Galaxias, page 38
Mel suppressed a sigh. ‘You’ll never know how proud I am. But I’m your mother. I couldn’t abandon you.’
Harry asked, ‘How did you find her?’
‘Contacts,’ Jane broke in. ‘She called on her friend Tash. And she arranged for my chip to be tracked—’
‘Yes,’ Mel said, ‘I called in favours. The English were already monitoring Naples. And when I knew where you were, and I found out the Skyship was coming over, and the projections were getting worse . . .’
In the final, terrible few days of anxiety and indecision, Mel, like the whole world, had followed the news from Naples with growing alarm. Indeed, since the Blink, Mel knew, the geologists had watched such locations with dismay as Earth and Moon settled into their new, changed orbits, and the Earth’s mantle, that global, underground sea of molten rock, perturbed by the new tidal stresses, became energetic, as if awoken – and had evidently begun probing for weak spots in the overlying crust.
Weak spots such as the Campi Flegrei, near Naples.
The big caldera under the ‘Fields of Fire’, sitting over a huge magma mass, was already scarred by a massive detonation from the time of the Neanderthals, and had long been a candidate site for a new eruption, sometime in the future.
But that future had been fast-forwarded by the Blink.
A few weeks back it had begun with earthquakes, some major – one runway in the main city airport had been cracked – and some more minor, transient. Jane had lived through these. She had said the quakes sounded like distant thunder, felt like a goods train passing by. American friends said it was like living in California.
Then, days ago, the ash plumes had started.
The ash was a symptom of the magma rising from beneath, pushing up against a lid of rock until it cracked, and an ‘ash’ of rock dust and flakes was expelled and rose high into the air – even into the stratosphere, from where it had crossed a continent, grounding flights, clogging machinery, and making populations choke. This hadn’t been the first volcanic-ash plume since the Blink. But this one, over Naples, had evidently been only a prelude to a more major event, so the geologists reluctantly agreed.
Which was why Mel had been desperately looking for a way to bring her daughter out. It wasn’t easy. The gathering ash cloud over the city was not just obstructing overflights, it was also blocking the view from satellites. The rest of the world couldn’t even see what was going on at Naples, let alone help constructively.
Then she heard about Skythrust.
The inspection mission had been hastily put together by the English and Australian authorities. The vacuum-lifted Skythrust needed no engines to keep it aloft, of course. Its big, languid directional turbines were thought to be robust enough to be able to withstand the ash-laden air, where conventional aircraft were struggling. Drone robots had quickly been improvised to sweep ash fall off the big solar energy farm on the craft’s upper hull. And so on. Skythrust could get closer to the incipient volcano than any other aircraft.
And Mel had pulled every string she could, starting with Tash and Charlie Marlowe, to get a place on the flight.
She hadn’t been too surprised to find Harry Regent already aboard, as a military attaché to a group of US-based observers – and, Mel suspected cynically, because of his high-profile status as hero astronaut. Hey, we can’t send any food or aid or get anybody out, but look at our handsome hero sky-boy!
It was more of a surprise that Grace Butterworth was here.
The justification was her ongoing role as an aide to the English science minister, and some of Fred Bowles’s juniors were on board. Mel understood Grace’s true motivation for being here, of course – the same as Mel’s own: family.
Well, Grace’s apparent motivation. As Tash had speculated before they had left England, if vaguely. There seemed to be other agendas at play here. During the slow flight from Newcastle Mel had observed Harry and Grace spending long hours together. Talking, Grace generally angrily, Harry more calmly, yet both with intent.
If Mel didn’t know better she might have thought they were plotting something. But she had not the faintest idea what.
Anyhow that had had nothing to do with Mel’s own objective for this trip, nothing at all.
Now Grace sighed. ‘Look, kid, your mum saw a chance, and she had to take it. I will if I get close enough to Ella and Billie. And I wish they were chipped—’
She was cut off by a distant rumble.
They looked at each other.
And Skythrust shuddered hugely, as if gut-punched from below. They stumbled, staggered, grabbed for handholds.
‘I hope you can make out what we’re showing you, or trying to.
‘Obviously we are not yet out in the sunlight. We inch that way, cautiously, behind small tug craft that are pulling us out of the umbra, the long shadow of Earth. But we have already unfurled our sail. Spots from the Lodestone are casting light over that huge, gauzy structure.
‘Can you see it? You may need some imagination to assemble these random splashes of light into an integrated structure. It is easier for us, we know the geometry of our craft intimately. Not to mention having simulated this sequence many times over.
‘To clarify: for the first part of our mission the structure will act as a solar sail, and only later as a ramscoop inlet.
‘The sail, at this moment, is all of forty kilometres in diameter. It is connected to our tiny hull by carbon-fibre threads, a spider’s web which sustains and controls the sail in flight. We can adjust its shape, we can send micro drones down the threads if repairs are needed. And so on. The sail far exceeds our tiny habitat in size, but is only maybe a third of its mass. The ship and habitat together weigh around four hundred tonnes. Still – forty kilometres. The size of a major city.
‘But the material is smart, and in the course of our flight it will spin itself out into a much larger form, fit for a much more ambitious purpose. Far from the Sun, far out in the dark, to maintain our acceleration it will mine the dark energy field.
‘So, as our predecessors have done for a century or more now, we astronauts work through our checklists. Completing tasks that we have studied, brainstormed, planned, with contingencies to work around any failure we could think of. Contingencies rehearsed and simulated over and over, until we could do it all blindfolded – literally.
‘But now, at last, the sail is deployed. And now we look forward to our next mission milestone.
‘Sunrise.’
Sunrise.
After that first sudden jolt, the ship had seemed to calm. Even now Mel listened with half an ear to Zhi, an In-Joke in deep space.
But that word resonated in her head. Sunrise. For he had said it just as a kind of sunrise glow seemed to rise up from the land below—
The ship moved.
With a surprisingly sharp lurch given its bulk, Skythrust suddenly lifted into the air. And started to tip.
In this fancy lounge, Mel was still leaning against that ornate couch, which luckily, or by design, seemed to be bolted to the floor. Now she clung to it desperately, and looked around.
She saw Grace, Harry, her daughter, sprawling. They had all got some kind of purchase. Grace seemed to have fallen across Harry, close to the lounge’s bar, and they had their arms locked together. And there was Jane, braced against a wall, clinging to a fire extinguisher bracket. Safe and stable, but far away from Mel, or Grace.
Mel grabbed tighter hold of her couch, and pulled herself closer to the window on the side the ‘sunrise’ had seemed to come from. Lifted herself up to see.
She was looking towards the Campi Flegrei, to the west of the city centre. And it really was as if a glaring, ruddy dawn shone up from the ground. It illuminated the huge, days-old ash column from below, casting strange vertical shadows up through the murk. A staggering sight to Mel, the shadows themselves must have been hundreds of metres tall.
Then the noise came, like a thunderclap but overwhelmingly more powerful—
The floor lurched up under her as the shock hit the Skythrust—
Mel lost her grip, fell on her back.
She landed on the carpet, and slid over the tipping floor. The carpet burned her neck, the palms of her hands. Frantically she reached for the leg of the couch grabbed it and hung on tight, stopping her slide.
She heard Harry calling names, checking if everybody was OK. But the ferocious, continuing roar from outside almost drowned his voice, and their replies in turn.
The floor tipped further. Mel just hung on. She couldn’t see Jane, or hear her.
And the floor tilted another way, back again. Skythrust was twisting, turning, tipping, almost tumbling in the air – this massive slab of a ship, she thought, picturing it in her mind’s eye, thrown like a leaf in an autumn storm.
The tilt worsened further. Mel shifted her position, trying to hold on tighter.
Mel started to fear that the whole ship might turn turtle altogether. In which case, she imagined, in such an unstable configuration, with the lift pods under the bulk of the hull, Skythrust would quickly break up. Even the main decks were meant to hang in the air, not bear weight. She imagined it, the ceiling become a floor beneath her, crumbling and cracking, until she fell out into a tormented sky. A scene just seconds away, maybe. Jane, falling—
‘No!’ Mel tried to push herself away from the couch, to scramble somehow to Jane.
Still the floor under her tipped and lurched.
Until it reached an extreme limit, and slowly, ponderously, started to drop back down. Mel, face down, scratched at the thick carpet, trying to get some purchase to save from sliding.
And she twisted her neck, tried to look around. That roar from outside the hull continued, but the four of them in the cabin, acting from instinct, just held on to the furniture, lying on the tipping floor, watching each other, waiting. Any attempts at speech drowned out by the ongoing explosion beneath them.
At last the nose of Skythrust dropped down, and the craft shuddered to a kind of stability, at a slight lean.
As soon as she could, Mel pulled herself to her feet, and staggered across the room to Jane, who was sprawled on the floor, still clinging to her extinguisher bracket. Jane’s eyes were closed. ‘Oh, God. Oh, God.’
Mel knelt and held her. Jane stayed stiff for one second – a second which broke Mel’s heart just a little more – and then she softened into the hug.
Grace looked bewildered. ‘What the hell just happened?’
Harry Regent shook his head. He stood unsteadily, brushed down a crumpled jacket, and looked out of the cabin windows. A strange light played on the planes of his face. ‘I think the volcano happened. Come look.’
Dizzy, disoriented – and the right-hand side on which she had fallen feeling bruised as hell, maybe even carpet-burned – Mel worked her way around the wall, handhold to handhold, to Harry’s side. Jane followed, and then Grace.
They saw it in the rear windows. The Skythrust was fleeing now.
Fleeing from the mushroom cloud expanding over the Campi Flegrei.
The days-old ash column was already scattered, shredded by greater, hotter air masses rising from below, masses thick with smoke and dust and glowing rock fragments, all lifted high into the air from a brilliant, hellish pinpoint on the broken ground. And at the pillar’s broadening base waves of smoke and ash billowed out, flooding across the ground, obscuring it.
Whole inner suburbs of the city were already engulfed, Mel saw. By ash waves taller than buildings.
Jane said dully, ‘We talked it all through, down on the ground. Well, we had geologists with us. When an eruption is coming you get this column, masses of material held up in the air by the heat flow from below. As long as that lasts. But when the root energy dies a bit, and the column gives way and falls back—’
The floor gave another lurch.
Mel grabbed instinctively for support. She found Jane’s hand, by some primal instinct. Jane let her keep hold.
The ship was accelerating now, fleeing faster away from the central zone.
‘Shit!’ The anger just burst out of Grace. She ran to a wall and slammed her fist against a window, making Mel flinch – but the window, built for the pressures of extreme altitude, held. ‘Shit! Christ! You bastard . . .’ Her face was twisted with anger and grief. ‘You bastard. We have to get down there. Get Billie and Ella out from under that.’
Harry Regent held Grace’s shoulders. ‘It’s not the captain’s fault. There is nothing to be done now. She would only imperil Skythrust if somehow she tried to land, even if she stayed around. Not her fault. It’s not even the volcano’s fault, in any sense. A volcano is a dumb mechanism with no more volition than a gun whose trigger you pull. It’s not its fault.’ He rubbed Grace’s back.
His voice was insistent now, Mel thought. Seductive even. She felt uncomfortable to hear it. As if he was leading Grace to some conclusion, in this awful, vulnerable moment. ‘Harry, maybe it’s better if you let Grace deal with this in her own way—’
He ignored her. ‘It’s Galaxias,’ he said. ‘That is the one responsible, Grace. Galaxias, whose “warning” to get us to stay in line has resulted in this. Death and destruction. The destruction of your sister’s home. Your niece’s home. Maybe their deaths. It’s Galaxias’s fault . . .’
Mel and Jane shared a look that overrode their own differences. What is he trying to do with her? . . .
Again the light shifted.
Jane turned to see. ‘It’s starting. The next stage.’
As they watched, Jane explained it all, in a dull monotone. As the heat of the churning magma at its root finally failed, the ash plume quickly collapsed. The rock fragments, pumice, smoke, gases, ash, all caught up in that huge, failing up-draught of heat, suddenly dropped from the sky. The cloud had been so tall this central fall would take several minutes, Jane said.
And around that huge collapse a dark, lethal blanket spread out across the ground, a grim circle. At its edge was a hot wind, hotter than steam, laden with glowing fragments of solidified lava, gases, even fragments of volcanic glass. This was a pyroclastic flow. Pouring across the landscape at the speed of sound.
Jane told them what was happening, down on the ground. Anybody at ground zero was gone, vaporised. People further out, if they were in shelter, if they survived the first overwhelming flow, would have to endure fifteen, twenty minutes under the collapsing cloud. No matter how they tried to shelter, even if they escaped the scalding solid rain, they would suffocate, in the streets, in their homes, until the air was gone, or the buildings collapsed.
Mel shifted her position, trying to see the wider panorama. Much of central Naples was already erased by the black mass of the flow, she saw, a huge spillage. And even beyond, wider ash falls began, hot, heavy. Kilometres away, people would be pounded by falls of hot stones, a relentless, rustling rain, caving in roofs, burying people. The four of them stood by the window, watching helplessly as Skythrust rose and fled.
In the background still Zhi spoke on, a meaningless whisper from above the ash-choked sky of Earth . . .
‘We will sail on sunlight – for now. Our acceleration is small – less than a third of one per cent of gravity. But we will keep that acceleration constant, as the Sun recedes, by allowing our smart sail to expand, thus catching more and more of the Sun’s increasingly scattered spawn of photons.
‘Our first target is a location in the Kuiper Belt, ninety astronomical units out – ninety times as far as Earth is from the Sun, indeed three times further than the orbit of Neptune, outermost planet. There we will seek evidence, at least, of the entity Galaxias. For that is where the Sun was taken, on Blink Day.
‘The mission to that point will take more than a year and a month. The plan, for now, is that we will not decelerate – not unless we see an obvious target to slow down for.
‘And if we do find nothing, we intend to go on – as far as we need to. As far as we can.
‘Some months further out, however, we will make a transition, when we reach a point where it will be more efficient for us to use our dark energy drive. With this drive we no longer rely on sunlight, or on any inboard fuel supply.
‘Meanwhile aboard the habitat itself our recycling loops are efficiently closed. We have the means to go as far as we like – always knowing that we have the ability to return, however long it may take.
‘Of that long journey we have completed, so far, a single day. A day in which our minuscule acceleration has already sent us a hundred thousand kilometres from Earth.
‘But already we approach a significant milestone. In just five days we will pass solar escape velocity. Like the Pioneers before us.
‘Are you watching, Galaxias?’
When the hot wind reached the Gulf of Naples and the sea, water was flashed to steam. Across the coasts of the Mediterranean, tsunamis rolled.
In the days that followed, a fine but persistent ash fell across the city suburbs and beyond, eventually accumulating enough weight to crush surviving buildings, smother any fleeing people, and bury their homes and crops. Across tens of kilometres.
The first estimates were that three million humans died in the first days. A history more than three thousand years deep erased. It was a new Pompeii, people said.
In the nights, aboard the silent Skythrust, Mel held her daughter for hours, as Jane wept, then finally slept.
37
October AD 2064: Year 8 ERC, Spring
It was a full year before Tash herself visited Naples – the first of the In-Jokes to come here since Mel at the time of the eruption, even though, Tash knew, Grace Butterworth had frequently returned.
And once again Skythrust Two drifted through the murky sky above the city. Or, a year on, the scar that had been Naples. A scar visible from space, Tash knew. From the Moon.
While Mara Caine made a speech.
