Mother of Storms Read Online Free Page B

and warms up ice that’s just below the freezing point, releasing methane. Moreover, as the clathrates dissolve they trigger landslides and collapses under the sea.
    Now, clathrates are delicate molecules. They’re big but there are no strong bonds in them, and it doesn’t take much more than a hard rap to
break them up, letting the water molecules regroup into plain ice … and the methane escape.
    Tonight the seabed is alive with avalanches, collapses, and pressure waves. Methane deposited across thousands of years is bubbling up from all over, making its way up to the surface of the Arctic Ocean, finding the countless rents and breaks in the ice. Within eighteen hours, the fifty-footdeep clathrate beds stretching along the outer edge of the North Slope, about sixty-five miles wide and running more than four hundred miles under the sea, are in collapse.
    Methane is a greenhouse gas, and the quantity of methane released, in a matter of a few days, is 173 billion metric tons. That’s just about nineteen times what’s in the atmosphere in 2028, or thirty-seven times what’s in the atmosphere in 1992.
     
     
    Diogenes Callare gets Jesse’s call and has to say he doesn’t know anything yet. He’s glad to see, via the little screen, that the kid is driving a Lectrajeep out into the Arizona desert, and that there’s a cute little brown-haired chick beside him.
    They chat a little, and Jesse says hi to the kids as he always does; Jesse is six-year-old Mark’s favorite uncle, but Nahum, who is three, doesn’t always remember who he is.
    When Di has talked with Jesse and assured him that no one yet knows what the detectable consequences of the cram bombs in the Arctic seabed might be, he takes some time to look around his living room, at the kids and in through the lighted doorway to where Lori is still working. Life is pretty good. The furniture is decent looking and goes together, he’s reasonably in love with Lori, the kids seem to be at the intelligent end of normal, and this place—on the Carolina Coast zipline, only forty-five minutes from his job in Washington, but a comfortable couple of hundred miles away from the big city itself—is big and could easily pass for a real instead of a duplicate Victorian.
    He’s doing pretty well, what the old man would call Getting On In The World. He wonders for an instant if the old man still talks to Jesse in capitals. Probably not. Di and his brother practically had different fathers, the dogmatic tyrant who raised Di somehow having faded into the crusty old character who raised Jesse.
    Di goes in to play with Mark a bit more before the next bedtime; it still seems strange to have young kids awake when it’s close to midnight, but he has to admit that the new way of doing things, with kids taking a lot of long naps that either he or Lori share with them, does seem to make for happier and less frustrated children. They are putting up a block house, not
very successfully because Mark finds it more fun to knock things over. But since Di fundamentally enjoys building block houses and watching Mark knock them down, it’s a good partnership.
    “What was up with Jesse?” Lori asks, passing through on her way to the coffeemaker. She’s currently at work on The Slaughterer in Yellow, the sixth of her very popular “spectrum series” of books about the Slaughterer, the serial murderer who finishes every book by framing the detective. Her success does not account for their having a house here—Di’s job at NOAA took care of that—but it does account for the fitted hardwood and the extra-large bedrooms.
    “Oh, he and his muffin of the month are worrying about Rivera’s taking out the Siberian missiles. Not that it’s not something to worry about, but the current muffin is a political muffin, so they’re worrying about it more than normal kids would.”
    “Not the best muffin it could be, then,” Lori says, grinning. “Good thing all you wanted in a muffin was a good