Chapter 303: To the Pylow Labs - IV

The service lift was big enough for a vehicle.

It sat behind a heavy door at the end of the corridor, and it opened as soon as Kordula came within a few steps of it. The display beside the controls showed the same line from the list.

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PRIMARY GENERATION — ACCESS: ESCORTED

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"I guess that’s us," one of the Engineers said.

They went down slowly. The lift stopped at every level on its own, the doors opening long enough for the Engineers to look out and mark the level against the Radar model before closing again.

Kordula didn’t ask it to do that. She suspected Facility Operations just wanted them to see.

The first level still looked like the rest of the facility. Corridors, doors, a few laboratories with their lights off.

The second level didn’t.

The corridors there were wider and emptier, and most of the space was taken up by pipes. Coolant loops as thick as a person ran along both walls and disappeared into the floor, each one wrapped in insulation and stenciled with flow directions.

Farther in, Kordula saw a row of heat exchangers the size of shipping containers, and past those, a switching bay with heavy cabinets lined up behind a mesh wall.

"Northern Command," the squad leader said. "Level two below the laboratories. Coolant and power infrastructure. No damage."

"Copy."

The third level was worse. The walls were thicker, the doors were thicker, and the hum she stopped noticing upstairs was loud enough now to feel through her boots. Bus runs as wide as a table crossed the ceiling in both directions.

Kordula could name almost everything she saw. A heat exchanger was a heat exchanger. A switching bay was a switching bay. She installed and repaired plenty of both at the NPP.

But she had never seen this much of them in one place, not even at the power plant, and the power plant existed to generate electricity for an entire city.

"What kind of project or object needs this much power?" she said, mostly to herself.

Nobody in the lift had an answer.

...

The lift stopped for the last time, and the doors opened onto a short corridor that ended in a door heavier than anything they passed on the way down.

It opened for them as well. Behind it was a control room.

It was larger than the sector control room upstairs, with two rows of consoles facing a wall of monitors.

Most of the consoles were dark, but the monitors were on. A single chair stood pushed back from the center console, as if someone had stood up from it and never come back.

On the far side of the room was a second door. It was sealed, and the warning painted across it was large enough to read from the entrance.

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PERSONNEL ENTRY PROHIBITED — MAINTENANCE UNITS ONLY

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"Don’t go near that one," Kordula said, although none of the squad had moved toward it.

The monitors showed what was on the other side.

Most of the feeds came from cameras mounted high on the walls of a chamber much larger than the control room. There was a gap of several levels between them, if the Radar model was right, and every one of those levels was rock and shielding.

In the middle of the chamber sat a massive ring.

It was built in segments, each wrapped in thick bands of coils and ribbed with cooling lines, and the whole assembly was ringed by a structure of supports and access gantries.

Frost clung to some of the coils in pale patches. A pair of maintenance units crawled along one of the gantries, slow and small against it.

Kordula walked closer to the monitors.

She had seen this before, but only in drawings, in the kind of long technical briefings the NPP received every year about compact power and fusion follow-up work.

She remembered the drawings well enough, because every one of those briefings ended with the same conclusion.

Promising. Years away.

"Is something the matter, Overseer?" the squad leader said.

"It’s a reactor," Kordula said. "A fusion reactor. Holy shit. The cold on those coils—that’s what the cryogenic storage upstairs is for. The magnets have to be kept colder than anything on this mountain, or none of it will work."

"Northern Command," the squad leader said. "We’ve reached primary generation. It’s a fusion reactor, up and running."

There was a longer pause this time.

"Say that again."

"A fusion reactor, ma’am. It’s in a sealed chamber below the control room. We’re watching it through cameras."

"Understood." Another pause. "Keep your people out of that chamber."

"Already done."

...

The revelation was indeed shocking but the Engineers wanted to run diagnostics first. Kordula agreed, and then realized they had nothing to diagnose against.

"It doesn’t know what normal looks like," one of the Engineers said, scrolling through the center console. "I can read everything it’s doing right now. I can’t tell you whether any of it’s wrong."

"The site should have references," Kordula said. "Nobody runs something like this from memory."

She found them along the back wall of the control room, behind a row of tall locked cabinets.

The locks released as she approached, and the doors swung open onto racks of storage drives, each one labeled and numbered in the same black stencil as the plates upstairs.

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DESIGN DOCUMENTATION

OPERATING PROCEDURES

COMPONENT REFERENCE

DIAGNOSTIC BASELINES

MAINTENANCE HISTORY

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There were more of them than she could count at a glance. Some of the racks continued into a second row behind the first.

The Engineers connected the console to the diagnostic baselines, and the readings on the screen started making sense within minutes.

"Core’s stable," one of them said. "Containment’s holding at its rated values. The reactor itself isn’t the problem."

"Then what is?"

"Everything around it." He pulled up a second screen. "Two pumps in the heat-rejection loop are running past their limits. One of the switching banks on level three is out, and the reactor has been shedding load around it for months. There’s damage to the transmission side as well, but that’s outside this room."

"Can your people fix that?"

"The pumps and the switching bank, yes. We’ll need parts for some of it."

"The maintenance units couldn’t?"

"They tried. According to the history, several times. They don’t have the parts either."

"So it’s a goddamn logistics problem. Duly noted."

Near the bottom of the screen, a single line sat among the other figures, marked in the same separate color as the items at the top of the list upstairs.

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FUEL RESERVE: 22%

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"How the heck is this thing fueled anyway?"

The Engineer opened the entry. The single line expanded into three.

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FUEL RESERVE: 22%

DEUTERIUM: SUFFICIENT

TRITIUM: 22% — BREEDING SYSTEM DEGRADED

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"Deuterium and tritium," he said. "Deuterium’s the easy part. You get it out of water. Tritium’s the problem. There’s almost none of it in nature, and what you have decays on its own even if you never use it."

"Then where does it get more?" Kordula asked.

"It makes it. There should be lithium in the blanket around that ring. The reactor bombards it while it runs and breeds new tritium out of it." He pointed at the last line. "Except that part’s broken too, so every day it burns a little and makes almost nothing back."

"And all that bombarding is why nobody walks into that chamber," another Engineer added. "The neutrons go through everything that isn’t shielding."

Kordula looked at the two of them.

"You know all this?"

"The principle," the first Engineer said. "Not this design. That’s what the drives are for."

Kordula looked back at the number for a while.

...

"When was this built?" she asked.

The Engineer brought up the maintenance history and scrolled back to the start. The first entry was the commissioning record, followed by a few pages of startup tests and sign-offs from names she didn’t know.

The date was roughly two years before the Event.

Kordula checked it again, then checked the startup tests below it, in case the first entry was only the date the construction began. It wasn’t. The reactor was running at full rated output within the same year.

"That’s earlier than it should be," she said.

"According to who?" Marianne asked over the channel.

Kordula didn’t answer right away.

According to every briefing she ever sat through. According to the people upstairs, who sent those briefings to the NPP every year and signed off on the same conclusion every time. According to everything she was ever allowed to know.

The reactor didn’t care about any of that. It was humming below her feet.

"According to me, I guess," she said finally.

She turned back to the cabinets.

"Tag every drive in here. Every rack, both rows. Don’t pull anything yet—the diagnostics still need them. You can copy the component references for the repairs. Operations should allow that much. The rest waits until we have a proper way to take it."

She looked along the racks again. "The Commander will want all of it."

"Understood, Overseer."

The Engineers started with the first rack. Behind them, on the wall of monitors, the two maintenance units finished their pass along the gantry and started the next one.