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“Gray?” Painter asked. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m staying here.”
“Why?”
It was a fair question. Though Gray had no time to digest the pages of Stamford’s account, he sensed the import. Thatstrange mindof his, as Seichan described it, had already begun to work on a puzzle, one with too few pieces yet. But in those pages, Stamford had hinted at a means of salvation, a way toappease the gods of the underworld.
Gray listened as more booms echoed over the horizon.
Painter repeated his question. “Why do you need to stay out there?”
Gray answered as best he could, knowing it to be true. “To discover a way to speak to the gods.”
19
January 24, 2:28A.M.NCT
Two miles under the Coral Sea
More than three hours into the evacuation ofTitan Station Down, Kowalski paced the geology lab. He chewed the end of his cigar, anxious to get moving, all too aware of the two miles of water over his head.
Outside the lab, handfuls of people ran up and down the central hub, shouldering duffels or carrying laptops. Shouts and calls echoed everywhere. Still, a quarter of the station’s personnel remained down here. The evacuation was way behind schedule.
What is taking so damned long?
Every half hour, a station-wide klaxon rang out, announcing the arrival of another shuttle of submersibles that would ferry the next contingent of researchers and staff toTitan Station Up. William Byrd had used the station’s PA to urge everyone to remain calm, assuring them that the evacuation was just a precautionary measure.
It had not helped much.
Especially with the repeated quakes that followed.
Kowalski had been tempted to leave with the first subs, but Haru Kaneko had refused to abandon his post, even though the man had sent the rest of his geology team packing. William Byrd was also down here, along with his security chief, Jarrah. Apparently, the billionaire was determined to adhere to the captain’s adage of going down with his ship—even when this ship was already at the bottom of the sea.
The ongoing quakes continued to harangue the evacuation. Most were just tremors. Others had been stronger. One had been fierce enough to rip free two of the six cables anchoring them to the seabed. But even minor temblors had made it challenging for the submersibles to safely dock at the station’s airlocks. To make matters worse, reports from topside described a heavy cloud of ash sweeping over the ocean. It rose from volcanic eruptions across the neighboring islands that had started a couple of hours ago. The ash, which was highly conductive, was wreaking havoc with communications due to insulator flashovers and repeated disruptions of theUp’s generators.
All in all, it was a clusterfuck.
And Byrd knew it. “Topside comms are still down,” he reported from his station next to the geologist. “I’m sorry, Haru. I should’ve listened to you earlier and not delayed the evacuation. We should all be gone by now.”
Haru stood before his monitors, bent over a keyboard. “At least down here, I’m still receiving data from the sonobuoys and seismic monitors.”
Kowalski leaned over his shoulder. “Are any of them sendinggoodnews?”
Haru sighed. “The buoys are showing a major seabed rise along the Tonga Trench. Fifty meters and still climbing. The seabed seismographs and geophones continue to show an escalation in quakes. Only now it’s no longer limited to justonesection of the Tonga. New clusters are popping up along the entire two-thousand-kilometer length of the Tonga-Kermadec subduction zone.”
Kowalski frowned. “In English, that means what?”
“That we’ve not seen the worst of it yet,” Haru said. “Not by half.”
“How much worse can it get?” Byrd asked.
Haru turned to them. “Volcanic strength is ranked by VEI—a Volcanic Explosive Index. It’s open-ended, meaning it doesn’t have an upper limit. A VEI of zero is a slow leakage of lava, like you see at Kilauea in Hawaii. From there, it rises across eight known ranks, from explosive to mega-colossal. The modern world has never experienced aneight. The last was seventy thousand years ago, the Toba eruption. It was sodevastating that it drove the human population down to a mere thirty thousand people.”
Kowalski felt a sickening drop in his stomach. “And now?”
Haru faced his screens and brought up a map of the region that was dotted with hundreds of triangles, marking the volcanoes most at risk.
“At present, twenty-four peaks have erupted over the past two hours. Most in the three to four range, a few sixes, which are still considered in thecolossalrange.” He tapped on his keyboard. “Here is what my son’s modeling program predicts, what the status will look like in two or three days if the tectonic instability continues to escalate.”
