BOUNDARY(27)

"Ethylene coming up!" Anne said cheerfully. "Lee, once I get Ethyl running, you can restart Ferris. Use the hydrogen reaction, so I can grab the carbon monoxide from Ruth. Once I get that all balanced, we can try Porky."



"'Porky'?" Joe repeated, puzzled.



Lee gave an explosive snort of laughter. "You haven't heard that one yet, have you? The heat cycle on the brickmaker was hogging all the energy, since we haven't got a nuke reactor right now. To use the waste heat to cook the bricks, we need to pull it off the mains and use electric heaters. When I said that to Annie, she said to me: 'Well, yeah, it's the Third Little Piggie.'"



"Lee didn't get it immediately," Reynolds chuckled. "Until I pointed out it was making our house out of bricks."



"You do realize we'll need more respectable names for our advanced technology than Ruth, Ferris, Porky, and Ethyl?"



"Joe, stop worrying about the damn investors." Anne coded in several instructions to the system, causing Ruth to increase production and Ethyl to start in. "We've got perfectly good, dull, respectable names full of stupid acronyms for them."



Meryl Stephenson and Bryce Heyers from the next lab poked their heads in. "Hey, guys, can we use some of the— Oh, hi, Joe. Big demo for the boss, eh?"



Joe smiled. "Something like that. Look, I'll be by your lab in an hour or so. We need to—"



A buzzing noise sounded from one of the panels. Reynolds' head snapped around. "That's—"



Joe was just turning towards the panel when the world split open.





Even through his headphones, A.J. heard the sharp boom of the explosion, and felt the floor jolt under his feet. The phones shut off as A.J. leapt from his chair and dashed for the door.



"What happened?"



"I don't know," said Melanie Sherry, standing indecisively. "But it sounded like it came from Engineering."



Other people in the hallway blurred past as A.J. sprinted towards the doors. He burst out into the open.



As he ran towards the testing area, he could see that it was bad. Black billows of smoke, lit from beneath by orange flames, curled upwards from the shattered Engineering wing, near the Atmospherics Testing area. He felt his stomach tighten. Joe had been planning to test some of the catalytic generation processes today.



He skidded to a halt in a scattered jumble of stone and brick. A few others were hesitating, like him, before plunging into the yawning, smoke-belching ruin.



"Joe!" he shouted. "Reynolds! Annie! Lee!" He could hear the distant wailing of fire and emergency medical vehicles approaching.



Setting his jaw, A.J. started in. But then, startled, backed off almost immediately.



Something loomed up in the smoke, emerging slowly, backlit by the flames, seeming almost to materialize like a monster in a bad action movie. It was too wide and squat to be human. A broad, blocky silhouette that wavered like a black ghost . . .



A.J. gave a shout and charged forward. "Joe!"



Joe Buckley gave a faint grin through the soot on his face, as did Reynolds Jones from beneath the reflective heat blanket the two had around their shoulders. "I don't believe it. We made it out alive."



"Christ, what the hell happened? Never mind!" A.J. interrupted himself and reached for the blanket. "Give me that. The EMTs will be here soon."



Wrapping the blanket around himself, he plunged into the building, ignoring the shouts of people behind him.



Acrid chemical vapors spiked into his lungs as he reached into his pouch and grabbed a small, somewhat malleable ball. With all his strength he pitched it into the darkness ahead of him.



His VRD lit up almost instantly, matching the data now coming in from the sensor motes being scattered through the shattered interior by the ricocheting "scatterball" against the filed building plan. The data was patchy but good enough to work with.



The air was bad, very bad, but it wasn't going to kill him right away. Atmospheric chamber gone kablooey. Bodies . . .



There! And alive!



A.J.'s eyes stung terribly, but he blinked and fought the tears away. Then, suppressed a cough with desperate effort. If he started coughing now, he might not stop until he'd finished himself off.



A.J. tapped out commands on the virtual control panel in front of him as he stepped over a sensor-outlined block of rubble to get nearer to the body. The ad hoc network was coming up and trying to link in with the emergency vehicles' frequencies. There! Got it!



As he squatted next to Anne Calabrio's unconscious body, A.J. broke into the EMT frequency. "I've got a live one in here. We may have a few others. I think . . ."