Xeelee Vengeance by Baxter Stephen

Author:Baxter, Stephen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473217201
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2017-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

‘I must – it was so fast – I must record my impressions. And the sequence, much of it too fast to follow with the naked eye, as unscrambled by my instruments.

‘I’ve seen meteors fall. Every Martian has. Small objects often reach the ground, on Mars; the thin air is a poor shield compared to Earth’s. They flash, detonate, rupture; they are generally friable, fragile lumps of rock or ice, and suffer catastrophic damage themselves before reaching the ground.

‘Not this time. Not this time. I think of the cohesion of the diamond core of it – I saw it myself, remember, in the Cache – and then there is the unknown protection yielded by its hull plate coat.

‘It screamed through the air, coming down almost directly towards me. I saw the glowing plasma of the tortured atmosphere, and my instruments tell me that the object itself was unharmed. Intact, all the way to the ground.

‘It came down – that flash—

‘Where Lockyerville was, and that wretched city was right underneath the impactor, I saw a point of unbearable brightness. I still have spots before my vision. On the ground, those close in must have died instantly, those further out blinded.

‘Then a moment of what looked like an upward hail – molten, red-hot rock droplets, I imagine, washing back up the tunnel of vacuum left by the passage of the Probe. Molten rock, and perhaps superheated vapour. Mars’s permafrost layer flashed to steam.

‘Then, a pulse of heat crossed Lockyerville. It was a wave of compressed, superheated air, washing out from the impact site. I saw detonations among the domes and shelters of the town: anything, I suppose, that contained oxygen to feed fire exploded and flashed into fragments. The very surface of the glass roads melted.

‘Then a tremendous ripple of energy washed out through the ground, at supersonic speeds, a circular shock wave travelling out through the landscape itself, tracking the air shock. I could see it. It overwhelmed the material strength of the rock itself, pulverised the upper ground, shattered bedrock. This wave travelled kilometres before stalling, with a great mound of overturned strata heaping up to form the rim of a new crater. And I saw a kind of rebound too, a reflected wave that smashed back to the centre, the point of impact, to throw up a rough-edged mountain there. Thus, a new crater.

‘All these events happened in mere seconds, you understand. The mechanism is well understood. At the point of impact, the tremendous kinetic energy of the Probe had hammered down on the bedrock beneath, compressing, vaporising it. That caused a tremendous subsurface rebound: a secondary explosion.

‘But even after this monstrous beginning, even as rock fragments begin to hail back down to the ground, a wave of destruction washes out from the epicentre through the atmosphere: a great circular storm already kilometres across, of wind and heat and red Martian dust, driven by the impact heat, an obliterating wave travelling at the speed of sound. It will be spectacular when this reaches the arcologies at the rim of Hellas.

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