The Dark Between The Stars

NINETEEN
LEE ISWANDER

Surging heat plumes turned Sheol’s red magma into an angry yellow-white storm. Iswander stared at the horrific beauty from his tower windows while the harpy song of alarms shrieked from dozens of systems.

Rlinda Kett began heading for the door of the office deck. “I know shit hitting the fan when I see it. You have an evacuation protocol?”

Iswander hadn’t been able to study the cautionary report Pannebaker prepared, and he needed more time to develop a modified emergency response plan. “The situation might be beyond the scenarios we modeled.”

Rlinda looked at him in astonishment. “You live in… this and you aren’t ready to evacuate on a moment’s notice?”

Iswander was scanning the reports on the screens, the stranded smelter barge with the breached hull. He forced down panic. “Let’s not go overboard, Captain Kett. Everything here was built to withstand the heat.”

The structure of Tower One began to groan. As the ceramic-metal pilings were heated beyond their tolerance levels, the deck shifted noticeably. Iswander grabbed his desk for balance and activated the comm. He broadcast over the full-facility loudspeakers. “This is Lee Iswander, activating emergency protocols. Team leaders, get your crews to safety. Take emergency shelter precautions. Go into your bolt-holes if necessary. I want structural integrity reports for Towers One, Two, and Three. We’ll have evacuation ships on standby if this gets worse.”

Iswander knew how to keep awkward information confidential, but he was going to have to rely on every possible option now. He turned to the trader woman. “We don’t have enough ships for an immediate and total evacuation—not nearly enough.” Didn’t budget for it, didn’t plan for it—but he wasn’t going to say that. “We did not foresee any circumstance that would require us to abandon the facility completely.”

But Garrison Reeves had warned of this. All of his employees knew that Iswander had received, and dismissed, the man’s warning. Now he had to salvage the situation, or he was going to look terrible.

The material tolerances should hold, unless the heat grew significantly worse.

His five enormous smelter barges had the best hull shielding, and he hoped they could withstand the increased heat from the plume, even though one was already foundering, taking on magma in the lower compartments. Iswander contacted the other four barge pilots. “Do you have room for evacuees? We might need you to carry a few dozen people until this simmers down.”

One of the barge pilots responded, “I don’t like the readings from our hull, Mr. Iswander. We’re well into the red zone and softening up here ourselves.”

Iswander pounded on the transmit button. “And I don’t like the readings from Tower Three! Get over there and rescue as many as you can.”

A second barge pilot broke in. “Will do, sir, but just because these barges look big doesn’t mean we have any spare room. Most of the vessel is for lava processing and metal storage. Only a few small chambers on the bridge level are shielded enough for habitation.”

“Understood.” He should have planned better, should have paid attention to worse-case scenarios no matter how problematic they might be. He’d been reluctant to listen to Garrison’s paranoia, more intent on quieting the rumors and keeping the workers calm than on assessing the problem. Dammit! These structural materials should stand up to the thermal stresses! It was in the design. He was supposed to be able to rely on his people when they gave him assessments.

The Tower Three supervisor called in, “We’re tilting at an alarming angle here. Our struts are buckling.”

Through the window wall of the admin deck, Iswander saw cumbersome smelter barges lurch toward Tower Three. He had 450 people in that structure, and if each barge could take only a dozen or so refugees under the best circumstances… Maybe it wouldn’t collapse. Maybe the material strength and heat tolerance were higher than projected.

Maybe that was wishful thinking.

Tower One began to groan again. A keepsake beverage mug from Iswander’s son slid off the smooth desktop and thumped on the floor.

“You’ve got one more ship.” Rlinda activated her comm. “Tamblyn, we need the Curiosity. Dump whatever cargo you’ve loaded and hook up to the Tower One heat tube. It’s going to be standing room only, but we’ll get all the people aboard that we can.”

Tasia responded, “Going to the cockpit right now to prep. Robb is over there—make sure he gets aboard.”

Standing near the windowport, Iswander could see the rippling surface of the landing deck. Blistering heat radiated through the special insulated glass. Three empty company ships were in shielded structures on the landing platform, along with his own private cruiser. He switched his desk comm to a secure channel. If the disaster grew worse, he had to set priorities. “Mr. Pannebaker, get my wife and son to our cruiser and take off. Once I know that they’re safe, I can better deal with the crisis here.”

Rlinda added, “If you don’t have enough lifeboats for everyone, you’d better cram your cruiser as full as you can. That’s another twenty people? Thirty? We’ll need every spot.”

Iswander was more angry than panicked. This wasn’t supposed to be happening. His engineers had guaranteed him that these structures were safe! Geologists had analyzed the tidal stresses, the magma temperatures; materials scientists had approved the tolerance levels of the ceramic-metal composites. This should not have been a problem!

Tower Three transmitted dozens of alarms, and the supervisor grew more panicked. The first smelter barge approached the distressed tower, positioning itself so it could link with the access hatch and take on a group of evacuees.

The Tower Two supervisor called out, “Save room for us! Our systems are already failing.”

Robb Brindle rushed in from the records vault, breathless. “What’s going on?” At the window wall, he watched the Voracious Curiosity lift off from the raised landing deck and circle around. “Where’s Tasia going?”

As soon as the ship was in the air, the cargo hatch opened. Pallets of specialized metal products, foams, ceramic alloys, and stacked ingots tumbled out like discarded garbage, falling into the broiling yellow soup of molten rock. The Curiosity came back, buffeted from side to side as a thermal hurricane stirred the air.

Tasia Tamblyn’s voice came over the comm. “I’ll land on the deck close to the access tube, but even the platform looks questionable to me.”

Iswander sounded a full-fledged evacuation. Personnel in Tower One were to fill the ships waiting on the landing deck. It was complete chaos.

The facility comm lines were a chatter of overlapping queries, shouts, and contradictory orders. On the private channel, Pannebaker broke in, “Londa and Arden are aboard your cruiser, Chief, and we fit twenty other people aboard. If we stick around, I could maybe take five more, but—”

“I want them safe now.” Iswander no longer had any faith in safety margins.

“Understood, Chief.”

The private cruiser lifted off into the smoke-stirred sky just in time for Tasia Tamblyn to land the Curiosity on the open grid next to the access tube. “All right, we’re open for business. Get people aboard.”

Iswander dispatched a pair of large company ships over to Tower Two to rescue maybe a hundred more workers. It wouldn’t be enough, but he had no more ships to give. He promised to send more nevertheless, reassuring the doomed people.

When the first vessel landed on the Tower Two access deck, though, the evac hatch wouldn’t open. “It’s fused shut!” the pilot cried.

The tower supervisor yelled through the static-filled comm, “We have to get out of here!”

“Send your compies to assist the evac ships,” Iswander said. “We’ve got twenty of them outside now.” The special heat-shielded robots were designed for maintenance of external systems and they should be able to withstand the conditions. He just didn’t know if they could do any good.

The smooth, shielded compies crawled outside Tower Two and worked their way to the fused evac hatch. Blunt-headed models manufactured to endure extreme heat, they looked more like beetles than miniature humans. The robots scuttled around the hatch, using their specialized tools to attack controls that had melted shut.

“We’re working on the problem,” Iswander said to Tower Two in his cool administrator voice. “Stand by.” He felt light-headed, and sweat prickled on his forehead.

One of the smelter barges finally attached to the evacuation hatch on the bottom deck of Tower Three. As the remaining three barges closed in, one veered off, declaring an emergency just like the first stranded barge. “Lower hull breach! Lava flooding the lower chambers. We’re going to get cooked in here.”

Iswander didn’t know what to do. “Your habitation chambers are insulated. Just hold on.” His hopeful words sounded empty, but the desperate workers clung to them because they had no other choice.

Moments later, Tower Three collapsed and came crashing down into the lava.