Extinction

by Ray Hammond

  Zaoskoufis kept frantically busy trying to get essential data out to those fighting the worst catastrophes. But he kept seeing in his mind the horrifying model of just this sort of global seismic cataclysm that Emilia had generated in his Simulation Theater only a few weeks earlier. As he worked he kept praying that there had been some fault in their computer simulation. If there wasn’t, he dreaded what was likely to develop over the coming days.

  Then the whole of the Athens facility itself shuddered as it was hit by the first shock of what would become Greece’s largest-ever earthquake. Geohazard’s own seismic sensors measured this first event at Magnitude 8.1. The lights went out, the data displays died. Giorgio Zaoskoufis clung to the edge of the console’s counter as the shaking increased. Then the emergency lighting flickered on, and the read-outs returned to life.

  ‘Everybody OK?’ he yelled to those picking themselves up from the floor.

  Just then another quake hit, this time 9.1 – one magnitude stronger than the first. But the Magnitude scale is logarithmic: one additional magnitude means that its shock is thirty-two times greater than the one that immediately precedes it on the calibration. The first quake to hit the suburb of Piraeus had released energy equivalent to the explosion of one billion tons of TNT, but the following Magnitude 9.1 shock was equal to thirty-two billion – or a 32,000,000-megaton thermonuclear explosion.

  Geohazard’s monitoring centre in Athens – and all those in it, instantly ceased functioning.

  *

  In their TV gallery, Perdita Curtis and her boss Narinda were working side by side to continue feeding live pictures of the Earth’s serial seismic explosions to the group of powerful people with whom they were temporarily stranded on the moon.

  As soon as the mega-tsunami had hit American soil, President Underwood had announced his intention to ferry himself back to Earth immediately – to be with his stricken people and to lead his nation from the front in their time of catastrophe. He also needed to steady the hastily relocated American stock markets; most insurance companies had already seen their stocks suspended, and banking shares were all in free fall.

  But since the Kennedy Lunar Terminal had been washed away, the President was advised that he must delay his return journey. His aides needed to speak first with their Russian and Chinese counterparts, to make safety arrangements for the presidential landing and put proper security procedures in place. Although now routine, space flight was not yet as straightforward as air travel.

  The visiting party had been delayed almost forty-eight hours beyond their planned departure time. Luna City’s adjacent Hilton, Ritz and Interplanetary hotels had plenty of accommodation available, but everybody kept coming back to congregate in the main meeting hall – they felt a need to be together.

  Extra tables and seating had been brought into the hall and doctors from the Luna City Medical Center provided tranquillizers to all who asked for them.

  Over this two-day period, individuals had periodically broken off from their huddled groups to check the monitors for television reports. The most telling pictures were those transmitted by the BBC crew located on the orbiting ERGIA climate-control station.

  These pictures showed volcanic smoke, ash and debris beginning to obscure large parts of the planet. From the space station’s deep orbit it was possible to observe that a thick volcanic fog was slowly spreading around the entire globe.

  ERGIA technicians worked with TV engineers to tap into signals transmitted from close-orbit Earth telescopes. These were specially instructed to focus downwards onto the mother planet: they soon revealed a sequence of spacecraft taking off from Russian, Chinese and South American launch sites, blasting out of the Earth’s atmosphere every few minutes to rendezvous with orbiting space stations and hotels. It seemed that the rich and powerful were beating a prudent retreat.

  Orbiting telescopes also revealed some of the less wealthy trying to escape the encroaching volcanic cloud. Commercial jets and private planes could be seen taking off from just in front of the thick brown engine-clogging miasma as it rolled out to envelop the world. These fleeing craft were hopping from continent to continent in a vain effort to deliver their passengers from the choking volcanic vog.

  Eventually the pictures showed a planet completely shrouded in a veil of hot ash. Geohazard’s remote instruments indicated that earthquakes and eruptions had ripped open the surface fabric of the Earth along all its tectonic joints, faults and volcanic chains. Meanwhile, beneath the oceans over 14,000 volcanic chimneys were engaged in a continuous simultaneous explosive venting.

  Everything at ground level appeared to be cloaked in a ghostly twilight, with lightning-filled volcanic storms raging even over areas unaffected by any direct form of geophysical disturbance. Images of shattered city landscapes, burning buildings, flooded coastlands and heaped-up corpses had become so commonplace that they had almost lost their power to shock. Every TV station in the world that was still on air was transmitting scenes of Armageddon.

  As they worked their exhausting shifts in the TV gallery, Perdy and her boss said little to each other. What they were witnessing was beyond words. But now Perdy did call Damle’s attention to one particular incoming image.

  ‘Is that an aurora borealis?’ she asked, puzzled.

  The screen displayed a wide shot of the entire planet Earth. No oceans or continents could any longer be made out through the thick dark smoke and ash suspended in the atmosphere, but electric-blue haloes seemed to be flaring out into space above each pole.

  Damle shook his head. ‘No, I don’t think so. An aurora is an atmospheric phenomenon – that looks as if it’s extending way out into space.’

  ‘I’ll patch it through to the meeting hall,’ said Perdy. ‘Some of the scientists out there may be able to identify it.’

  *

  Twenty-four hours later, communications with Earth were becoming increasingly difficult. What looked like an aurora borealis and an aurora australis had been identified by Dr Emilia Knight as auroral electrojets – powerful electromagnetic discharges generated by dynamic forces deep within the planet’s core.

  ‘This is what we were warning about,’ Emilia informed Perdy Curtis sharply. ‘If you remember, we showed you a computer simulation of exactly this occurring when we visited you in your office.’

  Perdy hung her head, realizing that she had actually paid little attention to the real message her contributors had been giving her. She had only been interested in creating a provocative debate.

  An atmosphere of deep alarm, of something close to panic, was now spreading within the trapped lunar community. Their e-mails, calls and video links down to the home planet were frequently dropping out, and many found themselves unable to contact families or friends. Most of them had given up staring at the frequently interrupted broadcast signals, but now they began to gather by the windows of the LunaSun administration block; the events on Earth had grown to such a scale that they could clearly be observed by the naked eye – even from a quarter of a million miles away.

  In place of the glorious blue and white image that impressed itself on the soul of every space traveller, they could now see only a dim brown ball. Alarming electrical discharges from either pole were clearly visible against the star-studded blackness of the galaxy, as mauve rings and hoops crackled outwards deep into space.

  Emilia Knight had now briefed all the political leaders on Fivetrees’s theory of magnetic-pole reversal, while Steve Bardini had finally been given the opportunity to run the computer simulation in its entirety, several times, even making a presentation to a shocked and silent Nicholas Negromonte.

  But having been proved right provided no satisfaction, nor did the scientists’ model provide any reassurance. It now seemed as if the Berkeley professor’s theory had indeed been vindicated. But just how much more extreme would be the planet’s ultimate reaction to such a violent magnetic upset remained to be seen.

  Emilia and Steve were still receiving Geohazard sate
llite data suggesting that ocean levels were now rising rapidly. As they provided regular progress updates for the stranded visitors, Perdy realized that the geophysical scientists should really be providing this valuable service for others back on Earth – if any there were still able to pick up satellite broadcasts.

  But even as she started to raise this idea with her boss, there was a break in the magnetic interference and a screen crackled to life. It was the BBC’s Head of News in London.

  ‘Can you take over control of the ongoing broadcast?’ asked Robin Holmes, speaking from BBC World headquarters. ‘Most of London is under water, and we’re currently running on generator power.’

  ‘I understand,’ Damle confirmed.

  ‘We’ve lost most of our news crews and affiliate feeds but I’ll patch everything we’ve still got up to you.’

  ‘We can relay the signal to our transmitter satellites from the ERGIA space station,’ said Damle. ‘It’s in such a deep orbit that it seems to be unaffected.’

  ‘Switching to you in thirty, then,’ said Holmes.

  ‘Quick, get everybody in here,’ Damle hissed to Perdy. As she rushed out of the gallery to round up the rest of their production team, Damle glanced up at his Head of News again.

  ‘I can’t reach my mother . . .’ he began. ‘She lives in Greenford, Middlesex.’ He was working frantically at the board to get them ready to broadcast to the entire world.

  ‘She should be all right,’ his boss assured him. ‘Sea levels are rising but Greenford’s on fairly high ground. Coming to you in ten.’

  ‘God be with you, Robin,’ muttered Narinda.

  ‘And you’re live – now,’ said Holmes.

  *

  In Greenford, Middlesex, a suburb about one hour to the west of central London, it was not the rising water level that was troubling widowed Mrs Naresh Damle, Narinda’s elderly mother. Her problem, and the problem for all others in Southern England, was volcanic ash.

  Those of her grown-up children who still lived nearby had already taped up all of her window cracks and door openings, as the repeated emergency radio broadcasts were advising citizens to do, but micro-fine particles of soot were still finding their way into every corner of the house.

  Although it was mid-afternoon in Britain, it was so dark outside that Mrs Damle had been forced to light her emergency candles. Wild stratospheric winds were blowing ash across the UK from volcanoes in Mexico and Canada and everything outdoors had been turned into a negative of an old-fashioned snow scene. All was coated black.

  Mrs Damle had been coughing for three days as the ash content in the atmosphere increased. What the government’s emergency broadcasts had not told their citizens was that a proportion of the volcanic cinders contained both carbon dioxide and hydrogen peroxide, toxins that destroyed both the lining and the pulmonary system of the human lung.

  As the radio broadcasts suggested, wet towels held across the mouth did reduce coughing fits, but Mrs Damle no longer had the strength to protect herself in this way. Even as her younger son on the moon was assuming personal control of the BBC’s global news output, she was on her hands and knees in her bedroom, literally coughing up pieces of her blackened lungs. A massive and fatal heart attack finally ended her misery.

  All over Britain, Europe and the rest of the world, volcanic ash was competing with flood water to take the most lives.

  *

  ‘At least twenty thousand volcanoes on land or under the seas are currently in major eruption,’ Emilia Knight said, staring straight into the camera lens. ‘As a result, a countless number of tsunamis are now in train across all of the world’s oceans. All coastal regions up to twenty miles inland must be considered extremely dangerous and should be immediately evacuated. Relocate to higher ground – at least one hundred metres above normal sea levels.’

  Nobody knew whether her warning was being heard on Earth.

  ‘One hundred and sixty-two earthquakes above Magnitude 8 have occurred in the last twelve hours, and a further seven hundred and thirteen of similar intensity are predicted by this time tomorrow.’

  Although Emilia had frequently made guest television appearances, she had never before taken on the role of live reporter. But the situation was beyond all normal feelings of novelty or nerves; she was a professional geoscientist, and she now had a vital job to do. She knew that her image and words were being beamed down to the occluded Earth by three separate satellites for relay on a large number of different television and radio frequencies.

  All two-way contact with the Earth was now lost. Emilia had been able to speak with her sister and parents in Boston until twenty hours ago, but now it seemed no forms of personal communication were possible in the magnetic storm raging around the planet. She suspected that it was very unlikely that her words were reaching people on Earth, but there were thousands of others trapped on orbiting space stations, as well as the pioneers on Mars, who would still be receiving her broadcast.

  The Geohazard satellites were still able to use their infra-red cameras, laser beams and echo-Doppler atmospheric probes to measure events taking place on the Earth itself.

  ‘Sea levels all over the world are rising rapidly,’ continued Emilia. ‘It appears that the Antarctic ice cap is melting.’

  Emilia glanced at her communicator screen. ‘To repeat our main announcements from Luna City: Greater Los Angeles has been struck by a sustained series of earthquakes, all above Magnitude 9. It is likely that the whole metropolitan region has been destroyed and that the entire Los Angeles basin is now under water.

  ‘All contact with ground-based communications services has been lost. In the meantime we shall continue these broadcasts from the moon.

  ‘Finally, our instruments are recording a major disturbance within the Earth’s magnetic field, which may be the cause of the current worldwide seismic activity. The Earth’s magnetic poles now appear to be in the process of reversing themselves. What was the Northern Magnetic Pole is currently situated eighty-three kilometres from the Antarctic coastline, at one hundred and twenty-two point two degrees east, seventy-one point seven degrees south.’

  Emilia hesitated, and then added the words that she had rehearsed. ‘This is Emilia Knight of Geohazard Laboratories, broadcasting for the BBC from Luna City.’

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The moon colony had been self-sufficient for almost a decade. As soon as manned lunar exploration had resumed in the 2020s, significant water-ice reservoirs had been discovered at shallow depths beneath both the north and south poles. The largest of the two natural cisterns, covering almost 2,000 square kilometres, lay in the north.

  Plans had then been developed for piping water 800 kilometres south to serve the Sea of Tranquillity’s enclosed human communities. Such abundant water could be converted into oxygen and hydrogen, and could also irrigate artificially enriched moon soil for the cultivation of genetically modified lunar crops and meat protein. Everything essential for human habitation would thus be to hand.

  Because there was almost no atmosphere on the moon, only four lightweight orbiting solar-reflector arrays and six scalable sunblinds had been required to melt the polar ice and to adjust the alternating two-week periods of lunar day and night so that the extreme ranges of the lunar surface temperature came closer to human tolerances. The same sun reflectors also provided ambient lighting during the long lunar night while ensuring a continuous supply of electric energy produced by high-yield solar-conversion panels.

  At first, the American, Russian and Chinese governments worked closely together to found a single lunar community. But by 2036 it was clear that the use of the lunar surface as a jumping-off point for travel in deeper space was also making the moon highly attractive to commercial developers. On Mars, the discovery of rare gems, pharmaceutical constituents and minerals helped boost the demand for additional lunar launch facilities.

  By the time when Nicholas Negromonte’s company began constructing its vast farm of solar-reflecting mi
rrors on either side of the lunar equator, the moon’s establishment had swollen to include fourteen commercial buildings and three hotels, which served space tourists and the regularly rotating group of moon dwellers. All were linked by airtight, radiation-proof walkways to create the rapidly growing metropolis known as Luna City. The ERGIA Corporation had then erected its three-storey LunaSun administration building beside the existing development, thus extending the total size of the human habitat to over sixteen square miles, more than eight of which were devoted to intensive food production.

  Ten days after Emilia Knight and the BBC team finally gave up broadcasting to what now seemed to be an unresponsive home planet, President Underwood invited all those stranded on the moon to an emergency meeting in the LunaSun assembly hall. Narinda Damle was asked to broadcast the meeting to the Mars colonists and everyone else marooned on Earth-orbit space stations.

  Even before contact with Earth had finally been lost, Geohazard’s satellite sensors had revealed that sea levels on the planet were continuing to rise alarmingly. It was surmised that the intense heat blown upwards by underwater volcanoes had caused ocean temperatures to soar, melting all polar ice. Emilia’s final emergency broadcasts had included a lengthening list of cities that were being lost to the waves.

  As seismic chaos continued in all parts of the globe, even the largest continental land masses – the Americas, Europe, Russia, Asia, Africa, Australia – had started to disappear beneath the overheated waves. But, because of the smokescreen enveloping the planet, the seismologists on the moon could not visually confirm their streams of satellite data.

  For three days after they ceased broadcasting, BBC technicians continued to gather in the gallery to scan the frequencies for any signals sent from Earth. Others from the stranded party also returned to the main hall, gazing up at blank screens as if willing them to crackle into life. But nothing further came from the shrouded planet, even though magnetic interference was slowly beginning to abate.