Moonseed

by Stephen Baxter

  There was a huge lime-green crane-like machine that ran on rails along the roof; this was the fuel charging machine, designed to lug seventy-feet-long fuel assemblies to and from the reactor cores. But the charging machine was crippled, its iron frame bent out of skew.

  Number Two Reactor, to her right, looked intact. It was Number One that had suffered the explosion.

  Its massive lid had been blasted off—black tiles were scattered around the building—and its concrete shell was broken outward, reinforcing bars flailing upward wildly. She could actually see into the heart of the reactor, the exposed core, which was a mass of flame and smoke.

  The firefighters were hesitating before this, arguing about what to do.

  To Debbie it was obvious. The fire in that reactor core had to be put out, before any more radioactive products were vented into the atmosphere.

  And there was only herself and the other firefighters to do it, by hand if necessary.

  She’d heard about Chernobyl, the heroism of the firefighters there. The casualty rate later.

  She’d never expected to encounter such a situation herself.

  When she looked into the exposed core, she felt its warmth, on her face and chest and legs. She wondered if she ought to ask for a dosimeter badge.

  She fixed her helmet and oxygen mask. With the others, she pushed forward, into the heat.

  The traffic crawled through Dunbar, and beyond.

  Farther east, there was something going on. Jane could see a pillar of smoke, blowing inland. Helicopters were flapping over, dumping tons of what looked like sand.

  Five miles past Dunbar, close to the source of all the smoke, somebody came blundering into the road in front of her, and Jane braked sharply. It was a fireman—no, a woman—singed donkey jacket, blackened hair, what looked like a bad case of suntan darkening her skin. She looked around blearily, focused on Jane, and came staggering to the passenger door.

  “Please,” she said. “Help me.” Her voice was a hissed whisper.

  She was just a kid.

  Jane nodded. She got out of the car, and bundled the firefighter into the back. The woman lay down, her legs drawn up to her chest, shivering. Her face looked swollen, and she seemed to be trying to protect her hands. Around her neck, her skin had burst and was hanging in strips. She was bleeding through her nose, perhaps hemorrhaging. There was a name badge on her jacket. STURROCK.

  Jack just stared.

  Jane realized where she was. Torness. Jesus. I should have thought of this. I have to get Jack out of here—

  There was a thunderous roar overhead, startling Jane enough to make her brake. “Jesus Christ. What now?”

  She looked out of the window. Planes: fleets of them, huge black shapes, sweeping in from the north.

  “They’re coming from RAF Leuchars,” Jack said.

  Jane stared at him. It was the longest sentence he’d uttered in days.

  “There are Vulcans. See, the British ones. And B–2As. The Americans. Look, that’s a B–52. And I think that’s a Tupolev, the white one. Russian…”

  The sky was black with the bombers, the growl of their jets filling the air. All around her people were climbing out of their cars to see, or peering out of their windows into the sky.

  They were whooping, clapping. One woman was crying.

  Henry had told her about this. The start of the counter-measures. Now we fight back, Jane thought brutally.

  In the car, the firefighter groaned.

  Jane pulled onto the road’s central reservation, and put her foot down, ignoring the blaring horns around her, putting as much distance between herself and Torness as she could manage. She tried not to hunch her shoulders against the invisible radioactive sleet that must be drenching them both.

  In the back, Jack gave the firefighter water.

  From the heart of Scotland, behind the fleeing car, came boiling clouds and a continuous roar of thunder. More planes flew overhead, and she imagined the fight against the Moonseed, all over the suffering planet.

  35

  Garry Beus stepped out into the flat California sunlight.

  Edwards Air Force Base was a chunk carved out of the western desert, marked only by Joshua trees, twisted and arthritic and sinister. The land that time forgot. It was early, but already heat haze was shimmering off the flat, pale salt lakes on the horizon, obscuring his view of the giant aircraft hangars here.

  And there was a muddy brown color to the sky. Volcanic shit. The reason he would be earning his hazardous flight pay today.

  It had started off as a normal morning. Shower and shave, a pass on breakfast. But when he climbed into his flight suit, an ugly sonofabitch in olive green with a zipper from balls to neck, and he took his wallet and log book, and he pulled on the thick socks he always wore in case of a cockpit heating failure—well, his heart had started to pump.

  Edwards had always been the place to be for a pilot, a place you could come burning down out of the sky and always find a place to land on those broad salt flats, where you could touch down faster than some airplanes could fly. Chuck Yeager flew here. This was the home of the X–15. They even landed the Space Shuttle here. But in truth Edwards was a place for test pilots, like Garry himself.

  Today, though, Garry had some real work to do here.

  He walked to the squadron building. Here was the ops desk where he had to check in to confirm his mission, and his wing man for the morning’s two-ship flight, Jake Parrish.

  The briefing between the two of them took a solid hour, led by Garry. He covered the mission objectives, and the motherhood stuff, the basic principles for every sortie: operating standards, radio procedures, contingency plans, SAR—search and rescue procedures—and the weapons, though today that just meant the two laser-guided bombs each F–16 would carry on its underwing pylons. There was some special briefing material on volcanic effects they might hit: hot updrafts, microbursts, ash in the carb, toxic gases, other shit.

  Then it was back to the ops desk. There were no maintenance delays, no clouds, and the volcanic shit in the sky shouldn’t cause any hold-ups.

  But here was Garry’s mother.

  She was reduced to a shriveled little husk, hair a wisp of gray, probably only half his weight. It just wasn’t damn fair, Garry thought. But she was smiling at him, so he smiled back and hugged her.

  “My God, mom, what the—what are you doing here?”

  “Well, it’s my fault you’re going,” Monica Beus said.

  “Your fault?”

  “The whole mission was my idea, I’m afraid. I wasn’t best pleased when you called and told me you’d been assigned to the flight.”

  He grinned. “So, you want to split the hazardous-duty pay? It’s all of a hundred and fifty bucks.”

  “I think you’re going to earn that today,” she said quietly.

  Jake had joined them. “Don’t worry, Mrs. Beus.”

  “Doctor,” Garry said.

  Jake said, “I’ll watch his ass, pardon my French, and bring him home safely.”

  “Make sure you do that.” She looked up at Garry, as once he’d looked up to her, and he felt his heart break once more.

  “Mom, how’s…”

  She let him off the hook. “The brain tumor?” She smiled thinly. “Not so bad as you’d think. I get sickly headaches. Wiggly lines at the edge of my vision. If I had your job, they’d ground me.”

  He wanted to hug her. “Mom—”

  “Now, Garry, if I can handle it you can. Things can’t get any worse, after all. And I’m not ready to have a child die ahead of me. But you know how important this is.”

  “…I know.”

  “We need some good news here.” And she talked briefly through some of the issues that were coming across her desk.

  The breakdown of government and society, the great swathes across Africa, Asia, even parts of Europe. Massive population movements. Deaths from geological events, and simple crop failure and breakdown of trade, on such a scale
nobody dared estimate. The die-back they were calling it.

  Even in Fortress USA the problems were immense. Rationing was already breaking down. The survivalist types had made some parts of the interior ungovernable. Lethal force was meeting refugees from Mexico and Cuba and Canada, for God’s sake.

  It was worse than Garry had heard. Worse than had been made public. Somehow the censoring of the news was the most striking thing.

  “We have to make a stand against this Moonseed. You are an American, fighting in the forces which guard your country and your way of life. You are prepared to give your life in their defense.” She was quoting the servicemen’s code of conduct. “That’s never been more true than today.”

  Jake nodded gravely. “We’ll do our jobs, ma’am.”

  When they walked off to the life support room, Jake nudged his arm. “Was she always so serious?”

  Garry thought about that.

  His mother had seemed a plump, warm giant to him throughout his growing-up years. Despite her high-powered jobs, as her academic career took her to a variety of universities around the world—and, at last to Washington, where she had, it seemed, got the ear of the President herself—she had always made time and space for Garry, never been less than a mother. Something he appreciated even more now he was thirty, and he thought about his own young family in L.A., Jenine and young Tommy…

  “Yeah,” Garry said. “She was always serious.”

  When they were kitted out, they hopped into the van that would take them to their aircraft. The crew chief—a round, glum man of around fifty—showed him the aircraft forms; everything looked good today.

  Garry’s F–16 stood waiting for him: fifty feet of sleek gun-metal gray, its color darkened by the muddy sky. Garry walked around the bird and kicked the tires, made sure the right weapons were loaded, and checked the oil. The weapons pods were two fat, sleek torpedoes slung under the wings.

  He climbed the ladder that dangled from the cockpit, and perched for a moment on the canopy rail. He held onto the ledges and swung his legs into the foot wells, like James Dean hopping into a convertible. He finished up semi-reclining in the hardened seat pan, with his legs straddling the instrument console, his feet planted on the rudder pedals.

  The F–16 was his idea of an airplane: a single-seater, single-engine bird in a tradition that dated back to the P–51 from the Second World War. And its primary mission was air-to-ground, which would give him the chance to fly at five hundred feet, the ground rushing by, the sensation of speed startling.

  Garry thought his blood must be fizzing in his veins, loud enough for Jake to hear.

  The preparations continued. He snapped an air hose to his G-suit, to swell the bladders that would keep his blood from pooling when he pulled Gs. He fixed clips at his shoulders and hips to his parachute risers and the seat kit with its survival gear, all of it contained within the seat pan. He pulled tight his lap belt, lifted on his helmet and fitted his oxygen mask.

  The crew chief called up. “Rail clear?”

  Garry gave him a thumbs-up.

  The canopy came down, a clear polycarbonate bubble that slid down over him and locked into place, smooth as something out of Flash Gordon. He activated the seals to pressurize the cockpit, and set the climate controls to a little cooler than the flat desert air outside. He was in his own world, already cut off from the ground, the cockpit so tight and cramped around him it was as if he had donned the bird like some immense Batman suit.

  He strapped on his knee clipboards, and set his switches to their start positions.

  He called the crew chief. “Fore and aft clear, fire guard posted, chocks in place?”

  Roger that, Garry. Ready for run-up.

  He turned on his electrical power, and hit the jet fuel starter, the small engine that would turn over the main motor, the GE–100. He advanced the throttle from off to idle; the engine surged with a throaty roar.

  When he was ready to taxi, the fire guard removed the chocks from his landing gear. The crew chief directed him forward, waving his hands back behind his head.

  Garry pushed the throttle past idle, and led Jake out toward the runway, steering with his rudder pedals. The end-of-runway crew gave them a final systems check, and the weapons crew pulled the safeties on the bombs. He kept his hands in the air, where the crew could see them, just so the crew knew he wasn’t about to flatten them with a careless touch of a flight control.

  They were cleared for takeoff, and he taxied onto the runway. He pushed the throttle to ninety percent power. He ran one last check, cycling the flight controls. All was in order.

  He took his feet off the brakes and pushed the throttle to military power.

  The engine rose in pitch to a scream. He turned on his afterburner, injecting neat fuel into the hot exhaust stream, generating huge thrust.

  The plane kicked him in the back, and the runway was ripped out from under him.

  At three thousand feet he reached his takeoff speed, two hundred miles an hour. He touched his stick back, stroking the fly-by-wire, the plane’s nervous system.

  The plane just leapt into the air, and he followed the flight-path marker on the head-up display into the sky.

  Below him, the Earth closed over on itself, turning into a dome littered by the blocky buildings of the base—airplanes sitting in the washed-out sun like kids’ toys—and he could see the desert beyond, etched by roads, scarred by the smooth sheen of the dry lakes.

  Monica saw the takeoff from the ops building.

  It was a burn and a roar, as Garry bore down the runway at full thrust. His engine nozzle opened with eerie mechanical grace, and a sheet of flame shot out. There was a rumbling, and the air seemed to shake, or perhaps it was the very ground.

  Then he was in the air, and receding quickly, the flame becoming little more than a red dot. She watched until she had lost him, in the blur of the volcanic sky.

  Then she went indoors, wondering how much more of this marrow-sucking heat she could withstand.

  The doctors said she had a full house of mets now: secondary sites, lungs, and liver…She knew what to expect. The pressure in her skull was giving her the headaches. She might get speech or movement disorders, or epilepsy. Maybe even dementia, if she lasted so long. But the liver or lung stuff would probably collapse on her first.

  The only good thing about her illness, she was finding, was that it took her mind off her worry about her son, the fighter pilot.

  Aviate, navigate, communicate.

  Jake checked his relative position by radar. Two is tied. Two is visual.

  Garry craned his neck; he could see Jake’s bird in the muddy sky. “Clear to rejoin.”

  The wing man came skimming in, sliding through the air until he was in fingertip formation, within five feet or so of Garry’s wing tip, every detail of his bird visible sharp and clear. They ran an eyeball leak and panel check of each other’s planes, and then they slid apart to a standard formation, tactical line abreast, a mile and a half apart.

  Garry was sitting at the front of his plane, cushioned by ear plugs and ear cuff pads, surrounded by a crystal clear bubble of plastic. He was in a cocoon of sunlight and sound, everything at his fingertips and under his control, at home.

  Garry turned the formation to the northeast, toward Arizona.

  They flew over Las Vegas. The city was a splash of glass and concrete in the middle of a crumpled, arid landscape. He could see the pyramid of Luxor shining in the washed-out sun, utterly unreal. And then over Lake Mead and the Hoover Dam, and across the Shivwits Plateau…And now, here was his first, thrilling glimpse of the Grand Canyon.

  Here at its western end the Canyon was a knife-gouge in the Colorado plateau. He was flying east now, into the low sun, and he could see how the light picked out sedimentary strata. In the deepest section of the Canyon he could see the Colorado River itself, a stripe of silver-blue painted over the land. There was a greenish stubble over the plateau and the upper slopes of the Canyon, the a
sparagus green a strong contrast to the crisp red of the old rocks exposed beneath. The stubble was a covering of trees, he knew, junipers in a sea of sage, diminished to specks by the scale of the Canyon.

  He dipped low, and imagined the sound of his passing washing over the empty land. But a soft warning from Jake made him lift his nose, and gain a little more altitude. A smudge of volcanic shit, ash and dust, covered the ground here, emanating from the cracks that had opened up in million-year-old vents. Best to keep his engine intakes clear of that.

  He looked into the Inner Gorge, the oldest rocks. He could see where the Moonseed was eating into them, silvery patches like scars amid the volcanism.

  They headed farther east. He passed Lava Falls, where rapids turned the river white, and he was flying over the Havasupai Reservation, the home of the People of Blue Green Water, who had lived here for a thousand years. But today, of course, the People had been evacuated. Despite the peril they had stuck to their traditions; they had insisted on walking out, all the way to Tusayan.

  They flew on over the tourist areas around Tusayan. He could make out the tiny, scattered towns and lodges, the dusty trails along the South Rim, the fine black lines of the metaled roads. And then he followed the Colorado to the north, skirting the Navajo Reservation, soaring over Marble Canyon, until he reached Lake Powell itself.

  Lake Powell was flat, like some kind of engine oil spilled into the valley, its Mediterranean blue a striking contrast with the sunlit red and ochre of the high desert. He could see at a glance the lake wasn’t natural. Its shoreline was sharply ragged, like a fractal pattern: no time for erosion to smooth away the edges here.

  Maybe some day—if the kooks, like Alfred Synge, that his mother used to bring home had been right—Mars would look like this. Terraformed, by American hands and energy and ingenuity, blue against the red dust. He grinned. Even if all we do with the world we build is put up plastic pyramids.

  Anyhow, today the Moonseed was soon going to find out just what Americans were capable of. For better or worse, for them all.