by Allen Steele
From an altitude of 450 miles, Coyote lay before him as a vast blue-green plane that curved away at either end, its clear skies flecked here and there with tiny clouds. 47 Ursae Majoris had risen from behind the planet; Lee winced and held up his hand, then the glass polarized, blocking the worst of the glare. Alabama was passing over the daylight terminator; looking down, he could see the first rays of dawn, just touching the east coast of New Florida.
With any luck, Red Company and Blue Company would already be in position. Once he and Dana reactivated Alabama’s communications system, the two teams, along with White Company, would be able to talk to one another via satphone, coordinating their movements without fear of having their transmissions intercepted by the Union Guard. At that point, the operation would enter its second phase. But until then, he could steal a few moments to . . .
Something caught his eye: a brownish red cloud hovering just below the horizon. Alabama had crossed the East Channel and was above the western side of Midland; now they were above the Gillis Range, he could see that the cloud lay above the subcontinent’s eastern half. At first he thought it might be a storm front, yet there had been no indication of foul weather when Plymouth had lifted off. The closest edge of the formation seemed to taper downward; like the funnel of an enormous tornado, it rose from the high country past Longer Creek, where . . .
“No,” he murmured. “This can’t be happening.”
“Robert?”
Lee didn’t respond. He’d heard his wife, but only faintly, as if from a thousand feet away. It wasn’t until she’d pushed herself across the command deck and gently touched his arm that he pointed down at the massive fumarole below them. It took a few moments for her to realize what she was looking at; when she did, he heard her gasp.
“Oh, lord . . . that’s Mt. Bonestell isn’t it?”
“Uh-huh.” He took a deep breath. “Hurry up with the com system. We’ve got a problem.”
0551—MT. BONESTELL, MIDLAND
When the world came to an end, when the apocalypse finally arrived, it was with all the fury and thunder foretold by the biblical scriptures Sareech had read long ago.
First the ground shook, an earthquake that rippled the mountainside as if Satan himself had suddenly flexed his arms somewhere in the caverns of Hell. He could hear trees snapping as if they were little more than dry twigs, the vast forest crashing down upon itself in waves of percussion that steadily moved toward him, and through it all was the odor of sulfur, heavy and poisonous, as the morning sun disappeared behind a thick, black pillar of smoke that ascended upward into the heavens, blocking out the dawn, eradicating all warmth, all light, all hope.
The chireep were in full panic. For many days, they had felt the tremors, smelled noxious odors rising from the flanks of Corah, the mountain upon which they had built their city. Some had fled—the unfaithful, those who were more afraid of Corah than Sareech’s holy wrath—but most remained behind, believing that their god-from-the-sky would save them. Now they swarmed through the tunnels of the cliff dwellings even as the walls began to cave in, burying alive the young and elderly; they huddled together on parapets, crying out to him in words that he barely understood:
Save us, Sareech! Rescue us! The destroyer has awakened! Use your powers to send Corah away! We call upon you, please stop this!
This was the moment for which Sareech knew he’d been destined. Many years ago, far beyond the stars, he’d been Zoltan Shirow. He had been born a human, had lived his early life in that mortal shell, understanding nothing of the cosmos until the Holy Transformation had occurred. Not recognizing his own divinity, believing himself to be a mere prophet, he’d traveled to this world with his followers, only to discover that, as humans, they were inherently sinful, damned beyond hope of redemption.
One by one, his congregation had perished in the mountains. Only one among them he managed to save, after they consumed the bodies of the others in order to stay alive. Greer stood beside him; her body had become frail to the point that she was unable to walk without the aid of a stick, and her blue-green eyes had grown dark and haunted, her hair grey and matted. It had been a long time since he’d last heard her speak, yet she was still his consort even though she was no longer able to share communion with him.
Nonetheless, she was a holdover from his past. The chireep were his true people. They’d found him, worshiped him as a god, and, in their doing so, Zoltan had discovered his destiny. He was not a prophet, but far more. He was Sareech, capable of taming the Destroyer.
So now, as the ground quaked and ancient forests tumbled and the air itself became foul, Sareech stood his ground. Standing on top of a wooden platform high above the cliff dwellings, he raised his arms, let his batlike wings unfold to their farthest extremity.
“I am Sareech!” he shouted. “I am God!”
As he spoke, a hideous black curtain rumbled down the mountainside, a wall of superheated ash that ignited the undergrowth, setting bushes and fallen trees ablaze. Even the bravest of the chireep were running away; chirping madly, they scrambled downhill in one last, desperate effort to escape. Two of his followers clutched at his legs, their oversize eyes insane with terror, their claws digging into his calves and knees, no longer even praying for salvation, merely hoping that death would be swift.
Only his consort remained unmoved. Beneath the cowl of her ragged white robe, she stared at him, ignoring the ash descending upon them. Her eyes challenged him, daring him to justify his claim to divinity.
At last it was the time. It was within his power to perform a miracle; it was the moment when he would conquer the elements. Opening his hands, Sareech reached forth, calling upon the black mass hurtling toward him to part on either side, just as Moses had once willed the Red Sea to open wide and allow the escape of the Children of Israel.
“I am Sareech! I am—”
“Go to hell,” she said.
Then a wall of ash struck them with the force of a hurricane. He had one last glimpse of his consort—her head lowered, her eyes shut, her tattered robe catching fire—before she was swept away like an angel in flames.
In the next instant he was pitched off the parapet, hurled toward the ground far below. As hot ash filled his lungs, roasting him from the inside out, and his skin was flayed and his wings were ripped from his back, he had one last thought, as if a solemn and merciless voice had finally spoken to him.
You are not God.
0610—MIDLAND CHANNEL
Barry Dreyfus blew into his cupped hands, then stamped his feet on the skimmer’s forward deck. The sun had come up only a short while earlier, but it didn’t make the morning feel any warmer; a chill breeze blew across the channel, kicking up small whitecaps on the dark blue waters. He craved a cup of hot coffee, but was unwilling to venture below to brew a pot on the camp stove they’d brought with them. It was his turn to stand overnight watch while the others slept; so close to enemy territory, he didn’t dare leave his post.
The missile carrier lay at anchor within a small lagoon, concealed by the willowlike fronds of parasol trees he and his father had cut shortly after they’d arrived the night before. It had taken over a week for White Company to make the journey down Goat Kill Creek from Defiance to the Great Equatorial River, then east along Midland’s southern coast until they reached the confluence of the Midland Channel, then northwest up Midland’s east coast until they reached the most narrow point of the channel, directly across from Hammerhead. Although the captured Union Guard hovercraft was capable of thirty knots, they had traveled only in darkness, weighing anchor just offshore during daytime. There had been one close brush, five days earlier, when a Union gyro had flown over them when they’d stopped near Longer Creek. Fortunately, the aircraft didn’t spot them, and since then they had seen no other patrols.
He tried not to think about how cold and tired he was. His shift had ended ten minutes ago, but he was reluctant to wake up anyone. His father, Paul Dwyer, Ted LeMare . . . they were curled up in the hovercraft�
�s tiny cabin, and needed all the rest they could get. Twenty miles away, across the broad delta north of Barren Isle that marked the confluence of Midland Channel and Short River, lay Hammerhead, and high upon its rugged granite bluffs was Fort Lopez.
Barry could barely make out Hammerhead at that distance, yet during the night he’d seen the lights of Fort Lopez, watched gyros taking off occasionally. If all went according to plan, in the morning they would attempt to take the Union Guard stronghold out of commission by launching the skimmer’s rockets against its landing field. With any luck, they might be able to destroy the fort’s gyros and military shuttles. Fort Lopez was unassailable by ground force, but it was vulnerable to its own weapons. All White Company had to do was maneuver the missile carrier within striking range, and the balance of power on Coyote would shift. Red Company and Blue Company would do the rest.
If all went according to plan, that is. Barry didn’t want to think about how many things could go wrong. . . .
Hearing the cabin hatch creak open, he looked around to see his father climb up the short ladder. Jack Dreyfus peered at his son through bleary eyes. “Why didn’t you wake me up?”
“I’m okay.” Barry shrugged, gave the old man a grin. “If you want to sleep longer . . .”
“Stop it. You sound like your mother.” Jack stepped onto the deck, then arched his back and yawned. “I could kill the jackass who designed these things. No room for a man to get any sleep. And with Paul snoring all night . . .”
“Yeah, uh-huh.” Barry had heard the same complaints every morning for the last week. His father never stopped thinking like an engineer. He and Paul Dwyer had restored the skimmer to operating condition after it was shot to pieces during the Battle of Defiance; considering their limited resources, they had done a superlative job. Jack was a perfectionist, though; nothing anyone else ever did was good enough for him. “Did you make some coffee?”
“Ted’s up. He’s working on it now.” Jack stretched his arms, then turned his back to him. “I need to take a—hey, what the hell is that?”
Barry turned to look in the direction his father was gazing. Until then, his attention had been focused upon Hammerhead; he hadn’t looked to the west, toward Midland. At first he saw only the lagoon—nothing unusual there—but then his eyes moved upward, and he saw a thick blanket moving across the sky. Clouds that looked like black cotton boiled across the heavens; deep within them, he could see flashes of lightning.
“Storm coming in,” he said. “We’re about to get hit.”
“Uh-uh. That’s no storm.” And indeed, the clouds were darker than any Barry had ever seen, either on Earth or on Coyote. They resembled smoke from an burning oil refinery, or maybe a coal mine that had been set ablaze. And they were moving fast. “That’s so weird,” Jack added, absently rubbing the stubble of his new beard. “It’s almost like . . .”
Feet rang against the cabin ladder, then Ted appeared within the open hatch. “Alabama just called in. They say . . .” Then he glanced up at the darkening sky. “Oh, hell . . .”
Jack turned toward him. “What’s going on?”
“Mt. Bonestell just blew.” Ted’s eyes were fixed upon the menacing clouds. “And it’s coming our way.”
0656—DEFIANCE, MIDLAND
The eruption couldn’t be seen from the colony—Mt. Bonestell lay over the horizon, and the closer mountains of the Gillis Range blocked the plume from sight—yet the townspeople had been awakened by tremors so violent that tree houses had creaked ominously in the swaying blackwoods and the bell in the center of town had rung several times. Thinking about it later, Wendy Gunther realized that they should have anticipated something like this, for the animals had been acting strange for the last couple of days: chickens stopped laying eggs, goats refused to give milk, dogs barked for no reason, and shags had restlessly paced around their corral. But no one had been that observant, and the livestock and pets didn’t have the capacity to tell their masters what was upsetting them.
It wasn’t until she received the priority message from the Alabama that Wendy discovered that this was no mere earthquake, but something far more serious. As acting mayor in Robert Lee’s absence, the colony’s precious satellite transceiver had been placed in her care; she’d left it switched on, awaiting word that the Plymouth had reached the ship and that orbital communications had been restored. She was still picking up broken crockery and trying to calm Susan when the unit beeped for the first time in several years.
Lee’s transmission didn’t last very long, but Wendy managed to save the photo images he sent down before the ship passed over the horizon. Suddenly, shattered plates and a child were the least of her concerns. Once she copied the images into her pad, she put on her parka and boots, then shinnied down the rope ladder from her tree house and ran off to gather the members of the Town Council who’d remained in Defiance . . . and one more person, a recent arrival who knew much about such things.
So now Fred LaRoux was seated in front of the comp set up in the Council office, studying a succession of high-orbit images captured by Alabama’s onboard cameras. Save for the occasional whispered comment—“oh, boy,” “uh-oh,” “that’s not good”—the geologist remained quiet until he ran through the series twice, sometimes backing up to zoom in on one frame or another, while the Council members sat or stood around him, murmuring to each other as they gazed at the awesome views of Mt. Bonestell as seen from space.
Wendy finally lost patience. “So what’s going on?” she asked, leaning across the table so that Fred couldn’t ignore her any longer. “Are we in trouble?”
He sighed. “Good news first, or bad?” He didn’t wait for her response. “Good news is that the prevailing winds are pushing the plume to the east, not the west. So we’re not directly in the line of the ashfall . . . it’s moving away from us, toward the Midland Channel.”
“White Company’s over there.” Henry Johnson leaned heavily upon his walking stick, taking the weight off his wounded knee. “Is this going to affect their mission?”
Fred nodded. “When that ash comes down, it’s going to clog up their hovercraft fans . . .”
“But it’s just ash. I don’t see how—”
“This is rock ash, not wood ash. With an eruption of this severity—and believe me, this is severe—they’re going to get several feet of what amounts to powdered stone. They’ll be dead in the water if they don’t get out of there quick as they can.” He glanced at Wendy. “Better fire a message to them as soon as you can, warn them what’s about to happen.”
Wendy nodded, even though she knew it was hopeless. It would be another two hours before Alabama came within transmission range once more; until then, she’d be unable to bounce a signal to White Company. Just then, though, that was the least of their problems. “You said that’s the good news. So what’s the bad news?”
“Lava?” Kuniko Okada had been watching the comp screen with the same horrified fascination as the others.
Fred shook his head. “If this was a Hawaiian-type eruption, then we’d expect lava flows, yes, and even then I wouldn’t be worried. Oh, maybe I’d be concerned, if my people hadn’t come down here. . . .”
Fred had been the mayor of Shady Grove, a small settlement in a lowland valley beneath Mt. Bonestell, eight hundred miles northeast of Defiance. Six weeks earlier, fearing an eruption, he’d evacuated the town’s sixty residents and brought them down the Gillis Range to Defiance. Since then, many of them had joined the Rigil Kent brigade; they were among the members of Red Company and Blue Company, poised for a final assault upon New Florida.
“But lava isn’t a problem here,” he continued, pointing to dark grey plume captured by Alabama’s cameras. “See that? Instead of liquefied rock, what we’re seeing here is vaporized lava, coming up from a magma chamber beneath the planet’s crust, along with a lot of superheated gases.”
“Then . . . so what?” Vonda Cayle stood behind Wendy, nonchalant about the whole thing. “If it’s just sm
oke, then I don’t know what we’re supposed to be worrying about.”
“You don’t understand.” Fred rubbed his eyelids between his fingertips. “Look, this is a major Plinean eruption. No, not just an eruption, an explosion. What probably happened is that a bubble of magma, under very high pressure, gradually rose through the planet’s crust until it reached the surface, at which point it simply blew up.” He clicked to another view of the volcano, one made from nearly directly overhead. “It’s hard to tell, but I think it’s a safe bet that the force of the explosion was roughly equivalent to that of a nuke. Probably took out the top of the mountain. That’s what we felt down here.”
Fred expanded the screen so that the plume appeared in close-up. “So that’s not just smoke . . . that’s ash, millions of tons of it. The heavier particles stay close to the ground and roll downhill in what we call a pyroclastic flow. Think of a tidal wave, but instead of water you’ve got ash, rock, even boulders, moving more than a hundred miles an hour, reaching temperatures as high as three hundred degrees. Anything in its path is either crushed or incinerated.”
Wendy stared at the screen. Although most of the plume extended to the east, she noticed that smaller pyroclastic flows extended in all directions, including southwest toward Shady Grove. “Good thing you got your people out of there.”
“Yeah, well, I had a feeling something like this was going to happen when we started feeling tremors a few months ago.” Fred hesitated. “But your friend Zoltan . . . if he didn’t leave—”
“Don’t call him my friend.” When she and Carlos had encountered Zoltan Shirow a couple of months ago, his madness had become complete; he believed himself to be a god, with the sandthieves—the chirreep, he called them—worshiping him as such. She doubted that Zoltan had survived, but she couldn’t help but feel remorse for the primitive creatures who had probably lost their lives. And she’d also briefly seen one of his original followers.