Absolution

by Peter Smith

  “And we just confirmed that it’s on its way here.” Maria stated, flatly. She was impressed with her ability to control her emotions because she felt anything but calm and cool at this exact moment.

  “How long until it arrives?”

  Maria was about to speak when the automated systems began to blare and warnings populated before the two of them, “Que demonios?” Her mother said in Spanish as she expanded the radar returns from the Northern Hemisphere monitoring stations.

  Maria’s eyes grew as the screen did. Dozens of atmospheric disturbances were tracing their way through the layers of Earth’s upper atmosphere, “Now” she said, her chest aching as she forced out the words.

  Her mother shook her head frantically, “Where the hell did these additional objects come from?”

  Maria was accessing an invasive protocol in her command system as she responded, “Look at the mass estimates.”

  Her mother reviewed the data, “They add up to nearly what the earlier observations said the original comprised.” She paused, “It broke apart?”

  Maria connected to Sean again, only this time loading the protocol she had just retrieved. A connection request from Tobor sprung into her vision and she swiped it aside, she’d speak with it soon enough, “How would you launch an invasion of a planet mom?”

  The protocol was working as her mother responded, “I’d seize orbit and then hit critical infrastructure and command-and-control points across the globe simultaneously.” She paused, “So it’s an invasion.”

  Maria nodded, “Given our luck and that it’s something put in place by dad, yeah, going to go with invasion. And where is the largest concentration of leadership on this planet right now?”

  “Kauai” The statement came out almost as if her mother didn’t believe it, or more likely didn’t want to. Both of their husbands were at the largest target on the planet's surface.

  Maria’s virtual vision changed to that of a boardroom, over a dozen men and women sat around it, arguing with one another, “Damn it Sean, when I call you answer.” She shouted.

  The image shifted dramatically upward as her husband sat up straight, her voice being transmitted directly into his ears, “Maria?”

  “Who the hell else could hack your contacts? Now shut up, we’ve got a situation.”

  The view shifted from side to side, he was shaking his head like she could see him, “I’m sorry for not answering but we’ve actually hit a productive patch here.”

  “Yes, all the yelling and finger pointing looks real promising,” She barked, wanting to get to the point.

  “Wait, you can see through my contacts?” Indignation and confusion mingled within his tone. She could see some people at the table starting to pay attention to the young man who was talking to himself.

  “Yes, now what part of shut up was hard to understand. You have to evacuate the conference, now.”

  He stared ahead for a moment and then responded with one word, “Okay.”

  “Okay?” She asked, curious why it had been so easy.

  He didn’t respond, instead he leaned over and got his father’s attention. She watched as he oriented himself to whisper into his dad’s ear and then looked at the older man. Williams nodded and then spoke, “Maria, what’s wrong?”

  “The issue on Venus has now become an issue on Earth. A ship left the planet several days ago and parts of it are now entering the Earth’s atmosphere. I don’t know what the hell it is, but anything built and programed by my father is bad news.”

  She paused and looked at the radar data, “And the largest part is on a trajectory for the Hawaiian islands. Whatever it is, it’s coming for you.”

  She listened as Sean relayed what she had said into his ears. Her father-in-law’s jaw tightened and his eyes went hard. He taped General Kellen’s arm while he stood up and raised his hands to get everyone’s attention.

  That’s when her virtual vision disappeared. The signal she was receiving from Sean ended. She sat there, blinking in shock for a moment.

  “Sean?” She asked, hoping it was just a loss of visual data.

  She attempted to reconnect, but each time she did an error message appeared.

  “What is it?” Her mother asked.

  Maria looked at her, “I was too late.”

  19

  David Williams

  Kauai Summit

  David nearly fell to his ass as the entire building rocked. His legs instinctively spread about to support his upper body and his hands fell to the top of the desk to stabilize himself.

  Delegates and their aides fell from their chairs and onto the ground as the lights in the room blinked on and off from power disruptions. Ceiling tiles fell, one smacking into David’s back on its way to the floor. Thankfully, nothing more substantial broke loose. The shaking subsided, and the room erupted once again into a sea of voices.

  David looked over to Sean, seeing his son pulling himself up from the floor. He looked fine, no bleeding and no foreign objects protruding from his flesh. David turned his attention to General Kellen who was already barking orders into the air, using his virtual vision to connect to the rest of the forces on the island. Apparently he hadn’t had to follow the stringent security procedures they had prior to entering. Based on how frustrated Kellen was, it appeared as if he wasn’t successful in making a connection.

  “Jamming?” David asked.

  Kellen spared him a nod and then went back to work, his hands moving through windows in his virtual vision that only he could see.

  The light streaming in through the windows dimmed and drew everyone’s attention toward them, “What the bloody hell?” David heard Captain Dyer mutter.

  David walked toward the window, stepping over debris as he did. It was getting steadily darker with each passing second. If this continued, it would appear as if it were dark in just a few minutes.

  As he reached the glass, sensing Sean stepping up beside him. They both peered out upon the tropical paradise before them. Only instead of blue sky and serene clouds gliding over, they saw a large amorphous mass hanging above them. It wasn’t opaque, as it shifted he could see through it to the sky above. It was almost as if a colony of flying insects, titanic in scale, were above them. The part of the mass they could view from their vantage point undulated. It reminded David of flocks of birds, appearing almost random in its movements but having a purpose that was known only to them.

  The cloud grew, stretching out to cover more and more of the sky above them. A bulbous shape appeared in the outer edge and then snapped toward the ground so fast that he nearly missed it in-between the blinking of his eye. A filament of the black material speared a transport. It pierced through the cockpit, and then the entire aircraft exploded in a ball of flame and metal. Black tendrils dropped from the sky by the dozens, like demonic fingers, lashing at the parked aircraft and into the summit compound itself.

  Sean took a step back as the shock wave from the destroyed air craft slammed against the window, rattling it within it’s frame and sending splinters across it, “Holy crap!” His son yelled.

  David was already spinning toward Kellen when the doors burst open and a team of Marines and security personnel from the Berlin and London spires rushed into the room. Panic saturated the space as the guards secured the leadership of the alliance Kellen had created. Williams joined a Sergeant who was on the other side of the General. Sean pulled up the rear as they ushered the leadership out of the room. David’s hand clamped on Kellen’s elbow, his other hand instinctively going toward the pistol that should have been on his hip but was absent because of the security precautions for the summit.

  As they breezed toward the exit, he saw Trotsky stand up out of the corner of his eye. Trotsky’s expression was wide as he searched the room, “Where are my guards?” The leader of the Moscow spire shouted, a hand being clasped by his aide. Her face was white, and it was clear that she was frightened.

  David stopped. His mind locking onto the fact that the se
curity personnel for Trotsky’s league had yet to enter the room. They might not have been as capable as the Marine contingent on the island, but they were still professional and lethal in their own right. They should have entered at nearly the same time as the Marine forces had.

  He turned to bring Trotsky into full view. He was aware that Sean had broken away from the security detail and was standing behind him as Kellen was rushed from the room.

  Williams felt his son’s hand wrap around his bicep and the younger man tried to pull him toward the exit. His curiosity had gotten the best of him though, and he resisted the best efforts of his boy to extricate him from the room. The door on the opposite side of the table, the one behind Trotsky and his client delegates, twitched.

  That was the only way he could describe what he was seeing. One moment it was two solid pieces of wood. The next, its entire surface shifted as if it were a living piece of flesh that had just experienced an electric shock. The door convulsed and then dissolved into a cloud of black specs that hung in the air.

  “Get your ass in gear Marine,” Sean shouted at him.

  Williams allowed himself to be pulled toward the opposite doorway, his eyes never leaving the scene as Trotsky and the other spire leaders frantically ran around, crawled under or launched themselves over the surface of the conference table.

  Tendrils shot out to each of them. Valentina, Trotsky's aide and lover, was pierced through the back of her skull as she ran around the edge. Her face and entire head dissolving just as the door had. The leader of the Kiev Spire was nearly to the other side of the table, having crawled underneath it when his foot was grabbed by a tendril and dragged him into the cloud, his screams of fear quickly morphed into agony as he disappeared into the expanding darkness.

  Williams and Sean were through the threshold and into the hall when his eyes locked onto Trotsky, pressed against the edge of the conference table. The doors he and his son had just passed through were nearly done closing when a figure emerged from the haze of the billions of small particles consuming the room and people within.

  His heart stopped as he shifted his gaze from Trotsky to the newcomer. Their hand came down in a swift motion, extending as it did into a long blade. It crashed into the top of Trotsky’s skull as the doors closed and prevented Williams from seeing anything further.

  The shock ended as the doors closed, and so did his resistance to Sean. He turned and ran full speed with his son down the hall. The building was shaking from explosions happening outside and from every time the cloud above the island sent a filament of itself into the building. The sound of an air-raid siren outside pulsed through the walls as the two of them ran as hard as they could.

  “What’s the plan, dad?” Sean asked between breaths.

  “Armory!” He shouted back.

  “Shouldn’t we help secure the General?”

  “His security detail has him covered, you and I have bigger fish to fry.”

  “What’s more important than the general?”

  “Getting back home and protecting our family.”

  Sean nearly lost his footing as the words hit him, “The New York Spire is the most secure facility in the world. No one would be crazy enough to attack it directly.”

  “This person is.”

  “You know who’s behind this?”

  Williams forgot to answer as they rounded a corner and came face to face with James Dawson and the leader of his protective detail, Captain Dyer, “Wrong way!” The British soldier shouted.

  Both men blew past them, fear etched into their expressions. David saw what they were running from at the same time Sean did, “Holy shit!” Sean shouted.

  David grabbed Sean’s arm and pulled him in the opposite direction, running from a mass of black tendrils that were writhing down the hallway toward them. They ran with everything they had, catching up to Dawson and Dyer as the soldier hauled his leader from danger.

  “Where’s General Kellen?” David shouted as they joined the two.

  “No bloody clue, we got separated” Dyer responded as the four of them turned around a corner, then ran down an enclosed breezeway that connected the summit building to a support structure. Dawson was wheezing for air, likely never having exerted himself this hard his entire life.

  Windows lined both walls and for a second David wished they hadn’t. The destruction he could see occurring outside rocked his resolve.

  The door at the end of the passage dissolved into a wall of black. They all skid to a stop with Dyer forcing Dawson behind him, “Go go go!” He shouted. Dawson and David turned to run back. Pure instinct took over within David, his hand gripping onto Sean’s shoulder and pulling his son to the ground as a tendril rounded the corner and leapt across the gap, impaling Dawson through the heart.

  James Dawson turned and looked over his shoulder at Dyer, his eyes wide in fear, “John?”

  The tendril pulled and Dawson’s body sailed over David and Sean, slamming into the wall on the opposite end of the hall and then careening around the corner and out of sight.

  “James!” Dyer bellowed, chasing after Dawson.

  David and Sean leapt to their feet as the other soldier disappeared around the corner. They turned, looking at the door that had disappeared. The black wall of death was methodically making its way toward them. David didn’t hesitate, he grabbed a planter off the floor and hurled it through one of the windows.

  The glass was still bouncing off the tile floor when Sean pulled himself through. David followed, not bothering to look down either direction of the breezeway. He was already going as fast as he could, no further motivation could make him go faster.

  They landed outside, and they both paused for a second, taking in the breadth of the destruction that was occurring around them. Williams had served for most of his life and given that he was closer to a hundred than further away, that was a considerable amount of time. He had seen and done much in the service of his nation and later, after it fell, in its memory.

  He had experienced the hell that came from nearly drowning on sinking cruiser off the East Coast. He had been forced to crawl through the bodies and body parts of his dead friends while in South East Asia. During The Fall he had to sit back and watch as children were murdered and insurrectionist bastards raped women. All because his reconnaissance unit was aware of a Patterson drone force nearby and stepping in to save those people would have exposed the entire MEU.

  What he saw now, what he was witnessing with his own two eyes, gave him pause. The black mass blanketed the sky above, not quiet reaching the horizon but much of the ocean, and it blanketed this part of the island of Kauai. The surface of it undulated, ripples emanating from what appeared to be random locations, but he knew that it was all being directed.

  Tendrils, hundreds of them, plunged toward the surface, striking vehicles and people. He watched as an entire Marine fire team was consumed by the buzzing mass of black particles as one tendril slammed down into them from above. The material flattened along the ground and then rebounded back toward the main body above, as if pulled back up by some elastic band.

  Where four men and women had stood, clad in the most advanced body armor ever issued to main line soldiers, was now nothing but pristine beach. He didn’t know if they had been pulled up into the sky when the tendril had withdrawn or been dissolved. Given the screams of pain he heard from the men and women in the conference room, he suspected the latter.

  He slapped Sean on the arm and ran toward the armory building that the Marines had established to supply themselves here. Trotsky’s coalition had one, but Williams was unsure of its status. He didn’t even know if theirs was still in working order, but if it wasn’t, he couldn’t be sure they’d make it off the island. As it was, he didn’t give them a chance above the single digits.

  They both tore down the dirt path, the sounds of desperate battle buffeting them. Directly above them a Marine transport roared overhead, its jet wash throwing them both to the ground as it screamed p
ast, hugging the surface of the Earth as it tried to make it out from underneath the destructive cloud.

  A tendril swung from above and toward the aircraft. The pilot noticed the threat and pulled the craft in a tight banking turn to avoid it. The piece of the cloud adjusted it’s trajectory and sliced through the transport, cutting it from belly to roof and sending two separate pieces to crash into the compound less than a hundred yards away.

  Williams threw himself on top of Sean, as the heat from the explosion seared his exposed skin and caused sweat to spring to his covered flesh. The sound and blast washed over them, pulling at his uniform. Flecks of debris struck his skin, producing needles of pain that compelled him to grit his teeth.

  When silence reigned, he rolled off of Sean, then grabbed his son by the arm and hauled him to his feet. They ran past the still smoldering wreckage as it popped and sizzled. He did his best to not look through the cracked fuselage and at the body of a passenger still strapped into their seat. Their flesh being eaten away by the flames of the crash, the straps melted and gave way under the weight of the corpse and the body fell out of view into the flames.

  Williams silently prayed to God that James wasn’t on that transport. That his security detail had realized that with the sky dominated by the cloud of death that they needed to get him to the secondary extraction site at the beach. From there to the awaiting Swimmer Delivery Vehicles that were hidden nearby.

  He didn’t dare risk contacting the General, though. Whatever this threat was, it was aware, and it was being directed by a man that he had long since thought dead. If he used their radios, he knew they would immediately become the center of its attention.

  He and Sean rounded a corner of the compound and saw the bunker. They both ran with everything they could muster toward it. Sean was lighter and had always been faster, his body closer to that of a runner’s than Williams, who had always been more on the walking tank side of the spectrum. His son reached the bunker first, the guards were nowhere to be found. He knew the men that had been assigned here; they were not the type to cut and run, so he feared the worst.