Звезда Пандоры

“Into the pickup,” Mark told the kids. They clambered into the backseat without a word. An equally subdued Panda quickly jumped up with them. He almost ordered the dog out, then relented. They needed every bit of comfort they could get right now. All of them.

“I’ll follow you,” Carys said.

“Okay. Keep your handheld array on.” They’d dug out three old models from the house that had been switched off when the emp washed over the valley. It had been simple enough for Mark to alter their programs so they could be used as basic communicators, giving them a five-mile range.

Carys gave a backward wave of reassurance as she made her way over to the MG. To Mark’s complete surprise and grudging respect, the sports car’s systems had survived the emp almost intact.

“You’d better take this,” Liz said. She handed him his hunting rifle, a high-power laser with a low-light focus lock sight. “I checked it, it still works.”

“God, Liz.” He snatched a hurried, guilty glance at the kids. “What for?”

“People can behave badly in times of stress. And I’m not convinced the way Carys is about the Primes leaving us alone.” She opened her jacket to show an ion pistol in a shoulder holster.

“Holy shit. Where did that come from?”

“A friend. Mark, we live kilometers from anywhere, and you were away from home during the day.”

“But… a gun!”

“I’m just being practical, baby, a girl should know how to look after herself.”

“Right,” he said dumbly. Today it didn’t seem important, somehow. In fact, he was rather glad she’d got it. He climbed up into the front of the pickup, and drove it off down the long track to the main valley road.

Randtown was still standing. Sort of. The Regents had deflected the worst of the blast upward, but the terrible distorted pressure waves that had rushed out from the mountains had easily reached the town.

Composite and metal paneling had been twisted and torn off every building. The crumpled rectangles were strewn everywhere: on the pavements, embedded in other buildings, the lighter ones floating in the Trine’ba. Thick insulation blankets were flapping freely off the naked structural girders. Roofs were skeletal outlines, almost completely devoid of their solar panels. Strangest of all was the sparkle. The whole town glittered under a coating of prismatic rainbows. Each and every window in Randtown had shattered, flinging out splinters and granules in long plumes that fell across the pavements and streets, as if sacks of diamonds had been spilled out.

Mark stopped the pickup on Low West Street, barely a couple of hundred meters off the highway. “My God, I didn’t know there was this much glass on the whole planet, let alone here.”

“Can the tires take that?” Liz asked. She was looking along the street, trying to see if anyone was around. Several pillars of smoke were rising over the broken roofs, closer to the center of town.

“Should do. They’re gelfoam.”

“Okay then.” Liz brought the handheld array up to her mouth. “Carys, we’re going in. Can the MG handle this?”

“MG will be having a nasty talk with my lawyers if it doesn’t.”

Mark leaned out of the side window. David and Lydia Dunbavand were riding in the back, sitting on the bags of camping gear; while all three of the Dunbavand kids were squashed into the MG with Carys. Behind that, the Conants’ four-by-four was acting as rear guard; Yuri had fixed it when they arrived at their homestead.

“Going in,” he called back to them.

David brought his maser wand up. “Okeydokey, we’ll keep sharp.”

Mark shook his head as he toed the accelerator. What was it with disasters and people with guns? The pickup moved forward slowly, its big tires making a constant crunching sound on the road’s crystalline coating.

They found the residents as they got closer to the center. Almost everyone caught outside during the blast was injured to some degree. People walking along the pavements had been badly wounded by wall panels slicing through the air. Those who avoided the panels had been inevitably caught in the shotgun bombardment of glass. A lot had suffered both kinds of impacts.

As they approached the top end of Main Mall the road was jammed solid with parked vehicles. Mark braked the pickup, and they all got out to walk. “Leave Panda inside,” Liz told the children. “She can’t walk on this, her paws will be shredded.”

The dog started barking piteously as they left the vehicles behind.

Half of Main Mall’s buildings were bent over at perilous angles, their structural girders pushed beyond their tolerance-loading by the ferocity of the air that had surged against them. The town’s commercial heart had been busy at the time, with the cafés full of people having leisurely lunches, pavement tables crammed full, the street packed with window shoppers.

“Oh, Jesus God,” Mark groaned as he took in the sight. He felt dizzy and faint, needing to hold on to the nearest bowed wall for support.