“We’re also taking this scenario as a chance to see what your physical reaction to radioactivity is,” he explained. Your avatar will react as your body would, although the sensors indicate that the gMU blocks any harmful rays.”
“That’s interesting,” she agreed and clapped briskly.
She took a deep breath and rubbed her palms together. “All right. Well, let’s get to this. Cleaning up a spill this big would usually take a lot of people—like Chernobyl when over two hundred thousand emergency and recovery workers were sent in to do the job. What I need to do is recognize which tasks need doing and in what order. Then, I need to twist my magic to do what would normally be done using men and machines, only much, much faster.”
Stephanie scrutinized the area and her attention settled on the putrid valley that had once been a river and one of the largest reservoirs in the area. Water still pooled in some sections of it, but it was muddy and yellow and the mud on its banks was full of half-rotted debris.
Beyond the dead vegetation on the riverbank, she saw what had once been the containment wall for pools of water surrounding the plant. They’d been cracked wide, the buildings beyond them little more than piles of rubble in a small lake of still water.
gMU hummed over her skin to create a faintly visible silver glow as if the magic actively fought the radiation.
Good, she thought, glad to be protected while she turned her mind with its sudden burden of information to the problem of making the area livable again—even if it was only for plants.
“So,” she began, thinking out loud rather than speaking to Burt, “what I need to do is stabilize the reactors and make sure the rods are cool.”
She looked at what was left of the power plant and studied its fractured walls and the surrounding pool of water.
“I would assume that’s done. The next thing is to remove the contaminated topsoil, the debris, and the plant material.”
This time, she stopped and stared at the devastation around her.
“Somehow, I think I’m gonna have to move more than the two inches or so of topsoil they took out for Fukushima...and that’s not gonna happen. What if I use gMU to transfer the ions and...” She let her voice fade and frowned slightly. “Burt, I need— Hold on. Let me try something.”
BURT watched her pace and make calculations in her head. When she stopped, he waited to see what she would do next.
Stephanie rubbed her hands together and a smirk played along her avatar’s lips. She put both arms out to the side and let small orbs of light escape from her palms. They raced away and searched for the edge of the most dangerous areas of radiation.
With her connection to them, she knew when the orbs reached the limits of her ability to interact with them. There was still more radiation beyond, but they stopped and traced a boundary around the area. That done, they spun faster and faster until they became connected in one ever-revolving circle.
She breathed deeply, lowered her arms, and shook her hands out. Her focus intense, she crossed them in front of her at the wrists and closed her eyes as she pulled and pushed the gMU where she needed it to go. With a sudden shift, she swung her arms out wide before she slapped her palms together.
Bursts of streaming energy exploded from both sides of her body. They rocketed toward the circled limitation of destruction and elevated to create a dome of magical protection.
Stephanie opened one eye and glanced cautiously in all directions. “That will do.”
“Wow,” Burt muttered.
She pushed her sleeves up, put her hands in front of her with her palms together, and scrutinized the location. From where she stood, she could see the edge of the dome in the distance and turned slowly to study the entire thing.
Moving her feet lightly over the ground, she swung her hands to release the energy in different ways. Some danced high into the sky and spun and whirled to collect any radioactive particles that had escaped into the atmosphere.
The second energy release feathered out and rippled over the ground to gather any debris into neat piles. A swarm of airborne gMU swept in behind it to capture any particles kicked up. As it worked, she extended her hand and faced her palm up to release another surge of magic.
This resembled a thousand droplets of honey clinging together. The whole blob oozed stickily upward to hover in front of her.
“Find the water,” she told it, and the blob separated into an army of glistening gMU particles that headed purposefully toward what was left of the reservoir and the reactor’s cooling ponds.
Stephanie kept one hand extended in the direction the globules had gone while she knelt and pressed her other palm to the ground. With her eyes shut tightly, she drew more gMU and pushed it into the earth until the ground glowed from one side of the magical dome to the other.
That accomplished, she stood and raised her hand as if she were controlling a marionette. The energy elevated from the earth and hovered barely inches above the ground.
She drew that hand close to her chest, curled her fingers, and wiggled them at the soil. The energy coating there morphed to create thousands of small rods that punctured the earth and stuck, where they vibrated as if they were sucking on the soil itself.
They grew bigger and bigger as they filled with radioactive particles. In the meantime, the magic gathering airborne particles now resembled a cloud of small comets, each with a tail of radioactive debris.
The debris and dead plant material stood stacked in neat piles under a cloak of flickering gMU. The earth lay bare around each pile, now veiled as more gMU tried to decontaminate it. As she watched, the rods drawing the radioactivity from the soil reached two feet in length and turned a dull gray as they fell in neat rows.
The comets of gMU with their tails of debris settled over them and they melded into one another before they rolled together to form solid cubes of radioactive waste. She frowned. “That’s not quite what I wanted.”
BURT took a moment to consider what she’d done. “You expected to do more?”
“Yes.” Stephanie turned in a slow circle and surveyed the area. The outline of the plant’s collapsed chimney caught her eye. “I wanted to make this place habitable, again. I wanted—”
She glared at the neat stacks, approached one, and noticed how the gMU protecting her flared into brightness as the radioactivity increased. “How do I get rid of all this?”
“There were ways,” he told her. “Humans recognized the necessity of disposing of this kind of waste. They still had not perfected one before disaster struck, but...”
Once again, she felt the impact of a rush of incoming data. This time, she reached out instinctively and laid a hand on one of the cubes for support.
“Ow!” She stumbled back and rubbed her hand against her thigh. “That smarts.”
With a scowl, she raised her hand so she could inspect her stinging palm and an ugly red burn where she’d touched the pile.
“It appears the gMU has its limits,” Burt observed. “Proximity and concentration play a role in how effectively it protects you.”
“Noted,” she responded, her voice dry.
Stephanie stared into the distance and struggled to decide which method she would try next. She could attempt to transmute the waste at the molecular level. There’d been several methods where ions had been swapped and the waste had been transformed into a less dangerous form.
There was also one where extreme heat had been applied and dangerous radioactive waste had been burned in another kind of nuclear reactor, but even that had only changed the waste into another form with a less long-lived type of radiation. What she wanted to do was get rid of the radioactivity completely.
Can the gMU be used to restructure the material into something that isn’t radioactive? Maybe even something useful? Like... She thought about it. Like new topsoil, maybe?
“Burt, what kind of molecules are found in dirt that’s good for farming?”
He sent her the data, and Stephanie studied it quiet
ly for a moment.
“And what’s the molecular structure of these?” she asked and gestured at the stacks around her.
Burt scanned the piles and sent her the information. Stephanie gave a soft whistle. “Well, here goes nothing.”
She focused on the gMU and drew more in, then worked it through the vortex she’d built inside her. As she concentrated it into the strongest form she’d attempted thus far, she thought about the piles of debris and waste around her.
“This has to work,” she murmured as she thought of the molecular structure she had and the one she wanted to create. It wasn’t as simple as she’d first thought. Even using magic, she first had to split the heavy, radioactive atoms and recombine the protons, neurons, and electrons into the lighter atoms she needed. That was the only way to create carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen atoms that could be recombined into the various organic matter found in topsoil. She would definitely need to pull and compress a significant amount of gMU to accomplish it.
When she thought the gMU was concentrated enough to make the conversion, she raised her hands and turned to face the nearest pile of debris. As she directed the magic into it in a single silver stream, she thought about the way the molecules had to shift and change and willed the magic to make it happen.
She continued to pour the gMU into the stack until the orderly pile crumbled into a mound of dirt...and dirt that smelt better than the world around her. “Yes! Look, Burt. Look!”
Her delight made him laugh, but he tried not to let any of that humor show when he spoke. “And the rest?”
“Easy!” she exclaimed and channeled the energy over the remaining piles.
At first, it was as easy as she thought it would be, but suddenly, it wasn’t. The magic faltered as it curled over the last pile and she realized she’d focused so hard on sending it out that she hadn’t remembered to draw more in.
It didn’t take her long to fix that particular error.
“Nice!” he said, but she didn’t hear him.
With the last stack of debris now transformed into a nice big pile of dirt, her gaze had drifted to the collapsed chimney.
“You know what the ultimate test would be?” she asked.
“I dread to think,” BURT replied. He followed the direction of her eyes and calculated the odds of whether she’d go there next.
Sure, enough, she didn’t disappoint.
“Can you put me in the reactor room?” she asked. “Somewhere near the rods but not on them?”
Ah, so she’d remembered the burn.
“I can do that,” he told her, and in spite of his better judgment, changed the scenery.
His misgivings were well-founded when with a single shriek of pain, her avatar crumbled. Apparently, the gMU couldn’t protect against that level of radiation. He ended the scenario and brought her avatar back to stand amidst the piles of dirt.
“Ugh. Let’s not do that, again,” Stephanie told him. “Now I know what a piece of burnt toast feels like. Worse, even.”
Burt chuckled. “Well, now we know there’s a limit to the background radiation the gMU can protect you from.”
“Yeah. Thanks for that, Burt. I hadn’t noticed.”
“Really?” He injected surprise into his tones and then tried to sound serious as he suggested, “Would you like to go back and try again?”
“Oh, hell, no! What I want to do is figure out what else I can do while I think about how to deal with the rods.”
“Okay. And your next idea is?”
“You remember that data you sent me about phytoremediation?”
“Yee-ees,” he replied and wondered why she hadn’t made the connection before.
“Well, since I don’t have the energy to make another three hundred tons of dirt, I might as well see what I can do with the dirt I have. First, I need to spread it out.”
BURT watched, intrigued, as she directed gMU magic to spread the dirt evenly over the area she’d taken the radiation from. “What sort of plants do you require?”
She put her hands on her hips and cocked her head.
“Oh, I don’t know. You’re the one who gave me the list. Do you really want me to repeat it all back to you?”
He sighed. “When did you get so sarcastic?”
Stephanie rolled her eyes. “Blame the boys. Now, hit me with the greenery.”
Seconds later, she was not so impressed. “Are you done, yet?”
BURT dumped another layer of plant life over her avatar and watched as she collapsed under the weight. She said nothing when she struggled free of it and merely glowered as she spread the plants over the surrounding landscape.
When she was done, she sank to her knees and pressed a hand to the ground.
“So?” she asked and fatigue threaded her voice. “How did we do?”
He checked the system. “Within the dome, you’ve reduced the contamination by almost seventy percent.”
“Seventy percent.” Stephanie didn’t sound impressed. She raised her head and surveyed the land around her. It did look better, but it was a long way from done. She took a deep breath and drew in a little more gMU, but then she stopped. “I can’t do anymore today.”
She sounded so utterly defeated that he wanted to comfort her, but before he could, she continued. “That’s not bad. How much of the earth’s surface did I cover?”
He pulled the Virtual World back to give her the view from space. Her eyes shifted feverishly and a small frown creased her forehead. “I don’t see it. Did you get the projection wrong?”
A tiny light flickered on the planet and she blinked and stared at it. “That’s it?”
“That’s it,” he replied. “It’s about a square kilometer of surface area.”
Stephanie rubbed her aching shoulders, starting to feel the strain of using that much magic. “Well, at this rate, it will take…ohhhh…only a million lifetimes or so.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Stephanie whistled to herself, her mind on what she’d done in the pod as she packed her suitcase. She ran through different scenarios she could try in order to magnify the effect.
Her aim was to create a livable Earth again but at her current pace, the sun would swallow the planet before she could finish. A knock on the door drew her attention and she packed the pair of pants she held before she answered. Lars stood on the other side and leaned nonchalantly against the doorframe.
He flashed her a handsome smile and caught her off guard. Not because he smiled but because she actually, for a split second, considered it a handsome one.
“Hey,” he said and peeked into her room. “Are you about packed up?”
She looked back. “Yeah. I’m getting the last things folded, and then I only have my grooming supplies.”
Lars chuckled. “Grooming supplies? Are you hiding a horse in there I don’t know about?”
Stephanie joined his laughter, then he straightened and tapped the doorframe. “I wanted to let you know we have an hour before we leave.”
She nodded and glanced at the numbers floating on the wall. There were three columns of digits on the far wall, all keeping her informed of the time in every sector of Earth, Meligorn, and Dreth. The one lit up green was the one they went by. “Okay, I’ll be ready. I’m gonna call my mom quickly.”
He smiled again. “Tell her I said hi.”
Stephanie laughed softly and gave him the hand sign for okay before she closed the door. She stood there for a moment, frowning slightly, then shrugged and crossed to the small desk in her room. “AI, can you please get my mom on the line?”
“Calling her now,” the AI responded.
Quicker than she expected, Cindy’s holographic image popped up over the small silver box on the desk. “Hey, sweetie!”
“Hey, Mom!” She was excited to see her and hear her voice again. “How are you doing?”
“I’m good—cleaning up around the house,” her mom replied. “Your father went to meet with a vendor for the supplies we need to
reorder.”
“Aw, I was hoping to say hi.” She sighed. “And didn’t you just restock?”
Cindy smirked. “We did, but to start the contract job we just signed—thanks to you—we’ll need more.”
She gasped and clapped. “Yay! Congrats.”
“Thank you, and congrats to you too on those stellar selling abilities,” her mom replied. “We happen to have this investor…” She cleared her throat and winked. “We’re using some of that money to hire more people and get a second level of operational support.”
“Look at you guys, getting all crazy big.” She laughed and glanced at the door as a knock caught her attention. “Ugh, I’m sorry, Mom. We’re getting ready to go so we have a million things to do.”
“No problem,” Cindy said and waved cheerfully. “I completely understand. Go, do what you need to do, have a safe trip, and call us from Meligorn.”
Stephanie smiled warmly. “I will. I love you. And please tell Dad I love him too.”
“Always,” her mother replied with her signature warm, caring smile. “Kisses.”
They hung up and she sighed as she strode over and jerked the door open with one hand. Elizabeth stood outside, looking at her phone. “Oh, hey, sorry to interrupt. I heard your mom so I waited.”
She waved her mentor inside. “What’s up? Are you taking the long trip in a business suit? That’s hardcore.”
Ms. E looked at her black calf-length dress and black dress jacket. “Oh, no. Actually, that’s why I am here. Unfortunately, I have to stay behind and protect your back, so you’ll go to Meligorn with only your team.”
Stephanie bit the inside of her lip, slightly shocked by the news. “Oh... Okay. Whatever you need to do.”
She wrestled with an odd sense of despondency. Up until that moment, she hadn’t realized how comfortable she felt having Elizabeth around. She’d been a lot happier knowing she would go with them, and her disappointment must have shown.
Witch Of The Federation (Federal Histories Book 2) Page 30
