Worlds in Chaos (65 page)

Birden looked back and saw him. “Dash is coming through. Hold that door.”

Keene ran to the door and pulled it open. Behind was a work area with a tool bench. Birden stepped out and fired again as Dash appeared around the corner and ran past him. Keene held the door while Dash went through. At the far end of the passage Birden fired again and turned to follow. Keene waited, holding the door. But before Dash could cover effectively one of the pursuers appeared and cut the running figure of Birden down with a stream of bullets. Keene found that he was still staring, horrified, when Dash slammed the door.

“
He’s gone! Move!
”

They dragged the bench behind the door and tipped it over to form a block, then started away again; but Keene, on a second thought, turned back and took down a heavy sledge from a wall rack while the bench rocked from the pounding against the far side of the door. Turning again, he found that Dash had waited to cover him in case the door gave. They raced for the stairs that would take them up to the access bridge.

They arrived to find Mitch bundling Cavan across the bridge into the shuttle, and Legermount and Reynolds holding off more pursuers at the far end of the boarding antechamber, where one body was already lying on the floor among splashes of blood. Dash followed Cavan and Mitch across the bridge and disappeared inside. Keene stopped just past the blast door to wait for Legermount and Reynolds. Looking up, he saw the silo doors open, revealing a circle of orange-streaked sky. Jason must have already gone through. Legermount detached and ran through with Reynolds covering and took the door. “Where’s Birden?” he asked Keene.

“Out of it.”

Reynolds backed through, firing from the hip, and went through to the shuttle. Legermount waved for Keene to go after him. Keene shook his head, motioning with the sledge in both hands. Reading his intention, Legermount swung the door shut and stood back while Keene delivered a series of heavy blows to jam the hinge and latch mechanisms. By the time Keene tossed the sledge down and turned away, Legermount was across the bridge and in the shuttle, waiting at the hatch.

Inside, Dash and Reynolds were fastening themselves into harnesses; the others were all secured. While Legermount closed the hatch and settled down, Keene paused to find a grin for Robin, who was hunched between Vicki and Alicia, looking pale. “Bearing up okay?” Keene said to him. “That’s the worst over. We’re on our way.” Robin nodded, managing to keep a brave face. Keene squeezed Vicki’s shoulder in a way that said everything would work out okay—it wasn’t as if he would ever have to answer for himself if it didn’t.

“Okay, I’ve seen Mexico,” Colby said from his seat. “Can we move on?”

Keene went forward to join Joe in the crew section and buckled himself into the flight engineer’s seat. He would have to handle the electronics too, since they had no Ccoms operator this time, but that didn’t make a lot of difference to anything, since there was nowhere to communicate with. The first thing he made sure of, however, was that the computers still contained the navigation beacon and homing codes that had been used for the rendezvous with the
Osiris
. A quick run through the checks showed engines, fuel, power, hydraulics, environment, and cooling all looking good. He keyed in the command to retract the access bridge, and an auxiliary screen with a vertical view down between the silo wall and the body of the shuttle showed it sliding back cleanly into its recess.

“Tank and pump pressures good, temperatures good, auxiliaries functioning,” he told Joe. “Do we want the whole list?”

“With guys out there wanting to shoot this thing full of holes? Hell, no. Let’s get outta here!”

“Then you’re all set. We have delivery. . . . What’s this?
Oh, my God!
” Keene stared at the screen, horrified, as it showed the blast door at the bottom of the silo being opened from the other side. A group of figures in helmets and combat gear ran out, brandishing guns, onto a concrete ledge flanking the duct that directed the exhaust out to a water-cooled pit on the far side of the structure—Keene and Jason hadn’t bothered to flood it; what would have been the point?

Joe’s finger was already straightening against the button.

The figures came to a confused halt and stood gaping up at the tail and booster nozzles of the spacecraft towering above them. Then, realizing their mistake, they began a frantic scramble to get back through the door.

“Ignition.”

53

Keene counted seventeen gut-wrenching hits or lightning strikes on the structure as the ship climbed through the winds, the flaming clouds, and the meteorite storm. But it stayed together, and as it emerged from the atmosphere the occupants got their first view of Athena since the last transmissions before the satellites were knocked out, and the shots that had been relayed from the
Osiris
. The nucleus was clearly visible now, appearing six times the size of the Moon, which meant that it was well inside the lunar orbit. It hung as a malevolent, white-hot presence, its tail of dust and incandescent gas engulfing and extending far beyond the Earth, with twisted and braided secondary streamers discharging immense sparks through the plasma envelope to the main body and between each other.

The regular flight-planning programs were unable to compute a stable orbit through the changing gravity now permeating the region. Charlie Hu, Joe, and Keene calculated a burn that would send them coasting out on a long ellipse away from the two bodies as they closed. Although it meant expending an alarming portion of the remaining fuel, their estimates indicated that it would be better in the long run than constantly having to fire to correct a closer-in orbit. And with the ship’s vantage point lengthening, its occupants watched the devastation of an entire planet as the encounter between Earth and Athena entered its final, cataclysmic phase.

The seas of fire that they could see engulfing parts of the southwestern and central U.S. were repeated across huge tracts of every other continent also. From the size and sharpness of the spiral chasms carved in the smoke-laden atmosphere, they were generating winds more ferocious than anything seen previously. Watching in horrified yet compulsive fascination, they were able to glimpse through the slowly shifting patterns fragments of what was happening on the surface.

The tides filled the valleys of the Amazon, Mississippi, Congo, Ganges, and Yellow Rivers, rising over the southeastern states all the way to the Appalachians in the U.S., covering the plains of southern India and Argentina, and creating temporary seas that immersed London and Paris, Baghdad, Beijing, and Montreal. When the water receded, a mud bank running from Florida to Venezuela turned the Caribbean into a six-hour lake; Britain reemerged amid a plain of lakes extending from Norway to Spain; Asia became reconnected to Australia except for a narrow channel twisting its way between Borneo and Celebes.

As the magnetospheres of Earth and Athena intersected, colossal electrical bolts began flashing incessantly not just between parts of Athena but directly down upon Earth itself. After two days, Charlie, who had been trying to make measurements from the ship’s imaging displays, announced that the tidal extremes were getting less even though Athena was still closing. It confirmed the fears that Keene had heard voiced back at JPL: The motion through Athena’s field was making Earth an immense Faraday generator, heating the beds of the oceans and actually inducing boiling in places, causing sea levels to fall by hundreds of feet. The recondensing vapor turned into a pall of cloud miles thick, which the winds stirred with the browns of the hydrocarbon gases and the smoke from the continent-wide fires to draw a curtain over the death throes as Earth and Athena commenced the slow mutual gyration that would mark their closest pass. But the broad story told by the shuttle’s infrared scans left no need for every ghastly detail.

Under the close gravitational influence, the crust seemed to slip in its rotation. Softened and melted toward the surface by the induced heating, it buckled and tore into huge north-south running paroxysms of earthquake and upheaval. The great African Rift opened up into a two-thousand-mile-long lake of lava that could be seen widening hour by hour, soon to become a new ocean, while to the east the tip of India extended into a ridge of upthrusting, colliding slabs of seabed snaking its way southward across the equator. The trench system running from Japan via the Phillippines to Indonesia was opening too, and starting to cleave Australia—very possibly, Charlie guessed, presaging a continental uplift somewhere in the western Pacific. They were literally watching the next world being born, even as the old one died.

The shifting of the spin axis caused oceans to slop across continents. Swathes of blue and green cold advancing hour by hour across the previously yellow and orange hot areas on the false-color infrared images told of miles-high cliffs of water bursting over the Appalachian barrier to descend upon Cincinnati and Pittsburgh, surging up into the funnel formed by Siberia and Alaska to spill over into the Arctic basin, and turning the southern Himalayas into an archipelago. With the surface charted simply by its temperature variations, the images quickly lost all resemblance to maps that were recognizable. In any case, it was already clear that those maps would hence be of interest only to future historians, geologists, and archaeologists. “Could
anything
survive that?” Vicki whispered amid the horrified silence that had enveloped the cabin for hours.

“Nothing could survive that,” Joe murmured. His voice was numbed.

“It happened before, not all that long ago,” Keene reminded them. “And some survived then. It may have been just a handful, scattered across a mountaintop here and there or a few places that the floods didn’t reach. But it was enough.”

“Go forth and multiply, and repopulate the Earth,” Reynolds recited softly.

“But could it really have been this bad?” Vicki persisted.

“They didn’t have the technology either,” Charlie said. “Some of those down there might pull through, even with all that.” Keene didn’t know. All he could do was look with the rest of them at the dark ball that Earth had become and know that in the cities disappearing under towering walls of foam in the darkness beneath, the forests and grasslands that had become carpets of ash, the exposed seabeds being consumed under spreading lava plains, the splitting mountains and sinking islands, humans and life of every kind were dying in billions. The things he had seen in the past week had hardened and wearied him to the degree of showing little external sign, even to this. Vivid though the pictures were that he created in his mind, nothing in his experience enabled him to relate to the the calamity he was witnessing. But inside, in his soul, he wept for the tragedies taking place everywhere, a million every minute, on the scale he was capable of grasping. He wept for all the Marvin Curtisses with stepdaughters who would never play their cellos to a public audience now; for the David Salios with pretty wives and young children who would never see Europe; the Wally Lomacks and their grandchildren; the Washington cab drivers and their wives who weren’t going to retire to Colorado; the Lieutenant Penalskis, Colonel Laceys, and General Ullmans who had stayed to carry through their duty; the Buffs and Lukes who had gone back to find their kinfolk.

And he mourned the passing of the culture that had emerged from squabbling European tribes to produce the cathedrals of Cologne and Rheims, the paintings of Michelangelo and the music of Bach, the calculus, the steam engine, the Boeing 747, the IBM PC, and yes, even Wall Street. Would visitors from another age return one day to take pictures of New York’s steel skeletons standing stark against a sandy desert, or to excavate the ruins of Tokyo and its seaport among some range of inland hills as others had the pyramids or the ziggurats of Nineveh?

The momentum of the two bodies’ turning embrace parted them, and Athena at last began withdrawing to find whatever future was destined for it among the other objects of the Solar System. As a macabre finale to its act, it recrossed the lunar orbit close enough to draw the Moon toward itself until the Moon started to break up. It receded with what had been Luna slowly transforming into a trail of debris, curling around to circle Athena like a triumphal garland. The bulk of the material could be seen plunging down in a torrent to be consumed into Athena’s incandescent surface. The residue would accompany Athena as a ring system, a trophy from its victory, which it would carry across the heavens as a taunting reminder for thousands of years to come.