Cascade

1 - Disaster

1 - Disaster

“Hm,” Claire thought, “So this is what the end of the world looks like.”

Alarm bells blared across the planet wide alert system. Not like it did any good. The whole planet was dying. Where was there to run?

Claire looked up at the once impressive, glass dome above her and brushed a strand of dark hair behind her ear. Massive shards slowly rained down to shatter like mortars upon the marble floor. People ran, screaming and shoving, as if it actually mattered. The chances of being pulverized by part of the ceiling were essentially the same whether you ran, walked, or simply stood in place. Besides, even if one survived the lethal hail of crystal from the skylight, there was no escaping that which lay above.

Brilliant, white, and dazzling beyond measure, Vitae, the system’s sun, shone in the sky above, nearly 300 times larger than its usual appearance. Claire knew all the chaos was pointless. There was nothing to be done to save the planet now. How does one escape a collision course with their own sun? At just over a half million kilometers away, they were within the star’s Roche limit now. The tidal forces would rip the planet to shreds. The atmosphere would be blown off like a dandelion behind a jet engine. The intense heat would vaporize oceans, liquefy continents, and ionize anything else that was left. All the while, microwaves, heavy UV, hard x-ray surges, and your run of the mill gamma ray bombardments would quickly annihilate every living tissue on half the planet.

Those lucky enough to live on the night side would last only hours longer as powerful radiation washed over the surface of the planet like a tsunami. Then, the torrential blasts of solar wind and high energy particles would serve as a rather effective wake up call. Soon, the entire planet will be nothing but plasma.

A glass shard burst upon the ground not three meters from Claire’s position.

“Time to go.” She thought.

The shear size of the exodus was staggering. Vertex, the most populated of the nine planets in the system was being evacuated, but at this rate, the planet wouldn’t last another two hours.

Claire was jostled from every side as a surge of people flooded past her to the exits. The building continued to collapse, taking out large chunks of crowd where it fell. Claire knew it was more dangerous to run, but the coursing current of people carried her away. It took all her effort simply to remain on her own two feet.

A shudder ran through the building. The crumbling of the structure was hardly audible over the screams and chaos. The building shifted again. This time a massive fissure shot up a main support pillar to the left. Claire forced herself to stop and observe.

A crack along the main pillar, fractured glass perilously hanging from the front of the skylight, a slight list of the ground to the left. She put the pieces together. The throng was coursing towards the front exit. Claire bolted to the right. There was a maintenance hallway twenty meters ahead of her. It was keypad locked and no one was going to stand around long enough to enter a code. Claire looked at the structure of the dome ceiling, the distribution of weight, and she smelt the fumes of superheated steel composite being vaporized from above. She need only wait a few seconds. Once she reached the door, she ducked to the side, hiding underneath a small water fountain alcove near by.

Nexus guards were fruitlessly yelling orders to stay calm. One was brave enough to stand before the horde to direct traffic. He went down in seconds. Claire was certain he had been trampled. As more sections of the ceiling caved in, the room filled with a painful brightness. Claire could see powerful auroras erupting over the surface of the sky. There wasn’t much red. The hydrogen in the upper atmosphere had already been blown off. Soon, the nitrogen layer would be next, and along with it, the planet’s UV protection.