Fallout Read Free Page A

dug in his bag for a flashlight. “Do we need to worry about radiation?”
    Sambit handed Derek a dosimeter. “The levels are safe here. Whether they are safe elsewhere….” He shrugged as he trailed off.
    Derek clipped the device to his belt. “If I were a backup generator, where would I be?”
    “Why are you asking me?”
    “I’m not,” Derek said. “I’m thinking out loud. Stop distracting me.”
    He walked out of the staff room and searched for a stairwell. Once he found one, he headed down. “That explains the backup power being off,” he muttered when, after four steps, he hit water. “Who puts a basement in a building a few miles from the coast? If the generators are down there, we’re fucked. Where the hell are the schematics for this place? The backup generators should be in another building entirely, but I’d expect there to be controls around here somewhere.”
    “I don’t have them,” Sambit said. “I already told you that.”
    “It was a rhetorical question,” Derek snapped back. “Look, why don’t you go hang out in the staff room? When I get the power on, we can figure out the rest.”
    “It’s not safe to be here by yourself,” Sambit insisted. “What if you get hurt? I won’t even know where you are.”
    “Fine, but shut up so I can concentrate.”
    They headed back into the corridor and worked their way through the rooms in the control section of the power plant. Not finding anything, Derek headed to the outlying buildings, searching each one until they found the backup generators. Derek studied them carefully, resisting the urge to look at his dosimeter every few seconds to see if the numbers had changed. Based on the systems at NASA, he would have expected them to turn on automatically when the battery system failed, but this wasn’t NASA so maybe the protocols were different. Or maybe the generator was faulty and they were totally screwed. There was only one way to find out.
    He checked the dials and gauges, fiddling with the diesel intake until the first generator sputtered to life. “Maintenance protocols are there for a reason,” he muttered at no one in particular. “Okay, Sam. Let’s get the computers on so you can tell me where to send my robot and what to do when he gets there.”
    They went back into the main monitoring room. Sambit turned on the central computer and waited for it to boot up. It powered up willingly enough, but the moment it came online, it demanded a password. “We could try calling the hospital,” Sambit suggested. “The plant manager was in serious condition, but he did survive the storm, according to my briefing. He might be in good enough shape to help us.”
    “Call and see if you want.” Derek cracked his knuckles and started typing. He’d have liked to think the security software for the plant would require the users to have a strong password, but he’d seen that fail too often at NASA to be confident of it. He might get lucky.
    Sambit came back a few minutes later. “The plant manager is in surgery.”
    “Well, fuck,” Derek said, ignoring the way Sambit flinched at his cursing. The man could just get over himself. “Okay, look, if you could see what was going on inside the plant, could you shut it down?”
    “In theory,” Sambit said, “but we don’t have the schematics.”
    “I’m aware of that fact,” Derek snapped, “but we’re wasting time here, time we don’t have and time that’s letting the situation get worse. We need to find the shutdown or the safety valve, whatever that looks like, and we aren’t going to do it standing here.”
    “We can’t go in there. The heat and radiation would kill us long before we found what we were looking for.”
    “I wasn’t planning on going in there,” Derek said. “I’m planning on sending Number Five in there.”
    “Shouldn’t we call the NRC or—”
    Derek ignored the other man’s cautions, and walked back to the break room. He patted Fido’s head a couple of