Mike Ashley - The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF

“In spite of us, the news got out. Dozens of reporters and camera crews swarmed to the field. Cal had to confirm the story, but he begged them not to kill whatever chance we had. ‘Kiss your wives goodbye,’ I heard him tell them, ‘kneel in prayer, or just get drunk.’ I don’t know what they reported, but all the TV and radio stations soon went silent.

“We were still on the ground when the asteroid came down in the Bay of Bengal, south of Asia. We had too little time to get into the air before the shockwaves got through the Earth to us at White Sands. The P waves first, just a few minutes ahead of the more destructive surface waves.

“Navarro and Linder got in from Iceland. Dr Wu landed in a chartered jet. The work crews loaded what they could. We made it, but barely. We were hardly a thousand feet off the pad when buildings around the field began to crumble and yellow dust came up to hide everything. “Earth died behind us.”

“But you got away!” Pepe was round-eyed with wonder. “You were heroes!”

“We didn’t feel heroic.” My robot-father’s voice was solemnly slow and low, almost a whisper. “Think of all we’d lost. We felt very lonely.”

His naked plastic body quivered with something like a shudder and his eye lenses slowly swept us all.

“Christmas Day.” He went silent, remembering. “It should have been a happy time. My married sister lived in Las Cruces, a city near the base. She had two kids, just five years old. I’d bought trikes for them. She was making dinner, baked turkey and dressing, yams, cranberry sauce—”

His voice caught and he stopped for a second.

“Foods you’ve never had, but we liked them for Christmas. My father and mother were coming from Ohio. He had just retired. She was in a wheelchair from a car accident, but they were going on around the world. A trip they had planned all their lives. They never knew they were about to die. My sister called, but I couldn’t tell—” He stopped again, and his voice seemed strange. “Couldn’t even say goodbye.”

“What’s a trike?” Arne wanted to know.

My father just stood there, looking up at the iron-stained Earth, till Pepe nudged his plastic arm. “Tell us how you got away.”

“I hadn’t been on the survival team. Cal brought me in place of an anthropologist who was on a dig in Mexico. I guess we should have been glad to get away. But there on the plane, looking back at the terrible cloud already hiding half the Earth, none of us felt good about anything.”

He looked at Dian.

“Your mother opened her laptop and lay crying over it till Dr Wu gave her something that put her to sleep.”

“She lost her nerve.” Arne made a face at Tanya. “My father was braver.”

“Maybe.” My father made something like a laugh. “Pepe’s father was our pilot, and cool enough. He took us all the way out to orbit before he gave the controls to Cal. He’d brought a liter of Mexican tequila. He drank most of it and sang sad Spanish songs and finally slept till we got to the Moon.”

“It’s dreadful to see.” Dian stood gazing up at the Earth, speaking almost to herself. “The rivers all running red, like blood pouring into the oceans.”

“Red mud,” my robot-father said. “Silt colored red by all the iron that came from the asteroid. Rain washes it off the land because there’s no grass or anything to hold it.”

“Sad.” When she looked at him I saw tears in her eyes. “You had a sad time.”

“Tell us,” Tanya said. “Tell us how it really was.”

“Bad enough.” He nodded. “Climbing east from New Mexico, we met the surface wave coming around the Earth from the impact point. The solid planet was rippling like a liquid ocean. Buildings and fields and mountains were rising toward the sky and dissolving into dust.

“The impact blew an enormous cloud of steam and shattered rock and white-hot vapour up through the stratosphere. Night had already fallen on Asia. We passed far north, but we saw the cloud, already facing and flattening, but still glowing dull red inside.

“Clouds had covered all the Earth by the time we came around again. A rusty brown at first, but the color faded as the dust settled out. Higher clouds condensed till the whole planet was bright and white as Venus. It was beautiful.” His voice fell. “Beautiful and terrible.”

“Everybody?” Whispering, Dian wiped at her tear. “Was everybody killed?”

“Except us.” His plastic head nodded very slowly. “The robots here at the station recorded the last broadcasts. The impact made a burst of radiation that burned communications out for thousands of miles. The surface wave spread silence all around the world.

“A few pilots in high-flying aircraft tried to report what they saw, but I don’t know who was left to hear. Radio and TV stations went off the air, but a few hardy souls kept on sending to the end. A cruise liner in the Indian Ocean had time to call for help. We picked up a reporter’s video of the shattering Taj Mahal, the way he saw it by moonlight.

“An American astronomer guessed the truth. We caught a White House spokesman trying to deny it. Just a sudden solar flare, he said, with no verified reports. His voice was cut off before he finished. Watching from a thousand miles up, we saw the great wave rolling up out of the Atlantic. It washed all the old cities off the coast. The last words we heard came from White Sands. A drunk signal technician wishing us a Merry Christmas.”

“You got here.” Pepe grinned cheerfully. “But what happened to Mr Defalco?”

“There’s a robot for him,” Tanya said. “I saw his frozen cells in the vault.”

“A tragedy.” My robot-father’s stiff face had no expression, but his voice was bleak. “Cal got with us to the Moon, but he died before he had the computer programmed to teach his clones, but he was the real hero. Earth had been hit so hard that our mission looked impossible, but he never gave up.

“He tried to keep us too busy to fret about anything. We unloaded the plane and stored the seed and embryos and frozen life cells in the cryonic vault. We had to get used to lunar gravity, which meant a lot of sweating in the centrifuge to keep our bodies fit. We had to clean the hydroponic gardens and get them growing again.

“Still hoping somebody or something had survived, Cal spent most of the nights up here at the telescopes. Earth was then a huge white pearl, dazzling with sunlight but mottled with volcanic explosions. He never saw the surface.

“The second year, he decided to go back-”

“Back to that?” Arne was startled. “Was he crazy?”

“That’s what we told him. We’d seen no sign of life — nothing at all through those glaring clouds — but he kept imagining isolated survivors somehow hanging on. If anybody was there, he wanted to help.

“Three of us went down. Pepe at the controls. Cal with his search gear. I kept a video narrative. Flying low enough to look, all we saw was death. The impact had burned cities and forests and grasslands.

The polar ice had thawed. Lowlands were flooded, coastlines changed. We found the land like you see it now, black and barren pouring red mud into the oceans. No spark of green anywhere.

“Hoping for anything alive in the oceans, Cal had Pepe bring us down on the shore of a new sea that ran far into the Amazon valley. I got a whiff of the air when we opened the lock. It had a burnt-sulfur stink and set us all to coughing. In spite of it, Cal was determined to get samples of mud and water to test for microscopic life.

“We had no proper gear but he tried to improvise, with a plastic bag around his head and an oxygen bottle with a tube to his mouth. We watched from the plane. A dismal view. Jagged slopes of dead black lava from a cone north of us. No sun anywhere. A towering storm rising in the west, alive with lightning.