Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

But, though the light was sharp, there was a stink of ash, or smoke, in the air, and an odd orange tinge to the sky, like smog.

After a few minutes, she went to find a taxi back to the city.

The taxi carried her over the Kingston Bridge, the big motorway bridge that crossed the Clyde.

The Clyde was low. Very low, surely lower, in fact, than just a couple of hours before. She could see watermarks in the banks, high above the rippling surface of the river itself.

She thought she could see the water recede further, in the couple of minutes it took to cross the bridge. She’d never seen anything like it. Some kind of tide?

She had the taxi drop her at George Square. From here she could walk up the hill along North Hanover Street to the Buchanan, the big mall at the end of Sauchiehall Street.

…There was a sound like an explosion. The ground rippled.

She was lifted up, thrown into the air, and landed flat, face down on the ground.

The air was filled with shrieking sounds. Car alarms.

Dazed and confused, Jenny tried to get up, cradling her bump. Her knees were grazed, bleeding, as if she was a ten-year-old kid.

The buildings around the Square were swaying. Some of them had collapsed — the masonry and brickwork and glass just seemed to explode outwards — and the air was brown with clouds of dust and smoke. A couple of buildings to the north were on fire, sending up pillars of black smoke.

On the horizon were flashes. Electricity generators shorting out, perhaps.

Now she could hear the wail of sirens, police cars and fire engines and ambulances. She could hear people screaming and shouting. They were emerging from what was left of the buildings, blinking in the sunlight, and then they began picking their way back into the ruins.

Another shock, that jerked her onto her backside on the tarmac.

There were pillars of black smoke all around the skyline now. An awful lot of fires.

The speed of it struck her. Everything had just come apart, shaken to bits, in a few seconds.

No traffic was moving. There wasn’t anything she could do to help. The Square was open, and she decided to stay where she was, far from the buildings; at least here she wouldn’t be crushed by falling bricks.

One minute to LOS, You’re go all the way.

“Copy that.”

Soyuz, Houston, ten seconds.

“See you round the corner…”

Henry watched the clock, intently. At precisely 65:54:05 — two days and seventeen hours from Earth — static filled his headset.

“My God,” he said. “Right to the second.”

Geena laughed. “Aw, they probably just turned off the radio to make us feel better.”

Henry felt awed by the careless accuracy of the moment. To think that human beings could dig out this shell of metal and plastic, of Earth materials, wrap it around themselves and hurl it across space all the way to the Moon and arrive to the second.

Arkady and Geena began the checklist for the burn, working carefully and slowly, swapping languages all the time. They seemed doubly careful not to make any mistakes now, out of sight of the Earth.

The celestial geometry adjusted smoothly, the two great beacons of Earth and sun shifting steadily around the sky, illuminating the battered Moon. Through Henry’s window, the crescent of sunlit Moon ground grew, narrowing still, until it dwarfed the fleeing craft; and at last it narrowed to invisibility.

…And, quite suddenly, the craft was enveloped in darkness, in the shadow of the Moon.

It was the first time in three days Soyuz hadn’t been bathed in unfiltered sunlight. He craned towards his window. As his eyes dark-adapted, he could see stars, emerging from the gloom, each of them shining with a steady, gemlike brilliance. And, where the sun had been, the Moon was a giant, perfect hole in the star field — no, he saw now as his eyes adapted, not complete darkness: Earthlight played here, making the craters shine blue-black, like ghosts of themselves.

But, ahead of him, maybe a third of the lunar disc was in true darkness. It was the double shadow, the place neither Earthlight nor sunlight reached, as dark as any place in the Solar System.

Only the Apollo astronauts had known this experience before.

The hair stood up on the back of his neck.

“…Translation control power, on.”

“On, Geena.”

“Rotational hand controller number two, armed.”

“Armed.”

“Stand by for the primary TVC check.”

“Three minutes to the burn. We are still go, Geena…”

The ventilation hummed, the fans whirred, the machinery gleamed, mundane sights and sounds, as if he was in the guts of some immense pc; after three days they were enveloped in a persistent aroma of Russian cabbage and stale farts.

But there was nothing mundane about where he was, a warm pink body, sailing through the shadow of the Moon.

Come on, Henry, he thought. You aren’t supposed to feel like this.

There was an explosion of light. Henry craned to see.

Far ahead of the craft, the sun was rising over the Moon.

It was a dawn of sorts, but it was bony and stark, with none of the richness and fleeing colours of an Earth-orbit sunrise. This was an airless world with no atmosphere to refract sunlight, to bend it up from below the horizon, and create a pre-dawn glow in the sky. So sunrise was instantaneous: one moment it was night, the next a line of fire had straddled the horizon, poking through the mountains and crater rims there.

The light fled across the bare surface, casting shadows hundreds of miles long from mountains and broken crater walls. The smaller, younger craters were just wells of darkness in the flat light. For the first time, the Moon looked jagged and exotic, a craggy, romantic alien world; but he knew it was only an artifact of the light, giving the old, eroded Moon a rugged grandeur it didn’t merit —

The engines lit.

For a couple of weeks the rig workers had noticed strange happenings.

The sea water here in the North Channel, not far from the mouth of the Clyde, was sometimes so warm it steamed. And there was that prevailing stink of rotten eggs. Hydrogen sulphide, the lab boys said.

William Calder didn’t think much of it. Aged twenty-seven, with a wife, Jenny, and two kiddies in a tenement block in the Gorbals back in Glasgow, he’d always known the work on this exploratory oil rig was going to be hard and dirty and dangerous, even before Scotland started bloody blowing up. Twelve hours on, twelve hours off, weeks or months away from home; William just kept himself to himself and got through his work, like serving a sentence, which, if truth be known, William had done once or twice in his younger days.

But now it was nearly the end of his tour of duty — nearly the end for everybody, as the rig was going to be evacuated in a few days because of the volcano stuff — and William would be going home with his bank account stuffed with money, more than enough to get his young family out of Glasgow for good, and into some safe bolt hole in England, as far south as they could bloody go without falling into the English Channel.

So he was sitting with a six-pack in the cinema, watching Independence Day for the fourth time, when the first explosion came.

The rig shuddered, and there was a wail like a scream.

“Jesus Christ, that’s a gas leak,” said Jackie Brown, one of the blasting foremen.

Everybody stood up.

The film jammed, and burned through with shocking suddenness, a black circle just gushing outwards across the screen.

Then the plastic walls of the room started to melt, and the workers, men and women alike, started to run.

In the corridor outside, William saw people grabbing at metal railings. There was a sound of sizzling, like bacon, and people screamed. The railings were too hot to touch.