Earthfall Read Online Free PDF

populated by workstations and displays of all sizes and brightness. From here, the personnel on duty monitored the condition of the subterranean installation, home to almost a thousand people. All internal metrics were captured and stored and, if necessary, reviewed. It was mostly mind-numbingly boring work, a repetitive process of staring at screens, monitoring the internal affairs of Harmony Base, and keeping the occasional eye turned toward the happenings on the surface over a hundred feet above their heads. But studying the surface was even more boring. Ever since the Sixty Minute War had essentially eradicated the ozone layer, solar radiation continued to bombard the planet, causing the Earth’s surface to waste away even further. Beyond dusty rock and parched earth, there was almost nothing left outside to see. Not even a cockroach remained alive out there, so it was a rare circumstance for something outside to merit any discussion beyond Hey, look at how big that dust storm is , or Well, it might not look like Kansas … but it still is.
    “Sorry, Colonel, but do you have a second?”
    Corrine Baxter looked up. Barney Rosen, the lone technician manning the External Observation Station located in one corner of the Command Center was facing her direction, leaning back in his chair. Baxter simply stared at him for a moment before responding.
    EOS wants to talk?
    Baxter pushed away from her desk at the back of the Command Center and stood. She straightened her uniform and walked over to the EOS station.
    “What is it, Rosen?”
    “We’ve just detected another tremor, ma’am. One point four on the Richter, same general epicenter as yesterday.”
    Baxter had to think back to the morning briefing to recall what the sallow-faced technician was talking about, but she did remember that several small tremors had been detected in the direction of the Colorado plains. That area was relatively stable—tectonically speaking—so the sudden uptick in activity was interesting, but not considered threatening in any way.
    “You sure we’re not talking about equipment failure here? It’s been a long time … Can tectonic sensors go bad?”
    “They can, but they’ve passed all the diagnostics,” the technician said. “For my money, they’re working fine, ma’am.”
    Baxter didn’t know what to make of that. “Okay. Do you think the quakes pose a threat to the base?”
    “Oh, no. I wouldn’t say that. I just want to make sure someone in the command group is aware of them, that’s all. I would usually just log it and let it go, but since it’s a pretty repetitive event,” the technician pointed at one of the graphics on his workstation display, which showed a bar chart of tectonic occurrences over the past few days, “it seems like this is info you might want to look at for yourself, ma’am.”
    “Ah. All right, then. Forward the data to my station. I’ll look it over.”
    Rosen pressed a button. “Done, ma’am.”
    “Thanks.”
    Baxter walked back to her station and slid into the high-backed chair. Her shift was over in ten minutes, and she would hand over the task of overseeing base operations to a junior officer while she knocked off for a straight eight. Just the same, she called up the tremor readings on her workstation and reviewed the graphs and the baseline assessment Rosen had conducted. Seismology was certainly not her forte, but the fact was Harmony had been positioned in western Kansas because the area was thought to be tectonically stable. Even if it wasn’t, the base had been designed to survive a near-miss ground strike from a nuclear warhead in the forty megaton range, so she wasn’t very concerned about earthquakes.
    She bundled up the data and forwarded it to General Benchley. This was something he should know about.
    ***
    Andrews sat at the small dining table in his quarters, drinking a cup of coffee. Rachel was in the shower, and he heard the water splashing across her body as she prepared