Entry-2(II) – The Storm

Continued from last part…

The storm in the horizon, slowly creeping towards our Dome City kept on bringing flashbacks in my head, the destruction wreaked by the unwanted yet unavoidable repercussions of the war, frozen dead bodies on the streets, building the Vault, everything.

I had my breakfast in silence and left for the Center as soon as possible. Husky observed me almost silently occasionally letting out a whine, he could always sense me well. Even though we were inside a virtually impenetrable dome, the storm worried me and he could smell it.

My anxiety was not because of the harm it could cause to my city because Dome City was nigh impenetrable. Dome City is the only settlement in my knowledge that exists on this destroyed planet and my current place of residence. I was worried because every storm brought news of fresh trouble be it radiation or formation of acid pools that would slowly eat away at the ground beneath. New Minnesota was under water for a month the last time it was hit by a storm.

The storm had begun its onslaught on the dome by the time I reached our command facility or in short, the Centre because it was at the centre of the city. The rest of the city was built around it. The Centre houses the administrative counterparts of all the civic facilities, R&D buildings, and the central command and at accessible distances from all corners of the city.

I went to the meteorology department as soon as I reached and enquired about the storm situation. Its origin was quite far from our city. This meant the storm’s current intensity was lesser than initial. Meteorologists were trying to trace the path of Domino, the storm. Bhagirath, a young member of the team, came up with that name and it stuck since the others couldn’t come up with anything better.

The tracing could be done using our highly sensitive underground sensors. The satellites that survived were still in their orbits but incapable of studying the Earth’s surface because of the perennial cloud cover, mistress of the nuclear winter. The data from the sensors brought creases on everyone’s forehead except mine. After the loss of Martha I stopped feeling any kind of emotions except for Husky, my only best friend.

The storm’s accurate origin however could not be found and nor was it continuous. Its presence was first recorded 500km north of Dome City which is practically a cold barren land, the Cold Fields as we called it. The storm seemed to just have appeared from nowhere, there was no abrupt change in air pressure anywhere in that region before the storm. Then things got weirder, the storm seemed to disappear from time to time. There were a lot of theories from the specialists but none seemed to hold. The only effective method was to send an unmanned probing vehicle for field observation and wait for results.

I was a little enthused because the unmanned probing vehicle or UPV was my design and tomorrow was going to be its first field operation. It is literally an all-terrain vehicle with a top speed of 431kmph powered by a huge fusion engine coupled with axles made of aluminium alloyed with carbon nano-tubes. The shock absorbers are pneumatic gas charged pistons with small heat exchangers for compensating the temperature difference. The vehicle employed 4 wheels, 9 feet diameter each, 1.5 feet thick in the rear and two slightly smaller ones of equal width at the front. The air pressure inside the wheels can be altered so as to maintain appropriate traction over the terrain. The outer shell of the UPV is inspired from a Rotem battle tank but with more effective aerodynamics.

When required, this vehicle can also operate underwater though we didn’t know of any existing water bodies yet. I had always wondered how it would feel to sit inside. Pity, it is an unmanned vehicle with no space for passengers.

The UPV was completely prepped for launch but the process was tedious. Of course , it was important that every little part was checked and rechecked before releasing my creation into the wild. There was no room for mistakes. Then again, it did exhaust us entirely.

The UPV is due to start tomorrow as soon as the storm dissipates. Hopefully that would happen before we reach the Center so that no time is wasted when we start recording our observations. Let’s see what nasty stuff the car drags in. I should sleep now.