by Alex Bratton
“But our eyes do. Let’s check it again tomorrow. Maybe we can rig something to measure it.”
He pulled out the map of the mine and stared at it again. Several tunnels branched off to the left and right from the main tunnel. Only the tunnels that led to the ARCHIE facility were completed and marked with small arrows.
“What was ARCHIE doing down there?” he asked no one in particular. Lincoln turned to hand the sketchbook back to Carter, but the man had disappeared behind a tree. Instead, Lincoln shoved the book into his coat pocket to free both hands.
Alvarez nodded to the gun at Lincoln’s hip. “Good thing your sister isn’t here to see that.”
He shrugged. “She knows how to use one, too, but you’d never get her to admit it.”
An avid hunter, Lincoln’s father had made sure both his children could handle a weapon. After an accident involving a gun when they were kids, Mina had refused to touch one again. Lincoln hadn’t owned a gun in years, either.
Thinking of his sister, he plugged his phone into the portable battery he’d offered Nelson. He pressed the power button and waited for the screen to light up.
“Did Nash give you the gun?” Alvarez asked.
“Yes.”
“Why would he do that? We’re surrounded by armed soldiers.”
She was right. Arming civilians seemed out of place.
“Don’t know. A little weird, isn’t it? But he did say he hadn’t heard from anyone yet and was still awaiting orders.”
“What about Cummings?”
“Nope. No one.”
Alvarez frowned.
“Are you going to tell us what you found?” Nelson asked.
“I don’t really know what I found,” Lincoln said.
Once Carter returned, Lincoln told them everything he had seen, describing the corridors in detail, the locked door, and the large round cavern that wasn’t a cavern.
Alvarez tugged the map out of his hands. “I think we need to go check out the circular room before we explore these other tunnels,” she said after examining it. “We’ll have to wait for them to finish setting up camp. I think they plan on going in tomorrow morning.”
“This whole thing is starting to bug me,” Lincoln said. “We were sent here to finish our program. What does this facility have to do with any of it? I’d like to go back in there with more light to look around.”
“Let’s do it tonight,” said Carter, smiling as he lit another cigarette.
“At night?” Alvarez asked. “Why not wait until tomorrow?”
“Tonight,” Lincoln agreed. “It’s pitch-black in those tunnels, anyway. Doesn’t matter what time of day it is down there.”
“Okay,” Carter said. “What do we need?”
“Lincoln,” Alvarez said, “why don’t we just wait to go with Nash?”
“Because I want to look around some more, and I want to be able to say whatever I want without worrying about it being misinterpreted.”
“But that’s—”
“Wait a minute,” Lincoln said, interrupting her. He gestured at Schmidt. “Hey!”
Schmidt jogged over. “Yes, sir?”
“Would you help us set up our other tents? Near mine.”
“Yes, sir.”
“When’s dinner?”
“Thirty minutes.”
“Okay, then. You better hurry.”
“I think,” Carter remarked after Schmidt had hauled away their tents, “that you enjoy having someone to order around, Lincoln.”
“He does, doesn’t he?” Nelson said. “He’d love it if we would all obey his every command.”
Lincoln ignored them and turned back to his phone.
“Schmidt is just following orders,” Alvarez said as she pulled out a tablet and pressed the power button. “Huh. The tablet’s not working.” She dropped it.
Lincoln looked over at her. “That’s probably why it won’t work,” he deadpanned. “You drop it too much.”
The screen on his phone remained black, and he examined the portable battery. The tiny lights on it were dark, too. They had been working when he grabbed the battery from the office. He unplugged everything and tried again. Nothing.
Alvarez reached down for the device. “It’s hot. Surprised me.”
Carter sat next to Nelson. “Hey, guys. Come here a minute.”
Lincoln and Alvarez walked over to Nelson and Carter, who were bent over Nelson’s laptop. The exposed green motherboard showed blackened pathways along the melted circuits, all charred beyond repair. The rubbery smell of melting silicon emanated from it.
Carter pointed at Lincoln’s bag. “Does your laptop work?”
It didn’t. The four of them spent the next few minutes checking all the electronics they had brought with them. Phones, flashlights, laptops—nothing worked. Alvarez borrowed Carter’s pocket knife and pried open her tablet, removing the LED and backing to expose the logic board. It was fried, too.
Nelson left to find Schmidt and returned to say the rest of camp was experiencing similar outages. Several vehicles, like the ATVs, wouldn’t start. Flashlights, phones, and other electronics were out too, including radios.
“What d’you think?” Carter asked Lincoln.
“EMP?”
An electromagnetic pulse would explain all systems going haywire at the same time.
“Really?” Alvarez dropped her useless tablet back into her bag.
“Localized?” Nelson asked, looking up into the clear sky. “You think something’s up there watching us?”
They all paused a minute, contemplating what that might mean. Lincoln shuddered. Was something more sinister happening outside the camp?
“Maybe the colonel knows. Let’s find him before supper.”
Colonel Nash refused to see them. Schmidt said he was busy trying to find out what worked and what didn’t. “Colonel’s got a long-distance, high-frequency radio manned in the Humvee. It’s working, but we haven’t been able to raise anyone on it.”
“No one at all? What about HQ or amateur operators?” Carter asked.
“Nope, not yet.”
The team exchanged looks. Complete radio silence meant trouble. Ham radios could communicate across thousands of miles. With the proper equipment, an amateur operator in Maine could call someone in California. How widespread was this blackout?
“Does the colonel know what caused it?” Alvarez asked.
“No, ma’am,” Schmidt answered.
“Call me Alvarez.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Lincoln knew what she was thinking. There was only one plausible explanation for a widespread blackout, and it had parked itself in cities all over the world.
Chapter Seven
MINA GROANED, DISORIENTED AND IN more pain than she had ever experienced in her life. Rough concrete scraped her elbow as a bone-rattling cough shook her whole body. She concentrated on breathing, but her senses had warped. The only thing she could feel or hear was her body rebelling against the trauma it had just experienced.
Her eyelids, still heavy and thick with ash, scraped across her eyes as she opened them. The world was a blur of blue sky and black fog.
And something else, a dark figure against the backdrop of the sky. Startled, Mina threw her hands up. She hit flesh—a person.
Before a question could leave her lips, the cough returned. This time, the fit caused her to roll over and gasp for breath. As the pain in her lungs increased, her vision came back into focus. Several minutes passed while she struggled to breathe through the soot that had entered her lungs. Blood dripped from her head onto the cold concrete, mingling with big flakes of gray snow that drifted through the air.
Finally, the coughing subsided long enough for Mina to sit up and look around. The person had disappeared. She turned slowly, her whole body shaking. How far could they have gone? She blinked her burning eyes, and the world came more into focus. Ash, not snow, drifted around her. A hundred questions jammed together in her brain and then fa
ded away as the smoke grew darker. She stood on quivering legs.
The plane was gone. She was in some kind of breezeway between two buildings, with a walkway at one end where the smoke thickened. Opposite the walkway, the air was clearer. Mina walked to the edge of the building, reaching out to touch the brick for support. A distant roaring nagged at her, but she tuned it out as white noise. Otherwise, the breezeway was eerily quiet. Realizing she had not heard anything else since she woke, she scraped her boot on the pavement to test her hearing. The rough sound echoed dully in the enclosed area. Relieved, Mina leaned against the wall to focus on taking one breath at a time.
Help was probably on the way. She just needed to stay put. She closed her burning eyes, but then her mind refocused on the weight in her chest and the tickle in her throat. She should sit down and take a few minutes to rest and clear her pounding head.
Help will be on the way, she repeated.
More acrid smoke drifted through the courtyard. Why hadn’t she heard anyone else? Where was the person who had been here when she woke? The white noise in the background grew deeper, closer.
Instead of feeling safe, Mina felt vulnerable and blind. Emergency responders wouldn’t find her if she hid here. She needed to walk to them. Mina straightened, keeping a hand on the brick to steady herself.
She edged around the side of the building, and the quiet shattered into chaos. A sidewalk separated the buildings from a parking lot. People were running, shouting. Some pointed at the sky. Others argued with each other while still more pried at car doors or broke windows. A man in a suit walked down the sidewalk, a hand on his head, blood running through his fingers.
Still dazed, Mina skirted the edge of the cars, keeping the chaos on her left, refusing to look at what might be behind her. The parking lot went on endlessly, a sea of cars and panicked people. On the far side, she climbed a grassy embankment, putting more distance between herself and the rabble. At the top, she turned.
The airport terminal burned unchecked, thick, black smoke pouring out of every window. The tail of a plane lay on the tarmac next to the burning building. The rest of the jumbo jet stuck out of the gate, a wing jutting from the windows. Another overturned plane burned directly behind it. The whole building shuddered and groaned. Other terminals smoldered on the outside as if they, too, were burning within. Ash drifted down, covering the ruin of the burning runways. A few straggling shadows ran through the tangle of metal, fire, and smoke, looking for an escape.
Mina turned again, expecting to see the flashing lights of fire trucks and ambulances speeding toward the airport. Instead, black, dense smoke shrouded the horizon, blowing eastward.
The entire city was on fire.
A smoking skyscraper crumbled to the ground, its collapse sending a cloud of dust and debris floating upward to mingle with the smoke. The shockwave rumbled through the ground where Mina stood.
Strangely, one section of smoke moved opposite the wind. Mina squinted. Something gleamed from within it, reflecting the sunlight. An enormous object glided into the sun, its jagged edges and polished sides shining black. One of the towers had turned on its side and was floating over the city, an ominous, black craft levitating through the air.
They’re not towers, Mina realized with dread. They’re ships.
The ship cast a deep shadow on the ground as it moved away from the center of the city and toward the airport.
She searched the sky for fighter jets, helicopters—any sign of help—but the sky was empty except for the smoke and the great black monstrosity headed her way.
Mina tore her eyes away from the craft to look back at the airport. Flashes of fire burned across her memory. Coughing again, she remembered screams and panic and pulling a man out of his seat, but nothing else. She had been traveling alone. She knew that much. Whose eyes had she looked into when she woke? Her rescuer’s? She spun around again as if merely thinking about him would make him materialize out of the haze.
Explosions erupted on the tarmac with the force of bombs, sending up plumes of smoke and fire. The resulting tremor resonated in Mina’s chest. Screams drifted across the parking lot, but the smoke now blocked Mina’s view. Her gut twisted in fear, her heart pounding so hard she felt it in her ears. How long had it been pounding like that? Then, she coughed again, and her mind forgot to panic as it refocused on the pain in her lungs and head.
The ship was coming.
Shadows moved through the smoke. Faceless people hurried past, away from the airport, stumbling in the grass of the embankment. Mina wondered if they were running for help and, if so, if anyone was left to help them.
She vaguely thought that if there was help somewhere, she should go find it. As Mina stood numbly on the grass, a woman emerged out of the haze and slammed into her. They tumbled to the ground, but the woman jumped up again immediately, her face a mask of sheer terror. Without a glance at Mina, she stumbled off and disappeared.
Mina, still fighting panic, struggled to her feet. The smoke was so dense she didn’t remember which way she should run now or even why she should be running. Surely the fire couldn’t reach her here?
The ship. She needed to run from the ship.
A man yelled nearby. Disoriented, Mina pivoted toward the sound, wanting to avoid another collision. Another shadow moved toward her, this one towering over the others running past. Rooted to the ground, Mina stared as the thing took shape in front of her, her eyes following the shadow up to a height above any human. Its features were a blur in the smoky haze, and the shadows seemed to move in and around it, against the wind.
A piercing scream sounded somewhere near the shadow and then was quickly silenced as if it had been cut off. Something wet splashed Mina’s face. She reached up and wiped it away, her fingers coming away red. Blood.
Fear jarred her out of her daze, and she turned and ran.
“Could have been a solar storm,” Nelson pointed out as he opened a brown-wrapped MRE field ration package. The four civilians sat together in the mess tent, inspecting their supper. He narrowed his eyes at the package and sniffed. It resembled the kind of canned dog food that claimed to have real chunks of meat. “What’d you get, Carter?”
“Chicken fajita.”
“Me, too.”
“A big solar storm might do it.” Carter took a bite and grimaced. “Do you know if any were predicted?”
Schmidt joined them, sitting down in a camp chair next to Alvarez.
Lincoln poked at his pork rib ration. “Solar storms could damage power grids but not small electronics. Anyway, seems like a big coincidence, don’t you think? What do you think the alien towers are for? Networking? Communication? They could have something to do with the outage.”
“Don’t solar storms cause the northern lights?” Schmidt asked. He tore open his pasta ration and stuffed some in his mouth. Alvarez gaped. “It doesn’t taste as bad as it looks,” he told her.
Lincoln answered him. “A geomagnetic storm, actually. It happens when a solar flare or coronal mass ejection from the sun sends solar winds our way. They interact with Earth’s magnetosphere.”
“What’s the magnetosphere?”
Lincoln used the end of his plastic fork to draw a small circle in his food. “Pretend this is Earth, with North and South Poles.” He labeled the circle “E” and drew a bisecting line for the poles. Then, he drew lines connecting the two poles in sweeping arcs, one arc closer to Earth than the other. “This is the magnetosphere. It’s controlled by our planet’s magnetic field. On the sunny side, it’s compressed by normal solar radiation. When something stronger like a solar wind hits it, it gets closer to the Earth’s surface, causing polar auroras. If the shockwave is strong enough, it will compress the magnetosphere close enough to Earth to cause electrical disturbances. A severe geomagnetic storm could potentially cause widespread blackouts, but it hasn’t happened in our lifetime.”
“Until aliens showed up at our front door,” Schmidt said darkly.
Lincoln
nodded and turned his attention back to the others. “It’s just too big a coincidence. Aliens make contact and electronics fry from a catastrophic geomagnetic storm? What are the odds they’re separate events?”
“Interesting question,” Alvarez said, “but they haven’t exactly made contact yet.”
“When they do,” said Schmidt with youthful enthusiasm, “we’ll send ’em packing.”
Halston walked into the mess tent, eyes scanning the room. When his gaze fell on the civilians, he scowled.
“What’s got him?” Nelson whispered to Lincoln.
“Don’t know.”
A few others shot curious looks at Halston as he passed. Lincoln thought that was odd until he walked by their table for the coffee line. Large drops of sweat ran down Halston’s face. His shirt was soaked with it despite the cool day, and his eyes looked wrong somehow. Haunted, maybe.
Catching Lincoln staring, Halston’s scowl deepened. “Got a problem?” he asked.
“Not yet,” Lincoln said, irked. He didn’t really want to antagonize Halston, but the man’s attitude was uncalled for.
Halston slammed his coffee cup down on a table. Hot coffee sloshed out over his hand, dripping down to the ground. The water had just been boiled over a camp stove. It must have scalded his hand, but Halston didn’t seem to notice.
“You’ll address me as Lieutenant or sir. You got that?”
Blood rushed to Lincoln’s head. He stood, staring Halston in the eye. He felt Alvarez’s hand on his arm—a warning—but he ignored it.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I don’t have a problem yet, sir.”
Halston punched him in the jaw. The blow was so forceful that Lincoln reeled back, sprawling over Alvarez still sitting in her seat. He tried not to crush her as she cried out, but he didn’t have any way to catch himself.
The room exploded with the commotion. Lincoln attempted to right himself without injuring Alvarez. Nelson and Schmidt grabbed his arms to haul him up. Halston swore and bellowed at everybody.
When Lincoln got his feet under him, he saw a tall captain putting a restraining hand on Halston’s shoulder. Angry, Lincoln held his jaw, which felt like it had been hit with a hammer. He even thought a tooth might have come loose. Feeling wronged, his pride injured, he tried to launch himself over the table. More hands grabbed him. Halston sneered at him while the captain pulled him away. She marched him out of the tent, leaving Lincoln to nurse his injury. Already, his jaw was swelling.