Some Fine Day Read Free

gives us a pep talk and says he hopes we don’t get too bored, eliciting groans from a couple of the passengers.
    The mole ahead of us, the one with the contractors, rumbles off into the darkness of the hangar. Twenty minutes later, it’s our turn.
    Six hours to Archipelago Six.

Chapter Two
    If one imagines the Earth as an apple, the engineering feat proposed by the Intergovernmental Consortium merely entailed pricking the skin.

    We haven’t always lived like this. Most historians call it the Transition. It happened a while ago, when my parents were just little kids. And it happened fast.
    The seas warmed past fifty degrees, and hypercanes or superstorms or whatever you want to call them began to form, and instead of eventually losing strength and going away they got bigger and stuck around. Some of them are the size of continents now.
    So a decision was made to go underground. But there wasn’t room for everyone. Not even for most.
    That’s why some call it the Culling.
    “Beverage?” the attendant asks, and I thank her and take a soda. We’re an hour or so in, and the trip is actually turning out to be kind of boring, just like Captain Dan said.
    The red-headed kid is across the aisle on my left, hammering away at a game. His parents are nursing cocktails. The mood has gone from apprehensive to lethargic and half-drunk, by the glassy looks of some of the passengers. The mole is very smooth, soundproofed as promised, no hint of the rock being explosively vaporized a few feet away. Just a slight upward tilt to my seat.
    I doze off, thinking about the sheep and the valley and the sun breaking through the rainclouds. It’s become my favorite daydream.
    Then I feel Jake’s hand on my arm. “We’ve stopped,” he says.
    And I realize that there’s no hum under my seat anymore. It must have just happened, because no one else seems to have noticed.
    “Is that normal?”
    “I have no idea.”
    I expect Captain Dan to get on the intercom, but he doesn’t. Half the passengers are asleep, the others reading quietly or watching the cane network. Tracking the storms is something of a national obsession.
    Then a guy toward the back yells, “It’s not moving. Why is it not moving?”
    His voice slurs a little, and there’s an edge of panic there.
    Uh-oh, I think.
    “Now sir,” an attendant says, gliding down the aisle with a fixed smile on her face.
    But the cat’s out of the bag now. A low murmuring begins, as people start to grasp what’s happening. The attendant holds up her hands. She’s young and pretty and immaculately groomed.
    “There’s nothing to worry about. The mole ahead of us snapped a rotor on some bedrock. It’s being repaired. We expect to be moving shortly.”
    “What does that mean? How shortly?” the man calls out. He’s half risen from his seat. The middle-aged woman next to him, wife or girlfriend, puts a restraining hand on his arm and he shakes it off.
    The attendant knows better than to tell him to calm down, which usually has the opposite effect on people. “Why don’t I just check with the captain and get an update?” She disappears into the forward cabin.
    No one speaks for a minute. I know it’s my imagination, but the temperature in the mole seems to go up a few degrees.
    “How much air do they carry on these things?” someone asks.
    I sip my soda and share a look with Jake.
    “Moles have redundancies built into their redundancies,” he says quietly. “Foolproof.”
    I don’t really want to be the one to say it, but we’re all thinking it anyway, so I go ahead.
    “Black Dome.”
    Jake snorts and looks away, like he’s disappointed in me. But before he does, I see a flash of fear.
    Black Dome.
    It happened six years ago. I was only ten, but I remember every detail. My parents tried to shield me, unsuccessfully, since it was all anyone talked about for weeks.
    Five moles, twenty-five passengers and crew each. Departed from Black Dome launch station on August the