Mother of Storms

by John Barnes

  The government man has one of those names like Collins or Smith that you forget all the time, and all he wants to say is that the government will understand a launch delay, despite the problems that it might bring with fulfilling President Hardshaw’s commitments, but of course if there is to be a launch delay the government will expect to be compensated for the trouble, and that certainly the government is not going to buy two rockets to put up one satellite with the taxpayers’ money, so if this rocket is to be destroyed and another put in its place, then there is going to be compensation from somewhere, and in any case there is not going to be further money from the government until their satellite goes up.

  And now the only important person is sitting there, thinking hard, looking down at the table as he tends to do. Redalsen knows that this guy has been with the insurance company now for more than sixty years, and was turning down retirement before some of the current crop of retirees joined the company. Like most people with his job, he is widely believed to be too mean to die. Redalsen has had a beer or two with him, and gradually came to realize that here was a man who had spent most of an ordinary lifetime thinking about ways things could go dreadfully wrong, and trying to figure out how to make them go only a little less wrong.

  “Are there any qualified probabilities?” the insurance man asks, chewing on his lip and tugging on one mangled-looking ear.

  “Nothing you can measure,” Redalsen says. “I know enough about the rocket to say that, if it is adrift in high seas and runs into anything, it is very likely to detonate, and we cannot safely de-fuel it in the time we have remaining.”

  Crandall nods. “I think we may safely figure that for the next two hours it will drift away from us. We can put a transponder and a scuttling charge on it and blow it as soon as it is a safe distance from the launch tower and other facilities. Or, as Mr. Redalsen has suggested, if you wish to test the launch facility itself, apparently it is possible to send it up suborbitally and bring it down somewhere harmless, perhaps a few hundred kilometers to the north. Either will work splendidly—as long as that giant bomb gets away from my facility.”

  “And you concur in this judgment, Mr. Redalsen?”

  “Yes. Let me add, though, that our risk in future launches may go down if we can see how this one goes.”

  “Understood.” The old man tugs at his ear, looks sideways, scratches his head; Redalsen has had dealings with him, one way and another, for twenty years, and during that whole time has never failed to wonder at how ape-like a human being can be. “You do all understand that even though Industrial Facilities Mutual usually takes my word for it, they might very well reverse me on something this big?”

  “When was the last time you were reversed?” Redalsen asks.

  “Nineteen ninety-eight, on an old Soviet nuclear reactor that they wanted to insure despite the risks. It never went up, so I guess they won the argument.”

  “Do you think they will reverse you?” the government man asks. “It is essential from our standpoint that one way or another—”

  “Somebody else pays for it,” the insurance man finishes for him. “I can’t promise you that the government won’t get stuck with the bill, all I can do is recommend that NAOS takes action to minimize risk to the property, and recommend that we then pay for whatever damages happen. What we do is assurance, buddy, not reassurance.”

  The government man and Wheatstone are plainly unhappy, but Redalsen has added the insurance man to his list of reasonable people. It’s a pity this isn’t a straight majority vote.

  At last Wheatstone breaks the draw. “It sounds like my technical personnel and my external insurance advice are in favor of jettisoning the rocket. And we are at least not being warned that the insurance company won’t pay. Are there significant advantages to the jettison launch?”

  “Only a chance to get some data we couldn’t otherwise get,” Redalsen says. “In theory, it duplicates what we get from computer simulations, but I’ve been at this business much too long to trust the computer simulations completely.” He knows this is bad politics—officially NAOS had wanted to man-rate the Monster without ever having fired one. But he also wants it someplace on the record, as long as everyone is so concerned about that, that they at least had the chance for a test launch.

  “How long before you can jettison launch?”

  “Fifteen minutes from your go.”

  Her jaw sets and her head moves slightly to the left. “Then go.”

  She looked very decisive doing that, Redalsen realizes. When the board sees it, they’ll approve the whole thing, probably.

  They have to delay another two minutes so that the government man can stress, once again, that either NAOS or IFM is going to pay for this, because the government isn’t. But the deal is done, and that at least is a relief.

  As they leave the room, Crandall asks, “Is it really going to be fifteen minutes?”

  “Ten if I can manage it. Everything is modular and it’s just a matter of bringing things online—they should all be hooked up at the launch tower. If they’re not, then I guess we’ll have to get over there in the sub.”

  Crandall nods. “Carry on.”

  Redalsen doesn’t even feel like pointing out that he is not under Crandall’s command; it’s just such a relief to be able to act. A short elevator ride takes him to the control room; telemetry is still showing everything more or less normal, though the Monster is now jigging up and down more than a full meter with each wave.

  “Well, then,” he says to the crew—it is now eight minutes since they began checkout—“do we have the abort trajectory?”

  They do, just as he has asked them to. “All right then, if we’re not going to hit anything, start the short countdown and let’s get this bird gone.”

  Two more minutes until they say “zero” and dozens more green indicators appear on the screens. There’s a rough moment as it pulls out of the water and a wave and wind shear torque it, but the Monster makes its way upward in the face of that, its guidance systems fighting madly, attitude jets firing flat-out bursts in all directions, and in a matter of minutes it’s on its way to an empty stretch of ocean south of Hawaii.

  They watch it depart on radar. “I’ve been through more than a hundred launchings,” the technician at Redalsen’s left comments, “and this is the first time I haven’t heard one go.”

  “Even if we could open the ports in this storm, the storm itself would hide the noise,” Redalsen comments. “It might as well be invisible on radar, anyway. We’re barely getting image off it, and it’s less than forty clicks downrange.”

  “The clouds on radar are forming a weird pattern,” someone says—“look at that black spot right there—”

  “It’s called the eye,” Crandall says, coming in. “Did you get anything for it, Mr. Redalsen, other than getting your giant bomb away from us?”

  “Not one thing was different from the computer simulation,” he says, grinning, “but we did prove we can launch in seas a lot heavier than the Feds will let us.”

  Crandall seems to permit himself a smile. “I don’t suppose that you were indulging any emotional feelings that a fueled rocket ought to be flown rather than sunk?”

  “Oh, we sank it, Skipper. We just sank it farther away.”

  The smile is almost human. “An excellent point. I came down to let you know what your radar is showing you—that thing is only going to dust us and it’s still going to be the worst storm we’ve ever seen. That eye is about eighty clicks across and the official estimate on the wind velocity at the eye wall is close to two hundred and twenty knots. Fortunately it’s missing us by quite a bit—so all we’re going to get is a Beaufort of about nineteen or twenty.”

  The Beaufort scale is a scale of damage and physical effects; it was devised in part because people caught in severe storms don’t usually have time to read instruments. Officially Beaufort 12 is a hurricane; it’s about Beaufort 8 outside right now, and normally Redalsen wouldn’t have laun
ched in a Beaufort 6. Redalsen gives a low whistle. “I bet you’d like us to stay powered up and record data for NOAA?”

  “Actually I don’t care, but NOAA wants it and they’re prepared to pay NAOS for it. And at least that way you people won’t take up valuable room in the shelter down in the reef. But I should warn you, this place doesn’t normally get major hurricanes, so it was only built to take a Beaufort twenty-two—which is uncomfortably close, especially since that forecast of Beaufort twenty is plus or minus five. So if you’re willing to stay and keep the monitors up, NOAA and the company will appreciate it—but it’s at risk. Hazardous-duty pay for it, of course, if it makes a difference.”

  Redalsen nods. “I’ll stick, and anyone else who wants to is welcome to. The rest of you head down to the shelter. Will people be reasonably safe there?”

  “Should be—it’s embedded a hundred twenty meters below the reef itself. People inside there will probably not have the slightest idea what’s happening at the surface. I’ve already got the kids and everyone without a duty down there. I’ll expect your reports, then, from the bridge.”

  “You’ll ride out the storm up there?” Redalsen asks. It’s a good forty meters higher up and thus that much more at risk.

  “Have to. I wasn’t kidding about having written the book for Annapolis. And that was based on one experience with a Beaufort thirteen, and one with a Beaufort fifteen, which is pretty impressive—but I can’t pass up the chance to see this one. Might have to add a couple additional paragraphs.”

  Redalsen can’t resist sticking in the needle. “Just remember to tell the cadets about the importance of having your ship stuck to the bottom with concrete pillars.”

  “If we stay that way,” Crandall says, grinning back. “One way or another, the worst should have blown past by dawn—the damned thing is coming toward us faster than any storm, big or small, has a right to. Assuming the launch room, bridge, galley, and mess are still here, I’ll expect you at breakfast.”

  He turns and goes, and Redalsen swallows the urge to salute. Most of the older techs, who have family here, elect to go below, but he’s got several young engineers who probably signed on for the extra pay with no place to spend it, so there’s not much trouble staffing up.

  “Okay, major thing to do is make sure everything is recording, and watch your instruments for anything unusual.”

  “Mr. Redalsen, sir?” Gladys Hmau has that slight look of mischief that always makes him a little nervous.

  “Yes, Ms. Hmau?”

  “What exactly is unusual in the middle of a huge hurricane?”

  He laughs. “Oh, loss of sense of humor. Just everybody hang tight and watch for what you can find—radar doing funny things, wind shears on the tower, anything that looks like more than just a big storm.”

  The hours take a long time to go by. At about eight P.M., a cook’s mate comes in with grilled cheese sandwiches and coffee on a cart, “compliments of the captain.” They all take a break of sorts, sitting back from their screens and ceasing, for fifteen minutes, the endless, redundant narration of reading the screen into the radio, in case for some reason (some reason best not thought about) the recorders on board are never read back, and because a trained eye may notice a digital readout bar jumping when a reviewer, months later, would let it go by.

  Redalsen puts up the view from the cameras on the overhead screens. He turns the launch tower lights on, but what comes back is an all but solid white screen, only patches of dark green between the foam in the lower part telling them that the screen is anything other than white noise.

  In another hour they begin to hear the storm through the walls. Officially the barometric pressure is now down close to eight hundred millibars. Seas are rising and the strain gauges on the launch tower show bars leaping up and down on their screens here, occasionally flickering red at their tips as wave shear tries to twist the launch tower from its steel moorings in the rock far below the churning sea.

  Just past ten P.M., standing waves are forming in the cups of coffee that sit neglected by the engineers. Gladys Hmau looks sort of pale, and Redalsen touches her shoulder lightly as he looks over into the radar view. “The eye is still going to miss us by a wide margin,” he says.

  “Yeah, but if this sucker goes over we’re just as dead,” she mutters. “Feel that under your feet?”

  He stands quietly for a moment, and sure enough there is a noticeable swell running through the floor. “Impressive.”

  “Not as impressive as what’s happening at the launch tower,” Silverstein says, from the other side. “We’re at solid reds now on shearing, boss; I think we’re going to lose her.”

  “I wouldn’t like to, but better an empty tower than us. Got an idea of the break point?”

  “Shear is maxed at about sixty meters below sea level. Not that sea level means much in the circumstances—”

  There is a hard blow through the floor, and Redalsen falls to his knees. There are half a dozen small screams. As he pulls himself back to his feet, another one hits, just as hard, and there’s a brief flicker in the lights and on the screens. “Better get me the bridge. And cue up whatever’s left of the outside cameras on the launch tower.”

  “Uh, about the launch tower—”

  “Where’d it break?” Redalsen asks.

  “Just above surface. They never go at the max strain point, do they?”

  “I wouldn’t know, it’s the only launch tower I ever lost. And rockets go everywhere when they go. Can you get the bridge?”

  “That line’s dead.”

  “Great. Stay put, everyone else, I’m going up to see if we can get another com link in.” He’s out the door in a flash; he hopes what he said will keep them from thinking of the truth—that he is going up to see if there’s still a bridge.

  As he starts up the stairs, he notes that at least they are still under regular lights. The stairs surge under his feet, once, and then again, but now that he’s used to it and nothing seems to be coming apart right away, it’s not as frightening as it was—at least not till he’s almost to the bridge, and hears the scream of wind somewhere inside the station. The spiral stairs in the great concrete tube lurch hard under his feet twice, and the lights go out; blue emergency lights spring to life in the tube, and what had been a high, thin scream is now a deep bass moan.

  He pushes the door open to the corridor that leads to the bridge, and he can feel moving air as he makes his way through to the bridge door. He braces himself and yanks on the door; it flies open, all but knocking him backward.

  He lunges in and, heaving with all his force, gets the door closed; immediately the fierce wind stops blowing, and he looks around to see Crandall and the bridge crew crouched behind consoles. In front of them, one of the great windows that look out to the east has cracked, the plastic-glass compound shearing in broken layers like a strain break in plywood, and there’s a hole about as big as a human arm, slowly widening.

  “You’re just in time, Mr. Redalsen—we’re going to try to weld her, and we need one more hand pushing things into place.” Crandall’s shout is about as level as can be managed when yelling at the top of the lungs. “If you can rush forward with us and just put your hands where they’ll do the most good?”

  Redalsen joins them, sees that what they have is a self-heating patch—which ought to fix it, but the patch will need to be held in place for about a minute to adhere. He nods, and they rush forward, keeping the big patch down low to the floor where the wind won’t make it so difficult to deal with, then swinging it up from the bottom, some of them pushing to keep it flush against the window and others pushing from down below until it’s entirely covering the hole. Crandall pushes the trigger, and the edges glow dull red as it melts its way onto the window. They all stay braced, pushing hard, but now there’s no wind, and though it’s just as hard physically, the absence of the cold, wet shrieking terror of the wind and spray that had been coming through the crack seems to give everyone strength.
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  The edges cease to glow red, and then become clear; the welding-cure process is endothermic, and soaks up most of the heat. After a minute Crandall presses a knuckle to the edges and says, “Cool all around. All right, let go on three, but stay out of the way because if it flies it will take down anyone in its way. One, two, three.”

  Their hands leave it all at once, and then they all let a breath out as it holds.

  “I presume you came up to let me know you’d lost the communication link to the bridge?” Crandall says, as he returns to his chair.

  “Mainly that and to see what else was going on.”

  “We’ve had a couple of freak storm surges. One of them came up as high as the third east gallery, and that’s eighty meters above normal high tide. But we’re taking them. I’d feel better if this giant bastard child of a drilling rig had a bow I could point into the sea, but we’re holding anyway, thus far, even though the big hydraulics in the legs are bottoming on every wave.” The screen in front of them clears and then pops up a list of damage-control reports. “What we have are broken windows—which do have to get fixed, they increase the drag and give the wind a place to tear at us—and a lot of severed conduits because the damned idiot architects had a lot of them running on outside surfaces, and they’re breaking wherever they were bridging a gap or running too close to a pinch point. How are things in launch control?”

  “Well, there’s nothing to control anymore—the tower came down with the first big wave. Thank god we got rid of the Monster when we did. But things look all right down there. If you want I’ll get you some volunteers to help the damage-control crews—”

  “Deeply appreciate it. We should be taking the peak right about now, but it will take hours to get things repaired, and if we don’t—”

  The windows burst in, and Redalsen has one bare instant to realize that what is coming through them is not wind and spray, but solid water, before he is thrown to the wall and knocked unconscious; he does not even have time to notice the motion of the walls, and in this he is fortunate, for at least half the station crew are conscious as the next huge wave strikes, the reinforced concrete pilings shatter, and the whole station tips over into the ocean, bouncing and grinding its way down to the ocean floor; the least fortunate, perhaps, are those who find themselves in the slowly shrinking air pockets. When dawn breaks, late and dim, over the empty sea, there are still a few people alive in the wreckage far below it, as well as all those in the shelter; when a Navy submarine arrives to evacuate the shelter, two days later, they find the people in the shelter terrified but physically unhurt. They find no one alive in the shattered wreckage of the station itself. The divers refuse to talk about what they find, and the video they shoot is classified immediately.