by Eric Flint
But it helped as most of the others came into the shelter and greeted him—an extremely gentle hug from both Hitomi and Francisco, an arm-shake from most of the others, and well-wishes from Campbell and Tavana who weren’t nearby. The little parade of greetings left him both tired and energized, alert enough to eat the seafood puree that Sakura and Akira had prepared for him. It wasn’t the best thing he’d tasted, and swallowing still hurt, but feeling food in his stomach brought a surprising sense of well-being.
And with well-being came a thundering wave of exhaustion. “Going…back to sleep, Saki,” he said.
“No problem, Whips,” she said. “I’ll be here.”
And that assurance followed him comfortably into a warmer and friendlier darkness.
Chapter 40
Campbell surveyed the work area, then glanced at Akira. “We’re not digging too far into the rock, are we?”
The other man shook his head. “No, I worked with the boys on the design. We’re filling much more than we’re cutting, and with the acoustic signal processing Mel found and Caroline helped tweak, we’ve been able to verify that the thickness of the…well, call it crust, I suppose…of the crust here is something close to thirty meters. Given everything we’ve been able to learn about these floating islands, taking thirty centimeters or so off of it in a few patches tens of meters across should have minimal effect; there are natural processes that could do the same.”
“Good. Just figured I should check; this island’s had a hell of a shock just a bit ago, seems smart that we not give it any more.” He watched the excavator back up, start another run.
“We are all in agreement on that.” Akira glanced over, making sure that the smaller children remained visible and out of the way. “And I can’t express how grateful I am that your ad hoc family found its way to ours. We would never have survived that event ourselves.”
The thought had occurred to him, but Campbell grinned. “Don’t sell yourselves short, Akira. Your Sherwood Column might’ve gotten too damaged to stay in, sure, but there’s a good chance you people would’ve been inside, or gotten inside in time, and so long as you did, you’d have survived. Who knows, you might’ve ended up right where we are. Just…not as comfortably.”
“I am far more appreciative of ‘comfort’ or even ‘not entirely backbreaking’ than I was a few years ago.”
“So true, Dad,” Sakura said, dragging one of the tool cases past them, towards where some of the others were working on parts of their planned new home. “I guess I’ve learned stuff I’d have never learned even on Tantalus, if we’d gotten there.”
“Oui, but many of those things, I would have been happy not to have learned,” Tavana said; he was, predictably, following close behind Saki, two huge chunks of wood on his shoulders. “Still, I think we are just as lucky you were here. Without you, we would have been eaten by the island-eater, and if we weren’t, that disease would probably have killed us all.”
“We sure complement each other nicely,” Campbell agreed, looking around. The day was clear, clouds drifting in fluffy whiteness across the very blue sky, and the brilliant green of the ocean was just visible from the ridge, through the tops of the trees and columns and giant land hydroids. “And we sure could’ve had a worse place to—whoa!”
A quiver had run through the entire clearing, making dust puff from the drier ground, leaves shake loose, and Saki, who’d been in mid-stride, lose her balance for an instant. “What the…”
WHOOM!
Campbell flung himself onto the ground; the great, deep booming sound was so like a massive artillery shell detonating that it triggered old reflexes. The others followed his lead, dropping their loads and falling flat, presenting as low a profile as possible.
Despite a twinge of embarrassment at letting reflexes trump thought, Samuel Campbell felt a glow of pride and warm gratification. These people weren’t soldiers. They weren’t warriors. But they were his friends and companions, and they trusted that old Sergeant Campbell probably knew what he was doing.
And who knew, maybe this was the right action. He still didn’t know what that noise was, though now that his forebrain was processing instead of the backbrain, he could make out not-artillery aspects of the sound; it went on longer, and there was a background of grinding, splintering…
“Oh, crap,” he murmured. “Keep down, everyone, just in case. Scrunch up a bit, make yourselves the smallest targets you can.”
“What is it, Sergeant?” Saki asked tensely.
“I think I’ve heard that noise before, a lot closer up, and—hold on!”
Faint whistling noises were the only warning, before a scattered rain of something came smashing down through the forest and surroundings. Campbell saw something scythe straight through one of the trees and disappear towards the base of a column, which shuddered and then slowly, majestically tilted and fell, adding its own distant boooom to the sound of things falling and embedding themselves in the earth.
After a few moments, the deadly hail stopped. Campbell gave it a ten-count, then slowly stood; next to him, Akira did the same. “Think that’s over. Everyone okay? Sound off!”
“Xander here, Sergeant; something bounced off the roof of the excavator but I’m fine.”
“M…maddox. I’m okay, Sergeant.”
“I am here, Sergeant,” Tavana said. “No injury.”
“Francisco here, Hitomi and I are all right, Sergeant!”
“Hi, I’m okay,” said Sakura, waving shakily. “Almost got hit, but it missed me.” Campbell could see something jagged and white protruding from the ground perhaps two meters from Sakura.
“Laura here,” came Dr. Kimei’s voice, as calm and controlled as ever. “Whips and Pearce are with me, and everyone’s okay.”
“Me and Caroline are okay too,” Melody said, her voice also somewhat shaky. “What was that?”
“Unless I miss my guess, that was an island-eater taking a big bite out of the island on the other side. You figured right on that, Akira.”
“That’s kilometers away,” Akira said, looking stunned.
“Yeah, but those damned things are a kilometer or ten long. Figure out how much power’s in something like that striking at even a real slow walk—and they’re moving a lot faster than that.” Campbell shook his head. “Just hope the rest of our continent’s not gonna attract them.”
“I wouldn’t think so,” Akira said after a moment. “This mountain ridge separates us well from the damaged area and everything here seems very healthy. The continent is vastly larger, anyway. Huge though it seemed to us, losing that whole area is about like trimming a toenail to it.”
“Just so long as the clippers don’t slip and clip this part, I’m okay with that.” He looked towards the ridge of “mountains” that rose fifty meters or more above him. Maybe it was his imagination, but he thought he saw a faint, dark cloud of dust rising from where the island-eater must have struck. “Still, I’m guessing it’ll take quite a few more strikes before that toenail’s all trimmed off. Everyone be ready to take shelter whenever another one happens.”
He was right; there were three more massive concussions in the next several hours, each one resulting in sometimes-putrid remains of their old home ground literally raining down. Luck, however, remained with them, and no one was hurt, nor was anything important and fragile struck by the debris. The excavator took another hit, but even falling rock was no match for the machine’s advanced alloys.
By the end of the day, the excavator was ready to be brought back to Emerald Maui. The selected clearing was flat and smooth, the fill tamped down by multiple runs with the excavator’s roller mode despite the occasional rains of stone and mud, and stakes marked out the locations of the three buildings to be constructed: the Kimei home, Campbell house, and a third building that would be part-warehouse, part common room, meeting hall, and whatever else seemed needed.
Campbell looked at the site with the phantom projections of the future buildings on it, a
nd nodded. That’ll do fine, he thought, as they headed a bit downhill to where the current camp was. Oh, in a year or three we’ll have to probably build some new houses, or add-ons to the old, when some of us go from dating to more formal attachment—me and Pearce first, probably. He grinned to himself, savoring that thought. Forced retirement via shipwreck does have some upsides. Still, it’ll do just fine for now.
Rough wooden tables had been put together a few days after they arrived, and had settled securely into the thin soil on the ridge; sections of sawn logs made good stools. There were some camping chairs remaining, but those were being saved. It didn’t seem to bother people, though. All of them had now been through so much that the important thing was that they were all alive, healthy (except for Whips, and he was definitely improving), well-fed, and not uncomfortable. Okay, the shelters weren’t the same as real houses, but a hell of a lot better than sleeping out where the crants could get in and pinch and nip.
“Pass me the kraken tail, I’d like another slice,” he said. One of the predators had gotten too close the other day, and now was the centerpiece of this meal.
“Sure,” Xander said, hefting the wooden platter and passing it to the sergeant. “It’s not bad, but I think I like capy better.”
“I dunno, I like the texture of kraken. Still, it’s a top predator, probably not something we want to eat often for a lot of reasons.” He noticed Caroline, Sakura, and Melody talking quietly and gesturing at something invisible. “What are you girls up to?”
“Astronomy,” Caroline said. “We’re letting the satellites keep doing their periodic heaven-scan, not because we think we’ll catch anything, but because there’s lots to look at here.”
“You mean the comets?”
“Well, those are fascinating, and there’s a lot of them, but much more than that. Both our groups found the biggest gas giant in our system—I want to name it Iris, by the way, because it’s like a rainbow of stripes—and the other rocky planet near the sun, but there are actually six other planets in the Emerald system. Another gas giant—looks more boringly brown and white than Iris—a couple of Neptune-like planets, one I’m pretty sure is mostly a giant iceball about five billion kilometers out, and two more rocky planets. One of them’s pretty close to opposition and it’s the next one out, and we got some really interesting images of it. It has terrain that looks like a checkerboard from this distance; I have no idea what that could be.”
“You think someone made it that way?” Tavana asked.
Caroline shook her head, smiling “No, no. If there’s anything we’ve learned so far, it’s that planets are just plain strange and you don’t need alien interference to explain it. There are just infinite ways for them to become weird all on their own.”
“Absolutely true,” Campbell said. “They teach us that in the explorers. Hell, intelligent life usually doesn’t leave anything you can see, at least unless it’s still there and has the lights on.”
“The differences are always fascinating,” Caroline went on. “Especially those within a solar system. Theory says they all came out of the same nebula, so why, for instance, do you have something like Iris, all that bright-colored candy-striping, and in the next orbit a planet that looks basically like Saturn without the rings?”
“Oh, and look at this,” Sakura said, “it’s a composite from images of Lincoln over the last year. Looks like you were at least partly right, Dad!”
The image flickered onto everyone’s VRD—at least, everyone that was paying attention; the little kids were talking over their own thing and Mel seemed to be studying a separate set of images. The familiar globe hung in front of them, but this time with the faster time-scale the motion of the floating islands was actually visible, the huge living constructs drifting slowly but unmistakably across the face of the globe.
More interesting than that, though, was the ocean. Slight variations in color swirled across the surface, deepened, shifted in tint; green changed to aqua and then to a crystalline blue, sweeping over a large portion of the seas, and then slowly became teal and then shifting back to brilliant emerald green.
“That’s fascinating. I wonder what causes the die-off and repopulation of the plankton—I assume that’s what’s happening there. Nutrient flow from the deep ocean? Or perhaps from the islands themselves? I’ll have to see if there are patterns in this.”
“Heh. Still plenty of research to do, in between survival panics,” Campbell said.
He glanced around the table, and felt his gut tense. Melody was staring at the same invisible screen, saying nothing, as though she was unaware of the banter around the table. More, despite the tan even the palest of them had acquired, Melody Kimei looked white, and her body was tense, locked in place.
“Mel? Melody, what’s wrong? You look like you’ve seen about a dozen ghosts.”
At her name, Melody started, then turned. Everyone else fell silent as they saw her face, saw tears starting down it.
“My god, Melody, what is it?” Laura was up, touching her little girl’s shoulder.
Melody didn’t say anything, just glanced at Caroline, and made a gesture that transferred whatever she was seeing to Caroline’s display.
“Hmm. I don’t quite…” Caroline suddenly sucked in her breath. “Oh no.”
“What?” Campbell demanded.
For answer, the image appeared on all the adults’ screens: an image of a starfield. At first, Campbell couldn’t see anything unusual. Then his highly-trained observation told him there was a tiny, subtle change—a single dot, no more than a single pixel, halfway to the lower edge. It was moving—shifting perhaps one pixel to the side, then going back. Comparator. That means whatever it is is…moving? Or close? Or both.
Then text appeared in the display and Campbell felt a cold fist of ice close about his heart:
Diameter: 9.82 km ± 0.5 km
ETA: 221 hours ± 5 hr
Chapter 41
“It’s not fair!” Sakura heard herself half-scream the words and instantly berated herself for sounding like Hitomi—no, younger than Hitomi. None of what had happened to them was fair. The universe, and Lincoln in particular, clearly didn’t give a damn about “fair.” But that didn’t keep her from feeling angry and somehow betrayed, atop the rising fear.
“No, it isn’t,” Campbell said, looking around at the others.
Sakura looked over to Hitomi and Francisco. They didn’t look quite as shell shocked as the adults, probably because they didn’t grasp the extent of the disaster. They’d survived one big rock falling, why couldn’t they survive another?
“Those numbers,” Xander began, trying to sound calm and rational and doing pretty well, from Sakura’s point of view. “The size and approach numbers, are we really sure about them?”
“You saw the margins of error,” Caroline said, still sounding stunned. “I’m confident that’s right. We’ll get more precise as it gets closer. Right now we don’t even know where on the planet it’s going to hit.”
“Does it make a difference?” Pearce asked. “That’s a dinosaur-killer.”
“Dinosaur-killer didn’t kill everything,” Tavana said, getting a nod from Akira. “If it hits where we are, yes, we are all dead; but if we are far enough away, we may survive. We can survive. Lincoln must have been hit by these things many times, and life still thrives. We can survive…right?”
That last right? didn’t quite inspire Sakura with the confidence that Tavana had probably hoped for.
“Right!” Francisco said. Finding everyone looking at him, he blinked, then looked to Hitomi, who stood up and repeated “Right! We will get on Emerald Maui and run away from the meteor.”
“Where could we run to?” asked Akira slowly. “I mean, we saw what a much smaller impact did. Wouldn’t a larger one produce waves across the entire reachable ocean? If it strikes on the other side of the planet, that’s one thing, but…”
“It’s actually not so bad,” Caroline said, and there was a hint of
optimism that made Sakura swallow and let go of the fear inside—just a little bit. “That giant wave that hit us would have dissipated to a ripple in a relatively few more kilometers. If we’d been fifty kilometers farther away, or a hundred, it wouldn’t have been a disaster.” She frowned. “Something like that, of course, is going to make one incredible splash, no doubt about it, but on the open sea that will pretty soon turn into a not-terribly-big wave. I hope. It’s the shockwave we have to worry about. And anything from the splash coming back down, if it doesn’t turn to vapor. A big blast of steam won’t do us much good either, but it won’t last that long.”
“Climate’s going to go to hell, though, isn’t it?” Maddox asked bluntly.
“It…won’t be good, no. I don’t have the models to be sure which way it’ll be not-good, though. Put enough water vapor into the air, that’s a powerful greenhouse gas, it’ll heat the planet up, but if you also throw up a ton of new clouds, that drops the insolation, so that cools it down…” Caroline spread her hands and shrugged. “At this point, all I’m sure of is that it’ll be drastic. And it’ll last a while, months to years.
“On the positive side, unless it happens to hit one of the floating continents, the only thing it’s hitting is water. There’s no way it’s getting through a hundred kilometers of water and high-pressure ices. So minimal sulfate dispersal, debris ejecta, and so on.” She glanced at Melody. “I’ll give everything I have to you, Mel—you can work on the sims and get more detail out of them than I probably would.”
Whips’ voice spoke from within the medical tent, starting with a Bemmie curse that basically meant stagnation. “I just don’t believe this. We just survived one hit, and here comes another? How long can we keep doing this?”
Saki heard the exhaustion and pain in her friend’s voice and bit her lip. After everything he’d gone through, she couldn’t blame him. “I know, Whips. It’s like another punch in the gut.”
“We keep doing this exactly as long as we have to,” Laura said, and her voice was filled with certainty. “This is my family—all of you are, now,” and Sakura could see her looking at Campbell and his people. “Francisco and Xander and Maddox and Tavana, and even you two, Pearce, Sergeant—we are one family, and I will not let my family give up.”