Flag In Exile

"That's odd."

The soft murmur drew Adam Gerrick's attention from his own terminal. Stuart Matthews, the leader of the Eattem analysis team, stood gazing down at a detailed holographic model of the collapsed dome. The ghastly tangle of wreckage was brutally clear, but at least the bodies had been omitted. Gerrick was grateful for that, but even now his mind insisted on supplying the crushed victims, and a fresh shudder of anguish ran through him as he remembered a smiling little girl's final seconds of life.

He closed his eyes, fighting off the pain that threatened his ability to think, then stood and walked over to the holo.

"What?" His voice was a croak, and his eyes were red-rimmed and swollen in a sunken face. He'd had less than ten hours' sleep in the ninety-odd hours since the dome's collapse, and he'd gotten those only because the medics had flatly refused to prescribe any more stimulants unless he did. Matthews was in little better shape. Like all of Sky Domes' senior engineers, he'd been skipping sleep, meals, and baths, and his own exhaustion showed as he blinked owlishly, then ran one hand through the oily tangle of his thi

"I've been ru

"And?"

"And they won't match, Adam. Not even if we allow for defective ceramacrete in every footing pour."

"What?" Gerrick propped his buttocks on a work table to take the weight off his shaky legs, but though his shoulders slumped with grinding fatigue, his stim-fired brain worked with a sort of detached smoothness.

"I said what happened doesn't match any of them."

"It has to," Gerrick said reasonably. "Are you sure we've allowed for all the factors?"

"Damn straight I am." Matthews' temper was on as frayed a leash as anyone else's, and his voice was sharp with exhausted belligerence, but he clamped his teeth and fought it down, then took a deep breath and held up a thick folio of data chips. "We've got everything in here, Adam. I guarantee it. Hell, I even went back and applied all the met data from the period between our original survey and the start of construction just to see if it could have had some unanticipated effect on the soil strata. And I'm telling you that nothing in our models can account for what happened here."

"Why not?"

"Watch." Matthews tapped instructions into the computers driving the holo display. The tangled wreckage reassembled itself into an intact, half-completed dome, and Gerrick shoved himself up off the worktable and stepped closer for a better view. "I'm ru

Gerrick grunted agreement, then folded his arms and waited. Nothing happened for a moment, and then he detected the same, tiny movement he'd seen the first time. It brought back all his nightmare memories, but this time his angle of view was different... and this time he wasn't actually standing there watching children die. He could think about what he was seeing, not simply know he was trapped in an obscene tragedy.

The first support member began its fall, and despite his detachment, Gerrick's heart spasmed as he saw another begin to move. Then another. But then his eyes narrowed, for there was a pattern here. One he hadn't seen at the time, and one he still couldn't quite isolate. His trained instincts saw it, but it eluded his reason, and he leaned still closer to the holo, fighting to isolate the element that was indefinably yet utterly wrong.

"There!" Matthews froze the holo. Plunging crystoplast and alloy were abruptly suspended in mid-fall, and he pointed. "Look here, down in the alpha ring. See this?" He frowned and tapped more keys, and a clutch of structural members abruptly shifted color, blazing bright crimson in the display.

"Yessssss," Gerrick said slowly, brow furrowed in thought, and the other engineer shook his head.

"Couldn't happen that way, Adam. Look." He input still more commands, and glowing vector analyses appeared beside the crimson supports. "See, those suckers are turning. They're not just falling, they're rotating in the holes."

"But..." Gerrick began, then stopped, and his frown mirrored Matthews'. He remembered his original impression on the site, the way the collapsing shafts had twisted sickeningly as they fell, and his frown deepened.

"But that is what happened," he said after a moment, very slowly. "I was there, Stu. I saw it."

"I know it is," Matthews said tiredly. "This isn't a model; it's a recreation from the visual records of the real event. The only problem is, what you're seeing is impossible. The crosscuts in the holes would have prevented that twisting motion."

"Come on, Stu. There's a hell of a lot of mass coming down out there, and the footings don't have to actually turn to impart that kind of motion. Even the six-nineteen alloys would warp under that much stress."

"Sure they would, but not this soon. We're barely three seconds into the event, Adam. They would've held longer than that. And when they did start warping, they'd do it as individuals, in a cascade effect. Not only that, but if you look closely, you'll see there's very little deformation of the supports. In fact, if you check the post-collapse reports, the ones I've highlighted actually show less deformation than any other beams in the entire structure, and none of them actually sheared" Matthews shook his head. "No, Adam. These bastards started turning before they started falling."

Gerrick grunted as if he'd been punched in the belly, for Matthews was right. What had happened in Mueller couldn't have happened. The support bores narrowed once they reached bedrock, and each of them incorporated a squared-off crosscut a half-meter wider than the diameter of the lower bore. The rectangular support shafts socketed into those crosscuts, for their cross-section was also greater than the diameter of the lower bores. The last ten meters of every shaft was, in effect, locked into a supporting matrix of bedrock even before the ceramacrete footing was poured. Without proper ceramacrete, the native rock couldn't have held a support once the collapse began, but it should have kept the supports from turning until far more shearing force was exerted on the stone. The supports should have fallen straight inward for the first dozen meters and only started to twist in the last two-thirds or so of their collapse.

And, he thought, his eyes suddenly even more intent, only the supports Stu had tagged in crimson showed that motion pattern. The ones between them were falling exactly the way the models said they should, and he was right about the final degree of deformation, too. It was as if something had actually relieved the stress on the marked support members... and that, he realized suddenly, was exactly what would have happened if they'd been free to turn in the holes. More than that, there was another pattern that...

"We've input the data on the bad ceramacrete?"

"Of course we have," Matthews said a bit snappishly, touched on his exhausted professional pride, and Gerrick raised a placating hand.

"Highlight the supports with the bad footings in amber," he said intently. Matthews looked at him a moment, then shrugged and typed more instructions into the computer. Nothing happened for an instant while the molycirc genius considered its orders, and then most of the crimson-coded support members began to flash alternating crimson and amber. But not all of them, Gerrick noted, and leaned closer to look at the two which didn't.

His eyes darted over the displayed vector analyses beside the two steadily crimson supports, and then he grunted again. The numbers didn't match those of their red-and-yellow fellows, but allowing for the fact that they'd had good ceramacrete and the others hadn't...