by Ray Hammond
‘And they made me sign a goddam National Secrecy Agreement! Said that in the future I couldn’t tell anyone about our trip to Samoa.’
‘Did they tell you why?’ she asked.
He shook his head. Then she realized: if Steve had also signed an NSA, she could tell him what she knew.
An hour later and it was almost dark, only the faintest red line on the horizon indicating the sun’s passing. Emilia picked up a remote control and lit the deck lamps and anti-bug zappers. In the last sixty minutes she and Steve had allowed their scientific imaginations to run wild, hypothesizing about what sort of phenomenon could produce practically pure plutonium deep underground, and how it could be propelled to the Earth’s surface. Both wanted to go back over the data collected before the Samoan eruption to see if there was any buried clue. They agreed that they would do so in their spare time, over the coming week.
Steve rose to get himself another beer. As he passed Emilia’s lounger he squatted down beside her, reached out a hand and caressed her cheek.
‘And what about us, Em?’ he asked. ‘I’m really worried about you now.’
Emilia smiled in the gloom and caught his hand in hers. She lifted it away from her face.
‘I’m grateful for your concern, Steve,’ she said. ‘But I’ve already told you. It really is over as far as I am concerned.’
New York Times
Monday, 16 June 2055
U.S. AGREES LONG-TERM AID PACKAGE FOR INDEPENDENT SAMOA
The U.S. State Department today announced an aid package for Independent Samoa worth $48 billion over the next decade.
‘It is inequitable that standards of living in American Samoa and its independent near neighbour should be so different,’ said State Department Official Gyro Mandible. ‘Our package of aid will enable Independent Samoa to join the ASEAN-Pacific Climate Management Consortium to regulate local weather patterns. This will provide a much-needed boost to tourism in the region.’
Filbert Steps had been one of San Francisco’s most exclusive residential addresses for over a century. Perched on the eastern side of Telegraph Hill, the wooden stairs provided access to a score of old wood-frame Victorian cottages and villas. The incline was so steep that residents had to carry their shopping, bicycles and leisure gear up and down the treacherous steps by hand. It was an alpine lane suited for people who enjoyed the spectacular views that the hill provided, rather than for those who favoured their own personal comfort.
Michael Fairfax and his bride Lucy had chosen this rarefied location for their family home shortly before they’d got married. They knew that on their own they couldn’t have afforded a house in such an exclusive area of the city, but Lucy’s father had helped with the large down-payment.
Telegraph Hill, on which Filbert Steps itself was only one of a handful of picturesque streets and residential, bougainvillea-draped stairways, was a small but sheer phallic pinnacle – geologically ‘a sandstone tor’ – thrust up by the San Andreas fault system on the very edge of San Francisco’s wide, semi-landlocked bay: the largest and most beautiful harbour in the world.
Michael walked carefully down the wooden steps and entered the small front yard of ‘Jersey Villa’, the finest Victorian house on the hill, remembering to close the low picket gate behind him. It was his first scheduled return to the family home since his divorce. Lucy had agreed that he could visit to see how Matthew’s electronic wallpaper looked now that it was installed in his bedroom.
Matt opened the front door and minutes later Michael was up in a darkened bedroom on the fourth floor of the house, staring around him at a glowing night sky.
‘It’s absolutely fantastic, Dad!’ exclaimed Matthew. ‘When I go to sleep the stars are in one position and when I wake up they’ve moved to exactly where they should be.’
‘It’s not keeping you awake?’ asked Michael.
‘Sometimes I just lie here watching the sky move very slowly around me, and it’s as if I can feel the whole planet turning. Ask Mom if you can stay over – you should try it yourself!’
The divorcé sensed privately that it was a little too early for him to request such a privilege, but Michael was delighted that his gift had proved so successful. He merely smiled and nodded.
‘Hey, Dad,’ said Matthew suddenly, in a stagy voice. ‘Why does the Bar Association prohibit sexual relations between a lawyer and his client?’
Michael was already smiling; his older son never stopped teasing him about his much-derided profession. ‘I don’t know. Why do they prohibit lawyers having sex with their clients?’
‘So they don’t bill their clients twice for the same service.’
Michael’s guffaw was totally unforced. He’d usually heard Matt’s lawyer jokes before, but he always delighted in the pleasure his son derived from teasing him. This gag, he realized, represented a testing of the taste boundaries as his son entered adolescence. He wondered whether he was expected to disapprove slightly.
‘But there’s just one problem about the wallpaper, Dad,’ said Matthew, serious again. ‘The alignment is a fraction of a degree out.’
The boy pulled aside a curtain screening a pair of glass doors, opened them outwards and stepped out onto the wooden deck outside his attic bedroom. His father followed.
Arranged on the timber platform outside were three old-fashioned optical telescopes, all of them linked to image grabbers and computer cables snaking back into the boy’s bedroom.
‘You must be the only guy in the country still bothering with opticals,’ marvelled Matthew’s father. He knew that almost all other amateur astronomers now took their visual feeds from the Galileo IX or from one of the many other space telescopes in orbit around the Earth or Mars. The advent of solar-reflective climate management had produced so much light pollution in the night sky that only the brightest of stars remained visible over heavily populated regions.
‘But the wallpaper isn’t quite accurate,’ Matthew insisted. ‘I’ve got my telescopes trained on the Pole Star, Orion and Arcturus, and they just don’t quite line up with the stars in my room. Either they’re one parsec out or Telegraph Hill is subsiding.’
Michael stepped back into his son’s bedroom and gazed up at the simulated night sky again. He had bought this expensive electronic wallpaper in a department store in Auckland, and he had been very specific about the need for both realism and accuracy. With a son as star-mad and knowledgeable as Matthew, it wouldn’t do to present him with anything of less than professional standard.
‘One hundred per cent accurate, sir,’ the well-informed shop assistant had assured him. ‘The eighth-generation cellular-GPS networks are sub-millimetre precise.’
This gave Michael an idea for a father-and-son outing. ‘How about packing up your telescopes and us driving out into the mountains one night?’ he suggested. ‘We could do some real stargazing away from the city lights.’
‘Great,’ said Matthew. ‘But I’ll have to check with Mom first.’
Chapter Nine
‘Santa Maria, it’s an Armada!’ shouted Squadron Leader Julio Velasquez over the intercom. He had just seen the radar image on his head-up display.
In the rear seat of the long-outdated Peruvian Air Force fighter jet, Flight Sergeant Ricardo Garcia punched buttons that would calculate the number of individual ship signatures that were being picked up by the aircraft’s imaging system.
‘There’s over two hundred vessels out there,’ the navigator advised his pilot.
Flying in formation behind the forty-year-old twin-engined Eurofighter Typhoon, one of the last manned warplanes ever built, were seventeen similar jets. All were armed with laser-guided bombs and air-to-ground missiles. They had been scrambled from their bases at Chimbote and Callao on Peru’s Pacific coast after a commercial jet pilot had reported seeing a large number of unidentified cargo vessels approaching the nation’s territorial waters.
Suddenly the squadron leader made visual contact with his target. The ships were spread
out line abreast on the horizon, in a rank so wide that it was impossible to make out either end. There were old mega-tankers, crude-oil carriers, container ships and freighters. Velasquez realized that they must be hulk-people ships, but now they were all steaming under their own power.
Velasquez’s orders were clear. He issued an instruction for the large squadron to break into three groups, two to overfly the approaching ships from opposite directions, at 2,000 feet, one group to descend to 300 feet to pass low over the old vessels, to enable themselves be clearly seen – and heard.
‘This is Squadron Leader Velasquez of the Peruvian Air Force, calling the captains of ships approaching Peruvian national waters,’ he radioed in English over Channel Nine, the international frequency for all emergency broadcasts.
He waited, then repeated his call. There was no response.
‘Transmit on all frequencies,’ Velasquez instructed his navigator. Then he repeated his message twice more, once in Spanish.
‘They’ve lit up a missile range-finder,’ shouted Garcia. Until this point there had been no suggestion that any of the old vessels might be armed.
‘We’ve got incoming.’ The shout came from one of the aircraft flying down at sea level. Velasquez banked his plane sharply to the left, and peered down to try and get a visual fix.
‘It’s an old Chinese SAM,’ reported Garcia as his radar identified the weapon. ‘No problem – I have a lock on their launcher.’
Almost immediately there was a flash of light far away to the south. Then they heard a shout in their headsets: ‘We got it!’
‘Missile kill confirmed,’ said Garcia from the Typhoon’s back seat. ‘Shall I take out their launcher?’
‘Negative,’ said Velasquez, levelling his jet out again. He opened his transmission to include all aircraft. ‘Do not return fire,’ he ordered his squadron. ‘I repeat, do not fire. Delta wing return to zero-two-zero and resume formation.’
He tried again to make radio contact with the vessels below, this time adding a warning that any further missile launches would be met with immediate lethal retaliation. Once again he ordered the ships to change their heading immediately to a direction that would take them away from Peruvian waters.
There was no response to any of his communications.
The squadron had now been circling the ships for over thirty minutes and fuel limitations meant that they would soon have to turn and head back to base.
Julio Velasquez issued curt orders to his wingman and two other pilots in the squadron. Then he led them down to sea level.
The four jets began their bombing run at a height of 300 feet, coming out of the east. Each of their laser-guided bombs was set to detonate 600 yards ahead of the targets they selected.
‘Bomb away,’ shouted Garcia, and Velasquez watched on his head-up video display as the 200-pound bomb detonated right in the path of one massive oil tanker. A huge plume of water shot high into the air and the shock of the explosion sent a giant wave radiating outwards.
The four attack jets lifted their noses to climb to their recon altitude. Five minutes later, as they smoothly rejoined formation, Velasquez heard one of the other navigators call out, ‘Ships are turning, ships are turning.’
He glanced down and saw that several of the antiquated vessels were indeed starting a long, slow turn to starboard, as if choreographed. Then the remaining ships also began to slow and turn in the same direction.
After ten minutes of flying the length of the scattering convoy, to ensure that all of the ships continued along their slow semicircles, Squadron Leader Velasquez ordered the rest of his flight to return to base. He remained on station for a further fifteen minutes, pushing his own emergency fuel limit to the maximum. He wanted to ensure that none of the skippers on the ships below had second thoughts about trying to sneak back to anchor at any point along the long and sparsely populated Peruvian coastline.
*
‘On behalf of the people of Samoa, I wish to express my government’s gratitude for your interest in our cause and for all the help you have given us so far. But, I repeat, we must withdraw from participation in the legal case you are pursuing.’
Michael Fairfax had been surprised to hear again from Mautoatasi Otasi, prime minister of Independent Samoa, so soon after he had been forced to tell his clients that there would be a delay in getting their case before the international court. In the meantime he had been intrigued to read of America’s decision to grant the tiny nation a generous aid package, something he himself hadn’t even known was in the offing.
‘I don’t understand, Prime Minster,’ he said. ‘Your case for compensation remains excellent, and the current delay in bringing it to court is purely temporary.’
‘There’s a whole new future for Samoa now,’ said Otasi, ‘thanks to the generosity of your government. My cabinet colleagues and I feel that it would be wholly inappropriate to continue with a legal action – especially as so many of the corporations concerned have a large number of American shareholders.’
Michael nodded, even though Otasi could not see him. Neither man had chosen to select ‘visual’ for this conversation.
‘I understand. Thank you, Prime Minister,’ said Michael and he returned his phone to its cradle.
He sat for a while in his office on the sixty-third floor, just staring out of the window. From here, he could see all the way to the snow-capped summits of the Diablo Mountains, fifty miles to the north-east.
The recently constructed Embarcadero Space Needle had already become the city’s most famous landmark. Over three-quarters of a kilometre tall, it had been built right on the shoreline of the San Francisco Bay, on a site formerly occupied by the old Hyatt Regency hotel and the Embarcadero shopping centre.
Despite being constructed on reclaimed land only 500 yards from the water’s edge, mid-twenty-first-century civil engineering techniques and materials had allowed the builders to erect the world’s highest commercial, residential and retail building – a total of 181 floors topped off with a rotating viewing gallery – in a high-risk earthquake zone, whilst proclaiming with full confidence that the Needle could withstand any degree of shaking that the ever-parturient San Andreas Fault could deliver.
The tower’s construction continued down below ground level for a depth equivalent to twenty storeys, where its massive base sat on huge metal rollers which were themselves laid on a vast concrete platform. The theory was that even in the most severe shaking, the building above would merely glide back and forth on its rolling foundations, while the nanotube and carbonfibre upright girders would allow the tall building to flex and sway like a blade of grass in the wind.
Michael turned his gaze to the sprawling city of Berkeley, on the other side of the bay. It was a clear day, as scheduled, and picking up the binoculars he kept on his desk, he rose to his feet and focused them on a well-known Berkeley landmark.
His meeting with his former girlfriend inside Lompoc Penitentiary had unsettled him. On his long drive back north he had taken Highway 101, the more direct, non-scenic route, and once he had handed the driving over to computer-guided cruise control he had allowed his mind to wander again over what she had told him.
The more Michael thought about it, the more ridiculous Carole’s request seemed. He didn’t want to get tangled up with her again, or have anything to do with Planet First extremists or eco-terrorists. He believed that, for all its faults and delays, the law was the right way to deal with all forms of injustice and environmental abuse.
Through his powerful binoculars the Berkeley University campus looked neat and well-kept.
With a sigh he returned to his desk and slumped in his chair. Neither Saul Levinson nor any of his other partners had mentioned the hulk-people case to him again – and none of his colleagues had referred again to his threat to leave the firm. It seemed as if, having made their decision, they were now expecting him to simply pick up the threads and get on with alternative litigation.
But he had
spent almost two years preparing his case against the giant energy companies. By now, he had expected to have a team of thirty or forty lawyers working for him, and a date set down for a preliminary hearing at the new Court of International Civil Justice in The Hague over in the Netherlands.
Michael stared at his desk, now clear of everything except his pictures of Matthew and Ben, then turned to his info screen. Ignoring the scores of e-mails and messages competing for his attention, he touched the number his inquiry produced and waited for the call to be put through.
‘Professor Fivetrees’s office,’ said a female voice.
He picked up the phone. ‘This is Michael Fairfax, I’m an attorney. I’d like to speak with Professor Fivetrees.’ He hesitated, then added, ‘Please tell him I’m an old friend of Carole Gonzaga.’
*
‘Who knows how old Planet Earth is?’
Dr Emilia Knight glanced around the class of thirteen-year-olds and waited. Some of their faces were turned towards her but many students were making notes, doodling or affecting lack of interest. Yet, after an unsure start, she was starting to enjoy these local speaking engagements.
This afternoon’s visit to the Robert Louis Stevenson High School in San Francisco’s Sunset district was her third such experience within a fortnight. She had given the class her usual talk about how to be prepared for earthquakes in the Bay Area, and now she was moving on to more general geoscience.
‘Ten million years,’ said a pretty African-American girl with a bob haircut and acne.
‘A bit longer,’ said Emilia, glancing across at the strained-looking class teacher – a pinched man in his late forties.
‘A hundred million years,’ suggested an Asian girl with lime-green hair.
‘Even longer – quite a bit longer,’ Emilia prompted. She knew that these kids would have done basic earth sciences back in sixth grade, but it seemed as though they hadn’t retained much.
Turning to the large screen on the wall, she picked up the electronic stylus and started to write in capital letters: THE EARTH IS . . .