The War of Immensities (56 page)

The population
of Los Angeles, it seemed, had generally viewed the matter one of
three ways and seemed fairly evenly divided in those classes. There
were those who took Lorna, Grayson and Thyssen at their word and
packed up and fled to the east, causing the greatest traffic jam in
history. People were spending three days or more, camped in the
gridlock, just to get into Nevada. But really, most people who
feared ‘The Big One’ had moved away from the southern California
coast years before, scared off by the Northridge, Landers and Loma
Prieta shocks.

The second
group were those had heard the warnings too many times before and
weren’t any more likely to believe it now and determined to stay
and get on with their business. The third class shared the beliefs
of the second, and then changed their minds at the last minute.
There was little chance of escape from Los Angeles for those who
left it to the final twenty-four hours—every road and track, not to
mention freeway, was solidly gridlocked, every plane had been flown
away and every boat had sailed off or else, more heartlessly, had
long since been hauled onto a trailer and driven away by the owner.
As they flew by the airport, Felicity could see huge crowds moving
amid the fires of several crashed planes, offshore were only the
navy vessels, plucking desperate souls off the beaches.

Helicopters
buzzed everywhere, as if a swarm of giant bees had invaded the
city. They were snatching people off the rooftops and out of the
open land of football fields and parks and desperately hurrying
them to the giant camps established in the Mojave Desert and the
hills above Bakersfield—anywhere at all as long as it wasn’t near
the White Wolf Fault, on which Harley had also offered grave
pronouncements. Every volcanic cone, even those extinct, from the
Salton Sea to Yosemite, could be expected to erupt and the region
around them should be avoided.

And what,
Felicity and many others had wondered, of those people safe from
fault lines and calderas but within the zone of influence and
subject to the Shastri Effect. Of this Thyssen had offered little
information. The zone could not be known with certainty, it would
be huge and probably unavoidable, and anyway, the task was to save
lives whereas the Shastri Effect was not likely to kill anyone.
That, Felicity Campbell knew, was a very dubious proposition.

Harley offered
a circle of six hundred miles diameter centred roughly on the Grand
Canyon, which took in half of Baja California, stretched into
Oregon and Idaho, east to the borders of Kansas and Oklahoma, south
to Chihuahua, and somewhere in that vast area, a region of perhaps
two hundred square miles would fall into the Zone of Influence of
the Shastri Effect. It was just simply far too great an area to
clear, or even consider seriously. Felicity wondered. She was sure
that in the past, Harley had pinpointed it closer than that.
Indeed, he had assured the pilot of the Orion that ‘if you stay
offshore, you’ll be alright.’ That placed them two hundred miles
inside the western extent of the possible affected zone—how the
hell did he know that?

But her mind
was shaken back to more immediate matters when all of the alarms in
the cluttered belly of the Orion went off and a frenzy of activity
began. It was happening, and she turned with a sickened feeling in
her belly to watch the death throes of Tinsel town. By media
outlets and scientists alike, no event in history was more
precisely nor copiously recorded, and yet for all that, it was
rather hard to say exactly what happened. For in an instant, the
entire metropolitan area was completely lost in a haze of dust.

Down in the
city, the few miraculous survivors subsequently reported that the
first effect was the rolling and jolting of the earth and then they
were blinded by a hail of dust. This was because the impact of the
earthquake caused the sedimentary soil on which the city stood to
liquefy and virtually turn into quicksand, and all around,
buildings and vehicles and people disappeared underground. Los
Angeles began to sink into the earth before it began to sink into
the sea. Then, as the masonry began to fall, there was a great roar
and geysers of water erupted out of every drain, often hurling the
grates high into the air. Vast fissures opened in every street and
steam gushed out, adding its searing horror to the pandemonium. Now
the buildings were collapsing all about with the noise with
continuous thunder. And then it stopped—the geysers, the shaking,
the thunder and everything was still for a moment.

In the Orion,
Felicity had seen the city simply vanish in a yellow dust cloud and
thought that was the end, but then it seemed that a great wind
suddenly blew the dust and smoke away, and Los Angeles, looking
decidedly jagged and uneven but still possessing its proud towers,
reappeared for an encore performance. It lasted only a moment and
then the veil of steam and dust and smoke engulfed it again, but
that magical lull was extraordinary, and from her position,
Felicity could see why. The water had drained out of Santa Monica
Bay and welled up in a giant bulge about the Channel Islands,
parallel to the coast, and now the swell turned and rushed back
toward the city. A tsunami, maybe two hundred feet high, raced up
the newly exposed beach and crashed over the docklands as if it was
tripped, cascading down upon the doomed city.

The great wave
swept away the people on the Santa Monica and San Gabriel Hills,
such was its enormity. It forked and cascaded up the San Fernando
and San Bernardino valleys, swallowing all the towns and landscape
beyond. All along the coast, the rivers, even the mighty Colorado,
flowed backwards for a while and flooded all the lowlands about
them. The wave roared northward and drowned Santa Barbara and hit
the San Raphael Mountains and to the west, it began to crash
against an indomitable cliff. Mighty jagged escarpments had
appeared, all long the horizon line and the sea struck there and
surged back, thick with mud. All of the waters over their newly
claimed land churned dark and muddy as currents and whirlpools
surged everywhere. Again and again, the greedy sea hurled itself at
the cliffs, demanding more and more land but it was to be denied.
From Palm Springs to Tejon Pass, the San Andreas fault was the
craggy new coast of California and the high ground west of that
line was distributed as islands. And only about a thousand
survivors were awash, clinging to debris as the helicopters rushed
in to begin plucking them from the water.

Perhaps the
most startling image, certainly the one the TV news people most
favoured as symbolic of the whole event, was the one that passed
under the Orion as they crossed onto the land. The great Route 5
Freeway from the north of the state, sliced through the landscape
relentlessly until it reached a point just below the town of
Gorman, where it came to an abrupt end at the edge of a sheer
precipice that dropped vertically into the surging waves of the
Pacific Ocean.

Three new long
peninsulas formed between Santa Barbara and Salinas as the sections
in between fell beneath the sea, and all along the new towering
coast, great chunks of earth and rock broke off and plunged into
the jubilant ocean, dark versions of the way icebergs fall from the
face of glaciers. San Diego, although wrecked, remained above the
waterline but now stood at the end of a peninsula that ran back as
far as the place where the Salton Sea had vanished but four small
volcanoes now erupted furiously. North of the new cape, the Gulf of
Catalina had now doubled in size, and into it the Colorado River
now flowed.

The Orion
banked across the place where Ventura used to be and flew towards
two large islands that were once Reyes Peak and Mt Pinos, and he
radioed ahead to Bakersfield airport and got no reply. This he
reported to Felicity.

“The flood
couldn’t have gone that far,” she called back. The navigator was
able to assure her she was right. The pilot could see that far
ahead himself.

“The city’s
still there. I just can’t raise anybody.”

Felicity went
forward to watch from between the two pilots as they approached the
city and then the airfield. There had been some flooding along the
Kern River, but not enough to have any major effect. Fires blazed
at several locations, but none of them were large enough to suggest
wide area damage. Three such fires were on the airfield itself, one
plane and two helicopters had crashed there.

“Oh my God,”
Felicity breathed with suddenly realisation. “I think you’ve
managed to bring me to the exact place I want to go.”

“You think
they’re all sleeping down there?” the pilot said in
astonishment.

“Yep. If you
want to talk to them, come back in eight day’s time.”

They checked
the runway and it seemed undamaged and then flew on for a while
before attempting to land, and in that time the radio operator
searched his network and by determining who he could and could not
contact, was able to draw Felicity a rough map of the Zone of
Influence. It swallowed the cities and towns from Fresno to Mojave
and the new coastline to King’s Canyon, and all of Bakersfield
along with it, and those colossal temporary camps to which those
Los Angelians who had fled along US99 had gone. There were almost
one million sleepers in the zone.

“Harley, what
have you done?” Felicity breathed as the cold reality closed about
her.

So it had come
to this. Thyssen had known it would, sooner or later, and the fact
that it was sooner impressed him. They gathered in what had become
called the control room, in the convent on San Carboni, ten days
after the destruction of California. The location of the disaster
meant other authorities got involved sooner than usual, and allowed
them time to converge here, for what he presumed was to be a
Council of War.

It was the
first time they had all been together since Melbourne—just over a
year ago which meant it was long overdue—and some things had
changed and some had not. He looked them over now, with his memory
firmly locked on the images of that gathering. Then he had been
king, the master, the boss man who knew it all and would take them
in hand and guide them through the nightmare that confronted them.
Now they were his equals, or betters, each of them as powerful as
himself, a force to be reckoned with individually, greater still in
unity. His little hotchpotch team of galactic warriors were ready
to go into battle. And the next thing to be done was to resolve
what even Thyssen agreed was a growing crisis of confidence in
their leader.

Felicity
Campbell, who had called them all to this meeting, perched on the
far end of the long layout bench with her arms folded below her
breasts, dressed in a neat business skirt and blouse. Gone forever
was the harried yet cool medico from Wellington, now her lanky
blonde curls had been pulled back severely into a small tight bun
at the back of her head. Her gentle features had all disappeared
and been replaced with sterner lines—perhaps a slight flabbiness
had gone from her cheeks leaving them gaunt and sharply defined.
The overall effect was that she looked her forty-three years of
age, whereas before she’d seemed much younger. She was the Queen
who had lost faith in her King.

Behind her,
Brian Carrick leaned casually against the chart cabinet, also with
his arms folded, but he was utterly unchanged by his experiences.
If Thyssen’s memory served, he was even still wearing the same
clothes, as if it was the only outfit he possessed when his wife
kicked him out. Flopped on the top of the cabinet was the Akubra
hat that had been stiff and new in those days but now was battered
and full of character. It was the only sign of the several hells
he’d been through since then. The permanent smile still fixed his
lips and his eyes still darted around, eternally seeking mischief.
Plainly he was not prepared to take this matter seriously because
he knew that no meeting in history had ever solved anything
serious. Nor was his loyalty likely to be swayed by anything less
than absolute betrayal.

At the centre
of the bench, Joe Solomon had wheeled himself, resplendent in his
best lawyer blue pinstripe suit, and flopped before him a huge
stack of documents—the file on Harley Thyssen presumably—to make
sure everyone got the facts straight. The Greek looked sleek and
alive, as any man who had made many millions in the past year ought
to, but he was also sharp-eyed and ready for anything that might
portend his inevitable downfall. And nothing was more likely to
bring that about than doubt over Thyssen’s leadership. He would
remain impartial until someone presented him with irrefutable
evidence of something. Which, in this case, wasn’t likely. Two
votes to one...

Jami Shastri
had rolled her own wheelchair to the end of the bench and glared at
Thyssen with utter resentment. Her bones would mend but she looked
thinner and her face was all the blotchier from burn spots. Thyssen
looked at her and could not avoid a pang of guilt that surged
through his body and pumped blood into his ear lobes and other
extremities. She was the very manifestation of his errors—as if,
Dorian Gray style—she took on wounds and scars that he did not
allow himself to feel. The challenge, the only challenge really,
for Thyssen that mattered was the task of winning her back to his
side and that, he knew, would be hardest of all. The worst mistake
he had made to date was to underestimate her devotion to him, and
the depths to which she would plunge when her belief in him
faltered.

Back in the
corner, a picture of pure menace, Kevin Wagner was all but
unrecognisable in his military outfit all brass buttons and
straight creases. He stood with his feet apart and his hands
clasped behind his back but he was anything but at ease. The
product of another grave underestimation, Thyssen knew, but who
could have predicted the way a man who had lost his family and his
existence at one blow would react. The old charmer was outmoded and
replaced by this Hollywood hero figure, waiting to receive his
orders for the next mission impossible from whoever made the
strongest show of giving the orders. And ready to take complete
control if that show of strength didn’t happen, for such a man was
utterly loyal to whoever was in charge for only so long as they
maintained absolute authority.