Revelations (Extinction Point, Book 3)

by Jones, Paul Antony

“No more lip out of you. You’ll get your turn,” MacAlister snapped. “Wait here until either the skipper or I call you up top.”

  The sailor looked displeased but fell silent under Mac’s stony stare.

  Emily caught the briny scent of the Pacific Ocean wafting down to her as she pulled herself rung-over-rung up the ladder then up onto the flat observation deck at the top of the conning tower. Although her view was still blocked by the security wall that spanned the circumference of the tower she could still hear the whoosh of waves breaking over the deck of the sub below, gently rocking the vessel as it pitched and rolled with each swell.

  They had surfaced a half mile offshore of Point Loma, California.

  “It’s a safe enough distance for us to make a quick exit if we need to,” Captain Constantine had told Emily minutes before the sub’s ballast tanks had been blown and the sub began its ascent to the surface. “And far enough away that we won’t appear to be a threat if there’s still anyone alive in the base. Don’t want to be sunk before we even get a chance to see what’s going on, now do we?”

  Emily’s eyes squinted painfully in the bright California sunshine. She couldn’t see a damn thing after spending so long in the artificial light of the submarine. She allowed her eyes a few moments to acclimate, filtering the light through the flat of her hands while she listened to the crashing of the waves and absorbed the warmth of the sun.

  “My God!” she exclaimed when her vision finally cleared enough that she could see past the scintillating crest of the breaking waves.

  She was staring out over a bluff, a clutch of buildings squeezed together, too distant to make out any real detail, but she could see radio masts and satellite dishes jutting out from some of the buildings’ roofs. To the right of the buildings, the land slipped gradually down to a harbor. Another submarine was moored to a quayside; it was canted away from her, its conning tower pointed inland and its curved underbelly exposed. A long jagged crack, about thirty feet in length, zigzagged along the exposed hull. She could see waves hitting the side and flowing into the interior.

  Everywhere was silent, deserted. Not even a gull riding the warm thermals rising over the land disturbed this still-life portrait of a place deserted, abandoned. Emily took it all in within the first few seconds, but beyond the waves, past the rock-strewn beach and buildings with abandoned vehicles still visible in the parking lot, lay another world: an alien world.

  A red world.

  “Here,” said MacAlister, “take these.” He handed her a large pair of binoculars. Through their powerful lenses the distant shore seemed just feet away, and with it came the realization of how profound a change had been wrought across the world.

  Where once there had been palm trees, neatly trimmed stretches of grass, roads, oak and California ash, now lay an alien jungle. Giant red fronds and creepers snaked their way over every foot of exposed surface, thick lush leaves sprouting from thin stalks (if they looked thin from half a mile away, they would be anything but, she realized). They waved in the slow breeze, wafting inland from the ocean. The alien vegetation clung to every wall, wound its way over roofs and around antennas. Leafy creepers threw long tendrils across blacktop, snaked through broken windows like thieves, cracked concrete, and levered up slabs of sidewalk until the ground looked like an 8.0 temblor had rocked the coast the naval base was built upon.

  The submarine she had spotted earlier had not escaped the red vegetation; although the deck was angled away from her, Emily could still see a latticework of thick ropelike feelers spilling over the edge of the quay, obscuring the front of the hull under its swaying leafy camouflage. Red vines wound up the conning tower and dripped toward the ground like lank red hair, swaying in the breeze.

  Mixed with the smell of the ocean, ozone was another less inviting one. Even at this distance from shore the aroma wafted back to the Vengeance. It smelled like mold and burned hair. There was also another less distinct, but more easily identifiable odor of something disturbingly familiar to Emily: ammonia.

  “My God,” Captain Constantine mumbled, his voice barely above a whisper, his head unable to turn away from the line of red that stretched along the coast into the distance. “We might just as well be on another world.”

  Emily ignored him, focusing the binoculars beyond the base, tracing the line of the coast. Wherever she looked, what should have been clear land was obscured by the same red vegetation. It covered all but a scant few buildings within the Point Loma base but seemed not to have made it to the beach anywhere along the coast surrounding the base, as though the sand-covered, pebble-strewn beaches delineated the alien world’s dominion.

  Within the ocean of red flora, she could see the occasional alien tree surging into the air above the red canopy. They reminded her of the alien trees that had taken root after the red rain, but while what she looked at now were just as large, they also lacked the constructed uniformity of those first invaders; these were more natural, more recognizable as simple trees, yet undoubtedly not of this planet. They towered over the rest of the jungle. And that was exactly what this was, she realized: a freaking jungle!

  Somehow, over a matter of just a few days, the red storm had raged through the old world and changed everything, converting it from what it had once been; reshaping, reorganizing, recreating it into everything that now lay before her.

  Emily felt a bitter laugh escape her as she stared through the binoculars. Finally she understood what had occurred on their insignificant little rock: God had visited this planet and he had found it wanting, so he bent it to His will. And if it wasn’t God, that was okay, it might just as well have been. Because the intelligence, the technology, the sheer amount of raw power that had been harnessed to achieve this transformation was so far beyond anything imaginable it could drive you insane just thinking about it.

  “Emily?” Captain Constantine’s voice sounded as though it was coming from a very long way away. “Emily!” he said again, louder this time, touching her shoulder. She allowed her arms to drop the binoculars to her waist and turned to look at him.

  “It seems you were correct all along,” he repeated. “Do you have any suggestions?”

  “We need to get Jacob up here to see this,” she said. “We need to get him up here right now.”

  Two crewmen carried Jacob up into the sunshine of the sub’s conning tower and then supported the climatologist between them so he could get a good look over the edge of the conning tower’s observation deck.

  “Ho-leee shit!” he hissed when he saw the transformation of the mainland. His eyes grew wide. Thanks to many long months cooped up in the Stockton research station, Jacob’s skin was already the wrong side of ivory, but Emily was convinced she saw him turn, as Procol Harum had so eloquently put it, a whiter shade of pale. “Holy shit! I mean…I never thought…Jesus! This is…this is just astonishing.” The sense of awe in the scientist’s voice was tangible.

  “Here,” said MacAlister, handing Jacob a second pair of binoculars. The scientist glassed them back and forth over the base, then up into the jungle growing behind it. His index finger moved rapidly back and forth over the focus knob as he zoomed in as far as the magnification would allow, then out again as his head jerked, zigged, and zagged across the horizon.

  “It’s everywhere,” he whispered, more to himself than the others who were watching him. He studied the coast for another ten minutes, oohing and ahing, with the occasional “Fascinating!” thrown in for good measure as his eyes caught some new feature or form within the explosion of tangled vegetation littering the landscape.

  By that time the two sailors holding him were beginning to wilt in the sun.

  “So, Jacob,” Captain Constantine said eventually, growing impatient for some kind of input from the scientist and his seeming obliviousness to the welfare of the sailors, “do you have any idea what we are looking at here?”

  Jacob reluctantly
dropped the binoculars and equally reluctantly ordered the two sailors holding him to turn around so he could face the others. He thought for a moment before replying, “Ideas? No, I have no ideas, but I do have a theory.”

  “Well, what is it? Spit it out for God’s sake would you, man?” said the captain, a tight smile crossing his lips as he refused to be baited by Jacob’s truculence.

  “We’ve been terraformed,” Jacob said eventually, quietly, his voice flat, as if the words he had just spoken were wrong in some way, as though they did not quite fit the space within the air they had to occupy. “Our planet has been repurposed, reconstituted, and retooled. It’s the only possibility.” Jacob’s hands swept across the red landscape. “I mean, just look at all of this.”

  Nobody spoke.

  “It was always a possibility, I suppose,” Jacob continued. “I mean, we’ve talked about it for years as a possibility for colonizing Mars and eventually other planets, but we are…were…nowhere near it as a possibility technologically. And this, this is light-years beyond how we theorized we could do it. I mean, it’s simply amazing.”

  “Mr. Endersby,” the captain snapped, as his patience finally wore thin. “I have no idea what the hell you are talking about. So how about you explain it to us, how should I put it, less scientifically adept people: What exactly are we looking at?”

  Jacob eyes fluttered to the other survivors gathered on the observation deck, moving from one to the other as though he had only now noticed them.

  “Let’s get below,” he said finally, as if the words he had previously said had never been spoken. “I need a drink.”

  “Good God, man. Would you just tell us what you think?” the captain said, finally beginning to lose his temper with the man.

  “Captain. What I need right now is a stiff drink, and I think when I tell you what you want to know, you’re going to need one too. Besides, this is for your ears and for you to tell the crew, so just have these two oafs carry me down and I’ll be happy to explain everything. Okay?”

  For a second, Emily thought the captain was going to order his men to toss Jacob into the sea. His face flushed a bright crimson. This was probably the first time anyone had spoken to him in such a manner in a very long time, if ever, and she would bet her last dollar that no one had ever spoken to him in such a manner in front of his crew before.

  Captain Constantine sucked in a deep breath of the ocean air, his gaze never leaving Jacob, until finally he nodded to the two sailors carrying him. “To my cabin,” he said brusquely. The sailors disappeared with Jacob back down the tower.

  MacAlister posted two armed guards on the observation deck before descending down the conning tower. Emily and the captain had gone below ahead of him and they had been met by the throng of crew eager to learn news of what waited for them beyond the outer hull of the sub.

  “As soon as I know more, I will let you know,” the captain was saying, his voice raised to be heard over the barrage of questions. “Right now, I do not have enough information. Mr. Endersby is about to brief us and when we know, you will know. Now get back to your posts.”

  Emily could tell from the look on the men’s faces that they were not happy, there was even some barely concealed anger on the face of one or two of them. They quieted down when MacAlister stepped off the final rung and eyed them all with an ice-cold stare.

  “You heard the captain. Don’t you all have somewhere else you’re supposed to be?”

  The group of sailors slowly dispersed, but not without a few furtive glances at the conning tower ladder and the daylight leaking in from above.

  The two sailors carried Jacob to the conference room and placed him a little roughly in his wheelchair before waiting to be dismissed by the captain.

  When the door closed behind them, the captain spoke, “Okay, in small words so you will be sure we understand exactly what you are talking about, Mr. Endersby: What can you tell us about what’s going on out there?”

  Jacob had parked himself next to the captain’s small wet bar. Emily watched him pull a bottle of Glenlivet whisky from the shelf and pour himself a shot, downing it in one sharp gulp. He poured another then raised the bottle toward the others but no one wanted to join him. Jacob shrugged.

  “Perhaps after you’ve explained what’s happening we might feel the need to partake, but right now, all I want to know is what you know,” Constantine said.

  Jacob wheeled himself to the head of the conference table, carefully balancing his glass between his knees. He took a swig of the whisky and began to explain.

  “Our climate, our planet, along with every form of life on it, has been co-opted. Every major ecosystem appears to have been manipulated toward supporting some other form of life. In short, we’ve been terraformed.”

  “Terraformed?” Emily questioned, her eyebrows furrowed. Constantine and MacAlister looked on with equally questioning expressions.

  Jacob wheeled himself back to the wet bar and poured another shot of whisky, spilling some on the surface as he observed the blank expressions on the faces watching him. He sighed deeply and continued.

  “We’ve been invaded,” he said, his words beginning to slur around the edges. “You know, like in the movies. Planetary engineering.” He gulped down another mouthful of whisky. “They sent the red rain and transformed humanity and most every other life form on this rock into self-assembling biological machines. No need to ship complicated machinery here, like we’d have to do, just send in the red rain and use the indigenous species as the building blocks. Have them follow an encoded blueprint for making bigger, more complex organisms, and poof! Out with the old and in with the new.”

  Jacob sank the remaining whisky and stared at the empty glass.

  “They used those biological machines to build the equivalent of atmospheric processors, the trees Emily saw. And in just days they accomplished what would have taken decades for us to have even theoretically achieved. I mean, it is genius. Pure fucking genius. No, it’s bigger than that; it’s fucking God-like. They didn’t even need to come here themselves. Jesus! It’s just magnificent.”

  Jacob tipped the empty glass toward his outstretched tongue; when he realized it was still empty he poured another shot into it, this time spilling more on the wet bar than he got in the glass.

  While Jacob was speaking, Emily had watched Mac pace back and forth, his normally unfazed demeanor obviously stretched thin by what he was hearing. “You’re telling us Earth has been taken over by an alien race?” she said when Jacob paused to refill his glass.

  Jacob shook his head and polished off the shot. “Not by some alien race, for some alien race. The only question now is who they are and when we can expect them to show up.” He paused, then laughed as he reached for the bottle of whisky again. “Wait, that’s two questions,” he said, his words slurring into one.

  MacAlister moved to Jacob’s side and took the bottle from his hands. “I think you’ve had just about enough, mate.”

  Jacob looked up at the soldier. “I think you could be right,” he said, before letting out a long braying laugh.

  “So the rain, the creatures I saw, the alien trees?” Emily said.

  The effects of the drink were quickly robbing Jacob of his faculties and his words were becoming indistinguishable.

  “That, my dear, dear Emily, is the interesting part. This is just a theory, mind you, so don’t you hold me to it in the morning—” he let out another long laugh “—but I think that the rain was some kind of biological super nanotechnology. How it got here, I have nooooo idea, but it took every carbon-based life form on this planet, disassembled it molecule by molecule, and then reassembled it in whatever shape it wanted.”

  Jacob jabbed at the ceiling with the index finger of his left hand. When he next spoke his voice was conspiratorial. “It gave us what you saw out there. A new world. Their world.” He stared at his hand
still pointing at the ceiling. “I mean, do you have even the slightest inkling of what that means? Whatever did this to the world is so far ahead of us technologically, it might just as well be God.” He slowly lowered his hand to his lap and turned to face Emily. “I do not feel so good,” he said, his face suddenly turning a shade of green.

  “Don’t worry,” said MacAlister with a sigh, “I’ll take care of him. Come on.” He began pushing Jacob out of the room toward the scientist’s cabin. “I’ll get him to his room.”

  “We should all be afraid,” Jacob yelled as the Scotsman wheeled him away. “We should all be really fucking afraid.”

  “He’ll sleep soundly tonight,” said MacAlister when he returned from taking Jacob to his room. “I expect he’ll have a bit of a hangover in the morning, though.”

  “Let’s assume his theory is correct,” Emily said, picking up the conversation where they’d left off before the interruption. “Does it really change anything for us?”

  “Our primary objective has not changed. We still need to find a place to pitch our tent, so to speak. Point Loma seems to me to be as good a place as any to do that, wouldn’t you say?”

  “From what Commander Mulligan has told us, the chances of finding anywhere unaffected by the storm seem pretty slim and growing slimmer by the day. And if Jacob is right we might be running out of time faster than we know,” Emily said. “And since we’re already here…”

  The captain nodded. “Mr. MacAlister, I’d like you to take two men you know can handle themselves and go take a look around our new home. Report back to me if we need to call in a fumigator or not.”

  “I’d like to go ashore with them,” Emily interjected.

  “Not this time,” MacAlister replied. “Leave it to the experts for now.”

  “But—” she began to object.

  “No buts, Ms. Baxter,” said the captain. “My men know what they’re doing and you would be nothing but a liability at this point, I’m afraid. Please just let them do their job.”