May day, p.19
May Day, page 19
part #2 of Erelong Series
The elites, the ruling classes of the nation were already secure in their underground sanctuaries. They had done what they needed to do to ensure their own survival. Now, all they had to do was wait where they were hiding for the event to run its course. Not that they weren’t afraid. They were about to face a force of nature they wielded no power over, and that terrified them.
36
Tsunamis Above Volcanoes Below
Britain and America had demanded Australia allow the JS Ikuchi to return home with its two prisoners without delay. Canberra was to make it a top priority. Such were the political implications of any attempt to hold the JS Ikuchi for any length of time. Japan, a lost ally, must be encouraged to return to the fold without delay. The Japanese submarine was soon on its way back home.
Meanwhile, Tindale and his crew were delayed in Sydney by a brief military inquiry. The days passed. Finally, the USS Texas was making good progress through the deep water off the Australian continental shelf, and then it happened.
The superheated frothy mass from deep within the expanding planet finally forced its way between the tectonic plates. What began with the appearance of countless hotspots beneath the oceans had turned into a rash of peaks and domes. Each pulse of lava covered the previous, and on and on it went. The new volcanoes varied from huge, to others that measured less than a mile in diameter, and the number of eruptions was increasing exponentially. The submarine may as well have wandered into a minefield.
The instruments showed that it was completely surrounded. There was no safe channel or harbor to be found.
In the command and control room, Captain Tindale had taken over the Conn. For the past few hours, he had watched his new XO Carlos Martinez almost as closely as they both watched the young crew pilot the sub through what they had thought was the worst of it. There had been no letup. The turbulence was far in excess of anything anyone aboard the USS Texas had been trained to handle. The rolling and pitching were violent enough, but the sheer power of the energy waves was now threatening the integrity of the submarine.
The situation was growing worse by the minute. So much so that no one dared ask the question. How bad was it going to get? The situation had already blown right through what Captain Tindale had considered unthinkable.
“Do you think this turbulence might be caused by all the eruptions, Skipper?” Martinez asked.
“Could be,” Tindale replied. He didn’t look up from the chart. It seemed like they’d already gone through every possible explanation already. There wasn’t much else to say. Yet, even so, he pondered the source of his irritation with Martinez. The new XO was a large and very hairy man who appeared to wear a permanent scowl on his face.
Martinez could not ever be Frank O’Hara.
Everyone on the boat knew that. Whenever tempers flared, it had been O’Hara’s natural-born ability to make the crew laugh that saved the day. That reason alone made O’Hara an irreplaceable godsend on the boat. Finding an XO who was funny was never going to be easy.
No, Tindale knew his irritation with Martinez could not be blamed on the fact the Cuban lacked the considerable wit of his unfortunate predecessor. But, the XO’s unfortunate lack of humor certainly didn’t help their relationship.
“The current above us is fucking unbelievable!” Martinez declared.
“We hold steady,” Tindale told him.
“Skipper, we got to get the boat out of here,” Martinez said, shaking his head.
The sub rolled and pitching like a seesaw bounced by Poseidon astride the boat fore and Hades astride it aft. Every man and woman onboard did their best to stay upright, but not a soul was spared. They were horribly seasick and bruised and battered.
“It’s not safe to take her down any further, sir,” Navigation officer, Kirsten Pennyweather reported. “The situation is worse below us. The stuff we are seeing, sir. All kinds of rock formations forming. It’s just unbelievable!”
“Do you mean forming as we speak?” Tindale asked.
“Yes, sir,” Pennyweather confirmed. “Volcanoes and things—I don’t know how best to describe it all. And the scale, sir. It’s happening everywhere and all at once.”
“Keep her steady at eight hundred feet,” Tindale barked.
“Aye, Skipper,” Diving Officer Bradly shouted.
The man sat rigid between the planesman and helmsman, who were both in their early twenties. Bradly had his hands full simply instilling added courage into the two youngsters.
“We could break radio silence?” Carlos Martinez suggested.
“Did you forget, we are entering hostile waters, XO?”
“The enemy faces the same conditions we do, Skipper. They are not going to worry about what we’re doing or where we are going.”
“You must be goddamn psychic to know all that,” Tindale growled with more than a hint of scorn.
The boat gave a heave and the two men grasped the metal rim of the screen Tindale had been studying. The heave that followed slammed the two men into each other.
“Stands to reason,” Martinez muttered as he rubbed the welt on his forehead. “That’s all.”
“We maintain radio silence,” Tindale said, staring red-faced at the XO, daring him to argue the order.
“Skipper,” Martinez replied with a nod of acknowledgment.
“We are going to get through this,” Tindale told him.
“Cap’n, the Chinese submarine has surfaced,” Pennyweather said. “Seems they didn’t have a choice. Their status is not clear, sir.”
Tindale glanced at Martinez with a look of genuine surprise.
“Well done, XO. You were right.”
The men held tight to the uprights around them as the boat suddenly rose up at an angle of thirty degrees. The bow quickly sank again. They stayed where they were holding each other’s gaze, as once more the boat rose to an acute angle and fell back.
“Thank you, Skipper,” Martinez replied, his face as green as Tindale’s.
It felt like an hour or two had passed, but it was only a matter of minutes later when the XO received more bad news. This time it came from the Weapons Officer. He gazed at the captain. Tindale was already looking terrible, and no wonder. The situation they faced was complex, and the complexities were merging into one another. May as well add another problem to the pot.
“Weps reports problems with sonar, sir.”
Tindale glanced away from the chart on the screen.
“And, what kind are these?” He asked Martinez.
“We’re traveling through mud, Skipper,” Martinez told him. “It’s like something huge just scraped up the ocean floor and slung it at us.”
“Details, XO!” Tindale snapped.
“Weps says it looks like the whole seabed’s shaking, Skipper. The quake is off the charts.”
“Bring us closer to the surface,” Tindale told him.
“Weps confirms we have severe water displacement above us,” Martinez told him.
“What the hell are they talking about now?” Tindale asked. “Where above us is it, exactly?”
“Cap’n, we got turbulence from the ocean floor and in every direction,” the Weapons Officer told Tindale.
“We are at full speed and going sideways,” Martinez told Tindale. His face was the mask worn by a condemned man. A mixture of fear and resolve. Every line creased deep, and perspiration running in every valley.
For the first time in his career as a submarine commander, John T. Tindale felt the sharp edge of panic bite deep.
“We need to get out of this current—don’t you think?”
He locked eyes on Martinez. This time though he was looking for reassurance.
“I think we have to take her up, Skipper,” Martinez said.
“Let’s do it, then,” Tindale replied.
“Sir!” Martinez replied, and he turned to the helm. “Take her up!”
Try as he might, Tindale could not stymie a rising sense of hopelessness as he watched the crew struggle at the helm.
“Captain, we can’t…”
“We’ve lost control of her, sir.”
They dared not look at each other as they held on to whatever fixture they could to keep their frail bodies from colliding with the steel shell of the boat. The minutes passed, and they regained the use of their instruments. It was enough for the captain to steady the boat in preparation for the next punch.
The communication cables that stretched across the ocean floors were gone. They had lost all contact with the shore. Even the extremely low frequencies through the satellite system were no longer usable. The USS Texas was one of the most advanced weapons ever built by a nation and now it was completely on its own.
It was time to address the crew. Tindale switched on the intercom.
“This is the Captain speaking. I’m not going to mince words. I know you expect me to tell it like it is. So here goes. Our ride will get worse before it gets better. It will be worse than any Ohio class boat has experienced before us.
“We don’t know a lot about the cause of the turbulence. We know the seafloor is breaking out with volcanoes. We can’t take her deeper because of the activity below us. It appears that we are caught in an extremely long wave. It’s more like a tsunami. The amplitude is astonishing. What it’s like atop is impossible to imagine. So, we can’t surface at this time. Our best option is to maintain present depth, and we’ll do that for as long as we are can.”
Tindale switched off the intercom and took a deep breath as he looked into the steady gaze of his XO. Martinez was willing him to carry on. He switched on the intercom again.
“This is the Captain. I want to add to that we do still have a degree of control.”
He turned from the mic and grimaced at the XO. What a bald-faced lie. But it was a necessary one.
“A degree of control… Well, that’s something, isn’t it? Now for the bad news.”
He paused again, this time to listen to the strained laughter of the crew.
“We’ve lost contact with Washington. Some might say that’s not so bad…”
He glanced at the XO. Enough of the jokes.
“The short of it is—we’ve lost all communication with the outside world. For the time being at least, we are on our own. If you are religious, you might want to say a quick prayer. Damn, even if you’re not—it won’t hurt to say one. Then, when you’re done with that, I want you to get right back to your station, and be that great submariner you know you are. Because we are going to make it out of here alive.”
37
Solar Shakeup
The Dark Star was the anchor of its own tiny system. As it picked up speed on its swing around the Sun, so too did the entourage of orbitals. Although no bigger than the island of Rarotonga, the Dark Star had a mass close to that of its much larger sibling that was soon going to sling it like a stone into the cold reaches of outer space. But, even as the tiny star’s powerful magnetic field battled with that of its binary twin, its impact on Planet Earth was far from over.
The metallic core of Earth had been excited for five years by the Dark Star’s electromagnetic emissions. Now it expanded well beyond the crust’s ability to contain it. A froth of molten rock rose to the surface of the planet, and new vents appeared and grew in size at an astonishing rate. The volcanoes spread rapidly across the floor of the great oceans, erupting almost in unison hours before the shift. When the first pole shift happened, the continental plates, already lifted by the rivers of magma below, rolled over and under one another. At the points where they collided, the plates shattered and cracked to create great chasms and cliffs.
North America moved southwest, the lifting edge of the Pacific Plate grinding over the West Coast of the continent. Days before it erupted, the Yellowstone Caldera grew rapidly into a huge dome. When the supervolcano finally exploded, much of the North American Craton was flattened by the shockwaves. Meanwhile, the South American continent shifted northeast to tear away the land bridge that had for so long connected the two contents.
On the other side of the Pacific Ocean, the sea washed over Japanese lands. The peak of the wave fell just short of the tallest mountains, and saltwater pooled in the valleys of the Japanese archipelago, but the lakes did not settle. The North American plate rode over the sinking side of the tilting Pacific plate thrusting up the other end. The Japanese Alps attained even greater heights and the land mass of the Nippon archipelago doubled in size along the west of the northern islands. The Eurasian Plate was driven up out of the sea, and the continent of Asia became one vast land mass. Finally, the Korean peninsula and western Japan were united.
And, it didn’t stop there.
The tectonic plates continued to fracture and shift against one another as the lava created land. The Australian Plate lifted along the East Coast of the old continent and the West Coast was driven into the ocean. In a matter of hours, the same shift that lifted eastern Australia pushed the Southern Alps of New Zealand upwards to reach extraordinary heights. The oceans slopped out and sloshed over the land with the tsunamis rising to a height that equaled the depth of the seabed the movement had emptied.
Most of the low-lying island nations vanished and the volcanoes of Indonesia and the Philippines vented. In the time that immediately followed the massive eruptions, the pressure of the rising magma eased. In this way, the volcanic land mass was greatly increased. Where once had been the western seaboard of Australia there lay a new large island cooling under the lapping sea water.
As the magnetic south pole of the Dark Star traveled over the North Pole of Earth, it tipped the blue planet on end. For almost fourteen days, the rotation of Earth slowed while the atmosphere continued to revolve. As the spin of the planet slowed, the remaining atmosphere moved across the surface of Earth with a speed that evoked awe in the most experienced science officers who observed the event from afar.
The Dark Star continued its trajectory out of the solar system, its speed increasing as it trailed the Earth behind. The force of its pull ripped away the Earth’s ozone shield and the upper layers of the atmosphere. The Sun belched giant bursts of solar wind at its departing sibling, and no longer protected by a magnetosphere, wave after wave of the charged particles impacted the surface, killing all life that still managed to cling within the nooks and crannies of rocks.
Ironically, the winds of fire were the reason the surface of Earth did not combust as the temperature climbed over one hundred and fifty degrees Fahrenheit. A new debris layer formed from the volcanic gas and tiny cinders that had been ejected high into the thin stratosphere. The winds and the debris layer acted to protect the planet from the worst of the sun’s scorching heat, allowing the surface to cool down.
The Dark Star towed Earth for some distance, but as it drew closer to the orbit of Venus, it released the cloud and smoke covered planet. The debris acted to shield the surface of Earth, now naked to all the sun’s flares. For the time being, the temperature drop was rapid, and it started a new ice age, but it would last only a short while. The new orbit of Earth was closer to its yellow star than before, and as a result, the global temperatures were about to become much warmer.
The tiny star accelerated as it completed its journey around the Sun. With the added velocity it broke from its sibling’s grip to begin a long elliptical orbit that would take it quickly out of the solar system, and in another three thousand years, would bring it back again.
Earth, now released from the grip of the Dark Star fell once more under the influence of the Sun and the planet tipped right side up. The second pole shift was faster than the first and it was far more violent. The movement of the planet’s crust was completed in less than one hour.
When the distance between the siblings grew far enough apart, the electromagnetic energy connection snapped across to the Dark Star. For a while, the solar system’s light generating engine faltered. Sunspots grew huge and joined together to darken the entire sphere. It was as if the Sun had thrown a dark veil over itself as it mourned its departed sibling.
If not for the last of the firestorms on the planet’s surface and a new bright red light hanging low on the horizon, Earth would have endured three days of darkness. And what of the strange bright red light? Jupiter’s slow orbit had allowed the gas giant to stay close enough to the binary twin for a long enough period to receive a massive injection of electromagnetism. In just a few days, Jupiter had shrunk to a solid core. When it reached its most compact point, the former gas giant ignited like a helium-light bulb. That was how the solar system came to have its third star, and all the planets came to bask in the red glow of a Jovian sun.
Earth quickly settled into its new orbit and began to rotate again. Day followed night once more. Inside thousands of volcanoes, nitrogen produced from burning ammonium in the rock borne silicate was belched out in large quantities from the erupting vents. This was the mechanism by which the planet was able to restore its atmosphere in a very short time.
Fresh water ran through cracks and into the crevices and the surface began to green. Life ventured from wherever it had found shelter. The skies were already beginning to clear, and although much of Earth was still trapped in an ice age, the cold was not evenly spread. Warmer temperatures prevailed on many parts of the sphere, particularly at the bulge along the equator. It was in this zone that the first animals ventured from the caverns to find food. The intricacies of an ecosystem had begun to flourish once more.
The scientists who watched Earth for millennia evacuated the planet during the great catastrophic pole shifts. They observed the event from a safe distance, and when it was over they returned and were pleased to find that all the necessary conditions for life had so quickly returned to the surface.
