There was no school that day. Perigee day. The day the moon made its closest approach to Earth. Samantha allowed Lily to have a lie in, therefore, but she herself was too full of nervous energy to stay in bed. She rose, therefore, showered, got dressed and went downstairs to get herself some breakfast. The television turned itself on as she went down the stairs. The man on the news channel was still talking about the moon, of course. It seemed there was nothing else happening in the world right now. All human civilisation was holding its breath as It waited to see what the moon would do to the world.

There was another science expert in the television studio with the host, trying to make educated guesses about how the Chinese mass dampener could possibly work. Samantha didn't bother trying to follow what he was saying. It knew it would be completely beyond her ability to understand. She was, or had been, as astronomer, not a physicist, and so she went to the window instead to look at the sunrise.

It appeared at first to be a completely normal morning. The sun was there, right where it was supposed to be. Just appearing above the roofs of the other houses in her street. The sky was a cold, icy blue, almost cloudless, but there was something up above that was no cloud. She couldn’t see it very well from inside the house, and so she opened the door to the conservatory and went out to see it through the glass roof.

It was cold in the conservatory, so she closed the door behind her to keep the air from chilling the whole house. Then she looked up. Most of the snow that had covered the conservatory's glass roof had melted enough for it to slip off and fall to the ground, giving her an unobstructed view upwards. The moon was there, just as she had known it would be. Impossibly huge, over six times its normal size. It would be there all day, almost directly overhead as the rotation of the Earth followed its passage above. The sun would rise and set, it would pass behind the moon an hour or so after midday and then it would set again while the moon remained fixed in place, even moving backwards a little during the five or six hours of its very closest approach.

It was hanging above the world as if suspended by a thread like the Sword of Damocles. Its fat crescent shape even made it look a little like a sword, and the resemblance would grow as the sun moved towards it and the crescent thinned. It was almost completely circled by a golden halo where the sunlight was scattered by its atmosphere. That halo would grow as the crescent thinned, she knew, until the two narrow horns of light on its dark side met to form a complete halo of fire surrounding a circle of darkness. Night would fall as the sun was temporarily hidden, and it would be twenty five minutes before it reappeared on the moon's other side.

It was a breathtaking sight, awesome and wonderful and terrifying all at the same time. As she watched, the fiery atmosphere expanded outward as the Chinese device nullified the moon's mass, and geysers fountained upwards as magma, just below the surface, found itself no longer constrained by the moon's gravity. She stared at it as if hypnotised, as if she were watching all the angels of God singing above her. She stared until she saw the golden halo thinning and contracting again, saw the geysers of magma stopping as if someone a had turned off a tap. The Chinese had turned off their device for another five minutes, to give the moon a chance to recover before they turned it back on again.

She suddenly felt a wave of fear sweeping over her and went back into the main part of the house. She didn’t want that hideous, swollen moon glaring down at her. She wanted to feel safe. She wanted to feel that her daughter was safe. The moon was a reminder that unknown forces could sweep away the familiar, comfortable world they lived in at any moment and she was nowhere ready to face up to that right now. She wanted to hide from it, to go back to bed, pull the covers up over her head and pretend that it wasn’t happening, that everything was still the way it used to be.

She felt lonely and scared, and suddenly found herself craving the company of another human being, even if it was her daughter, the person she was supposed to be giving comfort to, not taking it from. She went to the base of the stairs. “Lily!” she called. “Come on! Time to be up!” A mumbled noise came drifting back down, telling her that her daughter was awake, at least, if not quite ready to face the world yet. Samantha knew exactly how she felt.

Something to eat would calm her down, she thought, so she went into the kitchen to get herself some muesli. She changed channel while she ate, wanting to think about something other than the moon for little while. She found an old episode of a comedy show and watched it as she spooned the cereal into her mouth. Then she went into the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea. The comedy programme followed her onto the kitchen television, and then back into the living room as she took the steaming cup back in.

After several minutes, though, she felt compelled to turn back to the news channel. Her curiosity was getting the better of her. There were momentous things happening in the world. Terrible, disastrous things, it was true, but momentous all the same and she felt the need to keep in touch. As soon as she changed channel, though, it was obvious that something had changed. The tone of the voices coming from the television was different. They suddenly sounded worried, uncertain. She sat forward in her chair in sudden anxiety.

“...can’t be certain what's gone wrong yet,” the science expert was saying, a hand to his ear as if he was listening to someone over an invisible earpiece. There was a message scrolling across the bottom of the screen, though. Chinese Lunar Rescue mission in trouble. “We don't yet know if this is just a temporary glitch or something more serious. For those just tuning in, the Chinese mass dampener device has stopped working. We are getting reports from all over the country, and from all over the world, that waters are rising all the way to the expected twenty metre mark. Anyone who remained in their homes, thinking the a Chinese device would make it safe to stay, are urged to evacuate as soon as possible.”

They were safe, Samantha told herself. Their house was well out of the danger area. They had plenty of food, plenty of power. They were almost alone, though. Almost everyone else in their street had gone, and in most of the surrounding streets as well. They might be the only two human beings left within half a mile. She realised that her heart was pounding, and her whole body trembling with nervous fear. She suddenly needed to see for herself that her daughter was safe, and so she ran up the stairs and threw open the bedroom door without knocking.

The only part of her daughter visible was a tangle of black hair on the pillow. Then a pale face looked up at the sound of the door opening. “Mummy?”

Samantha threw back the bedsheets and picked her up, hugging her to her chest. The familiar softness of her skin under the pyjamas and the smell of her hair made her feel much better immediately. She put her nose to Lily’s hair and breathed in deeply, feeling it restoring her calmness and self control. The little girl squirmed in her arms. “What is it, Mummy? What's wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong, Baby,” she said, forcing herself to lay the girl back down on the bed. “Mommy’s just being silly.” She smoothed Lilly’s hair down, then held her hands in both of hers. She suddenly found herself taking delight in every smallest feature of the little girl's body. The tendons in her neck, her tiny fingernails. Her tiny little button nose. Her fingers drank in the feel of Lily’s soft little hands like a parched desert soaking up water. She never wanted to let her go.

“Time to get up now, Sweetheart,” she said, forcing herself to let go of her daughter's hands and backing away to the door. “Are you getting up now, sugarpie?”

“Okay, Mummy.” Lily was staring at her in alarm, and Samantha smiled to reassure her. “Is everything all right?”

“Everything’s fine. See you downstairs in a minute.”

“Okay, Mummy.” Samantha smiled again, left and closed the door behind her.

☆☆☆

“The Chinese device has stopped working,” said Richard Lewis, joining the others in the common room.

“Stopped working?” said Cathy, looking up. She, Margaret, Hazel and Len were sitting in the comfy armchairs along with some of the other residents of the housing block. One of them, she’d been delighted to find, was an old school friend, Rebecca Golding. She was there with her wife Lynne and their one year old toddlers. They'd both been inseminated at the same time and had themselves induced on the same day to make their children, Samuel and Sarah, twins. They'd been swapping baby stories when Richard came in.

“They're not sure if the device itself has broken down or if it's a communication problem,” Richard said as he took the seat next to his wife. “Whatever it is, though, it seems the tides will be just as high as they always said they would be.”

“Our house is fourteen metres above sea level,” said Rebecca to Cathy, looking worried. “We were hoping it would escape the floods.”

“It's just bricks and mortar,” her wife said, reaching out to take her hand. “Everything important is right here!” She pointed to their two children, crawling around on the floor, playing with squeaky toys.

“You're right,” said Lynne, squeezing her hand back. “And it's all insured.”

“I'm not sure we can count on insurance payouts,” said Len, though. “Half the country will be claiming at the same time. There's no way they can cover it. They'll almost certainly declare that damage caused by the moon isn't covered.”

“We specifically made sure that flooding is covered by our policy!” said Lynne, though. “We live close to a river, the town's flooded before so we made sure.”

“Flooding caused by rainfall, maybe,” said Len, “But not this. Not because they're evil and want to cheat you but because they just can't. They just don't have the money.”

“He's right,” said Richard. “There won't be any insurance.”

“But we’ve put everything into it! All our savings... We just spent fifty thousand on an extension for a bedroom for the kids!”

“Doesn't matter,” said Rebecca, giving her hand another squeeze. “Like I said, everything that matters is right here."

Lynne nodded glumly and looked down at the children, who seemed to be wrestling each other. The girl was winning and was sitting on the boy's chest. The boy didn't seem to mind, though, and was sucking on the girl’s tee shirt.

Across the room from them, two elderly men laughed together at something one of them had just said. A couple of seats away from them, an elderly woman was sitting by herself looking lonely. Helen was sitting next to her, trying to keep her company. There were two dozen other families currently staying in this housing block, but they hadn’t seen any sign of them yet except for the occasional glimpse and a word of hello as they passed one or another of them in the corridor. They seemed content to stay in their own apartments. Strange, thought Cathy as she shifted Timmy in her arms. You'd think they’d treat it as an unexpected holiday, and one of the best parts of a holiday was meeting new people.

“So what will the a Chinese do?” asked Len. “Can they fix it?”

“The bloke on the telly said they were sending it different commands to try to wake it up,” said Richard, “but he didn't sound optimistic. This is brand new technology, he said. Cutting edge stuff. It’s only to be expected that there are problems with it. Give it twenty years to work the bugs out and it'll be fine, but until then...”

“The moon forced them to try a new invention before it was really ready,” said Len. “They probably knew it wouldn’t work but thought it worth a try nonetheless. Gotta respect them for that, I suppose.”

“I wonder if Dad will be involved? He's up there right now, and they've got a shuttle. Maybe they’ll be asked to fly over to the Long March and try to fix it.”

“Do they know enough about it to diagnose a fault and fix it?”

“The Chinamen might. Maybe they just need someone to pilot the shuttle.”

“Can your dad pilot a shuttle? I thought Benny was the pilot.”

“Then maybe he'll pilot them over there.” He looked up at the ceiling. “The moon must be pretty much at its closest by now.” Richard went over to the big double doors that led out into the small garden and struggled with the bolts until he got one of them open. A breath of cold air came wafting in. The garden was overgrown and unkempt but Richard didn’t care about the plants. He was looking upwards and the others heard him gasp with amazement at what he saw. Len went out to join him, and the two elderly gentlemen followed. “Bloody hell!” one of them said. “Now that's a sight and a half!”

“It sure is,” said Richard. “Come take a look at this, Cath!”

“I've seen it,” she replied. “I don't want to see it again.”

“It's awesome! It's like... Like...”

“I know what it's like. I went out on the balcony and saw it.”

“What about you, Mum?”

Margaret also declined the offer, and Richard saw that there was fear on her face, and on the face of his wife as well. This wasn't like the northern lights or a meteor shower, he realised. This object hanging in the sky above them was going to kill a lot of people. Probably had already. Also, it was too cold to be outside in casual indoor clothing. He and Len came back in again, therefore, leaving the two elderly men to continue staring up at the moon, muttering awed comments to each other.

“Anywhere close to a fault line must be having earthquakes by now,” said Richard. “California, Japan, South America...” He fished his phone out of his pocket and brought up a news app.

“No, please don't!” said Cathy. “Isn't it bad enough that these things are happening without us seeing it as mere entertainment?”

“Of course it's not entertainment,” her husband replied. “I just want to keep in touch. If I'm going to protect you and Timmy I need to know what's going on.”

A voice came from the phone. A man's agitated, alarmed voice reading a list of places. Cathy stared at him, though, her eyes pleading, and Richard stared back. Then, reluctantly, he turned the phone off and put it back in his pocket. Cathy beamed gratefully at him.

From outside came the sound of aircraft engines warming up. Something big. Aircraft had been taking off and landing almost continually since their arrival. Richard had speculated that they were transporting relief supplies to the refugee camps, while Len had wondered whether they were carrying goods across the channel until sea travel became possible once more. Most things could wait a few days until the moon had passed on and the seas settled down, but there were some things, medicines for example, that had a very limited shelf life and had to be gotten from the factories that made them to the people who needed them very quickly.

Timmy began crying and Cathy checked him to see if he needed changing. He didn't, which meant he probably wanted feeding. She looked into the small handbag she'd brought with her and cursed quietly. “I left his bottle upstairs!” She said. She'd expressed some milk for him that morning and left it in the cooler.

“I'll go get it,” said Richard.

“No, don’t worry.” She looked at the two elderly gentlemen, visible through the windows in the doors, and wondered if they’d be offended. Bugger them if they are, she decided. She undid the buttons of her blouse, took out a breast and lifted the baby until he latched on to it. Rebecca and Lynne looked across, smiling, then returned to their own conversation. Cathy rocked him a little as he sucked contentedly.

We are so lucky, she thought as Richard and Len started talking about aircraft. The refugee camps are still only half built. They're trying to house and feed thousands of people displaced from the coast and they're still trying to find enough tents for them all. Many of them are probably sleeping in their cars. We, on the other hand, have comfy apartments with guaranteed supplies of food and water and armed guards to make sure looters don't try to take what we’ve got. And all because Paul got picked to be an astronaut! She wondered where they’d be now if her father in law hadn’t been so lucky. Probably huddled in one of those camps, she thought. Wondering whether the authorities would be able to find enough food to feed them all. When a consignment of food did come in, there would probably be an undignified scramble as fathers tried to get some for their families. The soldiers would have to threaten them with force to keep order. We, on the other hand, can just get what we need from the food and supply depot. She beamed with delight that everyone she loved was safe and gave thanks once again for the extraordinary stroke of luck that had made it possible. In her arms, little Timothy continued to suck and gurgle happily while, outside, the sound of aircraft engines got louder as it prepared to take off.

☆☆☆

If Paul Lewis had happened to be looking out through a window in the space station as it passed overhead, the world he saw would scarcely have been recognisable. Huge areas of eastern England and western Europe were under water. Lincolnshire had been turned into an island, completely cut off from the mainland. Cambridgeshire was almost entirely under water, as was Huntingdonshire, Rutland and Nottinghamshire. Cambridge, Peterborough and Kings Lynne were flooded, and water surged through the Humber Valley to flood vast tracks of Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and South Yorkshire. On the west coast, sea water gushed into the Mersey, Dee and Severn valleys, flooding tracts of land five kilometres wide, while on the south coast Portsmouth and Southampton were under water. Even where the waters failed to penetrate inland, the lower parts of coastal towns and cities were swept away as waves crashed against buildings that had never been designed to take that kind of punishment.

In the south east, the Thames Estuary now stretched from Canterbury to Brightlingsea and the river was five kilometres wide as far inland as Windsor. Water flecked with salty foam lapped against the walls of Windsor Castle, and Eton College found itself on the waterside. A few miles further east, Westminster was entirely flooded, and waves lapped against the tallest buildings, including the clock tower of Big Ben, as if they were sandcastles about to be carried away by the rising tide.

Across the Irish sea, most of the island of Ireland was protected by steeply rising coastlines so that only coastal towns were flooded, but the Atlantic gushed into the Galway, Limerick and Conn valleys, poisoning the sweet waters of the south eastern lakes with briny salt. In the north, Londonderry and Belfast were flooded, and floodwaters gushed along the Bann Valley towards Laugh Neagh. Ireland's largest lake was saved from salt poisoning, though, by the ridge of high land on which the Portglenone forest stood, and locals stood, staring in astonishment as the clear, blue waters of the Lower River Bann met the frothing, foaming floodwaters and stopped them in their tracks.

Across the English Channel, the west coast of Europe suffered the worst flooding of all. The Netherlands were almost completely flooded. Virtually the entire population of the country had been forced to flee, east to Germany or south to France. Four frigates and four coastal patrol craft were cruising back and forth across the flooded country, watching out for opportunistic divers out to take advantage of the crisis to loot the country's national treasures. Only the most reckless of thieves would have dared to try, though, as the waters were surging across the country with deadly speed and the ships were forced to run their engines at maximum to avoid being run aground.

The Mediterranean was spared a disaster on a similar scale. It just wasn’t a large enough body of water to experience tides. Montpellier suffered some flooding, but only experienced a sea level rise of around five metres. Still disastrously high compared to what had been known before, but nothing compared to what the Atlantic coast was experiencing. Cherbourg, as well as being half flooded, was cut off from the rest of France as a long, narrow tongue of floodwater turned the peninsula into a temporary island. Seawater poured inland along every river, vastly swelling them in size and inundating towns and villages up to a hundred kilometres from the coast. The worst damage suffered by France was south of Brittany, around the Bay of Biscay, though. The cities of La Rochelle, Rochefort, the Olonne region and the entire Ile de Oleron disappeared beneath the waves, and only half of the city of Bordeaux was left high and dry.

Spain and Portugal were only marginally affected, as the land rose rapidly from the coast, but a torrent of sea water gushed in along the river Tagus to flood an area a hundred kilometres long and twenty wide. So violent was the inundation that those parts of Lisbon too close to the river were not just flooded, they were totally destroyed, swept away by the wildly rushing waters.

The European countries were wealthy, though, and had the resources to cope with these disasters. The first time around, anyway, although repeated flooding over the years to come would gradually empty their coffers. The countries of the west coast of Africa were already virtually penniless, though, and particularly the countries between Mauritania and Sierra Leone, where the flooding was worst and which also had the misfortune to be suffering stormy weather. The governments of those countries had done what they could to warn their people, but many of them hadn't believed the warnings and had stayed in their homes, only leaving at last as the waters actually began to pour inland. It hadn't been a gentle rising of the waters, as the rising of the tide usually was. It was more like a tsunami, with the waters rising with terrifying speed and irresistible force and raised up into giant, crashing waves by the wind. The people of the coastal towns and cities fled before it, a panicked stampede in which many were killed in the rush or in the collapse of buildings totally incapable of withstanding the onslaught.

The almost penniless governments had been unable to house and feed these people, and so they were left huddling miserably in crowds in the higher cities and townships, scrounging for food wherever they could and frequently driven to theft in their desperation to feed their families. The governments were driven to extreme measures to maintain law and order, and hundreds were shot on the spot or rounded up and placed in fenced enclosures with no food, no sanitary facilities and no healthcare. The refugees, who in some of the smaller river countries formed the bulk of the population, rebelled and fought back. In Liberia the fragile government collapsed completely, and Sierra Leone survived only by such a use of force that it led to hundreds of prosecutions of police and army officers in the weeks and months that followed.

The people living the other side of the Atlantic weren't as badly affected this time around. The seas in their part of the world were only rising between five and ten metres, although that was still enough to turn Miami into a forest of tall buildings rising from the waters and make the Everglades entirely disappear. The rest of the east coast was turned into an archipelago of small islands for up to fifty kilometres inland as the seas poured in. Norfolk and Virginia beach were flooded. So was half of the city of Philadelphia. In New York, Long Beach, Kennedy Airport and East Rockaway were flooded, and so was a ten kilometre wide stretch straddling the Hackensack River. Liberty Island disappeared beneath the waves, but Lady Liberty watched it all with stoic indifference from atop her high plinth while she waited for the waters to subside again.

A tidal bore rushed inland along the Potomac, its momentum carrying it even further inland when it reached the centre of Washington. Waves washed against the walls of the Capitol building and even the White House itself, but then they withdrew, doing no more damage than to leave sand and seaweed high and dry on the perfectly maintained grass lawns. They wouldn’t be so lucky in twenty seven days time, though. The next time the moon passed by, it would be directly overhead during perigee and the American east coast would suffer the full twenty metres of flooding.

The American west coast suffered no flooding at all this time around, although its time would come during some future perigee. It did suffer earthquakes, though, along with many other places located on fault lines across the world. Low Angeles suffered the long awaited ‘Big One’, but rode it out with comparatively little damage. The city had been preparing for it for decades, and virtually every building was designed to cope. Roads and bridges were damaged, though, and gas mains burst, causing disruption to the city's business costing billions even though there was almost no loss of life. If the earthquake had been an isolated event the city might have moved on from it and forgotten it fairly quickly, but another big earthquake was expected to strike the next time the moon passed by, and again and again. Every twenty seven days. Forever. Even the superbly earthquake resistant buildings of Los Angeles would eventually collapse under that kind of continual assault, and the American government was already making plans for the permanent evacuation of the entire west coast.

To add to the injury, the United States suffered no fewer than twenty volcanic eruptions that day, the most serious being Mount Kilauea in Hawaii. Mount St Helens also erupted, along with Washington’s Mount and Mount Rainier. Clouds of ash and smoke rose to blanket the country, and other volcanoes around the world followed suit to create the most intensive and extensive bout of volcanic activity in human history. Over the weeks and months to come, the ash and smoke would spread to cover the whole world, blocking out enough sunlight to plunge the world into a volcanic winter that would last several years. The centres of every continent would be frozen and snowbound, to the horror of the people living there who were currently congratulating themselves on being safely far away from the flooding.

Off the coast of Denmark, a massive undersea earthquake lifted an area of sea bed a hundred kilometres long by thirty kilometres wide. People all across England and Scandinavia felt the tremble, but they thought nothing of it as they, along with everyone around the world, had been feeling similar tremors all day long as the moon pulled mercilessly on the Earth’s crust. This one was different, though. The rising of the sea bed displaced enough water to cause a tsunami over fifty metres high that raced across the North Sea towards the already flooded east coast of England...