Sedulity (Book One) Impact

by David Forsyth

  Throughout the theater couples of all ages, nationalities and genders clung to each other in fear. Lydia wished that her husband was with her too, but knew that the lives of everyone aboard were in his hands already. Fire alarms echoed throughout the ship, but the theater seemed to have ridden out the impact without major damage. Mrs. Krystos counted their blessings, said a silent prayer for her husband and others outside the theater, then began trying to calm the passengers and keep them seated until further word came down from the Bridge.

  ****

  Kevin was thrown against the chart table at the Navigation Station and thought he had broken a few ribs when the wind was knocked out of him. The noise of the blast wave was almost more violent than the impact itself. Sounds that should only come from a plane crash or multicar pileup assailed his senses. Then the heat built rapidly amidst the screams of the crew. Kevin would have been screaming too, if the wind hadn’t been knocked out of him. All he could do instead was watch the door to the Bridge bulge and threaten to buckle. The actual impact and overpressure of the blast wave only lasted for a few seconds, but it left a lasting impression on everyone who survived it. The temperature rose instantly to over 100 degrees in the Navigation Room, but then it stabilized and started to fall at the same time that the power went out and emergency lighting clicked on.

  “Dear God!” exclaimed the Captain. “Is everyone alright?” A chorus of responses indicated that the Bridge Crew had all survived and Kevin managed to nod and wave ascent as well. The Captain moved towards the door to the bridge, but Kevin reached out to stop him.

  “Wait,” he gasped, still catching his breath. “It will be hot and there might be fire.”

  “Right,” the Captain agreed. “Mr. Crawford, break out the firefighting gear. We need to secure the Bridge.”

  “Yes, Sir,” the First Officer responded as he collected several of the crew and moved towards the fire locker. A few seconds later they returned with fire extinguishers and breathing apparatus. Mr. Crawford also wore gloves and a heavy jacket. He cautiously opened the door to the Bridge and smoke billowed into the Navigation Room, but thankfully no flames.

  Two crewmen with fire extinguishers and oxygen masks entered the Bridge first. They split up to deal with the scattered fires. The upholstery on the minimalist furniture and a few other flammable items had ignited. Most of the windows were intact. Only the windows jutting out over the side of the ship on the Bridge Wings had actually imploded, allowing the hot blast to sweep into the Bridge from both sides. It would have been a pressure cooker for anyone there at the time. The main windows of the bridge survived because they were constructed of ballistic Plexiglas, bullet proof, as a precaution against pirates and anything Mother Nature could throw at the ship. It took less than a minute to extinguish the minor fires on the Bridge.

  “Well,” the Captain said to Kevin, “it seems as if the ship has survived. I hate to think what would have happened if that had hit us broadside. You were right, Mr. Summers. It probably would have capsized us or gutted the ship. Now it’s time to take stock of the damage and injuries.”

  “I’m afraid it’s not over yet, Captain,” Kevin said.

  “Oh?” Captain Krystos asked with raised eyebrows. “What else?”

  “That was the atmospheric blast wave, next comes the real wave.” He pointed towards the horizon which seemed to be rising ominously in front of the ship.

  Chapter 3:

  The Rogue impacted the center of the Pacific Ocean at a 40 degree angle, traveling at close to 15 miles per second after being slowed marginally by the Earth’s atmosphere. The asteroid was still close to a mile wide, even after its outer shell burned away. With a density of 8,000 kilograms per cubic meter, it’s mostly iron composition packed an explosive force equal to more than a million megatons of TNT – over five hundred times more powerful than all of the world’s combined nuclear weapon stockpiles. The release of this energy upon impact instantly formed a hole in the ocean twenty miles wide and more than a mile deep. Then the asteroid hit the sea floor and created a transient crater twelve miles wide, while penetrating more than four miles deep into the Earth’s crust. The fireball at the point of impact was nineteen miles wide and hundreds of times brighter than the sun.

  More than three cubic miles of water were instantly vaporized and a hundred times more was displaced in the fraction of a second it took the asteroid to reach the ocean floor. Many more cubic miles of the ocean would be turned to steam as the water tried in vain to cover the molten crater on the seafloor. The impact itself caused a massive example of what happens when you drop a large rock into a shallow pond. In those first few moments the ocean tried to escape the Rogue. The effort was in vain, but nonetheless epic in proportion. Many billions of gallons of seawater were pushed away from the point of impact, creating a wave of water the likes of which Earth had not experienced in eons.

  Of course water was not the only thing driven out from the impact zone. A massive blast wave, dwarfing what would have been produced by all the nuclear bombs and warheads in existence, spread out at the speed of sound ahead of the wall of water. The blast wave propagated in every direction, but dissipated quickly in the thinner upper atmosphere. At sea level it remained a solid wall of compressed and superheated air. It arrived at the SS Sedulity eight minutes after impact, travelling at 764 miles per hour, with an overpressure of 33 pounds per square inch, shattering windows, bending metal, igniting exposed clothing, paper and wood, while causing third degree burns to exposed human skin.

  They say that the explosion of Krakatoa was the loudest sound in recorded history, heard over 3,000 miles away, but it paled in comparison to the heralding call of the Rogue. Windows would shatter in Australia, Indonesia, and Hawaii. The effects closer to the impact were so extreme that only a handful of reports were ever made. Initial reports of the blast wave from islands and coastlines around the Pacific Rim were followed by silence when the real waves arrived.

  ****

  Armando didn’t know how long it took him to put out the fire. It was a timeless battle. He manhandled the fire hose, adjusting it from a wide spray to tight stream and back again, knocking down one set of flames only to turn and attack another conflagration. He wore a breathing mask and found himself yelling into it, like a berserker in battle. The Sky Lounge was a disaster area when he suppressed the last stubborn fires.

  The walls and ceiling were blackened by soot and scorch marks. Tables and chairs lay scattered in smoking piles of debris. Not a single window in the lounge had survived the blast wave, so air rushed through the room, driven by the ship’s own speed, and swiftly cleared out the smoke. Armando finally turned off the fire hose and removed the breathing apparatus. His scorched hands were shaking and he gulped air in ragged breaths. Now that he had a moment to take stock of the situation, the reality of what he had just gone through began to sink in. He shivered and shook with nervous tension, or possibly the onset of PTSD. Nothing in his life offered any form of comparison to what had just happened.

  Armando looked around the ruins of the Sky Lounge in disbelief. Then he turned towards the gaping holes where the windows had been and stared at the still glowing horizon. Something didn’t seem right, and not just the faux sunrise. No the horizon itself was moving, growing, climbing into the sky. Was it another blast wave sweeping over the ocean? He didn’t think he could survive another one of those. But this looked different than the wall of compressed and superheated air that he had witnessed before. This time the ocean itself was rising like a rolling foothill, building into a gigantic wave that was bearing down on the ship at high speed. “Dios e diablo,” he muttered in shock.

  ****

  “Bridge crew! Man your posts!” Captain Krystos barked. “What do we have on radar?”

  “We don’t have any radar, sir,” a crewman replied. “It must have been torn off or burned out.”

  “Right,” the Captain said. He took a pair of binoculars out of a wall cabinet, handling them gingerly becau
se they were hot to the touch. Focusing on the horizon, his breath caught in his throat. The night was clear, aside from the massive and glowing mushroom cloud spreading along the horizon, but that horizon was rising to obscure the lower portion of the cloud. “Tsunami?” he asked no one in particular.

  “Impact displacement wave,” Kevin clarified. “There will probably be Tsunamis too – caused by earthquakes and eruptions along the entire Pacific Rim, or Ring of Fire – but this one is from the asteroid hitting the ocean. It’s like stomping your boot in a puddle.”

  “How big will it be?” the Captain asked.

  “Who knows?” Kevin replied. “How deep is the ocean here?”

  “Several thousand meters,” the Captain said.

  “Good,” Kevin said in relief. “Then it probably won’t break on us. But it’s big and moving fast.”

  “What do you suggest we do?” Captain Krystos inquired.

  “Keep going towards it?” Kevin said as more of a question than answer. “Ride up and over it? I don’t think we have any other option.”

  “Right,” the Captain agreed, then he turned back to the Bridge crew. “Full speed ahead, all engines. Steady as she goes on 90 degrees true. Is the public address system working?”

  “I think so, Sir,” Mr. Crawford answered. “And Sir? We are showing multiple fire alarms on decks four through fourteen.” Those were all the decks of the superstructure above the line of the hull, from the lifeboat deck to the top of the ship. Most of those upper decks were lined with balcony staterooms that may have been gutted and ignited by the blast wave.

  The Captain nodded calmly and picked up the microphone. “Attention please. This is your Captain speaking. All hands prioritize fighting fires and render assistance to any passengers in distress. Secure all watertight doors. I repeat, secure all watertight doors. The ship has made it through the initial blast wave, but we are facing another major event…” His words trailed off as he failed to come up with a proper description of the danger. “All hands and passengers should stay away from windows and open decks, find a secure position, and brace for another impact. God willing, we will make it through this one too.”

  ****

  Amanda huddled with Emily under an emergency light in the stairwell lobby. A knot was forming where she had hit her head, but the worst seemed to be over. However, she could smell smoke and hear screams echoing up the stairwell from where the other passengers had fled. A wave of heat had passed through the lobby and fire alarms continued to sound. Then the Captain’s voice came over the loudspeakers, warning of continued fire danger and another unnamed but impending threat. At least he hadn’t given the order to abandon ship yet.

  “It’s okay, Emily,” Amanda told her five year old daughter. “Daddy will be here soon.”

  “I’m scared, Momma,” the child said with tears running down her cheeks. “What’s happening?”

  “Don’t be scared, baby. Daddy says we’ll be safe here,” Amanda said as she brushed Emily’s blonde hair out of her green eyes and hugged her tightly. “We just have to wait here a little longer. Daddy is coming soon, you’ll see.”

  Amanda prayed that saying those words would make it so, but inside she was terrified. The impact, the heat, the smoke, and now a warning of more to come were almost too much. She might have broken into hysterics, if not for the instinctual need to comfort and protect her daughter. She did trust Kevin implicitly, and would wait for him until the last moment, but her inner doubts couldn’t help arguing that it might soon be time to take Emily down to the lifeboats.

  ****

  Lieutenant Reiner pulled himself up from behind the slot machine where he had been thrown by the impact of the blast wave. The ship’s casino was one of the muster stations that thankfully did not have windows. It and the people sheltering within it had been spared the worst of the heat and blast. That is not to say they were unscathed. Far from it. Reiner could see quite a few passengers sprawled unmoving on the floor. Others were moaning. Some were screaming. Nevertheless, the majority seemed to at least be alive.

  He was alarmed to see clouds of smoke billowing into the casino from the direction of the Martini Bar and it sounded like most of the screams were coming from that direction. He gathered himself and rushed across the room, issuing empty reassurance to anyone who could hear him. This was worse than any of the catastrophic events the crew prepared for. But where there was smoke there was fire, and that was one threat that all the crew were trained to combat. Lieutenant Reiner gathered four crewmembers he saw in the casino and ordered them to join him as he headed into the smoke.

  Automatic fire suppression sprinklers were spraying water everywhere in the Martini Bar. Even sprinklers that were not directly above a fire had been triggered by the heat that accompanied the blast wave when windows imploded. Fortunately only a few windows were broken here. Unlike the Sky Lounge, whose windows overlooked the bow, the windows near the muster stations faced out along the side of the ship. For the most part the blast wave had swept along these windows, instead of hitting them head-on. Yet the few windows that had broken, and the doors to the deck that had been blown off their hinges, were more than enough to admit hellfire and wreak havoc on the room and its occupants.

  Not much in the Martini Bar was flammable, aside from alcohol, decorations and seat cushions. Sadly, the other flammable things were clothing. Human torches rolled and writhed on the deck amidst the sickly sweet smell of burning flesh. Other burning lumps had already stopped moving and screaming. Reiner was frozen for just a second by the sight, before heading for a firefighting cabinet and passing out extinguishers to the crew that followed him.

  By unspoken agreement they focused first on putting out the fires engulfing those who were obviously still alive. Then they shifted to the unmoving bodies of crispy corpses, before turning to deal with the flames rippling along the walls and furniture. The automated sprinklers helped, but nothing could detract from the horror of the overall scene. Close to a hundred passengers had been clustered at this must station. Ten or twenty of them might walk away from it in one piece. The rest were either dead, seriously injured or too badly burned to move under their own power.

  Lt. Reiner was horrified to see that one of the badly burned survivors was his boss, Staff Captain Stevens. His hair was burned away and what remained of his uniform was black instead of white now. In fact, he would have been unrecognizable if not for the four gold stripes on the singed epaulet upon his shoulder. After directing the rest of the crew with him to suppress fires and care for injured passengers, Reiner knelt down and said, “Captain Stevens? Can you hear me? It’s Lieutenant Reiner, Sir.”

  “Reiner…” the Staff Captain mumbled through swelling lips. He tried to open his eyes, but they seemed welded shut. “Reiner… Mrs. Krystos was right,” he said amidst obvious pain. “Took passengers to the theater. Are they safe?”

  “I’m not sure, Captain, but I think so,” Lt. Reiner replied. “Those of us in the casino were okay too. Only the rooms with windows seem to have caught on fire.”

  “Good, that’s good, son,” Stevens murmured. “I was trying to clear people out of the bar. I guess I didn’t make it in time.”

  “Relax, Captain,” Reiner said. “We’ll get you down to medical right away.”

  “No!” Stevens barked. “You focus on the passengers first. That’s an order!” This outburst seemed to tap the last of his strength and his head fell back onto the smoldering deck. Lt. Reiner paused uncertainly, until he heard Captain Krystos’ warning of another “event” echoing from public address speakers in undamaged parts of the ship. That confirmed Reiner’s course of action. He placed a gentle hand on Staff Captain Stevens’ charred forehead for a brief moment before turning his attention to helping those who could be helped. The crisis wasn’t over yet.

  ****

  Armando saw what was coming and did not want to face it. He might be a sailor by profession, but he was deathly afraid of drowning. The thought of facing a mounta
in of water was much more terrifying to him than fire. So what he saw approaching altered the equation in his mind from fight to flight in an instant.

  Armando Ramos turned and ran. He tripped and stumbled on the smoldering rubble of what had been luxurious furnishings in the Sky Lounge, but he kept running. The nearest exit took him to the observation deck above the Resort Deck where he had recently been serving cocktails. The sight below almost brought him up short.

  The Resort Deck where he usually worked was almost unrecognizable. All of the furniture was gone, aside from smoldering piles in the corners. Many of the side windows were blown out. Portions of the deck that had been made of wood were blackened charcoal and some areas still burned fiercely. More than half the water in the pools was gone, either evaporated or blown away, but the most distressing sight was the bodies floating in what remained. Most of them wore remnants of crew uniforms on the submerged portions of their bodies. The exposed portions were burned away. They were most likely some of the Pollywogs who never quite made it to becoming Shellbacks, or even out of the swimming pools for that matter. Steam still rose from the pools and Armando felt bile rise in his throat when he realized that the people floating there might have been boiled alive.

  Running in a daze along the upper deck, gazing down at the carnage in and around the swimming pools, Armando was further sickened to discern the charred remains of more bodies mixed in with the smoldering debris of deck furniture piled up near the shattered glass doors leading inside the ship. Had they failed to heed the Captain’s warning to go inside and get below? Did they remain to gawk at the spectacle of an artificial sun beyond the horizon? Or had there simply been too many people trying to get inside in too short a time? Armando suspected a bit of all three and was sure that many of the dead on deck had been blinded or elderly passengers who couldn’t or wouldn’t move fast enough anyway.