Fantastic Children 2 Ch.23

Chapter 23: Unforeseen

Dumas swore.  He ought to have worn his bodysuit under the designer outfit, even if it did ruin the lines.  Still, he was not a complete idiot.  The bodysuit was in the escape pod.  He made his way to the pod through the killing winds, away from the shelter of the station.  The parka did little to shield his face or bare hands, and did nothing at all to protect his thinly clad legs, but he managed to get to the pod and activated the hatch control.

A message flashed: Not Recognized. The hatch did not open.

Somebody had coded a recognition lock on the escape pod.

Dumas tried again and again to open the hatch, with the same result.  Inside were shelter, protection, warmth and life. He was left out in the cold.

The backs of his legs were numb and nerveless already where the wind was hitting them.  His only hope of survival now was to get back to Sei station. He turned into the wind and it howled in his face, scouring his skin and eyes with glasslike ice fragments that filled the hood, melted cold against his ears, and dripped down his neck.  He staggered into the sheltering wall, where the wind was less fierce, and found the door again.  It was still locked.  He didn't know where any other door might be. He pounded and pounded on this one with his fists, as the wind drained the life from his body

---

Hesma stumbled through Sei station, his mind a numbed blur. How had it come to this?  Why was he here?  Their journey had ended.  He was…dead.

It was supposed to be over.

What sick cosmic joke had brought him back again?  And put him on Earth again?  And sent Dumas against him again?

Before Hesma could get his mental bearings, a hand seized his shoulder.

"Where have you BEEN?" Doctor Mellert demanded. "Don't you know everyone's waiting for you?" She rushed him along a corridor.

"But I have to find…Tina…" No, Tina had been found. The facts of his current life, Castor's life, returned to him.  "Pollux, I need to find Pollux—"

"After the demonstration," Mellert ordered. They arrived at the hangar, and Mellert took a moment to compose her facial expression before they entered the room.

The hurry had been pointless in any case.  Randolph Phelps was busy making a speech.  It was all about Brightwater Industries, and Hesma was sure Phelps was good for at least another fifteen minutes of self-congratulatory rhetoric. Mellert pushed her way to stand beside Phelps, Castor held before her on display, her hands clutching his shoulders like the talons of a harpy.

Hesma took in the sight of Castor's generator.  Even now, he couldn't help being proud of what Castor had accomplished, as if he was the child's father, instead of the child's own spirit.

Of course, the machine could only have been designed by either a completely insane sociopath, or a child too young to understand the magnitude of the atrocity he was about to commit.

Now Phelps was talking about Castor and his achievements, and the patents Brightwater held in his name. Mellert's hands relaxed on his shoulders slightly.  She would not be pleased when he put an end to this pompous occasion.  

Because he must.  Castor had designed the generator to channel power from the Zone.  While that might or might not be dangerous in and of itself, Castor had carefully calculated the direction of the power dispersal and built his generator upside down.  When activated, a beam of pure Orsel energy would shoot down into the sea, and into the bedrock under the Antarctic Ocean. The full power of the Zone would heat the ocean floor white-hot, bringing the sea to a boil, causing huge ice melts, and earthquakes and tsunamis all over the planet. When Antarctica's ice had boiled away, most of Earth's land would be under water.

Obviously, that had to be prevented.  It would be murder on a global scale.  Hesma wasn't a murderer.

Was he?

Antarctica could be so cold…

"…and with a continued tradition of innovation and responsibility, Brightwater will lead the planet into a brighter and more sustainable future.  Mr. Weaver, would you care to say a few words before turning on the juice?"

The entire room focused on him, eyes staring from every direction. For a moment Hesma stared back.  Then he twisted out of Mellert's grip and ran for the door and through it.  He ran as fast as he could, back to the exit corridor, back to the door.

Someone was sill thumping on that door, very weakly.

Hesma threw it open, and in a blast of icy wind and snow, Dumas fell through.

---

"Well, it seems our young genius has a touch of stage fright," Doctor Mellert said cheerfully. There was an indulgent chuckle from the audience. She was going to kill the kid when she got her hands on him.  

Mellert approached the control panel and started prodding at it. Blast, why couldn't Castor have provided a clearly marked 'on' button?

---

Dumas lay in the corridor.  The freezing room felt almost warm by comparison with the outdoors.  There were entire sections of his body he could feel nothing in any more. And the ones he could feel, hurt.

Castor had backed away from him as far as he could in the little room, and was staring at him again as if he were some sort of dangerous venomous reptile.

The feeling began to come back to Dumas's fingers.  They were on fire with stabbing needles. He weakly sat up.

Suddenly the floor vibrated, and the ice under their feet glowed. The little boy's face went white.

"They've activated the machine," he said.

"The machine," said Dumas dully.  Hadn't Palza said something about Castor building something dangerous?  And hadn't Hasmodai, though clearly of questionable sanity, said something about it opening the Zone? "How do we turn it off?"

"We don't," said Castor. "It was designed NOT to turn off.  But I think Castor may have forgotten about the fact that we're on an ice island, and not allowed for melt time and refraction. We need to get out of here, right now.  How did you get to the island, Dumas?"

"Escape pod," said Dumas. "But I'm locked out of it.  Someone programmed a recognition lock on the hatch."

"Give me your energy pack," Castor ordered.  Dumas fumbled in his pocket until the boy grew impatient and took it himself. "Come on," Castor said. "On your feet. There's no time to lie there and warm up. The island is melting out from under us as we speak!"

Dumas staggered up. "Ah, not again," he said as Castor opened the door to the storm and dragged him into it.

They made their way to the pod.  Castor pressed the energy pack against the hatch and had it open in seconds.  Dumas collapsed gratefully into the copilot's seat as Castor closed the hatch and started the pod engine.

"Sloppy work," said the boy.  "Must have been Tarlant.  Never let him lock anything important."

"So, are you Hesma again?" The boy only gave him a sour, suspicious look and took off.

The pod circled the island.  Below, Dumas could see that the people were hastily evacuating the station already, piling into motorized inflatable boats and being taken to the large ship anchored nearby.

The whole island sparked and flickered with glowing energy like a fantastically huge gem, sending off beams into the ocean at extraordinary angles.

"It looks…it looks…"

"Unless it destroys itself when it destroys the island, it looks like the end of the world," said Hesma sharply. "Do you have another vessel nearby?  Did you bring any weapons?  WHY is there no scanning equipment in this pod?" He snarled with frustration.

If it is Armageddon, thought Dumas, staring at the glowing island, at least it's beautiful.

---

Hasmodai leaned on the rail of the hovercraft, head resting against the clear canopy that shielded them from the bitterness outside. The sea was black and cold.  There was nothing visible below the surface.

But down there, he knew, unless it had all been the product of a damaged brain, lay the Atalanta.  Down there, unless she had been the figment of a tormented imagination, his soul mate slept and waited to return to a home two hundred million light years away.

He ignored the well-meant inquiries as to how he was, ignored the questions about where he had been.  He didn't know the answers, not for certain any more.  Where he was now, it seemed, was reality. Where he had been, real or not, was his own and Pirya's private world.

Not too far away floated Sei Station on its island of ice.  It had been decided to follow Dumas, so that they would be close at hand to lend aid if it was needed. With the pod no longer equipped with scanning controls, Dumas might otherwise find it difficult to make his way back to the ship.

Hasmodai felt someone come to stand behind him. He felt the pressure of a hand on his shoulder.  He kept staring down into the sea.

"Agi, I think you need to come look at this," Soreto called, and the hand and the presence were removed.

"What is it?"

"The scanners are showing some sort of energy surge from the island."

"Oh, no!  He's activated it!" Palza's voice.

Hasmodai raised his eyes to Sei Station Island.  The ice was lit from within, flickering with blue luminescence. Spears of jagged light shot off into the sea.  

That's not how it's supposed to work, Hasmodai thought.  Not if it's Poromet's generator. He knew, he had pieced together the original himself, just because he had wanted to understand how it worked.  He had even considered activating it, just for a moment, to charge the Atalanta's energy cells—releasing a little Orsel from Earth's zone might actually alleviate the current overcharge—but Pirya had been so furious that he was playing with the generator at all that he hadn't dared even suggest it.

Unless someone shut down whatever Hesma had built, Hasmodai supposed Earth was in for another ice age.  He sighed and looked down into the sea again.  Would the Atalanta charge in time, or would it be stuck here through another twenty thousand years or so? If it existed.

The spears of Orsel from the station lit up the ocean like an underwater lightning storm, sending a blue glow through every iceberg.  In the flickerings, he could almost imagine he saw the Atalanta, the radial pattern of ambient power collectors scoring its arched hull like the stripes of a sea urchin.

A sizzle of energy shot from Sei Station to crackle over a rounded shape below. He COULD see the Atalanta. Whether it had drifted here, or whether it had been attracted to and drawn by the power being emitted, it was here, just beneath them.  And appeared to be growing larger.

"We have to move the ship!" he shouted.  

The others, clustered around the scanner display, stared at him.

"We have to move!" he shouted again.  "The Atalanta is rising!  The cells have been charged by the Orsel coming off the station!"

Seth turned to Palza.  "I thought you fixed his head."

"So did I" Palza had Hesma's scanner out again and was pointing it at him, frowning.

"We have to go NOW!"

"All right, all right," Seth said, after Agi had given him a nod. He took the wheel of the hovercraft and powered the engines.

"Hurry!"

"Where are we going?"

"ANYWHERE!"

Seth gunned the engine, shaking his head.

"FASTER!"

Seth accelerated.  "If you're in such a hurry, why didn't you just take the wheel yourself?"

It hadn't actually occurred to Hasmodai.  He shrugged.  "You're the man of action, Lord Seth.  I'm busy doing all the thinking."

"I'm not sure I like the implication—HEY! HEY!"

"Everyone, strap yourselves in!"

Under the hovercraft, the sea began to surge and curl away from the rising hull. They were being pushed by the tide, sliding out of control over the rising ship.  They went over the edge, plunging down into the ocean, and bobbing to the surface, protected from swamping by the sealed canopy.  The sea rushed in to fill the hole the Atalanta had left, taking them with it, nearly smashing the hovercraft against the Atalanta's still emerging sensor tail. They were left spinning as a huge wave radiated outward to lift and tumble the icebergs.

When the wave hit Sei Station Island, the fractured, stressed ice gave way.  The island broke into pieces, and as the segment containing the station slowly rolled over, Hasmodai saw a beam of pure blue light lift from the waves and rotate to point upward.

Yes, Hasmodai thought.  That's how it's supposed to look.

And as the Atalanta flew by overhead, the beam moved across its hull, pervading the ship with its energy, until it penetrated to the very heart of the vessel, to the place where Poromet's generator sat waiting silently.

And the world tore apart.