Fractured: Tales of the Canadian Post-Apocalypse(12)
Who am I? No, not the eldest assassinated by the second one. And, no, not the second one you executed under the windows of your office in Clarendon Castle, shot for all to see. And not the idiot you imprisoned for life in the asylum of Upper Beauport. And, no, not the fifth, the designated heir as long as he keeps his mouth shut. Or the sixth, born last year…
The nave was deserted. Weekdays, the faithful were scarce, especially if no mass was scheduled. Yet, sword in hand, Darrick almost wished for the irruption of a squad of the governor’s guards. While most ironbearers carried a sword as a token of their rank and wealth, Darrick had learned to use his in France. And he wanted to face his enemies. To fight them.
The third one! I’m the third one, Father. Joseph Darrick Faucher de Limoilou. The banished one!
But there was nobody to hear and the echo of his footsteps was the only other sound under the vaulting. The diversion had worked. All the other guards had left the basilica to lend a hand to the rescue efforts.
A sudden rumble warned him to step aside and he gave way to a Compagnie Phénix-France dray pulled by four horses in a lather, steaming from the climb up the ramp laid over the stairs of the entrance. Standing at the front of the dray, Carolin tugged on the reins to hear Darrick’s orders.
“Keep going. The doors of the dome are straight ahead. I’ll meet you there.” Darrick returned to the front of the basilica. Two of his men were disassembling the wooden ramp to turn it into a barricade that would allow them to defend the entrance. He found nothing in the sentry box, but he broke down the door of the guardroom and seized all the key rings.
At the far end of the nave, a pair of monumental doors separated it from the inside of the dome. The choir. The holy of holies. Normally, priests were the only ones to enter the inner sanctum. On feast days, the doors were opened halfway to let the faithful glimpse their bishop saying Mass before the altar holding the relics of St. Macaire.
Darrick’s heart beat faster as he tried a dozen keys before finding the right one. The doors were solid steel, but so well hung that he needed only to push them with the flat of one hand to start them swinging on their hinges.
Followed by Carolin, he slipped inside, noting the extraordinary thickness of the walls. He looked up immediately to see the top of the cupola, about 100 metres up.
“Here we are,” he whispered.
“At last.”
His companion stared at the floor between them.
“So, everything is underneath,” he said, almost disbelieving.
“Everything,” Darrick confirmed. “The island’s only nuclear reactor.”
A well-kept secret. The power plant’s construction dated back to the period just before the dark years, when physicists and engineers at Université Laval needed an experimental reactor to play with. Experimental in the sense that it did not use heavy water like most other Canadian reactors. Yet, designed for power levels that hinted at something more than a test-bed for new reactor designs.
Likewise, transforming the cooling tower into a cathedral choir could not have happened without an ulterior motive. In the short term, it probably owed a lot to the era’s deep-seated mistrust of nuclear power, and the builders’ lack of resources. They might have sought the material help of a revived Catholic church wishing to dedicate a basilica to the dead of the Dark Age.
Carolin had come across a forgotten trove of the university’s archives about the project during his studies. A common friend had provided Darrick’s mailing address in France, since the young man wanted to find out if the governor’s family knew. Darrick didn’t, but the more he thought about it, the more certain he became that his father was in on the secret.
Carolin hadn’t been able to determine if the plant had ever served. The first governor could have used an additional source of electricity to make up for the deficiencies of the wind farms… but hiding the condensation plume of a running power plant would have been no easy task, unless it operated at night or during storms and foggy days.
“Let’s get to work,” Darrick said. “If we’re lucky, we’ve got until the next changing of the guard. And maybe the next one if we manage to deal with the new shift.”
Three women and 22 men were now inside the basilica. Half of the men, and all of the women, were students and friends of Carolin. They had never set foot inside a nuclear power plant, but Darrick had supplied them with every document he’d been able to get his hands on in France. He was also providing them with the enriched uranium of the Compagnie Phénix-France, in the form of rods locked inside wooden chests over four metres long… He hoped it would be enough to awaken the sleeping reactor.
The others had just volunteered to fight. Each of them had a reason for hating the governor, Granger de Limoilou, and each had chosen to trust his son. They had come armed for war – with old hunting guns, cutlasses, and sometimes with nothing more than knives or clubs.
Before he left to check on the basilica’s defences, Darrick pulled Carolin aside.
“First impressions?”
“I won’t promise anything until I’ve seen the crypt, but it’s looking good. Everything is clean and well maintained. I’ve found where the access panels are cut into the floor and the grooves are practically dust-free. I even spotted some traces of oil near the base of the altar, still wet, as if somebody lubricated gears or something mechanical not so long ago. And look at the air vents up there. Not one is actually blocked by the hanging tapestries.”