All-Patron Reward: Early Draft of Castaway Peril, Chapters 54-55

As we may recall, this little sequence of posts showcases how Castaway Peril (later relaaed as Castaway Resolution) could have gone in a somewhat different direction. In very broad strokes they were no different -- the castaways discover there's a huge meteor on the way,  it hits at the same time as the rescue mission arrives in-system, and after some trials and tribulations the castaways do end up rescued. 

But the details were very different, because modeling the effects of such an immense impact on a planet very unlike Earth (Lincoln's oceans being many tens of miles deep)  turned out to be nontrivial and I ended up with several different concepts of how it would all work out. 

These chapters show the events of one of those different models. Here we come to the end of those chapters, because it was at this point it became clear that I couldn't keep some of the particular effects in place. 

I kind of regret it, as some of the events were pretty cool, but in hard SF you have to subordinate "cool" to "accurate" at least some of the time. :)

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Chapter 54.

Susan stared speechless at the screen; the rest of the bridge crew of Sherlock were likewise frozen, unable to tear their gazes from the view of Lincoln below.

A blazing sphere of fire was rising from a holeblasted in the very ocean itself, rising with an apparent grace and grandeur that belied the speed and violence of the event. Clouds had been dispelled for hundreds of kilometers about the impact site, wiped away by the pressure and thermal pulse; a skirt of fire streaks surrounded the base of the column of flame below. It was, indeed, more than mere fire, for still it burned as it reached altitudes where oxygen was no more, burned with the brilliance of a savage and dying sun.

"Tell me we're recording this," she said finally.

The words seemed to break the malign spell of Armageddon. "Um… yes, Lieutenant, all cameras, all sensor suites recording since before the impact," Tip said after a moment. "EMP from the impact was significant but will die down shortly; probably not significant at the distance our castaways are at."

"Waves?"

Tip paused a moment. Then they spoke in a hushed tone. "Big. Can't even guess at this point. They'll get smaller as they move out from the center but right now… tens of kilometers or more."

"Tip, do we have any software to give us any kind of idea as to what to expect in the moderate run? We know about tsunamis, air blast, debris, but what about the weather?"

Tip glanced at Ayrton. "Captain? Computations may be highly demanding."

"Give her anything she wants, Tip. Turns out she was right; this is her show now."

Tip grinned. "Good! I have a detailed impact aftermath model, in fact – although I admit it's focused on smaller impacts, the kind more likely to be encountered. Still, it should scale up fairly well. What do you need to know, Lieutenant Fisher?"

"Specifically? I need to know when we can pick up the castaways. Obviously we have to wait at least a couple of hours because of the airblast, but what about weather?"

"I'll get right on it. Without even looking it will be… horrid, to say the least."

"Get me details as soon as you can. Captain, I'm going down to help supervise preparations for the rescue shuttle."

 "Very good, Lieu—"

A sharp ping echoed through the bridge, and everyone stiffened.

"Multiple high-speed fragments!" Pavla Amberdon called out tensely.

Jesus, Susan thought, appalled. It's ejected stuff this far? What's it going to be like down there on the surface?

She forced herself to continue down to the launch bay. Despite some very tense moments, Sherlock came through the hail of fragments essentially unscathed; the one impact had just been enough to frighten, not damage.

Prepping the rescue shuttle took time. They were, naturally, not normally carried fully fuelled – too much chance for leakage of reaction mass, and rocket fuel was even touchier. In the normal way of things they'd have taken several days to prep the vehicle – but Susan was pretty sure they didn't have a few days.

Tip confirmed that an hour or so later. "Once the airblast passes, the storms are really going to get started, Lieutenant," they said, with a combination of grimness and glee that Susan found uncomfortably easy to understand; after all, no one else in human history had ever had this chance to observe a great impact.

"How bad? And how much of a window will we have to get down and up safely?"

"How bad? Lieutenant, we're talking hurricanes and tornadoes that make Category Fives look like breezes. Possibly trans-sonic wind speeds, rain measured in multiple decimeters per hour, lightning, hail the size of… I dunno, basketballs, anything you can think of. Temperature's going to go crazy for a while. I think the ultimate outcome's going to make it colder, but there's a lot of heat coming from that impact that's going to drive insane weather patterns." Tip took a breath. "As for a window… you've got to get down there and back up fast. I'd get ready so you can launch before the air blast hits, if you can. You'll have maybe an hour, three or four at the outside, before things get really, really bad, but by the time thirty minutes pass, it'll already be turning into a major storm."

Susan muttered a curse, glancing at the time in her omni. "That leaves me about an hour or less. The tsunami must be close to hitting."

"Yes. We spotted Emerald Maui on the surface nearby." Tip's voice was tense.

"What's wrong, Tip?"

"We… have a measurement on the tsunami. Eight hundred meters, moving at about one point four kilometers per second."

Susan froze in the midst of locking a cargo net down. That wasn't a wave; it was a cosmic-sized steamroller. "Keep an eye on them."

"Yes, Lieutenant."

"You heard Tip, everyone – doubletime! I want to be ready to launch in forty minutes!"

A few minutes later, Ayrton spoke. "Lieutenant… I'm not sure if there's anyone left."

She twitched but kept going; no one else stopped. "Why, sir?"

"We just saw Emerald Maui do… a truly unbelievable maneuver, but it was caught by the wave and disappeared; the clouds don't allow us to see perfectly, but…"

"I will continue preparations and be ready to launch. If our friends did survive, the threats they face aren't changing theirtimetable."

"Understood."

She looked at the time: airblast arrival in about one hour. "Move it, people!"

There were so many things to check – and many of them just could not be skipped; a rescue mission that cut too many corners on prep would soon be the subject of its own ironic rescue. And in this case, there'd be no chance of rescue. Winches had to be tested, medical nano station run through diagnostic and self-test, load balancing…

Her omni crackled, and a distorted voice spoke. "Sherlock, come in, Sherlock, this is Emerald Maui, still barely alive."

She grinned broadly. "Thank God for that, Emerald Maui. Is everyone all right?"

"Everyone but Whips," Laura said; even through the distortion her pain was evident. "He was… outside when the wave arrived."

"My God."

"That's not like one of us being out there!" a younger voice said fiercely. "He's still alive."

"Saki, I hope you're right, but… he's going to have to find us, or at least get in touch soon. Lieutenant, do you have an ETA for us?"

"I'm going to be launching pretty shortly. I hope to be getting into your vicinity within a few minutes after the airblast has gone by. We won't have much time after that before the weather becomes intolerable."

The others were silent for a moment, and Susan knew what they were thinking. They would have to leave before the disastrous weather really closed in.

Even if Harratrer was still out there, in the meteor-shattered seas of Lincoln.

Chapter 55.

Whips plunged below the surface as the waves raced towards him, diving fast to get below the level that surface turbulence might catch him, jetting as fast as he possibly could. Seconds left maybe, but no more, that thing is coming at Mach speeds. Still he dove, unsure how far down he had to go to be safe.

The light from above dwindled with terrifying speed, and as it did Whips felt pressure mounting as though he were not merely diving, but being dragged into the depths.

But this was his element. Staying on the surface would have been insane. And he could adjust to the pressure – this was still nothing compared to the time he'd spent on Europa itself, or exploring some of Earth's deepest waters with his parents.

Whips locked down his tympani as best he could, because the wave carried with it a ROAR, a blast of sound that was cataclysmic. He couldn't imagine what it and the pressure would have done to Emerald Maui.

Thinking the name brought back his fear. I'm going to survive this… but what about them? Could they survive the wave? Am I already… alone?

He twined his arms together in denial. No. Somehow they'd survive it – they had to. There was no way they could have come so far, survived so much, to die now. Sakura was alive. They'd find each other again. There was absolutely no other possible outcome.

Suddenly the pressure began falling away. The wave's passed me. Probably be a couple more, but I'll be able to surface soon.

Within the chaotic masses of water, Whips was beginning to distinguish other shapes, and he shifted his color scheme to match the darkness and light surrounding him. Oh, there were predators that would hunt with other means, but making himself hard to spot was the first step.

Now that the main waves had passed, the next order of business was to get to the surface, and hope his omni had survived. It was a special Bemmie model, specifically made for their species, which meant it was intended to survive great depths… but this was a unique situation.

Whips battled his way upward now, finding the sea uncertain, disturbed, in motion; eddies and upwellings and down currents yanked at him, shoved him sideways, moved him up and down, but he fought hard to keep the line, to keep the dim light slowly brightening above. At last, after minutes, he broke the surface. In the distance he could see the horizon sinking back to its normal configuration, leaving behind a sea surging with patterns of flow and motion Whips had never seen.

A pair of creatures like Finny zipped towards him, circled him uncertainly. He spun in place, watching them; as they sidled closer, Whips let out a loud warning bellow, preparing to ramp it up to injurious levels if they persisted.

The really loud noise, however, seemed to have been sufficient; the two streaked off and, after a few minutes, seemed to have no inclination to return. Possibly that also had to do with the motion beneath, that Whips realized with a shudder belonged to an island-eater.

Still, monsters that size would never notice him. Whips lifted his top arm out of the water, letting the omni have a clear line-of-sight with no water interfering.

A shimmer, and suddenly his retinals showed his standard omni panel. "Yes! It's working!"

The GPS came up and showed his location, not much different from where he'd started. "Emerald Maui, come in. Emerald Maui, this is Whips."

He couldn't help but occasionally glance back in the direction of the impact. He knew the airblast wouldn't be here for about an hour, but still…

There was no answer, and now Whips was starting to get worried. But... "Sherlock, this is Whips – Harratrer of Tallenal Pod – do you copy?"

There was no answer there either, and while it was theoretically possible that some freak fragment from the impact could have hit Sherlock and disabled her, Whips didn't believe it for a minute. Which meant… "Omni, full diagnostic, comm system."

A moment later the diagnostic came up, and sure enough, there it was: the transciever was completely down. The GPS was receiving, but the main comm component was nonfunctional, at least for now. He set the omni to attempt self-repair at highest priority.

The question now was where he should go. Thanks to the GPS he wasn't lost, but he couldn't communicate with Emerald Maui or Sherlock to find out where the others were. They could be just a kilometer or so away – in this mess of a sea, he'd never spot them farther than that – or a lot farther, depending on what had happened when the waves hit.

Wait. At the end Saki had turned the rear of the ship towards the wave. With the likely compressed air shock around the wave, that makes no sense at all – Emerald Maui could take that kind of thing a lot better head-on. So why…

He froze. No. That would have been insane.

But at the same time… it wasn't insane at all. It was Sakura's way. Exactly her way, to try something crazy because the sane options were all gone.

"Okay, let's say she did. She'd be trying to run in front of the wave. She couldn't keep that up for long, though." Or he had to hope not; if Emerald Maui was really somehow riding the great wave, they were completely out f his reach and getting farther away at almost one and a half kilometers per second. "They'd have ended up going exactly in the direction of the wave – that's how the push would have worked."

Which meant that that was the only direction that made sense.

Whips began jetting as fast as he could, pausing only rarely to watch for predators. Less than an hour now before the airblast… and Sherlock isn't going to hang around waiting. Whips didn’t fully understand the models Mel had been using, but he believed the results; Mel was awfully good at that kind of thing. And the results made one thing clear:

I better find them fast – because they can't wait for me!