“What’s going on?” Roquette asked a little winded, Derrick close behind her.

“Derrik! Get in there and make sure Fink makes it up here, then close the door!” Lewis shouted, pointing down the stairs. “Alice, see if you can help Lindy. I’m not ordering an evacuation yet but be ready.”

Lewis ran back to where Telini was touching an icon on the desk, then reading a little and then tapping another icon. Telini put a finger on a flashing red icon and moved his hand to the right, the symbol slid across the desktop and when he released it with an extra tap it bloomed into an entire workstation.

“This is yours,” he told Lewis. “It’s the reactor, talk to it.”

“This ain’t the reactor!” Lewis said, feeling a slight panic building. “I’m a mechanic, not a computer tech.”

“Look at it,” Telini said, in an icy calm voice. “It’s easy like lego instructions, think stuck gas pedal and bad brakes. I’m working on the brakes, you need to slow down the engine or we’re going to throw a rod.”

“Ok,” Lewis answered, studying the layout on the screen. On the right, a column of numbers, the top ones with a larger font, were changing color from yellow to orange as the numbers increased in size. The icon above the numbers said ‘core and fuel’. On the left, an icon symbolized ‘water and steam’, and the numbers were decreasing. He saw that a couple of the numbers had red dots next to them. A diagram of the reactor filled the bottom center of the screen with corresponding marks for the location of each temperature or flow meter. The top of the screen was filled with text, explaining, in words he didn’t understand, how the system functioned. At the bottom of the text box was a tool bar with the words; engineer, technician, student. He poked the word student and the entire screen went blank, replaced by a message that indicated that he was not authorized to run the reactor. ‘Auto emergency cool down in progress’, flashed in red letters.

“Please step away from the display, you are not authorized to use manual controls,” A female voice said firmly. “You may observe.”

Telini stepped back. “What happened?”

“Well, I guess I told the computer we didn’t know what to do,” Lewis chuckled.

“Ok, let’s observe,” Telini said, putting his finger on an icon that said ‘comprehensive display’. The screen went blank, and then a complicated diagram filled the entire desktop, with a ‘you are here’ asterisk by the center power plant. A crawler at the bottom indicated what the systems self-diagnostic program was finding out.

“What now?” Roquette asked, coming out of the conference room.

“When I woke up this control panel, it must have also started the reactor,” Telini informed her. “Right now it’s trying to decide whether to blow up this side of the mountain or not.”

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

“Look, it found a blockage and it’s diverting the water around it,” Lewis said, pointing at a growing blue line heading toward the reactor. “It’ll be there in a few minutes.”

“That’s good, cause the temperature readings just turned red,” Telini sounded calm, but he was gripping the edge of the desktop and staring at the rapidly climbing numbers adjacent to the reactor icon. “They’re at two thousand ninety-five, at around twenty-eight hundred the system should go critical. No amount of water’s gonna help us then.”

As if to accentuate his statement, the crawler disappeared, it was replaced with red letters that said, ‘Time to melt down twelve minutes’. While they looked at the screen, the twelve disappeared and was replaced by eleven. They heard an explosion somewhere in the hallway, making everybody wince.

Lewis looked back at the board and he saw a flashing red icon, with text next to it, ‘step-down transformer failure, dispatching fire crew.’

The blue line was getting closer to the reactor and another blue line was forming and moving toward the reactor core from the other side.

“Four thousand degrees,” Telini intoned. “How far away is the water?”

The timer indicated that they had ten minutes.

Something was rattling outside in the hall, so Lewis sent Roquette to check, and she and Derrick jogged over to look.

“Hey boss,” she called from the doorway. “You might want to see this!”

“Keep me posted,” he told Telini.

Roquette and Derrick were looking out the door and around the corner to the left. The rattling sound was increasing. When Lewis looked into the big hallway he saw two tracked vehicles. Each one was four feet wide and five feet tall, they were orange and had flashing lights and water cannons mounted on top of them. The one on their side of the hallway stopped in front of them.

”Please withdraw to a safe distance,” it said, sounding like it had blown a speaker. The first word sounded normal, and then the rest sounded tinny and raspy. “Spectating is not helpful, move along.”

It rushed off to catch up with the other vehicle. Lewis could see billowing smoke further down in the hallway.

“Your water has arrived,” Telini said when they got back. “But it doesn’t seem to be helping yet. We’re at twenty-three fifty and seven minutes. Here comes the other water now, let’s see, twenty-four, twenty-five, six minutes.”

“Six minutes till what?” Gomez asked, coming from the conference room with a towel in her hands.

“Till we have a meltdown,” Roquette answered.

“What kind of a meltdown?” Gomez asked tentatively.

“There’s a reactor core in there,” Telini told her. “And it’s overheating.”

“No!” she screamed. “You’ll kill my patient, now make it stop!” She threw the towel on the floor and gazed up at Telini in fury.

“Hey,” Roquette pointed at the display, which now said seven minutes. “Tony, what’s going on?”

“Well, it looks like it’s heating up more slowly,” Telini said, trying to keep an eye on Gomez while looking at the desktop. “It’s still heating up, but it’s only at twenty-four fifty-five. The water’s working.”

Lewis took Gomez by the arm and steered her into the conference room. “Let’s check on your patient.”

Mr. Dingo was talking to Larry in quiet tones. Larry looked pale, but was keeping occupied by answering Mr. Dingo’s questions. Gomez was still out of breath from her outburst. She stopped dead in her tracks when she saw that Dingo was awake.