By Kevin J. Phyland
They dropped me two blocks from the derelict warehouse and left me to make my way on foot.
The radiation signal was very weak but obviously located in the abandoned basement and shielded at least partly. Reaching the building, I forced a rust-riddled door open and jogged to the nearest stairwell and descended to the location pinpointed by the data scan.
The terrorists had messaged CopCom twenty minutes ago with a thirty minute heads-up. Since the object of terrorism is terror it was probably moot for the perpetrators whether the device was authentic or not.
My onboard sensors tickled with increased radiation as I neared the basement area and I knew that this was at the very least a workable dirty bomb and more likely a small yield nuke.
I quickly scanned the room on entering. Five minutes left according to the old analog clock on the wall if the terrorists had been sincere — an assumption not to be trusted.
In the actinic glare of the overhead fluoros my hands were trying not to shake as I carefully pried the dried punk from the recessed screwheads. This was different. Taking the phillips head screwdriver I rotated it feverishly anticlockwise to enable me to remove a piece of the outer casing to get at the device within.
The clockwork mechanism continued its ratcheting as it moved the two sub-critical pieces of uranium-235 inexorably towards each other. Inside the fuel capsule neutrons were whizzing thoughtlessly from piece to piece replacing random uranium atoms with krypton or barium and spewing out energy in the form of radiation.
As the pieces of uranium got closer to each other the number of neutrons escaping lessened and more of them started to create new radiations. If the mass became critical all the material would change pretty much at once with one enormous energy release. This was an obscenity, an atomic weapon, and I now had less than four minutes to disarm it.
This bomb had been designed using mostly non-electronic parts — a clever piece of subterfuge — which precluded simply using magnetic fields or power disrupters to disarm it. My arms were starting to feel warm. Psychosomatic or not, the amount of radiation reaching me now must be giving me some serious rad action.
Three minutes. I removed what I expected to be a klystron housing but it wasn't, and through a tube of plexiglass saw the two pieces of silvery metal sliding slowly towards each other. It was spring-loaded so that the pieces would surge toward each other if the tube was broken. My skin had now reddened and blisters were rising on my hands and fingers. They bled freely.
I paused to consider my next move. The pieces must be kept apart — that was a no-brainer — or those innocuous looking three kilograms of metal would become a five kiloton urban renewal program.
A minute twenty left. I had to give the terrorist points for creativity, as there seemed to be no way for this particular nascent mushroom cloud to have a silver lining without taking at least one victim — me.
There was a buzzing in my ears and my vision started waving with scanlines of interference as the intensity of the emitted beta particles and gamma radiation started interfering with my body's electrical systems.
Only one solution appeared possible.
I took a huge gulp of air and picked up a metal handled corkscrew left by some boozy janitor and, holding it tightly in my fist, smashed it down through the glass between the two pieces of uranium.
The pieces leapt towards one another – but struck either side of my hand – which was keeping a gap of a few centimetres between them, and I flicked the forehand piece away onto the floor.
The radiation would slow and I would probably lose my hand, possibly my eyes and some organs but importantly no big bang.
My sweat dripped freely onto the floor as I collapsed into a chair and signalled for retrieval.
Outside, the city shivered in barely contained fear. Just another day on the front lines.
About the Author
Kevin J. Phyland
Old enough to just remember the first manned Moon landing, Kevin was so impressed he made science his life.
Retired now from teaching he amuses himself by reading, writing, following his love of weather and correcting people on the internet.
He’s been writing since his teens and hopes he will one day get it right.
He can be found on twitter @KevinPhyland where he goes by the handle of CaptainZero and his work is around the place if you search using google or use the antisf.com.au archive.
Ion Newcombe is the editor and publisher of AntipodeanSF, Australia’s longest running online speculative fiction magazine, regularly issued since January 1998, and conceived back around November 2007. He has been a zealous reader and occasional writer of SF since his childhood in the 1960s, and even sold a few stories here and there back in the '90s.
Mark Webb's midlife crisis came in the form of attempting to write speculative fiction at a very slow pace. His wife maintains this is a good outcome considering the more expensive and cliched alternatives. Evidence of Mark's attempts to procrastinate in his writing, including general musings and reviews of books he has been reading, can be found at www.markwebb.name.
Natsumi Tanaka is a writer living in Kyoto, Japan. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous Japanese magazines such as Anima Solaris, Kotori no kyuden, and Tanpen.
Evan James Sheldon’s work has appeared recently in American Literary Review, the Cincinnati Review, and New Flash Fiction Review.
Jake Dean is a writer and waverider living on Kaurna land in South Australia.
Matthew R. Doherty currently resides in Leeds, England, where he spends most of his free time writing about military history, but his other consuming passion is for science fiction.
Joanna is a writer who lives in the bush near the Glasshouse Mountains in Queensland.
Geraldine Borella writes adult short stories and stories for children and has been published in anthologies for both. In 2018, one of her children’s short stories placed second in The Buzz Words Short Story Prize and she won an ASA Emerging Writer’s Mentorship. She currently works part-time as a hospital pharmacist and as an online creative writing tutor.
Andrew writes science-fiction and fantasy from the state of Maryland on the eastern coast of the United States, often drawing ideas from jogs through forest trails at sunrise or a tasty beer at sunset. 
Tim Borella has never lost his childhood passion for SF and writing in general and has been lucky enough to have worked most of his life as a pilot — in other words, he’s never properly grown up.
Simon Petrie, born and educated in New Zealand, now lives in the Australian Capital Territory, where he is paid to be careful with words.
Although a writer of the baby boom persuasion, Ed has not boomed for quite a while.
Timothy Gwyn is a professional pilot in Canada, where he flies to remote communities. During a lull in his flying career, he was a radio announcer for three years, and he is also an author.
Garry Dean lives on the Mid Coast of New South Wales Australia, and has been a fan of SF for most of his natural life. Being vision impaired, he makes good use of voice recognition and text to speech in order to write. Many of his stories have appeared in AntipodeanSF over the years, and his love of all things audio led him to join the narration team in 2017.
Pixie is a voice actor, cabaret performer & slam poet From the Blue Mountains in NSW.
Laurie Bell lives in Melbourne, Australia. She was that girl you found with her nose always buried in a book. She has been writing ever since she was a little girl and first picked up a pen. From books to short stories, radio plays to snippets of ideas and reading them aloud to anyone who will listen.
Margaret lives the good life on a small piece of rural New South Wales Australia, with an amazing man, a couple of pets, and several rambunctious wombats.
Alistair Lloyd is a Melbourne based writer and narrator who has been consuming good quality science fiction and fantasy most of his life.
