Moonseed (54 page)

Arkady and Geena began the checklist for the burn, working carefully and slowly, swapping languages all the time. They seemed doubly careful not to make any mistakes now, out of sight of the Earth.

The celestial geometry adjusted smoothly, the two great beacons of Earth and sun shifting steadily around the sky, illuminating the battered Moon. Through Henry’s window, the crescent of sunlit Moon ground grew, narrowing still, until it dwarfed the fleeing craft; and at last it narrowed to invisibility.

…And, quite suddenly, the craft was enveloped in darkness, in the shadow of the Moon.

It was the first time in three days Soyuz hadn’t been bathed in unfiltered sunlight. He craned toward his window. As his eyes dark-adapted, he could see stars, emerging from the gloom, each of them shining with a steady, gemlike brilliance. And, where the sun had been, the Moon was a giant, perfect hole in the star field—no, he saw now as his eyes adapted, not complete darkness: Earthlight played here, making the craters shine blue-black, like ghosts of themselves.

But, ahead of him, maybe a third of the lunar disc was in true darkness. It was the double shadow, the place neither Earthlight nor sunlight reached, as dark as any place in the Solar System.

Only the Apollo astronauts had known this experience before.

The hair stood up on the back of his neck.

“…Translation control power, on.”

“On, Geena.”

“Rotational hand controller number two, armed.”

“Armed.”

“Stand by for the primary TVC check.”

“Three minutes to the burn. We are still go, Geena…”

The ventilation hummed, the fans whirred, the machinery gleamed, mundane sights and sounds, as if he was in the guts of some immense pc; after three days they were enveloped in a persistent aroma of Russian cabbage and stale farts.

But there was nothing mundane about where he was, a warm pink body, sailing through the shadow of the Moon.

Come on, Henry, he thought. You aren’t supposed to feel like this.

There was an explosion of light. Henry craned to see.

Far ahead of the craft, the sun was rising over the Moon.

It was a dawn of sorts, but it was bony and stark, with none of the richness and fleeing colors of an Earth-orbit sunrise. This was an airless world with no atmosphere to refract sunlight, to bend it up from below the horizon, and create a pre-dawn glow in the sky. So sunrise was instantaneous: one moment it was night, the next a line of fire had straddled the horizon, poking through the mountains and crater rims there.

The light fled across the bare surface, casting shadows hundreds of miles long from mountains and broken crater walls. The smaller, younger craters were just wells of darkness in the flat light. For the first time, the Moon looked jagged and exotic, a craggy, romantic alien world; but he knew it was only an artifact of the light, giving the old, eroded Moon a rugged grandeur it didn’t merit—

The engines lit.

For a couple of weeks the rig workers had noticed strange happenings.

The sea water here in the North Channel, not far from
the mouth of the Clyde, was sometimes so warm it steamed. And there was that prevailing stink of rotten eggs. Hydrogen sulfide, the lab boys said.

William Calder didn’t think much of it. Aged twenty-seven, with a wife, Jenny, and two kiddies in a tenement block in the Gorbals back in Glasgow, he’d always known the work on this exploratory oil rig was going to be hard and dirty and dangerous, even before Scotland started bloody blowing up. Twelve hours on, twelve hours off, weeks or months away from home; William just kept himself to himself and got through his work, like serving a sentence, which, if truth be known, William had done once or twice in his younger days.

But now it was nearly the end of his tour of duty—nearly the end for everybody, as the rig was going to be evacuated in a few days because of the volcano stuff—and William would be going home with his bank account stuffed with money, more than enough to get his young family out of Glasgow for good, and into some safe bolt hole in England, as far south as they could bloody go without falling into the English Channel.

So he was sitting with a six-pack in the cinema, watching
Independence Day
for the fourth time, when the first explosion came.

The rig shuddered, and there was a wail like a scream.

“Jesus Christ, that’s a gas leak,” said Jackie Brown, one of the blasting foremen.

Everybody stood up.

The film jammed, and burned through with shocking suddenness, a black circle just gushing outward across the screen.

Then the plastic walls of the room started to melt, and the workers, men and women alike, started to run.

In the corridor outside, William saw people grabbing at metal railings. There was a sound of sizzling, like bacon, and people screamed. The railings were too hot to touch.

William tried to get to the heli-deck, but that was a
waste of time. The stairwells were jammed with people, and the heat was already intense. So Jackie Brown turned and said, “Come on, boys,” and he started to push his way deeper into the rig.

Eventually they got out through the drill deck, to a lower level which took them out to the foghorn platform. William blinked in the sudden light, breathed in fresh air. The sea was calm, the day bright. People were running everywhere.

There was no sign of rescue, no choppers. There was a gigantic pall of black smoke, though, hanging over the eastern horizon.

“Shite,” somebody said. “They must have nuked Glasgow.”

William could see the gas flare, the system that burned off the inflammable gases produced by the thimblefuls of crude oil that was all they had managed to dredge up, here in the Channel between Britain and Ireland. The flare was burning furiously, much more intensely than usual.

And then, as William watched, the flare exploded. The light was dazzling, brighter than the sun, and you could feel the energy pouring out of it.

The bang was followed quickly by heavy, mortarlike crumps coming from the heart of the rig.

Jackie Brown was standing beside him. “That’s the bloody diesel tanks,” Jackie hissed. He was nursing burned hands.

…And now a fireball rose with a kind of majesty through the heart of the rig. It was the central gas jet. William could hear the tearing of metal, the cracking roar of explosion after explosion, as the rig tore itself to pieces.

The deck beneath him tipped—the whole rig was coming apart—and now, oh God, some of the deck plates were buckling.

The flames were towering over his head.

Jackie Brown clapped William’s shoulder. Jackie, in his
fifties, had seen it all before. “Fry and die, or jump and try,” he shouted, and he jumped without hesitation off the tipping side.

There was oil burning on the surface of the water, which was all of a hundred feet below. The heat was already unbearable—

William thought of Jenny, and wondered where she was now.

He wondered if he should take off his boots first.

He jumped.

Henry was pressed back into his couch.

The ignition was a sharp rattle, the engine noise a dull roar, transmitted through the fabric of the Soyuz. Suddenly Arkady’s knee, pressing against his, felt heavy, unbearably bony.

He heard a clattering noise from above as some loose piece of gear fell through the orbital module. The pressure was heavy; he knew it was only a fraction of Earth-normal gravity, but, after three days of weightlessness, it felt like five G.

Arkady and Geena scanned their controls. “Pressures coming up nicely,” said Geena.

Time seemed to stretch, flowing like mercury. Henry knew that if the burn was too short, they would finish up on some weird, perhaps unrecoverable orbit. But if the burn was even a few seconds too long then instead of missing the Moon by that crucial sixty-nine miles or so, they would drive into its eternal surface, creating one more crater among billions.

It was the longest four minutes of his life.

“Burnout coming up,” Geena said. “Chamber pressures dropping to fifty psi…three, two, one.”

The engine thrust died in a snap; the vibration and noise disappeared, and Henry was thrown forward against his straps.

The fires around George Square seemed to be growing, not diminishing, and still the jolts and aftershocks came. Jenny sat squat on the ground, her hands spread out, not daring even to stand.

In one place, in the west of the city, there was a kind of fountain, of steam and fire, that reached hundreds of feet into the air. Great glowing rocks shot out of it, and where they landed, like bombs, new fires started. A volcano, she guessed, right here in the middle of Glasgow.

People were gathering in the Square, in ones and twos or small groups. Some were burned, or were nursing damaged limbs or heads, crudely bandaged, or were carrying other injured.

Some of them had stories, and Jenny listened in horror.

There was the woman who had come across the Glasgow Bridge, to flee the fires on the south bank. The bridge had collapsed, and the woman, with dozens of others, had ended up creeping across a single iron beam. But there had been a panic, a rush, crushing and suffocating, and fifty or sixty had been sent headlong into the waters of the Clyde. When she looked down, the woman saw maybe a hundred people in the water, some swimming or clinging to flotsam, some already dead. There were small boats trying to pick up survivors, but their task seemed hopeless.

Here was a man who had seen Argyle Street crack right open, and fill up with a bizarre mix of rushing water and a wall of fire, from burst mains; the crowds had fled through streets that, even where intact, were jungles of downed power lines, bricks, rubble, shattered glass and felled lampposts and burning cars.

Another woman barely escaped when the motorway bridge collapsed, steel reinforced concrete twisting like plasticine.

An elderly woman had been asleep in her bed, when her high-rise block collapsed. Her first floor flat had become the ground floor; the lower level had telescoped
down to eighteen inches. When she clambered out, dazed, she found people trying to mount a rescue operation, shimmying down fire hoses, people screaming and crawling over each other.

There was the tale of a man who was buried up to his neck in the ruins of the City Chambers. When they dug him out, the whole of his lower body was crushed flat, like a tiger rug, and he had time to see it that way, before he died.

Another woman had been trapped by her legs under a beam. Her son had tried to free her by, good God, amputating her legs. But he could only remove one before the flames beat him back.

…And so on; everybody had a story to tell, it seemed.

More and more people crushed into the Square. The fires were still growing, all around the skyline. New arrivals said the big fires on the south bank had leapt the Clyde. That big explosion was the fuel depot at the Central Station going up.

And while all that marched up from the south, another great blaze was licking its way down from the wreckage of the Buchanan Center to the north.

She waited. There was nowhere to run. She just had to hope it would die back before it reached her. She cradled the bump in her stomach, shielding it with her hands.

While Geena and Arkady worked through their post-burn checklist, the craft left the land of shadows and sailed over brightening ground. The Moon filled his window now, a montage of pale tan and black, the edges and rims of the craters sharp and stark. Sometimes he lost his sense of perspective and the landscape seemed to flatten out, and the shadows looked like streaks of oil, sliding past his window.

But those streaks of light and dark were the mountains of the Moon.

Without air, compared to Earth from orbit, the view was remarkably clear. He flew over a landscape of craters:
young, smooth, perfect bowls; random gouges; gentle hollows; tiny buckshot wounds; craters on top of craters. Here was a big old basin, with an eroded mountain at its center, and on the smooth floor—and on the flanks of its mountains, and its rambling walls—he could see the pockmarks of younger impacts.

Craters on craters, everywhere: everything he saw, it seemed to him, was made of the rims or basins or central peaks of craters. It was like flying over some ghastly World War One battleground. It was a world of death, a world whose life had been smashed out of it.

The clarity was incredible, though. When he peered down into the craters, especially when the shadows were long, he could see boulders, even broad scars in crater walls that had to be landslides. He could even see details by the milky blue of Earthlight; the landscape disappeared only when they flew through the double shadow of Earth and Moon. The view was so clear, in fact, that his vision kept playing tricks on him. The smoother craters seemed to reverse, popping up into domes or blisters, then sinking back to depressions. He couldn’t tell if he was sixty-nine miles up or six, and every so often, as some new mountain passed below, his heart would skip a beat, as if the Moon was clawing up into the sky.

Now the jokes by those old Apollo guys didn’t seem so funny.
Sixty-nine miles high? Watch out for the seventy-mile mountain on the Moon’s backside…

He craned to see more. This module had been designed for survival, not as a viewing platform, and it was unbelievably frustrating to be so close and not to be able to
see
properly. Like driving through a national park, he thought, in a Sherman tank.

As he skimmed around the rocky limb, passing from shadow to light, he learned that shadows—the angle of the sun—were the key to seeing, on the Moon. When the sun rose, other features would become more prominent, like the brighter ray systems. They looked, he thought, like the
marks left where a pickax had dug into concrete.

But when he was subsolar, with the sun behind him, the shadows were flattened, or disappeared altogether, as if he was looking down at the bleached floor of some dead ocean.

In fact, when the sun was right behind him, the lunar landscape seemed to brighten suddenly.
Heiligenschein,
the lunar scientists called it. The saint’s halo: some obscure effect of the dust.