Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

That was puzzling. But even that didn’t seem to matter.

“One hundred feet… eighty feet… eighty feet.”

“Roger that, eighty feet.”

“Power lines a quarter mile.”

“Roger, power lines. Pulling up.”

The surge upward caught Henry by surprise. His attention had been fixed on the evolution of the Seat; suddenly he was pushed down in his jump seat, his consciousness forced back into his fragile body, hurled around inside this clattering contraption.

“One twenty… one fifty… one eighty… five hundred feet now.”

“Five hundred feet. I have the lines visual. Over we go.”

Henry saw the power lines pass seemingly feet below the Chinook.

“Okay, going lower—”

The Chinook orbited over the south face of the Seat once more.

In the last few seconds, the landsliding had become intense. As Henry looked down, it was as if everything south of a line drawn east-west from the Salisbury Crags to the Dunsapie Loch was beginning to move. The nature of the movement was eerie — like nothing he had seen before — not truly a landslide, for there was no lateral movement; rather, the whole mass was rippling and churning up, basalt shattered and turned to a crude fluid by the immense forces stirring within.

And now, at last, the whole south side of the Seat began to slide southwards along a deep-seated plane. Already outlying billows of dust and ash were reaching Duddingston Loch and Prestonfield, the suburb to the south of the Seat, mercifully evacuated —

That was when the explosion came.

Red-hot stones were hurled yards into the air. They came down hissing on the grass. Ash was hosing out, black outside, red-lit within; a cinder cone was already building up around the aperture.

The ground shuddered. There were more deep-throated cracks and explosions: Mike was hearing the voice of the ground coming apart, new fissures and vents opening up.

Mike repeated one of Bran’s favourite mantras. “Christmas Eve, 1968. In the beginning, God created the Heaven and the Earth…”

He heard people join in. “ And the Earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” He was not alone, then. “ And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters—”

The ground shuddered, and he was thrown flat again, his face pressed into the grass. The first stones had become a fount of boulders, incandescent bombs hurled so far into the air they passed out of his sight, into the ash cloud that was gathering above him.

Lightning sparked in the cloud. The sunlight was blocked out. He was enveloped in heat.

Mike was sure there was nothing like this in the literature, this sudden and spectacular opening up. But then, there was nothing in fifty thousand years of human history, nothing in five billion years of Earth, like the Moonseed.

The noise had merged into a roar now, continuous, the shuddering unending. But still he could hear his own voice.

“And God said, ‘Let there be light. ’ And there was light.”

The ground split again, gas and steam rushing all around him. He heard a scream, unearthly; he was scorched by the heat, but still, it seemed, uninjured. He could scarcely breathe, the air was so hot and thick with the ash.

The ground subsided under him.

In the darkness, he seemed to be falling. Perhaps he would fall all the way to the centre of the Earth, hollowed out by Moonseed.

But now the ground returned, slamming up under him, and he fell on his back, the soil and grass and rock and heather and moss rubbing against his flesh.

He was rising into the roiling ash cloud. It rose up above him, lightning sparking. Remarkably, he still felt no pain, no real discomfort.

There could be only seconds left, though.

Far above, a glint of metal against a square inch of blue sky. A helicopter?

He tried to shout, but he had no voice.

And God saw the light… That it was good…

But now the ash descended on him — oh, Jesus, it was hot, it was burning — and there was no more light.

The cloud of dust and steam billowed upwards, thrusting like a fist towards the Chinook.

“Get us out of here,” Henry said. “ Now.”

The pilot didn’t need telling twice. He opened up his throttle and the Chinook dipped, its big rotors biting into the turbulent air.

Henry looked back. The cloud, a black wall, hundreds of feet high, seemed to be catching them up.

The Chinook lurched; the pilots fought for control.

There was an explosion nearby: a crackle of acoustic shock waves, a blast of light, as if someone was shooting at the chopper.

“What—”

“Hold on!”

The Chinook rocked violently.

“Break left! Break right!”

The Chinook banked; Henry grabbed the frame, but even so he was thrown from side to side.

Thick and viscous magma, he thought. Undisturbed for three hundred million years. Heavy with dissolved gases. Suddenly the Moonseed takes the lid off. The magma tears itself into hot fragments, that jet upward or tear out of the new/old vent. Hurling volcanic bombs into the air, even high enough to threaten this Chinook.

Understanding it, he found, was no reassurance right now.

The rocking began to reduce.

“Take it easy,” the pilot said.

The Chinook levelled out.

Henry looked back again. The cloud was still expanding faster than they could run, probably three hundred miles an hour or better, close enough now to turn the day dark.

There was a patter of ash particles on the windscreen.

“North,” he said. “Go north.”

The pilots hurled the Chinook into a sickening wrench to the left.

Henry looked back. The cloud was still expanding, but mostly southward; the north was shielded a little by the topography of the Seat, what was left of it.

The cloud was separating into distinct mushroom-shaped clouds, thick and black, heavy and pregnant with ash. There were lighter cirrus clouds arrayed above. He could see the ashfall beginning already, a black ram; it would turn what was left of Edinburgh into a new Pompeii, he thought.

The Salisbury Crags, at the western face of the Seat, had given way. He could see what looked like a pyroclastic flow, a heavier-than-air mix of gases and hot volcanic fragments. From here it looked like a smoke ring spreading down the battered western flank of the Seat. The flow would follow the contours of the ground, and pool in the lower areas: the heart of Edinburgh, the old loch that had been drained to build the New Town.

Already the Seat itself, what was left of it, was scraped bare of life. And, through the clouds, he couldn’t see any sign of the Moonseed pools.

Lightning bolts shot through the clouds, extending to tens of thousands of feet.

For Morag, it started with a low rumble, like a tram deep underground. But there were no trains running today.

Then a series of buffeting jolts. Jolts that grew stronger.

She stood in the middle of Princes Street, in the roadway away from the buildings.

Then she was down, her face slammed against the tarmac. It was as if a rug had been pulled away from beneath her feet.

She tried to get to her knees. There was blood on the tarmac, a deep sting down the right side of her face, where the skin had been scraped away.

The noise was suddenly enormous, the crashing and roaring of the buildings overlaid on the deeper rumble of the ground. There was a muddled stink, of gas, steam, ozone, soot.

The street, still shaking, was turning into a battlefield. The facings of the buildings were coming away and crashing to the pavements, sheets of stone and bright plastic and metal and glass, smashing and splintering as they fell, as if the street was imploding. Billboards and neon light tubes turned themselves into deadly missiles, showering shrapnel over the pavements below. Some of the older buildings seemed to be collapsing already, the breaking of their beams like gunshot cracks.