The Day The Earth Died
By Troy Dennison
Cover image T. Dennison
Copyright 2010 Troy Dennison
License Notes
Thank you for your support.
For everyone from the good old days at Twilight's Resurrection - I miss you guys.
I was there the day the Earth died.
Even though it was inevitable we still prayed that it wouldn’t happen. As the skies turned to fire we cried out for a miracle. Right up to the very end when the grey clouds of death slowly suffocated our home world we hoped against hope that the scientists who had foreseen this were wrong. We waited for God in his infinite compassion and mercy to reach out his hand and offer us salvation; but it never came. In the end the destruction of the Earth was as inevitable as the sunrise that our devastated planet would not witness again for countless millennia.
You would have thought that the planet killing instrument of destruction would have had some sort of Old Testament name like Oblivion or Defiler, but it was simply called Shuster-379. The comet that brought life on Earth to an end was discovered by chance by an amateur astronomer called Anthony Schuster some twenty five months earlier. It sparked a storm of controversy that a six kilometre chunk of snow and ice had slipped through the Kuiper Belt and past Sky-watch, the multi-billion dollar deep-space debris detection system that had been designed to spot exactly this sort of thing.
Schuster was interviewed time and again in the ‘Last Days’ as they became known and turned into a minor celebrity. He also became the target of a few nuts that didn’t understand the difference between discovering an object that would wipe out all life on Earth and actually doing the deed himself. Schuster refused to leave Earth with the evacuees, and he was at home in Pennsylvania on Zero Day. It was almost like he felt the need to atone for being the soothsayer of oblivion. He probably died with the three billion other souls who remained behind.
During the Last Days I was stationed as a Second-grade Communications Officer onboard Vanguard. The Vanguard platform was the original off-world colonisation staging post which had been established some eighty years before during the First Wave of colonisation. She was an inelegant conglomeration of mismatched modular units built in a rough hoop around a central core that resembled a vast silver/grey donut with an éclair rammed through the centre of it. The old girl creaked and sang to us as we worked (a strangely reassuring sound) as the hull plating moved in gentle harmony with the gravity waves of Phobos. In those eighty years some 27 billion people had passed this way, following the trail blazed by the Deepstar probes as they discovered habitable worlds outside our own solar system.
Those early pioneers lived in some of the harshest conditions imaginable. It had taken years, sometimes decades to reach their destinations using the near light-speed photon engines that had been developed and many had perished on the way. Even if they reached their destination countless more still died in the struggle to establish colonies on the New Worlds. In the end, through determination and hope and sheer human bloody-mindedness they had succeeded and thrived and paved the way for future generations. There were a few (there always are) who said that mankind was never meant to dwell among the stars and they gloated at each new setback as if it stood in smug testament to reinforce their beliefs. In the end, thankfully, they were proved wrong.
Once it had been established beyond a shadow of a doubt that the comet would strike the earth somewhere along the Pacific Rim two major operations wheeled into action. The first was called Atom Smasher and was basically an attempt to “crash” a series of old style remotely controlled nuclear warheads into the comet’s nucleus and hopefully blow it into harmless pieces. The General who came up with the concept was lauded as a hero right up until the day that they tried it out. The first nuke had no visible effect, but the second and third both did their jobs with catastrophic results. The comet calved. There were dozens of pieces of smaller debris, but the two largest sections now posed an even greater threat (if such a thing were possible). Beneath the outer shell of ice the comet had an iron/nickel core, and now these two sections had the potential to cut an even greater swathe of destruction.
If the fragments hit water they would cause untold devastation, tsunami, massive vaporisation that would form clouds that would cause colossal damage to the eco-system. If they hit land there would be similar destruction, with the ejecta from the impact forming a dust cloud that could potentially block out the sun for decades and drown the world in acid rain. The potential for both types of impact was now greatly increased and the Earth was sitting in the path of an extinction level event greater than the one that had wiped out the dinosaurs! The Earth was doomed. The end of the world really was nigh. Fortunately there was another option, the Salvation Project.
During the expansion dozens of worlds had been discovered throughout the explored universe that could support human life in some fashion. They ranged from the paradise world of New Eden, with its crystal waterfalls and azure sky to the frozen wastelands of Juro where the driving ice storms could peel the flesh from a man’s bones in seconds. There were a few worlds that were in the early stages of terra-forming and even more that had only been visited by deep-space probes. They became the focus of our attention. Some already had small colonies, some were barely explored, but they ALL provided a means to escape the Earth’s imminent destruction.
For the first time in recorded history the nations of the Earth worked together as one. Old differences were set aside in this bid to survive. No one nation was in charge and each colony transport that we ushered past Vanguard on its way out of our solar system contained the broadest spectrum of peoples and cultures throughout the globe. Family groups were kept together and each ship held experts in every diverse element required for building a new life on a strange new world.
So the ships began to leave, wave upon wave of silver salvation heading out into the void to reach the nearest habitable worlds which were being utilised as staging grounds. Construction on these craft never stopped, automated factories ran day and night in a tireless effort to avoid what was to come. Some of the colony ships made two and even three trips off-world. The smaller craft carried hundreds of people and the heavy cruisers like the Stellar Drift carried hundreds of thousands. Some didn’t make it.
Dante’s Child, Biosphere II and the Imagine all vanished without a trace. Rourke’s Bluff ripped itself apart near Saturn killing the 2000 colonists and crew onboard instantly. We never stopped, never gave up hope. Each setback only seemed to strengthen our resolve to succeed.
Near the end the panic set in as millions clamoured to escape. The infamous lotteries began as some wealthy individuals offered the chance to gamble for a place in the stars. Because whole governments had already gone off-world there was no one to enforce any sort of order on them. Religious fervour gripped the world as the panic spread. Comet cults sprang up across the globe driven by a crazed destructive zeal. There was looting and rioting, people were murdered on the streets and nothing was done to prevent it. It reached a peak with the Albany Massacre, when more than 500 cultists were callously cut down by what remained of the local armed forces. All we could do on Vanguard was watch helplessly and wait for the inevitable.
When the end came it was terrible and swift. The comet blazed into our solar system trailing its icy tail behind it. The tail grew longer with each passing day as the comet drew closer to the sun. Hundreds of star-ships sat in near orbit to Mars and watched the majestic passage of Schuster-379. The two main sections tumbled slowly as they made their inevitable way to the point where they would cross Earth’s orbit. We watched, we recorded, and we prayed.
The last day on Earth reached us via a Tri-D broadcast from a news anchorman
who was alone on top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris. He described how still and quiet the city was, and as the camera panned around we could see no signs of life. The beautiful crystal blue sky was empty of clouds and birds alike; it was as if they knew what was coming. The first herald of the comet was what appeared to be an elegant fireworks display in the morning sky. Tendrils of slow fire drew themselves through the still air as comet fragment burned up in the atmosphere. The news reporter wept as he described the sight and our hearts broke for him because we knew that the end was near.
The first major impact came when a blazing chunk of comet tore through the sky above Alaska and drove itself into the tundra with the force of a small nuclear bomb. As the Earth rotated more strikes occurred; the one in London decimated a huge portion of the city. Two struck Honshu in Japan starting a series of volcanic eruptions that caused the tectonic plate to slip. Japan sank swiftly beneath the waves and the ensuing tsunami rose into the night sky and thundered outwards to wreak untold damage.
The sections of the comet's split core arrived without fanfare and tore into Earth’s atmosphere. The sonic booms as they crossed the sky broke windows and eardrums alike. The air behind them boiled as they arced across the sky and buried themselves with deadly finality into the Mediterranean basin. The surrounding area vaporised instantly. Thousands of years of art, culture and history in Italy, Greece and Turkey vanished in the blink of an eye. The fragments drove deep into the bedrock of the sea, melting it to super-hot temperatures. A huge mushroom cloud of condensed steam and ocean floor was hurled into the atmosphere reaching upwards to point at the heavens in accusation. Then the water returned, rushing back to fill the white hot crater and exploding in a flash of secondary destruction.
The clouds formed slowly at first, then with greater enthusiasm as they moved to create a permanent barrier between the Earth and the Sun. By the end of the first year over 60% of plant and animal life was gone, and what remained held on by the most tenuous of grips. A new Ice Age had come about below the impenetrable barrier of cloud. People were still alive somewhere down there, eking out a mean and primitive existence. We watched and we waited and we wept, and finally we turned our backs on our home and looked towards the new horizon of tomorrows yet to come.
One day, far away in the future when the clouds roll back and the sun shines on the Earth once more people will throw their faces to the sky and draw strength from its rays. Mankind will rise again on its home world like a phoenix reborn and the Earth can once more become the heart and soul of our existence. But for now it exists as a shining beacon, a testament to the human spirit proving that even in the face of supreme adversity we have the tenacity to endure and the strength to succeed.
We live among the stars, our home is here on the worlds between the solar drifts and we have embraced it. I live on a world that we named Frontiosa. I have a family here, and I have grown old and watched as they have claimed this new world as their own. My children have never stood on Earth’s soil, or felt its grass beneath their feet. They have never seen a sunrise on a different world. All that they have to show them the place I once called home is picture books and old films. They can never understand the feelings of hope, despair and triumph that I and my fellow humans have endured over these years because, unlike them, I was there the day the Earth died.
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About the author
I am a professional make-up artist, writer, actor and X-Box junkie.
I have three children and live in Staffordshire with my crazy dog Theo.
About the story
TDTED was written many, many years ago and echoes a love I have for science fiction and the total and utter annihilation of the Earth; because you can't go wrong with a solid end of the world yarn. Do I honestly believe that the planet will get wiped out by a chunk of space rock? My answer is that it's a miracle it hasn't happened already. Just take a look at the surface of the moon; all the scars that cover its surface from collisions. The Earth doesn't look like that because our atmosphere burns up most of the debris that the universe throws in our direction, but we do bear marks from some of the larger chunks that have hit the planet. An extinction level impact is only a matter of odds really, and my friends know exactly how I feel about mathematics. My bottom line is that it really is only a matter of time, and when it happens we won't have Bruce and Ben on hand to save the day!