The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF - Mike Ashley [216]
"Everybody?" Whispering, Dian wiped at her tear. "Was everybody killed?"
"Except us." His plastic head nodded very slowly. "The robots here at the station recorded the last broadcasts. The impact made a burst of radiation that burned communications out for thousands of miles. The surface wave spread silence all around the world.
"A few pilots in high-flying aircraft tried to report what they saw, but I don't know who was left to hear. Radio and TV stations went off the air, but a few hardy souls kept on sending to the end. A cruise liner in the Indian Ocean had time to call for help. We picked up a reporter's video of the shattering Taj Mahal, the way he saw it by moonlight.
"An American astronomer guessed the truth. We caught a White House spokesman trying to deny it. Just a sudden solar flare, he said, with no verified reports. His voice was cut off before he finished. Watching from a thousand miles up, we saw the great wave rolling up out of the Atlantic. It washed all the old cities off the coast. The last words we heard came from White Sands. A drunk signal technician wishing us a Merry Christmas."
"You got here." Pepe grinned cheerfully. "But what happened to Mr Defalco?"
"There's a robot for him," Tanya said. "I saw his frozen cells in the vault."
"A tragedy." My robot-father's stiff face had no expression, but his voice was bleak. "Cal got with us to the Moon, but he died before he had the computer programmed to teach his clones, but he was the real hero. Earth had been hit so hard that our mission looked impossible, but he never gave up.
"He tried to keep us too busy to fret about anything. We unloaded the plane and stored the seed and embryos and frozen life cells in the cryonic vault. We had to get used to lunar gravity, which meant a lot of sweating in the centrifuge to keep our bodies fit. We had to clean the hydroponic gardens and get them growing again.
"Still hoping somebody or something had survived, Cal spent most of the nights up here at the telescopes. Earth was then a huge white pearl, dazzling with sunlight but mottled with volcanic explosions. He never saw the surface.
"The second year, he decided to go back-"
"Back to that?" Arne was startled. "Was he crazy?"
"That's what we told him. We'd seen no sign of life - nothing at all through those glaring clouds - but he kept imagining isolated survivors somehow hanging on. If anybody was there, he wanted to help.
"Three of us went down. Pepe at the controls. Cal with his search gear. I kept a video narrative. Flying low enough to look, all we saw was death. The impact had burned cities and forests and grasslands.
The polar ice had thawed. Lowlands were flooded, coastlines changed. We found the land like you see it now, black and barren pouring red mud into the oceans. No spark of green anywhere.
"Hoping for anything alive in the oceans, Cal had Pepe bring us down on the shore of a new sea that ran far into the Amazon valley. I got a whiff of the air when we opened the lock. It had a burnt-sulfur stink and set us all to coughing. In spite of it, Cal was determined to get samples of mud and water to test for microscopic life.
"We had no proper gear but he tried to improvise, with a plastic bag around his head and an oxygen bottle with a tube to his mouth. We watched from the plane. A dismal view. Jagged slopes of dead black lava from a cone north of us. No sun anywhere. A towering storm rising in the west, alive with lightning.
"Cal had a radio. I tried to copy what he said, but the plastic made him hard to hear. He tramped down to the water, stooping to pick up rocks and drop them in his sample bucket. 'Nothing green,' I heard him say. 'Nothing moving.' He looked at the smoking volcano behind him and the blood-colored sea ahead. 'Nothing anywhere.'
"Pepe was begging him to come back, but