Althea stared upwards, shielding her eyes from the bits of debris which were still fluttering and drizzling down. Climbing up would be a struggle through the added wreckage. She didn’t have time to wait or rest – despite collection of fresh, painful bruises. The Macro would be reacting to what she’d done – reacting with haste.

Muscles burning and heavy as stone, skull throbbing with every heartbeat, she reached a hand up to grip the slippery lip of the shaft. The harsh acrid smoke continued to waft down from above, clear lines of blackness stretched out through what she could see of the sky. All the way up, the sounds of distant thunder continued to shake the shaft, but they were weak, sporadic, doing little around her but dislodge the dust.

Only small pieces of a drone littered the platform, much to her relief. The commands she sent must have blown it right off the plaza; there weren’t enough pieces scattered about to account for it all.

Pulling herself out of the shaft, Althea could do little more than turn over, lay down on the snow. Still breathing heavily with the strain of the climb, she stared up at the dirty sky, the vast smudges of black and white bound together. Her NANs – depleted from her previous injuries – were no longer adding to her strength, her stamina. The weakness she felt was mortifying.

It took an act of will to pull herself shakily to her knees, to her feet – to stand up, battered and stiff, to survey the burning wasteland she’d created.

The fireworks were almost over, but many fierce blazes remained. The clean line of the horizon, the plain beyond the city was littered with huge burning pieces of the corpore.

Althea turned around, feeling again, the icy wind from the north – smiled. It looked like the city had only taken superficial damage from the blasts. Some of the buildings were cratered, and smoking, but the destruction seemed minimal. The odds that the men had survived were good.

A sensation of warmth wafted over her, along with harsh, nauseating smoke – she held her breath, covered her mouth, shut her burning eyes. Was the warmth more than just residual heat from the fires? She turned her attention back to Dorian, readjusted the loose audio pod in her right ear, static worryingly buzzed, crackled. Thankfully, the smell had passed by the time she had to breathe again.

“Was I deep enough Dorian?” she asked, concerned about the radiation risk. How much trilium was still reacting, radiating? “What’s the radiation count?”

It was a clean blast. His voice had a hard time through the static. There is only residual radiation.

A lot of residual radiation, Althea suspected. She was probably going to lose the last of her NANs as they fought to preserve her against it. She pulled his case out, checked the display, frowned at the peaks in emissions.

A spike showed up with every blast, the figures confirming her fears.

There may still be some volatility.

“So I see,” she agreed, smiling at the understatement, spotted new fires, puffs of smoke. “But we’ve survived this far.”

She tested her transceiver reception, frowned. There was a wash of interference over all the radio bands.

“I’m worried about the static, Dorian,” she noted. “Can you pick up any transmissions through it?”

Linear points radiated through the visual noise on his display. She relaxed a touch.

The core’s signal is still obscured by local interference. There are many high-energy reflections from the dispersed trilium, but I can detect data burst fragments.

“Direction?”

Difficult to pinpoint – southwest, between two hundred and two hundred and fifty degrees.

“Pin the source down,” she told him, “What about weaker signals?”

Where were the men?

“Traejan!” she called out. “Kyso!”