Fallout 6

Tylha

Cool air blasts into my helmet as the respirator steps up a notch. The suit's readouts are all in the green - which you would expect, since the crystalline nanofiber EV suit is rated for combat on Nukara Prime, and I'm on what used to be a class M world.

"Down here," the civilian disaster relief worker says over my headset. He's an Andorian, a chan named Koneph Phoral, and I can't shake an odd feeling I've met him before, although I can't think where. Now, bulky and ungainly in his hazard suit, he leads the way down a narrow flight of concrete stairs, into the survival bunker on Bercera IV.

The power is gone. The only light in the narrow stairway comes from our helmet lamps. And, although the readings inside my suit are all green, on the outside, it's a different matter. We are thirty kilometres from the centre of Bercera IV's planetary capital - and that's as close as we can get, even in these EV suits. The tricobalt penetrator warhead actually cracked the crust of the planet at its impact point. A hundred years from now, the crater will be a truly impressive shield volcano; right now, it's a raw wound spewing white-hot magma. Heat, toxic gas, and radioactive fallout all combine to make this place uninhabitable. But people should have been safe, in the survival shelters....

"Here," Phoral says. He uses a hydraulic wheel in the wall to open a heavy blast door. I lean forward, let my lamp shine into the room beyond. Lying on the floor are several short, stubby, humanoid forms. Tellarites, and lying very still.

"Some of them made it to the shelters?"

"Yes." Phoral's face is long and humourous, marked at mouth and eyes by laughter lines, but there is no laughter about him now. "They had about two or three minutes' warning, but for the few who were close enough, and fast enough, they should have been safe. But there was something else in the mix."

I kneel down beside one of the bodies. "What was it? Radiation?"

"The tricobalt is fierce enough, but no. This was something else, something I've never seen before. An isotopic gadolinium clathrate. Looks like it was designed to get through micro-fractures in the concrete walls. And the stuff's -" Phoral swallows. "It's strongly hygroscopic, but in contact with a wet surface, it undergoes a rapid chemical change. The gadolinium precipitates out."

I frown. "Gadolinium... is it rapidly toxic?"

"Not especially, in that form. But the precipitate is crystallized, thousands and thousands of microscopic, needle-sharp crystals. You can imagine what it does to the lining of the lungs." He gestures with one gloved hand. "Well, you don't need to imagine. You can see."

I gaze down at the contorted features of one of the victims, at the bloody foam already dried on the nostrils and mouth. "This stuff - how much of it was there?"

"Several hundred tonnes. We figure it was deployed in containers that followed the warheads down, and were ruptured in the initial blast wave... then, it just fell. Sank through the atmosphere, into the ground... and through the walls."

"You have detailed forensic scans?"

"Oh, yes. All fully documented. I just... I just felt you needed to see."

"Yes," I say, softly. "Yes, I think I understand."

We know something of what has happened, by now. While King Estmere was travelling to the Bercera system, the data was already coming in; communications records from satellite buoys, visuals from the few ships that made it off the planet in time. We have a name, a ship's name, some idea of the perpetrator of this monstrous crime. But to - to understand it - you have to see, for yourself. I reach out with one gloved hand and close the Tellarite's eyes. Then I turn to Phoral. "This was planned," I say. "Premeditated. There's no doubt about that."

"Yes," he says. "That carrier came into orbit already loaded with planet-wrecking weaponry. No question about that. They even anticipated the countermeasures, and took advantage of those. Roughly a third of the tricobalt warheads were intercepted on the way down by Bercera's anti-meteor defences. So, now, there are thick clouds of pulverized tricobalt in the upper atmosphere."

"What can we do about that?"

"Very little, even with the resources of your ship. A wide-area tuned disruption field could disintegrate the tricobalt, it's what we'd often do with a fissile material leak - but there is so much of it, so spread out, and so damn energy-dense, that disintegrating it would release enough energy into the atmosphere to trigger another firestorm. The initial bombardment took the oxygen content down from twenty-one to seventeen per cent." The warheads, though devastating in themselves, couldn't do that much damage to a planetary ecosystem... but they were spaced, carefully positioned, so that the shock waves from the blasts united to generate a firestorm, an eruption of burning air that covered most of a continent before it burned itself out. "If we let the stuff settle, though, it will sink deep, and probably permeate down into the deep oceans... and the pelagic depths are the only place that hasn't yet suffered massive devastation. Either way, we're talking another killer blow to the planetary ecology." His eyes are bleak, and I can see his antennae drooping. "We're doing everything we can... but it's not going to be enough. In a couple of centuries, once the worst of the radioisotopes are gone, this planet should be fit for terraforming back to class M status. But for now...."

The oxygen content has been reduced... and it will not be restored, not with half the planet's vegetation already in ashes, and the rest dying as the sun is cut off by choking clouds of volcanic dust. With the oxygen content gone, animal life will perish, everywhere. Some single-celled anaerobic life might survive, in the ocean depths, or beneath the planetary ice caps. But the restoration of Bercera IV will take generations of work, work that can't even begin until I'm dead and gone.

"How much tricobalt did they use?" I ask.

"Hard to say, exactly. Kilotons. I don't mean in explosive yield, I mean actual mass of material. Thousands of tonnes. How many thousands, we don't know yet."

I shake my head. "It's all of a piece," I say. "A single ship, even a big one like that Kar'fi carrier, couldn't manufacture tricobalt in that sort of - industrial - quantity. You need specialist replicators and transmuters even for small amounts of it. I used to use tricobalt torpedoes, aboard the old Sita. It's frightful stuff."

"Isn't it, though?" Phoral says, dryly. "Let's get back to the shuttle." With so much radioactive dust in the tormented atmosphere, we can't use the transporters safely. I let him lead the way, back up the stairs. I turn the handle of the door, though, to seal the Tellarites into their tomb.

"By the way," I say, as we trudge along the ruined, blackened streets, back to the shuttle, "I keep thinking you look familiar - have we met before?"

"Sort of." He turns and shoots a glance at me, and I can see his expression lighten, briefly, behind his faceplate. "We were both a bit out of it, at the time. You'd just donated a lot of blood, and I was coming out of long-term cryostasis."

I stop dead in my tracks. "You're one of Corodrev's augments?"

"Well," he says, "don't hold it against me. I took the same deal as everyone else - immunity, in return for full details of every operation the damn Nausicaans sent us on - and then I decided to do something constructive with my life. Disaster relief seemed... constructive."

"I see your point. Colonizing Gimel Vessaris didn't appeal, then?"

"It did, to most of us.... Blame Big Daddy Corodrev, though. My genetic augmentation runs to an enhanced immune system - I can take most biological agents, and a lot of chemical toxins, in my stride. But it doesn't quite work properly, and I get some fierce allergies as a result. Some of the organic chemical compounds in Gimel Vessaris vegetation fall into my sensitivity range. I could live there, but I'd never be comfortable."

"I'm sorry," I say.

He shrugs, the gesture almost invisible in the hazard suit. "It's like you said to Oz, the genetic augmentation thing never really pans out properly."

"Oz? Osrin Corodrev?"

"My thaan-partner. He's about somewhere; he decided to work with me."

"Oh," I say. Osrin Corodrev, scion of his xenophobic father's genetic experiments, raised as a living weapon and used over many decades by the Nausicaans... I'd never expected him to form part of a normal Andorian quad-marriage. "Well. Tell him his great-grand-niece sends her regards, then. And your wives?"

"We've not found a shen and a zhen who'll put up with us, yet." He smiles. "We've just got an understanding - that the two of us come as a job lot." Binary-gender species never seem to understand that the two "males" in a quad-marriage are every bit as married to each other as they are to the "females". But, thinking about it... I'm rather happy, all told, that these two damaged people have found some love in their lives.

We reach the shuttle, and begin the laborious process of decontamination; the damn suits have plenty of nooks and crannies to carry toxic dust. By the time we're through, the red disk of the sun is descending, half visible through the clouds, dimmer still than the fires on the horizon where the volcano rages.

Aboard the shuttle, I pop my helmet and stretch out my cramped antennae. I have a brief moment of relaxation, and then the comms console chirps. "Shohl here."

Anthi's face forms on the screen. "Some news from the Federation Council, sir," she says. "They've framed their diplomatic protest... and they've found a pretty big gun to deliver it."