Mercury Retrograde

"Can the Grabbers catch it again? Shift it around."

"No."Felix's voice, so carefully worked on between them, had taken on a more mechanical, computer-ish tone. "They are no longer in positions to do that. And from my calculations, the comet is not going to miss. I'm projecting an impact in the southern hemisphere, in the region of central Africa."

"It's going to hit the Earth?" Roulette demanded.

"Yes. Unless there is something unforetold which happens within the next few hours, the chance of a miss is spiraling down to zero."

"Damn it, what are those fools doing back there? Sitting with their thumbs up their asses!" Grabbing the mic, Roulette keyed it to speak to everyone on board Big Alice. "All personnel, all personal there is an emergency situation on Earth. Go to your nearest vid screen and turn to the incoming broadcast from Earth. I say again emergency on Earth. All personnel should be watching."

There were several demands from the crew as to what was going on but Roulette ignored those as she switched channels and began to spread the word to other mining rig pilots.

She had only managed to contact three others before the topside control officers slapped her down.

"Pilot of A-Rig cease and desist your broadcasts. You are inciting a panic in a situation that elements of Queen Space already have in control."

Rue was about to shoot back a demand as to how they thought it was in control when the officer up top shut down her communications.

"That son of a bitch!"

"I can restore your communications whenever you wish me to do so, Rue."

Hearing Felix gives her assurances calmed her a bit.

"I'll let it pass for now." Sitting back in her chair, she looked at the screen. The velocities involved back in Earth orbit were huge, and the distances meant that what she was watching had happened several minutes ago. "How long till that giant snow cone hits?"

"The gravity tug from the Grabbers, when they turned it loose, gave the comet an additional boost of velocity to facilitate the work of the Smashers. It's currently traveling at 16.26 kilometers per second. Given the distances involved, and the constant speed of the Earth around the solar mass--"

"Damn it, Felix! In simple terms. How long?"

For a long moment, the AI paused. "Less than nine hours."

Rue sat too stunned to even blink. She finally asked a question she didn't really care whether he answered or not. "How much less?"

"Eight hours and twenty-five minutes till it reaches the atmosphere. It will touch the surface less than a second and a half later."

After a few minutes, Roulette asked another of those questions. This one she knew but wanted to hear the confirmation spoken so that the information didn't come from within her own brain. "With what result?"

Felix must have sensed her mood. He didn't answer with a long stream of numbers. "A rough estimate of 150 times the impacting force of the asteroid that formed the Chicxulub crater."

Roulette shook her head. "Right into the main population centers of Africa. Hundreds of millions are going to die."

"No."

Rue looked up, and for a second had hope that he had seen something she hadn't yet.

"Billions." Felix let his god-let image form upon the main vid screen. It no longer mattered if his AI brother back on Paradise Station discovered him. "This is an extinction level event, on a scale not seen upon the Earth in sixty-five million years."

The AI wished he hadn't spoken when the women he loved began to cry.

** ** ** ** ** ** **

Roulette listened to the last words of Caesar Queen the second with a numbness of soul and spirit.

"Behold a Pale Horse. I'm sorry."

The self-styled Master of Space had died weeping for his own failure. With his golden yacht's thrusters at full, he had managed to run down the huge chunk of ice that his company had brought in to the inner solar system and -- against all advice being screamed at him -- landed upon it. With his engines red-lined he had attempted to turn the massive mass of frozen water and dust. He managed to move it a bit. Not nearly enough but it shifted the impact closer to the Indian Ocean.

He apologized.

He died.

And billions died with him.

Every human eye on Luna, Mars, Mercury, and Venus was glued to a vid screen as the "Pale Horse" comet struck the mother planet. With a fury unbeknownst in human history it struck and released a shock wave that circled the globe to heralded the impact all around the world. So many vid cameras had the planet under observation. So many different views coming in, most from space but a few managed to get up out of the deviated planet at first. Scenes of tidal waves off the shattered coast of Africa, miles high, emptying the Indian Ocean onto South Asian and Australia. Swamping the lands under boiling sea water.

Across the Pacific the towering waves ran, ignoring small islands, destroying all in their path.

Off the coast of Baja California a huge bulge appeared, lifting the whole ocean above it out of the way then it burst the surface and spewed for a billion tons of molten rocks. The waves from this buried all of the western Americas, and then met the waves coming east from the impact and crashed upwards to heights unbelievable, touching the edges of space. Billions of tons of water crashed back down and then rolled back.

The Indian Ocean was a sea of molten lava.

Sitting with her hands over her mouth, rocking in terror, Rue watched from the command room of Big Alice as reports and vid of double-digit magnitude earthquakes, in places as isolated as London and Moscow, cities shook themselves apart . Often destroying them only moments before other types of destruction began to rain down.

"Rue?"

"Yes, Felix?"

The AI spoke with a tender softness. "The destruction will continue at this level for weeks, if not months. All you are doing now it torturing yourself by watching it. And I need you to look at something I've discovered."

For a moment Roulette wanted to cuss him out. To tell him off for the unfeeling, uncaring machine, curse against nature which humanity should never have made, thing that he was. But even as she had the thought she knew it wasn't true. In a way, the AI was more human than most of the humans she had met in her life.

"What is it?"

Video footage began to appear. It was of the "Pale Horse" comet as it approached the Moon. It irritated her to see this again. She hated seeing the Smashers fly out to intercept and knowing that they were going to fail made this hurt even worse.

"Why are you showing me this?"

"Look here, please."

Beside the image, a series of computer code began to scroll past. She saw inserted commands in the binary structure of numbers.

"What is this?"

Felix's answer made no sense. "That is a command code being sent to the Smashers turning them into testing mode."

Rue paused. "And that did what?"

"Turned off the explosive warheads that, when coupled with the time-conjoined impacts, should have broken up the comet into a snowy powder."

Slowly it got through and her jaw began to drop open. "Why did Paradise Station send a testing signal to the Smashers during a real event?"

"They didn't."

Roulette's world shattered even as she watched her world shattering.

"Who ... who did?"

** ** ** ** ** ** **

It took a week before the reality of what had happened really sank in.

Everyone back home that was not in one of the orbital colonies ... was dead.

Or dying.

Pictures coming to Mercury from Earth were horrifying. The ground where the comet "The Pale Horse" had struck was little more than a massive crater of liquid lava. The opposite side of the Earth was nearly as badly damaged. Hundreds of volcanoes, many long dormant, had awoken and begun to belch out a mixed vomit of gas, ash, and pumice. Through the thick clouds of dust and ash could be seen huge spots of fire that were once massive cities. Cities that now burned like red flowers.

When Rue asked him about it Felix confirmed that the footage coming in was being censored. At her request, he showed her the raw footage that Paradise Station was editing. Then she wished that she hadn't.

The screams.

Every communication channel still connecting humanity's survivors to the world of their birth was clogged with hideous screams. Pleas for help. Begging cries to many different gods. The sound of prayer often mixed with rapid choking breaths.

So many screams. Then fewer, and fewer.

Slowly the half-way organized society of miners on Mercury began to fall apart. They had no purpose now. What was the need of excavation silica ore for huge mirrors to surround the Sun ... for a project a thousand years from now? The general consensus was that humanity was dead.

As a species, dead.

And people with no reason to live see no need to act like civilized people.

The reports reaching Big Alice told of murders, rapes, riots and all the normal hash-marks of panic and fear.

Jack'o and Rue called a meeting of the full crew and, together, they all decided to stop mining, least the stresses and strains of the big cutting wheel damage something that would keep them from getting back to base.

Some lunatic up topside received this new and ordered them back to work. Then he began to threaten them with termination of their jobs. Rue wasn't the only one to laugh in his face.

Felix cut the guy's access to Big Alice's computer systems.

A-Rig began to move faster without the cutting wheel engaged, but the pilots had to temper the desire to go faster against the fact that the Sun was setting less than a week of normal speed ahead of them. That eight hundred degrees furnace was a constant thought to them all. A rumor began that the miners at base camp might seal the base against the people outside, to conserve the now precious supplies for themselves, began to filter around the communications network between pilots.

"Let them try! We can dig them out like rats!" was the general response.

After a few heated replies from the command structure at both base camps with the Queen Company Mining officers up in the orbital stations, it was decided to suspend the right for the people on the ground to communicate between the base camps. Or between the various rigs.

When Rue had Felix try to undo this he found out that it had been done on a hardware level, not at the computer command level. The topside people must have been worried about hackers. If they had known an AI was going to come at them they would have been even more worried.

Felix put some of his many splinters to work on getting through. From the ground level computers, he did manage to restore communications between the rigs, but the base camps were not answering.

That was how they learned that T-Rig had stopped.

Called "Tony the Tiger" the excavator was both older and smaller than A-Rig, but it carried the same crew compliment. Calls to the crew were only being answered by a recorded message from one of the mechanics. It said the main drive gear had broken and that they, the crew, was abandoning the rig to try and make it to an old supply station. Such stations dated back to the early days of man's presence on Mercury. Deep boreholes, many had been destroyed by excavators chewing them up for their silica. Apparently, the T-Rig's pilots and crew thought the ones closest to them might still be intact.

"That's insane." Minnow smoothed at the scruff beard he had been growing for a week now, shaking his head in disgust. "There will be no supplies there. Maybe even no breathable air."

Old Frank shook his head. "Better than being cooked alive in a dead rig when the Sun comes up. look how far behind they were? They were out of time, the Scorch was going to get them."

"Someone would have gone and gotten them before that," Minnow insisted.

"Would they have?"

"Yeah, I mean sure things are bad, but no way." The younger mechanic threw out his hands in helplessness. "How could anyone just let them cook?"

It was Rue that answered. "Billions just cooked." She looked up into the silence meeting their shocked eyes. "What's a few ore miners more at the great human barbecue?"

"How are we going to recover from this?" asked Hondo, picking at a sandwich. The worry for his family had all but silenced the big Latino man for days. "Surely God will not allow-- "

"GOD?" Jack'o tossed a glass at the trash can. "If there is one, he's laughing his ass off at us. We wanted to be gods, we wanted to move the heavens about. Well, it looks like our dumb asses were too stupid to know not to touch God's toys."

"It wasn't God's fault." Roulette sat back, chewing on what to tell them. "But it looks like it was man's. From what I was able to discover it looked like someone ordered the Smashers to shut down." She paused, then decided. "Someone from Mars."

"Wait ... what!" Jack'o spun around. "What the hell does Mars have to do with it?"

Roulette sat silently for a second as all eyes came to rest on her, demanding with that very silence answers she wasn't ready to give, but that they deserved.

"Um... well, when I was living in Paradise Station, I was friends with a guy named Felix." She looked up hoping to sell the half-lie with her eyes. "Computer technician. He had hacked a secondary communication satellite, and he and I were talking when ... well, when it happened. Felix was monitoring a long ranged scanner on the outbound Grabbers. He saw a tight band signal come in and touch the Smashers. He didn't have long to talk, and he hasn't called back since then, but he said he thought that it did something to their systems when the comet arrived. Activated a test program. Made them think it was just a test run so they didn't deploy the explosive warhead."

"Why did he think the signal came in from Mars."

"Not Mars, per-say, but from a Martian Ambassador's ship that was in near-lunar orbit."

The silence could be cut. Then, when it broke and was shattered into slivers that could be used as blades, Roulette was happy she wasn't on the receiving end.

"Those motherfuckers." Old Frank's voice was as cold as Mercury night. "That pile of rich-boy wannabe nobility. If this turns out to be true ... humanity will kill them all."

Minnow was shaking his head. "No, way. No fucking way. They are evil as fuck, sure, but there is no way they could have done that! I mean not knowing what it would do to Earth."

"Like hell, they wouldn't! I know those fuckers. I worked on Mars for a couple of seasons running a low gravity crane. Building one of their damn domes." Jack'o shook his head in disgust. "Those fuckers think their shit not only doesn't stink but that it smells like vanilla and roses. I wouldn't put anything past them."

"Rue?"

Roulette turned to look at Hondo.

"If you hear from your friend ...," he paused, stumbling over the name. " ... this Felix, do you think he could hack his way into our base camp? Find out about my family?"

Looking into his eyes, Rue hated that she had to give him any hope, but she had to. "If I hear from him, I will make sure to do that."

"Thank you. And tell him thank you, from me."

Nodding, she got to her feet. "I will. I've got to return to the control room. Given how things are I don't want to trust the autopilot anymore than we have to."

"I'll be up in a couple of hours to take my shift." Jack'o tossed her a half-assed salute.

"Sure."

Roulette all but ran back to be alone with Felix.

It was strange how now the company of an AI was more preferable than that of her fellow humans. But it was.

** ** ** ** ** ** **

Slowly, hesitantly, all across the inner solar system, the scattered remnants of humanity began to try and pull themselves back together.

Calls went out from Mars, the only colonized planet that was fully capable of autonomous human life. They promised that -- if the O'Neil stations would begin to move themselves across the system and into the L4 and L5 Lagrange points near Mars orbit -- the nobility would be willing to allow as many humans as wished to, to settle themselves upon Mars. Those humans would, of course, have to sign the agreement of serfdom that the Nobility imposed on all human settlers to their dusty red world, but that was a small price to pay to live.

Paradise Station -- now under the command of the oldest son of Caesar Queen, Spartan Queen, the Fourth -- sent back an answer. An answer that was for pretty much copied and sent by all of the solar system.

"You're cordially invited to go fuck yourselves, Mars."

Venus was, of course, the next best option. The hellish copy of Earth was capable, in their handful of floating cities and farms, of growing plentiful amounts of food. But it would take time to develop a more extensive infrastructure.

Spartan Queen was promoting the terraformed Moon as the only viable alternative. It was only one comet away from having it's completed atmosphere and that one was already approaching. The smashers were being taken apart and gone over with a micro-toothed brush to discover exactly what had gone wrong, but so far nothing had been found.

Earth had gone completely silent. A surface temperature reading had been one of the last things transmitted up into space. Six hundred degrees, day and night.

The infrastructure around Earth --dozens of small space stations, several full-size O'Neil stations that were half finished and could be rushed to contain an atmosphere and provide a limited habitat and soon, perhaps, even places to farm -- were there but not idea.

Mercury was not seen as any kind of survivable option for humanity. The heavy requirements of imported foodstuffs, and the terrible amounts of station keeping fuel needed to keep the topside orbital station hidden behind the shadow of the planet -- and thus out of the Sun's full radioactive fury and electronics-damaging solar winds -- was going to be too great a drain upon the Queen Space Corporation to maintain without some influx of goods from Earth.

Felix told Rue the truth.

The Mercury project had been the pet project put in place by Caesar's father but that his grandson, Spartan simply didn't care about a project that was going to take a thousand years to complete. No matter the unthinkable reward that "star lifting" the Sun for construction materials would provide in that distant future.

No, Spartan IV was more of a "here and now, today is what matters" kind of person.

So, Mercury was to be abandoned, but not just yet. It was still capable of providing a few things now made rare as hen's teeth. Silica was still used to make far too many things that were needed in space, no matter the cost ... well, no matter the immediate cost.

Would it be a few months or a few years, that question was seeking an answer.

Till one was found mining operations were put back into, a semi-half-assed, operational plan. There would be no more trips off planet for any miner. Their pay was cut to almost nothing, which is only slightly better than the full nothing they had been getting since Pale Horse struck Earth. Of course prices in the Company store were beyond any possible means. A full seasons pay might buy you less than half a season of even the poorest quality of food.

Suicide by stepping outside was getting so frequent that the piles of slow roasting dead filled the entrances with either a short-lived misty haze or an oily black, fog-like, smoke that clung to the ground like some lost bit of shade.

In fact, it was just as things had begun to finally settle back down on Mercury -- about midway through A-Rig's season -- that the second shoe dropped.

** ** ** ** ** ** **