Extinction

by Ray Hammond

  ‘I’ve also measured joule output and plasma-particle dispersion from the solar reflectors. The periods of peak output for weather modification are invariably followed a few days later by seismic disturbances – I’ve created formulae and algorithms that prove this circumstantial link. But in addition I’ve built a model that predicts the actual magnetic disruption in the mantle and the seismic activity that invariably follows. It is clear that climate management is the reason why the world is suffering so much volcanic activity and so many earthquakes.’

  Michael had no idea if this man was a crank or whether there might be something to his claims. He had checked the professor out on Berkeley’s website and he certainly appeared to be eminently qualified in his field. But the lawyer’s own training and experience had taught him to be sceptical of any claim until he had verified it for himself. But he also realized that he wouldn’t be able to check out this wild theory without some high-level expert help.

  ‘I’m worried that there may be an abrupt and permanent reversal of the magnetic poles if we continue to interfere with the Earth’s natural feedback loops,’ added Fivetrees, his forefinger hammering home his concerns on the table top.

  ‘And what would that mean in real terms?’ asked Michael.

  ‘Nobody knows for sure, but pole reversal seems to be part of the planet’s regular renewal process. There would be an abrupt loss of magnetosphere protection which would allow a lot more radiation to hit our atmosphere. That alone can be fatal to life forms – if it goes on for very long. There would also be some huge gee-gees and then—’

  ‘Gee-gees?’

  ‘Global-scale geophysical events,’ explained Fivetrees. ‘Like a super-volcano erupting, or a mega-tsunami. Then there would be a very rapid melting of the polar ice – perhaps a monstrous rising of the oceans. Like I said, it’s been half a million years since the last time the magnetic poles reversed, and nobody was then able to record what happened. Certainly it would be totally catastrophic, something that would qualify as what biologists call an “extinction event” – the loss of a whole species, or even multiple species, like when the dinosaurs died out.’

  ‘But why on earth would our government want to suppress such information, and to shut you up?’ asked the lawyer.

  ‘They just think I’m a troublesome crank.’ Fivetrees shook his head. ‘They’ve accused me of being unnecessarily alarmist because I want all forms of climate management banned immediately.’

  ‘But if there’s even a remote chance that you’re right . . .?’ protested Michael.

  ‘It’s a politically unacceptable theory,’ Fivetrees spat out, stressing the world ‘politically’ as if it were a venereal disease.

  The band finished a number. Both men glanced up and turned round in their seats to join in the applause. Then, almost immediately, the remorseless beat struck up once more.

  ‘Politicians are now too scared to relinquish climate management,’ continued Fivetrees, as the ambient sound level rose again. ‘All of the developed economies in the world have become totally dependent on tightly scheduled weather patterns – energy consumption and production is now wholly geared to it. If governments suddenly banned climate control, industries like tourism, agriculture, insurance and energy would be set back by decades, with colossal losses. Worldwide recession would follow – and no politician holding office is going to risk that.’

  That much was obvious: Michael nodded. ‘What do you want me to do?’ he asked.

  The professor picked up his miniature holo-projector from the table top.

  ‘Take this,’ he said, handing the unit to the lawyer. ‘As well as my models of the magnetic poles and the seismic disturbance in the mantle, it contains all my analysis of those monastery records, and also a copy of the government’s emergency secrecy order. Take a look at my legal position to see whether I really can’t publish here. Let me know if there’s any way I can get this information out – I don’t know, maybe to the media or to some publication abroad. Maybe it should even go to the UN.’

  *

  There are many theories about why ancient civilizations venerated and celebrated the planet’s solstice days. But the most convincing reason proposed for humankind’s almost universal celebration of midwinter is that the prehistoric people of the high European latitudes could never feel wholly sure that the declining sun was going to return again.

  The prehistoric British temple of Stonehenge, on the other hand, appears to have been built to celebrate the summer solstice, the point at which the Earth’s acute axial tilt brings maximum sunshine to the northern hemisphere.

  Each June, Senior Lecturer Jean Landsman invited a group of her Cultural Anthropology students from Bath University to forgo their sleep on Midsummer Eve in order to board a midnight coach for the thirty-mile drive to the spot where Stonehenge sat disconnected from both its time and its culture on the bleak open spaces of Salisbury Plain.

  She organized this annual end-of-term trip partly because her undergraduates were mostly young and liked slightly crazy adventures and partly because the modern Druids, New Age Romantics and other neo-hippie types who also turned up to witness and worship the solstice themselves provided plenty of material for the enquiring anthropological mind.

  It was also true that, in the thirteen years she had been organizing these field trips, Jean herself had never failed to be thrilled by the occasion. Each midsummer she had stood there, gazing towards the two great rings of sarsen stones through the massive triple uprights and out towards the east, to see the morning sun rise in precise alignment, throwing its first blinding rays over the Heel Stone, through the centre ‘window’ of the great lintelled quadriform, and out along a line so precisely predicted and delineated by the prehistoric temple’s builders. Jean always felt a profound sense of awe then, a closer connection with some of the very earliest people to have lived, worshipped and died in her native land.

  The advent of weather-management services also meant that solstice enthusiasts could now rely on enjoying cloud-free midsummer nights followed by perfectly clear sunrises; the British government understood how important Stonehenge and its sun worshippers were to its tourist trade.

  On this particular solstice, fourteen of Jean’s students had agreed to make the trip with her. She had advised them to bring folding chairs, small stepladders or boxes to stand on, as the area around Stonehenge now got so crowded that it was sometimes impossible to see the sunrise over other people’s heads.

  By three minutes to five a.m., British Summer Time, the sky in the east had been brightening steadily for a quarter of an hour.

  ‘Thirty seconds,’ Jean called out to her small flock as they stood around her, perched on their steps and chairs. This midsummer’s dawn the expectant crowd at the ancient monument seemed larger than ever.

  Suddenly a ray of light shot upwards into the sky, and it seemed as if a million light bulbs had been switched on all along the horizon.

  There were cries of ‘Oooo’ and ‘Ahhh’ from the crowds all around, some worshippers immediately falling to their knees in prayer. But after a few seconds it seemed as if this crowd’s response was more muted than usual.

  ‘Excuse me, Miss Landsman?’ asked Mimi Ikutaro politely. She was one of Jean’s younger Japanese students, and was balancing on a small set of aluminium steps beside her lecturer, video camera at the ready. ‘Shouldn’t the sun shine through – I mean, in between those stones?’

  The vast crowd fell silent as realization spread that on this particular solstice the sunrise had missed the Heel Stone and was instead completely obscured by one of the outer circle’s huge upright monoliths.

  *

  The Global Haven, the largest ocean-going passenger ship ever built, was steaming at twenty-six knots some 430 miles north-east of Hawaii, almost at the Tropic of Cancer, when the radar blip first appeared on her screens.

  As the world’s most exclusive marine residence for the international hyper-wealthy – 6,160 people who li
ved their lives permanently offshore, in a floating, self-governing, tax-free maritime state – the Global Haven sailed by strict rules and regulations that prohibited unscheduled stops or interchange with other vessels on the high seas.

  But even when they are in control of the world’s richest ship – a vessel containing some of the most expensive condominiums, flats, apartments and duplexes ever built – sailors remain seamen at heart, so the sight of another vessel in distress prompts atavistic impulses to provide assistance.

  ‘She’s steaming very slowly, sir,’ observed Thomas Johansson, the ship’s First Officer, as he watched the radar blip. ‘Making almost no headway at all.’

  Captain James Monroe, an upright, bearded Scot who looked as though Central Casting had been approached for ‘a traditional ship’s master’, straightened up from the screen and said simply, ‘Maintain present heading and speed.’

  Almost two kilometres long and two-thirds of a kilometre wide, the Global Haven displaced over two million tons. This vast white flat-topped ziggurat-pyramid of the sea sat catamaran-style astride her two elongated multi-compartment hulls, each four times longer than an old super-tanker.

  The vessel’s incredible size had been made possible only by the development of new plasti-ceramic materials that, while being both flexible and light, possessed a tensile strength greater than steel or carbon fibre.

  In terms of volume, the mega-vessel provided as much interior space as six large conventional cruise liners. But although 3,700 domestic attendants lived on board to service the lives of their rich employers, the giant ship herself was heavily computerized and required only thirty officers and eighty seafaring crew members to pilot her around the world’s more amenable oceans.

  The Global Haven was heading for Los Angeles. This route was one leg of a carefully planned year-round cycle which took the residents to the Mediterranean in spring (Cannes Film Festival, Monaco Grand Prix, side trip to Wimbledon), then on to Australia and New Zealand (Round-the-World yacht race, Melbourne Gold Cup, and so on) before a two-week stopover in Hawaii, which had been the ship’s most recent port of call.

  During the northern hemisphere’s winter months, the Global Haven could be seen cruising off the coasts of Argentina (polo), Brazil (partridge shooting) and Mexico (shopping). During all stages of her annual voyage, the vessel would take advantage of the pre-published climate-management schedules to ensure that (other than when she was steaming at high speed on the open seas) each stopover was blessed by fine weather for shore excursions.

  But each year fewer and fewer of the Global Haven’s residents chose to leave the ship for longer than a few hours at a time. When she had been launched six years earlier, it had been thought that most of the wealthy leaseholders would spend almost as much time ashore as they did on board, but it was now clear that the protected and luxurious environment provided within the ship removed much of their incentive to return to dry land.

  Inside its ultra-wide superstructure, four main atria reached up through twenty deck levels, each enclosing gardens, trees, ornamental pools and fountains. Two dozen smaller courtyards, with interconnecting lanes, created a network of quaint and leafy environments for shopping malls, sports facilities, restaurants, bars, clubs and cafés. A pair of separate monorail loops provided transport for residents at upper and lower levels, while 262 elevators and forty-eight escalators provided vertical connection between the twenty-four residential decks.

  The long, flat top deck of the ship served as the community’s airport and provided a main runway for medium and small jets, six helicopter landing pads, and an elevator that took aircraft to a large lower-deck apron which provided parking and maintenance facilities.

  At the vessel’s stern, the starboard hull opened inwards in a wide horseshoe-shaped curve to provide a large, fully enclosed marina. Powerful hydraulically powered sea gates and a solid harbour bottom turned the ship’s private port into a wet-dock enclosure, allowing the moored vessels within to travel with the mother vessel while she was under way. An ingenious lock even allowed attendant craft to arrive and leave the giant ship while she was still in motion.

  Captain James Monroe made visual contact with the unidentified radar blip shortly before four p.m. She was ahead, thirty degrees off the port bow, also steaming in the direction of Southern California. An old freighter, she was riding low in the water, laden with scores of huge metal containers piled high on her decks and, most alarmingly of all to seafaring eyes, a thick column of black smoke was rising into the still air from somewhere in the centre of the ship. Fire at sea remained the worst nightmare for any sailor.

  First Officer Thomas Johansson attempted to make radio contact with this container ship on Channel 9, then on all the other available frequencies, but there was no response.

  As they came up rapidly on the limping freighter, Captain Monroe ordered an unmanned drone aircraft to be launched from the flight deck, and within ten minutes he and his officers were gazing at close-up video pictures of a few semi-naked crewmen using ancient hoses to frantically fight a fire within one of the holds.

  ‘Liberian markings,’ observed Johansson. ‘The Java Trader, out of Manila – I’d say about twenty thousand tons. There won’t be more than fifteen or twenty crew aboard.’

  He tapped the details into a computer and, seconds later, said, ‘Well, she’s not on the Lloyd’s Register. Perhaps she’s changed her name recently.’

  The bridge of the Global Haven was wholly state of the art. When the ship’s developers had been busy marketing her 2,568 spacious residential units (many with their own private pools, elevators and deck gardens), they had been keen to stress the ship’s numerous safety features, her inbuilt anti-terrorist protection systems, and the strict rules of engagement that would always bind the captain and the crew. Most important of these was that the ship would never make an unscheduled or unauthorized stop at sea except when the captain considered it necessary for the safety of the Global Haven herself, or for any of her residents – and then only after the ship’s heavily armed defence helicopter had been launched to circle the mother ship as a precautionary measure.

  ‘Reduce speed to one-eighth,’ ordered the captain. ‘Take us to within one thousand yards.’

  Johansson glanced sideways at his skipper, but received no acknowledgement that his look of enquiry had even been noted.

  ‘One-eighth speed it is, sir,’ he responded, nodding to the helmsman to punch in the instructions. ‘Head one-forty north-east.’

  The massive twin-hulled cruise ship seemed to rest slowly back on her haunches as the power was reduced.

  ‘Shall I order the chopper up, sir?’ asked the lieutenant.

  ‘We’re not stopping, Mister Johansson,’ said Monroe sharply. ‘Prepare to launch Global Support One. Order her crew to their stations immediately.’

  ‘Aye aye, sir,’ said Johansson and he relayed his captain’s orders.

  Monroe ran the ship as if he were still a frigate commander in the Royal Navy. The ship’s developers had reasoned that old-fashioned British naval values would appeal to potential residents – and they had been right. Monroe was universally popular among the wealthy residents and was regarded as one of the ship’s greatest commercial assets. There was now a waiting list of six years for apartments in the mighty vessel.

  Messages were barked into telephones, and preparations were put in hand to launch the large fire-fighting tug that Global Haven transported within her floating dock.

  ‘Their orders are to provide all assistance and, if necessary, to take the crew off that freighter,’ Monroe told his first lieutenant. ‘Tell them to radio us once the emergency is over and we’ll circle back and collect them.’

  Fifteen minutes later, the Global Haven was almost abreast of the old container ship. From a distance of just over 1,000 yards the Java Trader was totally dwarfed by the towering white leviathan.

  ‘Slow to five knots and launch Global Support One when ready,’ ordered Monroe.
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br />   The captain, his first lieutenant, the helmsman and the four other crew members on bridge duty all watched on their monitor screens as the hydraulic pumps raised the water level in the stern dock around the support tug and pumped in an artificial current. For a safe launch, the water within the wet dock had to be moving at almost the same speed as the ocean itself was moving relative to the mother ship.

  Then the end boom of the dock lowered, and the ocean-going tug slipped effortlessly away and out to sea.

  ‘Sir?’ Johansson now had his binoculars trained again on the stricken container ship. ‘SIR!’

  All heads snapped round to follow his gaze. The outside walls of three of the large containers on the antiquated ship had fallen into the sea. Then the tops and remaining sides of these containers were suddenly yanked away as if they were made of no more than cardboard.

  ‘For God’s sake, no,’ shouted Monroe, snatching the glasses from his lieutenant.

  But the pair of deck-mounted multi-tube missile launchers were now plain to see, even with the naked eye. As the officers of the Global Haven watched in horror, one of the launchers swivelled and tracked towards the huge vessel. Moments later two laser-guided missiles were fired in quick succession.

  The rockets streaked over the bridge and, with enormous blasts, exploded far above them on the flight deck. From their video monitors the officers could see their defence helicopter and a business jet explode in balls of flame.

  Monroe flipped up a metal lid on the control panel and hit the master alarm. A loud wailing filled the bridge, as it was simultaneously filling every other space within the vast ship. Almost instantly metal shutters began lowering inside all windows and portholes, other than on the bridge itself.

  Suddenly the radio crackled to life, on Channel 9.

  ‘Skipper of Global Haven,’ shouted a male voice in heavily accented English. ‘Stop your engines. Repeat, stop your engines. I have live missiles locked on to your bridge, communications centre and residential areas. I will fire again unless you stop your engines immediately.’