Radiation Hazard (The Stasis Stories #3) Read online

  Turnberry said, “I’ll predict that you’ll remember the day you encountered Stade for the rest of your lives. The properties of this stuff strain belief. First off, you can already see that, despite being a solid, it has the same density as air. Next, Steve, if you’d be so kind as to stand and grab that sample of Stade so it can be passed around the room?”

  Steve rose just high enough to take the Stade between his thumb and two fingers. His fingers promptly slipped off.

  Turnberry said, “As you can see, its surfaces are frictionless. Steve, if you’ll catch it by cupping a hand around each end.”

  By then Steve had tried to grab it a couple more times and it’d gotten completely away from him. John Stavros stood from a chair two down to his right and caught it between cupped hands. He stared wide-eyed at the object in his hands.

  “Thank you, John.” Turnberry said, “If you’d be so kind as to pass it around?”

  John did so, making several exclamations as he felt the surface of the Stade. It got away from the first person he passed it to but was quickly recaptured.

  Turnberry said, “I’ve asked, and Mr. Seba has expressed his willingness to give us a talk about Stade to the department. I’m pretty certain its astonishing properties can be used to advantage in several fields of investigation. I’d like us to have the opportunity to be leaders in such studies. Are there any objections?”

  There weren’t, so Turnberry said he’d set up the talk for an evening to be sure everyone would have the opportunity to attend.

  He had to wait an hour and a half while everyone on the faculty took the opportunity to handle the specimen.

  When he was asked about other unusual properties, he got out the datasheet Harry had emailed him from the Materials Science lab. When they looked it over, no one believed them, despite the evidence before their eyes of its density and low friction. And, despite his pointing out it had come from the UVA Materials Science lab.

  He didn’t strain them further by showing them the data from the outside labs.

  Chapter Nine

  Having practiced ad nauseam with the nuclear rover, Art felt he was ready to try to drive it into the containment of reactor number two.

  He’d gone over his checklist. It was fully charged. They’d tested both radiation detectors inside the cab as well as the sensor on the outside. He’d checked to be sure his Stade coat was hung in the cab, the helmet, and goggles in their cubbies. He’d just put in a fresh ten-kilogram block of ice. The air cylinder was fully charged,

  He got in and checked his comms. They were fine. Jerry—on the other end of the commlink—took the opportunity to give Art more blowback about doing this himself instead of having one of the men do it. This kept coming up, no matter how many times he told people he wasn’t going to have anyone else do it. It was his idea—and Lee’s and Kaem’s—and he couldn’t have someone else take the risks until he’d proven to his own satisfaction that it was safe.

  He started driving the rover down the hallway that led to the containment. The clicking of the external radiation counter gradually increased as he approached the door, though there were none of the higher frequency pings that would indicate one of the internal counters was detecting something. As he approached the door and slowed to line up on the handle, Jerry’s voice came over the radio, reading from the checklist, “Turn on your air and close the door to the cab.”

  Art did so, confirming by saying, “Air on and door closed.” It seemed silly, but having someone else read off the mission checklist and calling it back to confirm he’d done everything was straight out of his time in the military. It only made good sense when every step was critical.

  Lined up on the door to the containment, he gently nudged the rover ahead, then stopped and extended the grabber.

  Jerry said, “Power door lock disarmed,” telling Art that the door had been remotely unlocked.

  Art unlatched the door. After all the practice it was almost anticlimactic. Nudging up against the door, he gently pressed the accelerator and the heavy door slowly swung open.

  The popping from the external radiation detector picked up, registering a lot of hits.

  Art lifted the cowcatcher skirt and pushed forward until the wheels stopped at the lip of the door seal. He punched the accelerator and the wheel heaved up over the lip. He did it again for the rear wheels. The door had been pushed open wide by then. He drove on into the big airlock chamber and waited for the first door to close behind him while looking ahead to the next door.

  The next door was no more difficult than the first.

  He was through into the containment.

  The external radiation detector was droning now. Annoyingly, so Art stepped down its sensitivity, then drove in deeper. He heard a ping from one of the internal detectors and braced himself to hear more, but none followed. Just background radiation from the materials inside the cab? he wondered. After all, he’d heard occasional pings even out in the practice area.

  Art let go of the manipulator control and started steering the periscope to record images all around the inside of the containment.

  It didn’t look bad. Much of it had been blasted clean by the steam, but that’d condensed and descended into sumps. It hadn’t done much damage to the equipment. They hadn’t thought the meltdown had gone through the bottom of the reactor and in fact, the reactor looked normal from the outside.

  Enough pictures, time to make sure I can get out of here, Art thought.

  As he’d practiced, he unlatched the door, pulled it open wide, then let go and caught it on the wrist of the manipulator. A little shove and a nudge on the accelerator and he caught the door on the little cowcatcher skirt. But it’s a damn good thing I practiced so much out there. He drove forward and, with a little turn to improve the alignment, got the wheels to pull the rover over the door’s lip and into the airlock.

  It was when he tried to open the second door—to exit the airlock—that disaster struck. When he grasped the door handle with the manipulator and began to turn it, there was a sudden snap and the handle inside the cabin suddenly felt loose in his hand. “Oh, shit!” he exclaimed.

  Jerry’s voice asked, “What’s happened?!”

  “Something broke in the manipulator control arm.”

  “I thought Stade couldn’t be broken?!”

  “It can’t,” Art grunted, pulling on the sleeve of the control arm. It came off in his hand. He leaned down and peered inside. “Oh, damn…” The interior control shaft had broken down at its base. He pulled the shaft out and looked at the broken end. It looked like cast metal, he thought aluminum. There appeared to have been a substantial flaw in the metal. That, plus all the practicing he and Lee’d done had probably fatigued the remaining metal. Moving the heavy doors with it had been the final blow. “Jerry, looks like I’m gonna get to see how well their fancy radiation suit works.”

  “What! Are you catching rads in the cab?!”

  “No, the interior detectors have been close to silent. But I’m gonna have to get out and make a run for it. There’s no way I can fix this thing, and if I can’t fix it, I can’t open the door and drive out of here.”

  “Wait, let me talk to Lee. Maybe there’s something she can think of.”

  “Don’t waste your time. I can see it. There’s no way to fix this without a machine shop.”

  “Just give me a minute! You’ve got plenty of time to try the suit if we can’t come up with anything better.”

  Art agreed, then sat fidgeting. First it was too hot and he opened the cover over the ice a little wider. Then he closed it down because he was too cold. After sitting a little longer, he tried sticking the aluminum shaft back down into the manipulator sleeve. The grasper was still on the door handle and he was wondering if he could force the rough surfaces together firmly enough to twist the door’s latch.

  After several tries, the grasper slipped off the handle without turning it.

  He finally decided to give it up and start putting on the
Stade radiation suit. As he was backing the rover away from the door so it wouldn’t block him from opening it, it seemed to shift.

  He blinked. The door was swinging in toward him. There isn’t a power opener for that door! he was thinking, when he saw Jerry pushing the door open, wearing the full Stade radiation suit Gunnar’d delivered in case Art had to be rescued. In addition to Art’s coat that was crowding the cab of the rover, Jerry’s suit also had bellbottom pants dragging the floor. The helmet he wore had a shroud of small Stade plates hanging from it that reminded Art of medieval chain mail.

  Jerry’s voice crackled on the audio link, “Get ol’ Sally out of there!”

  “Sally?”

  “The rover, dammit. Drive her out of there. We leave her there and she’s gonna screw up the next mission… You gonna make me stand here all day?!”

  With a start, Art hit the accelerator. He hit the door’s lip at a spine-jarring speed that was significantly higher than optimum, but “‘ol Sally” made it over and continued down the hall. “You crazy bastard!” he shouted at Jerry. But he was already thinking about how hard it would’ve been to move Sally once her batteries had run down. Having driven her out of there would be a major help to any work they undertook in the future.

  ***

  Carlton Felder was checking some firing range paperwork when one of his deputies leaned into the office to say, “Sherriff, those guys are here with the bulletproof vests.”

  I shouldn’t be wasting time on this, Felder thought. But he couldn’t stand another minute of paperwork. He got up and followed Melnick. “We cleared some lanes for their demo?”

  Melnick nodded, then gave a little laugh. “One of them looks familiar so, of course, I started thinking he must be a perp of some kind. But I ran their names and neither of them has any priors.” He shrugged, “Maybe I’ve seen him somewhere off the job.”

  Felder snorted, “Not every face you recognize belongs to a criminal, Melnick.”

  Melnick grinned, “I know sir. I try to restrain myself from thinking that way, but...”

  The gun range had been cleared except for several officers Felder had invited to the evaluation. He focused on the two civilians, a tall, older white man, and a younger African-American man. Felder approached them and said, “You guys are the ones selling the bulletproof vests?”

  “Yes, sir,” the young guy said, suggesting, to Felder’s delight—since Felder was black and liked seeing brothers thrive—that he was the one in charge. “We’re from Staze, a local company. We’d like to give you a few coats to try out free of charge. If you like them and tell other police departments about them, we’ll count on making our money from such future sales.”

  The older man cleared his throat, “We brought a jacket and a ballistic dummy for you to shoot at today.”

  “Well,” Felder said, “where is this super-duper jacket, and just what’s so damn special about it?”

  The young guy pulled a plastic bag off a hanger, exposing the kind of mirrored mid-thigh coat you might’ve found on a seventies glitter-rock star.

  Felder snorted and several of the other men laughed outright. “The hell!” he said. “You don’t expect us to wear this out in public, do you? Chrome may look nice to some, but we don’t want to stand out when someone might be trying to draw a bead on us.”

  The younger man grinned. “You can wear it this way if you like, and you may want to in some situations.” He shrugged, “But we thought you’d probably want to wear a police windbreaker over it.”

  Felder studied it, surprised by the way the nylon of the jacket seemed to come out of one little mirror, go a couple of millimeters then merge right into the next mirror. He was shaking his head. “Besides, weight’s a killer in emergency situations. The guys’ll bitch endlessly if they have to carry all that metal around.”

  “It’s not metal,” the guy said, pulling the coat off the hanger and tossing it to Felder.

  Felder reached out to catch a coat he expected to weigh ten to twenty pounds - or more. Even before it landed in his hands, he knew it wasn’t heavy. As it flew, it slowed and puffed out like lightweight silk. When he caught it, he could immediately tell the entire coat only weighed a few ounces. He knew surprise was writ large on his face, but then, despite liking the young guy, he shook his head again. “If it’s some kind of lightweight plastic it’s not going to stop bullets.”

  Melnick suddenly took a step forward. “I know you!”

  The young guy smiled, “Hello Officer Melnick. Long time no see.”

  Pointing at Seba, Melnick turned to Felder, “He was with the girl who got shot in the chest but didn’t get hurt. She said she had some kind of rocket engine alloy in her jacket.”

  “We’ve all heard your story, Melnick,” Felder said patiently, rolling his eyes.

  “Your name’s Seba, right?” Melnick asked, directing the question to the young guy.

  The young guy nodded.

  “And this is the same stuff Vaii had in her jacket?”

  Seba nodded, “Pretty much.”

  Melnick turned to Felder. “That stuff really does stop bullets, Sherriff.”

  Felder sighed, “Well, I guess we ought to see for ourselves.” He didn’t make any effort to keep the doubt out of his voice. “Is it okay if I try the jacket on? See what it feels like?”

  “Sure.”

  Felder pulled it on, finding it hard to believe how light it was—not knowing that, to make it even lighter, a little vacuum had been pulled in the chamber before the Stades were formed. “If stuff this light can stop bullets.” he said, “I’ll buy everyone a beer.”

  When Felder started trying to move around, the plates around his shoulders and elbows folded and buckled. Some of them gouged him uncomfortably at the extremes of motion. He complained about it.

  Seba said. “If we make the plates smaller, they won’t dissipate the force of the bullets widely enough.” He shrugged, “We could make just a vest like other company’s body armor. Or we could make a coat that protected the arm and forearm but not the shoulder and elbow.” He shrugged, “But it’s my understanding that getting shot in a joint causes a lot more problems than getting hit between them.”

  Felder shrugged, “We can worry about that after we see if it can stop bullets.”

  It turned out the two guys from Staze did have a ballistic gel torso, with arms and head. After a struggle with the arms, they got the coat on the dummy and snapped the front closed. They put a mirrored helmet on the head, then settled the dummy on an adjustable stand. A couple of the guys carried it down to the end of the firing range.

  “What kind of weapons are you thinking it’ll stand up to?” Felder asked.

  “Anything you want to fire at it,” Seba said.

  “Fifty caliber?” Felder said jokingly, getting a laugh from his men.

  Seba nodded, looking serious. “There’d be a lot more bruising, but no penetration.”

  Felder snorted, patting at the lightweight silvery plates on the jacket. “This I gotta see.” He turned to the range officer. “Bring us a nine-millimeter, forty-five caliber, AR-15, and AK-47. We’ll work our way up the kinetic energy chart.”

  When the range officer got back with the first weapon, Felder detailed Smits to fire it.

  Smits asked, “Just center body mass? Or spread them around?”

  “Spread ’em around.”

  Seba interrupted, “Sorry, I don’t know enough about this. Can bullets ricochet straight back at the shooter?”

  Felder narrowed his eyes, “They can… but surely you don’t think bullets are gonna bounce off those lightweight plates, do you?”

  “Um, yeah. One ricocheted off my friend Arya Vaii in that incident Officer Melnick was mentioning. Um… I’m thinking this whole thing might’ve been a bad idea.”

  Felder said, “We’ll tilt the dummy forward so any ricochets deflect downward.”

  One of the guys trotted down and tilted the dummy. When the coat hung out away from the dummy
, he came back and got a strap from the range officer and belted it tightly about the waist.

  Felder made everyone but Smits step out of the firing lane and move over a couple of lanes to the left. He heard someone mutter something about “worrying too much.” Without turning, he said, “I hope I am worrying too much. As far as I know, there’s no such thing as too much safety.” After a moment, he thought, And if Smits misses those big plates and hits a little plate up high straight on, and it does ricochet right back at him, I could be in a world of shit anyway.

  Felder looked at Smits to be sure he had on his safety glasses, since ricochets didn’t usually have enough energy to do serious damage except to the eyes, then said, “Smits. For your first shot, aim at one of those big plates. A lower one.”

  Smits said, “Okay, Sherriff. You ready for me to shoot?”

  “Go ahead.”

  Smits pulled on his ear protectors and began firing with the 9 mm. After every shot, despite his ear protection Felder faintly heard the whing or zing of a ricochet. At first, he expected Smits to hear them and stop shooting, but it didn’t happen – Smits worked his way through the six bullets in the magazine.

  When he stopped shooting, Felder said, “Didn’t you hear those ricochets?”

  “Oh. Sorry. No, sir. I guess I was too focused on my shooting.”

  Felder sighed, “Let’s all go down there and see what you hit.”

  As they all filed out and headed downrange, Seba moved up alongside Felder to say, “You may not be able to tell where he hit.”

  Felder snorted, “Oh, yes we will.” But when they got down to the dummy, the only clue that the jacket had been shot was a rip in the cloth between a pair of the smaller plates. The plates themselves weren’t damaged. He frowned, How could a bullet hit a plate hard enough to rip the cloth but not leave a mark on the plate?