Ryker Petrović

[Ryker]

Dayton, 2044

The first line of fencing rolled away. It was chain link, over ten feet high, and mounded with rolls of barbed wire across the top. From the passenger seat, Ryker paid little attention to it. Then they rolled up to the second check-point, another line of fencing. The barbed wire atop this one was broken along the top. Strands of it swayed down like stringy hair. When the mechanism that rolled the fence locked up, the two ‘scientists’ in the car exchanged looks. After about a minute of the rollers banging, guards came out to manually pull it back. The intel was correct, then. Things had gone to shit since the Nuclear Power Safety Commission was defunded. That boded well for what was waiting inside.

There were plenty of parking spaces near the front. Their cover was as employees from another plant coming in to provide support when some key personnel recently took sick. One was even in the hospital. That meant their vehicle cleanly rolled into the visitor lot near the main entrance. Short walk in. Quick way out again. Climbing out, the first time Ryker noticed was the twin cooling towers loomed high overhead. The morning was foggy and the sun not quite up. The top of the tower seemed to disappear into the clouds.

Their path took them away from the ominous cooling tower. A minute later, Ryker and Johann entered the administration building. It had the feel of a third-world military base. The walls were bare concrete, 5-foot thick in most places. The kind of thickness required to contain meltdowns. Steel grates made the floor. Water circulated underneath that. The main steam vents would be inside the cooling tower, but water-filled pipes followed them everywhere. Another sign of protection against the worst possible outcome always in view. The people that worked here daily must be numb to it by now. Or else strung out with constant anxiety. Turnover in the industry was pretty high. Their footsteps echoed as they walked despite both men wearing loafers. Painted lines on the floor indicated directions. Red signs with angry symbols issued warnings where not to go without proper protective gear.

At the end of a long hallway, Ryker and Johann split apart. Johann to the left toward the command center, Ryker to the right toward the main reactor. Neither said goodbye. Each had their own task, their own scope of the mission. If one didn’t make it back, the other wouldn’t miss them. It was the kind of action where men were left behind if things went to hell. Neither one gave much of a fuck about the other. 

Schematics and videos and virtual walk-throughs were one thing, but he’d never walked the inside of a facility like this. He’d practiced the experience on VR headsets for the last two-days, but like that scouting run yesterday, it was entirely different to see it yourself.

The entrance to the main reactor was up a short flight of stairs. At the top was a round steel door that looked more like an enormous bank vault than the portal to the greatest power on earth. His hair stood up on the back of his neck about then, though he couldn’t explain the menacing feeling. Dont be a pussy, he told himself and entered.

He knew he was being tracked. Wioletta would know he was approaching the reactor just as she would know Johann was nearing the command center. Given that neither of them were competent nuclear physicists, it was she who was going to be responsible for relaying orders. Johann simply had to upload a malware into the command system. Something easier done from an internal terminal than even the best Custody hackers could accomplish on short notice. Besides, malware was only part of the job. Sabotaging the coolant system would require a physical presence, which was where Ryker came in. He passed through the manual door on the exterior of the vault. A baseline radian check scanned him for radioactivity. Markers on his coat gave a color-code of the same. He had 45 maximum minutes inside to maintain safe radioactivity exposure, which was plenty of time.

Massimo should be entering the adjacent reactor auxiliary building at the same time. It was separated from the reactor core by a 3-foot thick reinforced concrete wall, but the auxiliary building was the only space large enough to haul big equipment in and out of the core. Beyond the concrete was another 3-feet of open air followed a 2-inch thick steel annulus separating the outside world from the reactions taking place inside.

Inside the very dome that Ryker was currently entering.

The reactor dome looked almost exactly as he expected it from the inside. Bridgeways carried him across enormous pits filled with water so black they might as well have been pools to hell. The core rods would be submerged down there. That much power so close, it was a marvel that mankind was able to bend it to will. What would it feel like to harness that kind of power? 

Looking at the water, another menacing wave passed his senses almost as if it had been reading his mind. He frowned, surprised by what was clearly his imagination creeping up. He shook it off and proceeded.

He walked past an enormous control panel. Electric boxes larger than some vehicles were embedded in the grid. Rows and rows of power plugs thick as his arms dangled ready to be tapped into. He imagined plugging in to one of them would feel like tapping honey straight from the beehive.

Interesting, certainly, but the power grid wasn’t Ryker’s target. It was something far more mechanical.

There were rows of condensers built into the side of the reactor tower as tall high as two-story building. On top of each condenser was a single massive turbine spinning relentlessly. Three lower-pressure turbines flanked it. Together, they pulled the cold water up from the cooling lakes through hundreds of thousands of tiny pipes. It would flood the hot water coming off from the reactor rods inside the pools, siphon them back to the cooling towers where the heat would become steam. The steam condensed back to droplets and dripped back down to the underground lake and start all over again. Relentlessly swirling. One sweet circle of hot and cold where even a small disruption to that balance was dangerous.

But if the turbines were knocked out, the water pumps would slow. The heat would build too high and the system would be switched off until backups could be engaged. In the command center, Johann through the oversight of Wioletta, would make sure the backups stayed off-line once the malware was deployed. As she explained back in Moscow, a meltdown was absolutely to be avoided, but Massimo was to reengage the backups before that happened. With Ryker inside the reactor core to trigger the manual disruption of the turbines, he would also prefer that the system come back on as planned. Wioletta was right about that. He wanted to avoid melting his skin off.

Massimo waited like an overlord to provide ammunition should they be compromised and serve as a communication relay if necessary. Finally, back at the safe house, their team leader was monitoring the energy summit taking place where at the precise moment the Ascendancy’s speech would begin.

Speaking of. He checked an analog watch on his wrist... It was about that time.