Fractured: Tales of the Canadian Post-Apocalypse(13)
“I’ll leave you the keys. Do you need anything else?”
“Luck. According to specs, the reactor needed 50 tonnes of enriched uranium to work as designed. We only have five.”
“But you told me there was probably still some fuel left.”
“We’ll soon find out if I was right.”
Darrick mastered the urge to strangle him on the spot. He didn’t feel like joking.
Uranium’s radioactivity did not last forever. After more than a century, it would have gone down by a lot… And that wasn’t all. In an operating reactor, the fuel was replaced gradually, as it became poisoned with reaction products. Darrick had brought new fuel bundles to replace some of the old ones – if Carolin managed to identify the ones most in need of replacement.
“If there’s nothing else, we’re screwed.”
“Then again, maybe I’ll just be able to restart the reactor with a tenth of the required supply. With a huge helping of luck.”
“We will have all the luck we need,” Darrick spat. “Because it’s our turn to have some.”
Darrick toured the basilica, the mere tip of a gigantic underground edifice. Beneath the nave’s floor, turbines and generators slept. The huge cylindrical dome combined the roles of a cooling tower and a containment enclosure for the reactor core below the altar. For his men, the basilica would be harder to defend than for the governor’s guards. Besides the main entrance, several doors led to the main compound. Darrick assigned two men to watch each way in. The rest would guard the main doors. He wondered again if he should have recruited a few more sympathizers, but a small army tramping across the island would have been too conspicuous.
The hours went by uneventfully, as if the basilica had been utterly forgotten by the governor’s men. Carolin and his team burrowed into the building’s depths. Darrick only went down once below the altar. The pumps and conduits were clean enough to keep him hoping. In spite of its age, the plant might still be operational.
“Well?” Darrick asked.
“It’s been used before,” Carolin said, stopping to catch his breath. He was covered in sweat. Every person there had lent a hand to move the fuel rods. Hard work, even with the hoists uncovered below the dome’s floor.
“Recently?”
“No, not in a dozen years, at a guess, but everything is set up for a quick start. Part of the fuel is unusable, so we’ll replace it.”
“What about water?”
“There’s a line to the rainwater tanks inside the compound. That’s enough to last most of a day. After that, who knows?”
Finally, Darrick climbed to the plant’s control room, letting Carolin know he could find him there. The room ran all the way around the top of the cooling tower, just below the lip of the cupola capping the massive concrete tube. It felt more like a hallway, but the monitors embedded into the inner wall were paper-thin and the wheeled stools were easily stowed out of the way.
Actual windows had been cut into the outer wall, offering an unsurpassed view of the island and its surroundings. They revealed an expanse of countryside that might have been the main justification for establishing the control room in such an exposed position. It was the island’s tallest watchtower.
Alone in the narrow gallery, Darrick completed several circuits, reading the instructions posted beside each workstation. He kept an eye on the windows, trying to spot attackers. However, while the other end of the compound was crawling with men and women at work, tiny ants picking their way through the demolished palace wing, the basilica’s vicinity was still quiet.
Darrick took out a spyglass to inspect the sea near Port-Sillery. Not a trace of the man called Ségole Portelance – the name still managed to make him smile. Too bad. The fishing would have been great.
Things only started happening by the early afternoon. Off Sillery, a whole flotilla made up of canoes and boats from all points of the compass – not just a single fishing dory – appeared.
The ironbearer’s spyglass did not let him make out the features of the men aboard the small craft, but he assumed they were the tribals. Newfs and Hicanos who’d sworn fealty to Ségole – whose real name was Fraser – to attempt an unprecedented raid. They were going to land on the island of Quebec and make off with anything that wasn’t nailed down. At the same time, a small armed company showed up in front of the basilica.
Darrick swore. The way he’d planned it, the tribal raid would have been his second diversion, forcing his father to split up his men and delay a full-out assault of the dome. However, the tribals had come too late. They hadn’t even landed yet and it might take several minutes for the good people of Port-Sillery to realize they were under attack. Several more minutes would pass before the commander in front of the dome was alerted, during which time the defenders of the basilica’s main entrance would be desperately outmatched.
Darrick was on the verge of heading down when a loud ringing shattered the tomb-like silence of the control room. He guessed it was a phone, found the handset, and answered.
“Carolin here. We’ve gotten the reactor going and the generators are spinning. It’s about a third of nominal, but we’re producing power.”
“I didn’t hear anything.”
“The dome walls are massive. But don’t try to come back through the choir. We’ve closed all the doors and flooded the entire ground floor. The pressurized water tubes are deployed and they will dump part of their heat into the pool. Very soon, it’s going to be a death zone, but everybody on the island will know we have a working nuclear reactor here.”