Fallout Read Free Page B

times and set out a bowl of water for the dog. Then he unpacked Number Five. “Time to go to work, baby. We’re going to show that ignorant asshole in the other room what we can do.”
    He powered up the robot and turned on the controls. There where he could see what was in front of Number Five, he didn’t bother with his laptop. Later, he would connect the robot’s cameras up to the laptop remotely so he could see the robot’s surroundings and guide him.
    “What is that?” Sambit asked when Derek guided the robot back into the room.
    “This is Number Five,” Derek said proudly. “You tell me where to send him, and he can go anywhere we need him to go and do anything we could do with our hands.”
    “That would be great if I knew where we needed him to go.”
    “Look, Sam,” Derek said. “We could spend hours trying to find out the password for the computer. We could make phone calls and maybe get answers, or we can send Number Five exploring, make the maps as we go, and maybe find what we’re looking for faster.”
    “Without the computers, we have no way of monitoring the system to make sure it cools down correctly. We could make matters worse.”
    “If we do nothing, we could both be dead. Yes, it’s a risk, but it’s one I think we have to take.”
    “You haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”
    “Maybe not,” Derek said, “but it’s got to be better than sitting here waiting for the core to melt down and the heat and radiation to kill us both.” He opened up his laptop and activated the remote viewing and controls for Number Five. “I don’t know what he’s looking for so you’re going to have to come help me here.”
    “This is a bad idea.”
    “Dying is a worse one.”

Chapter 2

     
    S AMBIT scrubbed his hands over his face. His head hurt, his eyes stung from staring at the laptop screen for what seemed like hours, and his stomach was growling, when it stopped churning long enough, but they couldn’t stop for food yet. Sambit’s experience might be more theoretical than practical, but he knew what could happen if they didn’t get the reactor under control. He’d studied Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima. He didn’t want to add Bay City to that list with his name attached to the failure.
    The man sitting next to him, with his foul mouth and brash manners, worked Sambit’s last nerve, but this was the robotics engineer NASA had seen fit to send him. Not that he was all that fit for the job either. He hadn’t done any practical work with nuclear reactors since he’d taken the teaching position at Texas A&M, but there hadn’t been anyone else to call. Not anyone close enough to get here as fast as Sambit could. The only thing that had gone right since he’d gotten here was the little robot Marshall called Number Five. Sambit didn’t claim to know anything about robotics, but he knew a useful tool when he saw one.
    Number Five was definitely useful. Its track roller let it move over uneven surfaces, but Marshall had also fitted it with a lifting mechanism that allowed it to “climb” stairs. The cameras took video in three hundred sixty degrees so anyone looking at the computer screen could see everything around the robot. Its sensors detected temperature, radiation, and a score of other measurements that Sambit hadn’t bothered to track because they didn’t matter at the moment. Even better, the built-in GPS linked to a program on Marshall’s computer that created a map as Number Five moved through the corridors. It wasn’t quite as useful as the full schematics of the plant would have been, but Sambit was beginning to get a feel for the layout of the plant. It didn’t match any in his eidetic memory, but he saw enough similarities to draw conclusions based on everything he’d studied.
    “Turn right there.”
    Marshall backed Number Five up, guiding the robot with a joystick controller in one hand and another remote in the other hand with a