Free Hieroglyph by Ed Finn Page A

thunderstorms, evacuate any parts of the structure that hadn’t been shielded yet—
    â€œThank you,” I said, “you’re a sharp one.”
    Nicky nodded.
    â€œWhat is your idea? Why are we donning?” I asked her.
    â€œThere’s a place over in the depot where some plate steel has been stacked up—I reckon if we huddle on top of that, it should stop most of the gamma rays coming up from the storm.”
    Roger had been listening intently to all this. In a weird burst of insight, I understood why: Alexandra was pregnant. She wasn’t showing yet. So there was no real evidence to support my intuition. But she had declined the offer of a drink, which was unusual for her, and there’d been something in the way she and Roger looked at each other . . . Carl’s grandchild was up here, taking shape in her womb. We had to get her over cover.
    The depot that Nicky had spoken of was the old construction materials dump, near the middle of the Top Click. It was all out in the open, which was why we’d had to don in order to get there. In a few minutes’ time we were all able to put on our helmets and let our suits run through their self-check routines. We stepped out into an airlock and experienced the weird sensation of feeling the suits stiffen around us as the outside pressure dropped. They were awkward to move in, and none of us was really trained in their use—they were for survival purposes only. For that reason a number of electrically powered scooters were parked in their charging docks right outside the exit. We merely had to waddle over to them, climb aboard, and then steer them away. In an ungainly queue we followed Nicky in a circuitous path among buildings-in-progress. Shortly we arrived at the depot and followed her to a place where corrugated steel floor panels had been stacked up in neat rectangular blocks almost as tall as our heads. Hiram, who of all of us was most adept at moving around in a suit, clambered up onto the top of a stack and then reached down to pull the rest of us after him.
    The view here wasn’t as good, but none of us doubted Nicky’s judgment as to the gamma rays, so we didn’t mind. Soon the most intense part of the storm was passing beneath us. We could tell as much from the fact that the red sprites were directly overhead. Most of us ended up lying on our backs so that we could gaze straight up and watch the light show.
    We had taken all of these precautions for one reason: to avoid exposure to gamma radiation. The storm was nowhere near us. Far below, winds were buffeting the lower structure, but we didn’t even feel it. Our view down blocked by tons of steel, our only clue that a storm was in progress was the sprites blooming tens of thousands of meters overhead.
    All of which made the superbolt just that much more surprising.
    Of course, we didn’t know it was something called an “upward superbolt” until much later. At the time, I just assumed that I was dead for some reason, and that the transition to heaven, or hell, was a much more jarring event than what tended to be described by survivors of near-death experiences. My next hypothesis was that I was still alive, but not for long—I remember reaching up to touch my helmet, fearing that it had popped off. Nope, it was still there. Then, for a minute or two, I was convinced that terrorists had set off a small nuclear device somewhere on the Top Click. Buildings were damaged, debris—glowing hot—was cascading to the deck. Finally my ears recovered to the point where I could hear Nicky saying “lightning,” and despite all of this chaos some part of my brain was registering the schoolgirlish objection that lightning was a cloud-ground interaction, and we were not between the clouds and the ground, so how could that be? Now, of course, I know more than I want to about upward superbolts: another fascinating middle-atmospheric phenomenon