by Alten-Steve
“Christ, what should I do?”
Kyle Hall’s heart is pounding so hard he can barely breathe. “Don’t stop! We have less than three minutes!”
Captain Barker revs the engines once more. The shuttle lurches ahead, its wingspan passing over the crowd, its front wheel rolling over an older woman and her Chihuahua. Moaning aloud, Barker veers the shuttle to the far right side of the runway, then back to the left before accelerating beyond the crowd.
17:18 …
“Seventy knots … one ninety … two seventy-five. Come on, girl, get your fat ass into the air!”
The shuttle lifts off, beginning a slow ascent above the rapidly diminishing northbound runway—as the towering dark wave breaks on shore half a mile to the east, blasting a thousand-foot-deep trowel of sand and sea skyward. The debris storm explodes across the space vehicle’s wings and windshield, momentarily blinding the captain as the ascending space plane lumbers above two hundred feet—and is suddenly swallowed by a mountainous wall of water.
The megatsunami pile-drives Shuttle 12 sideways against the concrete runway. The portside wing snaps, the vehicle flipping over and over, its fuel tanks sparked and bursting into orange balls of fire—quickly smothered beneath the furiously moving seascape.
The supersonic jet circles two thousand feet above the invading Atlantic, which rolls westward over Cape Canaveral and the Banana River, the Merritt Island Space Center, the Indian River, and scenic Cocoa Beach, leaving devastation in its wake.
Lilith stares below, unable to breathe. Hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of facilities and technology … an assembly line for space planes … nearly two decades of space tourism and seventeen years of hard work—everything wiped out in a span of twenty seconds.
For Lilith Aurelia Mabus and her Hunahpu soul mate, there is no future.
H.O.P.E. is gone.
14
I’m in the ATLAS control room, fifteen minutes after the first high energy collisions at the Large Hadron Collider. The physicists have been waiting for this moment for more than a year and are still jumping up and down about it. It’s been a long day for everyone—the journalists got here before 6 a.m.—but a lot of the scientists were here all night. A lot of delirious grins. Earlier this morning two minor glitches meant that the energy had to be ramped back down and up again twice. But everything went smoothly on the third attempt, to the excitement and relief of everyone involved. Collisions were detected in all four of the experiments at the LHC—CMS, ALICE, ATLAS, and LHCb. From where I’m at in the ATLAS control room, I can see images of the collisions being beamed in on floor-to-ceiling screens. There’s just been another outbreak of clapping, following the announcement that the two beams are still circulating smoothly. This means that the inner detectors—those that will capture the most interesting information about the collisions—can now be switched on. Congratulations to all at LHC!
—HANNAH DEVLIN,
SCIENCE REPORTER FOR THE TIMES,
MARCH 30, 2010
Vastitas Borealis Basin
Mars Colony, Mars
James Corbett grips the safety bar of the lift with one gloved hand of his space suit, the other hand twirling the palm-size sensory cane looped around his wrist—a device that feeds information from a laser pointer into a relay embedded in the engineer’s brain.
James Corbett is blind, having lost his sight in a deepwater diving accident when he was thirty years old. Refusing to curb his appetite for life, he took up mountain climbing and ascended Mount Kilimanjaro and within three years was again leading deepwater descents hundreds of feet below the surface. Learning to function in his new world of darkness actually saved Corbett’s life when he and a dive buddy decided to explore an inverted freighter located at the bottom of Lake Ontario. Lost in a world of silt and quickly running out of air, Corbett calmly felt his way through the ship’s corridors, leading them to safety.
The descent grows bumpy, rattling the open lift’s cage. Immune to claustrophobia, the chief engineer of Mars Colony has taken it upon himself to descend into the just-completed mining shaft. Seven hundred feet below the rocky Mars surface lies a mysterious mass, its potential yield weighing in at an estimated 130,000 metric tons. To find a vein of ore that can be melded into steel plates for the Colony’s bio-domes makes the discovery a fortuitous find; to locate it in a basin believed to be a 200-million-year-old sea has baffled his team of geologists. Using a laser-cutting tool, Corbett will cut loose a sample of the mass for analysis in their lab. Before any more exploratory shafts are dug, his team will determine the nature of the metal and whether an elaborate salvage operation is worth the cost in fuel and manpower.
The hydraulic lift slows, then stops with a clanging thud. Corbett’s helmet fills with radio static, followed by a faint, “End of the line, sir.”
“A simple ‘You’ve arrived’ would have sufficed, Mr. Jefferies. Which way is the targeted section?”
“Exit the lift and head west three meters, you’re practically on top of it.”
Corbett steps off the lift, his sensory cane determining direction and distance, the distinct reverberations leading him to the object subsumed in rock. Reaching out with his right gloved hand, he feels the shaft wall, distinguishing the rough silicate from a smooth metallic surface, its contours curved, its planed edges several inches thick, yet honed to a degree of sharpness not found in nature.
The engineer taps the mysterious object with his cutting tool, a strange sensation of déjà vu overwhelming the former salvage diver. Using a pickax, he chips away a four-foot section of rock, exposing a protrusion of the buried object.
“Sir, is everything all right? Dr. Corbett?”
“Huh? Yes, I’m … it’s good. Actually, it’s the tip of a very massive iceberg.”
“Iceberg, sir?”
“It’s not a vein, Jefferies, and no, it’s not an iceberg. It’s a buried vessel of some kind. If I didn’t know any better, I’d swear it was the blade of a cruise ship’s propeller.”
Mount Weather
Bluemont, Virginia
It is located forty-six miles from Washington, D.C., a top-secret facility rivaling that of Area 51. Aboveground all seems innocuous—a dozen administration buildings set on manicured lawns, a helipad and control tower, everything surrounded by a perimeter fence. But beneath this mountain summit lies a vast underground city.
Welcome to Mount Weather, a self-contained “Doomsday Hideaway” established before the Cold War and modernized over the decades at a taxpayer cost approaching $3 trillion. Of course, Mount Weather and the more than one hundred subterranean Federal Relocation Centers spread out across Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, and North Carolina were never intended to be used by taxpayers, nor was the “continuity of government” program it secretly services meant to comply with the constitution or congressional oversight. Mount Weather and its network were built with one objective in mind: surviving the apocalypse.
Built to withstand a nuclear strike on Washington and its “target areas,” Mount Weather and its network of bunker facilities are literally self-contained underground cities, complete with private apartments, dormitories, streets, sidewalks, hospitals, and cafeterias, as well as a water purification system linked to underground streams and aquifers, sewage treatment plants, agricultural greenhouses, livestock, power plants, a mass transit system, and its own telecommunication system. While the world’s population perishes by nuclear weapons, radiation fallout, erupting calderas, biological disasters, asteroid strikes, or nuclear winter, the inhabitants of the Mount Weather network will survive catastrophe so that humanity can go on.
That these “survivors” will most likely have been the ones to have caused the catastrophe in the first place has never seemed to bother past presidents, cabinet members, and those appointed in secrecy to man FEMA’s parallel government-in-waiting. Joining this secret fraternal order of politicos are the CEOs and executives of some of the top companies in the world, alon
g with key personnel at the Federal Reserve and the US Post Office, both private corporations.
In essence, Mount Weather is Mars Colony here on Earth, a safe haven for the rich and affluent.
President Andrew Hiles is in the Situation Room, the nerve center of Mount Weather, which is linked with Raven Rock, the Pentagon’s underground facility located sixty miles north of Washington. Appearing before him is a real-time holographic image of the Earth, originating from the Defense Department’s satellite array, then reconfigured. Ash clouds from over two hundred erupting volcanoes have combined with the Yellowstone caldera to cover ninety percent of the planet’s atmosphere. America’s breadbasket is covered in ash, its farms devastated. Photosynthesis has ceased to exist. Rolling blackouts will lead to anarchy, mass starvation, and a decade of nuclear winter. Nine billion people, save a privileged few, shall die.
Now the president must deliver a final message to the people. How does one talk of hope when none exists? How does a president prepare his constituents for death when he himself shall be spared?
With a heavy heart, Andrew Hiles is led by his trainers to his new Oval Office, where television cameras and a teleprompter awaits.
Gulf of Mexico
The Aerion supersonic business jet ascends to five thousand feet as it banks west at Mach 1.3, soaring over the Florida Panhandle.
Manny closes the cockpit door, guiding Lilith to a chair. “Are you okay?”
“My son is possessed for an eternity by some kind of demonic force, and the only chance we had to save him—to save humanity—just got pummeled by a wave. So no, Manny, I’m far from okay, in fact, I’m about to freak out.”
“Listen to me, the window hasn’t closed just yet. Salvation isn’t on Mars, it’s through the wormhole that will appear when the singularity crosses into the physical universe. That event will happen before this day is over—I can feel the Nexus trembling beneath its gravitational weight. Lilith, we don’t need a Mars shuttle to reach the wormhole, we just need a space plane. Don’t you have another space port in Houston?”
Her eyes widen. “Yes.”
McMurdo Research Station
Ross Island, Antarctica
Surrounded by ocean, the continent of Antarctica covers the geographic South Pole at the bottom of the world. The land-mass, fifth largest on the planet, is ninety-eight percent ice and possesses no indigenous human inhabitants. Nevertheless, each spring three thousand workers join teams of scientists that weather the extreme cold in order to staff Antarctic research stations, all part of a cooperative global effort to study conditions that serve to stabilize the planet’s weather patterns.
McMurdo Station is spread out across two square miles of ice on the southern tip of Ross Island. Operated by the American branch of the National Science Foundation, the complex houses twelve hundred residents, making it the largest human habitat in Antarctica.
It may very well be its last.
Geologist T. Paul Schulte stands on the partially frozen shoreline of McMurdo Sound, staring across the waterway at the four snow-covered summits spewing ash clouds high above Ross Island. That Mount Erebus has erupted is unusual but not shocking—as part of the Ring of Fire it is one of more than 160 active volcanoes situated along the Pacific Plate. That its three usually silent sisters are also erupting is what had shaken the scientist to the core—even before he had spoken to his wife, Christine, and learned what was transpiring across the rest of the planet.
Schulte is separated from his wife and six children by an entire hemisphere. His last good-byes were cut off by atmospheric interference caused by the blanket of volcanic dust. The Mormon has prayed nonstop for the last three hours for a miracle.
Now, before his frosting gray-blue eyes, it appears as if a miracle is actually happening.
While the Earth’s geographic poles are located at the center of the planet, the two magnetic poles are perpetually shifting. The phenomenon, known as polar drift, is caused by variations in the flow of molten iron in the Earth’s rotating outer core, which affect the orientation of the planet’s magnetic field.
As Schulte watches in terrifying fascination, the surrounding ash clouds begin slowly coalescing—rotating counterclockwise for as far as the eye can see. The center of this force is rising up from the southern magnetic pole, situated high above a patch of ocean lying to the east of the easternmost shore of Ross Island. Drawn upward through the quickly forming eye, the swirling vortex appears to be inhaling the toxic blanket of volcanic ash into space.
Gulf of Mexico
There is no warning; one moment they are soaring through smooth air—the next they are plunging through space at the speed of sound.
Manny lunges for Lilith, dragging both of them into the Nexus. The physical universe instantly slows around them, their bodies floating upward in the spinning cabin, gravity temporarily defied. Pushing away from the merry-go-round of furniture, they fight their way into the cockpit.
The pilot is unconscious.
Manny tosses him aside and grabs for the controls, struggling to level them out as the altimeter rolls backward from 12,800 feet to 8,900 feet to 4,400 feet—the wind shear releasing them eight hundred feet above the Gulf of Mexico into a rising torrent of wind that buffets them sideways.
Lilith takes the copilot’s seat. She slips out of the Nexus, greeted by the sound of howling wind. “What happened? Did we fly into a hurricane?”
“Look at the sky.”
The dense layer of brown clouds is rolling south like a raging river of mud, its airspeed in excess of a thousand miles an hour—and still climbing. Menacing gray tornadoes of ash appear over land—vertical columns of volcanic dust feeding the vacuous moving carpet of atmospheric debris.
The jet pitches from side to side, rising perilously atop a sudden updraft, only to drop again. “Lilith, it’s too dangerous—we have to land.”
“Do it!”
Scanning the GPS, he banks to the northwest in a steep descent when the windshield is blanketed beneath a blizzard of wet ash. Manny feels the engines seize a moment before red lights flash across his console, and suddenly they’re soaring just above the Gulf, sheets of water dousing the windshield clean as he fights to keep the jet’s nose up, the aircraft’s belly skiing half a mile before its inertia is gripped by gravity and the cockpit settles beneath the incoming swells.
The cabin lights extinguish, and the two Hunahpu, their turquoise eyes radiating in the darkness, slip back inside the Nexus.
Manny communicates telepathically within their shared island of existence: Pop the door, I’ll grab the pilot.
No time. Leave him!
Can’t do that.
Twisting the steel handle, she yanks open the cockpit door, venting the cabin. Leaping into a maelstrom of wind and sea, she treads water, only to discover she can stand.
They are in a cornfield, the stalks submerged under five feet of water.
Remaining in the Nexus, they push through the gelid fourth dimension until they are standing on an elevated strip of concrete.
Manny releases the inert pilot, slipping out of the higher realm. A blinding wind whips at his legs, the ash clouds soaring overhead at a dizzying speed. The air is static with electricity, generating sparks of lightning that dance around upswells of wet ash, feeding the turbid heavens.
“Lilith, where are we?”
She looks to the east where waterspouts dance across an olive-green horizon, the shoreline littered with grounded oil tankers, a maze of gray battleships, and mangled pleasure craft. “I’m pretty sure that’s Galveston Bay. What happened?”
“The megatsunami is what happened. It entered the bay through the Gulf and flooded the Texas coastline.”
She points to a highway off-ramp. “That’s the Gulf Freeway, it leads into Houston. We’re about twenty miles southeast of the space port. Maybe we can find a car.”
“Too dangerous. The ash cloud is moving so fast it’s charging the atmosphere with electricity while popping tor
nadoes faster than we could avoid them. It’ll be exhausting, but our best shot is to do this on foot within the Nexus. At least we can see the updrafts coming.”
“What’s causing the ash cloud to move so fast?”
“… a miracle. Call it God or the Second Coming, but whatever it is, it’s clearing Earth’s atmosphere and jettisoning the debris into space.”
President Hiles stares at the holographic Earth, tears in his eyes, as the gray-brown blanket of volcanic debris dissipates from the Northern Hemisphere, drawn into space hundreds of miles below the South Pole like a steadily draining hourglass. “You say it’s jettisoning the debris into space—where exactly is it going? Is it orbiting our planet?”
“No, sir. Astronomers stationed at observatories in Ontario and British Columbia confirm clear views of space, at least over the Northern Hemisphere.” Despite the startling developments, atmospheric scientist James Thompson appears visibly shaken. “To be perfectly honest, Mr. President, we just don’t know what is happening. We’re calling it a miracle simply because there’s no precedent for this or scientific explanation for why any of this is happening; for that matter, we still don’t know what triggered all the volcanic eruptions. We can’t access our satellites for answers either; the atmosphere is so charged with electromagnetic particles that it’s scrambling our communications from space.”
“What happens when the atmosphere is cleared of debris? Will the process stop?”
“Again, sir, since we have no idea what’s causing the phenomenon, we have no way of answering that.”
“Maybe it’s a do-over?”
“Sir?”
“A clean slate … you know, God’s way of letting us know He’s out there, that He’s giving us a second chance.”