Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

The wind hit him again, harder, and he found himself drifting through a neck of fierce volcanic cloud. Suddenly he was immersed in darkness, and his mouth and nose was full of hot, gritty dust. The buffeting got worse. There was hot air all around him, roiling and turbulent. It was possible that even if he wasn’t burned or suffocated to death, the damn turbulence could tip him upside down.

He had to get out of this. Like, now.

He reached up to the four-line release, a set of red handles either side of his head. He tugged at them sharply, to open panels to the rear at the canopy. He could feel himself shoved forward, as the air gushed out of his canopy.

In a few seconds he had come out of the cloud, into relatively fresh air. He was coughing, eyes streaming, but he was intact.

The air was carrying him a little more to the east than he would have liked, but he was able to correct that with tugs on his harness lines, and keep his heading to the north.

A thousand feet, less. He could see a lot of detail now — too much — trees and sage everywhere, scattered over a landscape that didn’t look nearly so smooth and featureless as from the air.

He’d done his time at jump school. Keep your feet together or your legs might snap — head up, and land into a roll, with contact at the balls of your feet, legs, hips and back, to disperse the energy of impact…

The landscape opened out, the horizon receding around him, the trees foreshortening, as if reaching up towards him. There was a patch ahead of him, clear save for a little sage. He had his landing area.

He hauled on the harness lines and got a little more northerly push. He kept his feet and knees together, legs slightly bent.

The ground was hard, and he fell to his left, hard enough to knock the wind out of him, and his head slammed into the exposed rock.

Quick-release the harness strap clips. Release the seat kit… No pain. Shock again?

He could see his parachute, billowing and collapsing, and, bizarrely, his rubber life raft, bouncing over the scrubby ground.

It was turning into one lousy morning.

He didn’t come to until they lifted him off the ground, wrapped up in some kind of silver emergency blanket. He heard the whup-whup of chopper blades.

Here was Jake’s face, hovering over him.

“You’re okay, buddy,” Jake was saying. “You’re a hero.”

“Bullshit.” Christ, his voice was a croak.

“It’s true. The whole damn Canyon looks like a dried-out river bed,” said Jake. “Ledges, buttes of bedrock, gravel bars, teardrop hills, like a piece of the Mississippi delta. And you should see the IMAX images taken from the Space Station. We’re famous, man. We’re on TV.”

Garry grabbed Jake’s sleeve. “But the Seed, man. The Moonseed.”

Jake’s face split in a grin. “We stopped it. NASA said so, those sensors they have up there. It stopped spreading. Listen, you get yourself fixed. I got two shots of Jeremiah Weed lined up at Edwards already…”

Garry thought about the new volcanism he’d witnessed from the air: the deep wound the Moonseed had dug into the continent’s oldest, hardest rocks, that even the Colorado could only scratch, the silver patches there.

Maybe they had bought some breathing time, at least.

He knew his mother said efforts like this were only superficial. More about making people feel good, feel they were fighting back, than about canning the Moonseed.

But hell, maybe that was all anybody could do.

He wished he could do as much, by analogy, for his mother.

In the oily interior of the Chinook, he stared at the metal frame ceiling, until the rotors roared and he was lifted, and he closed his eyes.

Henry and the mission planners were receiving a briefing, by a quiet young military officer, on the systems they were installing to support the nuke.

“We removed the code box, the permissive action link. For your purposes we engineered a time fuse and detonator and matched them with the warhead. You will have a timer, but you will be able to abort the detonation at any time up to the final moment.” The young man, earnest and soft-spoken, referred to the bomb as a “monkey’.

The nervousness this topic roused in the program managers and controllers and astronauts intrigued Henry. These were hardened, experienced people; why should the idea of carrying a weapon into space spook them so much?

Unless it was the very fact that a weapon was now deemed to be necessary.

Since the 1950s, if not earlier, the Solar System had been assumed to be an empty, barren place, a wilderness of gas and rock and ice, a stage on which man’s drama could be played out. A place to take a camera, not a gun. Now, suddenly, it looked as if that assumption was not true.

And they were scared…

That was when Henry got the message about some kind of problem at Torness.

He ran back to his quarters. There were several messages waiting for him, from academic contacts, the Scottish authorities, Blue Ishiguro.

Torness. He remembered the map he’d inspected with the Prime Minister. Twenty miles from Edinburgh, to the east; exactly along the route Jane said she was going to follow.

Since he told her to get out of Musselburgh he’d tried a slew of ways to get in touch with her, and had failed every time.

Torness wasn’t the only nuclear installation to have suffered a catastrophic failure, as the quakes and fissures and volcanism and floods hit, all around the world. Nuke stations going up like firecrackers. All we need.

It was the peculiar fortune of the human race, he thought, to have encountered this problem just when it was smart enough to build such things as nuclear reactors but not smart enough to shut them down safely.

He had to do something for Jane.

He contacted Geena, and called in some more favours.

By the time he was done he had a guarantee. If Jane made it out of Scotland, if she was found, she’d be flown out of Britain, to the relative safety of the States.

It was all he could do for her, as it turned out, because the latest blocking moves, in House and the Senate, were overcome, and the authorization came for them to be shipped to Russia.

On his last day in America, Henry received two packages. One was a cancellation of his life insurance policy. The other was an olivine necklace, a string of bottle-green beads.

He tucked the necklace into the little pouch of personal effects he was being allowed to take, all the way to the Moon.

A USAF transport plane took them into Moscow. Henry tried to sleep, during the long haul over the North Pole.

He woke up during the descent into Moscow. He glimpsed green-clad hills below, an ancient landscape where Nazi and Soviet soldiers had fought to the death: humans sacrificed in waves in the cause of nations which no longer existed, offerings to vanished gods.

He didn’t know what was in the minds of the Administration that had made them progress their decision this stage further. Some of the attempts to disrupt the Moonseed had worked, like the cataclysmic flooding of the Grand Canyon. Elsewhere, they had failed.

Like the backpack nuke that had, against his advice, been dropped on a Moonseed patch that had been set up in Nevada.

The nuke had made a predictable mess, but basically the flood of gammas and X-rays had accelerated Moonseed propagation. Monica Beus led a study that showed, taking into account the energy returned by the accelerated activity of the Moonseed in those Nevada rocks, that the gamma-fired Moonseed had delivered an energy return in a feedback factor measured in the billions.

As Henry had suspected. In fact he was counting on that, for his secret plan to save mankind, although when he put it like that he found himself staring in the mirror and wondering exactly how crazy he was.