Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

“If it’s prehistoric, how do you know it was 1700?”

Smartass. “Because they cross-correlated it with a tsunami that washed up across the Pacific, in Honshu.”

“Where?”

“Japan. And that was recorded. And, look, the legend describes what should happen. When the fault gives way the edge of the North American plate slips forward, and what used to be an upward fold in the plate catapults into a downward fold. The sea rushes in, and brings in sediment. And that enriches the land, like the man said. It’s happened several times. They’ve found layers of sea bottom mud and sand over ancient peat.”

Cecilia rubbed her eyes. “Sea bottom mud. Native Americans nobody heard of. Look, Joely, this just isn’t what we’re looking for.” She glanced at Joely. “I’m expecting anger from you here.”

Joely thought it over. She said carefully, “I think I used up my anger. I used it up on all the times you undermined my authority by sending out my copy to those shit-for-brain buddies of yours scattered around the corporation, and having them blind-side me with their e-mails.”

“Joely—”

“All this after you said I had autonomy. At least now you’re being straight with me.”

“This isn’t personal,” Cecilia said. “It’s editorial. Don’t you get that? I don’t want nursery school songs about peat, for Christ’s sake. I want NASA and the USGS and FEMA. Now, if you could have gotten hold of that guy Meacher, the one who’s been shooting his mouth off about going to the Moon, we might have something—”

There was a boom, like remote thunder.

They stared at each other.

Cecilia said, “What the hell was that?”

Joely laughed. It can’t be. Not right on cue.

They went to the window. Cecilia, as a permanent employee of Virtuelle, had a corner office, of course, up here on the third floor. The biggest window faced west, towards the Puget Sound.

The day was clear, if oddly smoggy. They had a good view of the campus. On one of the neat squares of grass a cat was standing. It was facing north, standing oddly, with its legs apart…

Far to the west, over the ocean, there was a giant electrical storm raging. It was a bank of thick black cloud, roiling, spread right along the horizon.

There was sheet lightning, cracking in the gaps in the cloud, and what looked like fireballs, tossed into the air like popcorn. Ball lightning, maybe.

“I think it’s a quake,” Joely said. “A big one.”

“Oh, you’re an expert,” Cecilia said.

“That black stuff could be dust, thrown up by the quake. The rock shears, the water vaporizes… You get a build-up of electricity…” She glanced around the campus. “These buildings — they conform to the California building code. Right?”

“This isn’t California.” Cecilia looked confused. “How would I know?”

“Well, they look like tilt-up construction to me.”

“Is that bad?”

The thunder was replaced by a low rumbling noise overlaid by a crackle, a series of short bangs that sounded like gravel on a tin roof.

Joely listened intently to the low-frequency rumble, fascinated. She knew what that was. She was hearing the shortest-wavelength seismic waves, listening to the vibration of the Earth itself. The longest waves, with a period of an hour or so, corresponded to the whole Earth’s resonant frequency, and were much too low-frequency to hear.

The planet was ringing like a bell.

Now, above the storm, there was a strange cloud formation. Something like a smoke ring, Joely thought, a loose band of fluffy white. Maybe that was the acoustic pressure wave, rising up towards the stratosphere. The satellites would detect it later, a displacement of the atmosphere’s layers by a mile or more.

Now Cecilia was starting to sound nervous. “What’s going on? Are we safe here?”

“I don’t know. That storm front must be hundreds of miles long.”

“But we’re safe, right?”

Of course not. “…Yes. I guess so.”

Cecilia was silent.

On impulse, Joely reached out and took Cecilia’s hand.

Joely thought of the cat. Animals knew how to brace themselves like that, standing with their legs apart, cross-ways to the shock.

That cat is smarter than I am, she thought.

Now there was movement.

A couple of the pine trees at the edge of the campus tipped up, locking their branches together like clasping hands. When they sprang apart, their trunks cracked, and burst into showers of matchwood.

Another line of trees, closer, popped out of the ground, roots and all, like wooden rockets.

Incoming, Joely thought.

“Holy shit,” said Cecilia.

…And then it hit.

It came in a second, without warning. The floor just disappeared from beneath her, and she was thrown into the air — like a kid in her father’s arms — her nose was inches from the ceiling… Then she fell, landing heavily on her back.

An instant of stillness. Something falling to the floor with a soft explosion, maybe Cecilia’s pc monitor. Glass, she thought, and she closed her eyes.

She’d had Cecilia’s hand wrenched out of her grasp in that first moment. She opened her mouth to call her.

Slam, under her back.

Again she was thrown into the air.

She landed with a grunt, on her front this time, mercifully clear of furniture.

And now the ground was pitching. She lay flat, spread-eagled, trying not to be turned over. It was like being on a violent sea, she thought — but not quite, for the motion was compound, shaking her up and down and side to side. More as if she was a flea on the back of a dog, shaking after a swim.

She was surrounded by explosions. The window burst, creating a new hail of glass fragments over her neck and head. The wall cracked with a report like gunfire.

Then the whole building fell, just like that, dropping through several feet, and she landed hard on her front again.

There was a grind of metal, the soft crump of fresh explosions. That open car lot on the ground floor must have collapsed. The building was now a storey shorter than the architects had planned it.

More booms. Smoke, curling into the window. That would be gas tanks going up, in the crushed automobiles beneath.

Cecilia’s Toyota 4Runner. Her pride and joy, paid for by the company. Even now, lying here in her own blood in the middle of the greatest damn earthquake since Cecil B. de Mille, Joely found room in her head for a touch of spiteful joy at that.

The floor was still shaking, but maybe not so violently. She got to her knees. She turned, looking for Cecilia.

Cecilia’s pc lay smashed on the floor.

It occurred to Joely that with the intranet destroyed, so was all the work she had done here; she had no hard copy, anywhere. Nothing to say why she had made her way here, today of all days. All those e-mails, lost like dreams, forever unanswered.

If this is the end of us, she thought, we will leave less behind us than the citizens of Pompeii. So much of what humans had created in the last few decades had been, when you got to it, just electronic patterns, stored on some tape or chip or disc somewhere. And when the power failed…

She saw a pair of legs, dimpled with cellulite, protruding from a too-short skirt. The edge of the stone desk top, still in one piece, had come down just above that skirt. Joely could see there was only a couple of inches clearance between the sharp rim of the desk and the floor.

Just a couple of inches, into which a human torso had been crammed.

There was blood seeping out under the desk, thicker and darker than Joely had imagined. Jesus. She felt bile rise at the back of her throat.

She looked for the door. It was on the other side of the desk, and she wasn’t sure if she could make it that far. And even if she could it looked as if it had buckled in its frame. No way to get that down except with a fire axe.