The Tides of Nemesis (The Windows of Heaven Book 4)

by K. G. Powderly Jr.

  “What do you mean by ‘most of the gyroscopic stability’?”

  “A reverse precession wobble will remain, but its long cycle will take millennia, not years. Your sons will need to re-plot the heavens for a new North Star, solstice, and equinox markers. It will seem to them as if many thousands of years will have passed in the heavens, as measured by the new precession after the disruptions. Much will be changed.”

  Samuille’s words barely registered. Such things were easy for a Watcher to say! Q’Enukki tried not to hyperventilate at what happened next.

  The crack beneath the mega-continent’s inland Sea of Aztlan began to extend faster now, just off Far Kush, into the Great South Channel. Gravity from the first core fragment exerted its full force on the Earth’s mantle, making it pulsate with violent sub-crustal tides at each planetary rotation. Radiation showered up from the depths in scalding waves, through the crack. The situation reached critical mass while the western coast of Aztlan faced away from the core fragment.

  The ocean floor plate offshore from the Gate of the Setting Sun reacted not only to the tug of Earth’s gravity, but also to that of the fragment from the other side, through the planet’s core. The stress line between the ocean bottom’s tectonic plate and the western leading edge of the mega-continent rapidly grew both northward and southward, as mantle material dropped away in a “low tide” beneath the slabs. As the Earth rotated, the mantle tide should have come in, except that the moon’s position, now opposite, prolonged the effect.

  A large asteroid impact ruptured the Earth’s crust just north of the Southern Aztlan city of Psydonis. Klyeto, the wife-mother of the Titan Psydonu, never knew what hit her. New crustal fissures radiated out from the impact zone in crosshatched lines, perpendicular to both the growing Aztlan Sea rift, and the series of north-south subduction zones growing off the west coasts of the Great Outer Ocean.

  Much of the inland Aztlan Sea vaporized to its bed in an instant blast of steam. The atmospheric shock wave drove vast amounts of dust and grit away from the impact zone at many times the speed of sound. All over Aztlan, storms of dry wind-driven sand rapidly buried grasslands and forests. The impact recoil completely snapped the bonds between the sub-oceanic slab and the western continental plate of both Aztlan and the southern landmass covered by Dragonwood. It fractured both land and sea plates into several shards; the smallest, closest to the impact zone, with larger northern and southern plates cracking along lines of least resistance.

  The ocean floor plates sagged as they curled beneath the continental plates, into the drop created by the mantle’s low tide. Growing radiation in the mantle, unrelated to the impact, had decreased magma viscosity near the crust, spreading this effect rapidly. The Great Outer Ocean raced away from the Gates of the Setting Sun, which rose on its continental plate. The thicker land craton forced the ocean floor plates downward into the hot plastic mantle, toward Earth’s core. The growing series of subduction zones raced in a thin line, tracing the continental margins almost from pole to pole.

  Friction heat accelerated these events, further liquefying the gooey mantle in the subduction regions. This sped the subduction of the cold ocean floor plates, generating even more heat around them. Soon the sliding of the tectonic slabs reached runaway speed.

  As cool undersea plate material displaced hotter basaltic magmas, the Earth’s mantle began to bulge. It pushed back up against the crust, and over-stressed the thinnest, weakest zones.

  The underwater cracks, first started by the testing of Lumekkor’s superweapons, now wound lengthwise almost completely around the globe. Gravitational mantle tides forced them to widen, but the displaced material from the subducting sea-floor plates blasted that opening into a planet-wrapping ribbon of erupting magma.

  Pandura of Aztlan was so lost in the reflection that stared out at her from her looking glass that she almost ignored the bone-shocking jolt through the floor, and the wrenching screech at the foundations of her tower.

  The High Priestess smiled dreamily; almost relieved by anything that could draw her away from contemplating the knobby, yellow-green cysts that now grew from her forehead. She drew back the draperies to her long-unused balcony, and started to go outside to see what had happened. The earthquake struck full on just as she stood in the arch.

  Pandura narrowly missed stepping off into the void, when her porch tumbled away down the sides of the tower. She clutched the curtains to keep from falling into oblivion in the violent wobble of her minaret. Even as she did so, she could not think of a good reason why she should not just throw herself off onto the sliding rubble anyway. The quake lasted several minutes before abating into a slow rolling motion.

  The High Priestess’ chamber opened to the west, overlooking the lower city and its harbor. Two things struck her almost simultaneously; the first was how all the ocean water drained from the bay—indeed was still gushing away into the distance, shrinking in muddy rivulets over the horizon. The second thing rushed at her from the southwest—an immense blackness that consumed the vast farmlands of Northeast Aztlan in a racing wall of roiling murk.

  The dust wave reached from horizon to horizon, and went up as high into the sky as Pandura could see. She wondered why she could not hear the monstrous howl of the thing, crying with the screams of a billion dead. It did not occur even to her sophisticated mind that the great blackness drove toward her at many times the speed of sound.

  “The old Seer called it right.” She laughed with lazy resignation, as she hung over the swaying ruins of her life and her world. She recalled the words of A’Nu-Ahki one last time; “In forty-eight years the plagues you’ve spawned will have consumed you and your people so thoroughly that the destruction E’Yahavah sends will be welcomed as a mercy killing.”

  Pandura clutched the curtains, and felt her huge sores pop against the fabric. “A mercy killing,” she said softly, when she saw little worms wriggling in her own pus and blood, “At least it’s a mercy killing.” She laughed, softly at first, until she looked again at the oncoming wall of dust. Then her laughter grew until it reached a pitch as shrill as what she imagined should fit the howl of the coming blackness, her teeth bared as snarling fangs.

  A roar out of the north drew her eyes away from the approaching darkness. A blast of water scoured through the strait between Temple City Epymetu and Psydonu’s Shield, to refill the harbor. Ships, laid on their sides in the mud, tumbled away like toys left on the beach for the tides.

  Pandura never even heard the sonic boom that blew her inner ears to bloody pulp, just before the black shock wave’s impact. The wall of water caved her city in from the east, while the supersonic sandblast dissolved everything in its path. Reality collapsed on top of her in crushing spirals. Her Temple, her city, even the hill on which they stood, blasted away so fast, by so much water-driven, rock-eating silt that Pandura did not even realize that she had passed into eternity until she began to notice the stifling pressure, the growing heat, and the tangible lack of light.

  Yet the real horror hit with the final sinking realization that, for her, this had not actually been a mercy killing at all.

  Tylurnis found herself sitting with her sister on the pavement before the Golden Pyramid of Assur’Ayur, with their hair and clothes messed up, like little girls that had just tumbled in a catfight.

  What just happened here?

  Uranna flopped on the lower stair; her legs bent back, and drool running from her opened mouth. Her eyes stared blankly into space.

  “Samyaza’s gone!” Tylurnis thought aloud.

  Murmuring priests began to congregate from the nearby shrines. Tylurnis stood and looked around to get her bearings. I was walking with Samyaza, discussing Aztlan’s war progress. Something rushed by, and snatched him away from me somehow!

  The First Wife of Samyaza left her sister, and ran to the harem court. Tylurnis felt somehow drawn to the open chamber, where her predecessor lay comatose. The wide-open eyes of the ancient woman on the pallet saw ever
ything, and saw nothing. Isha’Tahar’s thin, stringy hair, untended for weeks, was pinned back from her face. Something important had changed.

  Tylurnis saw the trace of a triumphant smile on the old hag’s lips.

  “Used-up slut!” ‘Nissa shrieked, slapping the frozen crone’s face.

  Isha’Tahar’s smile only got wider.

  Tylurnis raced back out to the Pyramid Court, and lifted her sister’s dead weight. “Come on, ‘Ranna, snap out of it! We’ve got to make it to the astra pavement, and commandeer an airship!”

  Uranna would not budge. ‘Nissa dragged her to the outer pavement that overlooked the southern city. From the elevation of the pyramid’s base, she saw a great bluish-gray mountain rise beyond the low green river delta. Tylurnis gauged the distance to the stone-paved astra port, and any hope died.

  “Get up, ‘Ranna! If we fly to Akh’Uzan, Father will take us back!”

  Tylurnis tried to move her sister unaided, while the consuming roar grew out of the south. The last thing she saw was the sky roofed over in a curling arc of water that plummeted toward her. The impact imploded her body instantly, yet somehow still grew in its pressurized omnipresence. Heat and blackness enveloped her, as she was consciously drawn, ever downward, into crushing depths that she somehow knew would never end.

  Q’Enukki saw the lengthening steam-blast as the erupting chasm yawned, tracing under the narrow South Inland Sea, between the huge Dragonwood and Fire-drake rainforests. The flaming gash rose from the sea, and arced east through the lowlands of the South Inland Sea City-States, then over a low mountain pass, into a depression bound by two mountain chains between Aertimikkor and the immense tropical jungle belt. The lava-ejecting fissure split under the inland Sea of Glass, sending two new arms of fire to carve the Dudael sub-continental plate away as a huge triangle, from Aertimikkor to the south, and north toward the ocean trench under the Gulf of Dudael.

  When the northern rift tore into mountains southeast of the port city of Suinne, it circled the highlands eastward, and then turned north again, to cut the mountains and city off from the main Dudael plate. Ocean inundated the entire region, as the lengthening fissure plunged back undersea, beneath the Gulf of Dudael, just west of the rapidly sinking port of Bab’Dudha. There, over a hundred thousand people tumbled into a racing gash of falling water, earth, and flame within the space of ten minutes.

  Asteroids struck frequently, constantly shifting the stress patterns on the Earth’s fracturing crust, and affecting the speed and direction of branching rifts, and the rates at which they widened. A peppering of impacts in what was rapidly ceasing to be the Coral Shallows, off Ae’Ri, added resistance to the rift-spread against the Dudael plate, causing it to rotate anti-clockwise. This transmitted kinetic energy to the northward rift, sharply bent it eastward into the Fire-drake plate, splitting though a narrow mountain pass into the lowland jungles that, until now, had belonged to the soon-to-be-extinct tribes of the South Kush Alliance.

  From there, the scar of bleeding magma shot northeastward, overland, to bisect the delta city of Absha nearly dead center. By this time, growth of the jagged northern fissure had lost momentum, but not enough to keep the better part of Absha—buildings, people, and all—from blasting clear into low orbit, without the benefit of a star chariot. The great rift seared into the Sea of Gebur, where it cut northeastward, due to the thickness of the approaching mountains of the Far Kush headlands.

  Meanwhile, the southern branch of the rift curled southeast along the sinking mountains, slicing Dudael free of Aertimikkor as it consumed the hapless ports of U’Palqua, to Ras’Assuli, in vast geysers of lava. The flaming abyss made a wide arc southward to cut off the wilds of Ae’Ri from Aertimikkor, which began a steady slide toward the South Pole.

  When both rift branches reached the edges of the southern mega-continental shelf, the erupting crevasses dropped off into the deep-water abyssal plains—one into the Central Sea, the other into what would one day become the South Pacific Ocean. The broken shards of the Great Southern Landmass—except for Aertimikkor—spread apart northward, driven by the rift eruptions, as the south fissure continued to wrap around the globe, cutting under the Great Outer Ocean in an arc that turned slowly northward.

  Increasing amounts of basaltic mantle magma shot through these elongating fissures, increasingly displaced by subducting ocean-floor plates curling deeper beneath the mega-continent’s fractured western edge, toward the Earth’s liquid outer core. Rising lava created violent ribbons of boiling sea and hyper-pressurized volcanic plumes that hurled vast geysers of super-heated steam and carbon dioxide beyond Earth’s atmosphere, dissipating most of the intense heat directly into the deep cold of outer space. Moisture from the edges of this globe-wrapping steam jet condensed into heavy clouds, with carbonate-rich rains spreading as they sank away from the fissure zones.

  The mantle material beneath Earth’s crust roiled in a conveyor-belt action, which began to pull the shattered mega-continent apart wherever the fissures blasted up between plates. These water-cooled magmas also started to overspread and replace the old ocean floors, driving seabeds toward a growing series of linear subduction zones in the Earth’s crust.

  With much of the Southern Landmass driving northward in pieces, a new subduction line started in the Central Sea, south of Near Kush, and stretched all the way east, to Zhri’Nikkor, opening at a near right angle to the first north-south subduction zones. This west-to-east progression gradually arced southeast, along the Assuri-Zhri’Nikkor Mountain Range, before forking somewhere beneath the deeps south of Nikkoria Anchorage. There, it encountered opposition from moving ocean floor plates under the Great Outer Ocean, and multiple meteor impacts.

  The fastest of the forked subduction trenches curved northward, while the others fanned out east, southeast, and south. The North Subduction Trench skirted the Corsair lands, past the island of the old Gate of the Rising Sun ruins, until it met resistance from a smaller rotating slab that the Sages of Time’s End would call the Philippine Plate for reasons Q’Enukki found unclear. Resistance from the largest ocean plate against this smaller one tore open a new, deeper subduction line on the smaller plate’s eastern side. This gash was destined to become the deepest ocean on the planet; a place the Time’s Enders would call the Mariana Trench.

  From there, the new subduction line curled northward, then northeast, in a wide S-curve against Outer Nhod, until it met resistance from the spreading of the northernmost plate. This forced the oceanbed-consuming line out to sea just south of the shallow North Polar Sea, across to the Bay of Whales. There it joined the near pole-to-pole subduction lines along the western continental edge, to become a ring of fire around what would soon become the Pacific Ocean.

  The erupting rift shot northward, under the Outer Ocean, which forced open the subduction zones by moving the sea floor plates on all sides of it, cutting diagonally across a section of the north-south subduction lines at a place the dim future would name Baja California. The other end of the globe-wrapping rift shot out of the Polar Regions, across what would soon become a fiery continental collision zone known as the Siberian Traps.

  Branches of the Zhri’Nikkor subductions, and its displaced northern cousin, sank into trenches stretching along a broken fan of future island chains bearing names like Marianas, Philippines, New Guinea, and the Solomons, on out to the New Zealand and Fiji of Time’s End. Other islands would erupt far away from the subduction and rift lines, from volcanoes forced up by plate torqueing and thrusting motions that found release no other way. The word Hawaii drifted meaninglessly out of the distant future.

  Aztlan moved away from Lumekkor in a split far more violent than the revolution of a half-century before. Only this time, there would be no survivors. For rising sea floors meant rising sea levels, driving in waves of gravel-laden ocean fast and furious enough to planarize most coastal cities to the bedrock near instantly, and dissolve them without trace.

  Q’Enukki’s concentration broke when
he heard a cry that he knew came from one of his descendants—a woman. She cursed his name like a dagger hurled skyward that hit him right in the heart. He focused on her curse, somehow following its vibrations with his enhanced senses down to the source—his great-great granddaughters in the land of Assuri. Samyaza had deserted them, just as he had deserted Isha’Tahar.

  Q’Enukki saw what Tylurnis could not see, just before her death. Kherubim seized her “god-husband,” and locked him in a hidden prison with three other Watchers, beneath what would soon become a river plain, to await release for another battle, in another World-end yet to come. From his dark, hot prison, Samyaza would occasionally whisper into the minds of men, but rarely, and only at a huge expenditure of energy, which he could not renew. Had Tylurnis known this, she would have been little comforted.

  Q’Enukki foresaw that old Isha’Tahar would attain her immortality in name only—for her memory would eventually be deified, and embellished by the works of later women of similar character, who would adopt her name as their own. The two daughters of A’Nu-Ahki, however, were doomed to obscurity. All physical evidence of Assur’Ayur tumbled into the yawning subduction trench in eroding fragments, drawn by sheering undertows, deep into the heat and pressure, and finally swallowed by hungry magma.

  As the continental movements picked up speed, the first rains of a global deluge started to fall.

  When Nu found he could still breathe, he turned to see the gigantic cargo hatch slammed firmly into its aperture. He stepped to the door, and tested it with several hard tugs. The water-soaked interior wood beneath the panel’s stone-hardening had not contracted, insuring a tight fit impossible to budge. He slid the locking bolts into place with deliberate reverence.