Лю Цысинь - Supernova Era

Vaughn asked, “Did he say anything else?”

“No. He hung up right after that.”

All eyes focused on Vaughn. He gently set down his knife and fork, and said calmly, “It’s real.”

Just then another officer came running in and nervously reported that the warning center had detected an unidentified projectile heading in their direction. The warning system had first detected the object when it took off from southwestern China, but by the time the warning had navigated the multiple layers of confirmation, the object had already passed the equator.

All of the young generals and officials stood up at once, eyes wide and faces white, as if a gang of armed assassins had burst into their plush restaurant.

“What do we do?” Davey asked in bewilderment. “Can we hide out in the new underground hangar we just dug?”

The seven-star general shouted, “The underground hangar? Bullshit. One blast from a four-megaton nuclear bomb will turn the whole area into a crater a hundred meters deep. And we’re smack in the center of it!” He grabbed Davey and threw his typical insults back in his face. “You moronic asshole! You’re the one who’s stuck us here. You’re gonna make us die here!”

“The helicopters,” Vaughn said. His simple statement pulled everyone to their senses and they surged toward the exits. “Wait,” he added, and they stopped as if nailed to the ground. “Immediately notify all the planes to take off at once, and to take as much equipment and personnel as possible. But don’t explain why. We must remain calm.”

“And the other branches? Order a total evacuation of the base!” Davey said.

Vaughn shook his head gently. “There’s no point. In the little time we have, no vehicle will be able to escape the blast radius. It would only cause chaos, and in the end no one would escape.”

The children scrambled for the exits. All but Vaughn, who remained behind, sitting at the table and wiping his fingers on a dinner napkin. Then he slowly got up and made his way outside, waving to the band as he passed to signal that it was nothing important.

Out on the tarmac the children fought to board the three Blackhawk helicopters. Scott managed to scramble into the cabin of one, and when the rotors started up, he looked at his watch and said through tears, “Only eighteen minutes left. We’re not going to make it!” Then he turned to Davey. “You’re the fool who got us stuck here. You’re not gonna get away, not even in death!”

“Keep your composure,” Vaughn, the last to climb aboard, said coldly to Scott.

“We’re not going to make it!” Scott choked out through tears.

“What’s so scary about dying?” A rare smile came to Vaughn’s face. “If you’re willing, General, you’ve got another seventeen minutes to become a true philosopher.” Then he turned to another officer next to Scott. “Tell the pilot not to climb, since the bomb will probably detonate at around two thousand meters. Fly with the wind, at top speed. If we can make it thirty kilometers or so, we should be outside the blast radius.”

Three helicopters inclined their rotors and accelerated inland. As Davey looked out through the porthole at the Antarctic base spread out below them, it seemed to gradually transform into an intricate sand-table model, and he shut his eyes tight against the pain.

The sky was foggy, and now that nothing was visible below them, it was almost as if the three helicopters were holding stationary. But Davey knew that they might already have flown beyond the base. He checked his watch. Twelve minutes had passed since they had received the warning.

“Maybe the Chinese kids are just trying to scare us?” he said to Vaughn, who was sitting next to him.

Vaughn shook his head. “No, it’s for real.”

Davey pressed against the porthole and looked outside again, but there was nothing but fog.

“The World Games are over, Davey,” Vaughn said. Then he closed his eyes, leaned back against the cabin wall, and said nothing more.

They found out later that the three helicopters had flown for roughly ten minutes prior to the nuclear explosion, putting them around forty-five kilometers away, outside the blast radius.

The first thing they saw was the outside world drowned in light. In the words of one young pilot, who had not been informed of the situation, “It was like flying through a neon light tube.” The glare lasted for around fifteen seconds and was accompanied by a giant roar, as if the planet below them was exploding. All at once they saw blue sky, a circular region centered on the blast that expanded rapidly outward. It was the nuclear shock wave dispersing the cloud layer out to a radius of one hundred kilometers from the hypocenter, they later learned.

Smack in the center of the blue towered a mushroom cloud. It started off in two parts, one huge ball of white smoke and fire that took shape at two thousand meters after the initial fireball cooled, and a second on the ground where the shock wave kicked up dirt into a low pyramid whose apex extended upward into a thin spire that joined up with the huge smoke ball. The white ball instantly darkened in color as it absorbed the dust sent up by the pyramid, and flames flickered intermittently throughout the surface. Now the fog beneath the helicopter had been banished like the clouds, giving them a clear view of the land. The pilot later recalled, “The ground got fuzzy all of a sudden, like it had turned to liquid, as if an endless expanse of floodwater was surging toward us, and all of those little hills were islands and reefs. I saw cars on temporary roads flip over one after another like matchboxes….”

The three helicopters were battered about like leaves in a storm. A number of times they dropped perilously close to the ground and were pelted by flying stones and sand; then they were flung high into the air. But they didn’t crash. When they finally landed safely on snowy ground, the children jumped out of the cabin and looked back seaward at the tall mushroom cloud, even darker now. The morning sun, still below the Antarctic horizon, was high enough to just light up the top of the cloud, painting its rippling outline in gold against that slowly expanding dark blue circle of sky.

“Now this is Antarctica!” Huahua said, standing in the driving snow and bone-chilling wind. Visibility was poor through the endless whiteness of earth and sky, and even though they were on the coast, there was no distinguishing land from water. The young leaders of all the countries in Antarctica were closely gathered together as the blizzard swirled around them.

“That’s not really accurate,” Specs said. He had to shout to make himself heard over the howling wind. “It rarely snowed in Antarctica before the supernova. It’s actually one of the driest places on Earth.”

“That’s right,” Vaughn said. He was still only lightly dressed, and stood at ease in the cold wind, which had the children burrowing into their coats and shivering anyway. It was like the cold didn’t affect him at all. “Higher temperatures filled the air in Antarctica with moisture, and now the dramatic drop in temperature is turning that moisture to snow. It might be the biggest snowfall on the continent for the next hundred thousand years.”

“Let’s go back. We’ll be frozen stiff if we stay here,” Davey said through chattering teeth, as he stomped his feet.

And so the heads of state returned to the pressurized hall, identical to the one on the US base that had been vaporized by the atomic fireball of the CE Mine. They had gathered here with the intent of holding talks about Antarctic territory, but the long-anticipated conference was entirely meaningless now.

The CE Mine had ended the Antarctic war games. The children of every country had finally agreed to meet at the negotiating table to discuss the question of Antarctic territory. Each country had paid a heavy price during the war games, but now that the contest had unexpectedly returned to its starting point with no major power commanding a decisive advantage, negotiations seemed impossible for the foreseeable future. The children had no clear idea of whether war would break out again on the continent, or if events would follow another path. In the end, however, all of their problems were solved by a sudden change in climate.