Earth-Thunder

by Patrick Tilley

  When the repairs were completed, Marriot’s two vehicles would rendezvous with the waiting Bobcat to which Cantrill’s section would also return. The column would then proceed down river, pick up the old interstate, cross over into Oregon and then keep rolling with each of the four-man crews taking turns at the wheel till they reached Arizona. Yess-surr. Once the job was done, Marriot didn’t believe in dragging ass.

  Three and a half hours later, as he stood wiping the grease from his freezing fingers, the ground – which had been giving off the odd rumble even before they left Mount Rainier – shook violently under his feet, pitching him against the vehicle. The second Bobcat was parked up on a rocky outcrop which gave a better view of the terrain. The unit hadn’t sighted any Mutes on the out-run, but when you were in Plainfolk territory you could never afford to relax between sunrise and sundown. These lumpheads had a habit of popping up when you least expected it.

  There was a sharp hiss from inside Marriot’s vehicle as the parked ‘Cat made radio contact. A voice burst from the speaker grille on the dash. ‘Better get up here, loo-tennant. Somethin’s happenin’ and it … smokin’ lumpshit!’ There was a confused babble of voices.

  Marriot looked up the slope towards the parked ‘Cat. In the sky beyond, it looked as if someone had turned a huge orange spotlight on the thick blanket of grey cloud. The top hatch of the ‘Cat flew open. A figure hoisted his butt onto the rim and beckoned frantically. Marriot signalled he was coming and shouted over his shoulder to his three crewmen. ‘Lock down the engine covers and get inside the vehicle!’

  He reached the top of the slope in time to see a huge fireball collapse into a doughnut-shaped cloud around the truncated peak of Mount St Helens. A glowing necklace of death, pink, orange, red and scarlet billows, roiling and boiling – like a speeded-up film of clouds – as they tumbled over each other in the race to be first down the mountainside.

  The densely-packed pines covering the ridged slopes were flattened by the pressure wave and left blazing from end to end. Sgt Lyman’s crew, who were busy servicing the instrument package, and those in the second vehicle mounting guard, barely had time to comprehend the horror before it engulfed them.

  Down by the lake, Cantrill and his crew still had two minutes and thirty seconds in which to react to the oncoming avalanche of fire. Cantrill ordered his driver to high-tail it back down the road. The ‘Cat took off with the ensign standing in the roof hatch.

  Seeing the unbelievable speed at which the glowing cloud was descending, Cantrill realised they had no chance of getting clear. Reasoning that a large expanse of water was the best antidote to fire, he dropped back inside the speeding amphib and yelled at the driver to change course. The driver – who had arrived at the same conclusion – was already turning the wheel.

  The sixty seconds spent driving in the wrong direction proved fatal. They were still zigzagging wildly through the pines and down to the water when they were overrun by the rolling wave of incandescent gas and volcanic ash. Trees crashed down around them and burst into flame. Others fell across the vehicle, pinning them down. Escape was impossible. Within a few seconds, the cabin temperature rose to furnace heat, searing their lungs and blistering their skin. The tyres caught alight, the fuel tanks ignited, and the metal and glass-fibre hulls buckled and melted, frying the crew in their seats.

  The fire-cloud rolled on, instantly turning the surface of Spirit Lake into steam that exploded upwards, tearing the glowing mass to shreds and hurling molten particles in all directions.

  Four miles downstream, on the north bank of the Toutle River, the stunned crew of the fourth vehicle saw the mountain grow a crown of fire. They had already been jolted out of their seats by the same earth-tremor which had thrown Marriot off balance. Now, this wall of flame was expanding outwards and barrelling down the mountainside, consuming all in its path at incredible speed.

  Realising they had to reach higher ground, the driver turned the ‘Cat’s nose towards Winter Mountain, put his foot on the floor and forgot about the damage he was doing to the suspension.

  The fire-cloud swept across the lake, washed up against the southern flank of Mount Margaret, then turned left, like a flash-flood, driven by its own momentum to seek the lowest level. The encounter with the lake had slowed it down and taken some of the heat from its turbulent core but it was still lethal by the time it reached the rendezvous point.

  All it found was the fuel trailer that the crew of the fleeing Bobcat had wisely ditched.

  Marriot ran over to the vehicle as it slid to a halt. It was covered with ash and hot to the touch. Tiermeyer, the crew-chief, tumbled out of the portside door, his face as grey as the pumice-stone coating.

  ‘Sheee-itt!’ he croaked. ‘What the fuck was all that?!’

  ‘Something they forgot to tell us about,’ said Marriot. He led Tiermeyer and his crew up to the vantage point where the other men were clustered, and stood side by side, watching the mountain burn. Both of them knew there was no point in speculating about the fate of the other crewmen. Nothing in the path of that cloud could have survived, and repeated radio calls had been met with silence.

  Zwemmer, the crew-chief of the parked Bobcat, looked down from his perch on the rim of the roof hatch. ‘Hey, lootennant! Ain’t it time we got out of here?’

  ‘No,’ said Marriot. ‘I think we ought to stay here on the high ground and wait till things quieten down.’

  Two hours later, after a series of minor tremors, they heard a long, rumbling roar like the boom of the Trans-Am shuttle hurtling through the approach tunnel towards a subway station. Then there was another, much louder, muffled peal of thunder that seemed to come from the very bowels of the earth.

  The ground shook – throwing the watching crewmen off balance.

  ‘Jeezuss. H. Kurrist!’ cried Tiermeyer. ‘It’s happening again!’

  He was right and wrong at the same time. This wasn’t another fire-cloud, this was the big event; a full-scale eruption, the like of which the Trackers had never seen – or hoped to see again.

  A vast undergound pocket of gas and glowing magma exploded with colossal force, sending a towering column of fire into the sky and taking the lining of the vent with it. The SIG-INT team arched their necks and watched, open-mouthed, as several thousand tons of incendiary debris rose several thousand feet into the air, reached its apogee then arched outwards like one of Versailles’ elegant fountains and rained streamlined gobbets of magma and jagged lumps of red-hot rock over the surrounding terrain.

  The outcrop they were standing on was eighteen miles from the eruption and on the fringe of the fall-out area. Everyone dived for cover inside their vehicles as they saw a wide-spaced shower of volcanic ‘bombs’ heading their way.

  Marriot, realising the need to document the event as part of his operational report, timed the second, main eruption at 16:42.

  At precisely the same moment, at locations thousands of miles apart, two other events occurred. Both were linked to the eruption and each other by the strange geometry of fate, forming a triangle whose importance was to remain hidden by those who sought to gain control of Talisman.

  At 16:42, in the Federation’s Life Institute, a darkhaired child was gently eased from Clearwater’s body and drew in its first life-giving breath with a sharp, choking cry.

  Clearwater, her vision slightly blurred from a drug injection, searched for sight of her baby, but a raised green sheet prevented her seeing the lower half of her body.

  The masked nurse who had sat at her shoulder during the delivery, leant over and mopped the sweat from her brow. ‘It’s a boy,’ she whispered. ‘A strong, healthy boy. Lie back, they’ll bring him to you in a minute as soon as he’s been cleaned and weighed.’

  Clearwater was overwhelmed by a feeling of desolation.

  The nurse attempted to soothe her. ‘Don’t cry … don’t cry.’

  Watching the scene on television, Jefferson the 31st could hardly contain his excitement. Talisman was in the ha
nds of the First Family. The world was within their grasp.…

  In Ne-Issan, in the domain of the Yama-Shita, in the family stronghold at Sara-kusa, Roz lay sleeping in the bed-chamber that had been prepared for her and Cadillac by their grateful hosts.

  Placing the severed heads of Yoritomo and Ieyasu before Aishi Sakimoto and the other members of the family council had won them the praise they expected, and had left the Iron Masters in even greater awe of their power than on their last visit.

  They were, in fact, regarded as unassailable – and even if they weren’t, who would be foolish enough to kill two geese which laid such golden eggs?

  The hospitality they now enjoyed and the circumspection with which they were treated came as a welcome relief. On boarding the junk that was waiting off-shore, both Roz and Cadillac had been shocked to realise that they were mentally and physically drained.

  The long land and sea journey from Sioux Falls, the deceptive imagery they had been forced to weave around themselves, the plotting with the Yama-Shita, the mounting tension of the journey south with Lord Min-Orota, the nail-biting suspense and the blood-soaked climax had taken their toll. They had been running on a high octane mixture of fear and adrenaline and the tanks were now empty.

  Even so, they had not been able to unwind until they were out of reach of the Toh-Yota in the relative safety of the Sara-kusa palace. Then, at long last, they had been able to take shelter in each other’s arms and shut out the world for a long, loving, tender moment.

  That had been yesterday. And now, as Roz lay in the darkened room, a crucial chemical change was taking place inside her body.

  Clinging to the wall of the uterine tube was a newly fertilised egg. An egg which had succumbed to the advances of one out of two hundred and fifty million potential suitors implanted by Cadillac.

  Shorn of its tail, the sperm head had pierced the protective membrane, then had chemically sealed it against his rivals. And in the wondrous alchemy that governs our existence, the successful suitor had been transformed into what is known as the male pronucleus. Within the maturing egg, a female pronucleus had also formed.

  At 16:42, as Mount St Helens spoke with a tongue of flame, the two pronuclei moved towards the centre of the egg, shed their protective membrane and fused together.

  And in that instant, a new, unique human being was created.…

  Chapter Fourteen

  Mount St Helens continued to erupt with varying degrees of violence over the next seventeen days, pumping out a column of dense smoke and hot ash into the upper atmosphere. It was like an upturned space heater incinerating the laundry that had been placed on it to dry.

  The cold moist air sweeping in from the north-west over the Pacific found itself riding a giant thermal which lifted it up over the Rockies onto the plains beyond where it collided with the polar air stream – also warmed by the spreading plume of volcanic ash.

  As these two unseasonably warm air masses came into contact with the freezing earth, the result was not the expected heavy falls of snow, but rain – precipitation on a scale that had rarely been equalled in the annals of North America and which, in falling, dragged the thousands of tons of grey ash out of the sky and cast it across the landscape like a death shroud.

  The snow that had already fallen was washed away, and the melt which normally filled the streams and rivers in April and May was turned into a flood as the incessant downpour drained off the surrounding land – bringing to pass the third line of the Talisman Prophecy: And the earth drowns in its own tears.…

  From the Milk River, the northernmost tributary of the great Missouri, from the Yellowstone, the Cheyenne, the Niobara, and the Platte, the silt-laden waters rushed eastwards to join the huge flood heading down from the Dakotas, while from northern Minnesota, the mighty Mississippi fed from both east and west by the St Croix, Chippewa, Cedar, Rock, Iowa, Des Moines and Illinois swept south towards the looping junction with the Missouri just north of navref St Louis.

  By the time it was joined by the swollen waters of the Ohio River, a hundred miles further south, the Mississippi had become an unstoppable grey-brown tidal wave that overwhelmed the remains of the concrete levees and run-offs which had been put in place during the mid-20th century. In the aftermath of the Holocaust they had been an irrelevance, and by 2465 AD, the year of the Break-Out, they were judged to be beyond repair.

  Work on shoring up the river banks had begun following the incorporation of Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas to the Federation, but the continuing shortages of labour and heavy equipment and other more urgent tasks had turned it into yet another on-going construction project – which in this instance was still incomplete after two hundred and forty-three years.

  Even if the original flood-control system had been in place, it probably could not have held back the gigantic volume of water now descending onto the coastal plain. The uncompleted system stood no chance at all, and within a matter of days, some thirty thousand square miles were submerged – creating a vast inland sea.

  It was not just overground facilities that were affected when these floods burst upon an unsuspecting Federation. Surface water, percolating down through the sub-strata, raised underground levels to a point where the pumping facilities of the divisional bases at Le May/Jackson, Truman/Lafayette and Lincoln/Little Rock were strained to the limit.

  And as is always the case, the build-up in pressure found the weak points in the outer concrete skin. Cracks became open fissures then gaping holes allowing water to gush through, flooding entire galleries before cascading down through vent and lift shafts, escalator and service tunnels to the levels below. At one point, the Trans Am subway system was menaced, but swift action brought the situation under control – although not without loss of life.

  Flooding of underground facilities was an ever-present danger in the Federation and a great deal of thought and effort had gone into methods of containing inflows. In the same way that everyone knew the emergency drill in the event of a fire, every Tracker on an underground base had an assigned role with a Flood Control Team.

  To help cope with a dangerous inflow, all levels were fitted with watertight doors and vertical shut-offs which could be closed rapidly to isolate a flooded section – and most of the fatalities occurred amongst those unlucky enough to be in the wrong place when they lowered the boom.

  In an earlier age, closure had been a manual operation, but this had not proved 100 per cent effective because of what an AmExec report had called ‘the emotionally-induced delay factor’. Those ordered to close the doors were found to be holding them open to allow their buddies to escape – in some cases for far too long, leading to more widespread disruption.

  COLUMBUS, whose primary task was to ensure that the Federation functioned efficiently, did not have the same problem. Its logical analysis of the situation and the resulting decision to implement closure of a particular door was not affected by the hammering fists and desperate entreaties of those trapped by the rising tide.

  ‘Welcome back.’ The President-General invited Steve to take the armchair by the fireplace he had occupied on his first, memorable visit to the Oval Office. ‘Must have been quite a trip.’

  ‘It was, sir. But I learned a great deal – including the fact that I wasn’t cut out to be a sailor.’

  ‘You and a few thousand others. That’s one of the reasons why we don’t have a navy.’ Jefferson sat back in his rocker and stretched out a hand towards the gas flames that leapt through the cast iron logs and mica ash. Karlstrom wheeled another chair in to complete the triangle.

  Steve waited, not knowing how it was going to play. The P-G had welcomed him with the usual ten thousand volt hand-shake, but this time the voice had lacked warmth and he had not been greeted by his given name.

  Karlstrom caught Jefferson’s signal to start the proceedings. ‘Okay, Brickman, we’ve talked at some length to Major Fujiwara, now we’d like to hear your side of the story.’ He saw Steve’s reaction. ‘Relax. We’re
not exactly overjoyed at what’s happened but you’re not about to be strung up by the thumbs.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘And to save time, we accept Fujiwara’s assessment as to who master-minded this coup. The Yama-Shita family – who used Lord Min-Orota to set up Lady Mishiko. A shrewd move. Fuji’s probably told you why she was happy to oblige.’

  ‘Yes, sir, the Hase-Gawa connection. Small world…’

  Karlstrom nodded. ‘You and Commander Franklynne just happened to arrive at the wrong time, but we were also taken totally by surprise. Lady Mishiko obviously had outside help – though how the Yama-Shita managed to breach the island’s security cordon is a complete mystery. Anyway, the people helping her must have been the ones who jumped you and Fran. What we can’t figure out is why they didn’t take you as well.’

  Steve knew this question was bound to come up, and throughout the voyage home he had been searching for a plausible answer. ‘If I knew what hit me, sir, I might be able to answer that. The jap who was guarding us figured there were six soldiers closing in on the house. We went out to take them on and … the next thing I knew –’

  ‘Fujiwara was untying you, and Commander Franklynne was gone.’ Karlstrom pinched his nose thoughtfully. ‘Okay … here’s another question – how d’you think the Yama-Shita managed to get the goods on Ieyasu? Who uncovered our deal to supply his organisation with radios and surveillance devices? One of his own people?’

  ‘I doubt it, sir. You can check with Skull-, uhh, I mean Major Fujiwara, but in my opinion, if any of Ieyasu’s people were caught in the act, they’d face death by torture rather than talk.’

  ‘Yes, well, to save them the trouble we also supply cyanide capsules. A press-pack of five is included with every item we supply.’