Tevun-Krus #8 - Dystopian SF

Soul Fire

Soul Fire

By: Bloodsword

The Call

He let a slow streamer of oil smoke ease from a nostril as he stared into the distance.  Instantly the streamer was in a fight for its life with the sluicing downpour, the fifth such opening of the skies today.  Idly he turned his attention from the horizon to that streamer, a twisting cable of grey and black as it danced between the fat, oily drops of fetid rain for its life.

"Hey Mac," the embedded commlink in his mastoid bone came to life with a thrum of vibration.  "If you're done feeling sorry for yourself, I've got something coming in over the dark net."

Sighing, Mac took one last pull on his cigarette before flicking it off into the gloom.  Then he was standing.

As humans go, he was tall for his kind, his normally unruly blue-black hair plastered to his skull by the unrelenting downpour, his face scarred and his skin pallid from a lack of sunlight.  He might have been handsome once, before the scarring, perhaps even pretty but now ... Now his face was a grim mask chiseled from battered ivory that more often than not sent people scurrying away from him than sauntering towards.  It was an appearance only enhanced by his icy blue gaze, hard as diamond and cold as a polar wind, stabbing this way and that as it tried to pierce the gloom.

Pulling the black oilskin longcoat closer around his muscular frame, Mac took one last look skyward.  As he did, the clouds parted for a brief moment and he saw into the early evening sky.

Instantly his eyes were drawn to the moon.  Or, rather, its shattered remnants.

For decades Humanity had worried that the Earth would get hit by a planet killer like the one that supposedly wiped out the dinosaurs, killing every man, woman and child on its surface.  That paranoia had spawned fiction and movies, asteroid shelters and survivalist cults.  In the end, however, the big rock the size of a continent that came from the sky that could've killed the Human Race, didn't hit the Earth at all.

It hit the moon.

For all the damage that the moon's destruction caused, the asteroid might as well have hit the Earth.  The gravity field connecting the two was thrown into flux as massive chunks of the ancient satellite were blasted free by the impact.  That flux, in turn, caused equally massive tidal waves, shifts in the tectonic plates and a permanent compression of the planet's inner core by nearly 2%.   The survivors called the event by what it did to the planet: the Crush.

The resulting shrinkage of the planet's diameter, combined with the tsunamis and shifting tectonic plates, caused seas to slosh out of their beds and cover nearly 60% of the planet's habitable surface.  Within minutes of the impact, the planet's coastal cities were obliterated and continental interiors became inland seas, mile-high waves washing everything before them with unrelenting and unimaginable force.

Earth as they had known it, was gone.  Along with it, nearly eight billion of it's ten billion occupants. Another billion died shortly afterwards, from injury, disease, and starvation.  Not to mention the chunks of the moon that made their devastating way down to the planet's already battered surface, adding insult to injury with impacts that made the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs look like a pebble into a puddle.