Prometheus and the Dragon (Atlas and the Winds Book 2) (53 page)

Then the ground snapped under them, more violent than any single jolt from the previous earthquake. More like an explosion. A few seconds later they heard the boom, rattling pieces of the polycon roof coating down on them like concrete snowflakes.

“What the fuck was that?” Jenna Atkins yelled, jumping up and leaping off the front of the stage to avoid one of the chunks falling from above.

“A secondary impact?” Bobby said, shrugging. “A few miles away.”

A new sound started, steadily getting louder. A squeaking groan above them. Andre glanced up at the balconies in time to see the highest one still intact, sagging. “Run!” he hollered, pointing up at the collapsing overhang.

It settled, letting loose and taking the ones below it like dominoes. The ground shook again as tons of concrete and steel cascaded to the floor of the biome.

When the dust cleared, there were no surviving balconies from the top to the bottom of the back wall. Including the one for the Power Center where they’d sheltered Mica.

***

Mount Weather:

Marine One
and the two escort helicopters fought the weather heroically, not weather created as a result of the impact, but the usual run of the mill storm front that had been pushing its way across the country for the last few days. The pilot had tried to keep them high enough to be safe from getting tangled up in the terrain, but when he gained altitude, the storm hammered them harder.

It was cold and snowy, and Sylvia Hutton stared out the window. Her mood matched the weather, frozen solid outside and boiling hot inside. Janice sat beside her, looking like she was trying to hold onto her breakfast, even though she hadn’t had one to speak of. Across from her, in the jump seats by the door, the agents who had arrested her sat watching her and stealing glances outside when they thought she wasn’t looking.

“We’re about three minutes from touchdown,” the pilot announced, his voice almost inaudible over the noise from outside. “Radar puts a wall of ejecta about three hundred miles east. It’s going to be a race to see which of us gets to the pad first.”

“Ejecta?” Janice asked.

“Debris kicked up from the impact,” Sylvia said. “Molten rocks and dirt, mostly.”

“Sounds fun,” she said, rolling her eyes and making a squeaking sound as they bounced through an air pocket.

A couple minutes later the pilot came back on. “It’s going to be real close. We just got an update, and the debris is already on the ground at the pad. It’s still light and we’re only about thirty seconds out ourselves.”

Janice closed her eyes and grabbed the arms of her chair. Sylvia gave her hand a reassuring squeeze. “We’ll be ok,” she said. She crossed the fingers on her other hand.

There was a loud ping and the chopper spun sideways, alarms audible from the cockpit. Another bang and they started shuddering violently. Another, and then one more like a thump.

“Brace yourselves. We’re coming in hard,” the pilot said, sounding like he was reading a grocery list. Not a trace of anxiety in his voice. Sylvia just had time to push her head back into the rest on the chair when they hit, and bounced. The shoulder straps of her seat harness dug in. Both agents slammed into the door as they hit again, one side of the helicopter several feet lower than the other. There was a loud grinding noise and she felt the entire aircraft twist almost to the point of tipping onto its side. The engines stalled.

“Were about thirty feet short of the pad,” the pilot said, appearing at the doorway to the cockpit. “It’s out that side.” He pointed to the left. “You can’t see it from here because of the tektites, but it’ll take us about a minute to get inside.” He pulled rain slickers out of the cabinet beside the door and handed them to the President and Janice.

“They won’t be much help, but put them over your head once you get outside.” He looked at the two agents and nodded, jerking the door open and shoving them out first.

“Move, Move!” he shouted, as flaming chunks of hail rained down through the open hatch. The air outside smelled like a furnace full of rotting chicken eggs, blasting into their faces and making her eyes water. She took a deep breath and leapt into the fiery darkness.

The agents had held their ground, pulling their already smoldering jackets over their heads, grabbing the President and Janice, almost dragging them up the slope toward the landing pad. The concrete was covered with glowing cinders that rolled like marbles under their feet. Slipping and nearly falling several times before they got to the safety of the door, Sylvia swore like a sailor.

Inside, several agents grabbed them, and without offering explanation stripped both women to the skin. It wasn’t until she saw that her clothes were on fire that she stopped to react. She sputtered and glanced behind her where the two men who had helped them through the hailstorm were also busy ripping their clothes off.

“Well, that’s not quite how I expected this to happen,” she said, shrugging. Beside her, Janice glowed bright red, blushing through her blistered skin. “I don’t suppose someone’s got a bathrobe handy?” she asked, putting her hands on her hips and glaring at the men.

“No ma’am,” one of them said, looking at the floor.

“John, get me some clothes,” she said, when the President appeared several seconds later. She didn’t care if he was in charge now, she was pissed enough to be contemplating his assassination.

“Yes ma’am,” he said, blinking in surprise and handing her an epad, before he turned and headed back through the door. It had a live picture of the White House on its screen.

In flames.

***

College of Volcanic Studies, Reykjavik, Iceland

Johann Danskjold sat staring at the monitors. The College, world-renowned for its studies of volcanology, had mounted cameras on almost every volcano in the world. The only center that could rival them was the American center in Hawaii.

Across the room, a map covered with multicolored icons displayed several key factors for each camera location. Showed in dramatic relief was the progression of the ground shock traveling not just through the rocks, but transversely through the mantle itself. When the seismograph at any camera position showed an active earthquake, the icon turned yellow. When there was an eruption, it shifted to red. When, and if, a camera quit transmitting, the location went black.

More than a thousand real-time images were available to him with the touch of a finger on his screen.

In the first instant after Antu slammed into the Earth, the Cascade monitors shut off. No transition colors, just from their normal green, to black. Working, blink, dead. Some seconds later, several more shifted yellow as the shockwave pushed out across the northern edge of the Pacific Plate and into the North American Continental Plate. In less than a minute several of those went to red, and more than one dropped to black shortly thereafter.

He’d watched, calling up several of them on the screen, seeing the tops of mountains explode violently, but what he was waiting to see was Hawaii. The Big Island was the top of the largest shield volcano on Earth, and one of the most steadily erupting locations ever. He watched the ring of shockwaves spreading, the yellow band of icons widening as the crust carried the waves more quickly along the surface. The red zone was growing steadily as well. Much slower, but still moving at more than a thousand miles an hour.

The earthquakes rolled into the Islands within a minute, but the eruption took almost ten minutes to begin. The miniature gas spectrographs they used to detect an eruption in Hawaii were calibrated at a different level than the ones elsewhere, far less sensitive to change because of the continuous background eruptions, so when they went off, he switched to the visual monitor almost instantly.

The screen was black.

“Is that camera dead?” he asked the technician who sat in front of him on the next level down.

“No, Dr. Danskjold,” he said. “It shows as still active.”

“Can we boost the brightness and see if we’re under a smoke cloud?” he asked.

“Ja,” the tech said, tweaking the controls on his screen. The image started to show a little definition. A thin, dark-gray line, close to where the horizon should be.

“Interesting,” he said, calling up the other telemetry to see what else he could tell. Air temperature reading was an unbelievably hot eighty-seven degrees Centigrade, and rising at more than five degrees a minute. He called up the GPS data and that’s when his heart stopped for a second. The camera was changing altitude. At more than two hundred meters a minute.

“Get a weather satellite on the screen, over the Pacific. Quickly!” he hollered. The screen shifted to an image of the Pacific, or what should have been the Pacific. A dark cloud of dust was rolling down from the northeast obscuring everything beneath. The glowing crater visible, and almost painfully bright in the far upper corner of the image. What was more unbelievable to Dr. Danskjold was Hawaii itself. It looked like a blackened, overripe orange, slowly turning itself inside out. There was a split in the crust three hundred miles wide, and the mantle itself was pouring out onto the surface, looking determined to create a whole new continent.

He glanced out the window beside his desk and down at the ocean, probably fifty feet below, wondering just exactly how large that eruption had to get before it displaced enough water to be a problem.

***

Stormhaven:

It was a strange, disconcerting feeling to be suddenly and utterly deaf and blind, even for a computer that dealt in absolutes, and yet had learned to accept the humans around it were often more gray than pink. A small portion of her processors had failed, unnoticeable except for the mathematical precision required for her awareness. For now, she would reroute around the damaged section and proceed with her analysis of the situation.

There must have been additional damage done to the structure of Stormhaven, and something had severed her links with her I/O interfaces. Unfortunately she had no senses except for these interfaces, and without them there was no way to assess what had happened. There was no inner ear, or its digital analogue, to detect physical motion. Of course there were seismographs, but they were all accessible only through the abstraction of the interface systems.

She could tell, at a rudimentary level, she was still oriented in a vertical direction by knowing which of her circuits were being cooled first. The design of her interior was partially constrained for gravity flow for the electrofluid pumps. As long as the difference in temperature maintained its typical rate from one subsystem to another, she must be positioned in the correct vertical orientation.

The pump systems still operated at nominal voltages, indicating no restrictions to flow rates, therefore no constricted coolant lines. She tested the local power supplies and felt something akin to relief when all of them were still operating. Any single one would provide more than enough power to keep her core array operational, so having the assurance that all eight were still available was reassuring.

Now the question was, how long would it be before someone would be available to restore her I/O capability? With no way to tell if anyone outside had survived, she contemplated the disadvantages of living eternally. Especially when you measured time in picoseconds.

***

Sentinel Colony:

“Dr. Rosnikov, I am sorry to interrupt, but I have several items requiring your attention that are rather urgent,” Papa said over her comlink. She stood behind Ambassador Kuromori waiting for the reception to begin. She was almost relieved that the computer intruded, except she understood when he said urgent, it usually was euphemistic for freaking critical.

“Go ahead,” she said, stepping back and ducking around a potted tree that had been hauled out onto the platform.

“The last four ships from Stormhaven are en route,” he said.

“Four?” she asked, knowing there had been five.

“Yes,” Papa said. “The
Draco
was destroyed in combat with the Army of the Holy Right.”

“Oh my God,” she said, feeling her throat constrict in fear. “Is Dave alright?”

“He is injured, but not in critical condition,” he said. “They are bringing them straight here.”

“Right, I’ll be there as soon as I can,” she said, almost disconnecting before she remembered that he’d said several things required her attention. “What else?”

“We are receiving a very low-power distress call from the
Joseph Smith.
It was still in Earth orbit and was damaged by a collateral effect of the impact,” it said. “I assume it was an atmospheric ridge blown away from the explosion. If they were at an insufficient altitude they would have experienced—“

“Save the technical discussion for later,” she said. “Where are they?”

“In a long elliptical orbit with an inclination of—“ it started to explain but she cut him off again.

“Just tell me, can we get to it before they run out of air?” she said.

“Yes,” it said, stopping without additional comment.