Free Hieroglyph by Ed Finn Page B

that Nicky hadn’t gotten around to lecturing us about.
    Shock and awe only last for so long and then you begin to take stock of reality.
    The First Bar in Space was mostly gone. The superbolt had melted a hole through its floor and roof and it had explosively decompressed, vomiting its contents—barstools, dartboards, Carl’s ashes—into space. So Nicky’s precaution about the gamma rays had not only saved us from a stiff dose of radiation but, by dumb luck, kept us from being blown to bits and sprayed across the desert.
    Several other buildings were no longer shirtsleeves environments. Some looked undamaged. Safety doors ought to have slammed down in the tube network, preventing depressurization of the whole Top Click. When the storm had passed and the danger of gamma rays was over, we’d move into one of the undamaged structures and wait for rescue.
    In the meantime, we were in for a wild ride, because the tower had begun swaying and shuddering beneath us.
    Panic would have been too obvious. I confess I was headed in that general direction, though, until Hiram’s voice came through: “I don’t care how big the lightning was,” he said. “I rode that steel up and there is just no way it could have taken that much damage.” He rolled off the stack of plates and let himself down to the deck. “I’m going to go have a look.”
    What the heck. My kid-having days were over. I had responsibilities. First and foremost to Carl’s grandkid-in-the-making.
    â€œEmma, what the heck ?!” Tess called.
    â€œThe storm is over, baby,” I said, and followed Hiram, who let me down easy to the deck.
    Some touristy impulse led us straight to the wreckage of the First Bar in Space. We dropped to our knees and approached the hole in the deck on all fours.
    Staring down through the hole, we could see, a couple of kilometers below us, something like a venetian blind that had been attacked with a blowtorch. Several of those burnished-aluminum airfoils had been blasted by the superbolt. A huge strip of aluminum had peeled away from one of them and gotten wrapped around the one below it.
    â€œWell, there’s your problem,” Hiram pronounced. “No wonder the tower ain’t flying right.” As if on cue, the structure lurched beneath us, eliciting squeals of horror from our friends back in the depot.
    â€œIs it dangerous?” I asked him. Because one of the advantages of being a middle-aged chick in this world was the freedom to ask questions that a young male would be too insecure to voice.
    â€œTo people below? If some of that crap falls off? Sure!” he said. “To us? Nah. Structure’s fine. Just ain’t flying right. Only real risk is barfing in our helmets.”
    I wasn’t about to second-guess Hiram, who had ridden the tower up from day one and had a strong intuitive feel for what made it stand up. But uneasy memories were stirring of briefings, years ago, about top-down failure cascades. The classic example being the Twin Towers, which had collapsed in toto despite the fact that all the initial damage had been confined to their upper floors. Debris from a high-level event could damage structural elements far below, with incalculable results. The thin, almost nonexistent atmosphere up here would allow debris to fall at supersonic velocity. Energy, and damage, would increase as the velocity squared . . .
    Where was the problem, I wondered, that was preventing the tower from “flying right”? Had the superbolt fried the electronics? Jammed a mechanism? Bent a control surface?
    Which caused me to remember one other detail from earlier in the evening . . .
    â€œCrap,” I said. “There’s a guy down there. Working on the system. Joe. An engineer. I hope he’s okay.”
    â€œI wonder if there’s any way to reach him?” Tess asked. Reminding me that all of us up here were linked in a single