Endworlds - Nicholas Read [55]
Designed for shallow diving as well as surface skipping, the ship boasted systems to travel under the waves, but not at such depth.
It was all Quall Gilgam could do to maintain a power-assisted ascent as one baffle after another blew, each implosion slowing the ship as it limped ever slower towards salvation. A credit to the qualler profession, the sea lynx broke surface against all odds, and opened all decks to oxygen with minutes remaining in the masks that had been donned when main air gave out. Bilging began in earnest, the water coughing out in sprays ruddy with oil and blood.
But being on the surface held its own dangers. The water canopy had not fallen uniformly, causing thick columns and sheets of water to crash erratically into the rising sea. Bursting from each cascade, tidal rings sped outwards, ring joining ring to form super swells that sped around the planet’s surface. It had been only a few hours after Elayen was rescued that the ship pitched again.
Quall Gilgam and his crew wrestled doom by turning the ship’s aft into oncoming surges, or risked diving through the waves too treacherous to surf. Of the six thousand aboard, two hundred and four survived. They outlived the qualler and those in his bridge by the time the tides calmed.
The epic tale of Gilgam and his sailors was passed down in oral tradition long after the heaven and earth it occurred on had passed away.
Queen Fae’Elayen flexed her toes now, recalling the time her legs would not respond, when the kindly old medic had found her a repulsor chair in the wreckage of the yacht. It listed to the left but she was far from being choosy. Days passed and support crew placed the ship under control. The Urimet, a constant source of news and other programming, was eerily silent.
Earth turned cold, by night a startling new canvass of black pierced by winking eyes, and by day the great orange orb, the black shadow of Tiamet playing across its bands low on the distant horizon.
With communications down, none could know what events transpired on Tiamet, nor what fate befell King Anu’s convoy. It was therefore without fanfare or explanation that one morning as some gazed to the sky, treacherous Tiamet was seen to change.
Silently the perfect orb became oval, then slid outward into a ribbon of powder as though a knot of laces had been pulled undone. Then it was no more. It had only taken seconds, and the people blinked, uncertain what they had witnessed in the heavens.
Debate was rife hours later, when watchers raised the alarm that the fine talcum suspended above had changed. Elayen Palatino navigated her floating seat up winding stairwells to the deck, wrapped in a blanket against the chill, and with a hundred others saw tiny grains in the sky, almost imperceptible against the bands behind them. Then the planet rotated away as night fell.
By next morning’s light the grains had turned to small pebbles. Then another night was spent turned away from the spectacle, anticipation high as to what the dawn would show next, dread rising as fast as curiosity. Realization dawned with the light, as pebbles were now uneven stones, visibly tumbling Earthward.
The yacht had been in darkness when the first shards struck the other side of the planet. First came the wind, then a distant thunder, and finally the quaking of waves as the sky filled with cloudy plumes of fire as rock scraped across the fragile gas atmosphere.
With the dawn their position rotated inexorably toward the incoming hail of molten rock. They saw it coming at them from the horizon, pelting the sea with rapid staccato fire that joined surface to the sea floor in milliseconds.
On every strike, water collapsed into the superheated passages and vented a million exploding jets into the morning air. The ocean shook from below as smoky fingers snatched down from above.
If the meteors were Tiamet’s shattered fingers reaching after them from the grave, next came