‘Pete? What’s your ETA?’
Tom Erickson’s voice resonated in the tiny speakers positioned close to Peter Sherringham’s ears. He flicked his gaze to one corner of the holographic image in his headset. ‘Three minutes, 10 seconds, Tom.’
‘Copy that.’
Pete ran his fingers over the plastic control panel in the cockpit of the Silverback jet, George, and the plane ascended 400 metres on a sharp incline. At Mach 10, it covered the distance in a fraction of a second. Glancing back at the holoscreen, Pete could see two traces – two planes behind him – another Silverback piloted by Mai Buchanan, and the larger bulk of the Big Mac, the E-Force workhorse, with Stephanie Jacobs and Josh Thompson aboard.
‘Okay, guys.’ It was Mark Harrison, the team leader, speaking from where he stood next to Tom in Cyber Control at the E-Force base on Tintara Island. His voice could be heard by all four E-Force members in the three planes. ‘As we have a few minutes before you reach the target, I’d like to bring you up to speed. The BigEyes tell us the situation at St Maria is deteriorating fast.’ A schematic of the plant appeared on the team’s holoscreens. ‘As you know, Pump Number 4 blew. We’re not sure how or why. The engineers on site are unable to increase the flow of coolant to the core. Coolant is getting through from secondary backup systems, but it’s way too little, too late. The core housing has ruptured and the outer casing of the reactor itself is exposed. There’s been a very small radiation leak from this, but it also means we have a way of cooling the thing externally.’
Tom broke in. ‘The quencher tanks are on “max”, Steph. That means you have 50,000 litres of Quenchex to smother the flames. You then have a further 20,000 litres of liquid nitrogen to dump on the core itself. As you can imagine, you only have a small margin of error. Miss the flames and the liquid nitrogen will be ineffectual. Putting the fire out is only half the job, so both drops have to be within a metre of the target.’
‘So, no pressure then,’ Steph, in the Big Mac, laughed. ‘How long do we have?’
‘Tom reckons we have nine minutes until the reactor blows.’
‘Wonderful!’ Josh said. ‘Our ETA is six minutes 35, so we’ll have no more than two and a half minutes to get the core temperature down.’
‘I know,’ Mark responded. ‘Mai and Pete, you should be there a few minutes ahead of the Big Mac. You have to get a clear picture of the critical drop areas. Use the full spectrum analysers that’ve just been installed. Here’s a schematic of the plant.’
A 3D image of the St Maria Nuclear Power Plant appeared on the Silverback holoscreens. Tom described the layout. As he spoke, the image shifted perspective and different parts of it became enlarged to show more detail.
‘There’re four pumps,’ he explained. ‘In most reactors, failure in one or even two of the pumps would be manageable, but this place is old. In fact, it was due to be decommissioned
a year ago, but the Paraguayans managed to push it back. All four pumps need to be working at a constant 80 per cent plus efficiency rate to maintain stability for the core. Pump 4 has vaporised and the core temperature has risen rapidly. I can’t understand how it was left to get so bad. The warning systems must’ve also been offline. Anyway, the explosion has done us one favour. It just fell short of ripping open the reactor core itself, but it’s exposed the housing. This is the primary drop area. There’s a serious fire raging all around the Pump 4 module, but there’s also a very hot fire all over the core housing.’
‘How hot?’ Josh asked.
‘It’s a chemical fire, outdated insulation and piping material. We’re looking at 6000 degrees in places.’
Josh whistled.
‘And that, my friend, is why we only have...’ Tom paused for a second, ‘seven minutes 50 to put out the fire.’