Page 3 of Rescuing Ally: Part 1

I don’t need Whittman to explain what’s happening.

I know.

Quantum tunneling. Containment field destabilization. A cascade effect spiraling out of control. It’s a runaway chain reaction—inevitable, relentless. The math is merciless.

The fusion reactor is going critical.

The air changes.

It feels alive.

The vibrations pulse in rhythm, the earth itself bracing for catastrophe.

“No,” Whittman gasps beside me, his eyes wide as the explosions crescendo behind us. His voice cracks with desperation, his words garbled and too fast, but I understand.

The reactor.

“No, no, no…” Whittman’s voice is more than a gasp now—it’s close to a sob. His words tumble out, barely carrying over the frantic rush of footsteps and the deafening roar of the night. “The containment fields… they’re collapsing. If the cascade initiates—if we reach tunneling thresholds … ”

“Keep moving!” A sharp command silences him.

The black-clad figure on my left drags me forward, his voice razor-sharp and unyielding—the voice of a man who expects immediate compliance and gets it. The rescuer on my right balances that precision with something dangerously calm, his movements fluid but his rifle steady as it scans the distance.

I don’t understand their rhythm, but it’s there—perfectly honed as if they’ve moved together for years. Something about them feels familiar, a déjà vu that needles at me through the fog of adrenaline and fear. No time to chase it now.

Another explosion rocks the earth behind us, sending me stumbling into the rescuer on my left with a choked cry.

“Easy.” He pulls me upright, his grip steady, almost gentle despite the urgency.

The steppe stretches out before us, wide anddesolate. We’re running, but there’s no way to escape the catastrophe of a fusion reactor reaching critical.

I grit my teeth, lungs burning.

My mind’s spinning, running calculations I wish I could forget. This isn’t a nuclear plant meltdown. It isn’t an atomic bomb.

That’s fission.

A fusion reactor losing containment is nothing like a nuclear power plant’s meltdown.

This is far worse.

The core melts down with a nuclear power plant, and the radiation leaks out, but everything stays in one place—at least long enough for some containment.

An atomic bomb? That’s fission, too.

The explosion is over in a blinding instant. There’s radiation and wholescale destruction, but we’re talking fusion.

It’s far worse than either of those.

When a fusion reactor loses its containment fields… it’s like freeing a miniature sun.

Fusion runs hotter than fission—hundreds of millions of degrees hotter.

All that heat turns rock into molten slag, air into plasma.

There’s no stopping it.

No obstacle can hold it back.

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