U.S.S.
CONSTELLATION
T
HE BOOM OF THE HUGE GLACIER
collapsing into the water was like a bomb blast, knocking Admiral Warren off his feet and shattering the glass of the bridge on the U.S.S.
Constellation.
Another boom followed seconds later, and then he heard more still as the massive waves crashed over the bow. Glass fragments were scattered across the flight deck, where seventy-six attack jets were straining at their chains.
“Admiral?”
Warren turned. It was a signalman.
“FLASH traffic.” The petty officer handed over the clipboard and held a red-covered flashlight over the dispatch so Warren could read it.
“God Almighty,” said Warren as he started reading. “U.S. Geological Survey sensors at McMurdo just registered an eleven-point-one shock wave.”
“Admiral!” shouted a lieutenant.
Warren looked up in time to glimpse a towering, muddy green wall of water descend on the bow and wash over the flight deck, scattering the attack jets like toys and crashing into the superstructure where he stood. A deafening crack split his ears as the crush of water demolished the bridge. Desperately he searched for something to hang on to.
Water filled the compartment. Warren held the bar of a console and braced his back against the wall to stay upright. On calm waters, the 86,000-ton carrier rose 201 feet above the waterline. But these swells were lifting the aircraft carrier like an empty Cuban cigar box.
Warren coughed up some water and yelled to anyone who could hear him. “Turn us into the wave or we’ll capsize!”
He strained to hear his command received with an “Aye, sir!” from a helmsman, but there was no sound beside the crash of water.
When the wave broke, he looked around the bridge and saw two floating bodies. The rest had been swept to sea. He ran down the stairs to the wheelhouse, gripping the rail tightly. The wheelhouse was empty.
He turned toward the coast to see another towering gray mass, a cliff-size wave. He grabbed a chain reserved for one of his 55,000-pound planes and hoisted it on his broad shoulders and headed down to the flight deck.
Men and planes were thrashing about the tilting deck. Then a new wave lifted the carrier toward the sky. As he fell through the air, still clutching the chain, Warren saw a rail. Water crashed over the deck again, knocking him to his knees. But he saw his salvation. If he could just reach the rail in between waves, he could chain himself down.
The next wave split the twin-finned JSF attack jet in front of him, and Warren ducked to avoid being sliced in half by a broken wing. He willed himself to stand, his numb legs wobbling beneath him, and broke into a run, splashing through the shallows toward the rail.
Part of him wanted to slip and fall so he could just stop fighting and die, but he stayed on his feet until he rammed into the rail. He reached up and grabbed the heavy chain on his shoulders with both hands and lashed himself to the rail before the next wave crashed.
The winds and spray swept the deck as he clung for his life. The wave broke over the bow, and just as Warren could feel the force lift his body off the deck and sweep him aside, his chain caught and held.
For more than a minute he stayed that way, sure his arm would be torn off and he would be washed away like the remaining planes on deck. But God help him, he swore, he was going to survive this cataclysm if only to pay back Yeats. Then, slowly, he felt the carrier shifting and heard the creak of the massive steel buckling. He looked up and saw that the entire ship was on the verge of capsizing before the giant swell had passed.
“Goddamn you, Yeats!”
I
NSIDE P
4
’S STAR CHAMBER,
Conrad coughed as the whiskey stung the back of his throat. He looked up at Serena sitting next to him. Her wet hair was wiped back, her face pale.
“Jack Daniel’s?” he asked hoarsely.
“Found it in Yeats’s pack.” She reached over and touched his face. The feeling of her hand on his face brought him back to life. “You’re warm.”
“This whole place feels warm.” Conrad sat up and felt a terrific pain at the base of his skull. He groaned. “Where’s the obelisk?”
“I don’t know,” Serena said.
“It was right here.” Conrad quickly scanned the star chamber. He saw the empty altar standing in the middle of the cartouche. Something in his gut churned and he remembered a nightmare about the floor splitting open. “Where’s Yeats?”
“Disappeared down the floor shaft.”
Conrad looked for the shaft, but it had closed up again beneath the altar. He’s dead, thought Conrad. He felt himself shake, his heart beating rapidly.
“I’m so sorry about your father, Conrad.”
He looked into her eyes. She was indeed sorry, he thought. But there was something peculiar about the way she looked at him now. Something different. He wouldn’t call it fear, but there was something else in her eyes that put distance between them. Surely she didn’t believe Yeats’s bizarre revelation about his origins, did she? It was obviously a psychological ploy.
“You don’t actually believe—”
“Whatever else you may be, Conrad, you’re clearly not on anybody’s ‘most worthy’ list—not God’s, not the Atlanteans’ and not mine,” she said. “You’re still going to die for your sins. Only this time it looks like you’re going to take the rest of us with you straight to hell. That’s what I believe.”
Conrad could only stare at her. “You never stop, do you? You always have to have the last word.”
“Yes.”
Then Conrad saw something gleaming on the floor. He reached out to touch it. Was it sunlight? He looked up at the ceiling and blinked his eyes. The two concealed shafts he suspected had been there all along were now wide open, and a beam of sunlight strained through the southern shaft and touched the center of the floor where the obelisk had been.
Had the ice chasm overhead collapsed? he wondered with alarm. What about Ice Base Orion? The horrific thought that P4’s geothermal vent might have melted the ice or even shifted the earth’s crust briefly drifted across his consciousness, but he quickly suppressed it. Had something so catastrophic happened, he and Serena would be dead.
“What time is it?” Conrad asked Serena.
“Three in the afternoon,” she said. “Antarctica has equal hours of daylight and darkness in September. So we only have a few hours until dusk.”
Conrad craned his neck at the shafts on the sloping north and south walls of the chamber. He could crawl out one to check. It was the only way out. But the angles of the shafts looked steep, and it was at least a thousand feet up to God knows what.
“I’ll need to have a look outside,” he told her.
She nodded slowly, as if she had reached the same conclusion long before he had regained consciousness. “You’ll need these to climb up the shaft.”
She was holding pressurized suction-cup pads for the knees and hands.
“Where did you get those?” he asked.
“Your father’s pack,” she said. “He seemed to have prepared for everything.”
Conrad looked at the altar in the center of the room covering the shaft that had swallowed his father. “Not quite everything.”
Conrad rose to his feet, took the suction gear from Serena, and crossed the floor to the southern shaft. He stared up at the sun and blinked. “Looks like the polar storm cleared.”
“That’s what it looks like.” Serena didn’t sound so sure. She didn’t even look like she wanted to know.
“If there are any search parties looking for us, we need to send a signal or flare,” he told her, strapping the suction pads on. “I’ll have to crawl up through the shaft. And I’ll carry up a line with me, just in case it’s our only way out and you’ll need to join me. Meanwhile, you try to raise Ice Base Orion on Yeats’s radio and tell them what happened.”
He could feel her searching his eyes for clues. “What did happen, Conrad?”
He wanted to hold her in his arms, if she’d let him, and tell her everything was going to be OK. But they both knew that would be a lie. “I’m going to find out,” he told her. “I promise.”
The square of light overhead grew larger as Conrad neared the top of the shaft. It had been a steeper climb than he expected, slowed by the suction pads he needed for traction, and he was out of breath. The wind whistled as he gripped the outer edge of the shaft and pulled himself up to the light of day.
The brightness was harsh and he blinked rapidly, allowing several seconds for his eyes to adjust. When they did, he blinked again in disbelief.
Spread out a mile below him were the ruins of an ancient city. Temples, ziggurats, and broken obelisks lay strewn amid what had been—could be—a tropical paradise. He noticed a series of concentric, circular waterways radiating out from the base of the pyramid complex, which he deduced was the center of town. It was an advanced, otherworldly city grid hidden for twelve thousand years under two miles of ice.
Until now.
Conrad shaded his eyes. The subglacial terrain stretched out in a
six-mile radius from the pyramid—a tropical island in a sea of ice. In the distance he could see the snowcapped Transantarctic Mountains.
The air smelled crisp and fresh, and he could hear the distant rumble of waterfalls. Somehow his fears and doubts and petty ambitions were swept away by the majesty of it all. But as he gazed out across the new world, he suddenly wondered what had happened to the old.
U.S.S.
CONSTELLATION
A
DMIRAL
W
ARREN SPLASHED ACROSS
the inside hangar deck of the U.S.S.
Constellation,
surveying the damage. The ship hadn’t capsized after all, but the deck had taken on enough water to sink the
Titanic
twice. And yet the old girl was still afloat, limping along on emergency power.
Initial reports coming in from the U.S. Geological Survey in Golden, Colorado, and some earthquake-forecasting agency in Japan blamed the tidal wave on a major quake in East Antarctica—11.1 on the Richter scale. But Warren couldn’t confirm it with McMurdo or Amundsen-Scott. All communications with American bases on the continent had been cut off by a burst of EMP.
All of which seemed to validate reports coming out of Moscow and Beijing that the “seismic event” in Antarctica was really a secret U.S.-sponsored nuclear explosion—a flagrant violation of the international Antarctic Treaty.
The electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, had also blinded spy satellites overhead. Warren was told that if he couldn’t get a bird up in the air to fly reconn over the epicenter, it was going to take at least sixteen hours before any U.S. forces could reach the target to either prove the nuke accusations false or cover up Yeats’s dirty work.
“Goddamn you, Yeats,” Warren muttered as he stepped around the floating pieces of a broken wing. Looked like one of their F/A-18 Hornets. The rest was mangled with what used to be an S-3B Viking.
Warren shook his head. Twenty-six wounded, three in critical
condition and nine missing. And that was just the
Constellation.
News reports said one-third of the island of Male, the Maldives’s capital, was underwater. Even a small rise in sea levels at this point could wipe out the island nation—all 1,180 islands. The entire population of 263,000 inhabitants was at risk.
The only positive news Warren could report back to Washington was that his crew had managed to rescue the Greenpeace protesters from their now-sunken ship. The meddlers were helping out with the wounded and serving up some of the best damned coffee Warren had ever tasted.
He was on his fourth cup when one of his radio officers splashed over. “EAM coming over Milstar, sir.”
Warren watched a sock float past him on the hangar deck. Milstar was the president’s communications link to senior military commanders. The $17-billion Military Commanders’ Voice Conference Network was designed to enable commanders to discuss whether a ballistic-missile launch threatened North America and, if so, to determine the appropriate response.
“Priority one, sir.”
“I’m coming.”
Warren took a final gulp as he eyed the rad-hardened Black Hawk chopper that several of his maintenance crew were working on in the corner—at his orders. He then crumpled the Styrofoam coffee cup and tossed it on the hangar floor, where it floated away.
Inside the
Constellation
’s war suite, the water was only ankle deep. Warren walked in to find his senior officer, McBride, seated at the conference table. Next to McBride, to Warren’s surprise and dismay, was the scruffy Greenpeace geek from the
Arctic Sunrise
whom CNN had featured. He was fiddling with some candy-colored laptop computer that looked like a toy.
Warren frowned. “What’s this civilian doing here, McBride?”
“This is Thornton Larson, a Ph.D. in geophysics from MIT,” McBride said. “He reviewed the Milstar downloads and has a presentation for you.”
“Couldn’t your officers figure it out, McBride?”
McBride said, “The data is so off the charts, sir, we felt we needed a second opinion. Dr. Larson has some valuable insights.”
Warren sat down and studied the disheveled Larson. The smart-ass hasn’t even discovered the razor blade, he thought to himself, and McBride was sharing national security secrets with him. “Enlighten me, Larson.”
“I was able to retrieve one final image from a satellite overhead before its innards were fried by that EMP,” Larson said excitedly. “I cleaned it up and here it is.”
Warren looked up at the large wall screen. A blue-tinted image of Antarctica, all too familiar to Warren these days, came into view. But in the middle of it, or rather just off center in East Antarctica, was a brown-yellow dot.
“Is that awesome, dude, or what?” Larson could only marvel at his work.
“God almighty, tell me that’s some storm and not ground zero,” Warren said.
Larson addressed the image on the wall screen. “Well, hello Mr. Ground Zero, are you ready for your close-up?”
The brown-yellow dot on-screen started to magnify, frame by frame, until Warren found himself looking at a crater in the ice, and at the bottom of it was a complex of pyramids, temples, and waterways. The kid was obviously playing them all for fools, Warren decided.
“You think you’re pretty funny, Larson, don’t you?” Warren said, starting to get up. “Let’s see how hilarious the brig can be.”
“Please, sir,” McBride said. “We checked it out and this guy hasn’t doctored anything.”
Warren slowly sat down, his thoughts immediately turning to Yeats. The SOB must have known all along. “So you’re telling me what I’m seeing on that screen is for real?”
“What you’re seeing is a localized event, like a garage band on the verge of stardom,” Larson said. “This is just the first single off an album I’ll call
Mother Nature’s Cacophony in Doomsday Major.”
Warren gave McBride his “your ass is on the line here” stare, which his executive officer acknowledged.
Larson said, “Your attention, class.”
Warren looked up at the large wall screen. The image of an ancient city surrounded by ice was gone. In its place, spinning in the
center, flickering with each power drain of the carrier’s electrical system, was what looked like a thermal image of the sun in space.
“Tell me what I’m looking at on the screen, Larson.”
“Earth’s core, baby,” Larson said. “The
core!
A new technique similar to a medical sonogram enables us to generate an image of the inner planet. I’ve used the latest version of PowerPoint on my G5 to generate—”
Warren waved his hand impatiently. “Get to the point.”
“Earth is an onion, man, made up of layers,” Larson said. “And it’s a rotating onion too, churning up hurricanes and storms in the atmosphere. But the core spins independently, and changes there can trigger significant consequences near and at the planet’s surface. I’m talking
consequences.”
“You mean earthquakes and tidal waves?” Warren said.
“Big time,” Larson said. “Albert Einstein, Dr. Relativity himself, even theorized that the outer crust, the lithosphere, periodically shifts over the asthenosphere due to ice buildup in the polar regions.”
“What are you saying?”
“What I’m saying, baby, is that we seem to be witnessing what is known as an earth-crust displacement. You dudes in the military-industrial complex prefer the perverse little acronym ECD.”
Warren didn’t know what this kid was smoking, but he had to know where this theory was going. “And what’s this ECD going to do?”
“Well, here’s where it gets really nasty,” Larson said. “Antarctica is going to get pushed toward the equator and North America into the Arctic Circle.”
Another computer image appeared on-screen, this one of Earth. Warren felt his own temperature rise as Antarctica moved up toward the center of the globe, ice free, and North America was pushed to the top of the globe.
Warren said, “So you’re saying we’re better off staying here and sunning on the beaches of Antarctica rather than freezing our asses off in the USA, which is going to get buried under two miles of ice.”
“Bingo!” Larson said. “Bingo! An ECD would cause extinctions to occur on different continents at different rates, based on varying changes in the world’s latitudes. I’ve mapped the projected lines of
destruction. We’ll call them PLDs. Hey, I made up a new acronym! Well, these PLDs are pretty damn awesome, I’ve got to tell you.”
On-screen Larson drew a circle around the globe, through the North and South poles. “The line of greatest displacement runs through North America, west of South America, bisects Antarctica, travels through Southeast Asia, goes on to Siberia, and then back to North America. All the continents along the line of greatest displacement—or LGD—are about to experience mass extinctions.”
“Nobody knows the future,” Warren said, uncomfortable with this green alarmist’s certainty. “If you ever read old five-year budget projections from the Pentagon, you’d know that. How long will it take for this alleged ring of death to make us all extinct?”
“It’s only an estimate, but my models project an ECD taking place over the next couple of days and running itself out within a week.”
Warren was stunned. “All that destruction in a few days?”
“Dude, it took God only six days to create the universe, according to Genesis,” Larson said. “Why should an ECD take any longer to destroy it? It’s like a coil that can unwind with unstoppable, devastating speed once it reaches threshold.”
Warren leaned forward. “This has happened before?”
“Several times.”
“And I suppose you were there to measure them all?”
“I wish,” Larson said. “The last one was roughly eleven thousand six hundred years ago, about 9600
B.C.
That’s when the geological record says vast climatic changes swept the planet. Massive ice sheets melted, ocean levels rose. Huge mammals perished in great numbers. A sudden influx of people flowed into the Americas. It was
party
time, you know?”
“And this happens every twelve thousand years or so?”
“No, every forty-one thousand years,” Larson said, who had suddenly hit his own threshold and run out of gas. He plopped down on a seat. “We aren’t due for an ECD for another thirty thousand years. Somehow the cycle has been accelerated. I don’t know how.”
Neither did Warren. But he was pretty damn sure who was responsible. “And how soon until we reach threshold?” Warren demanded. “What kind of countdown are we talking about here?”
“The ECD should reach threshold by dawn tomorrow morning.”
Larson started counting on his fingers with a glazed look in his eyes. “Damn, that’s less than fifteen hours. One last night to get lucky before it all goes poof.”
Admiral Warren could only stare at the kid in the hope that his Ph.D. stood for Piled Higher and Deeper. Otherwise, they were all out of luck.