Page 44 of Eruption
“Sis, we have a problem here.” David was all business now.
“What is it?”
“It’s the water weight.”
“I know. We’re still going.”
Another voice said, “I think we need to hold, Rebecca.”
The voice belonged to their cousin Leo, who ran the computers. It always worked the same way with those two: When David got nervous, so did Leo. If David sneezed, Rebecca half expected Leo to reach for his handkerchief.
“Why?” she asked.
“I’m worried about connections.”
“We’re not holding.”
Leo said, “But if the computers—”
That was as far as he got before Rebecca snapped, “Will youshut up!” She took a breath. “Pretty soon there’ll be more people around here, more traffic, more problems. More risk.”
David said, “That’s true, but—”
She cut him off. “And the rain’s hitting the east side of the building more than the other sides,” she continued. “We know that that concrete is porous crap.”
“More like an old sponge than concrete,” David said.
“Right. So the longer we hold, the more weight the rain adds to one side. Right now the computers can handle the change. Later, maybe they can’t.”
“Let the rain stop,” David said. “Let the building dry.”
“David.”She hit his name hard. “It may do this for days.”
Her brother wasn’t thinking straight, but she couldn’t tell him that. Once they had the building completely wired, they had to go. They ordinarily took buildings down on Sunday mornings, since that was when cities were least crowded. That was their routine, and they finished up their prep work the day before.
Just not this time.
This time they weren’t able to wait until Sunday; they had to go on Friday. Every building had its surprises, but the Kama Kai was so shoddy, it seemed ready to fall down on its own. And that was a problem. A big-ass problem. It was much easier to take down a well-engineered and well-constructed building because you could predict what would happen. With a heap of Legos like the Kama Kai, there was always uncertainty.
Too much, in this case. And pushing things back added more.
“Give me the count,” she said.
“We’re at fifteen seconds, Rebecca.” Leo again. He sounded unhappy, like Rebecca was punishing him by making them go ahead. But when they got this close to detonation, Rebecca knew, unhappiness was her cousin’s natural state.
Go time,she told herself.
“Lock it and go off radio,” she said. “Let’s blow this puppy.”
She started counting backward to herself.Seven… six… five… four…
Rebecca waited, staring through the rain coming sideways now at the building.
At four seconds, she heard the preliminarycrack-crack-crack-crackof the small calibration charges, the ones that the computer used. Ordinarily, it took the computer three seconds to make its final calculations.
Out loud, she said, “Three… two… one.”
She heard no detonation.