Endworlds - Nicholas Read [54]
GREEN EYES snapping open, Queen Fae’Elayan willed the glass to form again, and the howling of the wind instantly fell.
Returned to the silence of her private chamber, she dabbed at the eyes and cheek of the grim mask she now wore, a single teardrop perched on her fingertip, then thoughtfully rubbed between finger and thumb.
How rarely she recalled her mortality anymore. But this morning she indulged the reverie, allowing her life to play as echoes of worlds past. Those gathered in the adjoining room would wait.
IT HAD BEEN a battered superyacht on counter-balanced nacelles that hauled her from the sea two days after the Deluge, near death from exposure and starvation. One retired medic was among the ship’s surviving passengers—one healer among hundreds!—and he had told the recovering Elayan Palatino of the changes in the world while he applied splints and straps to her limbs.
As best the crew could account for by monitoring the now fading transmissions on the Urimet, Earth had been attacked by its neighboring moon of Tiamet for reasons unknown.
Attacked! It was unthinkable.
They had gathered incomplete footage of King Anu’s visit to the breakaway mining colony just days earlier, an envoy to broker a return to central governance. Greeted with garlands and fanfare, it had been on all the channels. Anu, first king, still reigning king, great Anu who had walked with the Builders in the beginning, was attending Earth’s neighbor in the spirit of fellowship.
Come back to the fold. Let us press outward together, not apart. We are of one race, one purpose.
Fast forward to his address in the glass-domed Tiametian Parliament, where at the very podium he was wrestled most unceremoniously to the ground, his holy Scepter of Rule seized unworthily by jeering guards and handed to Premier Enlil, the snake!
He who had merely been Administrator Enlil months earlier, now a master of treason claiming the very throne for himself? Surely he knew this was political suicide! No, not suicide. As it turned out, Enlil had darker motives—genocide!
Earth had no need of planetary defenses. Commerce and exploration had taken mankind to its neighbor-moons, and all nations were united, until Tiamet had seceded. There was no way anyone could anticipate that Enlil would place a collection of slow churning drill rigs into orbit and point them back towards Earth. Not expecting them, none saw them coming.
They fell from vacuum into the High Sea, sonic lances piercing the hydrosphere and explosives blowing holes through anterior and interior membranes sufficient to vent some atmosphere into space. What the vacuum didn’t bleed out, gravity pulled to the surface below.
One mile thick, the hydrosphere had been the outermost layer of the atmosphere, and was the most essential to life on an inhabited planet this far from the central sun. The hydrosphere filtered out the constant barrage of cosmic rays and background radiation; it cushioned and absorbed stray meteorites not sucked into the greater gravity well of the nearby gas giant that milled worlds in this system; and even more importantly it served as a heavenly prism that magnified light and heat from the distant yellow star, making the planet green and tropical.
All this was washed away, quite literally, when the hydrosphere broke. Water fell, not in gusting pellets, but in mountain-sized slabs. Within moments, the great capital of Rabis was swept away. The vibrant metropolis of Akædïn fell into the sea. The ocean paradise of Lameç drowned in mud as the earth swallowed it in liquefaction. Urgent faces filled Urimet screens in every Fae’er city, first calling for calm, then screaming for help.
Help that never came as the world drowned.
Elayan learned the superyacht had been skating on the ocean surface one second, then tumbling under half a mile of water the next. The thousands of revelers on deck imploded with the immense pressure that