their cores, and so they had been… so long as the combatants restricted themselves to chemical explosives.
They were not proof against the cataclysmic eruption of fusion-born plasma in their very midst, and the fireball of the Octagon’s destruction enveloped them like the fiery breath of Hell itself.
At least those man-made mountains of ceramacrete were tough enough and huge enough to channel the blast. They acted like a breakwater, protecting the city beyond them with their own deaths, and their sacrifice was not in vain, for “only” one-point-three million citizens of Nouveau Paris perished with them.
Oscar Saint-Just’s office was two-thirds of the way across the city from the Octagon, and the office itself lay at the very heart of its own tower. Not even the eye-tearing brilliance of a nuclear detonation could penetrate that much alloy and ceramacrete, but the entire stupendous edifice trembled as if in terror as the shockwave rolled over it. The deeply buried landlines of the government’s secure communications system were fully hardened against the EMP of the explosion, and Rachel Speer’s image on his com display didn’t even flicker.
Nor did her gaze, as she looked out of the display into his eyes.
“Detonation confirmed… Citizen Chairman,” she said softly.
