Jack McDevitt - The Moonfall

Jerry had parked at the extreme eastern end of the lot. This got them to one side of the crowd and also looked like a good spot to set up the telescope. To Jerry's left, the land ran abruptly downhill into a gully.

The Moon looked soft and fog-ridden.

Tomiko was a bright nebulous blur, following the track of its tail, cruising down the sky. People were bunched together in the lot, looking up, no one talking. Traffic on the two-lane road stopped and the cars emptied.

Erin asked where Moonbase was. She wanted Jerry to set up the telescope so she could see the microbus. But there wasn't time, even if the telescope had the capability, which he doubted.

The only person at that moment who might have been able to see the Micro as it lifted away from the lunar surface was Tory Clark, who had redirected L1's ADCOM telescope array and instructed it to lock onto any moving object in the Alphonsus area. But the light wasn't favorable for high magnification at that range, so she too was unsuccessful.

Passengers on board the Merrivale would have had to look east to see the collision. But the sky was overcast and a light drizzle had slicked down the decks. Horace had not recovered from his disappointment over the loss of Amy, and on this night he was not at all aware of any unusual events in the sky.

Arecibo, which tracked the comet throughout its six-day run, estimated its impact velocity would be 417.6 kilometers per second.

At the AstroLab, Wesley Feinberg watched it move toward the Moon with both fascination and sadness. The collision would be intoxicating, an astronomical joy unique to this generation. But they were losing this most fascinating of comets.

Comet cores are often more solid than their "dirty snowball" appearance had led twentieth-century astronomers to believe. Whether this was the case with Tomiko, or whether Tomiko was an asteroid with a massive accumulation of ice and dust, or whether it was something else altogether, no one was ever going to know.

Micro Passenger Cabin. 10:34 P.M.

They were also watching the comet on board the Micro, where the images from the Farside observatory had expanded into pure light. Even in the cargo hold, where Bigfoot had spread out some cushions left there for him by Tony, a wallscreen was picking up the Transglobal feed. Keith Morley's picture was on-screen, with a voice-over running conversation between the journalist in space and Bruce Kendrick on the ground.

"Here in the Micro, Bruce, everyone's quiet. We're just waiting now to see what's going to happen."

"Can you see anything yet, Keith?"

"No. The horizon's bathed in light. In all directions. I wish 1 had a camera to show you. But nothing's changed out there as far as I can tell."

"How high are you?"

"1 don't know. High. Maybe six thousand meters."

They were closer to five thousand meters a moment later, when the light exploded.

Impact came at 10:35:17 EDT.

The world watched through its array of orbiting telescopes. What they saw resembled not a large meteor crash, but a lightning strike. Tomiko had filled the sky, filled the lenses, floating in the optical field until there was nothing but comet. And then it came silently down, not a giant piece of rock and ice, nor a falling star of immense proportions. Rather, it was a lightning bolt blasting the moonscape, melting the regolith and its underlying rock, crushing the mantle, vaporizing everything within hundreds of kilometers of ground zero.

The Moon spasmed.

The comet nucleus ripped deep into the ground before exploding in an enormous fireball that melted the mantle to a depth of more than six hundred kilometers, exposing the outer core. Shock waves rolled through the lunar interior at thousands of kilometers per hour. The fireball expanded over the fracturing surface, moving seemingly in slow motion, spreading around the Moon, cradling it, engulfing it.

Tony watched it come. From his perspective, it was a wall of fire racing in from the north. He sensed the sudden stillness in the passenger compartment, saw the moonscape break up beneath him, saw Alphonsus disappear into the ground. A curtain of dust rolled over the churning scene, and the darkened flight deck glowed red.

The Micro fled before the fire, crawling away at a constant one g.

The sensors exploded in a tornado of pings and bleeps. Debris rattled against the hull. The Micro rocked and dipped and swerved, a leaf caught in a vast wind. A tread came off and a warning lamp blinked on.

Fire filled the sky.

It seared his eyes and licked at the blister housing the flight deck.

Saber switched off the warning. "Rising external temperatures," she said.

Tony nodded and refrained from sarcasm.

Something hit from below, hurled them higher, snapped his neck back. Bulkheads and decks creaked.

"Water line," said Saber. "Cargo."

That meant Bigfoot was getting wet. "Shut her down," said Tony.

"Done."

The attitude jets were firing in frantic sequences, trying to maintain stability.

Tony was hurled against his harness and thrown back into his seat. The Micro rolled and fell and soared. The storm swept it along, a steel bubble in a sea of fire.

Morley's running account was broadcast from the Micro to a Comsat, relayed to his New York studio, where it was combined with the network signal and returned to Tony's console. But the signal, not surprisingly, had died. The monitor carrying the Transglobal telecast was a blizzard of interference. Tony thought about informing the journalist he was no longer getting through, that he might as well give it up, but decided to say nothing. It kept Morley occupied, and maybe served as a link to safety for the others.

"Engine overheating," said Saber.

"Roger." Let it overheat. They'd be lucky if that was the worst that happened.

Something inside let go with a bang.

"Passenger cabin," Saber told him. "CDS." That was the Coolant Delivery System. Nothing to worry about.

A tentacle of melted rock splashed across the blister. The glass began to bubble. Tony opened his channel to cargo. "Bigfoot, you okay?"

"Great ride, Tony."

"Doing what I can. We're almost out of it."

Saber glanced at him. The world outside was full of fire. "What makes you say that?"

"One way or another. We can't take much more of this."

"Engine's in the red," she said.

He couldn't shut down. The Micro needed two-point-four kps to avoid falling back to the surface. Acceleration was passing two-point-zero. He watched it climb, not knowing whether there was a surface to fall back to, suspecting he'd be carried along with the blast whatever he did.

Two-point-two.

The storm clattered and banged and raged against the hull.

He'd have to cut power once he reached escape velocity. Or risk losing the engine and possibly the ship.

"Tony, we're pushing it."

"Don't worry," he said. "There's always a certain amount of leeway built into these things."

Two-point-three.

Red lamps were blinking all across the status board.

Two-point-four. Tony gave it another minute and killed the engine.

Riding now in relative quiet, they listened to the storm beating against the hull, the squeals of the status board, and the electronic burble of the instruments.

Saber picked up the mike. "Everybody okay down there?"

Evelyn's voice responded: "Alive and well."

"Good. Stay with it. We know it's loud but we're doing okay." She explained why they'd shut the engine down. "But we're still moving. We'll relight in a few minutes and begin to accelerate again."

At that moment the flames fell away, and the Micro rose above great, dark, boiling clouds. A river of light exploded from one and arced gracefully across Tony's field of vision.