Titans

by Niall Teasdale

  ‘Impacts that size…’ Nick was frowning as he spoke. ‘Dust would have been thrown into the air. There would have been rapid cooling. There’s nothing there to suggest a true extinction event, but things would have been bad.’

  ‘It gets worse. The west side of North America looks like it was entirely demolished. There’s evidence of a tsunami on Hawaii and Japan. Several of the Pacific Rim volcanos don’t match the shape they were in our image maps.’

  ‘So, severe volcanic and tectonic activity. My hypothesis was, unfortunately, correct. As on Titan, Earth experienced worse effects from the gravitational wave than we did.’

  ‘Merde,’ Joe said flatly.

  ‘So, we’re talking about some sort of apocalypse?’ Sophia asked. ‘My home is under a meteor crater. The world has been plunged into, well, darkness. What do we do?’

  There was silence for an indeterminate period. It might have been seconds or minutes. Everyone was making their own assessment and having their own waking nightmares.

  ‘We can’t stay here,’ Mercy said eventually. ‘I mean, we could for a while. We have food, water, air, and power, but we’ll eventually run out. And… Well, I think we should pick somewhere and go down.’

  ‘New York,’ Nick said. ‘There are clearly people in New York.’

  ‘And those radio transmissions probably came from there. There are organised people there. From the images we have of daytime there, we could probably land in the Battery.’

  ‘If we cannot go to Paris,’ Joe said, ‘then New York is acceptable.’

  ‘Yes,’ Sophia agreed.

  ‘Why would they go to New York?’ Nick asked. ‘Surely any attempt to re-establish government would happen in DC.’

  ‘I have a theory on that,’ Mercy replied. ‘With the flood defences and water on three sides, the city’s easier to defend. You’d just need to mount patrols and fortify the north end of Manhattan. It wouldn’t be perfect, but it would be easier than DC.’

  ‘That they need a defensible position is not the best sign.’

  ‘Agreed, but it’s that or pick a random spot and hope. Are we agreed?’ No one said anything, but there were nods. ‘Okay. Let’s pack anything we think would be useful. Anything personal you want to take. We’ll take as much food and water with us as we can. Let’s aim to leave in two hours.’

  ~~~

  ‘We’re ready,’ Joe said over the intercom. ‘Pallas is prepped. We just need you.’

  ‘On my way,’ Mercy replied. ‘There’s just one last thing.’ Releasing the intercom key, she turned to a panel in the wall in Daryn’s cabin and popped it open. Beyond it was a safe with a keypad lock. She knew the number by heart; Daryn had been the only other member of the crew who had the combination. Theoretically, after Daryn’s death, Mercy should have given Joe the combination for emergencies, but she had never quite got to it.

  Inside the safe were a number of things critical to handling emergency situations. There was a book of directions on how to handle various unlikely circumstances. There was a section in there on how to handle encounters with sentient life. Another section handled what to do should a contagious alien disease of some sort infect the crew. Several of the sections referred you to the snap-open card which gave the codes needed to cause Theia’s self-destruction. There was also a case containing a pistol and two magazines of frangible rounds suitable for use on a spaceship. That was the final recourse should one of the crew go nuts or decide to mutiny.

  There was nothing in the book about what to do should they return to a devastated Earth, otherwise Mercy would have had more of a clue. The playbook seemed pretty useless, so she ignored it. The pistol on the other hand…

  Taking it, she dropped it into the small rucksack she was carrying her personal belongings in. Then she headed for the door. This was the end of the Theia project, quite possibly the end of human spaceflight. Words seemed appropriate, but she had none. Still, as she floated in the docking tube to Pallas, Mercy turned and reached back to pat the airlock door.

  ‘Goodbye, Theia. You did a good job. I’m sorry to leave you like this.’

  Then she pushed away from the door and toward whatever lay below.

  Exploration Lander Pallas, over New York City.

  ‘Wasn’t there a park there?’ Joe asked as Pallas descended toward the Battery.

  ‘Yes, there was,’ Mercy replied. She was in the co-pilot’s seat, working the sensor systems. She had visual and lidar views of the area on her screens, and both were showing her nothing like what the area had been like when she had last seen it. ‘Instead, we’ve got two tanks and several fixed gun emplacements. And there’s something very weird about Castle Clinton. It looks like… like someone built a concrete bunker in the middle of it.’

  ‘I am not getting good vibes about this, Mercy. We still have enough fuel to go back to Theia.’

  ‘No one’s pointing guns at us yet. Take us in. There’s an open spot to the south of the… bunker thing. I’m going to try to raise someone on the radio.’ She turned slightly and tapped a button. ‘This is the exploration lander Pallas calling anyone on the ground. Please respond. Over.’ Silence. ‘This is the Pallas. We intend to land south of Castle Clinton. Anyone in that area who can hear me, please respond. Over.’

  ‘Pallas, this is… NYA command.’ The voice was female and the hesitation before it gave a callsign was a little unnerving. ‘Please land in the marshalling area to the south of the bunker. You will be met there. NYA command out.’

  ‘I really don’t like this,’ Joe said.

  ‘What I want to know is what the NYA is,’ Mercy said.

  ‘New York something? Administration?’

  ‘Maybe. Take us down.’ Mercy keyed the internal comms channel. ‘We’re landing. Stay where you are until I’ve found out what we’re dealing with.’

  There was a short pause, and then Nick’s voice. ‘That does not sound encouraging.’

  ‘I’m not trying to be encouraging. Stay put until I’ve checked out whoever’s running this place.’

  ‘Landing in thirty seconds,’ Joe added. He was already in vectored thrust mode and gliding the ship in toward a concrete platform south of the old walls of the fort and over the tall mass of the flood defence wall which, he noted, had machine gun emplacements on top of it. ‘Three metres. Two… touch down. Engine powering down and I see men with guns running toward us.’

  Mercy could also see them on her screen. Men in combat fatigues with assault rifles. ‘We have just come out of nowhere and landed beside their bunker.’ She shifted her camera view to look at the fort. The stone walls of Castle Clinton were still there, but they had been added to in concrete. The structure was now three times the height and apparently constructed from solid concrete. Up on the top of it, she could see machine guns pointing out in all directions.

  ‘This is going to be interesting,’ she said. Then she unbuckled her harness and headed for the rear door of the cockpit.

  ‘Be careful,’ Joe said.

  ‘Sure. If it looks bad, I want you to take off and head for Theia.’

  ‘But–’

  ‘That’s an order, Capitaine.’

  Joe glowered at her back and then shook his head. ‘Understood, Colonel.’

  The gravity pressed down hard on Mercy’s shoulders as she made her way to the starboard airlock. She had become too used to the lower gravity of Theia and Titan. All the exercise in the world could not make up for feeling the pull of Earth-normal gravity. Maybe it was something else too; the thought of going down to meet armed men outside the ship was pressing on her as well. She felt strangely anxious. The hair on her neck was standing up with that prickling feeling you get sometimes when you think something bad is about to happen. The airlock needed no time for depressurisation on Earth, so it took only a few seconds to get through to the stairs which had deployed from the side of the lander and then down to the ground below.

  Then she raised her hands because there were around twenty men wit
h weapons aimed at her in front of her. ‘My name is Colonel Mercy Garner, US Marine Corps. Could I speak to your commanding officer?’

  A woman who had to be in her twenties emerged through the double rank of troops. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt with army boots and a tactical vest. Her hair was blonde and fell to her upper chest on her right. The left side was shaved back to stubble. She was pretty, really quite beautiful, slim, and fit. She looked like she should be wearing a cheerleader costume and be in high school. Blue eyes examined Mercy with something between interest and confusion.

  ‘Good afternoon, Colonel Garner. Am I right in remembering that Pallas was the name of the lander sent to Titan aboard the Theia?’

  ‘That’s right. We–’

  ‘That mission was believed lost. There was little time to mourn before the Wave hit, but we did mourn you. There was a crew of eight.’

  Mercy looked at the woman, almost a teenager, in front of her. She remembered something which had happened fifty years ago? ‘Not all of us made it.’ And why was this strange woman not giving her name?

  ‘I see. There are more inside, and you’ve come out to make sure we’re not going to shoot you.’

  ‘That about covers it. I should point out that my pilot is under orders to take off at the slightest sign of trouble, and that the engine exhaust will likely kill you all before you can get out of the way.’

  The blonde smiled. ‘It’s lucky then that I believe you. Even if we thought you all dead, I don’t see how anyone could fake that ship. I’m sorry we can’t manage a better reception for our returning heroes. However, you need to get your crew off that ship and follow me. There’s a storm coming. We have about ten minutes.’

  Mercy looked up at the clear, blue sky. ‘A storm?’

  ‘Not that kind of storm, Colonel. We need to get inside and hope your ship survives. That represents a lot of resource we sorely need. I’m sure you have a lot of questions. Come with me and I’ll provide whatever answers I can.’

  New York Authority.

  ‘The crew of the Theia were heroes for as long as they were remembered,’ the blonde woman said. ‘I suppose they still are to some.’ She was sitting behind a big, dark-wood desk, which would have looked more impressive if it had not been so worn. Someone had salvaged it from somewhere, which seemed to be something of a theme.

  The office was in the middle of the bunker, which had concrete walls about a metre thick and massive iron doors to the outside world. There had still been no sign of a cloud in the sky when the team had been escorted in and led through corridors with bare concrete walls. Occasionally you could see into a room off the corridor, and when that happened you saw random office furniture and bored people. Some of the people were in fatigues, others in casual clothes. No one wore a suit that could be seen. Extra chairs had been produced from somewhere for the four ‘heroes.’ Straight-backed office chairs which were not especially comfortable.

  ‘You gave us some warning,’ the woman went on. ‘Because of you, it was not as bad as it could have been. And, it was thought, you died giving us that warning, yet here you are.’

  There was an implied question, but Mercy wanted at least one answer before she provided an explanation. ‘If you don’t mind me asking, who are you?’

  ‘Ah! Sorry. I’m used to everyone knowing me by sight. I don’t look the same as I did when you left for Saturn. My name is Faith Richard.’

  ‘President Richard’s daughter was named Faith,’ Nick said.

  ‘They call me President Richard now, though I’m the president of a nation of thirty-five thousand. I’m more like a mayor.’

  ‘Faith Richard was in her teens when we left Earth. You don’t appear to be in your sixties.’

  ‘I turned sixty-four three weeks ago. I’m… Perhaps it would be best to start from the beginning. And I’d like to know how you survived before I tell you what happened here.’

  ‘We don’t really know,’ Mercy said. ‘It seems like we were frozen in time somehow. Theia survived because it was small. The gravity wave didn’t affect it as much. We saw evidence that Titan had suffered more, and we noticed that Saturn’s rings had been disturbed when we flew out, but the ship didn’t take much damage.’

  ‘Our communications system was damaged,’ Sophia said.

  ‘I see,’ Faith said. ‘Messages were sent after the Wave passed Saturn. We never got a reply, but if your comms were down… We called it the Wave because that was how you described it in your reports. It gets capitalised now. By those who know how to write more than their name. It got to Earth on the sixth of February twenty-one oh-three and took around eighteen hours to pass. With your warning, we told people to seek underground shelters. Important people were taken to nuclear bunkers. I don’t think I was important, but I was safely locked away underground with my family when the Wave arrived.’

  ‘Pardon me,’ Joe said, ‘but you don’t seem particularly surprised that we’ve been frozen in time for almost fifty years.’

  ‘It’s not usual, but it’s also not unusual enough for me to think you’re all mad. I’ll get to why. It all comes down to the Wave. Everything does. We’re not sure of everything that happened because communications was among the first things to go. There were power surges which took down power grids across the globe, damaging equipment in most cases. Satellite communications and GPS were destroyed. A lot of exposed electronic systems were hit with massive EMP.’ Faith pointed at a rugged-looking laptop on her desk. ‘We still have computers, but they’re all fifty years old or cobbled together from working parts scavenged from found machines. No wireless networking because we don’t have the equipment or the people to build and maintain them. Besides, higher-frequency radio is unreliable in a storm.’

  ‘Storms again,’ Nick said. ‘Just what kind of storm causes interference with radio?’

  Leaning forward, Faith tapped at some keys on her hardened laptop. ‘I think there are a few outside cameras which still work… Yes, two-A was always reliable.’ She turned the laptop toward them and the camera feed on display became visible.

  There were still no clouds visible but there were obvious indications of wind. Leaves, litter, and some larger items were being thrown around. The wind was intense, but it did not look like anything too extreme. It did, however, look weird: the debris was moving as though trapped in some form of vortex, like a tornado laid on its side. Everything had a weird, blue cast to it as though the scene had been lit by an inexperienced lighting director, heavy on the blue filters. Lightning arcs burst from the clear sky, apparently coming out of nothing. Where they struck the ground, streamers of plasma burst from the impact point to lash out at the structures surrounding them.

  ‘We call them Wave Storms,’ Faith said. ‘They aren’t natural. They are deadly. They come out of nowhere, cover anywhere from about a thousand yards to twelve or thirteen miles, and last for anything from twenty minutes to three hours.’

  ‘You say the camera is working, but it appears to be seeing too much blue,’ Nick said.

  ‘No, the colour is right. What you’re seeing is ionised nitrogen and oxygen excited to emit light. The air is glowing. The ionisation effects explain the lightning from a clear sky, I’m told, but you never entirely get used to seeing the air emitting light around you.’

  ‘We saw plasma streams like that aboard Theia,’ Mercy said. ‘One of them killed our senior engineer.’

  ‘They’ll do that, but the storms themselves are deadly. There’s some… energy within them that affects most people badly.’

  ‘Badly like disintegration, extreme pain, cooking from within, or exploding?’ Nick asked.

  ‘That would be among the symptoms.’

  ‘That’s how we lost three more people,’ Mercy said. ‘How is it still happening? The Wave passed by fifty years ago.’

  ‘I’ll get to that,’ Faith said. ‘With communications down, we can only guess at some of what happened. The Cascadia fault seems to have been ripped open along its ent
ire length. The resulting earthquake and tsunami more or less destroyed everything along the west coast. A lot of volcanos began to erupt. Around the Pacific Rim, Yellowstone, and some of the active ones in the north west. High-energy particles from the Wave struck the atmosphere, reducing the ozone layer by thirty to fifty percent depending upon who you ask. Storms like what’s outside, but much worse, hit all over the planet. We’re not sure how many died in the first eighteen hours. We had ten billion people on the planet before the Wave. If there are a billion left, I’d be surprised. It’s probably a lot less.’

  ‘We surveyed most of the planet,’ Mercy said. ‘Not extensively, but we found very little evidence of humans. Almost no light at night. Campfires in a few places. Artificial lights in a smaller number. This area was one of the brightest.’

  Faith nodded. ‘After the initial disaster, we had to deal with the aftermath. The depleted ozone layer had less of an initial impact because of all the volcanic dust in the atmosphere. We had two years of severe winter. Crops failed across the world where they were even being cultivated. More people died. We came out of our bunker after two years and began trying to rebuild. We connected with some army groups and moved to DC, but we had resources people wanted and farming was not exactly back to its pre-Wave level. We moved here in late twenty-one oh-six and the New York Authority was officially founded in twenty-one oh-seven. By then, we’d discovered that the Wave had… left something behind.’

  ‘The Wave Storms?’ Sophia asked.

  ‘Those are a symptom. We’d had reports that compasses were not behaving properly after the Wave. The best guess is that it destabilised the Earth’s magnetic field. There was a brief reversal of the poles between twenty-one oh-three and oh-five, and there continue to be freak areas of reversed or abnormal fields in various parts of the world. The theory is that the Wave set up some sort of standing wave within the Earth’s core which causes the storms and powers… unusual events.’

  ‘Madam President, you are hedging about something,’ Mercy said.