San Francisco had suffered fire and quake damage once before in 1906 and had learned from the ensuing horrors. Some cities would have been flattened by such a tremor, but the city by the bay was made of sterner stuff. Fire departments rushed to extinguish the flames. Emergency vehicles raced to rescue trapped individuals. Police cars blocked streets and helped direct the injured to emergency medical care facilities. The damage would reach into the hundreds of millions of dollars, but the loss of life was minimal. However, the danger was not over.
Far out to sea, a wave rose. Generated by the force of the impact, the wave rushed toward the coast, climbing higher as it approached shallower water. Miles knew about earthquakes and tsunamis. He rushed north trying to reach high ground on the bluffs along the northwestern point of the peninsula, no longer jogging, but now running for his life. The sidewalk was shattered, too dangerous to follow. He cut across the park, dodging or leaping over toppled trees that rose from the mist like hurdles, scraping his legs on shrubs and flowers.
Around him, people were beginning to recover from the quake, stumbling from their homes, stunned and confused. He saw in their eyes the same fear that pushed him northwards. Perhaps, he should have warned them about the coming tsunami, but self-preservation was uppermost on his mind. He pushed forward in a blind panic, heart racing, his fear lending extra speed to his feet.
He almost made it. He was just south of Sutro Heights Park when the rumble of the approaching tsunami began to shake the ground. At first, he thought it was an aftershock from the quake, but then he looked out to sea. Even in the pre-dawn darkness, he could see a giant wall of water descending on the peninsula. With a sickening feeling, he knew would never reach safety in time. He had nowhere to go. He stopped running and watched. The wave had climbed to seventy feet when it struck the shoreline and ripped into the low-lying structures along the coast with the fury of Neptune’s trident. The wave swept over him, crushing him instantly, and then dragging his lifeless body along with the tons of mud, silt, rock, and debris swept up by the onrush of water, a grinder pulverizing everything in its path.
Within minutes the entire western side of the peninsula from the Presidio in the north to Pacifica to the south was inundated. The waters, laden with bodies and debris, crashed into the hills of Forest Knolls before sweeping back out to sea, carrying with it the litter of a destroyed city.
The wave, most of it still concealed beneath the deeper water, marched through the Golden Gate Channel beneath the still shaking bridge, submerging Treasure Island, most of Alcatraz, and then swept along the wharfs of Oakland like a watery scythe. Moored ships, carried by the wave’s power, careened like giant metal juggernauts through the streets of the city, ending up blocks inland. The wave swept backwards across the bay into downtown San Francisco, washing away the wharves of the Embarcadero and the Presidio before lapping at the feet of the lofty Transamerica Pyramid, 555 California Street, the Millennium Tower, and Forty Embarcadero Center.
Thousands died. Tens of thousands were left homeless, but San Francisco had survived worse disasters. By sunrise, emergency teams had scattered throughout the city. By noon, thousands of volunteers were scouring the wreckage for survivors. The city would recover.
Thirty miles out in the Pacific Ocean the earth was groaning again.
2
Thursday, August 9, 2018 2:30 a.m. (CDT) Johnson Space Center, Houston, TX –
Doctor Robert Wingate Rutherford was familiar with panic. He understood it as part of his equations. It was a measurable number impersonally represented by a letter of the Greek alphabet. However, this time the panic reached out to touch him personally. Cold fingers gripped his heart and squeezed until icy tendrils of fear insinuated themselves throughout his body. It was a chill that sapped his strength and whispered, “Give up” in the ghostly voice of his high school gym teacher. Memories surfaced of a younger Gate Rutherford struggling to climb the knotted rope dangling from the ceiling amid the laughter of his friends. He had not given up then, nor would he now. He fought off the panic attack, dismissing what might happen, and concentrating instead on the facts.
“Girra will hit the central mid-west,” he announced to his colleague, Joseph Palacio, an astrophysicist. The printout trembled in his long fingers as he spoke.
Joe swallowed hard before asking, “Where in the mid-west?”
Gate shook his head. He understood his friend’s concern. Joe’s family lived somewhere in Iowa. “Too many variables to tell.”
“Guess,” Joseph urged with a pained expression, staring into Gate’s eyes with the intensity of a raptor.
“Indiana, Illinois, Missouri … I just don’t know. It won’t matter much. Wherever it hits, it’s going to punch a hole a thousand feet deep and four miles wide.”
Joe’s nostrils flared, as he clenched his meaty fists. “It might miss.”
Gate didn’t share his friend’s misplaced optimism. While his predictions were based on many variables, the mathematics was an exact science. Numbers don’t lie. False hope was worse than no hope. It clouded the mind and prevented a rational exploration of the problem.
He shook his head. “Look, don’t hold out any false hope, Joe. Ishom didn’t miss. Girra and Nusku are coming for us like they were aimed at the Earth.”
Joseph squinted at Gate with his tired brown eyes over the top of his square-framed glasses, while raising a bushy eyebrow. “Aimed?”
“Just a figure of speech. The two objects passed just distant enough from Jupiter and Mars to avoid their gravitational wells, and just high enough above the ecliptic to avoid the asteroid belt. It’s bad luck, but inevitable given the solar system’s violent history.”
Gate grinned, but then thought better of it when he realized he was frightening his friend. Joe had a wife and a child – a family, responsibilities – whereas he was single, throwing himself fully into his work for lack of an outside life. While dying didn’t particularly appeal to him, he wouldn’t be missed. He decided to offer Joe a grain of hope.
“New data might prove me wrong.”
Joe shook his head. “You’re never wrong.”
“I deal in what ifs. That’s a fanciful way of saying, I guess.”
“You guess better than most scientists do research. You’re a natural born star gazer.”
“I haven’t used a telescope in five years,” Gate reminded him.
“I haven’t ridden a bicycle in ten, but I bet I still could. It’s a learned thing you don’t forget. With you it’s number crunching.”
Gate didn’t argue. To him, numbers were pieces of a puzzle, each digit or bit of data fitting neatly together until the complete picture was revealed. This time, the picture looked bleak indeed. He stood, stretching his aching muscles. He had been sitting for four hours. He ran his right hand through his short sandy brown hair, leaned against his desk and arched his back, popping his vertebrae. It usually helped relieve the tension in his back.
“Jesus, Gate,” Joe chided. “You keep doing that and you’ll snap your spine.”
Gate laughed. “My mother always told me that’s why I’m so tall.”
At six-one, he was four inches taller than Joe was and thin where Joe was stocky. Some called him lanky. Having once seen himself in a mirror while dancing, he tended to agree with that assessment, but he was not skinny. His slender frame belied his well-toned muscles. He might be desk bound, but he still performed his morning ritual of sit-ups and pushups to keep in shape.
“NASA moved the Disturbance Reduction System satellite into position to get a closer look at the next two objects,” Joe offered.
“Good, the DRS can give us a definitive reading on the object’s mass.” A frown crossed Gate’s face. “I’m of the opinion that the first object, Ishom, massed less than the initial observations indicated.”
Joe looked at him curiously. “Why?”
“From the few radar images we got, it was massive enough to wipe out San Francisco and inundate the entire West Coast.”
“It did enough damage. My God, Gate, thousands of people died, maybe tens of thousands.”
Gate winced at the words tens of thousands. He had often blithely annihilated millions of people in his catastrophe scenarios, but they had been imaginary numbers, not real people. He had even once used San Francisco as a target in one of his disaster scenarios. The strike the day before had been like calling up ghosts. He grabbed his chest and took a deep breath, but a dull ache remained.
“You okay?” Joe asked.
The look of concern on his friend’s face brought a smile to Gate’s lips. He exhaled slowly, nodded, and said, “It just hit me hard for a second. I’ll be okay.”
In truth, he wasn’t sure he would ever be okay again. As a catastrophist working for NASA, he had always expected an event such as this, but the reality was difficult to grasp. He sighed with relief several times over the past few years as Near Earth Orbiting masses had come disturbingly close to striking the planet, any of which could have killed thousands of people. Even then, his numbers had been certain, his faith in them true. His faith in the current numbers was just as true, and they predicted disaster.
“I suppose I had better inform the Director.”
Joe glanced at his watch. “It’s two-thirty. You’ve been working eighteen hours straight. You must be exhausted. Besides, I’m sure the Director’s pretty busy right now. Between monitoring the Lunar One mission and keeping track of Girra and Nusku, he has his hands full.”
Gate stretched his neck and yawned. Had it been so long? “I guess it will wait until morning. There’s nothing we can do about Girra anyway.”
“Who came up with the names? They sound like Japanese monsters.”
Gate shrugged. “Ishom, Girra, and Nusku were Babylonian gods of heavenly fire. Someone thought it appropriate.” He paused. “They didn’t realize just how appropriate.” He looked at Joe and noticed the dark circles under his friend’s eyes. “You’ve been here as long as I have. It’s time we both got some sleep.”
Joe rubbed his eyes. “Yeah, I guess so. Melissa must be worried.”
Gate smiled. Melissa, Joe’s wife, never worried about her husband. He was as devoted as husbands come. He had been a guest in Joe’s house many times and considered Melissa one of the finest women he had ever met. His smile faded when he remembered that her family lived in southern Indiana, not a hundred miles from Joe’s folks. Even if he determined that Indiana was the target of the meteor strike, he couldn’t warn her. In every disaster, public panic exacerbated the problem. Blind, uncontrolled evacuation from a potential disaster proved almost as deadly as the event itself.
The secrecy surrounding his current project was astronomical, the potential for panic enormous. The first object, Ishom, had eluded the orbiting telescopes, sneaking in unobserved. Almost before the tremors had stopped in San Francisco, astronomers were searching for any companions. They found two. If the data was correct, the two objects approaching the planet were each over three-hundred meters in diameter. Each would strike the planet at fourteen kilometers per second, leaving an impact crater seven kilometers wide and half a kilometer deep. He shook his head to clear it. He would never be able to sleep if his mind insisted on dwelling on facts and figures. To Gate, more puzzling than the lower-than-expected mass, was the fact that the three objects were spaced almost exactly twenty-four hours apart. That seemed to defy the odds.
As he and Joe left the building, he noticed lights on in several offices. Others were burning the midnight oil tracking Girra hoping for a few degrees alteration in its course that would send it sailing harmlessly past Earth and into the sun. He didn’t hold out much hope. The numbers didn’t lie, and they all seemed to be against them. The objects had entered the solar system from north of the ecliptic plane, so it was unlikely it had originated in the Oort Cloud. They had avoided the enormous gravity well of Jupiter that gobbled up many of the system’s stray asteroids and missed Mars by a hundred thousand kilometers, passing just near enough to bend its path directly toward Earth. Girra would pass by the moon close enough to cast a shadow but would not strike it. It had been a Perfect Storm of chance. If he believed in a vengeful God, he would call it divine providence. He was sure many would, once news of Girra and Nusku became public. He thanked the stars that he wasn’t the one that had to reveal its presence.
He glanced up at the night sky above Houston. A few wispy clouds streaked the waning crescent moon. He placed his thumb over the dark disk, and peered at the area just to the right and above the moon, but saw nothing. Unlike a comet with a highly visible tail, Girra was too dark and still too far away to be discernible to the naked eye, but soon an amateur astronomer would spot it, and the secret would be out. All their secrecy would mean nothing then.
“See you in the morning.”
Gate dropped his hand to his side and looked at Joe, as he climbed into his Mini Cooper. He had tried to ride in Joe’s car once. That’s all it took. Half an hour of sitting scrunched into the tiny vehicle had been enough. “Yeah, I’ll be here at six. I have to watch Girra come down. There’s something strange about it.”
Climbing into his Acura, the heavy guitar riffs of Led Zeppelin’s Rock and Roll blasting from KLTE hit him like a hammer blow after the near silence of his office. He was in no mood for anything with energy that might interfere with the sleep he needed so badly. He punched the dial to KTSU, one of Houston’s jazz stations. The soothing strains of John Coltrane that the radio offered up were less of an assault to his overloaded senses. The mellow jazz was like a glass of warm milk. He only hoped he could make it home before he fell asleep. Luckily, he met few cars on the two-mile drive to his apartment. He expected most normal people were in bed at two-thirty a.m. on a Thursday morning. By the time he parked his car and opened the front door, his eyelids were drooping. Before he could undress, his cell phone rang. The opening strains of Holst’s The Planets Suite he had chosen as his ring tone weren’t as sweet at such an early hour. He knew it couldn’t be good news.
“Gate, this is Director Caruthers. I need you back here ASAP. We’ve received disturbing data on Girra from the DRS.”
He let the news soak in for several seconds before responding. “What kind of data?”
“I’d rather not discuss it over the phone. We’re moving Hubble to get an optical image.” He paused a moment before adding, “I’ve already ordered Lunar One to investigate.”
Changing the Orion spacecraft’s lunar orbit mission involved substantial risks. The Director was worried. “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.” He hung up the phone before Caruthers could relay any more bad news.
He glanced longingly at the coffee maker. A jolt of caffeine would help keep him awake, but he didn’t have the time. He hoped the coffee urn at Mission Control was full.
* * * *
Thursday, August 9 3:00 a.m. (CDT) Mission Control, Houston, TX –
Security at Mission Control was tighter than Gate had ever seen it. He was forced to present his ID twice to Building 30-M security guards before being allowed in. Director Carl Caruthers stood amid a sea of shirt-sleeved technicians, an oak tree in a forest of saplings. His six-foot-two frame loomed over his subordinates, as he quickly scanned tablets and hand-scribbled notes presented him by department heads. He wore his glasses atop his balding head, squinting to sign his name to reports. When he needed to look at one of the screens on the wall, he flipped the glasses back down.
Caruthers’ haggard appearance was atypical of him. He usually dressed in a suit and tie. Now, a two-day growth of beard darkened his jaw. His rumpled shirt, with sleeves rolled up, looked slept in. Gate suffered a momentary twinge of sympathy for the director, but then remembered that Caruthers had spoiled his chance for sleep as well. Caruthers saw him enter and he walked over to greet him. He lifted his headset microphone from his mouth.
“I know I look like shit,” he said. “So do you.”
“What’s the latest on Girra?”
Caruthers po
inted to one of the three main screens on the wall. The fuzzy image from Hubble was visible only by the occluded stars in the background. It took several moments for Gate to focus his sleep-deprived eyes on the hole of blackness. “As you can see, Girra is so dark as to be almost indiscernible.”
Gate walked closer to the screen for a better look at the teardrop-shaped object. It could be a seed, he thought, seeds of destruction, if Ishom was any indication. “It’s damned near invisible. No wonder no one saw Ishom.”
“It has an albedo of .009.”
“But that’s …”
“Impossible? I would have thought so, but that’s what the readings indicate.” He paused. Gate studied the director’s face and realized that he was hiding something.
“Why did you bring me back in? I submitted my report.”
Caruthers nodded. “Yeah, I read it. Good job. Typical doomsday stuff. Shades of San Francisco. I sent for you because of our new data.”
This roused Gate’s curiosity. “What new data?”
“According to the DRS, Girra is massing much less than we originally estimated. Either it’s less dense than a normal meteor that size, or it’s hollow.”
Gate was speechless for a moment, as he absorbed the Director’s almost unbelievable suggestion. His musings about the object’s composition had been just that – musings. Now the Director was putting truth to his words. He walked back across the room and took a seat at the empty Public Affairs desk, the only unoccupied console in the otherwise busy room. As yet, the public was still unaware of the doom headed their way.
“Hollow, as in an alien spacecraft?”
Caruthers shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. It still masses a hell of a lot more than a spacecraft that size would. You reported that Ishom caused less destruction than anticipated. Could this be the reason?”
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