The Phoenix Project

by Kris Powers

  With the groundwork for their project finished, Elliot let out a long breath on the bridge of Joshua’s ship. They had been aboard for many hours now making the final preparations for Phoenix while junior officers had done their best to forward reports. With the last of their work done, they were able to monitor the evacuation.

  The Moon was now as lifeless as it had been a few centuries ago. The Central States were much the same with the exception of a few stubborn elderly people refusing to leave. As far as those last holdouts were concerned the government was trying to convince them that the sky was falling. Even now several choppers were stationed near their farms and houses. Representatives of the military were trying to remove them, by force if necessary, but they had barricaded themselves in their homes.

  The rest of the populations across the eighteen colonies seemed to be on the edge of one collective inhalation as the weapon closed in on the moon.

  Elliot left the couple at the captain’s chair and took up his accustomed position in the northwest corner of the battle—grey coloured bridge. Madison retained her place standing at Joshua’s left hand position as his first officer.

  “Sir,” a male officer said from the science station.

  “Yes Ensign,” Joshua replied.

  “The particle beam is now passing Mars. I estimate four minutes until it reaches the Moon.”

  Every person on the bridge stiffened at the statement. The entire atmosphere of the bridge had been tense for nearly fifty—two hours, but now the stress seemed to have become tangible.

  “Put it on the main monitor.”

  The large primary screen on the front wall of the bridge switched from a view of a star field interrupted by the distant sight of the moon to one with a long, thin emerald streak.

  “Magnify to maximum,” Madison commanded.

  The line of green became a blast of energy against the night sky of space. If not for the emerald hue, the weapon would’ve looked like a comet speeding into the solar system.

  “Four minutes,” Elliot said. Joshua turned his seat around to address the Admiral.

  “We got everyone out?”

  “There’s no one left on the Moon. The prairies are another story.”

  “We haven’t finished the evacuation?” Madison asked.

  “A few people are still in the target zone. They refuse to leave.”

  “Are they drunk?” Joshua asked.

  “No, they believe the angel of death will pass them over,” Elliot replied.

  “You mean the hard headed, stubborn kind of people.”

  “Those would be the ones,” Elliot said.

  “I should have asked if their parents were brother and sister.”

  “Helm,” Elliot said.

  “Yes Sir?”

  “Move the Endeavour and the rest of the Third Battle Group to a safe distance from the Moon and the target zone.”

  “Aye Sir.”

  The Third Battle Group moved to a higher orbit above Earth and farther away from Luna. The last dozen transports lifted off the surface to take their families to new homes in the solar system.

  Billions watched as a long and wide beam sped towards Earth’s satellite. Nadine heard the INN anchor’s voice rise in pitch as the weapon became a large round spot on the starlit monitor.

  “As you can see from our camera the weapon is now showing up quite large in the lunar sky. We estimate two minutes until impact.”

  Nadine could nearly feel the collective tension from colonies, ships, and stations across a thousand light years. She felt as though she was staring into an abyss as the beam grew larger on the screen.

  On a small farm near the Colorado border, a white—haired man objected as two soldiers escorted him off of his land. Charles Edward II had lived there since his father had died. No one was going to take him from those long green fields. At one hundred and twenty—seven he remembered his grandfather caring for these fields when he was just a boy.

  None of that mattered to the bastard communist soldiers pulling him through tall fields of wheat. He didn’t care if he damaged some of his perfect stalks as long as it prevented the men from kidnapping him.

  “You stupid bastards!” Charlie yelled and wrenched himself from the arms of people ninety years his junior. He turned back towards his barricaded house with a triumphant stride. They had managed to get him out of his home only after a full day of waiting outside with promises of food and water.

  “Mister Williams, we have orders to evacuate all Alliance citizens from the target zone. We have to get out of here, Sir. You’ve seen the news. You know what’s coming,” one of the officers said, rushing to catch up with him. He stopped in consternation and pleaded to the old man’s retreating back. “Please!”

  “I’ve been on this land since I was born. No one is taking me from it.”

  “Sir, Sir! This weapon is going to hit us any minute now. We’ve got to go!”

  “God damn you! Go save yourselves from your alien ray gun,” he said over his shoulder.

  Charlie thought up a better insult and turned around to confront his would be captors. He was startled to see that his fields were glowing green. The wheat stalks had gone from the slight browning prior to harvest to a nearly incandescent emerald. He raised a hand over his eyes to shield them from the setting sun and saw the same odd glow in the sky. To confirm what he thought he was seeing, he turned his attention to the soldiers who were also looking up into the sky.

  A long comet of energy was responsible for the change from a normal early evening sky to a strange sort of otherworldly twilight. It moved at incredible speeds and then became partially eclipsed by the Moon. They could hear what sounded like sonic booms from the disturbances caused by the weapon’s proximity to Earth as the beam crashed into the satellite’s surface.

  Charlie and the small cadre of soldiers stood in a hypnotic trance while they watched the dazzling performance. The beam continued to plough into the moon and the sonic booms dissipated into a still silence while all of the wildlife in the area stopped and listened.

  Charlie and the soldiers waited for a moment with their eyes fixed on the round giant in the sky. After a moment, they exhaled a long breath in relief. They were about to look away when they saw the Moon shatter. The weapon had vaporized much of the far side of the satellite but the resulting explosion from within forced the once great and whole satellite into billions of pieces. The remains of Luna glowed briefly as the weapon passed through its remnants. A strange daylight fell across the fields. It took only a second for the beam to travel the distance from the former location of the moon to Earth’s surface.

  Charlie and the remaining troops stood paralyzed in shock. Their terror mounted once they saw something bright and impossible strike the ground in the Black Hills lining the horizon.

  In that short moment they heard a great roar and the soil beneath them began to split. One of the younger soldiers no more than nineteen years of age ran in the opposite direction to a waiting helicopter. The rest of them felt the strong beat of warning in their hearts as they witnessed a great wave approaching them. The tall tsunami was not made of water but was composed of an emerald shock wave heading towards them at a phenomenal speed.

  Before Charlie or anyone else around him could recover, the blast wave hit his house with the force of a nuclear detonation. Charlie stood in awe of what annihilated him a moment later.

  The wave continued across America in an ever expanding circle. First, it shredded corn and wheat fields. Then it began to swallow entire towns. They disappeared in an instant while the shockwave gorged itself on the communities.

  Old cities were nearly blown down by great winds of hurricane force before the weapon even arrived. The very force it exerted on tectonic plates created massive earthquakes that felled many of the older buildings in dozens of metropolitan areas. Blowing debris smashed windows and pounded into the sides of buildings. Abandoned vehicles were picked up and tossed across great distances.

 
; After plenty of advance warning and only once it was at the apex of its fury, the blast was finally seen. The wave’s effect resembled old footage of nuclear testing. Cities simply disappeared; they were blown away by a great wind as if some Titan had exhaled a breath onto each city and town. Buildings collapsed or exploded as the wave met them. Highways saw lamppost after lamppost consumed while the weapon progressed across them.

  It was only after plowing through a diameter of one thousand miles of the Americas that the wave began to dissipate. It started out with a roar but lost energy and ended in a whisper five hundred miles from its center.

  The land was torn from the borders of Idaho to the edge of Lake Superior and from southern Saskatchewan to Northern Oklahoma. The entire surface of the Earth within its range had fallen below sea level. A great crater with a span of over one thousand miles had just become a reality within the heart of the United States. Small pieces of rocky land jutted out across the wide depression. Waterfalls from rivers that had once flowed through majestic valleys and across wide plains began to pour into the great depression in the earth. It would take many days for it to fill.

  The effect the energy weapon would have on Earth was debated from the moment it was discovered. Scientists quickly came to the conclusion that the effects of an energy weapon of this magnitude would not have the same impact as a meteor or comet strike. The effects of an impact from an object with mass would have been devastating to both the Moon and Earth.

  Scholars and experts came to a conclusion within hours that the weapon would leave an impact crater on the surface of the Earth. However, it would not create a nuclear winter or any other widely catastrophic side effects. They calculated that it would vaporize massive volumes of land rather than expel it into the atmosphere.

  The greater concern was for the possibility of lunar debris destroying the Earth. Due to the distance from Earth and the debris’ speed, the Coalition/Alliance forces were able to either destroy or fracture any threatening meteors with time to spare.

  Why Did Lucifer Kiss Softly?

  by Lauren White

  Chapter V

  Elliot vented his frustration with a hard click to the remote in his right hand. The INN’s news anchor disappeared from the screen as did his supposedly objective views. They had reported the loss of the Central States with a great deal of sympathy for a full day before starting reports of the Alliance’s vulnerability to outside attacks from aliens.

  They seemed to be looking for sensationalized headlines to boost their ratings and it had worked. Their viewership remained as high as it was during the Moon Crisis. Now words like “Alien Attack” and “Impending Threat from Extra—Terrestrials!” had become bolded words across the bottom of the screen.

  Millions of refugees had been deposited on Earth, Mars and the outer colonies stretching the local government’s resources to absorb them. Somehow the INN had gotten hold of classified documents and reported the Alliance Fleet’s shortcomings in the near future.

  A destroyed satellite and a big crater seemed reason enough to remove the Alliance and allow the Coalition to reign unopposed. Of course those opinions came from INN reporters and critics well paid by “anonymous” donors.

  From what the news had reported as a footnote to their daily political attacks on the Alliance, the crater had begun to fill with water from rivers that had once flowed through the area. They had come up with three finalists for a name for the emerging body of water. The “American Sea” was by far the most popular in public opinion and was likely to be the moniker for the new geological feature.

  He heard a signal beep from his screen. Elliot acknowledged it with a vocal command. The view of the giant crater in the Earth changed to Joshua’s face on the bridge of his ship.

  “Josh,” Elliot said, thinking of the captain’s location two decks away. “Why didn’t you just come down?”

  “Sorry Eli, we’re a little busy up here with the cleanup efforts. We’re still blowing up Moon garbage.”

  “What’s your progress?” Elliot asked.

  “Most of it’s gone now. I’ve got to admit that it’s been a little easier than I thought it’d be. That blast blew the Moon to tiny pieces.”

  “Tiny?”

  “Relatively speaking, I guess,” Joshua said. “Most of what we had to do was just make big pieces into little pieces. The rest is starting to settle into orbit.”

  “That still must be a bit of a problem with pieces of the moon everywhere.”

  “We’re taking care of that with the Grav beams. Earth is going to have a ring around it.”

  “And all this time, I thought Grav beams were used to tow ships around. A ring sounds nice though,” Elliot said.

  “Considering what we lost getting it, I want the Moon back.”

  “So why the call, Josh?”

  “I’ve got orders from HQ for you and your underlings.”

  “I’m glad the slaves are doing their job,” Elliot said.

  “Just doing my best for my master. I’ll read it to you, hold on,” Joshua paused for a second as he brought up the correct page on his link. “To Admiral Elliot Fredericks and his staff: The Horizon Project has been shelved indefinitely. Admiral Maria Peterson has been reassigned to command of the Second Battle Group. Admiral Elliot Fredericks is ordered to continue the Phoenix Project to its full conclusion. Engineering crews are ready to assemble the required base within one standard month with the completion of said project within three. Choose base site ASAP. End of orders.”

  “Wow.”

  “I know.”

  “Yeah, you sounded like a professional when you read that,” Elliot said.

  “Thanks, Admiral. They installed my cement pond yesterday.”

  “And your indoor plumbing?”

  “I’ll talk to you later,” Joshua paused with a smile on his face. “Elitist.”

  Elliot snorted and turned off the screen. He got up from the couch in his quarters and crossed to the dispenser. Elliot ordered a cup of coffee. The machine churned as it assembled his order, popping it out a few seconds later. He sipped at the coffee and thought of where a base to house the particle warhead should go. It would have to be in a secluded location in case of any major incidents.

  He sat down and accessed maps of Earth. Outer colonies would not be an issue. The only way that this doomsday device would be taken seriously was if it was located on their home planet. It would act as proof that others could be constructed on every planet in the Colonized Sphere much as nuclear weapons had acted as a deterrent to war in the twentieth century. An involuntary shiver went through his shoulders as he realized how logically he was thinking for the placement of a super—weapon that was potentially devastating. For several hours he studied chart after chart. He was on his third cup of coffee when he began to realize just how much of a chore finding a remote area on Earth really was. Even with a reduced population of four billion, the planet still seemed crowded. How humanity ever coped with its record high of ten billion was a mystery to him.

  Elliot zoomed out of the worldwide map in frustration and looked at the representation of the Earth in its entirety. He then looked to the one place that he had assumed would be out of the question. The United States had just had a hole blown in it. Elliot’s eyes widened once he realized that the map hadn’t been updated yet.

  Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, were all still there on the map despite recent events. Elliot called up the latest satellite images and saw an opportunity that he hadn’t considered before. There was a large projection of land at the center of the crater, well above sea level and habitable. Although the parcel of land was barren, radiation levels were low and the surface area was in the range of fifty square miles. It had more than enough square footage to accommodate the base. There was even room for a landing area for shuttles. A cross—grid he imposed over the area confirmed his theory.

  He immediately opened a comm—link to his superiors. Fleet Admiral Nelson would have a fit when he heard Elliot’
s proposal but knew that he had no other choice but to accept.

  Nadine had never realized the advantage of being a mind reader until she became a diplomat. The advantage had secured her a place of respect within the Machiavellian order. The ambassadors had expected a green and stuffy general. Her abilities gave her a razor edge that shocked them into silence. They seemed afraid to make eye contact with her now to her gratification.

  Her government issued communications machine hummed to life from one corner of the room. It printed off direct orders from the military chief of staff. Nadine digested the news and accessed her communications program to talk with her counterpart in the Alliance.

  A gracious woman answered. “This is the Alliance Diplomatic Office. How may I help you?”

  “I need to speak with Ambassador Mary Bourgeois,” Nadine said.

  “Thank—you, please wait while I connect you.”

  The face of a member of the diplomatic elite appeared on the screen a moment later. The woman had the nearly elfin, well spoken look of a French descendant from North America. Nadine saw a veneer of concrete, but under it, she sensed fear.

  “General Nadine Hanover. I have heard of your courageous conquests in your new position. What can I do for you?”

  Nadine could feel fear exuding from every pore of the diplomat. “Thank—you, Ambassador. I need to speak with you regarding your military defenses.”

  She saw that she had the upper hand as Mary’s fears for what subject would be discussed became a reality.

  “Cut to the chase? Thank—you, Nadine. Far too many diplomats spew pretentious compliments before they bother to get to the subject. Please, call me Mary.”

  “Thank—you, Mary. Please, call me General.”

  Mary’s face fell for a moment. “Of course General, you are after all due some respect.”

  “Thank—you. My concerns are not my own. You understand the mistake of killing the messenger?” Nadine inquired.