Red Lightning (4 page)

Matt pulled up a few more windows, including some I had never seen. There was a public feed from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and a false-color image from the United States National Weather Service. That one looked interesting, but I didn't know how to interpret it. There was something happening at what I was thinking of as the impact point, something with a lot of reds and yellows, and I thought I could almost see it expanding as I watched. I checked the count clock that had started when the urgent bulletin came in. We'd been watching for eight minutes, and the event had happened no more than five minutes before that. The visible-light image was just white in the impact area, a lozenge of what looked like a puffy white cloud that was growing. Unseen producers were running recordings backward and forward at high speed, and they all showed the same thing. The streak would appear instantaneously, fully formed, and then the white area would expand until it froze in real time. Big as that area was, we couldn't see it growing in the live feeds.

All the windows were showing the same view, but from widely different angles. From a satellite over the North Pole it was possible to see that the streak seemed to graze the Earth's atmosphere, maybe dip into the ocean.

Wait a minute, I thought.

"Wait a minute," I said, before the thought was fully formed in my mind. Several heads turned in my direction.

"Maybe I had it backwards," I said, and wondered why I'd said it. Then I had it.

"I think that streak is moving
away
from the Earth. I think it hit on a tangent, right there above the ocean, and... sort of... skipped?'

"Like chucking stones over water?" Matt asked. I could hear he wasn't buying it. "You know how fast it had to be traveling to –"

"Well, it had to be going fast?" I said. "To just
appear
like that."

"I make it the speed of light?" somebody said. "Or close enough as not to make much difference."

"How do you figure?"

"The distance covered, that we can see from some of these views, is about a quarter of a million miles, and I can't see which direction it came from. That means some small fraction of a second. It takes light –"

"Look, look!" somebody else shouted. "The JPL screen!"

That window was showing a slowed-down rerun from some distant satellite with a high-shutter-speed camera. Frame by frame, we could see the streak form. It definitely began on the ocean and shot off to the northeast very quickly, even slowed down as it was. Down at the bottom of the window was a clock counting off hundred-thousandths of a second, and a computer-generated computation of speed: .999
c
. C, in case they didn't teach any physics in your school, is the speed of light in a vacuum: 186,000 miles per second.

Nobody had anything to say when that figure came up.

I began to realize this was going to be one of those
Where were you?
moments.
Where were you
when you heard about New Delhi and Islamabad? For my parents, it was
Where were you
on September 11, 2001? For Grandma it was John Kennedy's assassination, and before that it was Pearl Harbor. This was going to be that bad. I didn't quite know how or why yet, but I felt it.

A few seconds later most of the screen cleared for a moment, and then somebody appeared, same shot, in all of them. It was a black woman – short, judging from the shoulders on either side of her – and she looked out of breath, like she'd run all the way to the cameras. The crawl at the bottom of the windows identified her as the Honorable Shirley Tsange, acting director of UNGWS. I ticked the acronym and was told it stood for United Nations Global Warning System. There was a lot of shouting from reporters off-screen, flashes going off, the usual turmoil of the press pack.

She started speaking without preamble, raising her voice almost to a shout until she got some quiet. She was reading from a prepared statement.

"At 1836 Greenwich Mean Time, a high-speed object of unknown origin impacted the North Atlantic Ocean at approximately sixty-seven degrees west longitude and twenty-four degrees north latitude. The global early-warning system had no indication at all of this object prior to impact, but the impact itself triggered numerous automatic systems that have been monitoring and extrapolating possible effects of the impact since that time. Ten minutes ago the data became alarming enough that I, acting for the director of the UNGWS, issued a tsunami alarm, which went out immediately. The following countries are expected to be immediately affected, in order of their proximity to the impact:

The Bahama Islands, Puerto Rico and the British and American Virgin Islands.

Anguilla, St. Martin, St. Barts... in fact the entire chain of the Leeward and Windward Islands." I winced, recalling that just a few moments ago I was thinking of those places as "flyspecks." That's what they are, on the map, but those flyspecks were inhabited by human beings.

"The Dominican Republic. Haiti. The Turks and Caicos Islands. The eastern provinces of Cuba.

But first..." She paused, and put down the paper she was reading from. "Sorry, I should have skipped right to this part, things have been happening very fast, and the warning is already out, automatically, so..." She paused, took a deep breath, and we could all see just how shaken she really was.

"First, the residents of the Bahamas are in the worst danger. The highest waves seem to be propagating in their direction. We offer the following advice:

First, if you are able, get to high ground. The initial wave is in the eighty-to-one-hundred-foot range, possibly larger. We can't see much because of the atmospheric storm forming over the impact site. You need to get higher than one hundred feet above sea level, the higher the better, as the wave will have considerable inertia. We realize that the Bahamas are low-lying islands, and high ground may not be an option. Failing that, get to the highest floors of a reinforced-concrete building. Experience in the Indian Ocean has shown that these structures are quite likely to survive.

Do it
now
! The sirens are sounding. Do not delay. If you are in a vehicle, I understand the roads are already clogged. Abandon your vehicle and look for the sturdiest structure in your vicinity. Estimated time of arrival of the first wave is twenty minutes for San Salvador Island, Cat Island, and Eleuthera, shortly thereafter for the eastern regions of Grand Bahama Island.

Once in a safe location,
stay there
. There may be more than one wave, as there have been in past tsunamis.

The first sign of the wave's approach will be a rapid recession of the ocean. Observers describe it as a 'sucking away.' Much of the seafloor may be exposed. Then the wave will arrive, and eventually begin to recede, but
do not return
to flooded areas until you hear the all clear from the local authorities."

One of the taller men standing beside her leaned over to whisper in her ear. She looked harried, nodded, and went on.

"Right... ah, as a precautionary measure, we are recommending the immediate evacuation of coastal areas and river estuaries from... from the Florida Keys to New York City and Long Island. Please get away from the ocean at once, and seek high ground or the highest shelter you can find."

My heart seemed to stop for a moment. I looked at Elizabeth, and she was looking right at me, and at that moment I could read her mind.

High Ground? In Florida?

"Grandma!" we shouted at the same time, and turned and began to run.

The planet Earth probably has ten video cameras for every inhabitant. They cover virtually every area where people live, street by street, block by block.

Okay, that's an exaggeration. There are still villages and towns and maybe even a few cities in Asia and Africa where there's no monitoring cameras. But where this tsunami was expected to hit, coverage was virtually total.

What I was doing as I ran, and I assume Elizabeth was doing the same thing, was calling up beachcams in the Daytona area. Fixed views, pan-and-scan, caller-operated, you name it.

It was hard. The traffic must have been enormous, the servers were being overloaded. Time and again as I tried to tick on the next one down the beach, hit-or-miss, I'd get "Unable to complete connection. Please try again later."

I had the code number of one of the beachcams on top of the Blast-Off Motel somewhere in memory, but I was hurrying too fast to find it and work the stereo at the same time, so I had just entered DAYTONA BEACH and started ticking through the available cams. I got a view of the ocean from, I thought, about a half mile south of the motel. There was nothing to see but beautiful blue sky and shining sea and glistening white sand. It was late on a February evening, peak tourist season... and no one was on the beach. There were plenty of towels and umbrellas and coolers. Then I saw a few tiny figures here and there, and they were all running. One couple was loaded down with beach gear, stumbling along in dry sand. What, were they trying to save a ten-dollar umbrella and a two-dollar cooler when doom was approaching, just over the horizon? A few others seemed to be frantically searching for other people. My breath caught in my throat when I saw a child, five or six, standing alone and crying.
Oh, god, I don't want to see this
. I ticked to another cam.

We were hurrying through the lobby, dodging people standing still as statues as they watched their own personal newscasts in their personal stereospace. I'd seen it a few times before, when some big news was breaking – last time it was the incredibly important flash that Hollywood heartthrobs Brad and Bobby Gonzalez were breaking up. It's called a freeze crowd. If you aren't wearing your own stereo, or if you didn't give goose crap about the affairs of two empty-headed pretty boys, it looked like time had stopped, or that somebody had sprayed everyone with liquid nitrogen. A few others were hurrying, like us. Most likely they had relatives on the American East Coast or Caribbean islands, like us.

See, our grandmother lived in Daytona Beach.

I mean, right
on
the beach.

The Blast-Off was bigger than it had been in my dad's day, but it was still a mouse among elephants. The "Blast-Off Tower Wing" had been added to the old two-story structure the year I was born, though Grandma admitted it was a grandiose word for a building whose neighbors were twenty-five and thirty stories high.

Which would stand up to a tsunami better? I wondered. A ten-story mouse or a thirty-story elephant?

And they'd said to get up high.

How high is high?

We came tearing around the side of the front desk at a speed that normally would have earned us a chewing out even from Dad.
No Running, Jumping, or Skateboarding in the Lobby!
The signs were posted everywhere, you couldn't miss them, and right under it
Nonresidents Must Wear Helmets at all Times
! It was for Earthies, who are always hurting themselves or somebody else by something as simple as trying to turn a corner too fast without leaning over far enough. As for jumping... there's a reason why all the ceilings in the Red Thunder Hotel are padded.

We didn't wear no stinking helmets, of course. Not since we were eight. We'd have died of shame.

Actually, only one staff member noticed us at all. The rest were staring at the various news channels on the walls behind the desk. Nobody was getting checked in or out, but that was okay; nobody was trying to. The freeze crowd effect was still working for most of them.

As we barreled around the corner Elaine, a beautiful Indonesian clerk who I'd had a crush on since I was old enough to have crushes, and our best friend on the day staff, looked over at us with an expression of concern on her face. She knew where our grandmother lived. And I suddenly remembered that she was a survivor of the '04 tsunami in the Indian Ocean. She had told us about it once, I couldn't remember the circumstances. She had been three, and her whole family was wiped out. She was found in the branches of a tree, barely alive, three days later. No wonder she looked concerned.

We ran down the ramp in the narrow hallway. The Owner's Suite is in the Frank Lloyd Wright prairie style, like the rest of the Red Thunder, and if that doesn't make a lot of sense to you, you're not the only one. The decor is all wood, angular and spare, and the big room is dominated by a floor-to-ceiling wall of what looks like glass panes, angled inward at the top. It shows a nice vista of hotel row, which is a long line of whimsical towers and attached pleasure domes that reminds a lot of people of the Las Vegas Strip.

It's actually just vidpaper. We were standing about ten feet below ground level; there was nothing but concrete beyond the glass. But it fools the eye. Just as good as the view from the very expensive penthouse suites.

When we get tired of it, we switch it to some Earth scene.

Dad doesn't wear stereos. Never. He hates them, and would be a lot happier if they'd never been invented. He'd be a lot happier if no one in his family ever wore them, but he knows that's a battle he can't win. He gets even by making the desk clerks use old-fashioned screens and keyboards. "This is a first-class establishment," he says. "Our clients don't want to see a bunch of people wearing space cadet goggles." That was years ago, when stereos really did look sort of goofy. The ones me and Elizabeth and most other people wear these days are slim, formfitting, you'd hardly know them from regular wraparound bubble sunglasses except for the thicker frames and wings, and the strap that keeps them on your head. Stereos are tough, and not as expensive as they used to be, but you don't want them dropping on a hard floor too often at four hundred euros a lens.

So Dad was standing and staring at the wall opposite the "view" windows, which was also vidpaper but divisible into different electronic windows. He had a dozen of them going, his eyes darting back and forth.

Dad isn't an imposing figure, in his slightly stuffy and definitely out-of-fashion navy blue suit with the Red Thunder emblem on the chest. He's of medium height, getting a little thick around the waist, and his dark hair has receded right to the top of his head and is gray on the sides. Once we were standing side by side at a mirror so he could see how tall I'd grown (I topped out at six-foot-six, which is not tall for a Martian child – the low gravity lets us shoot up like beanstalks – and I wasn't even Mars-born; no telling how big some of those kids are going to grow), and he muttered "I used to look like Jimmy Smits. Now I look like Cheech Marin." I didn't know who either of those guys were, but I googled them and I have to say he wasn't entirely wrong.