by Paul Teague
Billions of kilometres away in the Veluvian Galaxy, there was a sudden explosion, smaller than a pin prick in this vast mass of stars. It went completely unnoticed and it took only moments to burn up into nothing. Just a few bits of debris floated out into space.
The last person had attempted to leave the ISOCell and it had completed its final task.
To ensure the perpetual incarceration of the life form inside it. Or to destroy them as they attempted to leave.
Minutes later, in a different galaxy, there was another explosion, a much bigger one which rocked the planet far below and shook the matrix of satellites which had been formed around it.
The Nexus was gone and all who were on it had perished. And the Helyion ship which had been docked to it was nowhere to be seen.
Part Four: Regeneration
Funeral
Amy always found goodbyes difficult. She choked up as the memories of Nat’s funeral came back to her. Even though it had all been a carefully orchestrated charade, with no body in the coffin, it had been very real to them at the time. Here she was again.
Only Harriet and David provided some relief from it all. Young children are always a blessing at times like these, they create a distraction from the misery.
They were the survivors, a small group of regular people who’d been caught up in extraordinary events and managed to save the entire planet.
Amy let the rush of emotion come. The tears flowed freely now, she felt that she’d earned it. They’d been through so much together, those who’d survived, and the world was having to piece itself back together again.
She knew that she would never be able to tell the full tale, just like the time she’d been caught up in the Army exercise which had nearly ended her life for the first time. The truth about what had begun in the Secret Bunker would need to remain hidden, the world would have to believe that this carnage had been caused by a devastating solar flare, a natural phenomenon, rather than inhabitants from other planets.
She squeezed Mike’s hand hard as the final words were spoken by the minister and the coffin was lowered into the ground.
Simon nodded his head at her, acknowledging all that she’d done to fight this, to protect everybody involved.
They’d succeeded of course; the fact that they had come together at that time for the funeral service was confirmation of that. None of them felt like they’d won a victory though, with so much loss of life.
Kate stood by Simon, and it was good to see Magnus, Xiang and Viktor there. They were all bound by these terrible events and they would be for the rest of their lives. In fact, many people had attended from the bunkers, it was as if they had to be here, as if it was one of the only ways they could cope with what had happened.
The coffin was lowered into the ground.
Amy waited a moment, clutched Mike tightly, and they walked away across the graveyard.
For somebody who had just helped to save humanity, she felt a bleak sense of emptiness.
Survivors
Mum and Dad have gone to James’s funeral. Nat and I are mad that we can’t be there, but if they detach us from Xiang’s device, it’s going to cause us big health problems. Apparently. I think they just said that to scare us, to make sure that we stay hooked up to this thing.
We’d have liked to have attended the service; we didn’t know James that well, but we all understand that we owe him our lives. If he hadn’t disabled that mobile phone mast it’s hard to think how we might ever have won our battle.
My leg is still so sore. It’s been stitched and bandaged, but I hate the way that I can feel where the two bits of flesh are trying to heal. I’m reminded every time I move suddenly.
I’m still experiencing bursts of emotion, where I want to cry and scream, but I’m trying to keep them to myself. Nat can feel it, our connection is so strong now, but she finally seems to have learned some patience. She’s waiting for me to tell it when I’m ready.
I’m not even sure myself what happened in those last seconds. I can remember the Transporter lights flashing, and seeing that sword heading at speed towards my neck. It’s hazy now, but I can recall a sudden feeling of rage and I went to push Zadra Nurmeen off the Transporter.
I think he thought he’d got me, so he wasn’t expecting it. I must have managed to push him off just as transportation took place.
Or maybe he tried to follow me and was exploded as he tried to leave the ISOCell.
Either way, Nurmeen was the last off the ship. He was the one who got caught in the explosion.
I made it back to The Nexus by the skin of my teeth. I don’t recall much after that, just glimpses, like Dae-Ho rushing over to me on the Transporter.
That was my last thought actually, because I realized that if he was there, and not a Trooper, they must have re-taken The Nexus while I’d been away.
And Mum must have made it out alive too. Another flashback of Doctor Pierce. He didn’t have a tie on. I was so out of it I couldn’t work out which of the twins it was.
Then a medical room, and Xiang’s face I’m sure. After that, nothing. Not until I woke up stiff, sore and confused in a MedLab.
Not sure which Quadrant, but I was alive. And very pleased about it too. Nat was with me, and through the glass, in a separate room, the guy they call Jeff.
Nat tells me she has some big news to reveal about him, but she’s been sworn to secrecy until my strength is up, and I can’t sense it, even though I’ve tried.
I lost a lot of blood apparently – I’m lucky to be alive according to Nat. Don’t I know it?
We’ve got a lot of catching up to do. I’m looking forward to it now. It feels like this is renewal, a chance to put everything behind us and move on.
With Nat part of the family again, it’s like a second chance, something I’d never thought could possibly happen.
Most of us made it out alive. I can’t pretend to say I’m upset about Zadra Nurmeen or Henry Pierce, they got what they deserved I think.
Though Dad has told me some things about the Pierces which make me wonder about Henry Pierce, it sounds like he had a pretty rough deal. Nat and I need to be grateful we didn’t meet the same fate, it could have been one of us on that drugs trial.
Though things haven’t been easy for Nat either, we’ve all had some rough treatment from The Global Consortium.
I can’t wait to get out of this place now – I’m fed up with living underground. They can’t move us anywhere else; we need Zatheon technology for this healing process to complete, and that can’t be revealed to the outside world. It’s just another little secret that the public will never get to know.
I never thought that I would ever hear myself say that I need to get outside into the fresh air. But it’s all I can think of now, cooped up in this hi-tech, artificial environment.
Oh, there’s another great thing about finally leaving this place too. I can’t wait to get my hands on a decent Wi-Fi signal once again.
The Final Seconds
In the end, it took just seven minutes to determine the final destiny of the Earth. Seven minutes in which any other sequence of events could have forever changed the future for the billions of lives on the planet below.
At seven minutes, Mike opened up his Comms-Tab and spoke to Harold Pierce. Something he’d said earlier had been troubling him. It was about the terraforming codes – could that possibly be anything to do with what was on the SD card? He’d found four codes, they seemed useless to him, but might they be what he was looking for?
At six minutes he sent the files over to Harold and at five minutes, he’d confirmed that they were the codes to give him access to the sabotaged terraforming process. The sabotage was reversed in an instant as the codes gave him back control of the Shards on the planet surface.
At seven minutes Magnus and Viktor had watched as the twenty-nine Helyion ships had powered up and begun to leave the planet.
All fifty nuclear weapons were less than three minutes away from blo
wing them all out of the atmosphere. Viktor held steady right up to ninety seconds before detonation. He wanted to be sure they were leaving. Then he activated The Global Defence Matrix and blew every single missile out of the skies. The sentinels in space found each target, fixed on it and rendered each one immediately useless. He hadn’t needed to use the nukes after all, but the gamble had paid off.
By three minutes, Simon and Kate had managed to send any remaining Troopers back through the Transporter to Quadrant 3, where medical teams were ready to take them to any space that was still available. They were dazed, confused, delirious even, but harmless now that the poisonous stream of orders had ceased transmitting. The Troopers’ helmets gave free access to the Transporter; the evacuation process was fast and efficient.
At seven minutes Xiang had attached the final tube to Davran, who she’d had to sedate due to the extreme disorientation that she was experiencing since being detached from the machines that controlled her. A series of tubes and wires connected Davran and Nat, but there was an empty bed for Dan, it needed Dan for the process to be complete.
At four minutes, the Transporter in the Ops Area on board The Nexus sprang into life and the swirl of lights obscured the single form that had just materialized on the platform. Dae-Ho picked up a weapon discarded by one of the Troopers and pointed it at the figure. It was Dan, bleeding badly and looking bruised and tired. Dae-Ho shot the controls of the Transporter, to be sure that nobody followed after him, then threw down the weapon.
Simon and Kate had stayed behind to wait for Dan. Between them they loaded him into the main Transporter and sent him back to Quadrant 3.
By one minute he was wired up in the MedLab and the healing blood from his unconscious birth mother helped to save the son and daughter that she had not seen for over fifteen years.
As Simon had gone to activate the Transporter, he’d shouted to Harold, ‘What about you two?’
The brothers were the only two humans on board The Nexus. The Troopers were either heading back to Earth in one of the four Quadrants or they’d been evacuated by Simon and Kate.
‘We’ll follow you!’ Harold replied. Simon nodded and took the last party back to Quadrant 3 in the Transporter.
As the Transporter door closed, Harold heard the thud of Helyion boots stomping along the corridor.
It was too late, he didn’t have time to reverse the self-destruction sequence. If they caught him now, they could change everything and regain the initiative. That wasn’t going to happen.
The nukes were disabled, the terraforming was back on track, Dan had escaped the ISOCell, the four Quadrants were heading back to Earth, and he’d just heard from Viktor that the Helyions were leaving the planet’s surface.
Two minutes left. They were dead anyway unless he got back to Quadrant 3, along with his brother. He’d let his brother go once before, given him the benefit of the doubt. He was too dangerous to be locked up in a prison or incarcerated somewhere humane. The Helyions would only get to him again, Henry was unable to stop himself.
Spurred on by the approaching Helyions, Harold Pierce picked up his E-Pad and walked towards the airlock.
He typed in a series of three codes that only he knew, and then smashed the E-Pad against the wall.
He walked up to his brother and kissed him on the head.
His eyes moistened as he walked up to the airlock door and he keyed in the activation code. The airlock doors opened and the two Pierce brothers were flushed out into space, dying almost instantly.
As they drew their last breaths, the Helyion boarding team reached the Ops Area, where all was quiet.
The holographic images of two hundred of the world’s leaders looked on as the alien life forms looked around, bewildered by the scene that greeted them.
Then the self-destruct sequence reached zero seconds and The Nexus and docked Helyion ship were blown into tiny pieces, joining the two Pierce brothers in their cold, dark grave in space.
As the massive explosion ripped apart the two space craft and several of the surrounding satellites, an armada of Zatheon warships appeared just outside the bright lights of the matrix. They’d received the three codes sent by Harold Pierce only moments before. They’d finally come to help their friends from Earth. They were going to escort the twenty-nine Helyion ships back to their own planet and far away from this solar system.
And they were going to make very sure that they never came back.
Reborn
The Earth was reborn, though fewer than three thousand people would ever know it.
Officially, it was solar flares which had incapacitated the world for the past seventeen days.
Hurriedly, the world’s leaders, relieved to have survived these events, agreed on a containment and misinformation plan.
They’d just escaped the tragic consequences of their own scheming, yet here they were again, covering up, fabricating untruths, changing reality to appease the population of the planet.
Fewer than one million people perished in all. It was a terrible loss of course, but nowhere near as bad as it could have been.
The world had been minutes away from total extinction, now it had been reborn, billions of human lives were saved.
Nobody felt a sense of victory though, this battle had been won at a terrible cost.
And if it wasn’t for a group of civilians who’d been thrown together in the heat of crisis and created such a remarkable fighting force, this would have become a dead planet. Home for an aggressive Helyion race intent on mining its rich mineral deposits and allowing the human inhabitants to perish in a sabotaged environment, their dying screams unheard.
The four Quadrants had returned to their hiding places below the bunkers, their cargo of embryos, weaponry and Troopers intact.
The ethics of that programme would be argued about in private for many years to follow, but it remained intact, a subterranean ark, hidden out of sight should mankind ever need it again.
The terraforming process was successfully completed, thanks to the fast thinking of Harold Pierce. He perished on The Nexus, alongside his twin brother, but his final gift to the planet was the one that he’d intended to bestow all along, ever since he’d become involved in The Global Consortium – that of continuing life for the Earth.
The rebirth of the Earth would continue, undetected by humans, and using nanotechnology borrowed from the Zatheons. Technology developed by an expert mineralogist called Davran Saloor, a much respected citizen of that planet who’d once been Ostracized for crimes against The Off-World Federation. But now fully pardoned in recognition of the massive suffering that she’d endured in the battle for Earth.
Afterwards
I can’t believe that we’ve returned to this place a year on, but I guess it’s only fitting really – where else could we go to remember the people that we lost and the events that we were caught up in?
I’m walking with Nat across the car park and towards the cottage.
We all travelled here by traditional means – there were no Transporters involved in this gathering, just cars, taxis and aeroplanes. And there was also the occasional helicopter, laid on by Magnus of course.
My leg still twinges occasionally, usually when I swing out of the car, but most of the time I’m not really aware of it.
I notice that the mast that James blew up across the fields is back now.
After a year to recover, there isn’t much evidence of what went on across this landscape, just a few grassy mounds and rocks deposited where they weren’t previously.
The bunker staff greet us as we arrive. Troywood is closed to tourists for the day, it’s only people who were here for Genesis 2 today. We all shared a unique experience – I’m changing my mind about this gathering now I’m here, it’s a good thing to do.
We all move through the bunker entrance and gather outside the bunker’s blast doors. Everything is as it was when we first came here on that family day trip, completely oblivious as to what was about to happen
.
So much has changed in the past year, it’s been an amazing time for me and Nat. We finally met our birth parents – Davran and Jeff – and now we feel like we’re part of some massive, happy, extended family. It makes no difference to either of us that we have two mums and two dads, we treat them all the same, though of course we’re still getting to know our natural parents.
It took a long time for the Zatheons to put Davran right. She was a bit of a wreck after Mum rescued her from the ISOCell, but things are coming good now.
Jeff too has had a tough time of it, less so than Davran, but they’re both pulling together. It seems to really help when they’re around everybody else in the family.
I think they struggle to know what was real and what was implanted by the Neuronic Devices, but being rooted firmly in reality only helps that process.
What a change there’s been in a year.
Dad now works for Magnus at the recently expanded Magnum Enterprises. He’s a chief coder there managing multiple teams. He still does most of it via the kitchen table mind you, and always has time for an online cat video, but working remotely, he’s doing some great things these days. He’s updated and refreshed his tech skills, he seems to have been given a new lease of life in his new role.
Magnus looks like a different person too. He’s rediscovered his passion for helping humanity through tech innovation and is adapting his sabotaged exoskeletons to help people with mobility problems and paralysis. He’s determined that something good will come from what we went through.
He’s brought in Xiang too. He thinks they’ll be able to make the leap to bioskeletons fairly soon, as well as developing a way to bridge spinal damage using nanotechnology. Xiang seems to have found her natural place as well, she looks really happy that her work is being used for only good projects now, her conscience is at peace I think.