Extinction

by Ray Hammond

  ‘He’s agreed!’ announced Hanoch Biran triumphantly. ‘It will be the first time a serving US president has visited the moon.’

  Everyone seated around the elegant mahogany table nodded enthusiastically: it was a coup. President James T. Underwood had agreed to officiate at the formal opening of ERGIA’s LunaSun moon energy facility. The endorsement for ERGIA could not be more significant. All it had taken to secure this honour was the largest single donation ever made to a political re-election campaign.

  ‘The White House wants to take over a moon ferry completely, of course, for security reasons, and they want extra security features added. But they’re prepared to meet the cost of conversion themselves.’

  ‘Or have the American taxpayer meet the cost,’ observed Nick Negromonte. But he was smiling at his team from his position at the head of the table.

  ‘Looks like we’ve got ourselves a great launch party,’ he added. ‘You’ve done well, Hanoch.’

  The perception-management team handling the initial public offering of shares in LunaSun was meeting with the ERGIA boss at his English stately home. Most members had visited Langland Park before, and they were used to conducting business beneath glittering chandeliers and under the glazed gaze of long-dead Florentine worthies.

  ‘We’ve been having a think about how best to neutralize this forthcoming BBC documentary on climate control,’ continued Biran, ERGIA’s Israeli-born director of corporate communications. ‘The BBC can be very difficult, and very independent. Our recommendation is that we should embrace them entirely, overwhelm them with cooperation and input. In fact, I even recommend that you give Miss Curtis the exclusive interview she wants and let them film here at Langland Park. The more help we give them, the harder it will be for them to criticize.’

  Negromonte smiled to himself. He’d already reached the same conclusion. ‘Where does their broadcast fit into our schedule?’

  Biran scrolled up a page on his DigiPad. ‘You land on the moon in Apollo Eleven on October nineteen, the president arrives on the twentieth, and carries out the official opening the next day. The BBC and MSN have scheduled their documentary to be broadcast immediately after the opening dedication – to be followed by a live studio debate on the ethics of climate control. Our LunaSun IPO comes to market two weeks later.’

  ‘Perfect,’ said Negromonte. ‘Did you offer them our invitation to hold the debate in the LunaSun facilities?’

  Biran nodded. ‘The BBC is worried about the cost – they say nothing has ever been broadcast from the moon on that scale before. They’d have to lift twenty or thirty people up to LunaSun, just to run the technical side. Then there’s the question of how all the guests would get there.’

  ‘Tell them we might be able to get the President of the United States to be the keynote speaker for their debate,’ said Negromonte, smiling. ‘That’ll make them rethink their ratings forecasts – and their budgets.’

  ‘Sir?’ It was Bob Johnson, one of the team’s assistants. He had been working at a small side table while the main meeting was in progress.

  Heads turned, and the junior executive rose to his feet. ‘I’m sorry to interrupt, but there’s been a major earthquake, something huge, in San Francisco,’ he said. Then he held his communicator up. ‘You can even see it from space – the city has just become an island.’

  All heads turned back to the table, and to their own personal communications systems. Quickly, Hanoch Biran patched his feed to a large wall-screen. The views coming in were relayed from a helicopter belonging to Channel 9 News, a local San Franciscan TV station.

  They watched in silence as the chopper flew over the smoking undulations of the city, its hillsides covered with flattened debris, the slopes naked as if they had been suddenly deforested. Then they could see the Embarcadero Space Needle lying on its side, semi-submerged in the bay.

  *

  The US President declared a state of national emergency, dispatching 20,000 troops to the Bay Area. He also ordered the US Navy to sea, sending all available ships from their home port in San Diego to serve as emergency ferries in order to link the new island of San Francisco with the mainland.

  From all over the state of California, volunteer medics, paramedics, search-and-rescue teams, digging parties and blood donors rushed to provide their services. Earth-moving equipment and heavy lifting gear was flown into Sacramento by the army, and then driven westwards to the disaster area. Specialist listening equipment and specially trained sniffer dogs needed to locate trapped victims were airlifted in from all over the USA, Europe, Russia and the Middle East.

  Self-propelled satellites were repositioned and retasked to hover in geostationary orbit above the disaster area, bringing their long-focus, high-definition zoom lenses to bear on the devastation at all wavelengths, visible and non-visible. At the President’s personal request, the ERGIA Corporation liaised with the military authorities in charge of search-and-rescue to subdue and re-route Pacific onshore winds that might have fanned the flames of the myriad fires now raging all over the Bay Area. It was agreed that using spot rain to subdue the fires would only hinder the search-and-rescue effort.

  In Geohazard’s headquarters in Oakland the scientists worked back-to-back shifts without sleep, continually warning the public about multiple aftershocks, checking all of the local fault lines for new movement, providing specialist advice about building structures, and dealing with endless official enquiries.

  Emilia Knight didn’t leave the risk-monitoring centre for four days. She snatched what sleep she could in disused offices, showered in the company’s facilities, changed into company-issue field clothing and begged repeatedly to be allowed to go out and physically help with the rescue efforts that were going on all around them. Each time her colleagues told her that her specialist knowledge was far more valuable to the population than her muscle power. But they too felt the urge to rush outside and simply dig.

  Michael Fairfax suffered eighteen hours of almost unendurable anxiety. He had been woken by the first shock, half thrown out of his bed as his single-level house shook on its foundations. It stood on the bedrock of the Sausolito hills and although its roof was completely separated from its supports the thick brick walls had withstood the repeated convulsions.

  He’d grabbed a dressing gown, run into his front yard and thrown himself flat on the lawn. The heaving seemed to go on and on, loud reports coming from all around as tree trunks snapped, walls cracked and power lines came down.

  As Michael lay with his face pressed into the grass, all he could think about was his sons – and Lucy. He knew that Telegraph Hill was also bedrock, generally considered by insurers to be at lower risk than other parts of the city, but the house itself was old. It even pre-dated the 1906 earthquake. That thought gave him heart; if it had withstood that disaster, it would also withstand this one.

  When the ground’s heaving finally relented, he pushed himself to his feet. But he found it hard to comprehend what he was seeing. From his front yard he had a view right across the bay to the downtown city skyline and the Bay Bridge.

  It was a clear morning but the sun was still low, and at first he thought it must be some trick of the light. There was no Embarcadero Space Needle. His office building, the dominant landmark of the city, had simply disappeared. Then he realized that he could see all the way to Alameda, on the far-distant opposite shore. There was no Bay Bridge either.

  Michael started to shake uncontrollably. From somewhere nearby a dog began to bark, and he saw his elderly neighbours cautiously stepping out of the opening in which their front door had formerly hung. Now it lay flat on their veranda.

  He ran inside for the binoculars he always kept by the front window. There was broken glass all over the floor where his pictures had been hurled off the walls and smashed.

  Stepping carefully, he found the optics and returned to the front lawn. His hands were shaking so violently that he had to depress the electronic image-stabilizing button to make anythi
ng out.

  As the microchip compensated for his physical tremors, everything suddenly appeared sharp and crystal clear. His gaze swept past Telegraph Hill twice before he recognized it. Coit Tower had gone, as had all of the buildings on the hill’s western flank. He panned left, to where the Bay Bridge had been, and saw the giant Space Needle now lying in pieces across the bay.

  Michael rushed inside for his communicator – a satellite model whose operation should be unaffected by local network problems – and he tried all of the numbers he had for his ex-wife and sons and their home. But even the satellite phone he had given Matthew on his birthday went unanswered.

  Less than fifteen minutes later, he was powering his BMW rapidly up the sloping road that led out of Sausolito, intending to join the south-bound Highway 101 near where it approached the Golden Gate Bridge.

  Cresting a ridge he shot a glance to his left, as he so often did, to estimate the traffic flow on the bridge itself. It was part of his normal morning commuting routine. What he saw caused him to brake hard and bring his car to a stop. He switched off the engine and got out of the vehicle.

  Although its two giant ochre-red uprights were still intact, all three connecting spans of the Golden Gate Bridge were missing.

  Fifteen minutes later Michael was down in the marina at Sausolito trying to find a boat that hadn’t been damaged. The quake had been so strong that many of them had been thrown up onto the quayside and smashed.

  Eventually he found a place on a regular Sausolito–San Francisco passenger ferry crammed with others also anxious about their families and friends in the city. But it was another two hours before he reached the Filbert Steps, and the heaped wreckage of Jersey Villa.

  There was nobody around to help him as he tore at the large mound of tiles, stones and broken timbers. As he had run and walked up here through the littered wreckage of the city, voices had constantly cried out to him for assistance. Everywhere people were digging at rubble, pleading with him to stop and help them find their loved ones. Everywhere, retrieved corpses were being laid out in neat rows. There seemed to be no emergency services working yet in the city, but Michael realized that all access roads were probably blocked.

  As a native San Franciscan, educated about earthquake threat since childhood, he had brought along with him a flashlight, water bottles, ropes and basic tools and he was thankful that there was no fire blazing at his house or in the wreckage of the houses on either side. Probably this was because there was no gas supply to the Steps, he thought as he worked – they couldn’t pump it up this high. Many of the houses he had passed lower down the hill had been burning.

  He found Matthew in less than fifteen minutes. The boy was unmistakably dead but not yet completely cold. He was surrounded by his smashed computer equipment and telescopes, the stars on the room’s shredded wallpaper still glowing. From the enormous amount of blood that had soaked into the wreckage around his pulped legs, Michael guessed that his elder son had bled to death.

  The father could not allow himself time to grieve and, after forty minutes of hard sawing through a fallen beam, he carefully removed Matthew’s body and laid him out on the lawn. He immediately returned to continue sawing and tugging at the old redwood timbers that had once been his family home.

  It was dark by the time he finally found Lucy and Ben. They had died together in the same bed – perhaps the five-year-old had had a bad dream and his mother had taken him in to sleep with her. They had been killed instantly, crushed by a massive ceiling beam and the weight of the floors above.

  Michael left them where they were and went to sit beside Matthew. The moon was full, and by its bright light he saw that his hands were covered in blood; he had been sawing, hammering and clawing at the rubble for seven hours. He had lost most of his fingernails and there was no surface skin left on his fingers or on the palms of his hands.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The audacious commandeering of the Global Haven by the hulk people achieved for them in just a few weeks what years of diligent campaigning by charities, social campaigners and the more responsible member states of the United Nations had failed to achieve in decades.

  All over the world, the media’s lead news story was the great San Francisco earthquake and its aftermath. But the second item in most bulletins was the roaming convoy of hulk people – now with the Global Haven as its new flagship – that was cruising the international waters of the Pacific Ocean, not least because so many famous and wealthy people who had lost their homes and their possessions in the hijacking were complaining loudly on the airwaves.

  Of special interest was the new and ambivalent position towards the hulk flotilla being taken by the law-enforcement agencies of the world’s leading democracies.

  After half a century during which tens of thousands of super-rich individuals had fled their nation states to live aboard luxury ships that cruised outside all national boundaries (thus escaping taxes and other communal responsibilities), it almost seemed as if the societies they had deserted were now gleefully rounding on them. Receptive to the opinion of their voters, all governments claimed that this act of piracy fell outside their own jurisdictions, while issuing public assurances that they would act firmly if the hulk ships ever entered their own territorial waters. Not one member state was prepared to raise the issue at the United Nations.

  And the fact that the pirates had not injured a single one of the thousands of individuals whom they had so unceremoniously unloaded onto an ancient French oil-tanker also played strongly in the hulk people’s favour.

  The newspapers had created computer graphics showing what the luxury interior of the Global Haven might look like now that its luxury apartments, ballrooms, swimming pools, atria and gymnasiums had been taken over by as many as 50,000 of the world’s poorest people.

  The vessel’s insurers were naturally furious. But, after decades of fearful rejection, public sentiment began to swing inexorably in favour of the hordes of status-less, homeless human beings who were forced to live out on the open seas, rather than towards sympathy for those who did so solely for purposes of tax avoidance.

  ‘We can certainly use the hulk people’s story as an angle to open our film,’ Perdita Curtis explained to her executive producer as, with six other team members, they marched through one of the transparent aerial walkways that provided the main architectural feature of the BBC’s new West London headquarters.

  Narinda Damle and his production staff were heading for a meeting with the corporation’s head of news and current affairs. This was a conference in which their request for a massive increase in budget – sufficient to stage and transmit a live debate from the moon – would be considered. MSN New York, their co-production partners, had authorized their own increased share of the budget, as soon as the American President’s participation in this debate had been confirmed.

  ‘And there’s something else, Narinda – something important!’ Perdy stopped dead in the corridor, forcing her boss and the rest of the team to pause in their headlong rush to their meeting.

  Glancing at his watch, Narinda Damle turned to face her. ‘We’re due in six minutes,’ he reminded her anxiously.

  ‘I know, but I’ve only just found this out,’ Perdy apologized. ‘Guess what Negromonte is going to do with the billions raised by the LunaSun IPO? He’ll use it to begin climate modification on Mars. They’re going to melt polar ice and stimulate oxygen production by planting GM crops specially designed for Martian conditions. ERGIA’s long-term aim is to sell Martian real estate.’

  The little group was stunned.

  ‘My God!’ exclaimed Damle. ‘That’s a wonderful story, but how can we include it? We’ve only got a fifty-minute slot.’

  ‘That’s the trouble, we can’t include it,’ Perdy informed her colleagues. ‘I learned about this under embargoed nondisclosure – because of Wall Street regulations over the Luna-Sun share flotation. We can’t even talk about it on air until we get to the live debate – which i
s after our documentary goes out.’

  ‘Then we’ll certainly use it in the debate,’ said Damle as he resumed marching through the walkway. ‘Come on, the boss is going to love this. Perhaps we can get some Planet First people to join the discussion. Think how they’ll react to the idea that humanity is just about to start modifying the climate on yet another planet.’

  *

  Six weeks after his sons and former wife had died in the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 2055, Michael Fairfax was back working again. He was on his feet addressing over 300 members of the global news media who had gathered in the ballroom of the Intercontinental Hotel in Brussels.

  ‘This is the largest claim for compensation ever made in a court of law,’ he informed the attentive journalists. He had just shown them the video of the hulk people which he had shot inside the Antarctic Circle. ‘It’s larger in real terms than the tobacco settlements of the twentieth century, and the alcohol, cellphone and antidepressant awards of more recent times. Over eleven million people have lost their homes because of global warming, a phenomenon directly caused by the energy companies who once marketed oil, gas and coal.’

  He listened carefully to his own voice as it was amplified around the room. It sounded OK: strong, no hint of a waver. He was doing fine; he had been right to plunge back in. Work was always the best antidote.

  As he had suspected – and as he had once threatened his over-cautious partners in a meeting that now seemed to have taken place in another lifetime – the Brussels-based law firm Beauchamp, Seifert and Co had been delighted to pick up his hulk-people litigation.

  Saul Levinson, the senior partner who had originally blocked Michael’s pursuit of this case, was now dead. So were three more of the equity-holding partners, as well as sixty-one other attorneys and staff members – all killed by the earthquake itself or in its aftermath. The firm’s former offices in the Embarcadero Space Needle now lay under the waters of the San Francisco Bay. Like so much else in that area, the legal practice once known as Gravitz, Lee and Kraus was no longer functioning.