What’s the status over there?”
Lizzie put the wrist comm up to her mouth to respond, “We’ve got part of the door in sight, sir. It’s still got a lot on top of it, though. We’re sensing very little air inside. I think all of the air vents are either damaged or blocked.”
“Not at all surprised. Your first priority is to get them out. Noriko, you can do three things at once, so I want you dictating notes of what you’re seeing and taking pictures as they work. We need to keep some documentation of where things were for later.”
“Yes, sir,” she assured him even as she slung her bag around and pulled out a camera. Normally she’d take pictures with her holoshades, but, in this circumstance, she’d have to turn the camera in afterwards to preserve the chain of evidence. Besides, she wasn’t convinced the holoshades had a good enough camera equipped to handle this poor lighting. “Dictated notes are fine?”
“Just fine. Ley line over here is hopping around like a frog in a hot skillet, so you manage what you can. We’re not going to be available for help. Banderas, out.”
They were on their own, eh? Well, Noriko wasn’t too worried; Lars and Lizzie seemed very much in command of the situation. She started dictating things as quickly as she could while taking pictures at all angles. As she worked, she leant half an ear to Cameron and Lars’s conversation.
“We need to get them out fast,” Cameron said definitively, “Question is, do we drill a hole through first and get them air? It will buy us time.”
Shifting a little to the left, Lars looked the area over thoroughly. “Lizzie?”
Puzzled as to why he’d asked his partner for her opinion, Noriko then remembered that Lizzie had majored in Structural Engineering. Of course she would be the expert to ask in this situation. Lars was like her and Cameron, a Geology major. He wouldn’t be sure what was safe to move.
Lizzie stepped back and evaluated the area for a long time before shaking her head. “It’ll take an hour. At least. We better make sure they have air. Cameron, this fissure next to your right foot, can you sense how far down that goes?”
“Almost to them, why?”
“That’s the most stable area right now. Where we’re standing is in danger of shifting if we tamper with it in any way. Drill there first.”
Noriko went back to gathering and feeding him power. Cameron would direct the flow with a hand, sometimes circling it fast to encourage her to give him more, sometimes slowing it down by reducing his winching speed. It was the perfect way for her to gauge what he needed.
Jack stood near the van with both hands cupping his mouth. “RADIO!”
Oh, whoops, had they been ignoring the radio? Noriko certainly had been treating it like background noise while they focused on the job at hand.
Lars was the first to put the radio band near his mouth. “Sorry, Jack.”
“Try not to do that again, I need to deploy people where they’re needed,” Jack responded with considerable irritation. “Communication is key to that. Do you sense survivors up there?”
“Yes, sir, seven distinct energies are below us.”
He was too far away to read, but Jack sounded relieved. “Get them out!”
Lars didn’t quite salute. “On it, si
r!!”
Noriko prayed they could.
6th Merlin
They were not the only GF team working up on the hill. Expecting a team of six to handle a disaster of this size was unthinkable. There were four people from the Boron Station that arrived just after they did. When the new team arrived, they were dispatched to get the ley lines in the area stable. There were two main streams, one minor that branched off, and all three of them were tremulous at best. If they didn’t get those streams settled soon, it would likely cause another explosion, and this time it would take what was left of the hill with it.
Aside from casting them a glance or two to check on their progress, Noriko didn’t pay the people from Main Base a lot of attention. Her magical sense kept them in peripheral vision, of course, as she needed to be aware if something happened in that area. But her main concern was making sure that Cameron had the power he needed to work.
Lizzie made a frustrated sound and stopped abruptly. “Noriko. I’m having a hard time focusing on three things at once. I need to direct Cameron and Lars on what can be moved and how, but I can’t seem to do that and give Lars power at the same time. Can you cover for me?”
“Of course,” Noriko agreed instantly. She was surprised the woman had even tried. Just gathering up power and channeling it into something usable was taking concentration on her part. In a perfect world, Lizzie could have done both seamlessly, but this situation was as far from perfect as they could get. She was done with dictating notes and taking pictures now, as this area was hardly a virgin scene anymore. She had attention to spare now. “Lars, how much do you want?”
“What you’re feeding Cameron is spot on. What is that, 13 KMs?”
“Yes.” She shifted her stance so that she was more in between the men, and focused so that she could feed two constant streams of power to them. There were times, like now, that Noriko felt more like a human generator than anything.
Call to Quarters (A Gaeldorcraeft Forces Novel Book 1) Page 7