Ring of fire axial a dis.., p.24
Ring of Fire Axial: A Disaster Thriller, page 24
He reached for the external comms mic and spoke loudly but confidently. “Sloan.” His voice caught despite his best efforts. “Don’t move. Stay small. Wait for the basket.”
She looked up at him. Even a hundred feet away, he saw the shape of her face through the swirling eruptive fallout. The old stubborn line of her jaw and the flash of white teeth bared in something halfway between a smile and a grimace. She lifted her hand, then caged herself again like a bird fearing its own wings.
“ALIAS,” Beau said, “arm rescue hoist.”
“HOIST ARMED. LOAD LIMIT 272 kg. SHEAR-PIN GREEN.”
He reached for the panel, his hands shaking somewhat under the intense pressure. The hoist motor’s whine came faint and patient. He was ready.
“ALIAS, static line deploy!”
A staccato clatter began over his head just inside the cabin door as the weighted static discharge line snaked out past the door sill, a bright wick against gray that blended in with the ash-filled air. It swung downward, swinging wildly from volcanic crosswinds and the chopper’s own turbulence. It was too light, as Beau knew it would be. He needed luck and Sloan’s inner strength.
He spooled the basket out. The hoist motor bit and released line at a rate he made slower than training because the air was not a training center. Fifty feet down, then sixty, then eighty. The basket swung, a small pendulum drawn by a thousand invisible hands. He requested ALIAS to adjust the left cyclic a centimeter, then took it back, the kind of loving touch you’d use on a sleeping child’s hair if you wanted them to sleep through the night.
It continued to drop. Too far, in fact. It circled dangerously close to the lava flow, kissing the stone base six feet below the top of the pillar. On contact, the cable spat a tiny snap of light from the chopper’s airframe, static bleeding off. Better a wire kiss on stone than his sister kissing a significant static electrical charge caused by the atmospheric conditions.
Beau’s shoulders were set. He breathed in two counts, out two counts, found the pace he used when he had to solve problems in bodies and machines at once. He put his hand on the hoist control and spoke not to calm himself but to make the world obey a cadence.
“ALIAS, hover bias upwind,” he said softly. “Cable vertical. Line angle under five.”
“HOVER BIAS MAINTAINED. CABLE ANGLE—three degrees.”
Then ALIAS added,
“Recommend cable angle five point three.”
Beau furrowed his brow. You can see that? He rolled with the suggestion. “I see it,” Beau answered as if he were talking to Lt. Taylor. “ALIAS, kill drift.”
“CONFIRM. TRANSLATING TENDENCY HALTED.”
Heat climbed the line itself in shimmering snakes. He caught a glimpse of the radar altimeter, which had jittered a foot and came back. Sweat ran down Beau’s ribs under the harness, and for a second, he smelled himself—sweat and fear in an airtight room.
He thumbed the mic. “Sloan, listen to me. Don’t stand. Stay on your knees. Crawl into the basket. Keep your weight low. Do not look down. Focus on the basket.”
She nodded, a fast, jagged motion, and then closed her eyes for the slightest of moments. When she opened them, the basket was nearly within her grasp. Then the pillar itself ticked and pinged like a cooling engine, only it was warming, not cooling. Ancient basaltic rock was changing its place on earth back into what the rock had once been—lava.
“ALIAS, rate down two,” Beau shouted to the Sikorsky’s brain, his voice urgent as he saw the lava rising on the pillar. “Now one. Cable angle four-point-eight degrees.” The motor’s tone shifted.
A sudden clap of volcanic thunder accompanied a bolt of lightning toward the top of Mauna Loa, a reminder of the creature that started this macabre party.
The Sikorsky’s intercom screamed static, which quickly disappeared. A chime on the panel flashed, drawing Beau’s attention. His eyes grew wide as it appeared ALIAS/MATRIX was in wanting to break loose into self-preservation mode. The massive burst of energy from the lightning was forcing a fight-or-flight type of response from the computer system.
“ALIAS! Do not chase transients,” Beau shouted through his teeth.
“HOLDING BOX,” ALIAS responded although Beau had his concerns as to how long.
A fresh lobe of lava hugged the heiau wall. Radiant heat came through the cockpit like an open oven. The air thinned. Beau could feel the chopper’s lift drift in response.
“ALIAS, hold!”
“ACKNOWLEDGED. HOLDING one hundred feet AGL.”
The basket reached the level of Sloan’s shoulders. She reached for it, fingers open, the posture of drowning. The movement tipped her center of mass wrong. She teetered on the narrow top, stone wobbling under her. The blowing ash pelted her with the force of ball bearings.
Beau’s heart stopped for a beat. “Knees!” he barked. “Knees, Sloan! Crawl in. Do not stand. Crawl in!”
She froze at the command like he’d wired her body from childhood to listen to that tone. She sank, awkward and alive, and reached again. Not up this time, but into the basket’s mouth as it drifted toward her.
The cable angle swung ever so slightly A pendulum in the gusty air. Beau felt his jaw loosen without his permission. He immediately clamped it down again to focus.
“ALIAS, rate down point five. Hold.”
The basket hovered a breath above the pillar’s lip. The steel cable was hissing with heat like meat on a grill. Sloan crawled those last inches as if it were a hundred yards, elbows and forearms and knees, keeping her center low and tight the way he’d hoped she would.
He could see her skin now where her sock had slipped inside her boot—the blistering red of a burn finding the top of an ankle. He saw a small hole in the knee of her pants where a cinder had found the cloth and eaten it. He saw that her hands bled from old cuts made new by stone. He saw it all and threw the seeing away because she was alive.
Beau remained calm. “ALIAS, adjust cable and retrieve.”
“CABLE ANGLE CONFIRMED TO three-point-two. RETRIEVING.”
At door height, he reached for the basket, grabbed the handles, and hauled. He almost lost his footing as the ash had made every surface slicker. It would’ve been a stupid mistake that would’ve ended in a stupid fall killing them both. He slammed a knee into a rib of the door to stop himself. Pain shot through each tendon around his kneecap in return.
The basket bumped the sill hard enough to knock a clang through the cabin. Sloan grabbed at him through the mesh, fingers slippery with blood. She tried to raise her body, desperate to get inside.
“Don’t stand!” Beau admonished.
She didn’t.
He pulled her in sideways, dragging her out of the basket. Somehow, she was smaller than he remembered. Her knee cleared the lip. Her feet followed. For a reason only Sloan could understand, she abruptly turned on her hands and knees despite her agonizing pain to peer over the edge of the open cabin door.
She had to see.
Below, the ahu and its offering pillar were being returned to the earth.
For dust you are, and to dust you will return.
Forty-Nine
April 23
Late Afternoon
The Saddle
Island of Hawai’i
FOR A MOMENT, SOUND disappeared. Everything went blank in Beau’s mind like the mute button had been pressed. Then a profound sense of relief washed over him, and the volume button was cranked up to max.
Rotors slapped. ALIAS demanded his attention as beeps and buzzes and dings filled the air. It was a reminder that his job wasn’t complete.
Sloan was gasping for air.
“Mask on,” he said, already pressing it to her face. He flicked the valve, checked the small gauge. “Slow breaths so you don’t hyperventilate.”
She said something under the oxygen mask. His name, expletives, or perhaps both. He didn’t try to understand it. It was time to go.
He put his mind back into the world. First order of business was to engage the hoist until the basket and cable were secured inside. He quickly closed the cabin door to lock the demons outside.
“ALIAS! Disengage hover assist. Maintain ALG three hundred feet. Northwest vector, two miles, then hold.”
“ALG three hundred. NORTHWEST TWO MILES TO HOLD. CONFIRMED.”
Sloan’s eyes rolled upward as she pulled the mask off her face, revealing a slight grin. “She sounds nice.” She began to cough violently.
Beau scrambled to pull a bottle of water out of the back of the copilot’s seat and unscrewed the cap. He gently supported her back. “Rinse your mouth out first. Just spit it on the floor.” After she’d cleared the ash out of her mouth, he allowed her to take slow sips.
She coughed again and began to tremble as her body threatened to go into shock.
“Stay with me,” he said calmly. He took a deep breath as he encouraged her to do the same. “Breathe.”
Slowly, she began to recover. Her breathing stabilized. The color of her skin had turned from pale to something that resembled a sunburn with bad makeup deployed to cover the redness.
She laughed once, ugly as it was, followed by a coughing fit at the same time. Her bright eyes revealed her appreciation.
“You took your time, Mercer.”
“Had to find a parking spot.” He took her hand and gave it a gentle squeeze. The touching gesture caused her to wince. Beau inwardly chastised himself as he looked at the blisters on her hands. He eased away and retrieved the trauma kit.
Bandages. Burn gel. Tylenol. Saline for eye wash. Then blankets.
He removed her shoes and unwound a partially burned sock from her ankle with the patience of a man defusing a bomb. The skin under it had blistered and broken in places. Other patches of skin were angry and shiny. He applied a layer of Burnshield, designed to cool her burns, before applying sterile bandages. Saline was used to flush out the grit from her eyes. Then a squeeze bottle full to her mouth to cleanse her throat, followed by a water chaser.
She removed her mask. “Um, who’s flying this thing?”
Ignoring her question, he scrambled to his knees when he realized they were holding in the sugarcane field, which was ablaze beneath them.
“ALIAS, exit hover hold. Climb to five-zero-zero AGL. Heading one-eight-five. Groundspeed seven-zero knots.”
“EXITING HOLD. CLIMBING TO five hundred feet AGL. HEADING 185. GS seventy KTS.”
The helicopter nosed away from the inferno with pleasure, so it seemed. It somehow exuded a human approach Beau thought the AI didn’t have.
Sloan, who was fighting through the pain, was thrilled to be alive. She couldn’t contain teasing her brother, who’d just saved her life.
“I’d be okay if you actually flew this thing yourself. I never trusted Dad’s Cybertruck.”
“This is better,” mumbled Beau, pointing toward her oxygen mask. “Keep breathing.”
“I’m fine,” Sloan shot back as she tried to stand. She groaned in agony. “Shit.”
“Yeah, that’s right. Shit down, dammit.”
She burst out laughing and groaned some more before flipping her brother the middle finger. Then, a sudden moment of clarity, she asked, “Where are we going?”
“Back to base. On Oahu.”
She arched her back to stretch. Every movement reminded her what her body had been through. She longed for a hot bath and a bottle of wine. Or two.
Beau issued directives to the Sikorsky. “ALIAS, vector upwind from visible lava rivers by minimum three-zero meters. Adjust every five seconds. Maintain radalt margin.”
“THERMAL ANOMALIES NOT MAPPED. SPECIFY WAYPOINT.”
“ALIAS, dynamic offset,” he snapped. “Use camera feed. Contrast hottest zones. Keep us out of them.”
A two-second pause.
“EXECUTING DYNAMIC OFFSET VIA VISUAL PARAMETERS.”
The helicopter’s path smoothed into a line that could be lived through. Heat pushed at the windshield, then eased. The rotor hiss softened. EGT stepped a needle width back into happy.
Behind him, Sloan sagged against the bulkhead and then sat up with the stubbornness of the living. The mask fogged and cleared with each breath. Tears had cut clean tracks through ash and easily dried from the intense heat. However, new tears flowed making tracks of their own. She touched the gauze on her ankle and then took her hand away fast.
“Beau, wait. I have to see,” she said with conviction. “Please!”
He turned to her. “See what?”
“All of it. And the house. I have to see if she’s okay.”
“Who?”
“Leilani. She is a nurse who helped us. She wouldn’t leave. I have to know.”
A million questions flooded Beau’s mind. He let out a sigh and eased into the pilot’s seat, strapping in. If they were going back into the Saddle, he wanted to maintain the controls.
“I won’t ask,” he finally said. “Can you make it up here? Turbulence is gonna toss us around. I need you strapped in.”
While Sloan brought her portable oxygen and the water bottle, Beau regained control of the Sikorsky, bringing it to a hover until she was settled.
“Where to?” he asked.
“Up the gorge,” she said. Her voice, mask-muffled, was scratchy. “Maybe two or three miles up. Toward our right side.”
As Beau skimmed the gulch corridor, Sloan took it all in from a different perspective. Hot breath funnels alternated with strange patches of relative calm where airflow became smooth for a few blessed seconds.
After a few minutes, Sloan became animated, pointing her finger against the stretched acrylic windshield. Leilani’s home came into view where it shouldn’t have survived. Its green lawn was ash-covered but mostly unburned. The house on pilings, which had rocked during the eruptions and seismic activity, still stood. Even a laundry line remained strung with nothing on it, Leilani having the forethought to remove her clothing before the deluge began. It was a ridiculous miracle in the throes of a planetary-changing event.
Sloan’s hand pressed to the window, to the vision, to chance or gods. “Thank you, Pele,” she whispered. The words had the shape of gratitude and the weight of relief.
Fifty
April 23
Dusk
CVO
Menlo Park, California
THE CVO FELT LIKE A mausoleum. Emergency lights glowed in pale amber along the corridors, powered by the backup generators, which had kicked online two hours ago. The hum of the gas-powered engines permeated the building, giving an artificial heartbeat to the volcanic observatory that once thrummed with life.
Well over three-quarters of the staff had already evacuated, driven by fear or family or both, leaving only the skeleton crew who insisted on staying. Their absence was evident throughout the building. Empty soda bottles or snack wrappers left on desks. Desktop computers abandoned mid-simulation. Desk chairs spun half out as if people had been lifted from them mid-motion.
Duke stood in his office, hands resting on the edge of the table after analyzing the Cascadia subduction zone through the prism of the holographic map. After shutting it off, he noticed the glow of the monitors was softer now in the minimal light. Only the essential systems were powered. Servers that once roared with constant data chatter had been scaled down, their cooling fans silenced to conserve fuel. The room breathed differently, a hollow exhalation of something already dying.
He let his gaze sweep across the remaining faces—Tim, Mara, Lena, Tina, Casey. Five loyal CVO scientists, worn thin by exhaustion but still upright. Their eyes followed him with the weight of expectation as he returned to the center of the operations center. He felt it settle on his shoulders like another tremor, another wave. He had always carried that weight, but now, when the world itself seemed to be tilting, it pressed with unbearable clarity.
Duke cleared his throat. “Listen up, everybody.” His voice was gravel, aggravated by countless sleepless hours. The team gathered around the man they admired, respected, and had grown to love like he was their own father.
“We’ve given it our all. I’ve asked way too much from all of you, and you’ve responded without complaint. Now, I have a request. Well, not really a request. It’s more of an order.” Duke paused and swallowed hard, staring at his feet for a moment before continuing.
“It’s time to go home. And I’m not talking about the condos the government provided you. I mean to your families. Moms, dads, siblings, whomever you are closest to. If they are in harm’s way, warn them of what’s coming. If they need help, rush to them without delay. What’s coming cannot be stopped. It’s larger than I even imagined in two decades of running sims.”
The silence stretched. Mara’s jaw tightened. Tim leaned forward, ready to protest. “Sir—”
Duke raised his hand slowly to stop Tim. “Don’t sir me, Tim. You’ve got families. Go to them. Please don’t let me carry your ghosts too.”
Duke sensed a hint of rebellion in their eyes, but no movement. He pressed harder, feeling the ache in his chest as he envisioned the worst-case scenario.
“I’m not asking you to abandon the science or the very important role we’ve played in our careers. The servers will keep running as long as the diesel lasts. But you …” Duke paused as he became emotional. “Well, you’re flesh and blood. Practically my flesh and blood. I love you all, but I need you to get out while you can.”
Tina spoke first, her voice cutting through the quiet. “And leave you here? Alone?”
“I’ve been alone before,” Duke said, almost gently. His eyes drifted to the screens. “And I’ll be alone again. But this isn’t about me, and besides, I’ll also be going to Betsy and my family soon.” His eyes darted from one to another. However, none of them moved.
Mara shook her head, arms crossed. “You taught us better than that. You said data means nothing if it doesn’t have witnesses. If we leave, who’s left to see it through?”
