Free Not the End of the World by Christopher Brookmyre Page A

heat had crazed the very winds of the air. Men and beasts, even trees, were lifted bodily from the earth, drawn into the rage of debris and flame that filled the skies, there to be torn apart as by a thousand spears in flight. Then the sea itself began to boil. The waters in the bay convulsed in frenzy, rising as if to escape the earth, falling back in fearsome swoops, like carrion fowl in fiercest dispute. The waves had no purpose or direction, only the wildest agitation. Those boats in the bay were smashed like tinder by this violence. The stout beams of hulls that had traversed all the seas of the world were shattered like baked clay. Neither were all the vessels spared that had reached the open sea. Though there was no wind for their sails, they began to speed back towards land, all together, faster than ever they had ridden the waves before. It was as though time had turned upon itself as the boats’ journeys were reversed, unknown forces drawing them irresistibly into the bubbling cauldron where they met their end, disappearing beneath the waters as though swallowed whole. From the mouth of the mountain, a vast pillar of steam violated the skies, punching through the heavens and beyond in a white, unbroken shaft, reaching in the blink of an eye higher than all the mountains of the world piled one atop the next. Then in one moment, one single moment, Tira, our neighbour, our sister, was torn from the earth. Obliterated. Even on a hillside in Kaftor I was thrown to the ground as the air was shaken by the greatest sound any man had ever heard. There was a dark shape on the horizon, expanding into the sky and in all directions about itself a great cloud with fire flashing through it like the jagged barbs of lightning, and all the while the sound continued to boom and rumble, as though the air was crashing upon us in waves. An island. A country. Lands and farms on its back, towns and villages. Ports, woodlands, fields. All turned to flame and dust and stone in one terrible instant.
    Maria had thrilled as she read each of the passages, sent to her at tantalisingly random intervals as Jerry’s translation team made their unsteady progress. This narrator, whoever he had been, was describing a devastating caldera eruption, which fitted exactly the theories that had been hypothesised about Thera’s destruction. More than that, the description actually divulged something further about the nature of the eruption than extant knowledge had been able to suggest. It indicated that the final explosion had been caused by the collapse of a giant magma chamber, as had happened at Krakatoa. The ‘boiling of the sea’ and the spontaneous retreat of the boats would have been created by billions of tons of seawater flooding into the chamber. Then, when that enormous body of water met an equally enormous supply of molten magma and turned instantly to steam, there suddenly wouldn’t have been room for it all. Hence, bang. Or more accurately, the biggest bang ever seen or heard on the planet. But that – unprecedentedly destructive as it was – had been only the start. The real action would have got going about forty minutes later, when the largest seismic waves in history, or indeed prehistory, encountered the first thing in their path: Kaftor. The last message she’d got from Jerry had been about two weeks ago to say that he was almost ready to send her ‘the money shot’, as he called it, mocking her ravenous impatience to see the passages depicting the flood. Ever since then she’d been scanning her e‐
mail for his name each morning before being disappointed and having to get on with what she was actually paid for. Now, finally, it was here, and it didn’t seem to matter. She sat staring at the blue and white envelope icon through tear‐
welling eyes, lacking the will even to move the mouse and open it. She didn’t want to know what it contained. She’d far rather have two thirty‐
year‐
old adolescents standing behind her