Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

Over the dam, the sight was spectacular. Already he could see the angry water, brown-white and swirling, smearing itself across the landscape of the Canyon, washing out Highway 89, pounding at the Navajo Bridge, ramming its way deeper into the Canyon.

Since the damming in 1963, the Lake had been storing up two hundred and fifty tons a day of sediment — the sand and silt and smashed-up rocks which had enabled the river to scour out the Canyon in the first place — and today, all that good stuff was going to come pouring down the Canyon, taking decades of pent-up revenge, the mother of all mud slides.

He took another tour over what he was coming to think of as the badlands, the bleaker western end of the Canyon, laced with clouds of ash and steam, lair of the Moonseed. It was going to be a hell of a sight when the floods rammed into the Inner Gorge —

His head set rang with an alarm.

Acquisition radar. It was so unexpected it took him a couple of seconds to recognize it.

But he confirmed it on his threat warning screen. Right on top of him, out of nowhere.

Working on automatic, he called Jake. “Mud six. I got mud six.”

What?

It had to be a malfunction.

Closing up, Jake said.

The sound went off, but the visual alarm continued to show.

He turned his head, scanning through his bubble window through a hundred and eighty degrees. He was looking for the plume of a surface-to-air’s rocket motor. What if some crazy was shooting at him? Some eco-freak, maybe…

He saw nothing.

Jake was screaming. Shit, man, it’s right under you!

Counter-measures. Radar chaff —

But there was no more time.

There was a slam, the loudest noise he had ever heard.

He was thrown up, like a punted football, and then he fell away to his left. Whatever had struck him had come from beneath, his blind spot, and hit the F-16 in the belly of the fuselage.

He glanced back.

His plane was gone.

The F-16 had been broken in two; his nose and cockpit had broken away, and were falling through the sky, powerless. He couldn’t even see the rear section.

There was flame lapping all around him. His instrument console was breaking up, splintering and warping, glass dials popping and smashing. The flames dug into a gap between his oxygen mask and his visor, and the nape of his neck, behind his collar.

Slam, fall, flames, pain, all within a fraction of a second.

He looked down. There was a hard rubber handle jutting between his legs: PULL TO EJECT. He reached down with his left hand and pulled.

The seat pulled his restraints in, back to the parachute risers, dragging him back against the seat frame. The canopy popped, and was gone; air rushed over him, cool and clean, dousing the flames. The seat slid up its glide rails, and a rocket catapult hurled it into the air. A kick in the back: ten or twelve Gs, for maybe half a second. Garry thought he could feel it all along his vertebrae.

The air slammed into him like an ocean wave.

Then he was upside down, still strapped to the seat, shards of debris fluttering around him. The seat stabilized itself quickly, and there he was: face down, stranded in the air, five miles high.

The crumpled Arizona landscape was rising towards him, so slowly it was almost imperceptible. It would take five minutes to free-fall to Earth. He was supposed to ride out four minutes of that, until the seat opened at fourteen thousand feet.

He could see the wreckage of his plane, two big chunks surrounded by a cloud of smaller fragments of debris. He watched the nose section hit the Canyon wall, and it exploded there, and a pall of black smoke rose from the crater. His own miniature volcano, to go along with his earthquake.

There was no sign of whatever assailant had struck at him.

The air up here was cold and empty and silent, after the explosive shattering of the airplane. As the adrenaline shock receded, he waited for the wave of pain to hit him.

He’d never tried this before.

You didn’t practice ejections; they were too dangerous, not to mention expensive. You just studied the manuals and made sure you knew where the yellow lever was and hoped you never had to pull it. For sure, he didn’t feel as badly as he always imagined he would, after being hurled out of his safe, bubble-wrapped armchair in the sky, into this position of complete nakedness and exposure.

You’re in shock, he told himself.

He could even recognize where he was. The western end of the Grand Canyon was laid out below him like a National Park tourist map. There was the skinny sheen of the Colorado, bright blue against the Mars-red of the high desert into which it had cut. He could see the tributary canyons, cut by their own rivers, Prospect and Mohawk to the south, Andrus and Parashant to the north. Even now, there was no sign of the flood water that was forcing its way along the Canyon from the east. The Canyon was long…

There was a fiercely black knot of cloud, right about where Lava Falls should be. He was, in fact, drifting over the Falls, and so looking down, right into the cloud.

He could see the glow of red, inside the cloud. He heard distant bangs, like cannon fire, disturbing his peace. He saw sparks fly out of that red scar.

Sparks?

If he could see them from here, then they had to be the size of houses. Rocks, then. Probably lava bombs, freshly birthed from the Earth, cooling even as they sailed up from the mouth of the ground.

He knew about lava bombs. After the Moonseed, everyone was a volcanologist.

So now he knew what had hit him. Maybe he and Jake had indeed made the Earth quake. But the Earth, or at any rate the Moonseed, had struck back.

It wouldn’t take another lava bomb to kill him, now he was out of the airplane. Just a fragment, an ember of red-hot rock, might be enough to torch his canopy. And if he fell through the cloud his lungs were going to be filled with searing hot ash and dust and steam.

And he was falling right into that spreading cloud of black, fiery shit.

Garry got hold of the manual override handle in the right side of his seat, and pulled it.

He heard a light pop as the drogue chute emerged. There was a jerk as the drogue filled up, and then a billowing, like huge wings over him. It was a wonderful noise, the sound of his main canopy opening up.

Now there was another jerk, much harder.

Suddenly he was falling much more slowly, now at an angle to the ground, still strapped to his seat.

It was going to be twenty-five minutes before he touched down.

He would have to lose the seat at some point. A seated landing would be hazardous. But for now, it made him feel secure. Hanging in the air like this, it was hard to let go of anything.

At twenty thousand feet he pulled off his oxygen mask and dropped it earthward. His cheeks and neck immediately felt better.

He heard the roar of a jet over his head. It was Jake. The gleaming F-16, stunningly artificial against this barren, inhuman landscape, waggled its wings.

Then Jake fell off to the east. He must be low on fuel, and for all Garry knew had taken some kind of damage from the volcanism as well. But he knew his wing man wouldn’t rest until Garry was picked up.

He reached to the front of his seat and found the toggle switch that activated his distress signal.

At fourteen thousand feet his seat fell away, as it was designed to do. He looked up. For the first time he could see his canopy, a broad ceiling of orange and white and green, as visible as all hell.

He started to think about where to come down.

Even if he avoided that volcano, and any little brothers and sisters it might have, he didn’t want to land in the Canyon itself. Certainly not in the Inner Gorge, waiting for the giant flood he’d initiated to come scouring away the walls. He needed to look for a place on the plateau, then, either to north or south.