Countdown Amageddon (The Spiral Slayers Book 2)

by Rusty Williamson

  De Bella had felt dizzy with fear and disbelief. Resign? No.

  Wicker turned his back to him and said, “Please remove him,” and the security guards had yanked him around and dragged him from the office.

  De Bella did not remember the drive back to the Congress Building. The next thing he remembered was being pushed into his office. The Speaker of the House had been there. With a smirk, he had shoved a box into De Bella’s hands. “Pack up your personal belongings. That’s all you take, nothing more. You have ten minutes.”

  They had then left, leaving the door open. De Bella closed it then phoned his attorney.

  “Francis, I’m sorry but you know if you do not resign Wicker will fire you and that will look so much worse. You’ll never recover. He’s doing you a favor allowing you to resign. You can say it’s for any reason...your health would probably be best. It allows you to start over with a clean slate.”

  De Bella had known his attorney was correct. Still he slammed the phone down, hanging up on him. He looked around his office. In time, they would pay dearly for this. Time, that most precious commodity, was on his side now.

  Finally, he took only one thing; the antique wall clock.

  He returned to the present, turned from the window, and looked at that same antique wall clock now. The second hand clicked to 6:30 a.m.. How was he going to be able to wait all day?

  He watched until the minute hand clicked over to the next marker.

  ---

  Through the vines at the end of the cave, a faint orange light could be seen. The fire had finally been put out and, at that time, it seemed the fire had cleared out the trees well enough. The sun was coming up now and with only about three hours sleep, he got out of his sleeping bag, sat down, and peered through the eight-inch scope for a better look.

  He groaned. They were already at work repairing the damage and now blocking much of the view he needed were several large machines. He saw that they were pulling up the burnt tree stumps and he brightened. With luck, pulling up the stumps should be completed by this afternoon, leaving him the view he needed.

  ---

  The orange dwarf Iceis turned the marble capitol building a deep orange as it peaked above the Eastern horizon, igniting the scattered clouds in fiery oranges and reds.

  The wind picked up, causing an eerie moan to come from one of the windows in President Wicker’s office. The Capitol Building was over 300 years old.

  He glanced up from his desk, shook his head and refocused on the large display screen that was the top of his desk. If a person didn’t know, they’d think that the display was only the 8x10 inch area in front of the President for he kept the rest of the desk display blacked out—it helped him focus on one thing at a time.

  The current item made him angry. It was another message from De Bella. Repeatedly the ex-congressman had offered his ‘expertise’—of which he had none—in dealing with the ‘aliens’, the word he still used when referring to the Loud. He was tired of answering and so he just tapped the RTS (Return to Sender) key. The next item came up.

  Upon seeing what it was, he tilted his head back, closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He looked back down and moaned.

  The window moaned again like an echo and again he glanced up. This time he noticed the clock in his peripheral vision and jumped. “Shit.”

  He quickly got up and grabbed his coat. He glanced down at his next item and smiled. “Sorry, got to go,” and blacked out his desk display.

  ---

  Adamarus was at the coffee station pouring a cup. He turned, smiled, and said “Morning, Patrick.”

  With a matching grin, Leewood nodded. “Morning.”

  Adamarus heard footsteps and talking behind Leewood in the hall and turned in time to see Dr. Harrington, Captain Radin, Professor Woodworth, Jan Anderson, General Burnwall and Dr. Evelyn Eden enter the conference room. Hellos and pleasantries were exchanged as they got coffee and took seats at the conference table.

  Everyone turned when they heard the clank, clank, clank of Bugs’ avatar entering. It said, “Hello, everyone,” and sat down between Adamarus and Woodworth.

  Woodworth looked strangely at Bugs, “Something’s different about you.”

  Adamarus looked the avatar over and noticed it did look different—there were two small black bumps on its head, which weren’t there before, as well as what looked like a tiny vent on each shoulder.

  Bugs noticed everyone looking at him and simply said, “Upgrades.”

  At that moment, President Wicker rushed in through the rear door that led to the Presidential Office. He was carrying a box. Everyone moved to stand and Wicker waved a hand and said, “As you were,” as he took his seat at the head of the table.

  Wicker looked around at each face and said, “Who knows what day it is?”

  “Day 200?” Adamarus asked.

  “Bingo,” Wicker said, pointing at Maximus. “Unless the Blackship changes its current course or deceleration, two hundred years from today, it will enter orbit around Amular.” He looked around the table again then pulled a small black case out of the box then passed the box to his left to Evelyn. “Please pass this around, each of you take one.” He held up the small black case. “Go ahead and open it. Bugs, I did not think you needed one.”

  Bugs said nothing.

  The box was passed around. Inside the small black case was a watch with hands telling the time and a window showing the date but also three other windows labeled ‘YEARS’, ‘MONTHS’ and ‘DAYS’. The years read 200, the months and days each contained zero.

  “Self explanatory, I would think,” the president said. He took his PDA from his coat pocket and worked with it for a minute. “Okay, let’s see what we have...ah, our friend De Bella sent us another offer. I RTS’d it.”

  Bugs leaned toward Adamarus and whispered, “RTS?”

  Adamarus whispered back, “Stands for ‘return to sender’.”

  Bugs nodded.

  The president found what he wanted then held his PDA up for all to see. The screen showed a list of their next assignments—Leewood had sent it to the president. “Now, I presume that each of you knows what comes next, where you’re going and what you need to do. This will be kind of a brainstorming session on each of your assignments as well as some other important stuff going on...”

  ---

  The meeting lasted all morning, lunch was brought in and they finally wrapped up around 3:00 p.m.. Wicker walked them to the rear door. “Good luck people...and remember if you need me for anything, call my direct line.” Then he used the Loud’s standard farewell again. “Probability fold in your favor,” and with that he turned on his heel and left them.

  Burnwall, Radin, Jan and Woodworth waved to their friends then walked down the hall toward the motor pool. Leewood held the door open for Adamarus, Evelyn, Bugs and Harrington and they all stepped outside, blinking at the bright daylight.

  Evelyn said, “What a beautiful day.”

  Leewood put on his sunglasses, extended an arm and said, “Shall we?”

  Everyone started down the switchback walkway leading down to the helicopter pads. The blades on one of the helicopters had started turning.

  Adamarus gestured beyond the landing pads, looked over at Evelyn who walked beside him and said, “I guess that’s the fire we saw.”

  The burned area extended for 30 feet along a 20-foot stretch inside the chain link fence. Workers were raking up the ashes.

  Evelyn asked, “Wonder how it started?”

  Behind her Harrington said, “I heard they thought it was a careless smoker.”

  Evelyn nodded, “You can see all the way to the space port.”

  Leewood looked out in that direction and his brows furrowed. Vague alarms went off in his head and his eyes started scanning his surroundings.

  Chapter Two – The Assassin

  “To be blessed with meeting a friendly interstellar neighbor, access to their advanced technology and be given immortality freeing us f
rom sickness and death—only to be cursed with almost certain and complete extinction in two hundred years. And, to have to spend every minute of what little time we have left preparing for a hopeless battle…what a cruel joke the universe has played on us.”

  Admiral Adamarus Maximus

  Extract Personal Log

  Source: The Archive

  Axis, the Capital City of the Iceis Star System

  Showtime, Aaron Towers thought. He’d been waiting all day in the gun seat, the gun loaded and ready to go and the scope focused on that distant rear door. Twice before, the motion sensor he had turned on had sounded false alarms, but the third time was the charm. There they were—all of them.

  Aaron watched as they started down the switch back ramp. He set the cross hairs on Adamarus’ head and switched on tracking. The software detected the head and began following it.

  Aaron did not know whom the woman was walking beside Adamarus, but from his elevated angle, he’d get both of them—their heads would explode, their brains mixing.

  He saw the Loud avatar and ignored it. There were 30 some avatars working with Amular, and they’d become a common sight on the news feeds.

  He planned his moves. First, he’d take out Adamarus plus the unknown woman—sorry about that—then he would move the cross hairs to Harrington and pop her. Finally, he’d move to Leewood and pop him. Leewood was military. He would probably have the quickest reactions. Should he take him out first? No, he was set up on Adamarus and that’s the order in which he’d take them out.

  He placed his finger on the firing button.

  ---

  Adamarus’ forehead creased. A very uneasy feeling had come over him. He glanced at Evelyn striding beside him, remembering their brief shared attraction out at the Hideaway Shipyards. Absolutely nothing had happened but he was blaming his current uneasiness on the guilt and awkwardness he still felt. You are an idiot, he thought.

  “Have you heard from Brandon?” he asked.

  Evelyn turned and started to answer but she never got the words out.

  ---

  There was no wind. The air was still and it was a day when the impossible could happen.

  Aaron briefly thought of what the gun had done to the melons he’d used for targets during testing. They had completely disintegrated.

  Out of years of habit, he took a steadying breath—completely unneeded with the computerized gun—breathe in then halfway out and...his finger pushed down on the button.

  Even with the noise suppresser, the sound of the blast inside the cave was horrific.

  The gun jerked back, hydraulic rails extended, the gun assembly sprang back four feet, absorbing the recoil and ejecting the spent cartridge, then rebounded into position loading the next shell.

  Aaron watched the flat screen and as expected, for an instant, he saw the shell speeding away. His finger was already on the rollerball, preparing to switch to Harrington as soon as he saw the expected explosion of red mist.

  The sub-sonic shell sped across the three miles to its target.

  ---

  The Loud avatars had some capabilities and features that the humans did not know about. One was the material used in their construction, an alloy that was far stronger than anything the humans had. In addition, the avatars had far more power than the humans suspected. On top of this, the motion of the avatar could be computer controlled, making them incredibly fast and precise.

  Now there was even more to the short robot-like avatars.

  The Loud had made a decision after the disaster at the Hideaway Shipyards during the Counsel of War. If Bugs’ avatar had had more situational awareness, it could have mitigated the damage done by Van Loader’s sky dive from the top of the atrium’s 1,000-foot ceiling and his headfirst crash into the main conference table, subsequently killing the two heads of Amular’s most prominent shipyards.

  Instead, Bugs’ avatar hadn’t even located Van Loader until the scientist hit the conference table. If it had, it might have saved the two shipyard executives and perhaps even Van Loader himself.

  So Bug’s avatar had received upgrades. Ergo, the small changes noticed earlier by Woodworth and Adamarus.

  To increase the avatar’s situational awareness, the Loud had equipped it with two sub-nite detection hemispheres and, to operate and monitor these, four more Loud support staff had been added to the dozen already in place. Thus two highly sensitive domes now surrounded the avatar—one with a 150-yard diameter (75 yards from the avatar) and one with a 400-yard diameter (200 yards from the avatar).

  Nanite were molecular level machines. A-nite were atomic level machines and sub-nite were sub-atomic machines. One sub-nite could not do very much, but the billions that made up the two hemispheric swarms could. Combined, they detected all radiation and sound waves out to a five-mile radius. Moreover, the sub-nite could pass right though solids like buildings and walls. In addition to this was the enhancement and filtering of this data by the Loud’s molecular computers and AI systems.

  The outer sub-nite dome detected the heat plume from the gun and then detected the incoming shell. The trajectory of the shell was determined and showed that it would impact both Adamarus and Evelyn. Loud AI systems then worked out the precise actions needed to counter the threat.

  ---

  When Harrington saw it happen, she was immediately reminded of something that had happened to her as a child. She had seen what a mousetrap did to mice and rats. Not caring for this horrible fate for the cute little critters, when she had found a mousetrap in the garage one day, she had decided to move it. She knew how it worked so she was very careful—she figured should she trigger it; she could move her fingers out of the way before the steel bar snapped close.

  What she remembered was that the steel bar moved so fast that her eyes could not see it move. There was just a loud noise and then instant pain as two of her fingers were broken.

  In her peripheral vision, Bugs could be seen in the lower left walking along with the group. There had been a soft popping sound, then, a lot like the mouse trap, Bugs had seemed to just vanish and reappear in the upper right of her vision in midair about eight feet away. Seemingly, at the same time, she had been assaulted by an extremely loud bang and then Bugs had suddenly appeared ten feet away and in front of Adamarus and Evelyn.

  ---

  Bugs—the actual alien back in the ship controlling the avatar—relinquished control and the Loud’s computers took over the movement of the avatar.

  The avatar’s feet snapped downward against the cement with incredible force, launching the avatar at high velocity to an exact position in the air—about eight feet away from Adamarus’ head and between it and the incoming shell.

  At the same time, one of the avatar’s manipulators—what it used for hands—closed just right to form a short cylinder with just the right diameter and placed itself in the precise position and alignment, at exactly the right fraction of a second for the shell to enter this small tube. Its other manipulator slammed the opposite end of the tube at the specific speed needed to propel and lob the shell back to its approximate point of origin. The impact of the shell knocked the avatar back ten feet, but the avatar’s rapid motion and trajectory forced it to one side thereby missing Adamarus and landing in front of Evelyn. All of this happened so fast that all anyone saw was a blur.

  Back in the Loud Umbrella ship, Bugs took back control of the avatar and, with the volume turned up, said, “We’re taking fire, everyone down.”

  ---

  Back in the cave, Aaron did not see the expected burst of red mist. Instead, he saw something that looked like a blur of metal then he saw his target still standing. After a couple of seconds, he saw everyone dropping for cover.

  However, he had no time to assimilate this fact as seconds later, on this windless day, the impossible happened—the shell actually reentered the cave by arcing downward through the top edge of the roof then struck the rear of the gun, hitting the hydronic recoiling and reloading sys
tem. This exploded, hurling dozens of metal fragments about the cave. One entered Aaron’s head, ricocheting back and forth inside his skull, the result being the same as someone placing his brain in a blender. Aaron Tower died instantly.

  ---

  Except for Bugs, all of them were on the ground doing their best to hide behind the meager two-foot wall running along the side of the walkway.

  Leewood shouted to Bugs, “What the hell just happened?”

  Bugs replied, “We were fired upon, Admiral. The shell would have hit both Adamarus’ and Evelyn’s heads. I had to intercept it.”

  Evelyn gasped.

  Adamarus’ mouth fell open.

  Leewood asked in disbelief, “You intercepted it?”

  Bugs was still standing looking off into the distance. “It was close, but yes.”

  Adamarus asked, “Are you okay?”

  Bugs held out his manipulators and looked at them. The left one was now frozen in a fist, though this was hard to tell—it was badly mangled, blackened and still smoking. The right one was frozen open—the palm having a deep dent that extended out the back. “Repairable,” was all Bugs said.

  Adamarus asked, “What happened to the bullet?”

  Bugs turned to Adamarus and said, “RTS.”

  Adamarus looked at him, confused, “RTS?”

  Bugs was again looking in the direction that the bullet had come from, “Return to sender.”

  Adamarus blinked.

  Security guards burst from the door they had just exited at the top of the ramp and rushed toward them.

  Bugs said, “I can detect the shooter—at least I hope it’s the shooter.”

  Trying to judge where Bugs could be looking, Adamarus asked, “On the spaceport cliff?”

  “On the side of it, a little below the top,” Bugs said. “The body is cooling rapidly. The returned shell must have killed him…or her.”