Opening Acts

  *** ***

  In the few dozen seconds it took Stores Chief Sean Moriarty and his crew to suit up and force the locks open, the college intern-what was his name?-Sean struggled to remember. Carl. Carl Agre; that was it-lay dead amid the ruins of the fallen warehouse. Sean indulged himself with a string of obscenities. Not that he was surprised. But he had hoped.

  A small group of rocketbikers stood over the body. Sean shuffled over-damned low gee; it was supposed to make locomotion easier-and bent to examine Carl Agre's remains. Sean sighed. He was so goddamn sick and tired of burying the dead. He had fought in three wars, Downside; he had seen a lot of young dead. Hell, he thought, I'm a fucking death midwife.

  Commissioner Navio had recommended the kid for the job. Sean was not looking forward to that call.

  Then he got a look at the young man crouched beside the body. He adjusted his radio settings till he got a ping. "You related? A friend?"

  The young man said nothing. One of his companions said, "He's his brother."

  It just kept getting better. Sean waved the responders forward. "Get him inside." He moved in front of the young man, Carl's brother, and laid hands on the shoulders of his pressure suit. The youth would not have felt the touch, through the suit. Sean jostled him gently, to get his attention. It was hard to see the boy's eyes clearly, through the visor's shielding, but his gaze looked glassy.

  "We're taking your brother inside. We need to notify your parents. Come with us."

  "What…?" The kid seemed to come out of his daze. "Oh."

  As they turned, Sean caught a glimpse of Warehouse 1-H, which stood behind the ruins of this one. It had been hit by disassembler back-splash. Chunks were falling off, and Sean could see movement inside through the gaps. People? Yes. Some survivors were trapped in Warehouse 1-H.

  "Get a command center set up right away," Sean told Shelley Marcellina, his chief engineer. "We've got people trapped in the rubble over there."

  But Shelley, facing the opposite direction, gasped. "The ice." She was pointing over his shoulder.

  The ice-? Sean turned and looked where she was pointing. His view had been obscured by his visor and the outcropping-but from this vantage point, he could see it. Interior areas in the ice mountain were glowing; jets of steam spewed out. He could feel the heat of reaction on his face, even through the visor. Clouds billowed all around. The ground trembled.

  Terror surged in him. Three megatons of methane and water-the air, water, and fuel for over 200,000 people-was going up in wafts and jets of superheated gas.

  "It's a runaway. The reaction has outpaced the bugs' half-life. We've got to stop it." Sean sprang upright. "Let's move, people! Move!"

  Everyone hustled inside, two technicians carrying the body of Carl Agre. His brother, the young rocketbiker, and his friends followed behind.

  Before he moved Upside and became Phocaea's Deputy Commissioner of Stores and Warehousing, Sean had spent fifty-five years in the military. And if there was one thing he had learned, it was how to move fast in a crisis. Within minutes he had a command center set up, designated lieutenants, established priorities, and enacted communication protocols. He organized a team to pump neutralizer out to the ice, a team to check the bulkheads and seal off breaches, and a team to rescue those stranded in the other damaged warehouse. People were bringing the injured in; he assigned the medical techs to set up triage and first aid. Everyone scrambled. Then he and his engineers had a pow-wow. They laid down maps and piped in live images of the ice.

  Sean swore. The damned thing was nearly seven hundred feet on a side, and in the twelve minutes it had taken to set up command and lay the hoses, the ice was over a third gone. We're screwed.

  "Shelley, the hoses are way too slow. We have to get that bug-killing juice out there now. And the reaction is occurring in the core, where the heat is trapped. Not around the bottom edges."

  His chief engineer frowned at the images. "All our mobile equipment is down below, in Zekeston. Out here, everything is on tracks in the domes." She shrugged, looking grim. "There's not much we can do but lay hose and pump."

  "We're dead, then," Cal, a disassembler programmer, said. "We can't stop it. We're dead." His voice rose at the end to a shriek. Heads turned.

  "Calm down," Sean snapped, angry that Cal said what he had been thinking. "I need ideas. Not hysteria."

  "We can dive bomb it," someone said. "Hit it from above."

  Sean did not recognize the voice. He looked around. It was the kid, the one whose brother had just died. He stood at the opening to the triage area, helmet tucked under his arm.

  "Who let him in here?" one of the engineers asked, but Sean felt a tingling in his scalp. The rocketbikers and their nets, the kid meant. They could dive-bomb the ice, kill the reaction. "Go on."

  The teen lofted himself over. His friends hung back.

  He was tall and gangly, straining his suit at the wrist and ankle joints. He had black hair in a longish cut that looked like an afterthought. He was talking in a monotone. Sean could not believe he was able to form coherent sentences at all. "The gang is all out there right now. Right?" He glanced over at his friends. "Right?"

  The young man's companions moved closer, outside the ring of engineers. The young woman nodded slowly. "It could work, I guess."

  "How many?" Shelley demanded. "How many are there?"

  "Fifty," Carl's brother said. "Maybe more. We have our own comm frequencies." Smart kid-he had realized how critical communications were-and how long it took to set them up, if you didn't already have a system in place. "We're used to moving fast. To get the first ice, you know."

  He leapt up again, and floated above the maps, spread-eagled. Finally he settled onto the table cross-legged, and eyed the map from all angles. "Take a look," he said to his friends. "What do you think?"

  The engineers made room for the other three. "Our ramps are over here, on the other side of the Lake," the bigger boy said. He studied the map and pointed. "If your neutralizer can tolerate the deep cold and you can get the supplies out here, next to our launch ramp, in packages that fit in our nets, we can throw them at the mountain from low orbit."

  His friends were nodding. "It'll work," the young woman said.

  "What the hell are you talking about?" someone said, but Shelley got it.

  "Like sling shots. They'll drizzle right down into the center of the ice, shut down the reaction." Another of the engineers protested-but Shelley insisted, "It's our best shot. If they can pull it off."

  Sean gave the boy a searching look. "What's your name?"

  "Geoff." The kid's voice cracked, whether from stress, grief, or ordinary hormones, Sean could not say. Maybe all three. "Geoff Agre."

  "All right, Geoff, get off the goddamn table." The kid obliged. More graceful than he looked. Sean laid a heavy hand on the young man's shoulder as he touched down. Sean could tell the boy needed contact. He might have great ideas, but his gaze was still glassy, and he looked like he was about to float off into space. "Here is how it is, Geoff. We've got precious few supplies of neutralizer, and less time. You just saw your brother die. Are you going to fall apart on me up there?"

  Anger glinted in the boy's eyes. Sean liked that better than the blank stare it supplanted. "No way!" He struggled for control. "No. We can help you. If you'll let us."

  "You'll have to take orders from Shelley. All of you. Without question or hesitation. Even if you don't like what she tells you to do."

  The kids surveyed Shelley, who eyed them back, a corner of her mouth quirked up. He looked at his companions, eyebrows raised. One by one, they gave him a nod.

  "All right," he told Sean. As if he could make such a promise. The arrogance of youth. But hell; why not? Maybe the rest of the bikers would listen to him. At this point, the cluster had nothing to lose.

  "You're on, Agre. Shelley, you lead the op."