“I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that the planet has changed on a radical scale but what I thought you might appreciate is some good news for a change,” Mulligan said.
“We’re all ears,” said a new voice. The commander smiled again when she recognized her friend’s voice.
“Emily. It’s good to hear your voice.”
“Same here,” said Emily.
“So, in the time we’ve been incommunicado we have been busy monitoring the weather patterns since the storm and you’ll be happy to know that, as far as we can tell, everything seems to be pretty much returning to how it was, before—”
Emily finished the sentence for her, “—everything went to hell in a handbasket?”
“Precisely. So the good news is, the weather patterns appear to have only marginally shifted away from what the typical trend was pre–red rain, and the consensus up here is that we think you will probably see a return to ‘normal,’ whatever that might be, over the next few weeks to months. The good news is, that means we’ll be able to attempt the Soyuz reentry within the next couple days to a week; we just need to be one-hundred-percent sure of the weather conditions before we leave.”
“Well that’s certainly good to know,” said Emily, smiling. She was looking forward to finally putting a face to the angel that had helped guide her to safety.
“Unfortunately, there’s bad news too,” said the commander, “but it’s news I think you already are aware of. The spread of the red vegetation, it seems to have encroached on almost every continent and island, other than the poles. It’s as though…”
Mulligan’s words trailed off suddenly as a hint of movement on the edge of her peripheral vision caught her attention out beyond the observation port of the ISS. She repositioned herself just in time to catch a bright flash of light against the blackness of space.
“Stand by a second, Emily. There’s something—”
Another brilliant flash appeared in the distance, close to the curve of the Earth’s horizon. It was followed in rapid succession by two more blinding bursts as, one after another, dazzlingly bright globes of white light punctured the blackness of space. They materialized just outside the Earth’s atmosphere, bloomed momentarily, and then streaked down toward the surface. In the space of a few seconds, Commander Mulligan counted five…no…seven blindingly bright flares.
“My God,” said Mulligan, the intensity of the light so great her eyes reflexively shut as she turned her head away from the window. “Emily, there’s something happening outside the station,” she said urgently. “I can see objects, huge spheres of incredibly bright white light; they’re appearing outside the planet’s atmosphere and streaking toward the earth.” The commander opened her eyes fully again, the afterimage of the lights still flaring in her vision. She could see the tails of the orbs as they dropped through the atmosphere toward Earth.
“There are multiple objects,” Mulligan continued, breathless with excitement. “Each one appears to be heading to a different continent, I could be wrong though. They’re spread out so widely I—”
“Commander? Are you alright?” Emily interrupted. The other occupants of the makeshift radio room had seemed to freeze in place as they listened to Mulligan repeat what she was seeing through the observation window.
“Yes, I’m fine. Emily, I think I know what these are, Emily. My God, they are so incredibly beautiful. It’s as though—”
Commander Mulligan’s words were cut short as another of the immense orbs, dwarfing the space station and burning with an intensity that blotted out the sun, materialized just several hundred feet off the station’s dark side.
“Oh no,” said Commander Mulligan and closed her eyes.
Far below, on the narrow outcropping of land they had claimed for their own, Emily and the others waited for the radio signal to reestablish with the ISS.
“Commander? Can you hear me?” Emily asked for the third time in as many minutes. Her reply was a static hiss. Through the window she could see that night had finally chased the sun from the sky, and darkness now cloaked everything that lay beyond the illumination of the camp’s security lights.
“They probably just moved out of radio range,” said Parsons.
“They only just got in range,” MacAlister reminded him.
Emily felt a pang of nervousness tingling in the pit of her stomach as her mind ran back over the final words of the conversation before the connection was severed so abruptly. “She said something about seeing some kind of objects, spheres of light?”
“Aurora Borealis, perhaps?” suggested Captain Constantine.
“Maybe,” said Emily without conviction. “Surely they would have seen the northern lights on an almost daily basis? I doubt that would have stopped her mid-conversation.”
“Maybe it’s just a coincidence,” Parsons added.
The headphones Jacob had placed on top of the table next to the radio moved slightly, and for a second, Emily thought that the sound had simply switched back to them, but a low-frequency, throbbing vibration passed through the soles of her feet as she started to pick them up, and she stopped mid-reach. The vibration was faint at first, like the gentle purr of an engine, but the sound grew increasingly louder. The headphones rattled away from her reaching fingers and then rolled off the edge of the table, tumbling to the floor. The glass panes of the window thrummed and vibrated, rattling in their fixtures…then the entire room began to vibrate like the cone of a huge speaker.
“Earthquake!” someone yelled.
“Christ!”
Emily looked at the other confused and frightened faces staring back at her as she grabbed the table for support. From elsewhere in the building she could hear yells and curses as the thrumming grew toward a bone-rattling crescendo.
A pane shattered in the window, spraying the room with shards of broken glass, and suddenly the sound became even louder.
This was no earthquake.
“Outside,” Emily yelled as the whole building began to shake. She bolted for the door as Thor raced ahead of her, closely followed by the men. But instead of running for the exit, Emily sprinted for the stairwell, pounded up the stairs, and rushed out onto the roof.
She didn’t know whether it was the cold California night air or the strange mix of fear and excitement that raised the gooseflesh over her skin, she was more concerned with the deep rumbling filling the air, like approaching thunder, bouncing from one side of the night-black hemisphere to the other.
“What the hell is it?” MacAlister yelled, struggling to be heard over the deafening roar.
“It’s no earthquake, that’s for sure,” Parsons yelled back, twisting on his toes as he tried to identify the source of the sound.
The night was suddenly rent open by a bright flash of light that appeared to the southwest, far out to sea and high up in the atmosphere. It was a bright white ball of light, already half the size of the moon and growing rapidly as it sped toward them.
Instinctively, everyone threw themselves down flat onto the roof as it roared over their heads, their eyes drawn to the sky in pure fascination, even as their instincts told them they were all about to die.
The fiery orb streaked across the sky, a bright tail of flashing embers that flamed momentarily then disappeared trailing behind it. The object began to grow smaller and smaller as it thundered north, then dipped suddenly, its trajectory no longer a natural parabolic curve but a definitive course alteration, as though it had been suddenly swatted from the air by some unseen hand. It plunged rapidly toward some distant point far north of Point Loma and then hit the ground with a bright flash that almost instantly dissipated into the blackness.
There was no sound, no thunderous crash of impact or massive explosion. No pressure wave or fireball. Just the ghostly afterimage of the object burnt onto Emily’s disbelieving eyes.
They lay unmoving for
what seemed like an eternity, so still that only the sound of their breathing proved they were all still alive.
Minutes passed, then a faint but audible rumble found its way to them; nothing like the one that had heralded the arrival of whatever that thing had been but almost certainly the residual shockwave of its fall to Earth.
Emily was the first to raise herself to her feet. She looked back in the direction of the piece of sky where the object had appeared. In the inky blackness, tumbling and falling in a slow arc and chased by its own blazing tail of burning debris, Emily could see something else falling toward the Earth.
When she was a child, she had witnessed the destruction of the Columbia that fateful day that damaged heat shielding had caused the space shuttle to disintegrate on reentry.
“Oh no,” she said, her hand flying to her mouth as she immediately made the connection with what she was seeing now; she was witnessing the fiery death of the ISS as it and its crew made their final return to Earth.
At daybreak the following morning, the glowing remains of the ISS could still be seen scorching slowly through the atmosphere as, piece by piece, it was inexorably drawn back to the planet it had originated from, tiny pieces of man’s last foothold in the stars burning brightly in the upper atmosphere like meteors.
And not just metal and plastic, Emily thought, as she watched another flare of light burn up in the atmosphere above Point Loma. Her neck was beginning to ache from staring at such an acute angle for so long. She let out a long sigh, cracked her neck left and then right, and began making her way toward the dining area where everyone else was already gathered waiting for news.
While the majority of the crew of the Vengeance had not even heard the voice of Commander Mulligan, let alone spoken with her, they all knew of her. Her loss, along with the destruction of the space station, was a major blow to the morale of the survivors. And, judging by the sullen and disconsolate looks on the faces of the sailors as they gathered for their morning meal, the news had hit home extremely hard. While the station had circled overhead, there had been a sense of safety, of almost God-like protection afforded by their constant vigilance. Now, with the survivors’ vision forever tethered to the ground, there was a distinct sense of loneliness within the group.
“Do you think it might not be them?” Rhiannon said, picking at her food, her eyes still red from the tears she had shed when told that the commander had most likely perished. “Maybe it’s something else, one of the satellites…maybe?”
Parsons squeezed the girl’s shoulder, “Maybe, cariad,” he said. “Who knows, eh?” But even Parsons’s attention could not lift Rhiannon’s spirits from this latest tragedy.
“We have to figure out what we are going to do about the new arrival,” said Emily, switching the conversation to the phenomenon that they had all seen in the previous night’s sky. “Commander Mulligan said that she saw multiple objects outside the atmosphere, but we only saw the one. That means whatever they are, they were heading to different locations, and they were dispersed far enough apart that we only saw the one.”
MacAlister looked up from his breakfast of scrambled eggs (powdered, but not bad considering). “We checked the sub’s tracking radar this morning. The telemetry data we pulled gives us a good estimate of where that thing came down last night.”
Emily continued to chew her own food, and raised her eyebrows in lieu of the obvious question.
“It came down in Nevada, right around Las Vegas. Give or take fifty miles.”
“Always wanted to go to Vegas. Anybody up for some blackjack?” Parsons quipped.
Emily swallowed her food. “Do we even know what the hell that thing was? I mean it looked like a meteor but then it altered course so obviously…” She left the sentence unfinished, testing the response of the others.
“From what I saw of it,” said Jacob, “and from what everyone else described, as well as Commander Mulligan’s initial response, I think it’s patently obvious what that thing was, don’t you?”
Parsons decided to fill in the blanks. “You’re going to tell us that it was some kind of spaceship? Right? That there are little green men onboard that thing that have come to suck our brains out through our noses? Am I close?” Parsons’s words were dripping with sarcasm, but beneath the disdain, Emily could sense the rough rope of fear intertwined with every word.
“No,” said Jacob slowly and emphatically. “Not little green men.” He continued to speak quietly, refusing to rise to the bait, an honestly jovial smile creasing the corner of his lips. “But it most definitely signifies the arrival of something new. From what Commander Mulligan managed to tell us before the station was destroyed, it sounds as if my theory was correct: What she saw, what we all saw in the sky last night, was maybe a scouting party for the intelligence that created the red rain. Perhaps they are even the colonists themselves.”
Rhiannon looked aghast.
“It’s alright,” said Parsons, giving Jacob a hard stare that the scientist did not seem to notice.
Jacob appeared to have recovered a lot of the patience Emily had become familiar with during her trip across the United States, because now he used the same voice, the same quiet tone of knowledge and assuredness that she had heard when she had only been able to speak to him via her sat-phone.
Jacob continued, “My personal belief is that this is a vanguard. It would make sense that they would send a small force ahead to ensure the transformation of the planet has gone according to plan. That is, of course, assuming that these were even ships and not something entirely different. That would be my initial assessment.”
“Couldn’t this just be a coincidence?” MacAlister asked. “Commander Mulligan would have been under an enormous amount of stress, what with her predicament and all. Couldn’t she have made a simple mistake and misidentified a meteor shower? I mean it’s possible, right?”
“We can speculate about what it might be forever, but the only way to be absolutely certain is to go and take a look at the ship, meteor, whatever,” said Emily. She was surprised by the look of acceptance to her suggestion that she received. She had expected a straight-up no-way-José response; instead she was met with a steady gaze from each of those sitting next to her.
“I’d like a crack at these bastards,” said MacAlister. “At the very least, I want to see what kind of a being is able to bring an entire planet to its knees in a day.”
“So, let me get this straight: You’re suggesting that we travel to Nevada, track down where this thing landed, and try and make contact with them?” said Parsons.
“Pretty much,” said Emily.
“Okay, well, count me in.”
MacAlister glanced across the table at Captain Constantine, who had remained out of the conversation.
“It’s your call, skipper.”
“If Jacob is correct, and what we witnessed last night is some kind of an alien craft, then we need to know how much of a danger they pose,” Constantine said after a few moments’ thought. “We need to assess their capabilities and whether they pose any imminent threat to our safety here. If they do, then we will have to reassess our decision to stay here and find someplace else, somewhere safer to settle as far away from them as possible. I think it’s worth the risk to send a reconnaissance party out there and see what we’re facing. Mr. Parsons, do we still have that drone onboard?”
“Yes, sir,” said Parsons. “She’s stowed away and ready to roll out.”
“Drone?” asked Emily.
“We have a short-range aerial drone that we use for observation and reconnaissance work. It’s basically a big radio-controlled aircraft with a camera attachment that can relay live images back to a remote video unit,” the captain explained. “So, as long as you can get within three miles of the landing site, you can send the drone in and stay at a safe distance. If we decide to do this, I don’t want to unnecessarily risk lives. We
have no idea what kind of a wasp’s nest we might be sticking our fist into.”
“How we get there is the next question,” MacAlister said. “From what we saw on our little walkabout yesterday, there’s no way we’re going to make the trip overland, there’s just too much growth. We could skirt back north along the coast, maybe see if there’s any kind of break in the jungle. It’s going to be a hell of a trek, though. Probably looking at weeks’ worth of walking, maybe longer if we don’t have a clear shot to Vegas and have to lug the drone along too.”
“Can anyone fly a helicopter?” Emily asked, half-jokingly. “I think I saw two across the bay.”
The crew all turned their heads to look at MacAlister.
“I may have some experience in that department,” he said, smiling. “Actually, I have about two hundred hours of flight time. So…”
Emily smiled back at him. “Well, you’re just a jack-of-all-trades, aren’t you?”
MacAlister’s smile grew into a broad grin. “Oh, I’ve been called worse…much, much worse.”
Emily climbed into the dinghy and settled down onto the wooden seat next to MacAlister. There were five more onboard with her, including the boat’s pilot who stood at the raised steering column toward the back of the boat. Emily recognized Rusty from their first exploratory trip into the wasteland created by the fire. She smiled warmly at the young sailor.
“Morning, Miss,” he said. “Thor not with you today?”
What Emily wanted to say was: “Call me ‘Miss’ again and I’ll knock you on your ass.” God! She was barely ten years older than him. She had not had the best night’s sleep, and it was showing in her mood. What she actually said was: “No, no Thor today.” She had left the dog with Rhiannon. She was going to be travelling with a bunch of edgy armed men, and she did not want to take the risk that her dog would be shot by some nervous, trigger-happy sailor.
With everyone fastened in, the boat accelerated quickly away from land and headed out toward Coronado Island, east of Point Loma.
Revelations (Extinction Point, Book 3) Page 13
