Phobos: Mayan Fear (14 page)

“No, man. I’m a long way from all right. In fact, all right ain’t even on my radar.”

Lilith chides him with her stare. “Go. I’ll take care of Manny.”

“Yeah, I bet you will.” He climbs into the empty cockpit, starting the engines.

Manny leans inside. “Pep, find Salt. Once we get to the shuttle—”

“Forget about us, son. You have a job to do, so do I. I still got family out there. An ex-wife who can’t stand me and two grown kids and a new grandchild who never got to know me. I’ll lead this devil on a wild-goose chase, you do what you were conceived to do and give us all a second chance. Look me up in the past, before I hurt my knee playing in the Senior Bowl. Keep me outta that game. Hell, just keep me from joining the damn CIA. Don’t let me down. Don’t let my family down.”

“I won’t. Pep—”

“Love you, too, kid.” Beck slams the cockpit door shut, launching the airship into a steep climb.

Manny waits until the jet-copter disappears over the jungle. Then he follows Lilith, the two of them jogging through the ancient Mayan city, heading for the tourist entrance and the parking lot.

13

We know it will discover something because we have deliberately built it to journey into uncharted waters
…

—BRIAN COX,
CERN PHYSICIST,
“IN DEFENSE OF THE LHC,”
POPSCI.COM, OCTOBER 10, 2008

E
jaculated into existence from one of a hundred thousand microscopic Big Bangs, the naked singularity had escaped the slice of space-time within the Large Hadron Collider like a sperm strangelet seeking a proton egg. Drawn into a parallel dimension of existence, it had found reproductive fuel in the atoms inhabiting an aexo–dark energy hyperspace—a successful act of conception that christened the vacuous void as its fertile cosmic womb.

The placenta of this dark energy womb was the Earth’s magnetic core, an iron and nickel sphere of radioactive matter. The inner core—the very center of the planet—is 780 miles in diameter and 6,700 degrees Fahrenheit hot, yet is under so much pressure it cannot melt. It is surrounded by the outer core—1,370 miles of molten metal. As the Earth rotates, the motion of the outer core spinning against the inner core generates the planet’s magnetism.

Drawn to the center of the Earth by this magnetism, the beast had grown, each pass exponentially capturing more atoms, its inertia redirected by the awaiting North or South Pole and the frozen incubator of space. Hovering above the planet after each pass, its growing atomic structure would coalesce and cool, each supercharged atom of dense gravity its own shell-encased microsingularity. Drawn together like a shoal of schooling fish, the beast—in a highly synchronized cosmic ballet of polarization—would again accelerate into a particle stream through the center of the Earth, its spinning vortex of dark energy birthing a wormhole.

Like the composite singularity, the wormhole was limited by neither dimensional boundaries nor space-time, only its umbilical cord tethered to its feeding parent. These feeding times of existence continued to expand as the beast grew larger, stabilizing the wormhole while propelling its mouth and tail across the past, present, and future membranes of the physical universe.

Just as a fertilized egg expels all intruders to its mother’s womb, the presence of the growing singularity ensured that no other strangelet could conceive life from the continuously ejaculating Hadron Collider. Like an unborn child, the maturing beast occasionally kicked as it fed, each “growth spurt” causing the Earth’s mantle to belch magma.

The mantle is an 1,800-mile-thick layer that surrounds the molten outer core, situated approximately six miles below the oceanic crust and nineteen miles beneath the continental crust. The crust is divided into tectonic plates, which drift slowly atop the mantle.

As the singularity’s mass continued to increase, it exerted greater gravitational forces with each pass through the planet’s core, unleashing a bubble of pressure that traveled across the mantle like a metal ball spinning around a roulette wheel.

The roulette wheel was rigged, the singularity’s excess energy wake drawn to specific exit points in the Earth’s crust—exit points lined with deposits of quartz. Like a magnet attracting the roulette wheel’s metal ball, the crystal mineral contained trapped water which resonated at the same frequency as the strangelet. And everywhere there was quartz, there was also a seismic fault line.

If this wake of energy escaped beneath the fault line of two tectonic oceanic plates the result was a seaquake, sometimes leading to a tsunami; if a continental divide—an earthquake. If the bubble of pressure percolated an already volatile pocket of magma beneath a volcano, the mountain would erupt.

In the last six months, the singularity had been responsible for seven tsunamis, eleven volcanic eruptions, and more than fifty earthquakes across the globe.

“Polar shoaling” has painted its growing mass with the charged particles of the auroras. Now, as the gravitational monster approaches the moment of its birth into the physical universe, it makes one last journey through the center of the Earth, giving the planet’s doomed inhabitants a taste of things to come.

LA PALMA, CANARY ISLANDS
JULY 2, 2047
3:47 P.M. (LOCAL TIME)

Located in the Atlantic Ocean seventy miles off the western coast of Africa is an archipelago known as the Canary Islands. Consisting of seven main islands and six islets that stretch west to east over three hundred miles, the chain was formed 3 million years ago by sea volcanoes.

La Palma is the farthest island to the northwest, its base situated thirteen thousand feet below the surface, its highest peak rising nearly two miles out of the ocean. The island possesses two volcanic peaks and the Caldera de Taburiente, a six-mile-wide caldera surrounded by a ring of mountains that occupy the geology to the north. A north-south ridge divides La Palma through the center of the island, the Cumbre Nueva volcano to the north, its bigger sibling, Cumbre Vieja, to the south.

On June 24, 1949, Cumbre Vieja erupted for the first time since 1712, the event lasting thirty-seven days. Lava was ejected from the stratovolcano’s three vents, accompanied by two earthquakes. Left in the eruption’s wake was a massive fracture over a mile and a half long, located along the volcano’s western face. Geologists examining the damage discovered to their great horror that a block of rock measuring more than twelve cubic miles and weighing an estimated 500 billion tons had separated from Cumbre Vieja. Like a geological Sword of Damacles, the steeply sloped landmass remained suspended over the Atlantic Ocean, the coastal depths of which plunged almost four miles deep.

A tsunami is a large ocean wave created by a sudden displacement of water, usually caused by a seaquake, a volcanic eruption, or an underwater landslide. A megatsunami is a much bigger wave, birthed by either the ocean impact of a large asteroid, such as the object that struck Earth 65 million years ago, or a landslide that strikes deep water at an angle that drives the sea into a rising curl of incredible destructive force.

For decades, scientists debated whether Cumbre Vieja’s western face could actually unleash a catastrophic landslide. When a 1971 eruption failed to loosen the volcano’s fractured side, experts breathed a sigh of relief.

The Roque de los Muchachos Observatory is located on a remote mountain summit adjacent to the highest peaks surrounding the Caldera de Taburiente. Void of light pollution, the “Roque” operates under unusually clear, dark skies all year round, making it one of the most sought-after assignments in the field of astronomy.

Hector Javier has been working at the observatory eleven months. Exhausted from an all-night session on one of the main telescopes, the Mexican astronomer had camped out on his office floor rather than attempt the twenty-four-mile descent down the observatory’s winding mountain road.

He is awakened by a deep seismic rumble and the sudden pounding of his heart. Racing to the lab, he nearly collides with Dr. Kevin Read, the facility’s associate director. The Canadian’s face is pale, his expression urgent. “It’s Cumbre Vieja, the volcano’s erupting! Give me a hand with the seventy-inch Truss, we should be able to see something from the southwest platform.”

The portable Truss telescope is locked up in storage. It takes the two astronomers fifteen minutes to carry it to the southwest platform, a concrete slab perched eight thousand feet above the Atlantic Ocean.

The ash cloud has already risen ten miles into the late afternoon sky by the time Dr. Read directs the lens at the mouth of the volcano, the scope’s image partially obscured by the dense brown-gray plume of debris.

“Can you see anything?”

“Lots of smoke, no lava. It’s possible the magma—”

The catastrophic eruption is as sudden as it is deafening, the terrifying explosion shaking the entire island as it launches billions of tons of ash and rock and lava fifteen miles straight into the air.

Hector Javier reaches the fallen telescope first. Resetting the tripod, he peers into the eyepiece, searching through dense smoke for the origin of the eruption. He is shocked to see Cumbre Vieja is gone, its smoldering mountaintop obliterated.

A rapid green-blue flurry of movement draws his attention. Hector aims the scope at the Atlantic, stunned by what he is witnessing.

The ocean is rising skyward in a dark, fast-curling dome of water too immense to comprehend. A thousand feet … two thousand feet, and still it continues to climb, ascending higher than Cumbre Vieja, approaching the height of their own observatory platform!

Kevin Read sees the deep blue mountain of water with his naked eye just before it collapses. The scientist trembles in fear, knowing all too well what he has just witnessed—a cone of water, powered by five thousand trillion joules of kinetic energy from the Cumbre Vieja landslide.

The sound reaches them twenty seconds later—a hundred thousand Niagara Fallses driving a 360-foot-high wave! The megatsunami rolls away from the southwestern tip of La Palma, racing across the Atlantic Ocean toward the eastern coastline of North and South America at five hundred miles an hour.

YELLOWSTONE PARK, WYOMING
9:47 A.M. (LOCAL TIME)

The monster had been sleeping. Six hundred forty-two thousand years. Its heart was the Earth’s core and its blood the magma that heated the caldera’s vacuous belly. In restless slumber it shook and quaked and bulged the lake above its gut when it stretched. It hissed and steamed and occasionally it bled, and though it was probed incessantly it did not awaken because it was old—as old as the earth.

But now the earth was beckoning again, only in a manner that irritated the beast. The quakes that rumbled its gut had grown progressively deeper and sharper, causing the magma that had long crystallized within its belly to percolate. Its insides filled with fresh lava and its blood pressure continued to rise unabated until an ancient threshold was crossed.

Angry, the monster awoke.

It would be the last time.

It was ready to explode. Any minute now.

Jon Bogner choked down the milk of magnesia, praying it would quell the hot churning sensation in his belly. His wife, Angie, had warned him to watch his diet, that the diverticulitis could not be ignored. But he needed something in his stomach before he could handle the harsh antibiotics, and his long hours at the USGS office limited his options to expensive park snacks and fast food.

Admittedly, the breakfast burrito had been a mistake.

The geophysicist chased the chalky antacid with a swig of bottled water and returned to his computer. There were forty-one permanent seismographs spread across Yellowstone Park, a dozen of which had been added over the last twenty-six months when the caldera had begun showing unusual signs of a flare-up. Jon and his seismology team concurred that the earthquakes were tectonic and not volcanic in nature, but the signs were still worrisome. Like the indigestion building in his stomach, the caldera was bulging seven miles beneath the surface, pushing the rocky basin of Yellowstone Lake upward by more than two hundred feet over a half-mile radius. Another bulge, located south of Norris Geyser Basin, had risen thirty-eight inches over the last calendar year, the protuberance spread out over thirty miles.

New mud spots were sprouting up weekly. Ground temperatures on the foot trails were approaching 240 degrees Fahrenheit. Options to deal with the caldera’s threat were discussed. An elaborate system of vents and canals linked to Yellowstone Lake could potentially quell the beast, only Congress decided the $25 billion price tag was “far too excessive for a tourist attraction” and that the US Geological Survey’s “scare tactics” were not appreciated.

Scare tactics? A full-scale eruption of the supervolcano carried the devastating effects of a major asteroid strike. Forget about the lava, which would spread for hundreds of square miles, or the explosion itself, which would kill hundreds if not thousands; the worst problem was the sulfur dioxide–laden ash cloud. With the equivalent impact of ten thousand Mount St. Helens volcanoes, the cloud would span the planet’s upper atmosphere, reflecting the sun’s life-giving solar radiation back into space. Global temperatures would plummet, crops would die, then the animals, then the people. Nuclear winter would consume the planet for years to come.

But hey, there was some good news: at least the ongoing oil wars in Venezuela and Nigeria would end, saving any surviving US taxpayers a trillion dollars a year.

The rumbling builds again. Jon Bogner stands, ready to dash to the toilet, when he realizes the disturbance is not coming from his stomach.

Caitlyn Roehmholdt is growing impatient. The twenty-four-year-old Japanese translator has blisters on her feet from walking across the hot boardwalk in sandals, and her father, Ron, refuses to leave Yellowstone until he videotapes Old Faithful.

“Dad, enough already.”

“One more minute. Five, tops. Trust me, it’ll be worth the wait. Here, listen to this.” He reads from a brochure. “‘Geysers are hot springs with narrow constrictions near the surface that prevent water from circulating freely to allow heat to escape. Old Faithful’s eruptions have increased in both duration and altitude over the last year due to an increase in earthquakes that have rocked the park. There are more than ten thousand geysers in Yellowstone—’”