Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

“Yes.” Leropa’s eyes glittered.

Leropa showed her Michael Poole, in a glittering crowd of people, an explosion some distance away, out to sea, frozen in time like a deadly flower.

“Watch now,” Leropa said.

The flash came first. The curtain-wall of the marquee turned black, saving my eyesight. For a fraction of a second we all stood there in the dark.

Then the shock wave hit us. Bam.

The marquee was whipped away in the wind. Under the sudden sky the whole world was full of immense energies that roared over me, oblivi-ous to my presence. Around me VIPs fell like skittles, or went whirling away into the air. It was like being overwhelmed by some immense wave.

When the shock passed I found myself on my back, all the air smashed out of my lungs, staring up at a racing sky. I struggled to sit up.

Over the sea, a mushroom cloud was gathering. Small, perfect, symmetrical, it was a return of a twentieth-century nightmare. Around its base great streamers of fire gushed up out of the water. I guessed that we had managed to destabilize some of the very hydrate deposits we were supposed to secure, that the flames came from the ignition of some of the released methane. Now a wind began to rush the other way, at my back, as the huge blast of heat over the ocean began to push the air skyward, and suck colder air in from the land.

I was surrounded by wreckage, scattered people. I couldn’t see Tom, or John, or Shelley, or any of the others. I had no idea what had become of Makaay and Barnette. There wasn’t a trace left of the low stage where they’d been standing.

A camera drone hovered before my face, not five centimeters from my nose. The camera was a spinning sphere the size of my thumb. A tiny portal dilated open and a jewel-like lens glinted down at me. I stared back, bemused.

I didn’t seem to be functioning. I was having trouble breathing, as if iron bands had been clamped around my chest. I couldn’t seem to feel anything, not even the hard ground under my back, or the Arctic chill, and I could hear nothing but a vague, dull roar. It was almost comforting to sit there, while running people, spinning drones, bits of ripped-apart marquee flapped all around me.

And Morag was beside me.

She sat on the ground, not a hair out of place despite the wind. But her face was creased with anxiety. “Are you OK?”

I could hear her, but I couldn’t hear any other damn thing. I answered her question. I flexed an arm, testing the joints. “I think so.”

And then the meaning of our mundane exchange hit me. She was here. I could even make out her words. I stared at her. “Shit. Morag.”

“I know,” she said. “It’s a heck of a thing, isn’t it?”

We sat there for one more heartbeat. Then I reached up, and suddenly she was in my arms, warm and real.

I think I blacked out.

Sonia loomed over me. She was covered in mud and bleeding from a wound in her forehead, and she held her right arm clamped against her belly. She yelled, “Can you hear me, Michael? Can you move?”

I pushed myself upright. For a second the world grayed, as if reality were draining out of me again, but the feeling dissipated. Sonia reached down with her good arm to help me up, but she winced. I stood, unsteady. I don’t think I had ever felt so old, so drained of strength.

I leaned on Morag. She had always been strong, but now she felt very solid, like a stone pillar. She was wearing a simple white coverall, the kind of practical gear she had always preferred. But her coverall was mud-streaked and splashed by a spray of blood, somebody else’s blood, and her strawberry blond hair was mussed by the breeze. She was even more embedded in the world than before, when the wind hadn’t seemed able to touch her.

Somehow she had come back: not a ghost this time, not an elusive vision glimpsed from the corner of my eye, but here.

“You’re real,” I said.

She looked down at herself. “Real?”

“You’re back in the world.” I touched a mud splash on her sleeve. “You weren’t before. You are now.”

“It looks that way, doesn’t it? How strange.”

Suddenly I had a head full of questions, and things I had waited seven-teen years to say to her. But even at that moment, behind it all was a single sharp memory, of what John had said to me about their affair, a grain of pain.

I glanced around. The crowd was actually thicker than it had been before the blast, I thought. Engineers and VIPs, covered in mud and blood, wandered around or sat in the dirt. The VR guests had been untouched by the blast, of course. They walked like glittering ghosts through the battlefield that our event had become; some of them even had drinks in their hands. I wondered if we had a few visitors who hadn’t been here before the blast. It was a common phenomenon: Bottleneckers, they were called, disaster-tourists.

I became aware of the others, Shelley, John, Tom. They all looked battered and muddy, but had no obvious serious injuries — none save Sonia herself, who was shepherding us, despite her damaged arm. She seemed to be the only one of us thinking clearly. I guessed her military training had kicked in, and I was grateful for it.

Everybody was staring at Morag. Maybe the shock of having just come through the explosion helped us; if we hadn’t been dulled by that I don’t know how we’d have coped.

Tom’s mud-streaked face was a mask of hurt and bewilderment. “Dad—”

I felt a stab of regret that I hadn’t been able to save him from this profound shock. “Later. We’ll deal with this.”

Something of his dry cynicism returned. “Well, we’ll have a lot to talk about, won’t we?”

Sonia tapped her ear; maybe she was getting information through her service-issue implants. “OK, EI security are getting ahold of things. Makaay and Barnette are dead. Many casualties on the rig. The EI people are doing a good job, but they are concerned about follow-up attacks. And they hope to get the VR facilities shut down so we can lose these Bottleneckers.”

“What about the police, the authorities?”

“See for yourself.” She pointed.

Outside the footprint of the wrecked marquee, cops and military types swarmed, and as my hearing recovered I heard the roar of vehicle engines, the flap of chopper blades. They must have been on hand to provide cover for this VIP-heavy event anyhow, but they had been unobtrusive, and now they seemed to just melt out of the tundra.

Sonia began to herd us away from the marquee. “The Alaska State Troopers are taking charge of the incident for now. They want to get us out of here, the five of us—”

“Six,” I said. I got hold of Morag’s arm. Whatever happened, I wasn’t going to be separated from her.

“Six, then. The marquee area and the rig will be closed down as a crime scene. We’ll be flown out to a hospital. But we’ll be in military custody.”

Shelley said, “So we’re all suspects?”

We had all grown up with terrorism, and we knew the mantra: everyone is on the front line, everyone is a suspect. But it was depressing to be caught up in its dreary processing.

John said, “We’ll be held as witnesses at the minimum. I’ll make sure we get proper legal representation. I have contacts…” He trailed off. He had struck his usual blustering competent-man-taking-charge pose, and it was briefly impressive despite the mud streaked across his face, his torn shirt, the way his fringe of hair stood on end, caked in dust. But Morag stood here, large as life, impossibly alive, watching him without expression. He crumbled, his words drying up, his personality imploding.

Sonia led us toward a site that was being marked out by troopers as a landing area. A chopper descended toward us, a big old Chinook in camouflage colors.