Castaway Resolution

by Eric Flint

  Something flashed, a flare of light that somehow expanded even though they couldn’t see it, from far, far over the horizon.

  IMPACT.

  Chapter 47

  Three masses of nickel-iron, none less than five kilometers in any dimension, in toto making a single body ten kilometers in diameter, plunged through the atmosphere on very slightly diverging courses, the heat vaporizing the remainder of the water and ammonia ices that had bound the three together until minutes before. Though the atmosphere around them blazed into incandescent plasma, the journey was far too short to heat that titanic mass—trillions of tons of metal moving at tens of kilometers per second.

  In about one second the three impactors streaked from the high atmosphere to the immense floating continent below. Huge as it was—over sixteen hundred kilometers long and hundreds wide, with a maximum thickness over ten kilometers, made of natural carbonan-reinforced stone—it could in no way withstand the inconceivable force of that triple blow, equal in power to the simultaneous detonation of millions of the most powerful nuclear weapons ever created.

  The continent bowed under the impact and then rippled, the shockwave pulverizing the stone near the impact and shattering the rest in a widening ring of devastation that spread through stone and sea at tremendous speed. At the center of the impacts a hole was bored ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty kilometers and more into the depths.

  The incredible forces of impact deceleration did what the atmosphere could not; much of the mass of the impactors, and a huge volume of water, stone, and living things about them vaporized, creating a detonation of plasma many kilometers across, hotter than the surface of Lincoln’s sun. Trees burst into flame hundreds of kilometers away as a new and baleful star ascended, a seething fireball larger than a mountain rising into the sky on a pillar of fire and smoke.

  What did not vaporize still had to move, and move it did, opening an ephemeral yet monstrous crater well over two hundred kilometers in diameter in the surface of the ocean. Some of the mass was hammered down into the depths, a combined impact and pressure wave that shattered the foundation of ice sixty and more kilometers below, blasting a gargantuan crater that even reached the actual bedrock under more than twenty kilometers of exotic ice; more streaked outward in a trio of immense waves that began kilometers high, and would not subside to anything resembling normal waves for many, many kilometers to come.

  The crater in the ice-seafloor could not support itself, nor could the water remain water at that depth once the sea returned to reclaim the void. Freed of the icy pressure above, doughy magma welled from within Lincoln, contesting with the collapsing icy walls of the crater and the returning, crystallizing ocean in a bizarre cataclysmic contest that there were, unfortunately, no eyes to see.

  The rest of the impactor and its victim-continent was hurled into the sky with cosmic force, some pieces of the shattered continent flying into space, traveling with such velocity that they would never again return to Lincoln, or might, undisturbed, take incalculable years to do so. Most blew outward as well as up, flying hundreds of kilometers; some few flew free of the atmosphere on high sub-orbital arcs, to return as flaming impactors of their own, raining incandescent death far, far from the scene of primary impact.

  Most of these, however, were relatively small things; they might kill what they fell upon, start fires, send spectacular splashes skyward, but most of them were not threats to anything deep within a floating continent, or cruising tens of meters below the ocean surface.

  Most of them.

  Chapter 48

  “Do we dive now?” Xander’s voice was deceptively calm, but Tavana had heard him enough to note the tension underlying it.

  “Not quite. About sixteen minutes before debris really starts to arrive.”

  “What’s the rest of the disaster schedule look like, Mel?” Campbell asked.

  “Seismic wave pretty soon, but that’ll be nothing for us up here. Tsunami—with the water-compression wave riding along…that’s a little more than an hour. We don’t want to be below water for that one, we’ll have to surf.” She winced. “That’s tsunamis, plural. Frequency separation means there’ll be several of them, and the model says…it’s not going to be good.”

  “Right. So we dodge the shrapnel on the dive, come up in about half an hour or so, then ride the waves. Anything else?”

  Mel’s eyebrows rose. “Wow. Um, we really want to dive about two hours from now; the airblast’s going to be intense.”

  “We’re two thousand eight hundred kilometers from the impact and the airblast’s still bad?” Pearce asked incredulously.

  “That’s what you get when your impact’s measured in the hundreds of millions of megatons, yes,” Melody said. “And the outward airblast’ll be followed by an inward blast. And I think a couple lesser ones afterward. The whole planet, including the atmosphere, is ringing like a bell. Outward blasts will be hot, inward will be cold.”

  “Okay, so dive, resurface, dive, maybe another dive for the second airblast. That it?”

  Melody looked at Whips and shrugged; Whips echoed the gesture in his own way. “As far as the impact goes. We don’t have the data or experience to model what the weather’ll be like after this, but it’s going to be bad, that I’m sure of. Just the hot-cold contrasts of the airblasts says the weather’s going to be hideous. And of course near the impact site…”

  “…there will be some kind of mega-hurricane like we’ve never imagined,” Melody said, voice unsteady. “That’ll affect every weather system on the planet. We’re still way too close for comfort.”

  Tavana shook his head. “Well, we had best update our friends, yes?”

  “Yes,” Laura said. “Sherlock, this is Emerald Maui.”

  The reply was almost instant, with a hint of static. “Sherlock here. We read you, Emerald Maui. Go ahead.” The voice was shaky, carrying with it the implication that Captain Ayrton was watching the results of a major meteoroid impact.

  “Debris will be arriving in…about ten, twelve minutes now. We’re getting ready to dive. We’ll stay down about half an hour. Then we have to surface to ride multiple tsunamis, which doesn’t sound like fun, then dive again to duck the airblast, which I’m informed may be as much as a significant fraction of one bar.” Tavana knew that this meant a wind-impact greater than any hurricane ever, maybe much greater depending on how “significant” that fraction of a bar was. “After that it’s weather we’ll have to worry about.”

  “Understood, Emerald Maui. Thanks for the update. We will continue to prepare rescue vessels so they will be on standby as soon as practical.” Ayrton’s voice held a note of humor. “My pilots would also rather not fly through a major overpressure wave. So we’ll talk to you in about three hours.”

  “I don’t blame them, Captain. And yes, three hours. Thank you again. Emerald Maui out.”

  “Wait a moment, Emerald Maui.” This voice was a calm tenor, but not one they’d heard before. “This is Tip—sorry, Lieutenant Tip Henderson, Sciences. Your models may be making some things worse than they will be. They likely assume an Earthlike world. True?”

  “Yes,” Melody answered after a moment. “I tried to change parameters but I don’t think it was handling the shift well.”

  “Sixty-kilometer depths, which is what it appears you’re dealing with, are well beyond the standard models carried in even colonist omnis. If this impact happened on an Earthlike world, yes, the waves would be something to seriously concern you. In this case, with the depth of those oceans, the waves will be high, but also extremely broad, even the ones with the shortest wavelengths. You will see the horizon retreat and approach, but the effective vertical and horizontal accelerations will be no greater than those of the usual waves encountered. The airblast, unfortunately, will still be quite significant, and the minimal but still present risk of the debris also.”

  “So, to sum up,” Xander said, “we don’t need to worry about the waves. We should just stay submerged until aft
er the major airblasts are done.”

  “That would be my recommendation.”

  “Thank you, Sherlock. That’s at least one piece of good news!”

  “Glad to help. Good luck.”

  “Thanks again. Emerald Maui, out.”

  There was a moment’s silence, then Maddox burst out, “I can’t believe we’re actually about to be rescued!”

  The whole group exploded into laughs and cheers, which only slowly died down. “No one reluctant to leave?” Campbell asked with a grin.

  “I don’t think so,” Laura said instantly. “I suppose…if everything we’d built hadn’t just been wiped off the face of the planet…”

  “Actually,” Akira said slowly, “I must confess I will rather miss this place—it’s absolutely fascinating.” He looked around with a raised eyebrow at the others who were staring at him, then smiled. “But I would much rather study it with all the resources of a proper expedition. No, Sergeant, I think we are all very happy to think of getting away from Lincoln.”

  Sakura looked out at the sparkling water, then caught Tavana’s eye. “I’ll have some good memories of Lincoln, though,” she said, and Tavana felt warm all through.

  “I…guess,” Mel said slowly. “Scattered in among the days of grinding work, moments of terror, and unending exhaustion, yeah.”

  “It wasn’t that bad,” Caroline said.

  “Well…not all the time, anyway. But yeah, it was, sometimes.”

  “Life’s pretty much like that a lot of places,” Campbell said. “And shouldn’t we dive about now, Captain?”

  Xander nodded. “Yes.” He looked at Tavana. “Make it so, Tav!”

  “All right. Everyone make sure you’re strapped in?” Tavana waited to make sure everyone reported in, even Franky and Hitomi. Then he grasped the controls and took Emerald Maui down.

  They’d done this before, so Tavana knew what to expect; the glitter of the sunshine faded into brilliant shards of flickering light, slowly dimming a bit as they descended, until they drove at speed through an emerald sea twenty-five meters below the surface. He studied the telltales for a few moments, then nodded. “Captain, we are steady at twenty-five meters submerged. No indications of leaks. All green.”

  “Lock it in, Tavana,” Xander said.

  As he complied, the light began to dim. Vaguely he could see that the sky was darkening. “This fast?”

  “I don’t think anyone’s ever actually witnessed an impact anything like this magnitude,” Caroline said in a hushed voice. “Maybe the impact flash and heating is triggering cloud formation along its intersection with the atmosphere; who knows? We’d have to go up surface to see.”

  “And we are not surfacing for a while,” Laura said. “Everyone, relax. We’ve got hours yet before we have to do more than ride this out. We don’t have any other work to do. Just stay in our seats, in case anything happens.”

  It was quiet for a moment, then Hitomi said, “What the sergeant said…I guess things might have been tough even where we meant to be going.”

  Tavana nodded. “We were going to a colony world. It would have had better equipment, but I bet there would have been a lot of work, and not all of it fun, on Tantalus. Maybe even moments of terror.”

  “Probably all of that,” Pearce Haley said. “Heard enough tales from the old man here on that.”

  “Old man? I come by these gray hairs mostly from watching you young people doing stupid-ass things that nearly get you killed!”

  “Then I,” Laura said, “ought to be as white-haired as my grandmother.”

  “Mom! We’re not that bad, are we?” Whips protested.

  “Asks Mr. ‘oh, I’ll ignore my injuries and almost get eaten’?”

  “Oh. Yeah. I guess maybe we are.”

  “What ‘we’ is that?” demanded Melody. “I try to stay out of all that stuff!”

  The banter and laughter continued, and Tavana found himself marveling at it. A few hours before, they were running from a cosmic disaster, knowing they were entirely on their own. Now they were found, and the knowledge was buoying their spirits, even though in a few minutes they would be having to survive the aftereffects of that same disaster.

  Without warning, something began dimpling the sea above them, and a plipplopploploplopPLIP sound came from the external microphones, drowning out the mysterious distant moans and grumbles from below. Laura squinted up. “Rain?”

  “No,” Mel said tensely. “This is it. The debris from the impact.”

  The light had dimmed more—Tavana guessed that some of the debris was little more than dust, helping to block the light. The rest seemed to be tiny pebbles, with a smattering of larger stones among them. Faint taps came from Emerald Maui as some of those, slowed to simple drifting by the ocean’s mass, bounced gently off the hull before dropping away into the depths.

  “Why are they sinking?” Sakura asked. “Most of Lincoln’s stones float!”

  “If they were ejected at that kind of speed, they probably melted. Pieces that didn’t burn up would’ve gotten denser as they melted and congealed,” Mel said absently. She was still staring up suspiciously at the surface. “Plus some of this isn’t going to be Lincoln debris; it’s the impactor, and it was nickel-iron.”

  A distant boom coincided with a tiny vibration of Emerald Maui. “Whoa. That wasn’t small.”

  “Stands to reason some big pieces would get thrown up and come down,” Campbell said. “Just hope that I…”

  An impact slewed Emerald Maui around and rang her hull like a bell, tilting the ship sideways. If Tavana and the others hadn’t been strapped in, it would have sent them all tumbling like dice in a gambler’s cup. As it was there were curses and shrieks. Those died away to a watchful silence.

  The controls were stubborn now. “Merde,” he muttered. Red lights blinked on the board.

  “What is it, Tav! Talk to me!” Xander said.

  “Have to surface! We just lost most of our remaining wing, dive plane sheared off. And…and I’m showing seal integrity compromised on the rear door.”

  “Take us up, then, fast.”

  “Hold on!” Tavana directed the remaining, mangled shapeable material to become as functional a waterfoil as possible, then kicked in the jet to maximum. Emerald Maui wallowed for a moment, then seemed to understand; it steadied and lunged upward, charging to the surface and breaking it like a breaching whale to fall back with a thud onto the water.

  “How bad’s the leak?” Campbell asked with a strangely casual intonation.

  “Can’t…be quite sure, but it’s pretty bad.”

  “Can we stay up if the cargo compartment floods?”

  “I…dunno. Maybe. Maybe if I can use the jet to keep us up some. Can we dump the cargo?”

  “We’re up for rescue. We don’t need most of it. Worst comes to worst we just need data, which we’ve all got stored. Problem would be if we can dump the cargo.”

  Campbell unstrapped. “Tav, I’m going to take a quick squint aft. If the water ain’t pouring in, me and Xander’ll go see if it’s patchable. If not, well…we’ll start loosening all the big pieces, like the excavators. When the water really gets high, then we open the doors, you hit the jet and hopefully tilt us up fast enough that we can dump the weight. If you’re really good with it, might could dump a bunch of the water and then be able to close the doors again. Buy us some time.”

  “Better hurry,” Mel said. “Tsunami may not be a big deal, but the airblasts are coming in only a couple hours. Maybe a little less.”

  “Oh, I know it.” Campbell took a breath and then suddenly bellowed, shouting at the lowering sky showing on the viewport. “God-DAMN it, we’re LEAVING! Just give us one goddamn break, Lincoln!”

  The cabin was dead silent, everyone staring at the sergeant, who looked down, embarrassed.

  “Sorry, everyone,” Campbell said finally.

  “No,” Akira said, and chuckled. The laugh spread, rippling around the room like the waves on a pond, un
til even Hitomi giggled. “No, Sergeant, you said what every single one of us feels. And you’re right. We’ve survived everything Lincoln’s thrown at us. We’ll beat whatever it has left.”

  “Damn right we will.” He turned to the rear door. “Now let’s do that surviving thing one more time.”

  Chapter 49

  The door slid open, and immediately a thin wash of water spread out into the cabin area. Sakura could hear the splash and swish of the sea through the open door.

  “I’m gonna need muscles in here! Tav, Whips, Xander, get in here now!” came Campbell’s sharp command.

  Tavana began unstrapping. “Sakura, you’ve got the board!”

  “Got it!” she said, feeling her pulse rising again. Once more I’m the pilot in an emergency.

  She grasped the controls, tested them. “We’re already getting rear-heavy, Sergeant! I’m going to have to accelerate forward, try to dump some of the water!”

  “Understood, Saki. Do what you gotta do. Gents, make sure you’ve got a good anchor somewhere in reach, ’cause she ain’t gonna be able to warn us every time.”

  Sakura accelerated as slowly as she could. The idea was to push as much of the water back as she could by, effectively, driving out from under it. “Sergeant, I can’t do this for too long. When I say NOW, you’ve got to close the cabin door.”

  “That’ll stick the four of us back here, you know,” Xander said. His tone wasn’t reproving, just a reminder of an uncomfortable fact, but she still felt a pang of guilt.

  “I know, but we don’t want water up here too. I’ve got to have confidence you’ll get it cut off somehow…or at least be able to tell me when you’re sure you can’t and then I can let you in quick.”

  “We’ll get it done,” Whips said. “Like the sergeant said, you do what you have to.”

  Emerald Maui began to bump a bit as its speed increased over the increasingly choppy waves, and there were still occasional ting and whanggg noises as small pieces of ejecta rapped her. She saw a huge plume of water spout up where another large piece had hit, a kilometer or more away, and shuddered. One more hit on us like that and we’ve probably had it.