Phobos: Mayan Fear (17 page)

The coastal beach resorts are ghost towns. Traffic lights on the main drags still change like falling dominoes and the gulls still cull into the late afternoon, but as the sun dips gold and the hour approaches five, a pall hangs in the air.

Stephen Stocker notices something seems awry as he exits his one-story rental in Margate, New Jersey. The twenty-two-year-old quantum physics major at Atlantic City University is paying his way through college by working late shifts as a blackjack dealer at the Goldman-Sachs Riverboat Casino. Exhausted from finals week, Stephen has slept undisturbed through the incessant alarms and broadcasts that have bombarded the island residents of Atlantic City, Ventnor, Margate, and Long Port, the music coming from his sensory headpiece shielding him from the chaos.

Stephen crosses Atlantic Avenue to the beach block, feeling fortunate to miss the usual traffic. He hustles up the wood incline to the boardwalk, scares off a flock of pigeons feasting upon a turned-over trash can, then descends five steps to the beach, mentally debating whether he should run his mandatory three miles or work on his wind sprints. He has five hours of free time before he must get ready for a 12-to-8 a.m. shift. Having lost his cell phone, he has no way of knowing all businesses are closed and that the hotel casino where he works will never see the midnight hour.

The beach is gusting with wind, the sand stinging his flesh. He attributes the lack of bathers to the harsh conditions and opts to cancel his run for a swim. Tossing his towel over his backpack where dry sand meets wet, he dashes into the surf.

Stephen ducks beneath a five-foot swell, then begins swimming parallel to shore. He manages twenty strokes before the undertow spins him vertical again.

The water becomes a raging river, sweeping him out to sea. An experienced beachgoer, the college senior never panics, recognizing that he is caught in a riptide and that his best chance to escape is not to fight the fierce current but to swim parallel to shore. Launching himself into a powerful crawl stroke, he lowers his head and swims, the conveyor of eastbound shifting ocean emptying beneath him until his knee strikes sand and he’s lying in an acre of mud.

“What the hell?”

The Atlantic has receded a quarter of a mile, his towel and backpack a football field away. Baffled, he stands and turns as the muck between his toes reverberates and the air grumbles a baritone roar. What he sees rolling toward him causes the hair on the back of his neck to rise and his bladder to tighten.

The wave is impossibly massive—a majestically curling monstrosity towering higher than the tallest resort hotel. It continues to climb—a looming mountain of water rapidly diminishing the blue sky. The sea floor quivers beneath its approaching girth, its stench blasting his face with an exhalation of sea life and algae and oil, its roar so frightening it paralyzes him in absolute terror.

Stephen’s mind is gone, but it doesn’t matter: any rational thought of escape is futile. In a last desperate grasp at self-preservation, the physics major drops to his chest and shoves both arms elbow-deep in the mud. Then he turns his head away and closes his eyes, tears flowing down his cheeks as the atheist prays to a maker he has long been convinced couldn’t possibly exist.

The megatsunami plucks Stephen Stocker off the sea floor and tosses him into its raging belly, the sheer force of the dark water ripping his arms from his torso. Ocean meets concrete and steel a second later, leveling downtown Atlantic City while blasting every island residence off its foundation. The curl plunges into the bay, birthing a secondary wave, which is quickly consumed by the first.

The Atlantic never stops, it simply continues pushing inland, bashing through toll booths and car dealerships, malls and neighborhoods, before settling into a twenty-foot tide that eventually dies thirty miles west of what had once been Atlantic City’s famous boardwalk.

CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA
5:07 P.M.

Kyle Hall is standing on a grass-covered divide separating two immense reinforced concrete runways as an alternating procession of Mars shuttles accelerates past him in a low angled ascent—a choreographed ballet of flying metal elephants. Each airborne member of the thinning herd gradually rises to ten thousand feet before engaging its rocket boosters into a steep climb, accompanied by a sonic boom.

The control tower crackles in his earpiece. “Shuttle 7, you are a go on Runway Alpha. Shuttle 8, stand by on Runway Beta.”

“Control, this is Director Hall. This is taking way too long. Screw the go–no-go bullshit and get the rest of these whales airborne in the next ninety seconds.”

“Director Hall, this is Shuttle 12. We’re loaded.”

“Is my family on board?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m on my way.” Climbing inside a solar-powered golf cart, Kyle Hall races down the runway to one of twenty vehicle assembly buildings. Driving through the open King Kong–size doors of VAB-12, he skids to a stop, jumps out of the cart, and ascends the motorized gantry steps to the awaiting Mars shuttle, a three-story-high space plane.

He checks the time—5:13 p.m.—then hurries to the flight deck where a pilot and navigator are rushing through a series of commands while the shuttle captain starts up the space vehicle’s takeoff and landing engines, preparing to taxi out of the hangar.

A copilot signals him over to the communications console. “Sir, before he abandoned the Launch Control Center, the Launch Commentator received a communication from an inbound private jet.”

“Patch it through.” Director Hall snatches the headphones, pressing the receiver to his ear. “Lilith? Lilith, it’s Kyle Hall, can you read me?”

“—ETA in two minutes. We’ll taxi straight to the hangar. Which VAB?”

The four pilots turn to Hall, all anxious, a few shaking their heads. “Sir, we need a minimum of three minutes just to taxi to the runway, another two to be airborne.”

“He’s right, sir. We can’t wait, we need to roll out now.”

The female’s voice grows insistent. “Mr. Hall, which vehicle assembly building should we taxi to?”

Kyle Hall stares at the headset in his trembling hand. “Sorry, boss.” Grabbing the cord, he yanks the plug free from the radio console.

Lilith slams down the radio receiver, then turns to the jet’s pilot seated next to her in the tiny cockpit, her turquoise eyes seething. “Land the jet, there’s still time.”

The pilot looks back to Manny for help.

“I said land the damn jet!”

“No.” Manny’s eyes are focused out to sea where a dark brown ripple has appeared on the azure-green horizon. “Lilith, we’re too late.”

Wielding the fire axe, Ken Mulder swings again, tearing another sliver of daylight through the utility hangar’s aluminum siding.

“Dad, stand back.” His son kicks again—punching a four-foot rectangular hole through the side wall. A hundred twenty-two enraged would-be passengers rush out into the humid Florida afternoon in time to see Shuttle 12 roll out of its hangar a quarter mile to the east.

“Come on!”

Captain Brian Barker aims the nose of his space vehicle so it splits the double orange lines of Runway Beta. “This is Captain Barker in the flight deck, prepare for launch.” His digital time display reads 17:16 hours as he accelerates the massive shuttle north along the five-mile stretch of concrete—only to be forced to cut the engines as the runway is suddenly swarmed upon by dozens of people, with many more making their way across the grassy expanse.

“Christ, what should I do?”

Kyle Hall’s heart is pounding so hard he can barely breathe. “Don’t stop! We have less than three minutes!”

Captain Barker revs the engines once more. The shuttle lurches ahead, its wingspan passing over the crowd, its front wheel rolling over an older woman and her Chihuahua. Moaning aloud, Barker veers the shuttle to the far right side of the runway, then back to the left before accelerating beyond the crowd.

17:18 …

“Seventy knots … one ninety … two seventy-five. Come on, girl, get your fat ass into the air!”

The shuttle lifts off, beginning a slow ascent above the rapidly diminishing northbound runway—as the towering dark wave breaks on shore half a mile to the east, blasting a thousand-foot-deep trowel of sand and sea skyward. The debris storm explodes across the space vehicle’s wings and windshield, momentarily blinding the captain as the ascending space plane lumbers above two hundred feet—and is suddenly swallowed by a mountainous wall of water.

The megatsunami pile-drives Shuttle 12 sideways against the concrete runway. The portside wing snaps, the vehicle flipping over and over, its fuel tanks sparked and bursting into orange balls of fire—quickly smothered beneath the furiously moving seascape.

The supersonic jet circles two thousand feet above the invading Atlantic, which rolls westward over Cape Canaveral and the Banana River, the Merritt Island Space Center, the Indian River, and scenic Cocoa Beach, leaving devastation in its wake.

Lilith stares below, unable to breathe. Hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of facilities and technology … an assembly line for space planes … nearly two decades of space tourism and seventeen years of hard work—everything wiped out in a span of twenty seconds.

For Lilith Aurelia Mabus and her Hunahpu soul mate, there is no future.

H.O.P.E. is gone.

14

I’m in the ATLAS control room, fifteen minutes after
the first high energy collisions at the Large Hadron Collider.
The physicists have been waiting for this moment
for more than a year and are still jumping up and
down about it. It’s been a long day for everyone—the
journalists got here before 6 a.m.—but a lot of the scientists
were here all night. A lot of delirious grins. Earlier
this morning two minor glitches meant that the
energy had to be ramped back down and up again
twice. But everything went smoothly on the third attempt,
to the excitement and relief of everyone involved.
Collisions were detected in all four of the experiments
at the LHC—CMS, ALICE, ATLAS, and LHCb. From
where I’m at in the ATLAS control room, I can see images
of the collisions being beamed in on floor-to-
ceiling screens. There’s just been another outbreak of
clapping, following the announcement that the two
beams are still circulating smoothly. This means that
the inner detectors—those that will capture the most
interesting information about the collisions—can now
be switched on. Congratulations to all at LHC!

—HANNAH DEVLIN,
SCIENCE REPORTER FOR
THE TIMES
,
MARCH 30, 2010

VASTITAS BOREALIS BASIN, MARS COLONY, MARS

J
ames Corbett grips the safety bar of the lift with one gloved hand of his space suit, the other hand twirling the palm-size sensory cane looped around his wrist—a device that feeds information from a laser pointer into a relay embedded in the engineer’s brain.

James Corbett is blind, having lost his sight in a deepwater diving accident when he was thirty years old. Refusing to curb his appetite for life, he took up mountain climbing and ascended Mount Kilimanjaro and within three years was again leading deepwater descents hundreds of feet below the surface. Learning to function in his new world of darkness actually saved Corbett’s life when he and a dive buddy decided to explore an inverted freighter located at the bottom of Lake Ontario. Lost in a world of silt and quickly running out of air, Corbett calmly felt his way through the ship’s corridors, leading them to safety.

The descent grows bumpy, rattling the open lift’s cage. Immune to claustrophobia, the chief engineer of Mars Colony has taken it upon himself to descend into the just-completed mining shaft. Seven hundred feet below the rocky Mars surface lies a mysterious mass, its potential yield weighing in at an estimated 130,000 metric tons. To find a vein of ore that can be melded into steel plates for the Colony’s biodomes makes the discovery a fortuitous find; to locate it in a basin believed to be a 200-million-year-old sea has baffled his team of geologists. Using a laser-cutting tool, Corbett will cut loose a sample of the mass for analysis in their lab. Before any more exploratory shafts are dug, his team will determine the nature of the metal and whether an elaborate salvage operation is worth the cost in fuel and manpower.

The hydraulic lift slows, then stops with a clanging thud. Corbett’s helmet fills with radio static, followed by a faint, “End of the line, sir.”

“A simple ‘You’ve arrived’ would have sufficed, Mr. Jefferies. Which way is the targeted section?”

“Exit the lift and head west three meters, you’re practically on top of it.”

Corbett steps off the lift, his sensory cane determining direction and distance, the distinct reverberations leading him to the object subsumed in rock. Reaching out with his right gloved hand, he feels the shaft wall, distinguishing the rough silicate from a smooth metallic surface, its contours curved, its planed edges several inches thick, yet honed to a degree of sharpness not found in nature.

The engineer taps the mysterious object with his cutting tool, a strange sensation of déjà vu overwhelming the former salvage diver. Using a pickax, he chips away a four-foot section of rock, exposing a protrusion of the buried object.

“Sir, is everything all right? Dr. Corbett?”

“Huh? Yes, I’m … it’s good. Actually, it’s the tip of a very massive iceberg.”

“Iceberg, sir?”

“It’s not a vein, Jefferies, and no, it’s not an iceberg. It’s a buried vessel of some kind. If I didn’t know any better, I’d swear it was the blade of a cruise ship’s propeller.”

MOUNT WEATHER
BLUEMONT, VIRGINIA

It is located forty-six miles from Washington, D.C., a top-secret facility rivaling that of Area 51. Aboveground all seems innocuous—a dozen administration buildings set on manicured lawns, a helipad and control tower, everything surrounded by a perimeter fence. But beneath this mountain summit lies a vast underground city.

Welcome to Mount Weather, a self-contained “Doomsday Hideaway” established before the Cold War and modernized over the decades at a taxpayer cost approaching $3 trillion. Of course, Mount Weather and the more than one hundred subterranean Federal Relocation Centers spread out across Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, and North Carolina were never intended to be used by taxpayers, nor was the “continuity of government” program it secretly services meant to comply with the constitution or congressional oversight. Mount Weather and its network were built with one objective in mind: surviving the apocalypse.

Built to withstand a nuclear strike on Washington and its “target areas,” Mount Weather and its network of bunker facilities are literally self-contained underground cities, complete with private apartments, dormitories, streets, sidewalks, hospitals, and cafeterias, as well as a water purification system linked to underground streams and aquifers, sewage treatment plants, agricultural greenhouses, livestock, power plants, a mass transit system, and its own telecommunication system. While the world’s population perishes by nuclear weapons, radiation fallout, erupting calderas, biological disasters, asteroid strikes, or nuclear winter, the inhabitants of the Mount Weather network will survive catastrophe so that humanity can go on.

That these “survivors” will most likely have been the ones to have caused the catastrophe in the first place has never seemed to bother past presidents, cabinet members, and those appointed in secrecy to man FEMA’s parallel government-in-waiting. Joining this secret fraternal order of politicos are the CEOs and executives of some of the top companies in the world, along with key personnel at the Federal Reserve and the US Post Office, both private corporations.

In essence, Mount Weather is Mars Colony here on Earth, a safe haven for the rich and affluent.

President Andrew Hiles is in the Situation Room, the nerve center of Mount Weather, which is linked with Raven Rock, the Pentagon’s underground facility located sixty miles north of Washington. Appearing before him is a real-time holographic image of the Earth, originating from the Defense Department’s satellite array, then reconfigured. Ash clouds from over two hundred erupting volcanoes have combined with the Yellowstone caldera to cover ninety percent of the planet’s atmosphere. America’s breadbasket is covered in ash, its farms devastated. Photosynthesis has ceased to exist. Rolling blackouts will lead to anarchy, mass starvation, and a decade of nuclear winter. Nine billion people, save a privileged few, shall die.

Now the president must deliver a final message to the people. How does one talk of hope when none exists? How does a president prepare his constituents for death when he himself shall be spared?

With a heavy heart, Andrew Hiles is led by his trainers to his new Oval Office, where television cameras and a teleprompter awaits.

GULF OF MEXICO

The Aerion supersonic business jet ascends to five thousand feet as it banks west at Mach 1.3, soaring over the Florida Panhandle.

Manny closes the cockpit door, guiding Lilith to a chair. “Are you okay?”

“My son is possessed for an eternity by some kind of demonic force, and the only chance we had to save him—to save humanity—just got pummeled by a wave. So no, Manny, I’m far from okay, in fact, I’m about to freak out.”

“Listen to me, the window hasn’t closed just yet. Salvation isn’t on Mars, it’s through the wormhole that will appear when the singularity crosses into the physical universe. That event will happen before this day is over—I can feel the Nexus trembling beneath its gravitational weight. Lilith, we don’t need a Mars shuttle to reach the wormhole, we just need a space plane. Don’t you have another space port in Houston?”

Her eyes widen. “Yes.”

MCMURDO RESEARCH STATION
ROSS ISLAND, ANTARCTICA

Surrounded by ocean, the continent of Antarctica covers the geographic South Pole at the bottom of the world. The landmass, fifth largest on the planet, is ninety-eight percent ice and possesses no indigenous human inhabitants. Nevertheless, each spring three thousand workers join teams of scientists that weather the extreme cold in order to staff Antarctic research stations, all part of a cooperative global effort to study conditions that serve to stabilize the planet’s weather patterns.

McMurdo Station is spread out across two square miles of ice on the southern tip of Ross Island. Operated by the American branch of the National Science Foundation, the complex houses twelve hundred residents, making it the largest human habitat in Antarctica.

It may very well be its last.

Geologist T. Paul Schulte stands on the partially frozen shoreline of McMurdo Sound, staring across the waterway at the four snow-covered summits spewing ash clouds high above Ross Island. That Mount Erebus has erupted is unusual but not shocking—as part of the Ring of Fire it is one of more than 160 active volcanoes situated along the Pacific Plate. That its three usually silent sisters are also erupting is what had shaken the scientist to the core—even before he had spoken to his wife, Christine, and learned what was transpiring across the rest of the planet.

Schulte is separated from his wife and six children by an entire hemisphere. His last good-byes were cut off by atmospheric interference caused by the blanket of volcanic dust. The Mormon has prayed nonstop for the last three hours for a miracle.

Now, before his frosting gray-blue eyes, it appears as if a miracle is actually happening.

While the Earth’s geographic poles are located at the center of the planet, the two magnetic poles are perpetually shifting. The phenomenon, known as polar drift, is caused by variations in the flow of molten iron in the Earth’s rotating outer core, which affect the orientation of the planet’s magnetic field.

As Schulte watches in terrifying fascination, the surrounding ash clouds begin slowly coalescing—rotating counterclockwise for as far as the eye can see. The center of this force is rising up from the southern magnetic pole, situated high above a patch of ocean lying to the east of the easternmost shore of Ross Island. Drawn upward through the quickly forming eye, the swirling vortex appears to be inhaling the toxic blanket of volcanic ash into space.

GULF OF MEXICO

There is no warning; one moment they are soaring through smooth air—the next they are plunging through space at the speed of sound.

Manny lunges for Lilith, dragging both of them into the Nexus. The physical universe instantly slows around them, their bodies floating upward in the spinning cabin, gravity temporarily defied. Pushing away from the merry-go-round of furniture, they fight their way into the cockpit.

The pilot is unconscious.

Manny tosses him aside and grabs for the controls, struggling to level them out as the altimeter rolls backward from 12,800 feet to 8,900 feet to 4,400 feet—the wind shear releasing them eight hundred feet above the Gulf of Mexico into a rising torrent of wind that buffets them sideways.

Lilith takes the copilot’s seat. She slips out of the Nexus, greeted by the sound of howling wind. “What happened? Did we fly into a hurricane?”

“Look at the sky.”

The dense layer of brown clouds is rolling south like a raging river of mud, its airspeed in excess of a thousand miles an hour—and still climbing. Menacing gray tornadoes of ash appear over land—vertical columns of volcanic dust feeding the vacuous moving carpet of atmospheric debris.

The jet pitches from side to side, rising perilously atop a sudden updraft, only to drop again. “Lilith, it’s too dangerous—we have to land.”

“Do it!”

Scanning the GPS, he banks to the northwest in a steep descent when the windshield is blanketed beneath a blizzard of wet ash. Manny feels the engines seize a moment before red lights flash across his console, and suddenly they’re soaring just above the Gulf, sheets of water dousing the windshield clean as he fights to keep the jet’s nose up, the aircraft’s belly skiing half a mile before its inertia is gripped by gravity and the cockpit settles beneath the incoming swells.

The cabin lights extinguish, and the two Hunahpu, their turquoise eyes radiating in the darkness, slip back inside the Nexus.

Manny communicates telepathically within their shared island of existence:
Pop the door, I’ll grab the pilot.

No time. Leave him!

Can’t do that.

Twisting the steel handle, she yanks open the cockpit door, venting the cabin. Leaping into a maelstrom of wind and sea, she treads water, only to discover she can stand.

They are in a cornfield, the stalks submerged under five feet of water.

Remaining in the Nexus, they push through the gelid fourth dimension until they are standing on an elevated strip of concrete.

Manny releases the inert pilot, slipping out of the higher realm. A blinding wind whips at his legs, the ash clouds soaring overhead at a dizzying speed. The air is static with electricity, generating sparks of lightning that dance around upswells of wet ash, feeding the turbid heavens.