Page 6 of Mastermind

“There aren’t any volcanos here. We also checked with the seismologists,” says Sheppard.

“Do they have the data available?” I ask.

“I can get it, but why?”

“We can see if there’s anything that matches up with car bombings or whatever.”

Sheppard nods, then calls into his microphone, asking for the seismic data. “Anything else?”

“What do satellites show?” asks Vaslov.

“Thermal has buildings. Not much else.”

“What about before? Any large light spikes?”

“I can ask. What should we be looking for?”

“Maybe a comet of some kind?” answers the physicist.

“It’s not a comet,” I reply.

“How do you know?”

“The bridges and the tunnels have the most smoke. I get the tunnels, but why the bridges?” I gesture out the window in their direction. “Look at the smoke on the edge of the bridge. It’s not stopping. The wind should have blown that away.”

“What are you saying?” asks Sheppard.

“Those car fires are the source of the smoke. Or rather, they’re not car fires. Whatever created all this, it’s doing it right now on the bridges to keep everything shut down.”

“This is a hell of a lot of smoke. Just look at it!” Sheppard exclaims, more from shock than anger at my response.

“Vaslov, how much smoke would one tractor trailer filled with powdered charcoal and whatever else you needed produce?” I ask the resident scientist.

His eyes look up as he does the math. “The energy would be substantial, and assuming the rate of expansion . . . a lot of damn smoke.”

“But this much smoke?” asks Sheppard.

“Give or take a few dozen tractor trailers . . . yes. Possible. That’s the thing about smoke—it’s a gas. Well, a gas with solid particles. A little bit of solid goes a long way.”

“We’re going to go up the East River,” says Sheppard after he calls in the request to the pilot.

We go up the waterway with the wall of the Void to our left. The smoke has a slight purple hue to it. Occasionally sparks fly and the shadows of buildings flicker through the haze like cosmic rays.

“How bad is this on the lungs?” I ask.

“We don’t know. Hopefully people are indoors,” says Sheppard.

“Hopefully there still are people,” Vaslov adds.

“What do you mean?” Sheppard shoots back.

“What Blackwood said has me thinking. If this is some kind of chemical fire, and if they used an explosion to distribute it into a fine mist, igniting it would be like a massive firebomb. Anyone outdoors would be . . . not in a good place.”

“Incinerated?” asks Sheppard.

“No. Maybe those close to it. But they’d be breathing in flaming particles. Which would be bad.”

“Take us higher,” Sheppard calls to the pilot.