by Sean Ellis
“Did you hear me Beck? Your men are dead. Blow the charges now. Acknowledge, damn it!”
He switched off the handset without looking away. Screw Atlas.
It was easy for that rich bastard to treat Beck and his men like pawns on a chessboard, but it was Beck’s job—his duty—to ensure that any sacrifice his men made was not in vain. They had all—the men of Lightning Force—drunk more than their share of that bitter brew during their time spent in the uniform of various branches of the United States military and its Joint Special Operations Command. These elite warriors, willing to go anywhere and do anything to protect the country they loved, had gotten fed up with being treated like tokens in a game, employed with reckless disregard by politicians and bureaucrats who were, at best, clueless about how the world worked. Betrayed by the leaders of a country that sent them off to fight the worst sort of evil with their hands effectively tied, they had all turned their back on quaint but obsolete notions of patriotism and the greater good. There was only one ideal that remained sacrosanct—the blood brotherhood. Not a one of them would hesitate to sacrifice his life to save the guy next to him, and Beck was not about to drop a building on four of his own men if there remained even the slightest chance that they yet lived.
Although he had lost contact with half of the team, the remaining pair had checked in after the blast, reporting that they were responsible for the explosion that had demolished one corner of the building, along with most of the incursion force. While he had not been able to reestablish contact with them, he had neither seen nor heard anything that would lead him to believe that the men were not still alive.
Nevertheless, his thumb rested on the send button of the remote detonator, ready to blow Building #1 to smithereens if anyone but his men came through that door.
The eyepiece in the scope abruptly flared bright white, causing him to wince away. Before he could even blink, a tremendous eruption blasted up from the already damaged corner of building one. A deep, thunderous shock wave shuddered through him even as particles of debris started raining down.
The flash from the explosion, amplified by the night vision scope, had left his right eye temporarily blind. He knew it would be a good five minutes or more before the fireworks cleared up. Similarly, the burst of light had overloaded the sensitive optics in the scope. With his unaided good eye however, he saw that a large section of Building #1 had crumbled away.
Beck fumbled for his radio—checking first that it was on their operational communications frequency and not the one tuned to the demolition charges—and shouted for the team to check in once more. When there was no answer, he called the team watching from the roof of Building #2. “Tiger, this is Eagle. Tell me what you see.”
Beck had put Tiger team in their current position primarily to keep watch on the rooftop of Building #3, which was on the opposite side of the laboratory building, and as such, not in a direct line of sight to either the exit door or the area that had been destroyed by the blast. On the plus side, that meant Tiger team’s night vision had likely not been compromised.
“Tiger, here. Nothing on our side. What was that blast?”
“Not sure. It might have been one of ours.” Beck had already mentally ticked off all the possibilities. A premature detonation of one of the Semtex packages wasn’t very likely because they had all been daisy chained and could only be set off if an electrical current set off the blasting caps. A transient radio signal or even a failed attempt at defusing the bombs would have triggered all the charges, not just one, unless all the other charges had already separated….
“Eagle, this is Tiger. We’ve got movement…shit, it’s her!”
Suddenly, Beck knew that he had waited too long. He groped for the second radio and squeezed the ‘send’ button.
11.
Godspeed….
Eric Collier embraced the darkness. He had fallen, but knew that his sacrifice would not be in vain. One of his SEALs—Booker of all people—had survived and would accomplish the mission. It was enough for him.
He sensed he would soon be reunited with the rest of his men; he was a man of faith, and even though it was a concept from the pagan world, and nothing like the heaven of his own Christian faith, he had always secretly hoped that the afterlife envisioned by the Norsemen of old would be his final destination. Asgard, where those who died a warrior’s death reunited with their comrades, fighting together every day, and then drinking themselves senseless in the mead halls of Valhalla.
He certainly wanted to share a drink with Chief Ball.
However, his flesh would not surrender; he hovered there, feeling the ragged pain of his wounds, hearing the dwindling thump of his heart. He heard voices, too, not of his dead teammates, but rather of the living. Booker and someone else….
“We got it, sir. Mission accomplished.”
Someone grabbed his hands, pried his clenched fists apart and then…then the darkness became light.
Light filled his being, suffusing him with vitality and a sense of satisfaction. If this was the afterlife, then death was indeed nothing to be feared.
“This is not the afterlife, and you are not dead.”
The voice was like the light, everywhere all at once, resounding not just in his ears, but in every fiber of his being.
“Then what…where am I?”
In an instant, he was corporeal again, or at least it seemed that way. The light retreated and he realized that he now stood upon a promontory overlooking a vast and vibrant landscape, which stretched out before him all the way to a distant horizon. It was a vista unmarred by the cancer of human growth—no roads or electrical transmission lines, no smoking factories, no brown smudge of smog.
“This is the world that was,” intoned the voice, now embodied and to his immediate right. He turned and found an unfamiliar figure standing beside him. The man was Caucasian with light blond hair and tanned, rugged features and wearing casual clothes—khaki trousers and a work shirt. The man did not look him in the eye, but instead gestured out over the verdant landscape. “This was the world in the time of the Ascendant Ones, and thus it would have remained.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Then, look closer.”
When Collier tried to comply, he felt himself swept down into the vista, and abruptly he saw that, despite the absence of technology, the world was nevertheless boiling over with human activity.
Everywhere, there were vaguely human forms. They were naked and savage, yet utterly silent; moving almost not at all, but surrounded by a tempest of motion. Trees bent around them, shielding them from wind and elements, vegetation uprooted itself in order to be eaten, game animals presented themselves for slaughter and shed fur, feathers and skin without ever feeling the touch of a butcher’s knife.
“These were the Ascendant Ones; men with the power of God, the power to create or destroy with a thought. Supremely powerful and yet incapable of the most basic emotions. Human, but without humanity, an aberration.”
Collier saw them as he might a pack of savage dogs. These were the ancestors of man as imagined by those who believed in evolution, who believed that man was merely the descendent of apes, and yet this was nothing like that. These were not merely primates on the verge of developing civilization, they were something else altogether.
Confusion, like a spreading pool of spilled ink, began to change the complexion of the spectacle he now witnessed.
“Behold the beginning of the Great Work,” explained Collier’s guide. “It was not meant for the Ascendant Ones to achieve such heights, but only the power of the Trinity could abase them.”
Order began to emerge from chaos; shining cities seemed to grow from the shadows on the landscape. Collier knew he was witnessing the passage of hundreds of years; an unknown history of mankind in fast-forward. He further intimated that this was an abstraction, not a literal account, and further that the scene seemed to respond to his mental cues and unformed questions. He
thought of the stories he had learned in Sunday School, of Eden before the Fall, and the vision accommodated that imagery, right down to the appearance of the Serpent.
“The temptation of Divine Knowledge,” intoned his guide, “embodied in the Trinity was too great, and the Evil One corrupted humanity. In time, the Deluge came, the old world was swept away, and Eden sank into the sea of myth and memory before the Great Work could come to fruition.”
I am dead. It’s the only explanation.
“The only explanation? Where is your faith, Eric? Death is irrelevant; there is only the Great Work. I have need of you in this world, not the next.”
“Need?”
The man rested a hand on his shoulder. “You already know everything you need to know. Now…. WAKE UP!”
Collier’s eyes flew open and for a fleeting moment, he had no idea where he was. Then, in an instant, the sights, sounds, smells and textures flooding his senses informed him. He was indeed alive and still in Atlas’ building, though not where he had fallen. Someone had moved him.
Flee!
As if by a premonition, he understood that the building was on the verge of collapse and that he must move quickly to avoid a fate that even the Wise Father might have difficulty reversing.
The Wise Father.
He did not wonder how he came to have this knowledge, just as he didn’t wonder at the fact that, although his uniform was shredded and stained with his own blood, his skin bore no mark of trauma. He knew these things and that was enough.
He knew everything now.
12.
“Down!”
Without waiting to see if he had heard her, Mira tackled her newfound companion to the ground. He was nearly twice her size, but instead of resisting or questioning, he dropped into a prone firing position and began scanning for a target.
Her ears were still ringing from the detonation of her improvised demolition charge—a blast that had collapsed a large section of the building and blown open an escape route for them—but she had no difficulty hearing a crack like the sound of a hammer strike, as a bullet gouged into the concrete wall above them. She knew they were still exposed and knew also that the sniper targeting them was on the roof of a neighboring building. Between the two structures was a lot of nothing; the terrain was uniformly flat, covered in coarse gravel and clumps of sand. It was a considerable distance to cross, but Mira suddenly had the feeling that the shooter on the roof was the least of her concerns.
“It’s not safe here. Follow me.”
Not waiting for a reply, she sprinted for the shadow of the nearby structure. A glance over her shoulder revealed the barely visible silhouette of the American serviceman matching her pace only a few steps behind. She expected at any moment to hear the distinctive crack of bullets breaking the sound barrier around her, maybe even the report of a gunshot. Instead, the next sound was a tremendous thump, followed by several more—the sound of several demolition charges detonating in sequence. Even before the last explosion, a new noise joined the cacophony, a sound like boulders being crushed together. Mira lowered her head and poured on the speed. An instant later it ceased to matter as a hot wind, driving chunks of dust and debris along its leading edge, propelled her the remaining distance.
She slammed into the wall and, as the choking dustcloud engulfed her, almost blacked out. Through the chaos she felt a strong hand close firmly around her own, pulling her back from the edge of oblivion. The handclasp drew her into a sheltering embrace, and after a moment something cool and damp was pressed into her hand—a soaked kerchief. Intuiting its purpose, she spread the cloth over her nose and mouth in order to filter out the pervasive dust.
“Hug the building,” directed a voice from close to her ear. The firm hand pushed her forward and as soon as she felt the abrasive surface of the concrete exterior, he guided her to the right. “This cloud will give good cover. I saw some vehicles parked around on the other side when I dropped in.”
Dropped in? She weighed the import of that. Her throat was still clogged with dust and aching from the man’s earlier chokehold, but she gathered her breath and shouted through the makeshift mask, “Where’s your rendezvous?”
“About a klick to the northeast. Just outside the power plant. Near the coast.”
“Which coast? I’m not even sure what planet I’m on.”
“Really?” For a moment, she wondered if he’d understood that she was half-joking. Before he could offer further comment, they reached the corner of the building where the air was considerably clearer, though in the pervasive darkness, it was difficult to discern the difference. “Come on, let’s move.”
The gravel and cinders crunched against her bare feet, probably tearing them to shreds, but the adrenaline that had fueled her from the moment she had escaped her prison cell proved a potent anesthetic. As they dashed along the side of the building, she futilely searched the darkness for anything recognizable, any clue about where on earth Atlas had taken her.
“Hold up at the corner,” advised her companion. “They might have left guards on those vehicles.”
Mira didn’t sense any immediate threat, but complied with the request. It seemed easier than trying to explain her gift to the stranger. She held back, wiping the grime from her face with the damp kerchief, and awaited further direction.
“Damn, I wish I’d kept my NODs. It looks like the vehicles are unsecured, but let’s go in low and slow.”
The “vehicles” her new companion had seen during his parachute drop were not cars or trucks, but rather half-a-dozen four-wheeled contraptions that looked a little like a cross between a motorcycle and a one-quarter scale model of a Hummer, parked haphazardly about fifty feet from the building’s front entrance.
“Quad bikes,” Mira remarked. Better known as all-terrain vehicles, or simply ATVs.
“Polaris Sportsman,” he said approvingly. “They’ll do.”
“I guess I don’t need to ask if you can ride those things.”
“Can you?”
“I’m pretty good on a motorcycle.”
“These are more like a snowmobile. Automatic transmission, thumb lever throttle. Unfortunately, we don’t exactly have time for the beginner’s driving course. You’d better ride with me.”
“Thanks, but I’ll manage.”
He regarded her for a moment, but in the darkness she couldn’t tell whether he was irritated or impressed. “It’s your funeral. There’s an airstrike coming in, we’ve got maybe half an hour, and my first priority is to get the Trinity out of here. If you fall behind, I won’t be able to come back for you.”
“Should I just take off without you then?”
That earned a rough chuckle. “Okay, point made.”
He crept to the nearest vehicle. Mira swept the area again, both with her gaze and her enhanced perception, verifying that they were, for the moment, safe, and then advanced to join him. As she reached his side, he knelt and reached under the ATV as if looking for something he had dropped. “Cutting the tires?”
“Sort of. You might say I’m leveling the playing field.”
She peered over his shoulder and saw that he was carefully wedging a fragmentation grenade into place behind the front wheel. The safety pin had been removed, and only the pressure of the tire kept the spring-loaded spoon trigger in place. She took a prudent step back and allowed him to concentrate on the task at hand.
As he was booby-trapping a second vehicle, Mira felt her anxiety start to rise. “We need to go,” she urged in a steady but insistent whisper.
“Just a sec.”
A second was probably all they had, Mira knew, and that wasn’t nearly enough time to explain her unique abilities to her new companion. Leaving him to his task, she moved to the quad farthest from him, and swung a leg over its saddle-like seat.
She probed the handlebars, identifying the throttle lever on the right side and the squeeze brake on the left, and then groped for the dashboard. Her fingers found
a key and she gave it a twist. Several indicator light flashed on the panel and the headlights flared brightly, illuminating the area ahead, but otherwise nothing happened.
With a deep breath, she tried to clear away all extraneous stimuli, focusing on the subtle responses of her precognitive intuition. She let her fingers roam the control panel until she found a switch that felt somehow…right…and activated it. The four-cylinder engine roared to life, and as it did, Mira felt a fresh wave of anxiety.
They’re coming!
Almost without conscious thought, she shifted the quad into ‘drive’ and eased the throttle ahead with just the right amount of pressure for a smooth take-off. She glanced back and saw the soldier leaping onto another of the vehicles, and then in that same instant, saw the doors of the building burst open behind him.
Mira let the ATV coast and twisted around, aiming her captured Kalashnikov one-handed in the general direction of the entrance. She fired a burst, hoping not so much to hit someone as to give her companion a few seconds to make good his escape, and immediately released the trigger as the barrel bucked up, sending most of the rounds high into the building’s walls.
A set of headlights blazed to life behind her and a moment later, his ATV was racing forward to join her. Partially blinded by the sudden glare, she couldn’t tell if anyone had ventured out of the building, but as soon she had a clear field of fire, she loosed another short burst in that general direction. This time, she saw bright yellow flashes and over the roar of the engines, heard the report of answering fire.
She sensed that she was safe for the moment. The shooters were too frantic to aim carefully, but as the second quad pulled alongside her, she knew that was about to change. “Take the lead,” she shouted, waving him ahead. “You know where we’re going…Duck!”
She curled her body over the handlebars and heard the strident hiss of a bullet creasing the air a few inches overhead.