by Ellis, Don
“Raedawn,” he finally managed to croak, “Japan is sinking!”
2
Raedawn looked back at her own monitors. “Holy shit, you’re right. But that flash you saw wasn’t in Japan. That was the Svobodnyy nuclear power plant in eastern Russia.”
“Power plants can’t blow up,” David protested.
“They can if they’re running at supercritical to breed weapons-grade plutonium.”
“Shit.” He knew the Neo-Soviets were arming for war, but he hadn’t realized the extent of their treaty violations.
“There goes another one.”
David saw another flash to the northwest of the first. Eastern Siberia was going to be a radioactive nightmare for years to come.
But Japan was even worse off. Tidal waves washed in from either side, nearly meeting in the middle, even though the mountains were thousands of meters high.
“Well, what’s your theory about this thing?” Her voice broke a little. “I didn’t call you down here to gawk at the screens.”
“I don’t have much of one,” David said. “I think it’s getting its energy from zero-point fluctuations, but where it came from and what it’s doing here are still total mysteries.”
She looked at the monitors again, then back at David. “Zero-point what?”
“It’s the energy in free space,” he said, grateful for her question. He might be helpless to do anything for Earth at the moment, but maybe by understanding how the mysterious nebula worked he might eventually help send it back where it came from. He tried to ignore his horror at so much devastation and just concentrate on the science.
“I think the cloud is somehow tapping into the zero-point field for power. That’s why it’s so dark; that’s actually energy-depleted space we’re seeing. The anomaly is using zero-point energy just to exist, which means it’s got a temporary deficit to make up, so it’s actually sucking in anything that touches it. Light, matter, it doesn’t care. Anything to balance the books again.”
“Is this fact, or theory?” she asked.
“Theory,” he admitted. “But a damn good one. It fits everything I’ve seen so far.”
“Uh-huh. Where did it come from?”
He scratched his head and frowned. “That’s probably a meaningless question. It’s sort of like the Big Bang. It just happened. Space got tangled up somehow and there it was.”
She tapped one of her screens, one that showed the Moon wrapped up like a ball of string in the inky black tendrils. “Tangled up is right, but it had to come from somewhere, didn’t it?”
“Not really. Imagine a rip in a blanket. Where does that come from? Not from outside the blanket. But it’s not part of the blanket, either. Think of it that way.”
“What’s inside the hole?”
“That might be a meaningless question, too. But then again, maybe not.” David turned back to his controls and accessed the NORAD space radar, then waited for the data to fill in.
It was a long wait. Finally, after thirty seconds or so, he realized that microwaves were no better at penetrating the anomaly than light was.
“We may have to send probes in,” he said. He looked up at her, saw her looking at him oddly, and said, “What?”
“Are you going to let that thing vibrate all day?”
“Huh?”
“Your communicator. I can see the light flashing from here.”
“Oh.” David had been so absorbed in trying to think through his ideas that he hadn’t noticed. He slid the device off his belt and thumbed it on. “Hutchins,” he said.
“Where the hell have you been, Captain?” It was Colonel Kuranda. “I’ve been trying to get hold of you for over a minute.”
“Sorry, sir. I was busy. I assume you know what’s happening on Earth.”
“Of course I know. That’s why I’ve been trying to reach you. It’s time to attack.”
“Attack, sir? Attack what?”
“What do you think? The Neo-Sovs, man! Even if Earth survives this, they’re not going to be sending us any supply ships. And it’ll be a while before we’re even close to self-sufficient. Without that, we’ll need the Neo-Sovs’ infrastructure. We’ve got to hit them now.”
David had to close his mouth, but he opened it right back up again a moment later. “Attack the Neo-Soviets? But, sir, they outnumber us a hundred to one. We’re only four squads and we’ve barely gotten set up. I thought our mission was to infiltrate and sabotage their colonies, not go charging in with lasers blazing.”
“That was before this . . . this thing hit Earth. The entire picture has changed now.”
The colonel was right about that, but David had a hard time believing that meant everyone should start killing one another. Kuranda always seemed too ready to fight, but he was in command of the Mars expedition, and his word was law.
Despite David’s reservations about the general’s command style, this mission had been his only ticket to Mars. The challenge of setting up a colony here had excited him, even if they had to do it from hiding. As far as he was concerned, Mars was big enough for everyone. David had often thought that what the two sides needed was a common enemy. An external threat that would force them to cooperate for everyone’s survival.
Adam Kuranda, on the other hand, had been looking for action since the moment they’d landed. He’d booby-trapped and completely obliterated a Neo-Sov patrol at the head of the Valles Marineris shortly after touchdown, and he and his men were just itching to do it again.
“We still don’t have enough manpower for an all-out attack,” David said. “You might be able to take Pavonis or Tithonium, but they’d just take it back. Or bomb it from orbit. Either way our colony would be right back where we started, except that all of you would be dead.”
“Thank you for your assessment, Captain Hutchins.” Kuranda didn’t appreciate being contradicted. “However, I only called to notify you in case something goes awry. We can’t just sit on our butts and let our only opportunity evaporate. We attack Tithonium Base within the hour. We’ll wipe it clean of troops and withdraw with everything we can carry before the Neo-Sovs can retaliate.”
“Dumb strategy,” David muttered, though he hadn’t meant to speak aloud.
He could almost hear the veins popping out on Kuranda’s balding head. “I didn’t ask for your input, Hutchins. Stay here and learn as much as you can about that thing that hit Earth. If anything happens that might change our strategic position, I want to know about it immediately. Is that clear?”
“Absolutely, Colonel. And what do we do with your bodies if the Neo-Sovs are kind enough to let us recover them?”
“Good luck to you, too, Captain Hutchins. Out.”
David turned to meet Raedawn’s quizzical expression. “Well, looks like Kuranda got his wish—an opportunity to kick some butt by attacking Tithonium.”
Raedawn nodded. She’d served with the colonel for some time and knew all about his hotheadedness.
“The upside is that either way they’ll solve the consumables problem,” she said. “If they all go off and get themselves killed, that’ll leave only ten of us and a whole base-load of food and recycling equipment. That could keep the few of us going indefinitely.”
The notion of playing Adam and Eve with Raedawn held a certain morbid attraction. David had fantasized about it before, for about two seconds at a time. That’s all it took before reality kicked in. If he ever made any kind of romantic advance, she would no doubt ridicule him mercilessly and probably emasculate him in his sleep as well. He’d sooner cohabit with a porcupine.
He didn’t really think it would come to that anyway. If Kuranda and his troops got themselves killed, David and the others could always return to Earth.
Provided that swirling black menace from nowhere left anything to go back to. The images from orbit blinked out one by one as satellites died in collisions with its dark tendrils, and ground transmissions grew weaker as the tortured ionosphere filtered out all but the strongest signals. While the footsteps o
f running soldiers echoed down the lava tube outside and faded into nothing, David and Raedawn were reduced to watching events unfold through the Deimos telescope feed.
They patched sixteen screens together in a 4-by-4 matrix and expanded the view to fill them, then sat and silently watched the destruction. If David let himself think about what he was seeing, the horror of it nearly overwhelmed him, so he found himself noting the unnatural beauty of it instead. Clouds raced across the surface as energy discharges pumped cyclonic winds to jet-stream speeds, and lightning bolts danced from pole to pole, short-circuiting the entire planet’s magnetic field and letting aurorae flicker all the way down to the equator. Dormant volcanoes blew. The observatories atop Mauna Kea were now metal and glass vapor in the stratosphere, and Mt. Fuji had lost the top half of its majestic triangular peak as well.
“Jesus,” he whispered, repeating it like a mantra as he gradually took in the magnitude of what was happening to humanity.
“I don’t think Jesus has much to do with this,” Raedawn said, her voice uncharacteristically soft as well.
“I was speaking metaphorically.”
“Yeah, right.”
Raedawn turned back to the screen, and so did he. It looked like space had been stirred with a broken stick, scratching and swirling it into a multihued mess of darkness and light. As they watched, the image drifted to the left.
“We must have hit the scope’s limit of travel,” he said. Deimos kept one face toward Mars, but that meant it rotated with respect to the heavens. Earth must be on the horizon from the telescope’s point of view.
Raedawn tapped on one of the loose screens on her desk, looked at the readout, then said, “No, it’s still got twenty-eight degrees to go. It claims it’s still locked on to Earth.”
“Let me see that.” David took the screen from her and examined the numbers. Right ascension and declination were expressed in solar coordinates. He felt the hair on the back of his neck stand straight up again. “Oh shit,” he whispered.
“What?”
“It’s tracking the calculated position.”
“So?”
“So that means it’s the Earth that’s moving.”
3
The cloud was clearly drawing both Earth and Moon into its grip. David couldn’t detect any gravitational effects as far out as Mars, but that didn’t mean anything. There was enough loose energy out there to distort space and affect the local gravity gradient. And the tendrils that whipped back and forth across it could be providing impetus, too.
He wondered for a moment if the thing could be alive and consciously devouring planets. Maybe once it was done with Earth and Luna, it would come for Mars and Venus and Mercury as well. He gave that about ten seconds of heart-pounding speculation, then dismissed it from his mind. If that were true, there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it. Besides, Occam’s razor said otherwise. This thing was way outside the realm of human experience, but it wasn’t doing anything that couldn’t be accounted for by physical laws alone. There was no need to invoke a life force to explain it.
Unfortunately, he couldn’t think of any way to stop it, either. As the radio signals faded, he directed the telescope to follow the Earth’s actual position, but he gained no clues about how to resist it.
Both he and Raedawn fell silent as the doomed planet slipped deeper into the darkness. There were no words strong enough to express the horror of watching their home, and the home of billions of others, being dragged into oblivion.
In a surprisingly short time, it disappeared from sight. The Moon lingered a moment longer, then its gray surface grew darker, as if it were being eclipsed one final time. At last it was gone as well, and all that remained was the roiling black cloud.
“What do we do?” Raedawn whispered.
“I have no idea.” David reached out one hand, suddenly needing to touch someone, anyone, even her, just to reaffirm his humanity.
But she looked away to check for any last signals from Earth, and he lowered his hand.
“I should tell Kuranda,” he said.
She nodded. Neither of them wanted to acknowledge how pointless it would be.
David used his commlink, and even so had to wait a few seconds before the call was connected due to the scrambling and encryption.
“Kuranda.”
“Hutchins. Bad news. Earth has completely disappeared.”
“Disappeared how? Obscured by the cloud?”
“More like sucked into it. I don’t think it’ll be coming out the other side, either.”
There was a long silence, then, “Understood. This is it, then. We’re on our own.”
“Right in one, Colonel.”
“Don’t worry. We’ll get what we need to survive.”
David shook his head, a useless gesture over the comm. “That’s not what I meant. Don’t you think we’d be better off trying to cooperate?”
“With the Neo-Soviets? The only thing that’d get us would be a knife in the back.”
“How do you—”
“Got to go. We’re almost there. Wish us luck. Out.”
“Luck,” David said. He thumbed off the communicator and attached it back onto his belt. Wishing the colonel luck was all he could do to help Kuranda.
Earth he couldn’t help at all, but he could at least keep an eye on its killer.
Raedawn hadn’t moved. She was still watching the telescope feed, which continued tracking Earth’s last-known position. Now it showed only a black splotch against the lesser darkness of space. She wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“Nobody came out.”
“What?”
“Nobody escaped.”
David hadn’t been thinking that far ahead. Now that he did, that seemed very strange. “Nobody? Not from the entire planet?”
“Nope. A couple of ships tried it, but they got sucked in just like everybody else.”
“Ships, too! What the hell is that thing?” he muttered. To pull in a spaceship, it would have to exert four or five gees of force. That force had to be something other than gravity, because it hadn’t pulled Earth that hard. Had it done so, the planet would have broken up like a comet too close to the Sun.
That was a clue. He didn’t know what it meant yet, but he would add it to the gigabytes of data he’d already recorded. You never knew what would prove useful in understanding something. That was the nature of research. You observed everything, and with luck and enough data it all eventually made sense.
Of course, it was all academic in this case, unless the cloud did come for Mars now that it had swallowed Earth. He kept checking its position, but it remained where it was. If anything, it was moving slowly away. Or was it shrinking?
He picked up a loose data screen and called up the Helios XII satellite again. It couldn’t provide him with as accurate a reading as an Earth satellite, but he could still get a magnetometer reading from it, though whether he could believe it was anybody’s guess. According to the satellite, the intruder was now pouring out more magnetic energy than the Sun.
It was definitely shrinking, too.
“Plasma,” he said.
Raedawn looked over at him. “What about it?”
“I think it’s made of plasma,” he said without looking up from the data screen. “Ionized gas so energetic that the positive and negative charges exist side by side in kind of a particle soup. Plasmas are highly sensitive to magnetic fields, and they can also create huge fields when they’re in motion.”
“Will knowing that help get Earth back out of there?”
He looked up at her, surprised at her angry tone. “No,” he said. “I don’t think anything could do that. The only way we’ll get Earth back is if that thing spits it out again.”
“Then what good is all this?” She reached past him and picked up the screen he was looking at. “What difference does it make if it’s plasma or ectoplasm? Earth’s dead either way.”
/> “I want to know what killed it.”
“I want it back!” She snarled the word as if it were David’s fault her homeworld had disappeared.
“I want it back, too,” he said, “but we’re dealing with more energy than the Sun puts out. There’s nothing we can do to affect something on that scale.”
“Then knowing how it works is useless, isn’t it?”
“You don’t know what’s useless. Nobody does.” It was an instinctive response. All his life people had belittled him for being a technogeek, for preferring abstract knowledge to the real world, but again and again he’d found practical uses for that knowledge. The more he understood about the way the universe worked, the more he could manipulate its component parts. David couldn’t create another Big Bang, but knowing what had happened in the first nanoseconds of the universe’s life helped him understand how to tune a fusion reactor. And knowing what had swallowed up Earth might help him learn how to generate that same kind of power for a more practical use. Now more than ever, humanity would need every trick it could muster to survive.
And concentrating on the science kept him from dwelling on the destruction, which could easily turn him into a gibbering wreck if he let it. He couldn’t watch Earth get swallowed up by a rogue spatial anomaly and not feel something. He felt plenty; he just couldn’t afford to show it. Not now. Maybe not ever.
Raedawn didn’t hear all that rationale. All she heard was, “You don’t know what’s useless.” She stood up and flung the data screen to the floor, where it bounced once in the light gravity and spun around on one corner for a second before it landed facedown.
“I know you’re useless! You measure this and calculate that, but when it comes time to actually do something, you just sit back and watch it happen!” She clenched her fists, visibly struggling for control.
He scooted away and stood up himself. “Hey, I didn’t see you doing much, either, but I didn’t—”
“Damn you!”
“—accuse you of being a slacker. There’s nothing either one of us could have done.”
“Well, there should have been.”
