Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

She made her way to the wall, and grabbed onto the window frame. A shard of glass stabbed her arm, but she ignored that. She stood, the floor still trembling beneath her feet. She looked out.

The campus was demolished. Most of the buildings had simply fallen apart, she saw, like card houses, their prefabricated walls lying smashed on the neat patches of grass. One other building, still intact, had tipped over.

She wondered if the ground had dipped already, the way the scientists” models said it would. Was she below sea level yet?

The horizon was just a blur of smoke and fires and electrical sparking, against a continual crackling noise. There was a kind of dome of a greenish luminosity, she saw, gathering in the air above the cloud.

There were wide ravines, scratched at random across the ground. From a couple of them, fire was spurting. Gas mains, maybe. One of the fissures was closing again; and somehow that was more disturbing than anything else.

She couldn’t even tell where the level was, so broken up was the ground.

She could see nobody moving. There were a few splashes of colour that might have been people, or might not. No sign of rescue, not so much as a TV news heli.

And the quake wasn’t done; she could see a wave, maybe twenty feet high, passing through the ground itself, its crest sending chunks of shattered tarmac feet into the air.

But the shuddering of the building seemed to be subsiding.

My God, she thought. I might live through this yet. What a story I’ll have. Book deals, syndication, TV movies flashed through her imagination. She wondered if there was a webcam in the office.

The dominant noise changed, to a whooshing like a wind blowing through trees.

And now there was something emerging out of the smoke bank, to the east. Like a new cloud, wide and dark and rolling, laced with fire.

Oh.

It was water. A wave, surging out of the Sound, as if Puget was no more than a tipped-up bathtub. Burning oil had spilled over its surface, probably from the storage tanks at the docks. Earthquake cocktail, she thought.

The wave had to be a hundred feet high.

Waves like that could travel a hundred miles an hour; she could never outrun it. Not even in Cecilia’s Toyota.

Blood dripped into her eye from a wound she hadn’t noticed. She was lucky as hell to have survived this far, she thought, and then she laughed at herself. Lucky? She was the girl from LA who had to move to Seattle in time for the Big One.

The floor started to move again. She clung to the window frame, trying to stay on her feet. This was an up-and-down whip-lashing that no building was going to be able to withstand. More cracking sounds, as the walls broke open, letting in the daylight — a stink of sulphur — and she was thrown to the floor, which was splintering under her.

The ceiling came crashing down at her.

…But, before the ceiling debris reached her, the floor fell away.

She was falling through the storeys, arms and legs limp, pursued by a shower of debris. Maybe the building itself was falling, even as it fell to pieces all around her, as the ground flexed, giving up its stored energy.

A last moment of daylight, before a rush of heat, and a wall of water that slammed her sideways —

In Star City, Moscow, Russia, Henry Meacher watched the destruction of Washington State on CNN.

There were few pictures coming out of the area itself. Nobody left alive to send any, of course.

The best images came from the satellites and the Space Station: the band of smoke and flame laced along the western seaboard, the sea churned to mud and froth for hundreds of miles from the coast. You could pick out the cities by their dull burning glow, Seattle and Tacoma and Olympia and Vancouver, as far south as Portland. The experts said it was a series of firestorms that would not burn themselves out for many hours.

It would be a spectacular sight at night. Keep tuned, folks.

The economists speculated about the impact on the world’s economy of the loss of the Seattle region, Boeing and Microsoft and… The tame scientists, gabbling at each other, blamed the explosion of Mount Rainier for setting off an earthquake which had been overdue anyhow. And the wilder ones blamed Rainier itself on the bizarre infection the commentators were calling Moonseed.

Evidently, the whole of the locked subduction zone had given way.

There seemed to have been sympathetic earthquakes in Chile, causing severe damage there. The rest of North America seemed to have been spared, but unusual wave motions had been observed on the Great Lakes and other large bodies of water, in some places violent enough to tear boats from their moorings.

And in Alaska, hit by two earthquakes, the Yakutat glacier had changed its direction and was spilling ice slabs into the sea.

Henry wondered how much longer news like this would remain free and uncensored.

Henry pulled out his laptop, and checked the data against his predictions. The spread rate of the Moonseed, from both primary and secondary infection sites, had reduced drastically as the Moonseed had sunk into the crust. Nevertheless events were unfolding much as he’d expected.

It had taken some thirty days for the ocean crust to be breached, around seventy for the first deep breaches at the continental margins to be achieved, like the one which had caused the Seattle event.

But this was just the start. There would be an escalation of such gigantic seismic events, from now until —

Well, he thought, until the end.

Time to act, Henry thought. If not now, never.

The telephone started to ring.

And when he put the phone down again, he knew that, finally, there would come a day — in mid-August, just a week from now — which would be his last on Earth, perhaps forever.

He slept badly, with disturbed dreams.

There was a knock at the door, repeating gently.

He didn’t know where the hell he was, or what time it was.

He looked for his watch, and couldn’t find it, but it was useless anyhow as he hadn’t reset it since Houston. He pulled a towel around his waist and padded to the door.

Standing there was a doctor — it was obvious that was what he was, a little guy in a white coat with a black bag — and Geena, his ex-wife. Geena was wearing some kind of blue coverall and carried a little bag of groceries.

“You didn’t used to have to knock,” he said hoarsely.

“Different days, Henry. Can we come in?”

“Oh, shit,” said Henry, remembering. “You’re wearing a flight suit, aren’t you? It’s the day.”

Geena grinned, perhaps with a little malice. “The Russians say we are to share a great honour, this day,” she said.

Geena and the doctor bustled into the room. Henry backed off, and retreated to the bathroom. A last refuge of privacy.

He had spent his last night on Earth in Leninsk, the city that had grown up on the back of Baikonur Cosmodrome. They had arrived late. This was what they called the cosmonauts” hotel, the Kosmonavt, a low, modern building screened by what looked like elm trees — karagach, a young Russian told him. His room was a tiny suite, a doll’s-house Hilton of a thing, with a living room, a bedroom and a bathroom.

The room was like something out of the 1950s: carpets, net curtains, a fridge. Nothing inside the fridge but Diet Coke, labelled in Cyrillic. The bath had taps and a shower-head. But there was no plug — not in the hand-basin either — and the ceramic was cracked and stained.

Now, when he lifted the toilet lid, the ancient ceramic was so dark he couldn’t see the little puddle of water at the bottom. He had to admit it took a little willpower to lower his butt once more to this cracked Russian po.