The War of Immensities Read Free

and made her way
unsteadily back into the console room.
    The instruments
hummed on as if nothing was happening when plainly everything was.
The printers had stopped. All the dials were reading normally.
Three volcanoes were in full eruption, one of them was massive and
less than two kilometres away and the most sophisticated monitoring
system in the world didn’t seem to know it. Ridiculous.
    Jami forced her
way to the table and chair at the centre where a yellow telephone
reminded her of the next obvious step. She picked it up and was
automatically connected to a switchboard. Right now, she knew, the
alarms would be going off at the University, at the Bureau of
Meteorology, at the National Parks Emergency Service, police, fire
stations, hospitals, all around. The initial burst of activity in
the equipment would have done that but now they would be waiting
for some sort of confirmation, especially since everything had
apparently returned to normal. Power surge, they would be
thinking.
    “Central
monitoring,” came the voice—a real human female voice, not a
tape.
    “Ruapehu. She’s
blown,” Jami replied breathlessly.
    “Which services
are you requiring?”
    “All services,”
she said, trying to remember the right codes. “Level 5, Red
alert.”
    “State your
name and location please.”
    “Jami Shastri.
Whakapapa Monitoring Station. Number 3788810. Confirm. We have a
Level 5 Volcanic event going on here...”

2. UNCONSCIOUS
COLLECTIVE

    The cloud had
already extended beyond the blown-down zone, beyond the monitoring
station, beyond the valley and the lake, beyond the mountain range
itself. A black snowfall, fiercely hot, centimetres deep, began to
pockmark the landscape. The debris that tumbled into the many
rivers and innumerable creeks that flowed from the Tongariro
National Park rushed downstream in all directions with ferocious
turbulence until it was blocked by the dams it formed itself.
    From the three
craters on the plateau, a black pall of fiery rock, lava and ash
soared far into the sky. Casualties occurred up to ten kilometres
away although mostly due to peripheral accidents—cars running off
roads in the sudden black fog, people crushed by falling objects or
caught in the flooding as the mud surged down the mountain sides.
Within a kilometre, people, animals and trees simply vanished,
scorched out of existence. The fiery, hot ash blanketed the
terrain, suffocating everything, and with it a hail of boulders and
mud rained down upon the shocked world below the mountains.
    In the nearby
town of National Park, the end of a sunny day suddenly turned
totally black, as the towering cloud, billowing and flat-topped,
deepened the gloom that spread across the land. Lightning burst
from the cloud continually as the ground was veiled in the fallout
from the pall. Its hurricane wave of scalding gases and fire-hot
debris travelled at 200 kilometres per hour as it swept down upon
Ohakune. The pillar plumed eastward into a widening dark cloud.
    At Napier, 150
kilometres away to the east, a spectacular sunset was suddenly
obliterated by unrealistic blackness and with that unscheduled
night came a fog of choking ash. A third of the North Island of New
Zealand was brought to a complete stand-still by the ash fall. Days
later, the silt would reach the ocean via the rivers after causing
devastating floods, closing the waterways to deep-draft ships. The
cloud crossed the Pacific to South America in four days.

*

    Within an hour,
the rescue teams were moving in—by road, by helicopter, on foot. Up
to a kilometre from the craters, the 1000 degree ash and the
atmospheric heat made the air unbreathable. On the first night they
could get no closer but there was more than enough for them to
handle at that distance. Dozens of people, injured by fallen
buildings or trees or crashed vehicles, were picked up and conveyed
to nearby hospitals. Dazed and injured people walked out of the fog
of ash into the hands of rescue teams. They