Dry Ice

by Evans, Bill; Jameson, Marianna

  The Sistema de Alerta Sísmica, a system of electronic sensors installed along the coastal subduction zone, triggered warnings that were transmitted immediately to receivers in Mexico City—or so that system indicated. In reality, however, those electronic receivers had gone deaf when they were hit by the same massive electromagnetic pulse that had tripped the submarine fault line and the sensors. No warning sirens went off across the vast and densely populated city; no piercing electronic shrieks alerted anyone to the disaster about to engulf them.

  The temblor’s first waves passed from the deep-sea fault to the coast in seconds and moved rapidly inland without pause. In little more than two minutes, the waves crossed hundreds of miles of countryside and reached the soft volcanic clay that comprises the sediment underlying Mexico City. Tens of millions of people lived and worked in the sprawling, crowded urban valley built atop a drained and ancient lake bed. None had time to prepare when the homes in which they were preparing to face the day started to shake and sway.

  In the suburbs, screams split the morning. Clutching their children and whatever else they valued, people fled their homes for the ostensible safety of the streets and then froze with raw panic as they watched fissures form beneath their feet. The yawning, ever-widening chasms swallowed their neighbors and kin, their homes and cars, with an appetite beyond voracious. In the huge, sprawling city center, the hazy, smudgy blue sky rained boulder-sized chunks of concrete and warm, screaming bodies onto streets pregnant with growing piles of rubble. Billows of thick, choking dust rolled through the air and along the streets, hiding everything in their gritty depths. The particular and terrible vulnerability of tall buildings was there for all to see as they swayed like palm trees in sync with the earth’s magnificent resonance before snapping off fifteen stories up and crashing to the ground like a child’s toy thrown in a fit of temper.

  For more than five minutes—an eternity—the earth shook beneath the terrified residents. Shockwave after shockwave assaulted the nation as, deep underground, the earth’s crust broke in several places, sliding forward on a slow return journey to a molten state.

  When the shaking in Mexico City ended, the true horror of the events began to unfold as people picked themselves up from where they’d hidden or been thrown, and began to emerge from their demolished homes. Across the entire enormous valley, heavy clouds of black dust saturated the air, filling already troubled lungs. Screams and cries from the injured, the dying, and the grieving were drowned out by the belated, helpless wail of sirens.

  Streets of ripped and jagged asphalt stymied the efforts of emergency personnel. It was just as well; the would-be saviors had nowhere to take the wounded—or the dead. Too many hospitals had been damaged, if not destroyed outright, and the staff remaining within them had their own priorities to address.

  Steel beams lay twisted on the roads and dangled precariously from the shells of the buildings they’d once supported. Mountain ranges of debris had amassed between buildings. Broken glass crunched underfoot; huge deadly shards rested propped against other objects at odd, often invisible angles, as if lying in wait to impale the dazed and unsuspecting souls who thought they had survived the worst.

  Water gushed and geysered as huge mains and sewer lines cracked, then erupted beneath the roadways. Violent explosions rocked the remaining infrastructure as newly ruptured gas pipelines began burning. Hungry flames spread outward like the infernal circles of Hell, consuming everything that did not or could not get out of their way.

  Tsunamis raced in all directions along the Pacific coast and outward to the open sea. The scientists already tracking them from afar defined them as small but serious and predicted the sea-bound waves would lose their impetus by mid-ocean, fomenting no emergencies in the nations hugging the Pacific’s western rim. Those governments monitored the western-moving waves with the mildest trepidation, ultimately deciding not to annoy their populations with sirens in the middle of the night for what could easily be a non-event by morning.

  However, the towering waves roaring along the North American continent’s edge ripped into the land with fierce, foaming energy to spare. Residents had no warning when the wave train entered the Sea of Cortés. Its force intensified exponentially as the mainland on one side and the skinny peninsula of Baja California on the other enfolded the waves in a tight embrace. The deep, joined basins and sudden, steep inclines of the submarine landscape worked together to compact the towering walls of water like a rapidly closed accordion, forcing them to gather into one another as they raced northward through the narrow gulf. The waves roared through the shallows and made fast, furious contact with the shore, ripping palm trees from their place in the sand and beachcombers from their place in the universe.

  Near the southern tip of the Baja peninsula, just outside the sun-drenched coastal town of Los Frailes, a small army of household staff went about their daily work in Croyden Flint’s massive seaside villa. Gardeners and housemaids alike had no time to flee when the first wave arrived; they were already statistics by the time that wave had receded. The furious waters kept moving up the gulf, hammering the coastline for nearly eight hundred miles and flattening everything in their path. The surging waves lost little force until they released the last of their fury on the sleepy towns scattered along the edge of the Sonora coast, home to thousands of acres of Flint’s produce farms and processing plants.

  The waves raced along the coast to the south of the epicenter as well, and few beachgoers were fortunate enough to survive their onslaught. The flat, manicured beaches of resort communities, the rocky shores of quiet towns, and the commercial piers and dockyards of bustling cities were slammed indiscriminately by darkly shimmering facades of water that crashed over them and then moved on. The size and power of the southern waves diminished gradually as they moved along their trajectory, crashing into the coast of Ecuador less than an hour later.

  Meanwhile, in the heart of Mexico’s capital, the day had begun with unrelenting calamity and epic struggles for survival. The full scope of the disaster would not be revealed for hours; the first pulse of energy had disabled the systems needed to receive and relay information, sending governments, armies, and diplomats around the globe scrambling to find alternate means to communicate with their Mexican counterparts. Meanwhile, in other parts of the country and abroad, people went about their business unaware of the doom that had fallen on millions.

  As the sun climbed higher in the sky, burning through the everyday smog reinforced by the dense, suffocating fog of smoke and dust, the extent of the carnage was becoming unveiled. Those in the disaster-stricken region waited in vain for help from an outside world that was only beginning to learn what the dawn had wrought.

  In a small house perched on a dramatic cliff overhanging a pristine beach on Mexico’s Pacific coast, Larry and Gina Beauchamp clung to the frame of their bedroom doorway, not ready to die but too terrified to move. The remote bungalow they’d named Casa de Paz—House of Peace—had for ten years been their refuge from the world and a respite from their memories of decades spent devising the means to destroy the world. Now they lay—hung, really—on a floor that had been tipped to a forty-five-degree slope by the quake’s first jolt, and to an angle even more acute by the next. Their bare feet faced the wall of windows that had brought thousands of sunsets into their home; their toes could find no purchase on the cool, slick, colorful tiles they’d laid by hand.

  The specter of a slow and horrible death surrounded them as if it were a living thing, its voice clearly audible in the squealing wooden beams and grunting joints that were buckling under the stress of unplanned-for torsion. Tess Beauchamp’s parents would never know that it was a man, not Nature, who had decided it was their time to die; they would never know that their only child’s long-ago revelations had determined a madman’s target, that her reappearance in his life had been the trigger.

  They clung to crumbling hope and the slowly splintering lintel as the house dangled drunkenly over a fr
eshly opened chasm in what had been immutable rock beneath their home. They whispered their love to each other and sent their prayers to the heavens as they tried to inch their way toward safety.

  Gina lost her grip first, her neat, tidy fingernails catching in the soft wood and tearing off at the root. Her mouth was open in a silent scream as she slid, leaving Larry to endure the shushing of her large, muumuu-covered body and bloody hands as they crossed the polished tile. The altered weight distribution was enough to tilt the house past its tipping point, nudging the structure from precarious inertia to full and frantic motion. As she picked up speed, Gina at last began screaming, her voice primal and filled with terror. Larry’s grip faltered then and gravity capitalized on the lapse. He careened across the floor through a thudding rain of roof tiles and adobe bricks.

  With an almighty, ear-shattering crack, the groaning timbers surrendered and the house listed downward. It began sliding, then somersaulting past the raw walls of the new canyon before becoming wedged between them midway to the bottom. The combination of panic and injuries snuffed the life from the Beauchamps’ bodies. The screams stopped. Their corpses crashed through the wall of splintered glass and fell heavily into the ferocious, foaming sea filling the virgin space below them.

  CHAPTER 14

  Tess sat at the head of the conference table, looking at the tense faces in front of her. An hour had passed since the array had begun powering up, and mere minutes ago it had given birth to a pulse of energy that could—most likely had—rocked the world.

  Nik was a mass of barely controlled tension, Ron was tight-lipped and unsmiling. A pale, wide-eyed Lindy fiddled with a pencil and wouldn’t make eye contact with anyone. Etienne Pascal and Pam Webb, two of the scientists, were very still. Tess wasn’t feeling her best.

  If ever there was a good reason to have a belt of Scotch at this hour, this would be it.

  “Tell me again about the pulse,” Tess said, keeping her voice low and calm.

  “Four thousand tesla units in the Very Low Frequency range directed at the Schlüchthofen band. Duration, ninety-one milliseconds. Followed by a second pulse thirty-two nanoseconds later with a duration of two hundred and three milliseconds. The third pulse lasted four seconds. Each transmission was aligned along slightly different trajectories.”

  The words chilled her blood. “And the impact?”

  “A rupture in the central North Atlantic,” Pam said. “Magnitude four on the Richter Scale.”

  Everyone at the table looked at one another with expressions ranging from doubt to incredulity.

  “The north-central Atlantic?” Nik repeated. “What the hell is that about? It would cause tsunamis on both sides of the pond.”

  “Maybe not,” Etienne replied. “Mag four is not that big, and the rock there is stable. There is no fault line up there. Iceland, yes. The Caribbean, yes. But the north-central Atlantic is a spreading center. Any earthquake there would more likely open a gap.” He spread his hands in an acknowledgment that it made no sense to him. “If that happened, the water would rush to fill it, not rise up. It would pull down coastlines, no? Snap fiber-optic cables. Create havoc in the shipping lanes.”

  “Are you sure it was the Atlantic?” Tess asked, the information not sitting comfortably in her brain. “What would be the purpose of that?”

  “Lowering the sea level and causing an uptick in the coastal real estate market?” Ron offered to the quiet group. “Okay, maybe not.”

  “No, I’m not sure it was the Atlantic,” Pam replied to Tess while glaring at Ron. “But that’s what the data show. The location doesn’t make sense to me, either.”

  Lindy let out an annoyed sigh. “None of this makes sense, frankly. What’s going on? Have we been hacked? I thought we were secure.”

  “We are—from outside threats. I think we’ve been hijacked internally.” Tess knew her words would provoke a reaction, but she wasn’t prepared for universal, silent acceptance. “Unless anyone has another idea,” she added, looking around the table.

  “There is no other explanation.” Nik took a deep breath and met her eyes. “Given: The trouble started after Greg passed out of our airspace. Given: The comms blackout is thorough, not random, and not mechanical. Given: The arrays have never been programmed to execute without continual operator input. Until now. Given: We have been effectively locked out from controlling the arrays and contacting the outside world.

  “Hypothesis One: Greg is fucking with us a little bit. Hypothesis Two: Greg has gone over the edge and is fucking with Flint big time. Hypothesis Three: Greg has gone over to the dark side and wants to flex all the muscle he’s got.” He looked at Pam. “Blowing a hole in the middle of the Atlantic would not be his style.”

  Pam looked at her hands for a long moment, then brought her gaze back to the group. “Okay, as long as we’re engaging in the crazy, wild-ass-guess version of the scientific method, I’ll throw this on the table: what if the problem is more granular than just feeding the arrays and the power system off-the-wall commands? What if the substrate of the system has been tampered with?”

  “Meaning?” Tess asked, not liking the tension coiling like a snake in her gut.

  “What if the geographical coordinates have been altered? Flipped, nudged, whatever. Set off by x degrees to throw us off.”

  “So we wouldn’t know where the effects of the pulses were targeted,” Tess replied, slowly.

  Pam nodded. “If you want to make an earthquake, which is about the only thing that particular pulse pattern could do, you wouldn’t make it happen where earthquakes don’t happen naturally.”

  “You would if you want to shake things up—pardon the pun,” Nik argued.

  Pam shook her head. “No, Nik. If this is Greg’s doing, he wouldn’t be content with just scaring people. He’s too results-oriented. He’d get more bang for his buck if he hit crustal zones that are already vulnerable to shifting. The pulses that just went out would do a lot more damage in the Pacific than the Atlantic because of all the active faults and subduction zones and—come on.” She let out an exasperated breath. “You want some statistics? Try these: There are more than 450 volcanoes ringing the Pacific, and that doesn’t even include the underwater ones, or the cinder cones, maars, and volcanic shields. I mean, take Mexico’s Michoacán-Guanajuato volcanic field. It’s a single magmatic system that covers fifty thousand square kilometers and includes—”

  “We get it, Pam,” Ron interrupted.

  “Did you say Michoacán?” Tess asked at the same time.

  “Yes, I did. And, okay, I’ll shut up, but my point is that if Greg wanted attention, he’d go for the Pacific, or even the Mediterranean. The north-central Atlantic would be a non-starter.”

  Tess remained quiet, not liking the flick of new fear that one word had inspired. Her parents lived near Michoacán.

  Nik shook his head. “Think about it, Pam. What does he crave more, the attention that an unexpected, totally unpredictable earthquake would bring, or the destruction that would ensue if the quake hit someplace it would be expected?”

  “He’d want the damage,” Pam said with quiet force. “And the attention that would follow. Flint monitors us, Nik. They already know what’s happened and where and that, whatever happened, we did it. It wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of other folks know, too. We’re the only ones without a clue.”

  “Pam, I think your hypothesis about the substructure of the code is worth investigating. Please keep me apprised of what you find,” Tess said smoothly. “Nik, her other point that we could be the only ones who don’t have a complete picture of what’s going on is a valid one, too. We’ve been dark for about two hours. We know what the problem isn’t, and we have a pretty good idea of what the problem is, and it’s not going to be remedied quickly.

  “I think we need to very strongly consider taking our situation ‘public,’ so to speak, and get some messages out via the bog-standard radio frequencies, as you called them earlier.” She held up a hand to wa
rd off his objections. “I’m not implying that we need to send out a Mayday, but we need to let Connecticut know that we’re wounded. They’ll get in touch with Greg as soon as he touches down in Capetown. In the meantime, there isn’t much we can do except what we’ve been doing. Continue the search-and-destroy mission for Greg’s rogue code.”

  She rose to her feet, indicating that the meeting was over. A few glances between the others at the table let her know that not everyone was in complete agreement, but they were willing to get behind her, which said something, considering no one but Nik had ever worked with her before now.

  As she anticipated, Nik stayed behind, shutting the door behind the last person to leave. “Are you sure about this?”

  “As sure as I can be.”

  “Look, we don’t have to transmit on the open frequencies yet,” Nik said. “There’s a pre-set signal that’s transmitted to the satellites a few times a day when everything is okay. If that signal changes or is interrupted, it means there’s trouble in paradise and the powers-that-be can take steps to determine the problem.”

  “Is it still working?”

  “Nothing has indicated that it’s not,” he said. “But it’s a passive signal, Tess. If we interrupt it, the only message they’ll get in Connecticut is that there’s trouble, which they already know. They know we’ve gone dark, and they know we’ve fired the phased array.”

  “Then they’ll be expecting the signal to be interrupted.”

  “If we’re in crisis mode. But if the signal continues, it will—or should—indicate that we’re not in crisis mode yet. In other words, that we’re handling whatever is going on.”