A curtain of cloud and blinding light rose from the western horizon, then slowly curled about like a snake in pain. One end of the curtain slid over the sea with amazing speed in their direction, and Samshow cringed, not wanting it all to end just yet. There was more he wanted to see; more minutes he wanted to live.

The hull shuddered violently and the steel masts and wires sang. The railing vibrated painfully under his hand.

The ocean filled with a continuous light, miles of water no more opaque than a thick green lump of glass held over a bonfire.

"It's the bombs," Sand said. "They're going off. Up and down the fractures—"

The sea to the west blistered in a layer perhaps a hundred meters thick, scoured by the snaking curtain, bursting into ascending and descending ribbons of fluid and foam. Between the fragments of the peeled sea—the skin of an inconceivable bubble—rose a massive, shimmering transparent of superheated steam, perhaps two miles wide. Its revealed surface immediately condensed into a pale opalescent hemisphere. Other such bubbles broke and released and condensed from horizon to horizon, churning the sea into a mint-green froth. The clouds of vapor ascended in twisted pillars to the sky. The hiss and roar and deep churning, gut-shaking booms became unbearable. Samshow clapped his hands to his ears and waited for what he knew must come.

A scatter of calved steam bubbles broke just a few hundred meters to the east, with more on the opposite side. The turbulence spread in a high wall of water that caught the ship lengthwise and broke her spine, twisting her fore half clockwise, aft counterclockwise, metal screaming, rivets failing like cannon shots, plates ripping with a sound curiously like tearing paper, beams snapping. Samshow flew over the side and seemed for a moment suspended in froth and flying debris. He felt all that he was a part of—the sea, the sky, the air and mist around him—abruptly accelerate upward. A much larger steam bubble surfaced directly beneath the ship.

There was of course no time to think, but a thought from the instant before lingered like a strobed image, congealed in his mind before his body was instantly boiled and smashed into something hardly distinguishable from the foam around it: I wish I could hear that sound, of the Earth's crust being spread wide.

Around the globe, wherever the bomb-laying machines had infested the deep-ocean trenches, long sinuous curtains of hot vapor reached high into the atmosphere and pierced through. As the millions of glassy columns of steam condensed into cloud, and the cloud hit the cold upper masses of air and flashed into rain, the air that had been pushed aside now rushed back with violent thunderclaps. Tsunamis rolled outward beneath corresponding turbulent expanding concentric fronts of high and low pressure.

The end had begun.

DIES IRAE

DIES IRAE

69