The sunset was greeted with another aftershock. This one was milder than most, barely causing the piles that used to be buildings to shift and rattle. The shelter was rigged from blankets and tarps, far too small for the dozens of injured that lay around it.

A couple of firefighters, a nurse and an EMT staffed this shelter. Staffed isn’t the right word. They had found their way to this bit of open ground, and cobbled together the shelter as the injured began to arrive.

Everyone knew that there had been a quake. No one knew much else. Rumors abounded. California had fallen in to the ocean. The Chinese had nuked St. Louis. Terrorists, no, Mexicans, no, the wrath of a vengeful God.

Some supplies had been scrounged up, and the uninjured were put to work gathering more. It would be a cold night, and no one had yet seen any sign of police or rescue workers. One of the piles of rubble must have had a fur store in it since several volunteers had returned with armfuls of mink and ermine coats. The staff tried to ignore the pockets bulging with jewelry as they put the warm coats to good use.

A couple of old men, vets of the Vietnam War, they claimed, were setting up a latrine arrangement and some teen aged girls were using a table that they had found to put out a buffet of the food that was available.

The babies didn’t cry at the aftershocks any more. There had been so many, some almost as bad as the original quake. The little ones were all cried out and the toddlers just sat with a hollow stare in someone’s arms.

The sky was full of smoke and dust. All the fires locally had burned themselves out but several tall columns of smoke could be seen in the distance, out by the airport and the industrial park. A dog would bark in the distance, and others would howl a response.

They were getting hungry.

My generation lived in a fantasy world. We had all suffered through one day, The DAY, and had worked very hard to see that there would never be another day like it. September 11, 2001. We went on our merry way after the DAY, making war, finding peace, tearing down and rebuilding. All the while secure in the knowledge that there could never, would never be another DAY. There just couldn’t be. It would be too unbearable.

March 4, 2009

The elections were over. We still had troops fighting the War on Terror. The economy was up, or down, or normal depending on who you listened to.

9:42 a.m., CST.

Our world ended with a bang, not a whimper.

From Indianapolis to Little Rock and beyond, the ground began to shake. Then roll, then open and close. The roar was unlike anything ever heard and it went on for what seemed hours but was two minutes and 17 seconds.

Earthquake Details

The shock wave raced out from the epicenter, reacting with each type of rock or soil it found. The Mississippi River leapt sideways, to the west north of the epicenter and to the east on the southern side of the shock. All along the river, every community built on the bluffs died. Entire towns built on the sediment laid down by the river over a million years shook, and swayed and sank as if they had been built on quicksand. Tens of thousands died during the shock itself and in the moments after.

The worst was yet to come.

Every bridge crossing the Mississippi, the Missouri and the Ohio within a four hundred mile radius went down. Every pipeline, fiber cable, electric line, everything solid that crossed the rivers whether buried or not snapped. The power grid for the entire United States west of the Rockies other than Texas failed. Buildings were damaged as far away as Boston and Charleston, South Carolina. The quake was felt in Montreal and Houston.

Since the odds were long that a bad thing would happen, I was not worried. Well, no more than usual. I snuck a couple of additional air bottles and some combat rats onboard, finding places behind the wall plates that were empty enough to hold them. I also added some computing power, borrowing an officer’s battle comp from a boarding suit. That, I felt safe on, since no one had ever, ever boarded an enemy ship.

At least I could play Solitaire while I waited for the stations call to terminate.

Until the entire ship shuddered, and twisted. Now, I can definitively state as an Academy cadet and a career Space Marine that ships in space do NOT twist. This one did, and it was immediately followed by the loudest “bang” I had ever heard and a gee force of many gees shoved me sideways. Um… ow!

Zero gee made every bit of dust, debris and our friends flotsam and jetsam leap into the air making it difficult for me to seal my helmet. Yeah, I know, it was supposed to be sealed. What are you gonna do, toss me off the ship? Oops, happened already.

After I completed the helmet drill, I began to curse. I began with the crude, worked my way through the sexual and well up into the profane and blasphemous. I had begun on all of the curse words in all the wide variety of languages I had ever heard when it occurred to me to see if I could access the sensor logs.

What sensor logs? In fact, what memory storage? The jacks were all dead to the suit comp and to the officer’s comp. Odd.

Ever try to turn a screw in zero gee? OK, ever try to turn one that turns out to just be a screw head welded onto a face plate? I discovered that there was no access to those parts of the beacon that supposedly contained all the final memories of my ship. Now, being the trusting souls that I was, I had taken the plans and schematics that I had seen at face value. I truly believed that all the little pieces parts were where the prints said that they would be.

The Marine in me laughed out loud. “Embrace the suck.”

After several moments of contemplation and deep thought, I began to wonder if the beacon even had a signaling device. Not having anything else to do, I began the orderly removal of every screw I could see. I collected a variety of sheet metal, dials and knob not connected to anything, a Playboy magazine dating from the ship’s construction that had been left behind by some dockyard rating, and finally a problem.

There, at my two o’clock and up high, was the largest brick of demolition plastic I had ever seen.

There are gradients of bad things. Some make you say “Oh, shit!” Some cause you to exclaim “Oh, fuck!” And, then there are those times when the shit is rolling down hill so fast you don’t have time to speak.

The sole official duty of a Space Academy cadet was to be the “buoy boy”. That’s what the Petty Officers called it when there were no officers around. Except me, of course. I wasn’t really an officer, just a hunk of meat that was in the way.

Each ship of the Terran Navy carries an Omega Beacon. The beacon is launched when the bridge crew or the ship’s onboard computer determines that the ship will not survive whatever is happening. It contains the ship’s log and as much of the final sensor readings as it is possible to copy to the beacon before launch. That way, when, if, the beacon’s signal is heard and the beacon recovered the powers that be can determine what caused the horrid fate of the ship that launched it.

Since the beacon was a manmade body, and had small maneuvering thrusters, the brass had long ago determined that those qualities made it a space vessel. All space vessels had to have a captain, and all captains had to be officers.

No officer worth his salt wants to be ejected from a fighting ship in the middle of a battle. Thus the position of “buoy boy” fell onto the broad and manly shoulders of the most junior officer. Um… that would be me, in this case.

The drill was that on call to stations, I was to run to the beacon hatch, seat myself in the beacon and seal the hatch behind me. My clue that things had gone awry would be the violent acceleration of the beacon.

Our captain was thorough. We held a call to stations at least once a week, usually at meal time or in the middle of the sleep period. Or, so it seemed. After a dismal showing the first few times, I took a moment to scope out the ship’s plans and discovered that I could access any number of zero gee utilities tubes and that I could get to my station far more rapidly that way. All I had to do was not be seen opening the hatch that said “No Access” or be seen coming out of the one closest to the beacon.

I had also donated a night of sleep to a long and detailed examination of the beacon and the publicly available plans for the beacon. My job would be to flip the switch that scrubbed memory storage if the beacon was picked up by anybody but the Navy. Flip two covers up and flip two switches. I could also maneuver the beacon slightly if I somehow magically discovered that a piece of debris was about to hit us. You see, there were no sensors, no radio other than the beacon’s signal, and limited rations and air.

Whenever I did something unbelievably stupid, as young men often do, my dad would ask me “Did you take a stupid pill this morning, son?”

When I was discharged, after eighteen years in the Terran Marines, to accept an appointment to the Space Academy, I heard his voice. Two years from retirement and I bailed.

I was giving up a career to join a bunch of snotty nosed youngsters being tormented by older snotty nosed youngsters, all in the hopes of becoming one of those officers I had always looked down on.

Yep. That’s me, all right.

I did it for several reasons, mostly involving my future. The regs, beloved by all garrison lawyers, contain a curious provision. A Marine with at least fifteen years of service who is accepted into the Academy carries his longevity with him. In other words, I would reach my twenty as a wet behind the ears Kay-det.

It meant a number of other things, as well. My pay would be based on my years of service as well as my rank, so I would be making, on graduation, far more than any of my fellow, newly commissioned second lieutenants. As an officer, upon retirement, I would be entitled to free transportation anywhere in Terran space for life, and the Navy would pay my landing fees should I emigrate to a colony planet.

Oh, yeah, the way things were going in the war with the Bluecoats, an enlisted Marine could get himself killed. Naval officers died in combat far less often. It’s my skin and I’ve grown fond of it.

Planet bound military academies in the old days were four year programs. The cadets had their summers for drill and training. The Naval Academy was a five year program, with the entire third year spent on a training cruise in space. Take a wild guess as to who was low man on the totem pole on these cruises.

I was in good shape, and had lots of zero gee experience, so I wasn’t as exhausted by the run everywhere and always be late cruise routine. Book work came easy, so I managed to keep up with the constant assignment of manuals, and schematics, and inventories by hand that also went with the cruise.

I even found time to teach some friendly engine room ratings the probabilities of poker.

I was up several hundred dollars for the cruise when bad things happened.