Second generation, p.14
Second Generation, page 14
The land to the left started rising, the start of the Andes that ran the length of Chile. The land to the right remained relatively low. The plains of Patagonia. The shuttle screamed across the sea and the approaching shoreline showed an unexpected haze of green. Leo magnified the view on their vid screens and relayed it back to Stef on the Armstrong. He knew she in turn would be transmitting a recording of everything on to Mars. Leo wondered how many Martians would be watching what they saw, perhaps half an hour later. He noticed an inset view of Stef at the corner of his screen, watching now. She seemed rigid, frowning. What must she be thinking?
The magnified view showed what looked like trees stretching deep inland. “I didn’t realise there were forests at the southern edge of Argentina,” said Demetria from the cabin.
“I didn’t think we’d see forests anywhere,” said Phoebe.
“I’m not sure if it is a forest,” said Georgia. “Can you magnify further, Leo?”
“We’ll be right over it in a minute,” he replied, zooming in with the external cams. “There you go.”
“I stand corrected,” said Georgia, “It’s a forest, but not of trees. They look like giant ferns. Primitive plants. They were one of the first species to flourish billions of years ago. Looks like they’re making a comeback.”
“Does that mean Earth’s clock has been reset by a billion of years?” asked Demetria.
“Maybe. Leo says the cloud cover has been less dense over the poles, so perhaps it’s given these ferns a chance to flourish, ahead of anything else.”
The Andes rose beside them like a jagged edge of the world. Tall peaks caught by rays of sun which flared and simmered. Leo noticed how the light was so much brighter here. Everything seemed brilliant and sharp by comparison to the soft orange skies of Mars. The shadows snapped each peak forward like some immersive simulation that had been rendered in unbelievable super-reality. His eyes hurt, yet he barely blinked.
As they soared high above the Andes, they saw traces of snow on the highest peaks, but much of their rugged flanks were bare. To their right were spiders’ webs of green, spreading out along the paths of rivers as they weaved across the plains. Perhaps more fern forests.
“What’s that line down there?” asked Samaira.
Leo magnified the screen again, squinting. A ragged grey thread was barely visible among swathes of pale yellow and dull green.
“It’s what’s left of a road,” came Stef’s flat voice over the shuttle comms. “You’ll see many more as you go north.”
“Looks like its disintegrating, broken up by vegetation. I’m surprised, but I think the yellow and green areas are grasses,” said Georgia. “I thought they’d have died off without sunlight, but it seems there’s been more gaps in the cloud cover than we thought. Sorry, more than I thought. Leo said this was possible.”
Leo didn’t know how to react to that. He just watched the strange landscape roll by.
“Any news on the atmosphere yet?” Georgia asked.
“Still processing,” said Phoebe. “I’ll tell you when I have something. But it can’t have become too hostile if we have ferns and grasses.”
Katya steered them due north, away from the Andes and over the region that had once been called the Amazon. The ground was a patchwork of green, muddy-brown and rocky grey. In some places there seemed to be sharp lines between the change of ground cover.
“They look like field edges,” said Demetria.
“About forty years ago they probably were,” said Leo, remembering to use Earth timescales. “Millions of hectares of rainforest were cleared for farming. Millions of trees cut down. It was brutal. Now all you see is the ghost lines of the fields where they once cut into the forest. Seems like the topsoil of the cleared fields was washed away by the tsunamis.”
“Look at how barren the land is where the fields were. How could Earth people have allowed so many trees to be culled?” asked Demetria, astonished.
“Greed,” said Stef. “There were other ways to feed the billions who lived here. This was just greed.”
“What’s that?” asked Chen, pointing to a white patch in the middle of the barren plains.
Leo magnified the view to show something that looked like the bleached skeleton of a huge fish, bizarrely out of scale with its surroundings.
After a moment’s pause and furrowing of her brow Georgia said, “That’s a whale carcass.”
“What the hell is it doing in the middle of the Amazon?” asked Chen.
“When the shards of Goliath hit Earth, they threw massive tidal waves in all directions. Tsunamis higher than mountains. I expect there’ll be far more sea creatures dumped thousands of miles from the oceans.”
“Not just creatures,” said Feng. “Look.”
Leo saw a rusting hulk broken across the back of an escarpment. Multi-coloured metal containers scattered around it like toy bricks tossed out of a box. “A cargo ship,” he muttered. He glimpsed Stef’s darkening face in the corner of his screen. He wondered if they’d find more skeletons inside the ship. He wondered how many bodies had been strewn across the lands below or lost beneath the ocean waves.
Katya now steered them across what had been Colombia, towards a vast inland lake. What was left of the Caribbean Sea. A broad expanse of land stretched along its western edge and Katya followed the coastal edge between them. The land looked as if it had been gouged and scraped back to the naked rocks. Perhaps more evidence of the tsunamis scouring life from its ancient foothold.
“Hey, look at that,” said Chen. “Looks like someone cut a channel in the middle of nowhere.”
“They did,” said Leo. “Only it wasn’t in the middle of nowhere when they dug it. That channel was called the Panama Canal. It used to connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.”
“It’s hundreds of kilometres from the sea!”
“It is now, because the sea level has dropped so far.”
“What’s that pile of rubble at the far end?”
“Panama City,” said Leo. “What’s left of it.” Hectares of grey debris lay softened by the advance of grasses and ferns. Some broken stumps of tower blocks stood crumbling or laying on their sides. If he felt sad at the notion of a city full of people far more numerous than Tithonium, now empty and lifeless, then he wondered how much more Stef would be feeling. Or any of the elders who would see this in the next thirty minutes when the signal reached them.
Now they recognised the signs of a dead city they saw many more. Leo read their names from the digital maps as if he were calling out a roll call of the dead. San José. Granada. Managua. San Lorenzo. Guatemala. Mexico City. Monterrey. Chihuahua. Tucson. Phoenix. Some seemed like the traces of lost civilisations hidden among the fern jungles. The civilisation was indeed lost. But it wasn’t until they reached Las Vegas that they saw the edge of a vast blackened expanse which looked as if the very crust of the planet had been punched and burned. They flew along the edge of it for an hour before anyone dared speak.
“Is this a… a crater?” asked Chen.
“Yes,” said Leo.
“…”
“It’s where the fourth and largest shard of Goliath landed,” Leo continued. “The impact crater covers most of North America.” As he spoke, he was watching Stef in the corner of his screen. Her eyes were closed, tears were rolling down her cheeks. He knew she came from the Netherlands on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. He knew that she had trained in NASA facilities in America and made many friends there. She would know that the third shard had decimated the whole of central Europe. The place she had been born was called Arnhem. It was close to the epicentre of that impact. No one would ever find Arnhem ever again, because the largest fragments of its civilisation would have been pulverised deep into the Earth’s crust, or were now floating among the clouds, ready to fall as particles of dust that clung to droplets of rain.
Leo cried too.
Katya steered the shuttle further north-west, over a strange expanse of pale rubble and yellow-green grasses that were contained within a grid of broken grey lines, once roads. It had once been called Los Angeles. The home of over ten million souls. Those souls had fled this world four decades ago. Leo had stopped his guided tour some time back over New Mexico. This was too heart-breaking to speak of.
The shuttle left the coast somewhere west of what used to be Oregon.
“The Pacific Ocean,” Leo called. His mouth moved as if to say more, but he was struck dumb by the sight of so much open water. The widest expanse he had ever seen before was where the artificial river in Tithonium pooled into a pond, no more than a few metres across. The surface of Mars presented a detailed history of how water had shaped and carved its surface, yet not a single drop had been seen on its surface for millions of years. Earth was truly an alien world to him.
A dark wall of cloud stretched across the curving horizon, daring them to approach. Silent forks of lightning flickered like tongues. As they flew, the lightning strikes increased and Katya climbed upwards, so that they would rise over rather than through the gathering electrical storm. Viewed from above, the tight whorls of cloud continued to flash. A superstorm was in full flood beneath. This did indeed feel like a planet in its painful early stages of formation, not an elderly rock on which civilisations had risen and fallen.
The crew observed in thoughtful silence. If Leo had sometimes wondered about the worth of their journey, he need not have. They had learned more in the last few hours than centuries of long-range astronomical observation would ever have revealed. Time stretched out. The scale of the ocean assaulted his consciousness, knowing how fast the shuttle was still flying. At one point the clouds parted to reveal a deep indigo sea that shimmered in fleeting sunshine, before succumbing to more cloud. That cloud also thinned and Katya risked descending again. Dropping through the haze of water vapour that streaked the cabin glass, they saw an edge to the almost infinite ocean.
“Where’s that?” asked Feng.
Leo glanced at his virtual map and back at the view, “Alaska.”
“It’s like Antarctica, there’s no snow.”
“No. Not anymore.”
“That’s a weird narrow strip of land ahead. It stretches for hundreds of kilometres in either direction with sea both sides of it.”
“It used to be the Aleutian Islands that encircled the Bering Sea, between Alaska and Russia. Now the sea level ’s dropped they all join up. The Bering Sea is now a lake.”
“The land is all green. More ferns?”
Georgia squinted at her magnified screen, “No… trees.”
“Trees?” said Feng. “I thought you said all trees would be dead. No sun.”
“I did. I was wrong.”
“That’s going to make landing the shuttle more interesting,” said Leo. “That’s where the signal was coming from.”
Katya turned her head slowly to look at Leo, “You mean we’re supposed to be landing on that?”
“We are.”
“Well, unless you want to die a quick and painful death, I’m going to attempt a landing on water. As close to the coast as I can get.”
“Can you do that?” asked Leo.
“Do we have a choice?”
Leo looked at the narrow strip of land. It was full of trees. “No. Not unless we want to walk for several weeks.”
“Then we’re making a sea landing.”
“Is that dangerous?”
“It is for a craft designed to land on a runway.”
“… Shit!”
12
Surreal
Regeneration 6 – Earth
Intense heat wells up from deep within the mantle. Molten lava spills out through the fissure, boiling the water around it and forcing a stream of steam-filled bubbles up. Up, towards the dim lit surface above.
Fronds of kelp cling to the warmed rocks and bathe in the stream of rich minerals that spew from the volcanic fissure. Chub mackerel slip in and out of the fronds, seeking the plentiful carcasses that have littered the seabed these recent years.
Further out, watching for their chance, are tuna.
And behind the fissure, hidden by the stream of bubbles, something else waits for the tuna. It won’t use teeth to catch its prey, nor swallow it whole.
It patiently holds its breath. Holding a spear.
Aleutian Peninsula, Bering Sea, Earth – Demetria Philippou
Demetria gripped the arms of her seat as her father and Katya realised their landing would be hard. She had sensed the mood of the crew darken as they flew ever north, weighed down by gravity and thoughts of the dead. Mars was dead, but that was different. You couldn’t mourn what had never lived. She was living evidence that humanity had flourished here, and she felt heavy with the responsibility of survival. Perhaps guilt. Now she was starting to panic that they too may join the dead.
“Now may be a good time to give good news about the atmosphere,” suggested Georgia turning to Phoebe.
“It’s breathable,” she confirmed. “The results came in while we were flying the rim of that horrendous crater. Didn’t seem the right time.”
Georgia nodded.
Demetria breathed a lungful of their Mars manufactured air, while she could.
“Check your straps and hold on,” called Katya from the front of the shuttle. “This isn’t going to be a textbook landing.”
Demetria looked at Samaira next to her. They grasped each other’s hands. They could see the long arc of tree-filled land as it loomed nearer on the vid screens. The shuttle swung across it, over a band of barren mudflats that faced inwards towards the Bering Sea, or perhaps now the Bering Lake. Was Katya going to try landing on mud or water? The shuttle dropped lower and lower. Now it was aligned with the waters edge. Abruptly all vid screens went blank. It seemed Katya had cut the feed to her passengers so only those in the cockpit with her could see what was about to happen. Was she trying to protect them, or did she feel her actions were being watched and judged? Demetria didn’t care.
She just wanted to live.
No more voices from the cockpit. Nothing to see. She felt the shuttle drop, tilt then level out. She guessed the nose was rising because she was being tipped back in her seat. The engine noise faded. There was a moment of weightlessness, odd, almost serene, then the shuttle hit something hard. Demetria was thrown forward into her belts. Her feet and head bounced off the seat in front and all the air was squeezed out of her lungs. Another moment of weightlessness as her head reeled back. Another crashing impact and the engines roared. Going into reverse? Her head and feet dangled forward then sideways into the aisle. Was the craft spinning? Another roar, distinct from the engines. Was that the roar of water being thrown into the air? The cabin shuddered violently. Her bones were being shaken in her body like sticks in jelly. The shuddering stopped abruptly, and she was hurled back against her seat again.
Silence.
The vid screens were turned back on, in split screen mode. One cam pointing forward, across shining mudflats towards a line of trees. The other cam pointing backwards revealing a long, curved gouge in the mud that led back into the sea, where white foam and waves described their trajectory across the water.
“Welcome to Earth,” said Katya.
After a few more moments of stunned hush, Samaira started clapping. Demetria wondered if her friend was being ironic, but Georgia, Phoebe and Chen joined in. Demetria found herself applauding too, out of relief.
Leo put his head into the passenger section, “Anything broken?”
Chen held up his toolkit, grinning, “Nothing that can’t be fixed.”
Leo smiled, the relief clear on his face, “Good. Phoebe, did I hear you say the atmosphere is breathable?”
“Yes,” she nodded. “Less oxygen than we’re used to, so we’ll get tired quickly. A little more CO2, so we’ll be prone to headaches. But breathable, like you suggested it would be.”
“Thanks. What are your meteorological instruments telling us, Samaira?”
She frowned, looking through the data on her tablet projection, “I don’t believe it. It’s autumn for the northern hemisphere and we’re fifty-four degrees north of the equator, level with Canada, Newfoundland, Denmark…”
“Yes,” prompted Leo, patiently.
“It measures twenty-one degrees centigrade outside. And forty-five percent relative humidity. That’s what you would have expected in the Mediterranean.”
“Doesn’t look like we’ll need our EVA suits then,” said Leo, scratching his chin.
“Haven’t you heard what I said?” Samaira asked. “It’s sub-tropical out there, and we’re next to Alaska.”
“We would have been,” said Leo gently. “Our old maps and climate models for Earth ended four decades ago. We’re here to make new ones.” He turned to face all of them, “Gather your packs, put on your exoskeletons and get ready to go outside.”
It took a couple of hours to get ready. Demetria was glad there was nothing more than minor bruising and sprains to attend to among her team. She checked her medi-pack and personal rations, then helped everyone into their exoskeletons. The powered frames that fitted around their limbs and spine to allow them to work longer in Earth’s gruelling gravity. Each frame had been personalised, calibrated to fit the individual and geared to their idiosyncratic movements. She felt as weird wearing hers as everyone else looked. Literally as if she were wearing her skeleton outside her body. But the preparations had tired her already. Despite months in the Armstrong, building muscles and adjusting to the induced gravity, she was knackered!
She could see it on everyone else’s face as well. The unspoken look that said, ‘how long do I have to put up with this?’ But there was also excitement. They were on the brink of stepping into a new world and that seemed to release a rush of adrenaline. After working her way through her team, making last minute adjustments to the bionics on their exoskeletons, she found herself at the front. Next to the airlock.
“Looks like Demetria’s going first,” joked Chen, “Glory girl!”
