by Ray Hammond
Michael was filled with relief, then, suddenly, with extreme weariness.
‘Yes, that’s me,’ he said. He sank down into a nearby armchair. ‘And you are?’
Their initial exchange and verification of personal information took only a few minutes, Michael explaining that his gloves were protection for injuries he had sustained during the earthquake.
‘So what are you doing here and how did you get in?’ asked the lawyer.
Even before Steve Bardini spoke, Michael noted embarrassment in the younger man’s face.
‘Emilia and I were friends – quite close at one time. I used to drop by regularly in the evenings.’
Eventually, Steve admitted what he had witnessed a few nights earlier, when Emilia had been removed by a US Navy ambulance.
‘Why the hell didn’t you ask them what was wrong with her?’ demanded Michael, his alarm growing till his words came out more forcefully than he’d intended.
Emilia’s colleague shrugged, then bit his lower lip. ‘Em had told me to stop coming by. She and I . . . well, we used to go out together. She’d have been furious if she’d have known I was here.’
Michael suddenly understood; the ex-boyfriend hanging around Emilia’s home like a lovesick hound – ordered to stay away but unable to obey. Then he realized that he was meeting his immediate predecessor in the quest for Emilia Knight’s affections. He shook that thought away – first Emilia herself had to be found.
‘Do you have any idea why the Navy was involved?’
Steve nodded. ‘She was admitted straight to the naval hospital in San Diego once we got back from Samoa. They’ve got the only radioactivity treatment centre on the West Coast. I presumed that she’d suffered some sort of relapse. That was the word at work, anyway.’
‘Do you know what she actually found on Samoa?’ asked the lawyer.
Steve considered, then nodded. ‘I saw you discussing your case on the TV news. I knew who you were referring to when you mentioned the find of radioactive rocks.’
‘And she seemed to be becoming ill again?’ prompted Michael.
‘Not as far as I knew,’ insisted Steve. ‘She worked almost non-stop for five days following the quake, and she still seemed to have a lot of energy. I was just . . .’
‘What?’ demanded Michael as the younger man tailed off.
Emilia’s assistant slipped his hand into his trouser pocket and withdrew a slim stainless steel tube. ‘I was just checking background radiation with this when I saw your car pull up. I’ve checked out her bedroom, the kitchen, these armchairs. There’s no trace of radioactivity at all. But at first, everything she even touched started to sing.’
Michael pushed himself out of the low armchair, crossed Emilia’s glowing redwood-strip floor, and stood gazing out of the ocean-facing window. Outside, all was blackness.
After a few moments he turned back to face Steve.
‘I’m very suspicious about all this,’ he said. ‘I’m losing witnesses so fast it’s unnatural. Have you ever heard of Professor Robert Fivetrees?’
Steve nodded. ‘Em told me about him,’ he said. ‘She wanted to run one of his computer models in the Simulation Theater, but we were then too busy after the earthquake.’
‘He was killed earlier this week in a car accident – just up the coast,’ said Michael. ‘No witnesses, no other vehicle involved. Six-thirty on a Sunday morning, and an experienced driver allowed his car to just suddenly sail off the cliff road and out into space.’
He sat down again, on the edge of the armchair. ‘And the woman who put me on to him, she’s also dead. She was accused of being a member of the PFO unit that bombed the ERGIA space station. They claim she committed suicide in her prison cell, last week.’
Steve Bardini now looked horror-struck. ‘You don’t think . . .?’
‘I don’t know what to think,’ said Michael. ‘But I certainly think I’d better go and see my client immediately, wherever she is.’
‘Emilia told me the Naval Hospital is right inside a secure military base,’ said Steve, also rising. ‘You won’t get in there easily.’
‘I will with a court order,’ Michael told him grimly. ‘And I know one or two friendly judges.’
He turned, as if about to leave, then stopped as a thought struck him. ‘But I don’t know how I’m going to get down to San Diego. I’ve got no gas and most of the regular air shuttles have been suspended.’
‘I can get you some gas,’ said Steve. ‘As a Geohazard employee I’ve got a priority card. I can get as much gas as I want.’
The two men standing in Emilia Knight’s living room stared at each other. As so often happens between males who have fought each other physically, an immediate bond had formed.
‘I’m coming with you,’ announced Steve Bardini.
Chapter Fifteen
Reporter Floyd Merryweather, camera operator Jim McGill and pilot Jenny Reibber, all of Channel 7 TV News Honolulu, got their Bell Long Ranger helicopter into the air just as dawn was breaking.
With mains electricity out on all of the Hawaiian Islands, and unsure whether their news centre would be able to continue to run successfully on generator power alone, they grabbed two SatVid uplink units and took on as much fuel as the four-seater could carry. They expected to be in the air for some hours.
As Geohazard Labs in Oakland had warned, a major earthquake had occurred in the Pacific seabed seventy miles north-east of the Hawaiiain island chain. But the quake occurred twelve hours earlier than had been predicted and the resultant tsunami ripped into the northern coastlines of the islands shortly before midnight. The news team was on an assignment to provide the world with the first daylight pictures of the damage.
‘Your feed’s being taken by MSN, CNN and even BBC World,’ said Rob Richos, their producer in Honolulu, over the radio link. ‘Make it a good one, guys. Going live: three . . . two . . . one . . .’
‘This is Floyd Merryweather of Channel 7 News in Hawaii,’ announced the reporter into his close-fitting mouth microphone. Beside him, in the other rear seat, Jim McGill was using the remote controls to sweep the helicopter’s underbelly camera along the coastline of the main island. The sun had now cleared the starboard horizon.
‘A tsunami, sometimes called a tidal wave, came ashore on the Hawaiian Islands in the Central Pacific at eleven fifty-two last night. Eyewitnesses reported it to be over forty feet high, and emergency services say there has been significant loss of life and serious damage on all the islands.’
McGill’s camera was now getting pictures of a blasted landscape that seemed to run inland for miles. Trees were flattened, buildings washed away, and debris covered the entire surface of the now placid sea.
Merryweather was an experienced reporter and for the next thirty seconds he allowed the awful images to do the talking for him.
‘An evacuation order for the northern coasts of these islands was issued by the Governor shortly before seven yesterday evening, but it is thought that many families may still have chosen to remain in their homes overnight.’
Merryweather flicked off his microphone and pulled it away from his mouth. ‘Not that they’ve got any homes left now,’ he muttered over the chopper’s intercom as he gazed along the coast.
McGill said nothing. He just kept the camera trained downwards, poking out of its specially designed plasti-glass filming pod, capturing the stumps of ruined trees, the cars piled on top of each other, and the now roofless bungalows.
‘Turning right,’ warned Jenny Reibber suddenly over the intercom and, after a few more seconds of level flight to allow the camera operator time to zoom out, she banked the helicopter hard to the right and turned out to sea. Merryweather and McGill lifted their heads and shot puzzled glances at the pilot’s back. Wordlessly, she pointed towards the horizon.
Then they saw what had attracted her attention. Jim McGill hastily panned the camera away from the coast, telescoping its long lens to maximum range. On one of the monitors positioned at
his feet, Floyd Merryweather watched the images now being captured.
‘There’s a whole line of capsized ships out to sea . . . very large ships.’ He realized that he was shouting.
Without turning her body, the pilot reached behind her and thrust a map into the reporter’s hands. Then, still with her head turned away, she jabbed a forefinger down onto the map. Merryweather read the contours and understood what she was telling him.
‘It would seem that these ships have run aground,’ he told his global audience, the excitement pushing his voice up half an octave. ‘The seabed to the north of Hawaii shelves very gently, and at a mile or so off the coast the depth is only sixty feet.’
Then the images became clearer and seconds later they were circling over the line of stricken vessels.
‘It looks like part of the US Navy’s Pacific Fleet,’ said Merryweather, his voice rising almost to a treble as he lifted binoculars to his eyes. ‘Yes . . . yes, I can see . . . A United States aircraft carrier is lying on her side. I repeat, a US Navy aircraft carrier has capsized! She’s . . . the USS John F. Kennedy. I can see her name and number clearly now. She appears to have no planes whatsoever on her flight deck. I can make out the entire underside of her hull – it looks as if she’s been swept inshore by the tsunami, and has breached in shallow water.’
Using his joystick controls, Jim McGill panned the camera slowly from right to left along the huge carrier, and then swept the lens forward to the next grounded vessel.
‘That ship is the USS Lincoln . . . she looks like a guided-missile carrier. I can see Navy tugs with lines attached to her side . . .’
They flew on for another thirty seconds. ‘Now I can see the USS Navaho. She too is lying completely over on her side.’
‘Hold up, Floyd,’ said Rob Richos, in Merryweather’s right ear. ‘This might be sensitive stuff. You’re just telling the world that our navy’s out of action.’
Floyd pressed his broadcast-mute button and spoke to his producer in Honolulu. ‘Too late, Rob – they can see for themselves. It’s like another Pearl Harbor attack down there. I can see at least a dozen more capsized ships.’
‘I’m going to cut away for the moment,’ said the producer. ‘I’ve just got a fill-in satellite feed.’
Floyd Merryweather and Jim McGill relaxed involuntarily as they went off air. Then they turned their attention to the broadcast monitor positioned between the helicopter’s two front seats.
They saw an image of a vast number of old cargo vessels clustered tightly around a gleaming white cruise liner, a leviathan which dwarfed all the other ships in the pack. Then a screen caption appeared:
HULK CONVOY SURVIVES PACIFIC TSUNAMI
*
The ERGIA Corporation had spent ten days fine-tuning the weather schedule over central England so that Perdita Curtis and her film crew would enjoy precisely the climatic conditions they had requested for their shoot at Langland Park: sunny, warm, but with a few powder-puff white clouds in the azure September sky. This was a change to the previously published programme; originally each morning had been scheduled to get rainfall.
When climate-management services had first been introduced into Europe in 2031, each population had naturally cast their electronic referendum votes in favour of night-time precipitation and daytime sunshine – other than for the much-demanded, and by now obligatory, white Christmas. But after two years of this agreeable weather pattern, it was discovered that the ecology was suffering, since some species of flora and fauna needed to receive their rain during daylight hours.
As a result, ERGIA and other weather-management service providers started to design more natural weather cycles, even though these improved weather patterns were also delivered according to carefully worked-out schedules laid down three years in advance.
Now, after decades of local climate improvement, Britain had once more developed flourishing resort communities on the southern and eastern coasts. Many domestic and international tourists flocked to the UK’s sun-drenched ‘Rivieras’, more worthy of the name these days than they’d been during the previous century.
The science of weather manipulation was highly complex, but Perdy Curtis had swotted hard to improve her understanding of the techniques involved. She needed to make informed decisions about how much detail to provide to her TV-documentary audience.
Most laypeople understood that the solar energy companies used orbiting space mirrors to reflect focused sunshine down onto the top of cloud formations. Over long periods of time, this energy could disperse warm clouds to prevent rain, or could heat up cold clouds to produce precipitation.
The informed public also knew that incredibly large, self-repairing nano-polymer sunblinds had been placed in deep-space orbits between the Earth and the sun, positioned to provide adjustable areas of shade over both polar ice caps and other areas of the globe that were at risk from overheating. Then, in deep solar-stationary orbits, there were the giant Fresnel lenses, which could focus sunlight into such narrow beams that they delivered microwave energy bursts directly to ground-based receivers.
The amount of previously wasted solar power available for tapping was enormous. Each day the Earth’s surface received naturally solar energy equivalent to 160 trillion tons of TNT, sufficient in seismic terms to split the planet in two. And many million times as much energy streamed straight past the Earth, only to be dispersed in the cold depths of outer space – until ERGIA and others captured some of it, diverting this surplus power back to the planet for the benefit of grateful customers.
The BBC’s Virtual Realization Unit had already created 3-D models and graphics of these technologies and various data titbits for use in Perdy’s film. She intended to mix actual footage of the space mirrors, blinds and lenses along with the VR material, to demonstrate how they worked.
What Perdy was still unsure about was how much she needed to explain the more advanced climate-manipulation techniques such as atmospheric inversion, wind steering, tornado nudging, cloud seeding and slow-ocean warming.
‘You could get too bogged down in the detail and miss the real story,’ she told Torrance Olds, her unit director, as they crossed a manicured lawn in front of the house’s imposing Palladian facade. ‘The interview we’re about to do will provide the real meat of this section.’
Nicholas Negromonte had given the BBC crew the run of his English stately home. Everybody on the team remarked on the outstanding level of cooperation that the ERGIA Corporation was providing. No only were all fourteen members of the film unit being put up in the house’s fine bedroom suites during filming, Negromonte had ordered ERGIA staff to provide them with transport around the extensive grounds, full catering facilities, and even the exclusive use of one of the company’s helicopters.
Olds had been unable to resist this last temptation. He had spent the first day of the shoot getting aerial shots of the house and its surrounding parkland, even though Perdy had warned him that she would be unlikely to be able to use more than thirty seconds’ worth of such establishing footage before the big interview with Mr Negromonte himself.
Then they had shot petabytes of video of the house and its interior, and then of the lake and the Doric temple on its island. Negromonte had even provided them with a flying display in his historic fighter plane.
Now, as Perdy and Torrance Olds climbed the flaring stone steps and walked through the entrance portico under grand Corinthian pillars, they were preparing themselves for the big interview with the ERGIA CEO.
‘I could get used to this,’ chuckled Olds as a footman, anticipating their arrival, opened the large double doors to admit them into the gilded entrance hall.
They had spent the morning in the mirrored dining room, getting its set-up and lighting perfect. A grip had sat in for the ERGIA boss while they found the best camera angles and played with reflections in the large bevelled mirrors that covered much of the walls. They had placed a baronial armchair beside a marble fireplace and positioned Perdy, his inte
rviewer, directly opposite it.
Five cameras had been located carefully; two to record constant close-ups of both interviewer and interviewee, one for a two-shot, one for a long-shot from the other end of the dining room, and a roving Steadicam to provide movement footage for the cutaways.
To her surprise, Perdy now saw that Negromonte was already in position in the large wing chair, a make-up woman applying powder to his forehead. Behind him, two men whom Perdy knew to be from ERGIA’s perception-management consultants stood whispering together.
‘Can we get started, Perdy?’ Negromonte asked, as soon as he saw her. ‘I’ve got to run to a meeting as soon as we’re done.’
She nodded and quickly directed the rest of the crew to get ready. Taking the wing chair opposite Negromonte, she lifted her face for a second make-up artist to add a light layer of shine-killing powder. Perdy wasn’t intending to use much footage of herself in the final film; most of her questions would be heard in voice-over.
All five cameras confirmed that they were recording. Then the floor manager silently counted down with his fingers.
Perdy’s first questions were anodyne, gently leading. She wouldn’t use much of this stuff in the final programme. The early exchanges were intended to warm Negromonte up, to put him at his ease. Not that he needs much warming up, Perdy thought to herself as she listened to him explaining how he had entered the family business.
‘When my father took over Negromonte Oil from my grandfather, all the company possessed was a fleet of tankers and three oil refineries. Thirty years later, when I was still in my teens, Dad had transformed the business into a publicly quoted conglomerate that included aerospace, energy and energy-distribution interests. He’d also moved our family to the United States.’
‘But you had never originally intended to enter the business yourself?’ prompted Perdy.
‘No, my elder brother Chris had been groomed for that role. He was ten years older than me and when my father and mother split up he went to live with Dad whilst I remained with my mother.’
