Page 39 of Fated, Allegedly

Caleb comes across the deck bleeding from the scalp. "Then what does?"

Erin looks up from the console, and I know that face. I've seen it over a core sample and a bridge stringer and a table of dead numbers, and it's the face she makes when she's already found the answer and doesn't want it.

"Something that makes the machine impossible to run," she says.

25

ERIN

Ihave ten screens, a stolen binder, and a technician with his hands raised, and I need about four hours of study time, but I've got minutes.

The console is laid out sensibly, which is the only mercy. Left screen is the draw sequence. Center is the plant mimic, pumps, valves, temperatures, all live and mostly green. Right is the coil itself: current, field strength, and a bar labeled horizon pressure that is falling in visible increments while I watch. That bar is what stops my heart. It isn't a rate of production. It's a tank emptying.

"Talk to me," Nash says at my shoulder. He's bleeding from the flank and pretending he isn't.

"Stage two of three. Eighty-one minutes elapsed, and the pressure's down eleven percent already." I pull the process diagram out of my jacket and flatten it beside the keyboard. "Nash, there's no abort. I've been through every menu. There's a stage advance and there's a hold, and hold just parks it. It doesn't close the shaft, because they never built a way to close the shaft. Note four. Single-pass depletion. They designed a thing that has one direction."

Caleb's at the doorframe, blood down his face. "Then what's on the table?"

"Two options and I hate both." I turn to face them because they deserve it said to their faces. "Option one is I hold the sequence and we spend the next six hours defending this room, and the moment we lose it somebody hits resume. Option two is I break something they can't replace."

The technician says, "You can't overload the coil. It's got a quench protection circuit. It'll trip and dump before you get anywhere near it."

Everyone glances at him. He's about twenty-five and terrified and, I realize, has just given me the answer without meaning to.

"Say that again."

"The… the magnet's superconducting, it's got to be, at that field strength. If it goes normal it dumps its energy and the protection resistors take it. That's why you can't hurt it." He swallows. "It's designed to survive a quench."

"Designed to survive one. Not to survive one badly." I'm already back at the mimic screen, hunting the cryogenics. "Where's the helium plant?"

"Two-forty. Same gallery as the heat rejection."

Three lines on a schematic I have literally stood beside.

"Nash." I put my finger on screen. "The coil's cold because a compressor above our heads keeps it that way, and it dumps its quench energy into a resistor bank cooled by the same chilled-water loop that's running the whole plant. It survives a quench because two support systems catch it. Take both away at the same instant and the quench has nowhere to go."

Caleb says, "What's that mean?"

"It means the coil cooks itself. Windings go, cradle goes, and the field collapses across a twenty-meter opening. And they cannot rebuild it, because that coil came in on a lowboy through a mine tunnel, and it is going to be underneath a considerable amount of lake."

Nash goes very still. "Explain that last part."

"The chamber is so many feet of granite below feet of water, and it's been under stress since they opened the ring." I point through the glass. Water is running off the dome in long dark streaks and pooling on the deck. "That's not condensation, that's inflow. The rock's already talking. When the field collapses I don't know precisely what the pressure differential does, but I know it does something, and my honest professional opinion is that this chamber floods."

"How long would we have?"

"Minutes. Maybe. I can't give you a number and I won't pretend to."

Nash doesn't argue and doesn't flinch. He turns to Caleb.

"Get everybody who isn't essential onto the stairwell now. Wyatt, the wounded first, and the technicians go up with them, they're coming out with us."

The kid on the floor starts crying, which I don't have time for. I do the transmission before I do the sabotage, because evidence that never leaves the mountain isn't evidence.

There's a satellite terminal in the corner of the control room and it's live, because these people needed to talk to somebody in a boardroom. I plug in the drives from the raise and the photographs from the crib and I scan the binder pages on a flatbed that some poor administrator installed down here.

Amelia gets everything. So does the regional EPA criminal enforcement inbox, and the Corps, and two federal addresses Amelia gave me years ago and told me never to use unless I had something real.