Chapter 97: Indirect Environmental Hazard
The clearing was so quiet it didn’t even feel real.
The Ghostbird came down through the tops of the pines on her own and settled onto the dirt trail nose-first into the morning.
I stepped down out of all that noise into a cold stillness that smelled like wildflowers, while the shivering fear of maybe not having made it in time rolled inside of me, right over the hopeful anticipation of the exact opposite.
For a second I just stood there in it, because thirty kilometers back a plant was dying and a massive horde was screaming, and here a bird was singing somewhere and my own breath coming out in white plumes and not one single thing trying to kill me.
The tent arched over all of it, my truck and the trail and twenty meters of grass sealed under a membrane that no amount of what I’d just started was getting through.
"Home stretch, booger," I said, and my voice came out wrong in the quiet, too loud, still pitched for a stairwell full of the dead. "No point standing here like an idiot. What happens... happens."
The Ascender’s back was where I’d left it, and so was Nia.
She was on the queen bed, clean, in the white gown that the System had put her in, drip still running into her left arm, the little monitors ticking their slow green lines beside the mattress on the kitchen counter, her face peaceful as though she was in a deep dreamless sleep.
She hadn’t moved. She wouldn’t, not for a while; System made sure of that.
Both eyes were still bruised, still healing off the damage my own fists had put there, and I made myself look at that longer than necessary, before making myself get to work, because looking was a luxury and she needed hands, not eyes.
I’d rigged a litter in the Ghostbird’s cabin on my way here, belts to secure her. It was basically a full emergency medical wing.
So I settled the TK around her, soft, softer than my own two hands could ever manage, that held tension running out from the spot between my eyebrows and cradling her whole body so nothing folded and nothing pulled, and I lifted her off the bed a few centimeters and floated her out through the back of the truck and across the cold grass toward the bird.
Seeing she didn’t stir, I breathed a sigh of quiet relief.
The drip and the monitors came with her, along with everything else, floating alongside inside a massive TK grip, the lines never once going tight.
Gently, I brought her up into the cabin and laid her onto the litter and strapped her down across the hips and the chest and nowhere near either shoulder, while at the same time, settling her monitors and the drip.
And then I got the ear pro.
Because this thing was loud enough to draw an entire city on its back, and there was not one chance in this world I was flying her even thirty seconds in this thing with her ears bare.
I seated the cups over her ears even more carefully than I seat my own, adjusting the band, tucking the strands of that messy black hair out from under it, checking it sat right, twice.
"There..." I said quietly, to a woman who couldn’t hear me either way. "Now you can’t hear my music."
Tikki flowed off my shoulder and down onto the litter, and put himself against her hip as though this was where his true place was.
While I went back out and packed up the world.
The Ascender went into Inventory with a touch and a thought, eleven tons of rolling house folding down into one slot, gone.
The tent came next, the whole 31,500-Credit membrane peeling up off its anchors and collapsing down into another slot before I swung up into the cabin, and told the bird to fly.
"West," I said, feeling the strength slowly draining from me. "And keep us high. I want to be a long way away before the wind out of that plant catches up with us."
-Ding!
{
Prevailing wind: East.
Time to safe separation: adequate.
}
The rotors came up, the clearing dropped away, and the Ghostbird stood us up into the grey and turned her nose away from the rising sun.
I sat in the open door with my boots hanging over, eyes staring east, as though I could see the most evil thing I had ever done even from thirty kilometers away.
There was no mushroom cloud.
That’s the thing nobody who hasn’t seen one expects, but I’d braced for one anyway, some part of me still waiting on the movie version, and it never came, because a reactor is not a bomb and it does not do a bomb’s clean terrible geometry.
What it did was worse in a slower way.
A column of steam was coming up the distance, thick and dirty white, boiling straight up into the air where there was no wind yet to bend it, shot through underneath with something darker, and even from thirty kilometers away I saw a hard grey smudge of smoke spreading out.
-Ding!
{
Combatant Neutralized: Infected.
Indirect Environmental Hazard:
Radiation Exposure: Lethal Threshold Exceeded.
Reward: +150 Credits.
}
"It’s begun..." I glanced at the notification over in the corner of my eye.
Then -
-Ding!
{+150 Credits.}
It didn’t stop there.
And before long, the dings came faster than I could have counted them even if I’d tried, so I stopped trying and just watched the number start to move, slow at first and then not slow, every ding a thing dying in the poison that’d remain long after I would.
I sat in the door with the wind pulling at me and a sleeping woman strapped down behind me and a cat already asleep against her, while I watched one third of a country... my country start to die in a corner of my vision.
All the while, I ran the math over and over against the only thing that mattered.