by Sharon Lee
Could they be digging? he wondered. But what—
Alarms went off, not just in his lab, but all over the station, raucous noise bouncing against walls and ear drums.
Brunner spun away from his screen, trying to catalog the racket—alarms only, no instruction to abandon ship, or report of sections sealed, only—
Jack, clanking in at a run, a device of some sort in his hand.
“What is it?” Brunner yelled, over the unabated clamor.
“Neutrons! Look to your station screen!”
Brunner spun back, slapping the keypad as the alarms reached a crescendo, faltered, died.
“High Energy Particle Alert” flashed across the station information screen. “Check badges now.”
“Jack here, we’re fine in Science A.” A glance showed him listening intently before he said, “Then recalibrate. It’s not an error.”
Brunner snatched the badge from his pocket, confirmed that it was a perfect, unblemished white, spun back—
Jack waved him ’round again. “Take a look realtime—someone’s shooting off big stuff!”
The alarm gave tongue again; ceasing almost at once.
“Are we attacked?” Brunner demanded, his fingers calling up satellites and long-range scans.
“Dunno,” Jack admitted, flipping through his beltside inventory. “We’re looking secure right now. Bridge didn’t mention incoming.”
Jack walked around the lab, casually, fingers still busy along his belts. “Yeah, this’ll flush out what tech’s left, I’m guessing—”
The alarms blared again; Jack flashed his scanner, touched his collar, listened, then wandered over to stand next to Brunner.
“Not aimed at us,” he said, as the alarm screamed into silence. “Air bursts, off on the limb. Mostly neutron and gamma stuff but our shielding’s up to it . . . you’ll have some tracking to do.”
“But, the radiation! They’ll kill everyone!”
Jack made a noise like a laugh without energy, and patted the top of Brunner’s monitor as if it were a pet in need of reassurance.
“Nah. Only if they do it right. Likely they don’t have enough N-bombs to do everybody in that way. Gotta hand it to ’em, though; between the gas, and the nukes and burning everything that’ll take a flame, they might’ve figured out how to manage it, anyhow.”
Speechless, Brunner brought the tracking screen to full magnification, moving the satellite to cover the area of the Stubbs’ last report, while he fingered up the Stubbs’ screen. Even as the window came live, data began to flow. Brunner closed his eyes against the wave of relief, took a breath and touched the send button.
“Miri Robertson, please alert. Miri Robertson—”
The response was as instantaneous as the minor lag allowed. “Brunner! Am I glad to hear your voice! Tried to get you earlier, but the machine wasn’t getting anything but static! Anyhow, we’re ready for a forced march outta here. Locals are gone crazy; had a bunch attack us with sticks—carrying candles like they was going to light us out of the way. Another bunch just sat down in front of us and shot their own brains out—”
“Galandaria, they are using nuclear weapons on each other.”
A pause; a long, long pause—
“Say again, Brunner.” Absolutely serious, her voice, all trace of childish exuberance extinguished.
“We are recording . . .” he said, keeping his voice calm, so calm, for her sake. Jack shifted at his side, making room for the scout.
“. . . we are recording nuclear weapons blasts,” Brunner said into the microphone. “High-energy particle counts. I have not had opportunity to analyze, but—”
“Right. Hold that there. I’ll see if I can get Liz here to—damn!” There were sounds, popping, hisses, explosions. “Bastards coming over the hill! I’ll call!” The speaker went dead.
“Redhead!” He slapped at the switch, knowing it futile. On the screen, the instrument reports flowing in from the Stubbs cycled from active, to collate, to archive.
* * *
Jack was still, as it turned out, in the weather room when Brunner returned from his nightmare-riddled off-shift. He lounged in Brunner’s chair, feet propped up on the instrument stool. He was awake, as were the monitors, and seemed none the less for the wear. Brunner’s mood, already black, darkened.
“Jack, I see now what makes you so valuable to this station. You never sleep and you are always concerned of things you have no need to know!”
Jack grinned and bowed a meaningless, half-reclined bow.
“We’re alike that way, aren’t we? And yeah—my sleep center took a hit when I was on a mission, back when I was the age of your redhead down there. Well, pretty much all of me took a hit, tell the truth. Got put in an autodoc for about a week . . . and came out mostly better, ’cept I can’t sleep more’n about three hours at a time.”
Brunner shook his head, looking around at the busy screens.
“What happened?” he demanded.
“Well, I survived and found a job using my unique talents—”
Brunner bristled, strode over to his main screen.
“I know,” Jack said, rising with a minimum of clank and clatter. He bowed; a surprisingly apt bow of a colleague relinquishing activity to an equal. “It ain’t funny, but it’s my only defense right now.”
Sighing, Brunner returned the bow. “Now tell me: down there—what has happened?”
Jack rubbed his face wearily. “They’re killing each other. Not a peep from our weather station. Every time the terminator hits a new planetary time zone, bombs go off. Looks like somebody’s answering somebody else back. There’s been a couple of pretty big bombs go off up north, random times, like maybe they had to be delivered in person. I think there’s been more gas, too, but it’s hard to tell with all the other—Anyhow, I saved it all for you.”
Brunner stared at the screens full with smoke, fire, doom and destruction. He leaned against the counter, pushing hard to counteract the shaking.
“To what can they aspire?” he whispered in Liaden. “What can they achieve?”
“I guess,” Jack answered, in quiet Terran, “that they can be right.”
Still shaking, Brunner took his seat, riffled screens, counted seventeen marked explosions on the charts. He had no way of knowing dispersal rates at this point but many were already thinning rapidly. One in the north was very heavy, and he zoomed the map in to take a closer look.
“Was the south attempting to destroy the rest of the farmlands?”
Jack looked over his shoulder, shook his head.
“That’s centered on a small range of hills. Might’ve been the Chilongans were after a base, a treasure house—something buried for protection.”
The door opened, admitting the scout. He waved toward the wall and Brunner reluctantly put the image of the whole hemisphere on the big screen, with the terminator moving relentlessly west.
“That could be bad downwind,” said the scout, shockingly matter-of-fact. “We’d need twelve dozen automated Stubbs to begin tracking. Perhaps we could get by with six dozen if we rule out a need to—”
“Rate they’re going at it,” Jack broke in, “won’t be any reason to track it but science.”
“We shall see. I have spoken to the chief, who informs me that the station cannot accept more than ten dozen refugees, and that only with the assurance that there be no local interference and that ships will be on the way to offload them soonest.”
“No local interference? Surely—” Brunner was watching the clock and the terminator on screen, bringing the satellite online to the old coordinates—
“Nothing there,” Jack told him. “Trees, some. Burn marks. Couldn’t catch anything moving but the IR isn’t that good—”
“There!” the scout shouted, not quite as loud as the alarm.
Jack muttered something, his belt clanked briefly and the alarm shut abruptly off.
“What are they doing?” Even from here there were noticeable points
of light, all concentrated.
“Carpet bombing. Nuclear bombing on the isthmus.”
The alarms sounded again as two very bright spots blossomed, beeped as several more—
. . . and stopped.
“. . . here. Dawn shows us clear; we blew the bridge and—”
“Miri!”
Brunner slapped at the switch.
“Miri!”
“Got static, Tech, are you—There, gotcha. Yeah, it’s me. Most of us got through, but we picked up some damage. The Stubbs, it bounced a couple with my name on ’em.”
The station alarm sounded, stopped.
“. . . so none of ’em are dependable. Hey, sounds like you got some hoorah going up there.”
“Miri, Miri, do you know they are still using nuclear weapons? Several dozens or more. All over the world. Many, thirty degrees northeast of you. The—”
“Right, we thought something was going on. Locals suiciding, station control ain’t answering—doesn’t acknowledge.”
The scout made a small sound, and Jack said, “Why you think I’m down here? Tried to answer the phone, stupid old man that I’ve come to be.”
“No,” the scout said sharply, “look at the isthmus!”
The low sun angle and remains of expanding clouds made the seeing difficult; but the intent appeared clear. The excavation he had noticed so many days ago had been completed—perhaps by the bombing—and stretching from one ocean to the other.
Brunner took a hard breath. “Miri, it is good that you are far from a coast,” he murmured, his fingers keying his cameras to record, while Jack moved away. “We shall need to speak with Commander Lizardi.”
The alarm beeped, but barely. Around it, he heard Jack paging the planetologist.
“. . . with the wounded. I’ll grab her when I can. Be there, right?”
“We will be here,” Brunner promised. “Next orbit.”
* * *
Dr. Boylan was . . . delighted.
“Do you see what they’ve done? They have removed the isthmus, and that—and that has done something unprecedented on an inhabited world. There are shockwaves registering on the seismographs, and not simply the explosives. They’ve significantly altered the actual surface structures—and they’ve created a triple tsunami as well! Something else is going on—but that will take days to confirm, and perhaps millennia to conclude!”
Brunner closed his eyes against this ghoulish enthusiasm while trying to visualize the changes, the—
“I believe the flow of water has upset the balance of the underlying plates,” she went on, “and may have even broken the link! They’d be free to float—”
“Brunner! We will need as much as you can get in the way of gas analysis, for they may well have released the oceanic methane clathrates. Oh, that’s a delicate balance indeed, and given the odd sediment formations here, and the subsurface temperature variations, we could be looking at a cascade of undersea landslides and quakes, reinforcing a continental redistribution—”
“The jet streams,” Brunner managed to get in, “should not be greatly affected, but the currents—much of my database will need to be rebuilt, and we have no reliable reporting scheme—”
Boylan fizzed on, lost in the beauty of the cataclysm. “Imagine! A complete change in the ocean currents occurring nearly instantly! Storm systems and climate disrupted on the spot! Given the elasticity of the plates, who knows but that we might get volcanism out of this?”
“The people,” Brunner said, forcefully. “The survivors—”
Boylan’s lips straightened. She looked at him, and pointed at the missing isthmus.
“What we need to do now is study and record the processes and phenomena that have been unleashed,” she said firmly. “The people will have to be left to historians, don’t you think?”
Brunner’s glance sought the scout, who took a breath and bowed low—excessive respect for one far exceeding the bower’s humble estate.
“Dr. Boylan,” he murmured, honey-voiced. “Your enthusiasm for science is well known and manifest. I wonder if you might have the means among your programs, or”—he bowed to Brunner as might one to a comrade—“if you, Ichliad Brunner, might have among yours, a means to predict where these triple tsunami might strike, and when? Perhaps we are best placed to offer warning, if not solace, to those who still live.”
* * *
There was no response to Brunner’s call on the following orbit, and nothing on the automatics indicating that the Stubbs was online. Chief Thurton, apparently again against objections, permitted the station to broadcast a multiband warning to the world below once the scout pointed out that he might do the same from the comfort of his own ship, if the station preferred not to.
As to specific warnings, that was barely possible. A tsunami travels transparently in open ocean, its wave a rapid but nearly invisible swell in an already tumultuous world. They had no resources to determine speed, nor even to insure that the first burst of monster wave against nearby shores had continued beyond the initial coastline.
Eventually, Jack was pressed into service with the satellite, sampling coasts and islands visually, with his observations of specific sites added to the warning the scout gave. What lives were affected by this they could not tell: the surface spoke not at all to them, along any of the regular bands. Periodically he returned to view the isthmus area where a few sandy shoals amidst the deep gash of a river of darker water triumphantly flowing from the west were all that was left of the former barrier.
“An army of liberation?” Jack asked heavily of the room. “Is that what was here?”
“Does it matter?” Boylan answered impatiently. “They are beyond concern at this point, are they not?”
Brunner held to his tasks and said nothing, working as if he could prevent further disaster by the strength and purity of his research.
Eventually, the scout returned, bearing with him a station-issue portable.
Making a bow of respectful request to equals, he waved the portable as if it were a child’s rattle or toy.
“The main computer was able to share with me demographic information reported by planetary authorities, and later by those splinter groups claiming authority. Some of it conflicts, some of it is probably purposefully wrong. I would like to use overlays of the various records you have of the last Standard, with particular emphasis on the past three days.”
This was said to the room at large.
Jack looked at Boylan, who was tending her screens, working as if the words had not been said.
Brunner sighed and bowed, finding it within himself to add the flourish which brought his acceptance close to that of accepting a comrade’s necessity.
“Yes,” agreed the scout, “there is some of that, isn’t there?”
“Some of what?” asked Boylan, raising her face from her work.
“Must be a Liaden thing,” Jack said, rolling his eyes, and nodded at the scout. “How can I help?”
* * *
Liz was talking to the Scout via the Stubbs, and she was not happy. Redhead hovered nearby, one eye on the machine and the other on the horizon. The air was bad, pollution and radiation levels high—she saw it all on the screen as the Stubbs did its upload.
“The shuttles that brought us down might still exist,” Liz was saying, sounding like she’d be mad if she wasn’t so damn tired. “So what? They’re hellengone back down where the city used to—”
“In that case,” the scout interrupted, “they do not exist, my friend. Nothing exists there anymore.”
Liz rubbed her face.
“I’ve broadcast a plea for assistance,” the scout continued, “but Klamath has not been a good neighbor these last dozen years and it is painfully clear that there is no immediate commercial advantage to be had.”
Liz shook her head. “Merc unit here. I don’t have much in the way of bargaining chips, but I do have some off-planet resources. Beam merc headquarters, tell ’em Lizardi’s good for the f
are—”
Redhead saw it first, the tell-tale wobble in the land.
“Quake, clear and down!” She was parched, and her voice didn’t travel; Skel bellowed a repeat before going down flat.
Exhausted Lunatics ran from under tree and makeshift shelters. You didn’t want to be under anything when the wave came through and you didn’t want to be standing, either—in fact, you couldn’t; it was like trying to stand on a tarp stretched out over the sea with the tide coming in.
Whomp!
Redhead was flat when the roll hit, and Liz, already sitting cross-legged, bobbed around as the dirt groaned and a few more trees fell, and that part was over.
Now came the hard part for her: the ground felt unsteady and swollen under her, like it was thinking about splitting open or folding over, or—
The second stage passed, too, and she sighed into the scorched ground before pushing upright. Liz was still at the Stubbs; she swept her hand out toward the scattered Lunatics—
“Injury check!”
Redhead rose unsteadily and hinted at a salute with her right hand while grabbing up the staff she’d picked up from downwood. Her speed and size conspired, giving her a chance to get through tree-fall and such in a hurry. The circuit here was familiar, and this time there were no new casualties among the troops.
The civilians—there were still a few out there, and as long as they didn’t actively shoot or throw rocks, it didn’t matter if they came along. They’d already been on short rations and shorter morale when they’d stumbled on the Lunatics and their grasp of Trade and common Terran was less than good. Some of them still grabbed for their amulets and lucky pieces instead of hightailing to open land—and there were a couple more among them injured.
She got back to the Stubbs in time to hear an exasperated Liz snap, “Tidal? We’re a good three days’ march from anything approaching shoreside, assuming I can still read a map. Unless things have changed—”
“The tsunami made some new dents, but nothing that extreme,” the scout offered. “The underplates themselves are doing something we can’t quantify yet. The planetologist and the weatherman are working to define—to predict. Moment . . . Ah. Tech Brunner shows me that your location gained altitude in the last upheaval. Higher by about the height of your redhead, I think.”
