Terminal Reset Omnibus: The Coming of The Wave

by A. E. Williams

  Chapter Nine

  "Only the wisest and stupidest of men never change."

  -- Confucius

  “Power never takes a back step - only in the face of more power.”

  -- Malcolm X

  “Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power.”

  -- Seneca

  BUCKSPORT, MAINE

  The General lay dying. His breathing was labored, when he could actually gasp anything into his withered lungs. He caught himself blacking out and hallucinating. He saw people he knew were long dead. He saw places outside the bay windows of his mansion that were impossible. He saw battlefields and the canals of Venice, the shores of pristine beaches, and the dank jungles he roamed with impunity. He could smell gunpowder, and shit, and the savory odors of roasted beef, and taste heady liqueurs, wine, the finest spirits, and the foulest bitter tastes imaginable. He was dying and knew it.

  This, he thought, must be what all men go through when they have the luxury of having enough time to die peacefully. No wonder people believed in heaven and hell. The General would have preferred a less ignominious death – one where he was not drowning in his own mucus while he pissed and shit himself. Anger began to well up in him again. He looked over to see his niece standing next to him, eyes wide, and – was that fear? What was she afraid of? Him?

  The General, angry at his daughter for having left this girl to see him cough his last breath and turn blue, to shake and buck and strangle in his own snot, to gag and retch and finally shit himself that one ultimate time, stood up next to his bed. He felt a strange sensation, lasting several minutes, as he stood motionless and looked at the little girl.

  He was so angry that the girl should have had to see him die like that. What on Earth was his daughter thinking?

  He walked over to the little girl to comfort her, to assure her that she not need be afraid of him.

  He took her small hand in his and stroked her hair. Tears were streaming down her face, her mouth wide in disbelief and horror. He cooed to her.

  “Now, now,” he began, “There is nothing to worry about, sweetheart.”

  “Your mother will be back soon, and then you will be taken away from this horrible sight. I can’t wonder what that woman was thinking to leave you here with …” “DAD!” the little girl screamed. “Dad! Dad! Dad! What happened?”

  The General knew that the girl’s father was dead. Beyond all doubt. Why was she screaming for him? He noticed that his niece had been playing dress-up, apparently. Her clothes were much too big for her small frame, and the high-heeled shoes on her feet were at strange angles. Funny, those shoes were Manolo Blahnik’s, and he knew they cost a small fortune. He thought his niece was most assuredly going to catch hell for playing with something so valuable.

  “Dad! What happened to you? How did you get that way? What the hell is happening?” cried the girl. She kicked off the shoes, and looked at her feet, then her hands. She put her hands on her face. The General thought she appeared like that kid from that one movie, the one where he missed the plane to France. That dumb movie. What kind of family has that little awareness of the whereabouts of their children? Morons. Cretins. Would have served all of them right to have died on that plane, to have had it shot out of the sky by terrorists. Then that boy might have had a chance to become a real man.

  “DAD!” the girl screamed, looking like the Edvard Munch painting, again. “I’m sorry, honey. I’m not your father. He died…” he began again and stopped.

  Was he hallucinating? Was this Death’s final joke on him? That he would go out of existence as a moronic cretin himself, believing all manner of phantasms, drooling his last essence of life onto a moist pillow as he lost the remnants of his intellect? “Fuck them all,” he thought.

  The General stood very still, and the girl next to him had stopped screaming. She was looking at the tubes that were still attached to him.

  She looked at the monitoring instruments, which were showing readouts indicative of a healthy, almost fiftyish man in prime condition. He turned to follow her gaze, and comprehension dawned.

  He was standing. The gown was barely covering his nakedness, and he could feel the breaths he took filling his lungs with pure air, the oxygen tube now lying on the floor, the hole in his throat gone. As if it never existed. He could hear perfectly. See perfectly. He felt the cold floor underneath his feet. The noises that the medical monitors made were rhythmic and steady.

  His blood pressure showed at 110/50. His heart rate was 65. His temperature was slightly elevated, at 99 degrees Fahrenheit.

  He turned around to face the bed. It was stained with urine, sputum, and the feces his body had been expelling in its extremis. The tubes that had been running through his veins were hanging limply, and he suddenly looked at the pillow. Scattered on the pillow, like coins, were small bits of metal, some golden, some silver in color. He noticed some pins and screws where his hips had been, and a few metal rods where he had placed his left leg.

  The General had been wounded many times. In three cases, the shrapnel had remained inside him, wrapped in scar tissue. He looked now at the area where he had lain, and noticed, approximately where his right shoulder had been, the copper sheen of a 9mm full metal jacketed bullet. He had taken the bullet, and two others, from a rebel’s subgun burst in Angola. His returning shot from his M-16 had blown the man’s head completely apart. He remembered, as if it were only minutes ago, looking at his hands, covered with his blood, as he had stuffed clotting agent into the two more serious holes the subgun had made. He remembered that he had spent a few weeks in recuperation and that he had been angered to be out of the action.

  He walked into the bathroom, suddenly needing to urinate.

  He looked in the mirror at a face he had last seen forty years ago. He smiled. He understood. He knew.

  He was back.

  He, like Douglas MacArthur, had returned.

  He called to his daughter.

  “Monica, dear. I don’t want you to be afraid. Daddy’s here and everything is going to be fine.”

  The General pissed into the porcelain bowl, laughing at the top of his now restored lungs.

  *****

  CAMP DAVID

  The massive explosion in the Capitol was creating major havoc with communications all along the Eastern Seaboard. There were rumors that Atlanta was also under attack, but the information was sketchy. Some strange information was coming from Europe, but it was unrelated to the attack on Washington, D.C.

  Adding to the confusion, communications worldwide were being disrupted, including many of the supposedly secret or dark internets. Military communications were back to RF, VLF, and HAARP. There was no explanation for why these seemingly hardened conduits were suddenly going black.

  There was talk of EMP blasts along with whatever had happened to DC. Scattered reports were consistent in that a series of explosions were heard in Virginia, Maryland, and even as far as Pittsburgh and New York City.

  For all of its vaunted redundancy, the Internet was not fulfilling its promise. Apparently, major routers from Akamai on down to local ISPs were being DDOS’ed, either from traffic redirection or from the effects of the bomb in Washington, DC. Efforts were underway to clear the lines of SIPRNET and NIPRNET, but even the Navy and Air Force were undergoing some manner of cyber-attacks. The data supported advanced threats emanating from China and North Korea, but there was also a considerable amount of chatter indicating England, New Zealand, and Iceland were participating. Even the Minimum Essential Emergency Communications Network (MEECN) satellites were experiencing intermittent communications errors, and four of the main satellites were offline. SPARTACUS at JPL had been notified and was working on restoring the system.

  Some of the SPARTACUS scientists were speculating that the EMP events were the cause of the communications breakdowns but were reminded that many systems were explicitly protected, and even some timeworn equipment that was always kept on standby were inexplicably experiencing th
e same symptoms. Although the upgraded KH style surveillance satellites were hardened against many forms of radiation and charged particle attacks, even they were affected. Additionally, many devices and other systems that would have been affected by an EMP were still functional. It was as if someone had drawn a curtain over the world’s ability to speak to each other.

  The President was reviewing the latest video feeds from the Martian site, again sequestered in a room where almost everyone was smoking. It had been clear from the earlier recordings that Mars was a dead planet; the life forms that had been there prior to The Wave were gone.

  Watching the scene unfold again was jarring.

  The President took a puff of his cigarette as The Wave’s leading edge had apparently passed over Mars, and it was evident that something was happening only because the video static had stopped. Roughly seven minutes passed, and there was no sign of anything living on Mars. The animals had simply disintegrated. The rocky outcroppings and the areas around The Kimberly were slightly changed in color, but nothing significant could be discerned by that. There was no visible light or any effect that could be seen, even with infrared, ultraviolet and x-ray filters used by the various cameras on Curiosity.

  The President slumped back in his chair. The weight of his office bore down upon him heavily, and he sagged with the realization that even as he sat there, nuclear death was heading towards billions of people. He keyed up another Curiosity transmission, almost bored by the endless view of a red, lifeless desert. His gaze fixated on a mound of dirt, a clod of some Martian muck, which he now knew mankind would never see in person.

  Suddenly, he noticed movement in the background. “Bishop! Repeat that last thirty second clip!” he ordered. The clip was replayed. “Loop it,” said the President.

  For the next several minutes, he and the others watched and enhanced the image. They scanned other versions of the data tapes to see if they had made an error in what they were observing. Collaborative data was added and removed, color schemes were changed to see if there were more resolution to be gained.

  “Can we get anything more recent, or a different angle?” the President asked. “We can move the Curiosity closer,” began the Chief Scientist, “but that will take over an hour before…” “Do it,” commanded the President. “See if we can find anything else that shows any evidence.” “Yes, sir.”

  The President took a long pull on his cigarette.

  He was disheveled, his usually immaculate blue suit rumpled with the emotional burden he had carried since the launch codes had been authorized almost fifteen minutes prior.

  In ten minutes, there would be no way to avert nuclear Armageddon. The President sat down hard, his loose tie swaying against his white shirt. He yanked at it and tugged it over his head.

  The President thought for a moment and took a decision.

  “Recall orders. Do it now!” he barked.

  “But sir, we already have final launch indications on sixteen devices,” said one of the Generals. “I don’t care what you have to do, stop them. Something else is going on. I am not sure what happened in DC, but I am sure it wasn’t the Russians,” said the President. “Get me eyes on DC immediately. I don’t care what kind – sat, Navy flyovers, some fucking YouTube videos someone put up from a goddamn iPhone, just do it!”

  The President hoped he was not compounding one grave error with another. Something had indeed destroyed Washington, DC. There was not one shred of doubt about that. The data implied Russian bombs, but that might not have meant it was actually them, in spite of their recent saber-rattling and adventurism into the Ukraine. Putin was not a man to take lightly, but he did not seem irrational. At least, not the last time they had talked.

  He commanded some other functionaries regarding the specifics of the recall orders and tried to get one of them to communicate with Putin. A line was being set up, although the only truly reliable method was 1200 baud modems using the POTS system.

  The President was not at all happy regarding the fact that on Mars, there was at least one shlorg still alive.

  It meant they had been wrong.

  And if they had made that error, it was likely that other countries would also have made the same mistake. Which would have logically led to the conclusion that, with nothing left to lose, they could implement plans for a war that were unthinkable given the prevailing political winds.

  Desperate men, in desperate times, could always be counted on to do desperate things.

  *****

  SOMEWHERE TWO MILES BELOW THE SURFACE OF THE PACIFIC OCEAN –

  The Captain swore under his breath as he decoded the Emergency Action Message, received via Very Low Frequency. The launch codes were finally being issued. He had been waiting patiently, ever since receiving the last transmission. He did not know the exact parameters, but he did recognize the grave nature of being ordered to move off the coast of China.

  The Captain ordered Jonesy and Specks to the bridge to go through the PAL procedures. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I have a coded command message, code Aleph-One Zero Four Two. Please verify.”

  The Captain handed his XO the message. Jonesy scanned it and then handed it to Specks. “Captain,” said Jonesy, “I concur the command code is Aleph-One Zero Four Two. Mr. Thompson, will you please verify?”

  A bead of sweat stood out on Specks’ forehead.

  “Hoo boy,” he muttered. Then, “Sorry, sirs.” Specks took a moment to read the transmission, and then said “The command code is Aleph-One Zero Four Two. Gentlemen, we have a valid message.” “I concur, authenticate the message,” said the Captain. The Radio Officer sent a coded transmission out via the ELF to the National Military Command Center, indicating that the transmission was received and authenticated.

  The next phase of the procedure was to set the vessel up for the launch sequence. General quarters were sounded and the whole crew prepared for the launches. Since the crews had practiced for this scenario repeatedly, the actual work went rapidly. A flurry of activity happened all over the submarine as men moved to their assigned stations and began to follow their checklists. Headsets were donned, and clipboards carried from zone to zone as the men prepared for war.

  Jonesy issued the commands for the submarine to proceed to launch depth and to navigate to the launch area. The Weapons Officer, Grady, watched the process, checking off items on his clipboard and managing the crew as they worked to get the missile guidance system configured correctly. “Weps,” said the XO, “I need you to begin the code entry sequence for the PAL’s.” Grady went to a safe, along with another Weapons Officer. He spun the combination lock and opened the door. “Opening,” he said. An alarm began beeping as he retrieved the keys from inside the safe, and then closed the door. They walked over to a covered console that had two padlocks on it. Grady stood next to a padlock, and, taking a key from a chain around his neck, inserted it, and turned it, opening the lock. He removed the padlock and set it on the desk. The other Weapons Officer repeated the procedure. Jonesy then opened the console cover and entered a series of numbers from the message he had been given by the Captain. Next, Specks walked over and entered a series of numbers from a small credit-card sized piece of plastic. The console beeped four times, and two sets of readouts went from red to green. Grady then began entering codes into the console. Each time he completed a series, he pressed two buttons.

  Upon the first button being pressed, a numbered display would change color from red to yellow. He repeated the process twenty-four times. When he was finished, he was sweating a bit and looked nervous. “Weapons armed, Captain,” he said. “Launchers ready.”

  The Captain then went to the console and entered a final series of numbers twenty-four times. Each time, as he finished entering the codes, he pressed an “Enter” key.

  The yellow readout changed to a green color. When he had finally completed, he stood away from the console.

  “Depth?” he asked. “One-three-zero feet, Captain,” said the pilot. “Spec
ks?” asked the Captain. “Yes sir, the depth is one-three-zero feet,” said the Navigator. “Speed?” asked the Captain. “We’re hovering, Captain,” said the XO. “Bearing?” Jonesy said. “Heading three-five-five, sir,” said Specks. “Captain, we are ready to fire,” said Jonesy.

  “Weapons con, you have permission to fire,” said the Captain. He stood watching a video screen that showed a cross-hair in the center of it. It looked back along the submarine towards the stern of the boat. He could see the hatches were opening on Tube One.

  Grady took a red handled trigger assembly and plugged it into a DTL-38999 connector next to the first illuminated number on the console. He flicked a switch on the handle, and a green light lit, indicating a good connection. Saying a prayer under his breath, he said “Tube One, Launch!” and squeezed the trigger.

  The submarine was filled with a hissing noise, and an alarm sounded. The hissing changed to a loud bump, and the Captain saw the first missile emerging from its tube in a cloud of bubbles.

  Suddenly, there was another alarm, and the Captain looked over at the XO. “Incoming transmission sir, ELF channel four-Bravo,” said the Radio Officer. “Jonesy?” said the Captain.

  “I’m on it, sir” he replied. Jonesy ran over to the radio station and began decrypting the message. The Captain watched and sipped at his coffee.

  “Sir?” asked Grady. “Weapons con, you still have permission to fire,” said the Captain. Grady unplugged the trigger and then moved it to the next illuminated number.

  Number one was now red, indicating an empty tube. He again flicked the test switch, noted it was green, and said “Tube Two, Launch!” as he pulled the trigger. The hissing and bump were repeated.

  “XO, I believe you may have a message for me,” said the Captain, dryly, as Grady launched the third missile. “Yes, sir, I will have it in one min…” began the XO.

  The Sonar station lit up and the sonarmen began calling out coordinates. “Unknown surface contact, bearing two five four, twenty knots and closing,” said one. “Signature is of a Lanzhou-class destroyer, sir,” said another. “Range fifty miles.” “We have another contact, bearing two zero three, sir. Range thirty-four miles, twenty-two knots and closing”. “Third contact received, sir.” “Signature of contact two is a Lanzhou-class destroyer, sir.” “Third contact is submerged vessel, Shang-class attack submarine, according to signature, bearing one eight eight degrees, sir.” “Battle stations!” cried the XO. Red lights and alarms came on all over the boat, as men began checking instrumentation and going into defense mode. “Sir, the surface antenna is picking up transmissions from helicopter chatter,” said the Radio Officer.