A massive forklift held a steel barrel in midair, poised. Right where the driver left it when he poofed.
“I’m starting the sequence,” Jack said, typing furiously, rattled, terrified, but giddy, too.
The robot moved faster than Caine had expected. It perched like a predatory insect above the too-blue water.
It was hot in the room. The emergency generators didn’t keep the air-conditioning running and the temperature began rising almost instantly.
“How long?” Caine demanded.
“To extract it, make it relatively safe, transport it to the used-fuel cooling facility and—”
“We aren’t going to have time for all that,” Caine said. “Drake’s already shooting. We need to get out of here.”
“Caine, there’s no way to—” Jack began.
“Just grab the fuel rod. Yank it up out of that pool. I’ll take care of the rest,” Caine said.
“Caine, we have to follow procedure just to get the rod out of here. The only way out is through—”
Caine raised both hands. He focused on the convex dome over their heads, the containment vessel that would hold the radiation in if there was ever an accident.
He blasted the concrete with all his power. There was a wallop of sound that hurt Caine’s eardrums.
“What are you doing?” Jack cried.
“Caine!” Diana shouted.
The concrete would not give. Not at this distance. Not with nothing to use as a projectile.
Caine aimed his power at the forklift.
“Be ready, Jack,” Caine grated.
The forklift flew. Like an invisible god had kicked it. It hurtled in a straight line. So fast, it broke the sound barrier with a loud bang that was immediately swallowed up in the far louder crash of steel and iron blowing a hole through concrete.
“How strong you think that fuel rod is?” Caine asked.
“Are you insane?” Diana cried.
“Just in a hurry,” Caine said.
Drake squeezed the trigger.
A line of bullets chewed concrete just in front of Dekka.
Drake fought the recoil and raised the weapon just slightly, and the impacts advanced toward Dekka, who just stared at onrushing death.
Suddenly Drake was on his back. The gun, still in his hands, was blazing away at the ceiling.
A wheel bounced crazily around the room then fell onto a desk with a loud crash.
Drake let go of the trigger. He scrambled to his feet. He looked at the wheel, unable to make sense of it. How had a wheel gone flying through the air, through the hole?
Orc.
Drake ejected the magazine and racked in a replacement. He was bruised and shaken but not badly hurt. He crept back to the hole, cautious lest something else came flying in.
Dekka was no longer on the ground.
Orc was . . .
A massive gravel hand reached in and missed Drake’s head by inches.
Drake fired blindly at the hole.
Then he turned and ran.
THIRTY-SEVEN
01 HOUR, 6 MINUTES
THE JEEP BLEW through the gate. Edilio drove straight to where a shaken, bruised, and seriously angry Dekka was picking herself up off the concrete.
“What happened?” Sam demanded, leaping from the front seat.
The adrenaline was finally kicking in. But even now he felt strangely disconnected. Even now, rushing toward trouble. Like it wasn’t really his trouble. Like it was some other part of him that was doing this.
“I tried to fly,” Dekka said in a low growl. She shook her head and bent over to squeeze her knee. “Ow.”
“We heard something louder than gunfire,” Edilio said. “Like thunder. Or like an explosion.”
“Sorry, I wasn’t noticing thunder,” Dekka said.
Orc came loping over from one direction and Howard from the other.
“Orc, man, that was a seriously cool move,” Howard enthused. He ran to his friend and slapped the monster on the shoulder repeatedly.
“I owe you, Orc,” Dekka said.
“What just happened?” Sam repeated.
Howard answered. “Drake, man. He took a shot at Dekka. Dekka goes zooming up. Then, bam, comes down hard. Orc, man, Orc snatches up this motorcycle, right? He yanks the wheel off it and throws it at Drake. Like a Frisbee.” Howard actually clapped his hands in glee. “Right through the hole you burned in the wall, Sammy. Like sinking a full-court shot.”
“Gonna cost you,” Orc grumbled.
“Oh yeah,” Howard seconded. “Gonna cost. Orc doesn’t save the day for free.”
“No one else heard a really big sound?” Edilio pressed.
“We kind of had guns going off, Edilio,” Dekka snapped.
“You okay, Dekka?” Sam asked.
“I’ll live,” she said.
“Dekka: what do you think would happen to a cave or a mine shaft if you turned off gravity?” Sam asked.
“Is this a quiz?”
“No.”
Dekka nodded. “Okay. I guess if I hit it a few times, on-off, on-off, like that, I guess it would start to crumble. Probably collapse.”
“Yeah.” Sam put his hand on her shoulder. “I have to ask you to do something.”
“I’m going to guess that you want me to crash a cave or a mine shaft. So?”
“So it’s not just some mine shaft,” Edilio said darkly. “There’s a thing inside it. It’s . . . I don’t know how to explain it. It gets inside you. It makes you scared.”
“I need you to go with Edilio. Seal this thing in,” Sam said. “Howard? I need you and Orc to get back to town. I can’t believe I’m even saying this, but I need you two to keep an eye on things in town.”