Rude Awakening

by Mary Ruth Pursselley -

An earthquake rattled Celeste awake. She sat up and slapped the switch on the wall, filling the room with dingy light. A ceramic figurine skittered in a frantic dance across the top of the dresser before toppling over the edge. She leaned out and caught it, barely.

The walls still shook; this was stronger than the usual tremor. Celeste looked up at the familiar crack in the plaster ceiling of her room. It was expanding, shrinking, shifting, expanding again.

Flailing out of bed, Celeste grabbed her boots and hurried into the hall in socked feet. Evidently her fellow tenants had the same thought. The bedraggled crowd jostled to the end of the hall, down the stairs, and through the front-room towards the outside door. The front-room windows revealed gritty morning light but faced away from the mountain, which was what everyone wanted to see.

Outside, Celeste squinted through agitated clouds of ash as she hurried around the side of the tenement house to get a look at the volcano. It felt like the quake might be calming down, but there could still be an eruption coming.

A column of smoke towered above the mountain’s cone, fanning out against the atmosphere in an ever-widening blanket. Sheba’s halves were black shadows near the edge of the smoke-cloud.

The quake stopped. Sirens signaled the closing of Adagio’s watergates, but the mountain seemed to be quieting down—or gathering itself for a blast. Either way, it didn’t matter much.

People around her began groggily making their way back inside, and Celeste decided she might as well get some more sleep. No way was she going up that mountain today. She looked down and realized that in addition to her boots, she was still holding the figurine that had fallen off of the dresser—a white-robed girl with a benevolent smile, and a pair of silver wings growing from her back.

Mom had called it an angel; smiled at it, even talked to it. She’d said it represented real angels watching out for them. Celeste looked around her. The idea of angels didn’t seem very likely. But…

She looked back down at the figurine. “Don’t go trying that nose-dive thing again—just in case.”

Tsunami

by Grace Bridges -

Eleon McManus hauled on the ascent lever and threw his vehicle into reverse at the same time, then leapt to the comms unit on the other side of his cockpit and hit the emergency relay together with the tsunami warning button. If he felt the tremors out here in the sea, there could be danger for the land and settlement.

Alerts sent, he returned to steer his submersible. He had been moments away from committing to the docking maneuver when the sea had begun to shudder. Now at a safe distance, he throttled back from the reversing movement and waited to hear back from the harbourmaster.

Meanwhile, his ascent had continued and now the head of the sub broke the surface and a thousand droplets ran down the curved window. Eleon peered out at the harbour buildings, now too far away to make out any movement. He reached out and touched a control, and engines whined as the sub spun to face the open sea. If a wave was coming, he should face it for the greatest safety.

“Mac?” crackled from the speaker. “Reckon we felt that same time you did. All personnel now sealed inside our building, and they’re closing the watergate now.”

Eleon let out the breath he’d been holding. It might be an everyday occurrence in the life of every person on Eclectia, and a freight driver in particular, but he had long ago decided humans weren’t built to take the stresses of a violent seismic planet like this. But it’s not like they could up and leave—even its breathable air was a miracle in the unimaginable expanses of hostile, lifeless space. He was lucky to have secure quarters in the undersea city of Zirconia, built to withstand the greatest quakes.

He flicked a switch to take a little more water into the ballast tanks. On the outward journey still, he had no cargo for stabilisation. By now the rock valley leading to the settlement of miners and hunters would be sealed to a height of a hundred metres, the huge metal doors sliding out of their slots carved in the cliffs on each side.

His friends in Adagio would be okay. Eleon faced the oncoming wave and asked the whales to keep him safe.