The Soviet President spoke, “Is there anyone around this table who is able to discount this theory?”
No-one could think of any specific evidence that would discount it … other than common sense itself. If it was indeed the case that the extra-terrestrials really existed, and had returned, then they would have to consider a completely new war scenario for which there was no plan or precedent in existence.
The President himself felt a shudder of fear at the thought and then spoke, “Well, General. I too support your theory. So for the time being let us consider it to be the most probable one. Where to from here?”
The senior officials were all taken aback by the President’s unexpected about-turn in his opinion regarding the Supreme Beings. He had been one of the Ultimatum’s most vociferous dissidents ever since attending the summit; but none of those around the table who were sceptical, dared to question their Comrade Commander-in-Chief’s decision.
General Drashenko hid his personal relief and replied, “Comrade President, I believe we have two priority areas that need to be dealt with concurrently. The first is to deal with these strange hemisphere weapons that have enveloped our infrastructure. The second is to determine the exact position of this spacecraft.”
The President spoke, “Well then, gentlemen, we had better get moving as proposed. In light of this theory, I suggest we review the latest Global Compliance Monitoring Agency report against the confirmed locations of the hemispheres and verify whether they correlate. One of the possible reasons our cities were spared is because of our population adjustment as a result of last year’s flu epidemic.”
The General responded, “Comrade President, I shall follow up immediately.”
The President could see that most of his senior officials remained doubtful. But they would soon have to confront the distressing reality that the perpetrators of this global attack were undoubtedly the extra-terrestrial beings that the Principals had spoken of. Nothing else could rationally explain these extraordinary events.
He instructed his senior officials to obtain further updates from their respective departments and devise a viable way to not only deal with this unprecedented enemy, but also find their spacecraft. He adjourned the meeting and excused everyone. Once they had left the War Room he looked over at the operations screen in the WOCC. The dramatic images of planet Earth being under attack were spellbinding.
1:30 p.m. Earth: New York City
The gigantic hemisphere loomed over New York City. Despite the potential danger and warnings by the authorities to stay away, hundreds of thousands of people had gathered around the hemisphere’s outer perimeter. There were those who desperately wanted to find their loved ones, while others just wanted to get a first-hand view of the hemisphere’s edge and its swirling interior. A few ran their hands over its surface, which could be best described as rubberised glass that was warm to the touch.
Some people pounded on it with their fists and other make-shift implements, out of sheer frustration and despair. Others threw themselves and anything else they could find at it in a futile effort to breach it. Some even resorted to driving cars, buses and trucks into it, but without success. Traffic in the city outskirts had ground to a halt as those trying to drive away from the hemisphere were confronted by all those driving towards it. People began to ignore the rules of the road, which only compounded the congestion problem.
The military had been unable to control the influx of people who had gathered around the hemisphere’s outer perimeter, 65% of which was on land. They were concerned that the initial expansion phase of the hemisphere might be followed by a second one that would consume more of the city and claim further lives. Their warnings were only heeded by a small minority of the people that had gathered.
The vast majority were steadfastly refusing to go anywhere. Family members, friends, colleagues, pets, homes, livelihoods, businesses, careers – entire lives – had been lost to almost all of the people who stayed. Some hoped that by some miracle everything would return to normal, while others assumed the fatalistic attitude that they would be better off if their own lives were taken as well.
The military managed to clear people away from a two kilometre stretch on the outer edge of the hemisphere’s exterior. They attempted to break through its surface using every conventional means at their disposal. They tried jackhammers, chainsaws, drilling machines, plastic explosives, even diamond tipped tunnel borers, but to no avail.
They then introduced weapons into the frame, using pistols, rifles and then tanks mounted with G6 cannons and armed with depleted Uranium armour-piercing rounds. But as the projectiles slammed into the hemisphere’s surface, their energy was harmlessly dissipated in a series of coloured shockwave distortions which radiated outwards in concentric circles from the point of impact. It was very similar to the circular waves that appeared when a stone landed in a pond. The hemisphere proved to be totally impenetrable to all weaponry that the military ground forces had at their disposal.
The navy was then requested to use whatever means necessary to break through the hemispheres exterior lying over the ocean. More powerful weapons could now be employed since there was no risk of infrastructure damage and civilian casualty, as was the case on land.
The USS Chicago was in the vicinity to assist and set a course directly for New York. It was the Navy’s newest nuclear generation, Heaverset Class Battlecruiser designed to operate as the vessel of primary defence in a surface carrier fleet. It arrived within two hours of the directive being received and positioned itself one nautical mile away from the hemisphere’s edge. The sea was relatively calm on the outside but violent waves could be seen thrashing against the interior surface of the hemisphere as the churning storm continued inside.
The battlecruiser was equipped with the most modern and destructive conventional weapons systems ever created. This included the Mach-10 EPL Collider, which was a long, sleek bow-mounted turret, fitted with five large-bore, long-range hypersonic railgun cannons. The Electromagnetic Projectile Launcher was known to fire rounds at 10 times the speed of sound. The weapon had become infamous around the world for its lethality.
The battlecruiser’s Captain, Frank Mavron, ordered a test round to be fired at the vertical edge of the hemisphere to maximise energy transfer via a perpendicular impact. Moments later the Collider launched the round. There was a colossal impact as the projectile smashed into the exterior edge at a shade over Mach 10. Huge shockwaves reverberated through the surface of the hemisphere causing a massive wave in the ocean. The approaching wave crashed into the bow of the USS Chicago, drenching half the ship and causing the hull’s hydro-bulb to lift right out of the water. Once the ship had settled, Captain Mavron used his rangefinder telescope to confirm that no damage had been inflicted on the hemisphere.
The Captain then increased the battlecruiser’s distance from the hemisphere and fired all five Collider cannons simultaneously. The five rounds struck the hemisphere’s exterior with titanic force causing much bigger shockwaves to emanate from the point of impact. Two more five-round bombardments followed in rapid succession, both having a similar effect to the first. Three rapidly approaching tsunami-like waves struck the USS Chicago one after the other. They battered the warship and it began to take in water, listing dangerously to the starboard. Not long after, a frantic message was received from the Admiral of the Navy at NORAD instructing Captain Mavron to cease all fire. The Captain was then informed that the reverberations from the impacts were causing wide-scale damage and claiming lives around the land-based, exterior perimeter of the hemisphere.
It was now 12 hours since the hemispheres had first appeared and every effort to breach them thus far had been unsuccessful. All conventional weapon options available to the Armed Forces had been exhausted and there was now only one option left … and that was to use the ultimate weapon of last resort in the military’s arsenal, a thermo-nuclear device.
A remote, relatively unpopulated site, where one of the Uni
ted States’ highest capacity coal-fired power plants had been enclosed by a small-scale hemisphere, was selected by the military as the pilot site for a nuclear strike. Upon approval and sign-off by President West, the community that lived in the nearby town was evacuated on buses and military trucks in just six hours. A Razer-series missile equipped with a single 500 kiloton nuclear warhead was then readied for deployment by an Air Force jet fighter. As the jet flew overhead the missile was launched directly at the hemisphere. It was detonated a mere 50 metres from its outer surface.
The sky was consumed by a blindingly bright flash as the bomb exploded against the hemisphere. An immense smoke plume rose from the point of impact and visibility was temporarily obscured by the dust that had risen from the ground as a result of the intensive shockwave. There was a great cheer from the deployment team that had planned and executed the strike. They were convinced that this would breach the dreaded hemisphere.
But as the dust settled from the blast it become crushingly obvious that the nuclear weapon had not achieved its objective. Everything around the outer perimeter of the hemisphere including the nearby town had been completely obliterated, but the hemisphere itself still stood there, completely intact. It was apparent that the hemisphere was protecting itself with some kind of energy distribution force field. This was effectively transferring any external impact force through its surface to the point where it touched the Earth around its entire circular perimeter.
The ground in contact with the hemisphere had been vaporised and eroded far below ground level and the hemisphere could now be seen to be part of a full sphere, now resting on a golf tee-like piece of ground directly below.
The United States President, together with his Joint Chiefs of Staff and Combatant Commanders had watched the failed nuclear attempt from thousands of miles away in the safety of the PEOC. They all wore defeated expressions. The Armed Forces had now tried every type of weapon available to them. Their only option now was to wait patiently in the hope that the hemispheres would leave the planet of their own accord.
6:00 p.m. Earth: Media Reaction
Television news networks that were still up and running, continued to broadcast the latest developments including visuals of the hemispheres that had appeared in their thousands across the planet. They had engulfed entire cities, towns, villages, fossil fuelled power plants, oil rigs and refineries, open pit mines, factories, smelters, airports, heavy industries, farmland, as well as many other environmentally destructive human developments that did not comply with the Ultimatum’s conditions and targets.
Governments and news agencies around the world were reluctantly postulating whether the hemispheres had been sent by the Supreme Beings in response to the non-compliance of nations to the Ultimatum. Astute reporters started to pick up on the unnerving correlation between the compliance failures in the GCMA statistics, and the locations and prevalence of the hemispheres.
But news agencies were slow to broadcast the findings for fear of discrediting themselves. It would be interpreted as an overt admission that they had been wrong all along to question the authenticity of the Ultimatum. Worse still, they might be implicated for having contributed to humanity’s complacency towards compliance, leaving them open to lawsuits. At this stage they insisted that linking the attack to the Supreme Beings was a theory only and that their coverage over the last three years had consistently been in line with global thinking.
The consequences to humankind were devastating. Not only had there been an unparalleled loss of life, but most of the world had been thrown into a complete state of disarray. There was an immediate shortage of electrical power, numerous telecommunication centres were down, mobile phone network coverage was disrupted, broadband data lines had failed, fuel, food and water were in short supply, stock markets were either non-existent or not functioning, banks were closed and all unaffected civilian aircraft were grounded. Large sections of humanity had been plunged back into what felt like the pre-industrial ages.
Most startling to many people was the fact that they were no longer connected to the world via their mobile phones, tablets and computers. Those that could still connect, found that many of the major social networking and news websites were unavailable. Only IntraGlobe, based in Singapore, was still functioning normally. People that had been linked online to their friends, families and up-to-date news their whole lives, suddenly felt an overwhelming sense of isolation and disconnectedness, both of which were foreign and frightening to them.
People all over the world began to reconsider the unthinkable possibility that the Supreme Beings might really exist after all. Dissidents had suddenly gone quiet since the hemispheres had appeared, as they weren’t so sure of themselves anymore. Nothing else could reasonably explain what was happening.
6:00 a.m. Earth: Merrinov – War Coordination Room (Tuesday)
In the Merrinov War Coordination Room the Soviet President and his senior officials sank back into their chairs having just witnessed the failed American nuclear strike on a relatively small hemisphere. They had been watching various Soviet satellite surveillance feeds showing the Americans’ many different attempts to breach and destroy the hemispheres, and it was evident that all of them had failed. Rather than wasting Soviet armaments trying to do the same, the President and his Defence Command and Intelligence Unit focused all their attention on finding the spacecraft.
Their thinking was simple. If they could immobilise or destroy the spacecraft then the hemispheres would most likely be withdrawn or disappear on their own accord. All their resources were thus directed into determining the spacecraft’s exact position in orbit. It was proving to be a very complex task, and the team hoped more clues would emerge that could assist them.
The Soviet President was now aware of the full extent of remediation across the Soviet Union. He had deployed military resources to almost every affected area to assist the surrounding communities. He was furious that his nation’s huge industrial centres had been targeted. To rebuild them would take decades. If there was a way to stop this extra-terrestrial mayhem, then his exceptional staff at Merrinov would find it.
7:00 a.m. Earth: White House – Situation Room
With all of his options exhausted, President West was left with no choice but to contact former President Jameson and ask for her advice. He was reluctant to contact her as it would be construed as an admission of defeat. It would be humiliating, but he knew there was no alternative.
He retreated to the bunker’s Situation Room and called for his secretary. He asked her to urgently get hold of former President Jameson for him. He hoped that she was still alive after this whole ordeal, and if so, that she was contactable. His secretary informed him that Jameson had given her a satellite phone number in the case of an emergency. West shook his head hating the fact that Jameson was always one step ahead of him.
“Get her on the line for me right away,” he said curtly, showing his annoyance.
“Yes, Mr President,” she replied as she hurried out.
Seconds later the Situation Room’s landline rang and he lifted the receiver. His secretary put the call through and for the first time in his life he was glad to hear the voice of the former President on the other end of the line: “Terry, are you there?”
West replied, “Yes, Sally. How are you?”
“I’m devastated, Terry. What has happened is … is like Armageddon itself. Things must be dreadful on your side.” She sounded genuinely concerned.
“They are, Sally. This is not a day that any president should have to live through.”
Jameson shook her head at his statement – he had brought it on himself.
West then briefed her on the military’s extensive efforts, including the nuclear strike, that had been attempted to both breach and destroy the hemispheres, and that all their efforts had failed.
“Truth be told, Sally, we have no viable options left to us. Hence the reason I’m contacting you. Is there anything you could suggest or do
from your side, that might assist us in this … how should I put it … predicament?” asked President West.
The understatement fuelled Jameson’s anger and frustration.
She responded, “Predicament! Terry, this is a global cataclysm of historic proportion. Had we just complied with the Ultimatum Compliance Treaty then none of this would be happening to us. The defining moment of our nation’s tragic fate, was the moment you sabotaged my presidency. The sooner you take responsibility for this situation, the quicker we will be able to deal with it.”
She could hear him fuming on the other side of the line but he managed to keep his cool.
“Sally, let’s for the moment put the past behind us, set our differences aside, and look to the future. I don’t want to get bogged down in debating the causes of this situation – let’s rather work together to seek solutions. I assure you that once we get through this, we will sit around the table, assess the causes in detail and then apportion blame where it is due,” said West in his signature diplomatic tone.
She replied, “Very well, Terry. The only thing I can say at this stage is that all your efforts to stop this remediation will be in vain. These hemispheres will not disappear until their purpose is fully achieved … whatever that purpose might be. But right now, I would suggest that all your energy be refocused on the traumatised and fragmented parts of our nation that have not been engulfed by the hemispheres.”
Her comment made logical sense.
She continued, “Concentrate on maintaining nationwide law and order, providing support to the communities surrounding these hemispheres, and making sure that our society can continue to function at least on a basic level. Assuming that all the people and infrastructure within the hemisphere interiors have been lost, this nation will now have to function without them, and it is your responsibility to make sure that it can.”
Wake-up Call: 2035 Page 43