by Mark Wandrey
“How many are in custody?” someone asked. The captain looked annoyed, but answered.
“We’re told none, they all fought to the death.”
“Holy shit,” someone else exclaimed. The captain nodded. Billy shook his head. So, Victor and all his people were dead. It was a shock, but he wasn’t surprised. He felt badly because it took a load off his chest. There was no way to link him to them now.
“That isn’t to say all the cultists, the…” the captain looked at his notes, “Followers of the Avatar, are all dead. We think the leaders are, but we have reports of at least another hundred loose in the city. Some tried to get in during the Fed’s assault, and NYPD arrested 26 of them. Surprisingly, the Feds haven’t tried to take custody. The rest are at large. We’re distributing pictures of some who escaped. It should go without saying they are likely armed and should definitely be considered dangerous. If you uncover a nest, don’t play Clint Eastwood! Call for a tactical unit.” He looked slowly around the room. “Is that understood? Good. Any questions?” Billy raised his hand and the captain pointed at him. “What’s on your mind Harper?”
“What’s the mayor have to say about the Feds causing another pitched battle in the city without giving us any warning?”
“The mayor ain’t said shit,” the captain admitted. “We have five confirmed dead civilians in Central Park West from that .50 caliber fire inside the park. The FBI, NSA, and other alphabet soup say that was these cultists. But we know they didn’t have anything bigger than small arms, so it must have been some of the hardware they lost in the park when the Followers took it. And before anyone asks, no, they haven’t said what the government is going to do about the GW, either.” The captain was referring to the George Washington Bridge. Two hours earlier, shortly after dawn, a dozen APC and tanks had rolled across the bridge and, quite literally, tore the shit out of the bridge deck. The captain continued.
“The civilians have had enough. We’re seeing tourists and the uber-rich fleeing from Manhattan.”
“Good riddance,” someone said to more laughter. The captain smirked and nodded.
“Traffic is going to be fucked,” he reminded them, “and we can expect plenty of crime. Be on your guard, and keep an eye out for those cultists. That’s all.”
A short time later Billy was in the underground garage, getting into his new cruiser. A moving truck had wrecked the old one trying to get away from the carnage on the first night of the attack. He signed into the computer and, just as the captain warned, found five theft calls awaiting his response. As he pulled out of the garage and into the barely-moving traffic, he had a suspicion it would be a long time before life returned to normal. Then he wondered if it ever would.
* * *
More than 34,000 kilometers above the Earth, two spacecraft remotely piloted to a successful docking. One carried mostly fuel and a prototype engine. After docking, the second one burned out the remainder of its second stage transfer booster in one long outwardly-aimed burn. When it was out of fuel, the booster fell away, and the prototype drive blazed to life, climbing and gaining speed until many hours later it broke free of Earth’s gravity. It continued to burn, hour upon hour, gaining speed as Excalibur left Earth behind.
* * * * *
Chapter Thirteen
Intermission
Tensions around the globe grew steadily worse. Egypt lodged an official complaint with the UN stating that Israel launched a covert operation on their soil and stole something vital to national security, though they refused to disclose exactly what that item was. They released photos of bodies and cell phone recordings of a gun battle, but the perpetrators did not appear to be of any particular nationality. Israel’s only response was that Egypt should look toward the likes of ISIS or Iran for a source. U.S. defense analysts noted that Egyptian military elements were moving north.
NASA issued another vague and somewhat conflicting statement concerning asteroid LM-245. They said it appeared true that LM-245’s orbit was altered, though they did not say how, and that it was now classified as an ‘Earth crosser.’ However, they stated categorically that the asteroid would pass no closer to Earth than the orbit of the Moon, a distance of more than 200,000 miles. “Near the end of May, we’ll all be able to enjoy a once in a lifetime view of an asteroid as it passes safely by,” a spokesman stated. They did not issue a statement regarding the two rocket launches. Private astronomers clamored to offer proof NASA was lying. Other than a few tabloids and conspiracy websites, the press gave these accusations little coverage. Other nations such as Russia and Japan remained silent on the matter.
The government of India also had no comment as they struggled with their own alien portal. Keeping secrets of that magnitude was not one of the Indian intelligence community’s strongpoints. Word leaked out through various channels and found its way to Pakistan. Officials in Pakistan’s intelligence community were privy to world reports containing several alarming facts. First, there were more of these portals; second, the asteroid the British first reported weeks ago was coming toward Earth and could collide; and last, Pakistan didn’t have one of the strange portals. In a rare moment of clarity, Pakistan’s intelligence community realized the implications.
As is often the case in these matters, hotter heads prevailed. Realizing the Israeli operation in Cairo was real, and having uncovered its purpose, elements within the Pakistani government attempted the same feat, though with much less success.
Four Pakistani Air Force CASA/IPTN CN-235 Spanish-made transport planes flew low-and-slow over the Indian frontier, penetrated Indian air space just after one a.m., and managed to get all the way to New Delhi before a civilian Boeing 747 from Air India on its final approach to Indira Gandhi International Airport spotted them.
Indian F-16 fighters intercepted the Pakistani aircraft, and forced them to air drop their passengers almost five miles from their target, New Delhi’s Pusa Hill Forest, where the portal was located. What followed was a three-hour long firefight in the suburbs of Janakpuri, Hari Nagar, and Maypuri while the CN-235 transports sacrificed themselves as a distraction.
Out of the 252 men and women who parachuted from the transports, 91 arrived at the forest, mostly in groups of two to five. There were many wounded, and most lost at least some of their substantial packs of gear. There they met India’s Force One, 216 of the country’s best trained warriors, tasked with defending the portal and preventing what happened in Cairo. India knew full well what they had, and they were preparing a team to use it. The Indians wiped out the Pakistanis, who never got within sight of the portal.
Pakistani air commanders ordered the fighters that escorted the transports to the frontier to fly in and destroy the portal. All twelve of the Chinese J-7 interceptors went to mach and dropped their external fuel tanks for maximum speed. They covered the distance in less than 10 minutes.
The Indian F-16s were far superior to the J-7s, which were a remnant of the Soviet/U.S. Cold War, but the Indian fighters had been in the air for an hour and were low on fuel. Even so, they downed nine of the 12 J-7s, and damaged another. The remaining two reached their target sector, but could not locate the target. They knew the forest concealed their objective, but not the actual location of the portal.
The Indians believed in a layered defense, so the Force One unit had portable anti-aircraft missiles. When a surface-to-air missile hit one of the two remaining Pakistani fighters, the last pilot tracked the attack and located the portal. A second before his jet was blown from the sky, the Pakistani pilot released a single Ra’ad-II missile, which homed in on the target. The weapon struck the portal dead center of the dais. For a split second, the forest in the center of New Delhi was the epicenter of a release of a tiny volume of plasma, which only a moment before had been near the center of the convection zone of an O-class star.
The events of the next few microseconds only happened in the center of devices like the Large Hadron Collider, but they were a few thousand orders of magnitude bigger
. The plasma was more than 100 million degrees, and under inconceivable pressure. At its release, it expanded at nearly the speed of light, its sheer temperature inducing fusion with everything it touched, including air. The blast’s yield was impossible to estimate at the time, but it consumed the better part of five cubic miles of New Delhi and turned it into a nuclear fire. Later, scientists would estimate the yield in gigatons.
The shockwave rolled out at a hundred times the speed of sound, completely vaporizing everything from concrete high rises and massive steel bridges to small mountains. Inside of 250 miles, nothing lived, not even bacteria. Death followed the brilliant flash, instantly transporting a hundred million souls from life into death. Beyond that, the blast ignited buildings like plastic toys under a blowtorch.
For another 150 miles beyond that, the blast burned everything to a crisp, and the shockwave that followed tore it apart. Though the curve of the Earth shielded distant cities from the direct thermal flash, the air above them ignited, consuming everyone and everything below. As far as 600 miles away, aircraft traveling at 35,000 feet melted into sprays of aluminum raining down from the sky.
The blast threw billions of tons of debris into the sky, and a mushroom cloud bigger than any previously ever seen soared into the upper thermosphere, sending bits of New Delhi into orbit. Only minutes later, parts of China and Nepal experienced a rain of molten rock. Forests in Bangladesh and Myanmar went up in flames, and the ancient city of Dhaka burned to the ground. Less than an hour after the missile exploded, a billion human beings were dead, and a hundred million more would soon follow.
* * * * *
Chapter Fourteen
May 3
The city of New York experienced the first shockwave of India’s death two hours later, after the pressure wave traveled all the way through the planet. It only registered 2.4 on the Richter scale, so few people perceived it. The same wave would rebound around the planet several more times, like the ripples in a bucket of water after dropping in a stone. New York was far from the epicenter and wouldn’t feel the true effects for some time to come.
Mindy was about to go to bed, it being almost 10 p.m., when she heard a scream down the hall and changed her mind. In less than a minute, the hall was full of women in robes and men in pajamas. The disturbance was at the other end of the hallway, so it took time for everyone to migrate in that direction. She didn’t find out for days that the scream came from a young woman of Indian descent, who had a vast family living in India.
She found herself squeezed into the doorway of a hotel room identical to hers. On TV was a broadcast relayed from the International Space Station. Mindy recognized its location, moving south and passing below the equator above the Indian Ocean. The image was grainy, which was strange, and someone was speaking in rapid fire Russian. A person groundside was translating.
“We were out of position on the last pass
“What does it mean?” someone asked.
“It’s that asteroid, LM something,” someone else said.
“No, it can’t be,” Mindy said. “LM-245 isn’t due for weeks.”
“How do you know?” a woman next to Mindy asked.
“I’m an astronomer.” The woman’s mouth fell open.
The ISS broadcast broke up into static as the station continued its orbit. Mindy knew there was a ground tracking station in India. She doubted it was working anymore. Eventually, she made her way back to her own room where she watched the news by herself, where she didn’t have to listen to the wild speculations of her co-workers. None of them had connected the portal only a few blocks away with the one in India. As she listened to the late night news anchors talking about getting aid to the area, she tried to calculate the size of a blast that could cause that much destruction. Five hundred megatons? A gigaton? She didn’t know; that sort of physics wasn’t her cup of soup. She finally drifted off around three a.m.
The next day, she sent an email to Leo Skinner. Her message was simple. “Was that the Indian portal?” He replied by lunch. “You know about that?”
She replied, “I can watch the news and put things together.”
“Yes, we think it was the Indian portal,” he eventually replied. “The physics team at JPL put the yield somewhere around a gigaton. Osgood is glad we never tried too hard to penetrate the portal dais.”
Mindy stared at the computer screen, trying to imagine what could have caused the blast. It had to be antimatter. As she had multiple monitors and a fair amount of incoming bandwidth, Mindy became the trailer’s source of news. Their NSA guard quit urging them back to work and spent more than a couple of hours standing and watching the drama unfold, himself.
Around midday the first sirens in the compound sounded, and the guard told everyone in the trailer to shelter in place. A debris cloud was passing over the eastern United States, peppering it with pieces of India. Most of the falling debris pieces were the size of a marble, with the odd turtle- or refrigerator-sized piece thrown in. A piece of metal the size of a football helmet destroyed a brand-new Cadillac on a car lot in Brooklyn. Much of the debris burned up in the atmosphere. In the New York area, there was not a single casualty. An hour later, they gave Mindy and her co-workers the all clear, and they went outside.
It was a nearly cloudless and rather warm day for May. Everyone stared at the sky in wonder, many pointing to the dozens of contrail-like lines left behind by the missing pieces of India. The city was again alive with the sounds of sirens as police responded to thousands of panicked calls about unusual sounds, or reports of debris exploding above the city. Eventually, one of the NSA handlers came and gently nudged them back indoors so they could return to work.
Mindy tried to concentrate but had little success. She was reading about NASA trying to evacuate the ISS which was going to orbit straight through the debris plume, and the crew’s fight against that decision, when the internet began to fail. The portal village operated on a dedicated node maintained within its own secure servers. Outside contact came through those secure gateways, carefully controlled and heavily filtered. Without the right access, no emails got out. She only noticed the stop in inbound traffic because she was reading on outside sites.
Earlier, a major news network uploaded a story to their website. The story was almost complete when the New Delhi blast occurred, so the producers pushed it out to take advantage of the unbelievable spike in web traffic. She found an article linked to the Indian story that was impossible to miss. “Secret Government Report Leaked—NASA Scientists Confirm Asteroid LM-245 Will Hit Earth.”
When the internet came back late that night, the story was gone, as was the news agency that reported it. However, an adage of the information age held true: “The Internet is Forever.” Within hours, people had reposted archived copies of the story all over the internet.
* * * * *
Chapter Fifteen
May 4
Mindy was drinking her morning coffee and eating the bagel left outside her room by the hotel staff when her room phone rang. As they had disconnected the phone from outside lines, she knew it was business. She grabbed the remote and turned the TV off. The only thing on TV was 24/7 coverage of the disaster in India. It was hard to imagine being jaded by the deaths of so many people.
“Patoy,” she said, answering it.
“Ms. Patoy, you will not be going to the camp today.” She didn’t recognize the voice, and she panicked slightly. She glanced at the FBI laptop, sitting on the little coffee table next to her bed. She’d been up until well pas
t midnight, going over the data she’d gotten from Harold. The NSA had no idea of the capabilities of her laptop, or they’d have taken it away from her. Neither did Mindy, though she wasn’t aware of that.
“Is something wrong?” she asked, doing her best to sound nonchalant. Whoever was on the other end of the line had already hung up.
When Mindy used the FBI computer to access her private email, she’d been a little concerned. Their rooms’ network connections were as limited as those in the camp. They were painfully slow because they filtered all outgoing data. Only handshakes and download requests went out. They blocked any attempt to send email. She glanced at her watch. Their escort would arrive in 15 minutes.
Mindy grabbed the computer and accessed the pitiful network connection. She had a cloud storage file where she kept some of her useful tools. One of them happened to be an encrypted file. She marked it for download and waited. Somewhere, a computer was looking at the file with suspicion. Seconds passed. In the temporary data center the NSA set up a block away, an admin called a supervisor over to look at Mindy’s unusual request.
“It’s that astronomer Dr. Skinner brought in,” the admin said, reviewing the user information. The supervisor leaned over the admin’s shoulder and tapped the ‘analyze file’ icon. The powerful computers at their disposal chewed on the file and spit out their pronouncement, “compressed digital images.”
“She’s doing image analysis work, isn’t she?” the supervisor asked. The admin looked up her clearance, then nodded. “Approve the download.” Mindy was beginning to get nervous, and then the file started to download.
“Yes,” she hissed and grinned. By the time her escort knocked on the door, she’d put the downloaded file onto a jump drive and dropped it in her pocket.