by Mike Kraus
“I see everything that happens on this planet, Rachel Walsh. Nearly everything, anyway. And I even see some things that happen under it.” The figure turned to her as it talked, resuming a slow walk across the room. “For example, the submarine that you claim to profess ignorance over. There are still Changed on board. And while your plan to destroy this structure with the submarine’s nuclear warheads is admirable, it will not be allowed.” The figure stared at Rachel for several seconds. Its right eyebrow twitched ever so slightly and it turned around abruptly, walking away from her. “It is done.” A satisfied smile spread across the figure’s face. “And now, it is time for the rest of those you care about to die as well.”
Stumbling down the ramp, tears still filling his eyes, Marcus was nearly knocked off of his feet by a creature that lunged at him, clawing through the rapidly de-solidifying wall of nanobots to try and reach him. Marcus jumped to the side and fired a round from the rifle, more out of shock than trying to actually hit the creature. As more creatures began to push their way through the remnants of the wall, Marcus increased his speed, running down and around on the ramp as he tried to reach the bottom before the creatures managed to free themselves from their restraints.
At the bottom of the ramp, three creatures had already broken through the wall and were running in front of Marcus, heading out through the base of the structure. Firing while moving, Marcus managed to hit two of them in the head, dropping them instantly, while the third was struck in both legs and collapsed to the ground, screaming in pain. Marcus ignored the creature as he bolted past it to the end of the corridor that opened into the tunnel running underneath the tower. Stumbling on the rails that led underneath as he turned, Marcus ran full-tilt toward the sunlight at the end of the tunnel. Inside the locomotive, David was blowing the horn non-stop as he looked through the windows, trying to catch sight of Marcus.
As Marcus exited into the sunlight, he held his hand up to shield his eyes from the bright light. A horn sounded in the distance, though it was moving rapidly toward him. Following the track, Marcus scanned the area around him, looking for both creatures and the train, until he finally spotted both. Running the locomotive just fast enough to outrun the creatures behind him, David watched Marcus sprint toward the train, desperately hoping that he would reach it in time to avoid the creatures following just behind. With the rifle secured on his shoulder, Marcus put all of his remaining energy into a flat-out run, focusing on the train and not the group of creatures chasing after it. He could still hear Rachel talking with the AI through his radio, but between the interference, the sound of the train and gasping for breath, it was hard to make out anything she was saying.
With the train looming ahead of him, Marcus looked up and down the locomotive for a place to jump and grab on to. Nothing appeared immediately viable, so he chose the next best option. Running perpendicular to the track, Marcus swerved to the left, heading in the same direction as the train and jumped up and forward as soon as the back end of the locomotive passed by. The first boxcar, containing Bertha, loomed in front of him, along with the large steel handles mounted on the doors. The first set of handles slipped through Marcus’s hands, and he began to panic, fearing what would happen if he didn’t manage to catch hold of the second set.
Marcus’s fear came to life when the second handle began to slip past him, his hands clawing at the wood and metal door in a vain attempt to hold on. He then noticed a curious tightening sensation on his back along with a pain on his neck that grew sharply as he was jerked forward. In his jump, the stock of the rifle on his back had gotten jammed into the handle, and though he felt like his back was being torn in two, the strap was tight enough around his body that he was simply picked up and carried along. After twisting and turning for a few seconds, Marcus finally got a grip on the opposite handle and found a foothold under the door. Pushing himself up, he freed the rifle from the other handle before sliding the door open and climbing in and over Bertha. As Marcus collapsed on the floor of the boxcar, he pulled out his radio and breathlessly called out to David, who had been watching the whole ordeal.
“I’m in! Get us the hell out of here!”
“Working on it! Get up and out of there through the roof, and back in here! We need to ditch the boxcars to get as much speed as we can!”
Marcus groaned and took several deep breaths before standing up to look at the skylight in the roof of the boxcar. “Shit,” he mumbled, “this is getting really old.”
Leonard McComb | Nancy Sims
4:57 PM, April 27, 2038
“Missile bay! This is Leonard. Commander Krylov, come in please!” Nancy ran back to the control station and picked up the radio, answering breathlessly.
“Leonard, Nancy here. We’re almost done with the preparations.”
“Good. David just radioed.” Nancy’s heart skipped a beat and her stomach twisted as Leonard continued. “Something’s gone wrong at the tower. They need us to launch everything we’ve got at it. Half for aerial detonations, half for direct strikes.”
“What? I thought we were supposed to just do one or the other!”
On the command deck, Leonard shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know, Nancy. All I know is what David told me. He wouldn’t go into details, but he was adamant that we get everything in the air as quickly as possible.”
“Shit… okay, I’ll get Krylov on it.” Nancy dropped the radio and ran back to the center of the room and shouted up to Commander Krylov, relaying Leonard’s message to him. When she finished, he was quiet for a moment before responding.
“Do you remember selecting the arming sequence, Ms. Sims? How you selected sequence twelve?”
Nancy nodded, then shouted back at him. “Yeah, I think so!”
“Please do remember correctly, Ms. Sims. Now, please re-enter the arming sequence for missiles one through fifteen as well as seventeen through twenty. Select arming sequence number fourteen. One four, do you understand? I’ll be finished here momentarily and you can re-arm this missile once it’s ready.”
Nancy ran back to the control station and repeated the arming process, resetting it to the sequence that Krylov had instructed. When she was finished, she shouted back at him. “Okay, it’s done! What’s this supposed to do?”
Krylov ignored her question for a few seconds as he struggled with a bundle of wiring inside the access panel. “In my previous preparations, I anticipated an eventuality like this, Ms. Sims, and prepared accordingly. Now, please engage the arming sequence for this missile, number…” Krylov paused as he leaned around the missile, looking for the number painted on its side. “Number sixteen. One six, Ms. Sims.”
“On it!” Nancy looked over the controls with Andrey at her side, performing the arming process yet again. Once she was done, she stepped back from the control panel and yelled up at the catwalk. “It’s armed! What now?”
As Krylov put the last access panel screw back into place, he called down over his shoulder, his voice muffled by the flashlight in between his teeth. “Check the status on the missile again; see if all the lights are green.”
Nancy and Andrey ran back to the missile that had shown a yellow light, smiling when they saw that all of the status lights were now green. As Andrey replaced the lower cover on the missile, Nancy cupped her hands around her mouth and yelled up to Krylov. “Green across the board!”
Commander Krylov allowed himself a small smile as he gathered his tools and rifle and removed the flashlight from between his teeth. As he stood up and started to shout back to Nancy, there was the sound of metal grating upon metal from behind him, followed immediately by a lancing fire that started in his upper legs and traveled up through his back. Krylov shouted in pain, falling back to the catwalk and rolling onto his side. Above him, his attacker darted around the missile, then quickly reappeared, its silver-lined teeth bared in a menacing snarl as it lunged toward him again.
Below Krylov, Nancy squinted as she looked upward, trying to figure out what was causing all the movement
and noise on the catwalk. “Hey! Is everything okay up there?” Another sound, louder than the shout she had heard, came from above, and Nancy’s blood turned cold as she recognized what it was. Turning to Andrey, her eyes on fire, Nancy jammed a finger into his chest. “Stay here and guard these missiles with your life!” Without waiting for a response, she ran toward the stairs in the nearest corner, taking them two at a time with her right hand on the chain railing and her left gripping the barrel of her rifle.
As she rounded the top of the stairs, Nancy brought the rifle up to her shoulder and moved forward toward the location where she had heard the sounds. In the darkness of the catwalk, with dim light filtering up from below, Nancy saw a bright spot appear from behind a missile and she ran towards it, scanning to the left and right the entire way. At her feet was Krylov’s flashlight, smeared with blood that was covering a sizable portion of the catwalk as well. Pushing back against the fear welling in her, Nancy yelled at the top of her lungs as she whipped the rifle back and forth, trying to keep from being snuck up on.
“Krylov! Commander! Where the hell are you?” A groan came from a few feet away and Nancy moved toward it, seeing a dark shape sprawled out before her. “Krylov!” She knelt down next to him as he spoke quietly, shaking his head as she leaned in to hear what he was saying.
“No… it’s still… here…”
A howl came from behind Nancy, though unlike Krylov, the creature did not catch her off guard. Half-expecting such a surprise attack, Nancy had heard its footsteps a second before it leaped at her, screaming as it went. Nancy ducked down, pressing her body to the catwalk next to Krylov as the creature flew overhead, its head slamming into a nearby missile. The creature’s body spun around from the force of the impact, and it flew through the space between the rail and the edge of the catwalk, plummeting to the floor below. Without thinking, Nancy raced after it, leaping over the railing and falling after the creature. The metal floor raced up to meet her, though her fall was broken to some degree by the creature, which was still trying to get back on its feet. Nancy landed on her side on top of the creature’s back, slamming it back to the floor with a loud crunch. Pain arced through her side and back, but Nancy fought against it, pushing herself to her feet as she leveled her rifle at the creature.
“Not today.” Nancy fired six shots into the creature’s head, wincing as shards of metal and bits of bone exploded outward from the impacts. The creature’s body went limp after the first shot, but Nancy continued firing five more times until she was able to calm down enough to take her finger off the trigger. Looking up, she saw Andrey in front of her, his eyes wide as he held his rifle pointed at the creature, staring at Nancy in shock.
Above them, blood dripped down Krylov’s face, blurring his vision as it fell through the holes in the catwalk to the floor of the missile bay below. He coughed a few times as he struggled to move, his body beaten more than he had ever endured. “Ms. Sims…” Krylov wheezed as he spoke, closing his eyes and pressing his face against the catwalk as he tried to gather enough energy to talk. “Mr. Lipov, Ms. Sims… launch the damned missiles!”
Busy staring at the creature lying dead on the floor, Nancy and Andrey didn’t hear Krylov at first. Only when he repeated himself a second time did they realize he was talking. His mumbled and slurred speech was enough to jolt them into action, and Nancy hobbled toward the stairwell, yelling at Andrey over her shoulder. “I’ll take care of him, just get those things in the air!” Andrey turned around and raced to the controls, scanning them quickly to find the launch button. With Krylov unavailable to aid Nancy with the launch, Andrey’s ability to actually read the control labels overrode his inexperience with them. As the stairwell behind him clattered from Nancy’s ascent back to Krylov, Andrey finally found the controls required to launch the missiles: a simple arming switch and a discrete green button. Unlike a few films Andrey had seen, there were no double keys and no covered red buttons that required the breaking of glass to operate.
Furrowing his brow at the simplicity of the controls, he looked back up to see that Nancy was now with Krylov, who was breathing laboriously and bleeding profusely. After taking a deep breath, Andrey lifted the cover on the arming switch and flipped it upward, causing a soft glow to appear under the green button. Andrey pushed the button down immediately, closing his eyes as he half-expected one of the missiles to have been sabotaged by the creature to detonate before it left the missile bay. Fortune, though, had finally decided to smile—or at least stop frowning—on the Arkhangelsk.
Launching the submarine’s ballistic missiles did not require the vessel to be surfaced, but it made the sight much more impressive than launching underwater. At the touch of a button, the twenty rounded missile hatches on the deck of the Arkhangelsk opened, moving slowly but steadily from a horizontal position into a vertical one, revealing the missiles below. As each hatch locked into place, a rumble came from the tube below it and—one by one—the twenty missiles began their climb into the sky, their launches separated from one another by only a few seconds. Smoke and fire billowed from beneath each missile as they rose, the curvature of their flight path growing more pronounced as their altitude increased. From the missile bay, Nancy and Andrey each stood next to Krylov, his arms over their shoulders as they supported him. The small screen showing the launches was nothing compared to the sound in the missile bay that rattled the entire vessel, sending shock waves down its core as each warhead was lobbed toward the heavens and its final destination.
Rachel Walsh | Marcus Warden | David Landry
5:09 PM, April 27, 2038
The moment that the figure’s confident smile began to waver was the same moment that Rachel realized things weren’t going according to its plan.
“What’s the matter, Bob?” The figure’s smile had frozen, half-twisted on its face as it stared at her, its eyes darting back and forth as it reached out, stretching and hunting for any sign of the Changed that had been on board the submarine. The communication from the creature on the submarine had been tenuous but constant, though in an instant it had vanished, leaving behind an empty void that the figure hadn’t counted on. The figure’s head tilted and its jaw seemed to tighten, another movement Rachel had seen Doe express on more than one occasion. The figure still did not respond to her so she goaded it, advancing toward it as she spoke, her eyes glittering with anger.
“What’s the matter, Bob? Did something happen? Did your carefully laid plan encounter a bump in the road? Oh well, no matter. I’m sure that you, being highly advanced—far more than we—can cope with a simple change of plan. Surely you’ve got enough human in you to do that, right? After all, it’s something we’re pretty good at. Most of us, anyway.” Rachel frowned mockingly, pursing her lips as she furrowed her brow. “Although… now that you mention it, Doe seemed to have the same problem you’re facing right now. A well laid plan with an endgame that just wasn’t up to snuff.”
Rachel took a final step toward the figure, staring it in the eyes, watching as the nanobots across its body shivered ever so slightly as they worked to maintain their illusion. Rachel whispered to the figure, all traces of fear gone from her voice. “Buckle up, Bob. You’re about to get your ass handed to you.”
The figure’s eyes widened at Rachel’s words. It turned to one of the walls, its body racing forward without any of the limbs on it actually moving. The wall split open, disintegrating before the figure’s approach as the swarms that composed it took to the air, racing out toward the open waters, high in the sky. The figure itself began to waver as it concentrated, calling upon the disembodied parts of itself to awaken. Nanobots from across the structure de-solidified, forming into massive swarms that swirled forward, working to defeat the threat that the figure had finally realized was inbound on the tower.
“You will not defeat us!” The figure growled, its voice no longer smooth as it took on a feral tone laced with fear and anger.
A thin smile spread across Rachel’s lips as she watc
hed the figure drown in its fear, its form dispersing as the nanobots that comprised it began to re-task to other priorities, no longer concerned with maintaining an appearance for Rachel’s sake. Far above and beyond the tower, the swarms intercepted eight of the incoming missiles, tearing through their structures effortlessly. As many nanobots as there were, though, and as quickly as they worked, their ability to dismantle twenty missiles all traveling at nearly thirteen thousand miles per hour was limited, to say the least. Communications amongst the swarm were lighting fast, but that could not save them from the sheer speed at which their doom arrived. Packed neatly into metal cylinders, the gates of hell rained downward, preparing to open directly onto the earth below.
Thousands of creatures poured out from the base of the tower, racing toward the train containing Marcus, David and Sam, who were doing their level best to evacuate the area. A series of steady pops echoed across the ground, lost in the sound of the creature’s footsteps as Marcus fired into their ranks, picking off the few that were in the lead in an attempt to slow them down as much as possible. Marcus’s rifle clicked several times before he realized that he was out of bullets and that he and David were very nearly out of time. High above, the tower was changing form. The walls began to vanish, leaving only the skeleton of the structure intact as enormous swarms of nanobots burst outward, racing toward the sky.