The Phoenix Descent

by Chuck Grossart

  As Mirda neared, the ravages to her body became clear. Half of her head was covered with the black, sticky tar, as was most of her arms and torso. She looked up, and Litsa could see her eyes, full of pain. And fear.

  “Oh, Mirda. No,” Jarrod said.

  The watcher returned, torch in hand.

  Litsa touched the tips of her arrows to the torch, lighting them, and felt Jarrod’s hand on her forearm.

  “No,” Jarrod said.

  Litsa wasn’t going to let Jarrod stop her from doing what must be done, then realized she wouldn’t have to.

  He reached for the bow.

  Litsa saw in his eyes all that needed to be said. She handed her bow to him. He nocked an arrow and turned toward Mirda.

  She was close now and trying to speak. Her words were thick, bubbling through the black slime filling her throat.

  Litsa watched a single tear slide down Jarrod’s cheek as he drew the bow and let the first arrow fly. Then the second. And the third.

  He handed the bow back to Litsa and walked toward the secondary portal. “Let it burn,” he said.

  Chapter 15

  “My God, look at it,” Sif said. From the viewport on the lower deck of the command section, she looked down at Earth. “There are no lights.”

  Resolute was orbiting over the Western Hemisphere, which at the moment was cloaked in darkness. At the poles, the aurora borealis was visible, which provided a sense of normalcy, but North and South America were completely dark. Sif remembered seeing the pictures of the cities at night, and how Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles looked so huge and bright even from orbit, places that never slept, but now there was nothing there. Like North Korea in the old days, Sif mused. Black and plunged into darkness. It was as if someone flicked a switch, and all the lights went out. If Lucas was right, maybe the switch hadn’t been invented yet. He had to be correct, because nothing like this could have happened in the month they were gone. The entire planet couldn’t have gone dark, even if there were some sort of war. And if even if there had been, the cities would still be burning.

  “No one who has ever gone into space has seen Earth like this,” Lucas said. “No electricity. Anywhere.”

  “It looks so dead,” Hunter said.

  “Liv, any response to our radio calls?”

  “No response. Transmitting on all frequencies, as directed.”

  Sif wondered when cities would have started using electricity. “Lucas, when would we have started seeing some lights, timewise?”

  “Probably around the late nineteenth century, I would suspect. And even then, only the major cities had electric lights. Getting power out into the rural localities took decades.”

  “So, if we did go back in time, it’s safe to assume we’re further back than the late eighteen hundreds.”

  “At least, yes, but remember, we have no idea how far back we’ve gone. We could be staring down at the Jurassic age for all we know.”

  “Liv, status of planetary viewer?” Hunter asked. The viewer was designed to be used when Resolute entered Mars orbit, providing high-resolution digital images of the terrain below.

  “Planetary viewer is operational.”

  Hunter pushed away from the viewport and propelled himself toward the mid-deck access passage, which exited on the command deck right above them. “Liv, request infrared snapshots, fifty-meter resolution, thirty-second intervals. Send them to screen one. Include geo-coordinates,” he said.

  “Understood. Will comply.”

  Sif tapped Lucas on the shoulder, surprising him a little. He was transfixed by the darkened Earth below. “Let’s take a look,” she said. “Then we’ll know for sure.”

  Sif floated behind Lucas and followed him through the hole in the floor of the command deck. They found Hunter already at his station. “The first image should be coming through any second,” he said.

  Sif and Lucas each gripped the back of Hunter’s chair and stared at the screen.

  When the first image came up, it revealed absolutely nothing. It was black.

  As was the next one. And the next.

  Sif looked at the coordinates on the last picture to appear: 39.7910° N, 86.1480° W. “Liv, nearest city to coordinates on image three?”

  “Coordinates correspond to Indianapolis, Indiana.”

  A major American city, completely dark. No infrared signatures whatsoever. At least it was where Indianapolis was supposed to be, or would be one day. The whole situation was starting to make her head hurt.

  “Liv, screen two, US map, overlay orbital ground trace, include ship icon,” Hunter ordered.

  “Understood. Will comply.” A second later, a map of the United States popped up on Hunter’s second screen, with a curved line showing Resolute’s orbital path across the landscape below. A small diamond shape marked their progress along the ground trace.

  “We’re going to pass directly over Raleigh, North Carolina,” Lucas observed.

  “In about a minute and a half,” Hunter added.

  Sif followed the ground trace across the screen. After leaving the East Coast, they would head south, crossing eastern Brazil, and encounter the sunrise after passing South America’s Atlantic coast. Then they would curve northward after skirting the tip of South Africa, staying over water until the trace intersected Pakistan.

  The results for Raleigh were the same. No infrared signatures. Dark. As was Brazil, a little while later.

  “We’ll be able to see more in the daylight,” Hunter said. “We’ll switch the viewer to panchromatic when we see . . . um, Pakistan.”

  Unfortunately, this first orbit wouldn’t take them over many populated regions in the daylight, but they would make the same journey every ninety minutes or so, a little farther westward each time, as Earth rotated below them.

  “We’re going to have to go down there,” Sif said.

  “I know,” Hunter said, “but not until we survey as much of the globe as possible.”

  “Where?” Lucas asked.

  Sif glanced at Hunter and realized neither of them had an answer. Where does one go after traveling back in time, especially when one has no friggin’ clue when they are? “That’s a good question, Tater.”

  “I assumed we’d go back to Kennedy, like was planned on our return,” Hunter said. “I guess that doesn’t really matter anymore since Kennedy isn’t even there.”

  “I’ve always wanted to go to Paris,” Sif said. “But it wouldn’t be the same in the Jurassic era, right? How about you, Lucas? Want to try Ohio?”

  “I’m serious, Caitlyn.”

  And he was. “Okay, Lucas. Sorry.” Lucas was unmarried, as were she and Hunter, but he had family in Ohio and was probably struggling with the fact that he would never see them again. Sif had basically been a loner since her parents’ deaths and poured her whole being into her naval career, with one exception: her marriage. After the divorce, she committed herself heart and soul to the United States Navy, and then the astronaut corps, with no desire to spend any time trying to build relationships, especially those of the romantic variety. Sometimes she forgot that others, like Lucas, weren’t so . . . alone. “What are you thinking?”

  “Hunter’s right. We should survey as much as we can from orbit before we attempt a landing, which brings up another concern. Beagle was designed for a Mars landing—thinner atmosphere and lower gravity—not Earth.”

  Beagle was their reusable landing craft, loosely based on the Delta Clipper single-stage-to-orbit design from the early 1990s. “She can do it, Lucas,” Sif said. “Not a problem.”

  Hunter laughed a little. “You sound pretty sure of yourself, Navy.”

  Sif smiled at him. “I am a naval aviator. Beagle can do it. No sweat.”

  “And while you two are showing off your flying skills, I’ll be staying up here, right?” Lucas asked.

  “Someone’s got to watch the henhouse until we get back,” Hunter said.

  “Caitlyn’s piloting prowess notwithstanding,” Lucas
said, giving Sif a quick wink, “I hope you do get back.”

  Chapter 16

  Litsa sensed him standing beside her mat before he announced his presence. She rolled over and wiped the sleep from her eyes.

  “We leave in an hour,” Jarrod said. “Wake the others.”

  “Yes, my captain,” Litsa said.

  As Litsa descended deeper into the cavern to wake the other warriors, she wondered what life would be like without the threat of the Riy, to live as the old ones before the spread and the great death, and before the sky was thick with the smoke of the funeral pyres. She loved to spend time in the book spaces, where all the accounts of the old times were kept. Life was so different then, where people didn’t have to run from cave to cave, fearing sudden death.

  But this was their life now, and she would fight to keep it.

  The heat began to build in her body as she thought of the hunt, the excitement of killing the thing that threatened them all. She loved the rush of adrenaline she felt when racing across the fields in the darkness toward her enemy, knowing that she was a warrior, a protector, a keeper of those left behind in the Dak, and she would kill, or be killed, to keep them safe.

  “Warriors!” Litsa yelled as she entered the watchers’ cavern. “Awake! We are called!”

  Twenty of them, men and women, crawled from their mats and sprang to their feet in answer to her call. As one, they responded, “Urrah!”

  “For our home, we fight!”

  “Urrah!”

  “For our people, we fight!”

  “Urrah!”

  “For the clan, we fight!”

  “Urrah!”

  “Weapons!” Litsa yelled, and watched as each of them grabbed their bows, filled their quivers, and lit their torches.

  Chapter 17

  “I don’t know what it is,” Lucas said, still a little shaken.

  He was beside Sif in Beagle’s cramped two-person cockpit, technical manual in hand, making adjustments to the attitude control program to allow the lander to function in Earth’s atmosphere, hopefully, instead of the thinner Martian air for which it was designed.

  On their first orbit, as Resolute swung northward up the eastern coast of Africa, they trained the viewer toward Kenya and Somalia and saw something that none of them expected, and, as of yet, couldn’t explain. With the viewer set at maximum magnification, huge swaths of the arid landscape—mostly uninhabited desert in the world they all knew—were completely blackened, as if a child had taken a black marker to a picture of Earth and colored it in. The viewer failed shortly thereafter—and took all of Hunter’s time since, as he tried to repair it—limiting their survey to what they could see from almost 250 miles up.

  The oceans looked the same, the clouds, even the lightning storms as Resolute passed into night, but the land was wrong. With each orbit, as they passed over the equator, they saw more and more of the strange blackened surface. Their planet, it seemed, was ringed by a black belt that extended for hundreds of miles from the equatorial regions, becoming more sparse and spotty the farther north and south in latitude they traveled in orbit.

  “I’m not a natural-history buff, but I can’t recall anything that could explain what we’ve seen.” Lucas typed a series of numbers on his keyboard. “Your reentry angle will have to be much shallower, or you’ll burn through the thermal protection. I’ve adjusted it by a few degrees.”

  “Copy,” Sif replied, verifying his entries on her screen. “It almost looks like everything is burned, like the whole equator has gone up in flames, which makes no sense.”

  “Once Hunter gets the viewer working again, we’ll be able to take a closer look at it. Adjust pierce-point angle to ten degrees nose low.”

  “Ten degrees nose low, copy.” Sif entered the parameter into the automated flight program. Lucas Hoover was a fifty-pound brain, a genius, and if anyone could coax Beagle into performing properly in Earth’s atmosphere instead of Mars’s, he was the guy. She had learned Beagle’s systems inside and out during her training, but reentry was a different ball game altogether, and attempting to do it manually—by the seat of her pants—was a recipe for disaster. One wrong calculation, and they would reenter too steep and burn up, or too shallow and bounce across the upper atmosphere into open space. A one-way trip, either way.

  Once the lander slowed enough for the control surfaces to function—they were basically large, flat plates that extended from the lander’s biconic, or four-sided, cone-shaped body—she could orient the vehicle into a landing position and fly her to the ground. She had performed it in the simulator a thousand times, but for a landing on Mars, not Earth.

  It was a big risk, but they had no other choice. Like it or not, they were stuck here and couldn’t survive in orbit forever. Home—however far in the past it might be—was down there, unexplained blackened landscape and all.

  “Braking burn at . . . fifty thousand, no, check that.” She watched Lucas rub his eyes. “Braking burn at forty thousand feet.”

  “Copy. Forty thousand. Do you need a break?”

  “No, I’m fine. You?”

  “I’m a little hungry.”

  Lucas pushed himself back from the console. “Now that you mention it, I am, too.”

  Sif unzipped her breast pocket and pulled out a tube. “DINNER-ROAST BEEF-MASHED POTATO-GRAVY-PEAS” was printed on the side. “This one’s not too bad. Here.” Sif flicked it at Lucas, and he caught it as it floated toward him.

  “Yum. My favorite, just like Mom used to make.”

  “What, did she chew it for you first?”

  Lucas laughed, and Sif was glad to hear it. She pulled another tube from her pocket, this one stamped “DINNER-TURKEY-STUFFING-CRANBERRY SAUCE,” and unscrewed the cap. “Bon appétit.”

  “Down the hatch,” Lucas said as he squeezed a glob into his mouth. Sif did the same. Not as good as the real thing, she thought, but still tasty, considering NASA was able to shove an entire processed meal into a toothpaste tube. And it was admittedly better than the dehydrated MREs—Meals, Ready to Eat—she lived on during survival training.

  “Think you can fly this thing, Sif?” Lucas asked, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “If you can get her through reentry, I can fly her. And thanks for calling me Sif.”

  “I might as well, right? But you still can’t call me Tater.”

  “Deal.”

  “Let’s take it through some simulation runs. We can tweak the reentry program a little, and when we’re good with that, then we can see if you’re really ready to fly her.”

  Sif faked a look of shocked indignation. “You’re suggesting I’m not?” She squeezed another glob of her dinner into her mouth.

  “I’m suggesting practice makes perfect.”

  “I’m game. Switch it over to sim mode and we can check your reentry adjustments.”

  Hunter’s voice came through the overhead speaker. “Sif, Lucas, I think you might want to see this.”

  “Sounds like he’s got the viewer working again,” Sif said, a little concerned at the sound of Hunter’s voice. She pressed her comm button. “On our way. What’s up?”

  “It’s all gone,” he said, his voice full of emotion. “It’s all gone.”

  Chapter 18

  Litsa was in her element. She ran at the front of the ranks, beside Jarrod. The war party, torches held high, headed east toward the draw where the hive was last seen. Where Erik was lost, and Mirda infected. The muffled thunder of their feet across what was once called the Badlands was the only sound she could hear, apart from their heavy breathing and the crackle of the torch flames.

  When they left the Dak and crossed the fields, they saw the signs. The drones were there once again, leaving trails through the crop rows. If the hive moved, it didn’t move far.

  The moon was yet to rise, and the land was dark. Perfect conditions. They would stop, send scouts to see if the hive was still there, and then, once confirmed, spread out into a wide arc, surrounding
the hive. Then they would fill the sky with their arrows.

  The terrain was familiar, and Jarrod slowed his pace. They were close to the draw and had to be cautious, in case the hive moved westward, out of the draw and toward the Dak. If it did, there might be sentinel drones close by.

  Behind her and Jarrod were most of the watch, twenty warriors, full quivers all. A few of them carried oil-filled skins, drawn from the sulfurous black pools at the very lowest reaches of the Dak. They would lay a ring of the flammable oil around the site of the hive, trapping it behind a wall of flames. Litsa and Jarrod had seen the hive up close and knew they couldn’t contain it or destroy it entirely. It could move through the flames, losing part of itself in the process, but some of it would survive. If they burned enough of it, though, damaged it, scared it, the thing would move away.

  Jarrod stopped and raised his arm just as the stench hit him. There was a breeze blowing from the east, and it carried the thing’s horrid scent.

  Luck was with them so far. The hive was still there.

  The hunting party surrounded Jarrod as he knelt in the grass. His voice was low and steady. “Jaxom, Fleet, the hill ahead obscures the draw, high ground to the north, open land to the south. Approach from the south and confirm its location. Keep your distance,” he cautioned, remembering what happened the night before, “just close enough to confirm. There were drones to the south night last, so patience and stealth become your weapons.”

  “Yes, my captain,” they both replied, then quickly disappeared into the shadows, heading for the flat terrain to the south of the hill.

  Litsa watched as Jarrod smoothed the dirt with his palm, then drew a map with his finger. She recognized the high ground, the low area, and in the middle where he smacked his fist into the dust, a wide mark signified the location of the hive. “Oilers, you will pour from here to here, meeting at the eastern arc.” He drew a rough circle around the hive, showing where he wanted the oil placed. “From there, you will light the ring and return to that stand of pine,” he said, pointing off to his left. “That will be our rally point. When your arrows are expended, we will meet there.”