Moonseed n-3

by Stephen Baxter

  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 asparagus 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 further 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 metalled 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.

  He turned away from the sun, with Jake on his tail. He scooted low over Lake Powell.

  And there, at last, was Glen Canyon Dam. The target.

  Garry was going in first. “Target in sight. Ten seconds to the drop.”

  Copy, Garry. Your pickle is hot.

  “Master Arm on…”

  The LANTIRN targeting pod, fixed to the forward fuselage of the airplane, fired a short laser burst at the dam, to establish the range to target. A grainy image on his head-up display, generated by the pod, told him what was going on.

  The time-to-drop clock counted down to zero.

  The two bombs fell away from his wing pylons. They lit up and accelerated away quickly.

  When the bombs were fifteen seconds from impact, Garry fired his guidance laser at the base of the dam, as close as he could get to the water line. A clock in the multi-function display counted down to zero.

  He could see the missiles slam into the face of the dam: small puffs of masonry dust, in utter silence.

  After that, nothing.

  He peeled around, and stood off as Jake completed his own run.

  The bombs were “Deep Throat” penetrator bombs, officially designated GBU-28/B, complete with Paveway laser guidance kits. The first of these babies — improvised from old, rusting Howitzer gun barrels — had been put together by Lockheed in haste in the build-up to Desert Storm, to dig out Iraqi command and control bunkers.

  When all four bombs were emplaced, their tail-mounted fuses caused them to detonate, simultaneously.

  It happened in an instant.

  Concrete erupted from the face of the dam, hailing over the water of the Lake, which turned white. Garry imagined a shear wave slamming into the structure of the dam, weakening it fatally.

  The first cracks appeared, even as he watched.

  Jake whooped. “We’re the new dam-busters, boy!”

  They turned into CAP — “combat air patrol” — even though they weren’t on combat duty today; they’d trace a series of long, skinny ovals in the sky, like following invisible racecourse tracks, while the camera pods they carried recorded the results of their handiwork.

  It wasn’t particularly usual for a pilot to do his own follow-up spotting like this. But then, this wasn’t a usual mission. There were no hostiles. But the sky was full of volcanic shit, which nobody was quite sure of what it would do to the airplanes” engines, and so there was a reluctance to risk launching off more guys than necessary.

  All of which meant, Garry thought wryly, that all of the risk today was being bought by himself and his wing man.

  But he patiently settled into his ovals, each of them taking fifteen or twenty minutes, scooting over the tortured scenery of the Grand Canyon. It was no big deal. He was comfortable here, in this armchair in the sky, with the world’s greatest view; he could do this all day, or at least until he had to take a dip, a refuel, on the airborne tanker, the big 707 they had lined up on the ground.

  Over the dam, the sight was spectacular. Already he could see the angry water, brown-white and swirling, smearing itself across the landscape of the Canyon, washing out Highway 89, pounding at the Navajo Bridge, ramming its way deeper into the Canyon.

  Since the damming in 1963, the Lake had been storing up two hundred and fifty tons a day of sediment — the sand and silt and smashed-up rocks which had enabled the river to scour out the Canyon in the first place — and today, all that good stuff was going to come pouring down the Canyon, taking decades of pent-up revenge, the mother of all mud slides.

  He took another tour over what he was coming to think of as the badlands, the bleaker western end of the Canyon, laced with clouds of ash and steam, lair of the Moonseed. It was going to be a hell of a sight when the floods rammed into the Inner Gorge—

  His head set rang with an alarm.

  Acquisition radar. It was so unexpected it took him a couple of seconds to recognize it.

  But he confirmed it on his threat warning screen. Right on top of him, out of nowhere.

  Working on automatic, he called Jake. “Mud six. I got mud six.”

  What?

  It had to be a malfunction.

  Closing up, Jake said.

  The sound went off, but the visual alarm continued to show.

  He turned his head, scanning through his bubble window through a hundred and eighty degrees. He was looking for the plume of a surface-to-air’s rocket motor. What if some crazy was shooting at him? Some eco-freak, maybe…

  He saw nothing.

  Jake was screaming. Shit, man, it’s right under you!

  Counter-measures. Radar chaff—

  But there was no more time.

  There was a slam, the loudest noise he had ever heard.

  He was thrown up, like a punted football, and then he fell away to his left. Whatever had struck him had come from beneath, his blind spot, and hit the F-16 in the belly of the fuselage.

  He glanced back.

  His plane was gone.

  The F-16 had been broken in two; his nose and cockpit had broken away, and were falling through the sky, powerless. He couldn’t even see the rear section.

  There was flame lapping all around him. His instrument console was breaking up, splintering and warping, glass dials popping and smashing. The flames dug into a gap between his oxygen mask and his visor, and the nape of his neck, behind his collar.

  Slam, fall, flames, pain, all within a fraction of a second.

  He looked down. There was a hard rubber handle jutting between his legs: PULL TO EJECT. He reached down with his
left hand and pulled.

  The seat pulled his restraints in, back to the parachute risers, dragging him back against the seat frame. The canopy popped, and was gone; air rushed over him, cool and clean, dousing the flames. The seat slid up its glide rails, and a rocket catapult hurled it into the air. A kick in the back: ten or twelve Gs, for maybe half a second. Garry thought he could feel it all along his vertebrae.

  The air slammed into him like an ocean wave.

  Then he was upside down, still strapped to the seat, shards of debris fluttering around him. The seat stabilized itself quickly, and there he was: face down, stranded in the air, five miles high.

  The crumpled Arizona landscape was rising towards him, so slowly it was almost imperceptible. It would take five minutes to free-fall to Earth. He was supposed to ride out four minutes of that, until the seat opened at fourteen thousand feet.

  He could see the wreckage of his plane, two big chunks surrounded by a cloud of smaller fragments of debris. He watched the nose section hit the Canyon wall, and it exploded there, and a pall of black smoke rose from the crater. His own miniature volcano, to go along with his earthquake.

  There was no sign of whatever assailant had struck at him.

  The air up here was cold and empty and silent, after the explosive shattering of the airplane. As the adrenaline shock receded, he waited for the wave of pain to hit him.

  He’d never tried this before.

  You didn’t practice ejections; they were too dangerous, not to mention expensive. You just studied the manuals and made sure you knew where the yellow lever was and hoped you never had to pull it. For sure, he didn’t feel as badly as he always imagined he would, after being hurled out of his safe, bubble-wrapped armchair in the sky, into this position of complete nakedness and exposure.

  You’re in shock, he told himself.

  He could even recognize where he was. The western end of the Grand Canyon was laid out below him like a National Park tourist map. There was the skinny sheen of the Colorado, bright blue against the Mars-red of the high desert into which it had cut. He could see the tributary canyons, cut by their own rivers, Prospect and Mohawk to the south, Andrus and Parashant to the north. Even now, there was no sign of the flood water that was forcing its way along the Canyon from the east. The Canyon was long…

  There was a fiercely black knot of cloud, right about where Lava Falls should be. He was, in fact, drifting over the Falls, and so looking down, right into the cloud.

  He could see the glow of red, inside the cloud. He heard distant bangs, like cannon fire, disturbing his peace. He saw sparks fly out of that red scar.

  Sparks?

  If he could see them from here, then they had to be the size of houses. Rocks, then. Probably lava bombs, freshly birthed from the Earth, cooling even as they sailed up from the mouth of the ground.

  He knew about lava bombs. After the Moonseed, everyone was a volcanologist.

  So now he knew what had hit him. Maybe he and Jake had indeed made the Earth quake. But the Earth, or at any rate the Moonseed, had struck back.

  It wouldn’t take another lava bomb to kill him, now he was out of the airplane. Just a fragment, an ember of red-hot rock, might be enough to torch his canopy. And if he fell through the cloud his lungs were going to be filled with searing hot ash and dust and steam.

  And he was falling right into that spreading cloud of black, fiery shit.

  Garry got hold of the manual override handle in the right side of his seat, and pulled it.

  He heard a light pop as the drogue chute emerged. There was a jerk as the drogue filled up, and then a billowing, like huge wings over him. It was a wonderful noise, the sound of his main canopy opening up.

  Now there was another jerk, much harder.

  Suddenly he was falling much more slowly, now at an angle to the ground, still strapped to his seat.

  It was going to be twenty-five minutes before he touched down.

  He would have to lose the seat at some point. A seated landing would be hazardous. But for now, it made him feel secure. Hanging in the air like this, it was hard to let go of anything.

  At twenty thousand feet he pulled off his oxygen mask and dropped it earthward. His cheeks and neck immediately felt better.

  He heard the roar of a jet over his head. It was Jake. The gleaming F-16, stunningly artificial against this barren, inhuman landscape, waggled its wings.

  Then Jake fell off to the east. He must be low on fuel, and for all Garry knew had taken some kind of damage from the volcanism as well. But he knew his wing man wouldn’t rest until Garry was picked up.

  He reached to the front of his seat and found the toggle switch that activated his distress signal.

  At fourteen thousand feet his seat fell away, as it was designed to do. He looked up. For the first time he could see his canopy, a broad ceiling of orange and white and green, as visible as all hell.

  He started to think about where to come down.

  Even if he avoided that volcano, and any little brothers and sisters it might have, he didn’t want to land in the Canyon itself. Certainly not in the Inner Gorge, waiting for the giant flood he’d initiated to come scouring away the walls. He needed to look for a place on the plateau, then, either to north or south.

  The wind hit him again, harder, and he found himself drifting through a neck of fierce volcanic cloud. Suddenly he was immersed in darkness, and his mouth and nose was full of hot, gritty dust. The buffeting got worse. There was hot air all around him, roiling and turbulent. It was possible that even if he wasn’t burned or suffocated to death, the damn turbulence could tip him upside down.

  He had to get out of this. Like, now.

  He reached up to the four-line release, a set of red handles either side of his head. He tugged at them sharply, to open panels to the rear at the canopy. He could feel himself shoved forward, as the air gushed out of his canopy.

  In a few seconds he had come out of the cloud, into relatively fresh air. He was coughing, eyes streaming, but he was intact.

  The air was carrying him a little more to the east than he would have liked, but he was able to correct that with tugs on his harness lines, and keep his heading to the north.

  A thousand feet, less. He could see a lot of detail now — too much — trees and sage everywhere, scattered over a landscape that didn’t look nearly so smooth and featureless as from the air.

  He’d done his time at jump school. Keep your feet together or your legs might snap — head up, and land into a roll, with contact at the balls of your feet, legs, hips and back, to disperse the energy of impact…

  The landscape opened out, the horizon receding around him, the trees foreshortening, as if reaching up towards him. There was a patch ahead of him, clear save for a little sage. He had his landing area.

  He hauled on the harness lines and got a little more northerly push. He kept his feet and knees together, legs slightly bent.

  The ground was hard, and he fell to his left, hard enough to knock the wind out of him, and his head slammed into the exposed rock.

  Quick-release the harness strap clips. Release the seat kit… No pain. Shock again?

  He could see his parachute, billowing and collapsing, and, bizarrely, his rubber life raft, bouncing over the scrubby ground.

  It was turning into one lousy morning.

  He didn’t come to until they lifted him off the ground, wrapped up in some kind of silver emergency blanket. He heard the whup-whup of chopper blades.

  Here was Jake’s face, hovering over him.

  “You’re okay, buddy,” Jake was saying. “You’re a hero.”

  “Bullshit.” Christ, his voice was a croak.

  “It’s true. The whole damn Canyon looks like a dried-out river bed,” said Jake. “Ledges, buttes of bedrock, gravel bars, teardrop hills, like a piece of the Mississippi delta. And you should see the IMAX images taken from the Space Station. We’re famous, man. We’re on TV.”

  Garry grabbed Jake’
s sleeve. “But the Seed, man. The Moonseed.”

  Jake’s face split in a grin. “We stopped it. NASA said so, those sensors they have up there. It stopped spreading. Listen, you get yourself fixed. I got two shots of Jeremiah Weed lined up at Edwards already…”

  Garry thought about the new volcanism he’d witnessed from the air: the deep wound the Moonseed had dug into the continent’s oldest, hardest rocks, that even the Colorado could only scratch, the silver patches there.

  Maybe they had bought some breathing time, at least.

  He knew his mother said efforts like this were only superficial. More about making people feel good, feel they were fighting back, than about canning the Moonseed.

  But hell, maybe that was all anybody could do.

  He wished he could do as much, by analogy, for his mother.

  In the oily interior of the Chinook, he stared at the metal frame ceiling, until the rotors roared and he was lifted, and he closed his eyes.

  19

  Henry and the mission planners were receiving a briefing, by a quiet young military officer, on the systems they were installing to support the nuke.

  “We removed the code box, the permissive action link. For your purposes we engineered a time fuse and detonator and matched them with the warhead. You will have a timer, but you will be able to abort the detonation at any time up to the final moment.” The young man, earnest and soft-spoken, referred to the bomb as a “monkey’.

  The nervousness this topic roused in the program managers and controllers and astronauts intrigued Henry. These were hardened, experienced people; why should the idea of carrying a weapon into space spook them so much?

  Unless it was the very fact that a weapon was now deemed to be necessary.

  Since the 1950s, if not earlier, the Solar System had been assumed to be an empty, barren place, a wilderness of gas and rock and ice, a stage on which man’s drama could be played out. A place to take a camera, not a gun. Now, suddenly, it looked as if that assumption was not true.