Into the Maelstrom

by Loren L. Coleman

  “You’re here searching for Chernaya Gora,” Romilsky said. Was that a touch of humor in her voice? “You chased a phantom menace right into our hands, as the High Command knew someone would.”

  Sainz had been distracted maneuvering his Aztecs into position on the left flank, and now her casual mention of the supposed supersecret facility threw him further off-balance.

  “Chernaya Gora—” he began.

  “Does not exist,” she cut him off abruptly, her voice calm and cold at the same time. “Never did. And your time for surrender is up. I am sorry, Colonel Sainz, that you lose your command to a hoax. That is war.”

  Trying to shake the dread stealing over him that it might be true, Raymond Sainz simply said, “Well, so is this.” He nodded a signal to Major Howard, who ordered the Aztecs forward on the run.

  “What?” Romilsky spoke rapid Russian to someone else, her words lost amid a sudden flurry of voices until a final, “No, that! Those vehicles there!” Then the link went dead as she remembered to disconnect.

  Both commanders were certainly busy then, as the Aztec ag cycles destroyed the Thunders anchoring the Neo-Soviet right flank. And again when Tousley’s squad managed to throw the entire enemy wing into chaos by goading the Rad Troopers to break formation.

  The human-wave strategy with which Neo-Soviet commanders employed Rad Troopers was a hard one to break. Though Rad Troopers were among the weaker units fielded by the empire and easily put down, in sufficient numbers they were a serious threat not to be ignored. Direct too much attention toward them, and the heavy armor and Vanguard infantry following would tear the Union line apart. Direct too little, and the Rad Troopers would overwhelm many of his infantry assets. And despite the technological marvels possessed by the Union, infantry still remained the backbone of any army.

  Finding a way to deal with the Rad Troopers piecemeal was always a preferable option. The chaotic charge against his left wing was doomed from the start. It was a windfall he had hoped to create himself, noticing much earlier that the battle shaping up on his left flank would be the decisive clash. But its early triggering meant he was not quite ready. He nodded permission to Major Howard, who suggested dropping in two Auto Defense Drones early. They would blunt the advance without turning it back, and also give Tousley’s squad a chance to regain Union lines.

  “Order the Aztecs back around. Have them strafe the outside edges of that formation, but stay far enough back to avoid a run-in with the real mutants.” The armored antigrav cycles were safe enough from the Rad Troops’ weapons, but then the Rads were little more than diseased civilians handed a weapon and promised a quick end to their suffering. Cannon fodder. The strong mutants such as Cyclops and Zyborgs were the real dangers, though Sainz had as yet spotted neither on the field. On his right flank Sainz sent forward a pair of Wendigos backed by drones and two infantry platoons, to hold Romilsky in place while he finished rolling up her own right wing.

  It wasn’t until he paused to draw breath between orders that Sainz took note of the peals of thunder growing louder and Major Howard’s preoccupation with the sky. In all the excitement he’d forgotten the strange actions of the cloud cover, and now watched as it boiled and burned away to reveal a dead sky behind. The last of the clouds shattered and dispersed upward into a heaven bleached a uniform bone white. The ground shook with the thunderous clamor, as if the Earth itself was protesting the rape of its skies.

  Sainz barely noticed when his deployed drones quickly ran out of ammunition and were overwhelmed by the press of Rad Troopers. By the time he looked back to the battle, the Aztecs had whittled the advance down to fragments, and what little remained were being mopped up by intense infantry fighting as the ground troops ran forward supported by their Hydra carriers. His right-flank offensive had stalled, no doubt stunned by the dead sky. Around him his aides and nearby forces were shocked to inactivity as well, and the same seemed true of the Neo-Soviet forces. The fighting on his left flank slowly wound down, the few remaining rad-hounds shot down and exploding, and the Rad Troopers in that area of the field broken and fleeing back to their own lines. No one pursued the rout, the Union soldiers in the grip of paralysis as each finally noticed the strange sky with no sun.

  And then, the heavens opened. To the accompaniment of a ceaseless roaring thunder, long scars of crackling energy quartered the sky and then split farther apart to reveal a liquid darkness behind. It was as if Sainz stared through holes in the atmosphere and directly into deep space, though a space without stars. A space that had volume rather than vacuum, dark and thick as ink. He heard an aide off to his right begin to pray. “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name,” he murmured.

  Sainz disagreed. Whatever looked down on them from those great heights, it wasn’t God. And it certainly was not benevolent.

  And beyond that, the Union colonel was as lost a soul as any other.

  10

  * * *

  S ergeant Tom Tousley stumbled forward as the ground shook again, long and hard. He helped Danielle Johnson onto a stretcher that two corpsmen had dropped as the quake knocked them off their feet. Another medic tried to assist PFC Maria Carr, who had taken a hot, uranium-tipped slug from a Nagant assault rifle in her left thigh during their retreat back to Union lines. Her wound required immediate cleaning—painful, but necessary before the spread of contamination into her flesh and blood caused more damage than the slug itself. She refused to be carried within the protection of a nearby Hydra, shrugging the corpsman away rudely as she stared up into the hostile sky.

  Tousley was by her side immediately, helping her to sit and backing off the angry corpsman with the fierce scowl that came with sergeant’s stripes. He knew he should be glad that the medics attended their jobs at all with the chaos unleashed overhead, but Tousley wasn’t about to deny one of his squad the chance to confront the threat overhead.

  “No one’s taking you inside,” he promised her, then crabbed back over to Danielle and helped to strap her down. Her wounds looked more superficial than serious, but she was obviously in pain and weak from loss of blood. The quake finally subsided with a last light tremor, and Lance Corporal Johnson was quickly carried into the waiting Hydra.

  The rest of the squad had taken up a half-circle post around Tousley and their wounded. They divided their attention between the fleeing Rad Troopers and the final few rad-hounds bounding over the terrain, and long glances into the wounded heavens.

  Tousley followed their eyes upward. More of the dark pools had erupted into the bone white sky over Gory Putorana. Some ran together like merging oil slicks, hanging large and heavy overhead. Others extended out into thin wounds, stretching over the horizon. No sign of the sun—no telltale glow the likes of which Private Kipp had pointed out earlier. Only a uniform glow to a bleached sky stained by pools of corruption.

  The event lacked any semblance of reality, challenging the sanity of every person who looked upon it. Many soldiers wept openly. Some were caught up in prayer. Alex Kipp dropped his Draco launcher and began walking in a small, erratic circle, his mind unable to handle the stress. Tousley had seen such things before in heavy combat, often right before some man or woman stood up into enemy fire or began spraying bullets around at anything and anyone regardless of uniform. Tousley began walking toward the private, intent on relieving him of his sidearm. Angry yells and even more shouts of terror distracted him, and he looked up again at the skies.

  The pools had spilled over, and darkness slowly crawled down through the atmosphere—a hundred titanic inkwells pouring their foul blackness upon the Earth. It almost looked as if the skies were melting, the muted light running before the onset of an everlasting night. Already the dark trails smeared down to the horizon, leaving thin cracks of white in between, which would soon be lost. Overhead the blackness poured closer, silently creeping down through the atmosphere and casting a shadow over Gory Putorana and the rest of the world. One black runner slammed silently into the ground two kilometers d
istant. A thinner line speared the no-man’s-land between the two armies.

  Bedlam erupted among Union and Neo-Soviet forces. A Wendigo charged forward, unsupported, rail gun hammering into the enemy and machine guns simply tearing into the earth and air for the sake of it. The Aztec antigrav cycles raced back through the Union lines and sped northwest in a final bid to outrun the falling sky, though anyone could see that horizon was already stained fully black.

  A Hydra, in its haste to follow the fleeing cyclists, plowed through a formation of deployed infantry, adding to the growing terror and confusion. Many soldiers also turned and fled. A rare few simply suicided. Alex Kipp drew the pistol Tousley had missed collecting and used it on himself. Tousley barely registered the fact. Some others threw down weapons and raised their hands toward the Neo-Soviet force, surrendering.

  It was these few who roused Tousley from his state of shock. In seventeen years of service he had never surrendered. Not one stretch of ground he’d taken or one advantage he’d won from the enemy. Watching the curtain of darkness falling over him, he felt neither fear nor defeat. He felt rage.

  Another tendril came down over the Union center line, eclipsing Colonel Sainz and Major Howard. He looked straight up into the black arm reaching down at him. As if gazing through dark water, far above he thought he caught the reflection of a single white eye staring at them down through that column of darkness. He raised his Pitbull and squeezed into the trigger. Not panicked fire like so many others, but short, controlled bursts. One clip—eject, insert, chamber—and then another, directly into the face of the enemy.

  And then the blackness rolled over him, and he too was lost.

  * * *

  Major Randall Williams remained too busy to be much frightened. He quickly isolated TC&D from the many panicked requests for information—mainly from departments with no immediate need for the answers he was unable to give anyway. When the cosmic storm raging around the Earth reached out suddenly to ensnare Luna, he turned his back on it and concentrated instead on the data coming in over the astrophysics consoles. Visual effects would be recorded for better study later. He had to focus his mind away from the hellish storm. Survival could hinge on seconds of processing time, or the ability of one person to make the right intuitive leap forward from the data as given. And as a self-respecting scientist, Randall Williams remained just egotistical enough to believe that the one person might indeed be him.

  Armed forces officers didn’t know what real pressure was.

  The moon never stopped shaking now, as if the wash of energy surrounding them somehow caused a turbulence in space. Nothing they could detect, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t there. His own theory currently revolved around microchanges in the moon’s orbit. As if Luna had cut loose from Earth’s pull for a fraction of a second, and then snapped back into orbit. Unfortunately, there was no way to test that theory, at least not yet. Though it remained as likely an explanation as the event they’d witnessed earlier, when out the plex window the Earth faded to a gray shadow of its former blue-and-green majesty, then to a featureless black. On instrumentation, it showed the same as ever. Williams might have written that off to a trick of his own mind, except for the twoscore operators also in the control room swearing by the same thing.

  Then the moon came under two standard Earth gravities, and no one did much of anything for a moment but remained pressed into their seats or found themselves relocated to the floor.

  “Gravity generators all read normal,” one operator reported as soon as the heavier gravity released them. “Reports coming in. High gravity experienced all over Luna. Even outside bases. One standard G.”

  So a fluctuation in actual gravity, coupled with interior generators, had caused a double-strength gravity field. Williams couldn’t begin to imagine how that might be possible, and he possessed a remarkable imagination.

  “Atmospheric processor numbers twelve, fourteen, and thirty-five all read off-line. Operators verify system failures and many injuries.”

  Without doubt. Being subjected to twice normal gravity was one thing. No one had complained of too much pain, so bruises and sprains were probably the worst they’d suffered. But outside the bases, where one-sixth gravity had come under a full G, that kind of change broke bones and shattered skulls. Especially those weakened skeletons of lunar workers who failed to keep up on their gravity treatments.

  “I want medical to make inquiries to all critical posts,” he ordered. “Make sure we didn’t lose anyone vital. Any word from Colonel Allister?” The Tycho commander had been returning from a meeting at Tranquillity.

  “His transport is down, and he’s stranded,” a lieutenant reported. “But he’s all right.”

  “It’s clearing,” someone yelled. All eyes went to the large plex window rather than the instrumentation, which was showing clear pictures regardless of what their eyes saw happening outside.

  A dark wave of shimmering energies rolled over the landscape, leaving behind a trail of gray haze that glowed and swirled aimlessly for a moment. The shimmer passed on, leaving the moon behind and now completely occluding Earth. It also opened up to Williams and his staff their first glimpse of the spacescape.

  Blackness. Only two stars remained where once there had been millions to count at a glance. High-magnitude stars at that. Even by the naked eye, Williams knew they were closer than anything seen normally from Earth. Peeking out from the edge of the collapsing sphere of dark matter, giving it some definition along the eastern hemisphere, an ice-blue nebula began to fill the sky. The cosmic gases competed with the nearer gray luminous haze, though even as he watched, the trailers of haze left behind were streaming away as if suddenly caught on an incredible solar wind. Trailing off away from the collapsing sphere, it reminded Williams of a glowing black comet with a gray tail streaming out behind it away from the sun.

  Only no sun like he’d ever seen. As it broke around the cover of the Earth’s shield, it banished the artificial night and returned the color of Luna’s pale atmosphere. The shock of a sunrise four days early froze Williams for a full two seconds before his scientific mind took over again and began to evaluate the strange solar body. He estimated it easily three times the size of Sol in subjective appearance. Blazing white to the naked eye, roughly globular but nowhere near the perfect sphere their sun had been. Right then Randall Williams realized for the first time that he was already thinking of this as an alien sky. One that had somehow supplanted Sol and the entire Milky Way galaxy. And it surprised even him that the hardest thing for him to admit wasn’t that it had happened.

  No, the hardest thing was that he couldn’t explain it.

  * * *

  What might be called normalcy returned to Earth slowly. Colonel Raymond Sainz was aware of the darkness and little else for some time. Next came the touch of a cold, vast space, and the sense of motion. Then from high above a pinpoint of light. It grew in size, the only interruption to the eternal night. Slender arms reached out from its globular body and then wrapped back in, tearing off chunks of the inky black. Sainz saw those arms as able to rip planets like the Earth to shreds, and quailed under their approach.

  Something deep inside his mind promised that the Earth might be better off cloaked forever in the night.

  A halo circled this source of light, and quickly washed outward to color the sky the pale blue-gray of predawn. It stretched over the landscape with liquid slowness, the dark shadows clinging for every last moment of existence.

  The landscape around Sainz was not the same landscape they had left behind. Or not quite the same. Gory Putorana still rose up in the northwest, though large streaks of coppery soil hinted at some changes. It was the most recognizable landmark around, those slopes gradually rising up to the Siberian plateau.

  The battlefield was altered beyond salvage of the colonel’s battle plan. The open land that had separated the two armies was a jumble of broken rock crusted with ice and permafrost. There would be no easy crossing for antigravity
craft. To the west, about where he had deployed his right wing, an immense, rounded hill butted up where sharp cliff faces had before overlooked open ground. Steam vented from large cracks in the mountainside. The gentler foothills where he had placed the bulk of his forces were now sharp-edged dunes of dark rust red stone, their southern exposure capped by standing ice that flowed downhill like miniature glaciers.

  Sainz stood on one crest, a position analogous to his earlier one, and he picked out Rebecca Howard and many of his immediate staff and guard, all of them either wandering about the strange landscape or looking about as if waking from a trance. He found little immediate evidence of his Seventy-first Assault Group. One Hydra and a Wendigo. A pair of Ares assault suits, one outfitted with a plasma cannon and the other a Harbinger rail gun. Some infantry.

  Then the sky bled blue, its natural color, as the sunlike creation thrust itself into a late-morning position. Three times the size of the regular sun, it hung there, menacing in its blazing white fury but providing not quite as much natural light.

  Sainz checked the late-afternoon position where the sun should have been, and found clear sky. No sun or even a remnant of the cloud cover they had seen earlier in the day. And as he turned a full circle, he suddenly wished to find blue sky, clear of everything but that ominous, misshapen sun. What he hadn’t wanted to find were the grayish white contrails that arced from the northern and eastern horizons, trailing upward into the sky until finding the small white flares of ballistic missiles already flying.

  Warheads already set on their mission, as the Neo-Soviet empire struck at the Union.