Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

And with the dawn came the sound of thunder. Ted went outside, with Hamish’s collar grasped in his hand — Hamish-Bran seemed passive, beaten — and he climbed a ruined wall, looking for a vantage.

The Moonseed was on the move. The Moonseed pool was spreading like a silvery stain across the ground. The remains of buildings, of homes, with whatever tokens and bodies and memories they held, were cracking and falling, subsiding into the glowing mass. Ash was rising in diffuse clouds. There was a stink of ozone.

Inexorable. The word might have been coined for the stuff.

Where Holyrood Road used to be, a man, a soldier, was running before the spreading, flaring pool, somehow separated from his mates. He was far enough away to be reduced to a stick figure, his face a white blur.

He wasn’t running fast enough. The Moonseed was faster.

Ted pointed. “Look.”

“What? For God’s sake, what?”

“Did you ever see anything like that? The fox that couldn’t outrun the hounds. The child caught by the tide. Jesus, Jesus.”

In the last moment, that white point of a face turned to Ted, as if imploring.

“Nothing I can do,” Ted murmured. “Not any of us. It’s a tide of death. Come all the way from the stars, to wreck our homes, and kill us… And there are always little bastards like you, out to make it worse for everybody else.”

The Moonseed pool, hissing, overwhelmed the soldier. It was mercifully brief, from Ted’s point of view. One minute he was there, the next, in a flail of limbs, he was falling, and gone.

And now Ted turned to face east.

It was coming, crackling, bursts of light like a second dawn, the sound of rock breaking open like eggshell, washing up Castle Rock in a tide of light. Seconds left, no more.

“What do you think?” Ted asked gently. “Still expecting a great beam-up to that party in the sky?”

Bran was begging now. “Let me go. Oh Jesus, oh shit, let me go.”

Ted tightened his grip on Bran’s collar. “Burning witches in the Highlands, eh. Good for them. Maybe the Highlands will survive. Maybe the Highlanders will come back down here, like William Wallace, and stuff the bloody Moonseed back where it came from. Eh?

The smell of ozone was stronger. Just like the beach, he thought. He remembered what Henry had told him, nuclear fusion or fission or some damn thing going on as the Moonseed spread. He smiled.

“Maybe we’ll get a sun tan,” he said to Bran.

Bran, panting, his trouser legs stained wet, turned a dirt-streaked, tearful face up to him. “What? You crazy old fucker. What?”

The tears made him look young, the calculation and cunning gone from his face. He was younger than Michael had been, Ted remembered suddenly.

But Michael would never get any older. And neither would this boy.

…And now, after all this, he suffered an instant of doubt. This is only a kid. What right have I got to be judge and jury?

But there was no time. For now the Moonseed swept on him like a wave, buildings cracking and bursting into debris and falling, that fusion light bright all around him. All choice was ended, and that, for Ted, was a huge release.

He had time to see the Cathedral collapse. Big sandstone blocks just exploded out of the walls, as the church’s structural integrity vanished at a stroke, nine hundred years of building and preservation wiped out in a few seconds. There were massive blocks flying through the air towards him — Bran was screaming again — the Cathedral would kill them both, if it got the chance.

But before the blocks arrived, the wall he was standing on crumbled and collapsed. He was dropping, into a surging, silver-grey pool.

He closed his eyes, and fell into Moonseed.

It was soft and warm. Not like rock at all; like something alive, moving over his skin, exploring.

Something was grabbing at his hand. Bran.

He shook him loose; a creature like Bran should die alone.

The pressure built up around him. He was trapped, a fly in amber.

He opened his mouth to breathe. Something forced its way in — softly scraping, neutral temperature — scratching his mouth and throat as it pierced him.

No more air, then.

If Bran was right — Christ, the pressure on my chest — if Bran was right after all, he would be with Mike in a moment.

There was light beyond his closed eyelids, shining pink through the flesh. Streaks like meteors in his vision.

Michael, Jane, Jack. He’d done all he could for them. There would be no room in whatever was left of the world for an old fool like him. His doubt was gone now; to rid the world of a blight like Hamish Macrae was a worthy price for the remnant of his life.

A single instant of heat, unbelievable pressure, as the ancient volcanic plug gave way, and the surviving Castle buildings were blown apart, the fragments hurled high in the air.

So here was Henry back at Johnson Space Center, the heart of NASA, which he’d fled with such ill feeling. The old Saturn V still lay beside the entrance drive, as it had for decades, its most recent refurbishment leaving it sparkling white, like a Disney mockup. The mid-June air was heavy and humid, particularly after the clarity of Scotland, and the sky even here was an oppressive blue-grey dome, laden with ash.

From the security building, Henry was escorted to the Astronaut Office. He walked across the campus, the blocky buildings of oyster shell and glass, a solidification of a 1960s future that had never quite come to pass. Concrete paths criss-crossed between the buildings, lacing across bristly, bottle-green grass; the paths, Henry had observed in the past, never seemed to take you where you wanted to go, and he had developed a habit of jaywalking over the lawns, something that had not improved his popularity around here.

Today, following the girl from security, he stuck to the path.

There seemed to be a lot of people around, groups of them running between the buildings, carrying laptops and vu-graphs and folders of mission rules and procedures. There was a sense of urgency, in fact, that hadn’t been apparent in the time he’d spent here before. JSC, the centre of the nation’s space effort, had with time become just another place where big government work was done, with the nine-to-five schedules and leisurely pace that entailed.

Not now, though. Now, there were things to be done, missions to be mounted, a sense of urgency the place hadn’t known since the Apollo days.

All because of me, he thought. Jesus.

But then, it was as if NASA had been waiting for this call to arms since the curtailing of Apollo.

It seemed to Henry that once he had gotten through Monica Beus’s OSTP review, the official initiation of the scrambled Moon program had been extraordinarily fast.

He had to make another presentation, more formal, to the National Space Council: another presidential advisory group, this one chaired by the Vice President himself. And away from his own involvement, support built up. He read of Congressmen being hauled into the White House to be pressured into supporting the emergency bill authorizing the release of federal funds to NASA to implement the program. Opponents in the Senate, who appeared to think this was just another NASA job-creating publicity stunt, tried to filibuster the bill. But the White House orchestrated public opinion and concern, focusing on fence-sitting senators, who soon started to feel the heat from their home districts.

Maybe it shouldn’t have been such a surprise, Henry thought. This President had emerged from Congress herself; she was said to be the most skilled Chief Executive at dealing with Congressmen since Johnson. And that was just as well given the sexual harassment charges still being laid against her.