Without warning

by John Birmingham

  ‘I am sorry.’

  Caitlin almost didn’t hear her. Monique’s voice was small and timid and nearly lost in the roar of the busy street. ‘What?’

  ‘I am sorry, Cathy – Caitlin. I can hear what they are saying as well as you. It is disgraceful. Drinking to a tragedy. Saying your people deserved it.’

  ‘Oh, fuck that,’ replied Caitlin in pitch-perfect French. She really didn’t want to get tagged as an American at the moment. ‘This is one street, Monique. One little neighbourhood where people of like minds will gather all the time. It’s just human nature. If some Algerian madman set off a nuke in Paris, I could take you straight to a food court in any city in the US and it’d take me all of three seconds to find some fat, doughnut-sucking slob who said you deserved it. People everywhere are fucked, that’s all.’

  ‘No. Not everyone… Caitlin. Some people are led by the better angels.’

  At that moment they passed a cafй outside which stood a small, elderly gentleman in a black jacket and red beret. Both of his hands were holding the crook of a walking stick, which he was banging into the ground for emphasis while arguing with a couple of men who looked to be a fraction of his age. ‘I was with the Americans at Carentan. I saw them shed their blood for France. You dishonour them and you dishonour France with this rubbish talk…’

  Caitlin gifted the old man with a sad smile and a wink as she passed by. A siren brought her head up slowly, lest she draw attention to herself, but it was a fire engine a block over. She caught a glimpse of it muscling through traffic as they crossed an intersection.

  ‘Down here,’ she said, veering off towards a line of parked cars in a street of private houses and apartments. Only one shop, a liquor store, was open.

  ‘Are you going to steal another car?’ Monique asked warily.

  No, thought Caitlin. I’m going to buy a couple of magnums of champagne and pass them around the surrender monkeys back there, to help celebrate the cosmic cornholing of the great Satan. Aloud she simply went: ‘You got it.’

  Three minutes later they were cutting back across town in a grey Volvo station wagon, a late-model V40. A suction cap held a black plastic cradle to the windscreen just below the rear-view mirror. Caitlin leaned across Monique as they came to a red light, popping the glove box open.

  ‘Sweet,’ she said as she pulled out a small Magellan Meridian GPS receiver. ‘Is there a power cord in there? Look for a sort of flexi cord and an adaptor to plug into the cigarette lighter.’

  Monique couldn’t find one, but the little yellow and black unit had three-quarters of a charge on it anyway. Caitlin powered it up as the lights changed and waited for the chime that would tell them it had linked to enough satellites to fix their position.

  A frustrating few minutes passed, during which time she had to force herself to concentrate on the road. As full darkness covered the city, she could see the tell-tale glow of fires burning on the outskirts of the old centre, explaining the large number of emergency vehicles. Apparently not everyone was content to celebrate with a smirk and a snifter of Courvoisier.

  The Magellan chimed once eliciting a small ‘Oh!’ from Monique. ‘Is this us?’ she asked. ‘Here, near Rue Ricaut?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s us. Does it have a route function? Can you work out how to get us to -’

  The window shattered inwards with a huge, hollow boom and a tinkling of glass.

  * * * *

  11

  EVENT HORIZON, CUBA

  As a boy, Tusk Musso had loved visiting the city with his grandfather. For the Musso clan, that meant New York, the greatest city in the world. In the whole goddamn history of the world – except maybe for Rome, according to his grandpa, Vinnie Musso. There was a game they played, which Grandpa insisted little Tusk never tell his mother about, where they quickly lay on the footpath at the base of the highest building they could find, and then they just stared up at this monster looming over them, looking like it went all the way to heaven. They had to be quick, before the cops or security guards chased them off. The very first time they’d done it, when Tusk was only six, it had been a cool, overcast day, with a slight breeze dragging clouds across a lowering sky, and it looked for all the world like the Chrysler Building was gonna fall right down on top of them. Tusk had squealed with laughter, and not a little fear. He wasn’t allowed to say anything to Momma about it, of course, because she would’ve had a blue fit if she’d known that Grandpa Vinnie (whom she considered a very poor influence at best) had been letting her precious bundle roll around on the filthy pavement with the dog turds and cigarette butts.

  Thank God they’re long gone, he thought, as he stood about two hundred yards back from the base of the event horizon and craned his head back to watch it climb away to heaven, feeling as small and insignificant as he had all those years ago at the feet of the tallest buildings in the world. Clouds drifted overhead, just as they had back in New York with Grandpa Vinnie. But these were wispier, less substantial, and held no threat of rain or sleet. They didn’t even hold out the promise of much shade from the late afternoon Caribbean sun. Musso narrowed his eyes against the still-intense glare of the day and watched as a patch of white that reminded him of a Spanish galleon floated serenely into the silvery haze at the edge of the affected area. At that distance, it created an effect similar to a stationary waterfall – all glistening silver, hanging down like a curtain.

  And like a curtain, it moved. Not much, just a lazy drift back and forth across the ground, no more than a couple of yards in either direction. Just enough to wake up the primitive creature dwelling in the darkest parts of Musso’s mind, to fill him with an atavistic fear of whatever danger lay in the darkness just outside the mouth of the cave.

  Musso the modern, rational man, dressed in a short-sleeve khaki shirt and olive drab pants, ground down on that ancient terror and watched, fascinated, as the cloud drifted into the energy wave. It seemed completely unaffected as it passed through. Its form became less distinct on the far side, but it was discernibly the same shape and size as before.

  ‘Seen any birds fly into it or out of it?’ he asked, still peering upwards.

  Major Nuсez shook his head. ‘None. Some of my men say they saw large flights of birds moving away from here earlier today, but I do not know where they came from. And there are none here now. Not one.’

  The brigadier general dropped his gaze. They were standing by the crumbling edge of a two-lane road, the bitumen surface shimmering in the heat a few hundred yards behind them, a natural phenomenon. The much more powerful haze directly in front was decidedly unnatural. The small convoy of Hummers and Cuban vehicles had pulled up here ten minutes ago and Musso’s heart was still beating hard from the sight. Any last, lingering doubts placed in the way of belief by his rational mind had been banished. Visible from well over the horizon, it not only reached up to the stratosphere, it curved away towards the horizon in both directions like a giant standing wave, raised by an unknowable deity.

  It was alien.

  It sat there, in front of him, utterly removed from any human context to give it meaning. He had no idea what it was, and having seen it up close for himself now, he doubted that anybody ever would.

  ‘You still got nothing, Lieutenant Kwan?’ he said.

  Lieutenant Jenny Kwan shook her head. She seemed too young to Musso, almost baby-faced, but she was one of the smartest, scariest individuals he’d ever met. An MIT grad, Kwan was a Marine first lieutenant, the boss of an Incident Response Unit, which was a bland name for a bunch of very smart people trained to look for and respond to some of the worst things in the world: chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. Her crew and equipment took up three of the seven Humvees that had driven deep into Cuban territory, escorted by Major Nuсez and a platoon of his men in a couple of old Soviet-era BMP-2s.

  Musso had to hand it to the Cubans. This monstrosity wasn’t an abstract proposition for them, something to be intuited from indirect evidence provided by web links or sa
tellite data. It was sitting literally a stone’s throw away, bisecting their country. Given all that, he was impressed by their professionalism and no-bullshit attitude, although Nuсez had probably picked his Praetorian guard for this gig. They helped Lieutenant Kwan whenever she asked for it, and kept to themselves when she didn’t. Not that Kwan was having any luck with her equipment – no matter what sensors or sniffers or magic wands she waved at the haze, it made not a damn bit of difference.

  ‘According to my readings, General, that thing isn’t even here,’ she told him.

  ‘Uh-uh,’ he muttered. They’d had the same result plugging into FAA and weather satellites back at Gitmo. As far as their technology was concerned, the haze didn’t exist.

  He could feel the warmth leaking out of the late afternoon as the sun dropped towards a line of low, scrubby hills in the west. There was a faint but noticeable dry heat radiating from the haze, but that was all.

  ‘Care to take a closer look, Major?’ he said.

  Nuсez shook his head. ‘No. But what else is to be done?’

  The Cuban officer took the first steps away from the convoy, towards the new edge of the known world. Musso fell in beside him as they cautiously approached the barrier. The country hereabouts was little different from the area around Guantanamo. Both were nestled at the edge of the Sierra Maestra ranges, the remnants of huge fractured slabs of continental plate, raised from the ocean floor over millions of years by tectonic impact, volcanic eruptions and the 100,000-gigatonne blast of the Chicxulub comet punching into the surface of the planet just a short distance away, some 65 million years ago. The Maestra was perfect guerrilla territory, a vast contrary maze of steep valleys, volcanic dykes, abrupt fault lines and almost impenetrable karst areas, all riven with limestone caves and covered in dense forest. The ranges gave out on the far side of the haze, smoothing out into the low, rolling plains that made up nearly two-thirds of Cuba’s land surface. For all of the earth-shattering violence that had gone into creating this environment over the eons, it was nothing compared to the immediate spectacle of the static energy wave.

  Musso was able to make out the lowland steppes on the far side without much trouble. Nothing moved there. He had earlier compared it to looking through a waterfall, but now to his mind it was more like a few layers of plastic wrap. He stooped down to pick up a rock as they walked, wondering what would happen if he threw it in. Nuсez slowed as they approached the face. It appeared to billow, like a sail, just as the Cuban had described. They stopped about fifty yards away.

  ‘I would not think it safe to get much closer,’ Nuсez warned.

  ‘I wouldn’t argue with that, Major,’ agreed Musso. ‘Let’s just accept we’re both possessed of stainless-steel cojones and take it nice and careful from here.’

  He could see a burnt-out car wreck on the far side, near a bend in the road, and wondered if that’s where Nuсez’s superior officer had disappeared. This close to it, he avoided looking up. The scale of the thing was enough to give him a teetering sense of vertigo without making it any worse by craning his head back. He turned around to check on his people. They were all watching anxiously, their bodies rigid with anticipation.

  Suddenly there was a whooshing noise and he saw them all jump, like an audience in a horror movie frightened by a cheap stunt. ‘What the fuck?’ he said, turning to Nuсez.

  But the Cuban was gone. Only his smouldering uniform remained.

  The cries of his comrades and of Nuсez’s men reached him a moment later. ‘Run, General! Get the hell outta there!’

  * * * *

  PACOM HQ, PEARL HARBOR, HAWAII

  Admiral Ritchie found his eyes straying from the television news broadcast to the silver-framed picture of his daughter on the desk in front of him. The photograph was old. Nancy was nineteen now, but on his desk, she remained forever three, holding a small bear, sucking her thumb, and staring off a thousand miles into the distance.

  He had to tear his eyes away. It was almost too painful to bear. She should be all right – she was supposed to fly out from Chicago for Europe very early this morning. But they had heard nothing from her. Had she made the flight? Had it escaped the Wave? He didn’t know. His wife Amanda was frantically trying to find out, but without much luck. With a grinding effort of will, Ritchie turned his attention back to work.

  Thank God for cable news at least, he thought. He had wondered if he might have to press the Governor’s office for a declaration of martial law, fearing that violence would be inevitable as the population of the islands digested what was happening. But far from sending mobs onto the street, the wall-to-wall media coverage, all of it sourced from Asia and Europe, seemed to be keeping Hawaii’s civilian population glued to their TV and computer screens. Every available police officer had been called in, and a battalion apiece of Marines and the army were hurriedly kitting out with crowd-control gear, just in case, although all of the reports he’d received so far had the streets half deserted. Hopefully they wouldn’t be needed. The surf breaks off the north shore were a little less crowded than usual, but not much. Apparently even the end of the world wasn’t going to interfere with some people’s search for the perfect wave.

  ‘Governor’s office called, sir.’

  Ritchie looked up from the drifts of paperwork that covered every square inch of his desk. A couple of pages had even dropped to the floor. His PA, Captain McKinney, bent forward and retrieved them.

  ‘Yes, Andrew? Good news, I hope?’

  ‘Mixed, Admiral. Curfew starts at 1800 sharp tonight. They couldn’t agree on the rationing though. But they have organised emergency flights from Tokyo and Sydney for any perishables or medical supplies that run low. The National Security Committees of both the Japanese and Australian cabinets are still meeting, but their local liaison staff have passed on messages from both prime ministers that they’ll give us whatever help we need.’

  They’re the ones who’ll he needing help soon enough, thought Ritchie. But aloud he only said, ‘Well, that’s something at least. For now.’

  The armed forces had considerable stockpiles of rations and medical supplies on the islands, but they didn’t store items like insulin for diabetics, or drugs for cancer treatment or a dozen other common maladies. Ritchie couldn’t help wondering just how much of a supply of antidepressants there was in Hawaii, and how many people were likely to kill themselves or suffer heart attacks or stress-related strokes in the next few days. Given the number of tourists from the mainland here, probably lots.

  Nearly two-and-a-half decades earlier, he’d written his masters dissertation at Annapolis on the navy’s crisis management at Pearl Harbor. He’d been scathing of their efforts on 7 December, 1941. Now, faced with his very own calamity, he had to wonder if he would have done any better. There was just so much to do and so little to do it with. Events had accelerated to a point where he would possibly never catch up.

  ‘Thank you, Captain,’ he grunted, dismissing young McKinney, just as an officer in Army greens appeared at his door.

  ‘Colonel Maccomb, Admiral. I have your updates if you have a moment.’

  Ritchie didn’t, but waved the man in anyway. Maccomb looked like he had run all the way over from the 500th Military Intelligence Brigade – a decent hike in the midday heat of the equatorial sun. PACOM was just months away from taking possession of a new headquarters, the Nimitz-MacArthur Pacific Command Center, which would have centralised everybody in one modern facility. It looked like they’d be sticking with the old campus now, however, necessitating a lot of time wasting as his subordinates remained scattered about all over the island.

  ‘Sit down, Colonel,’ he said. ‘Give it to me as quickly as you can without losing track of the story.’

  The intelligence officer nodded brusquely, snapped a sheaf of paper in his hand and worked down a series of bullet points. ‘Both of our alliance partners in the AOR have either activated their treaties, or will have within twenty-four hours. Land elements of Jap
an’s Self Defence Force have been recalled to barracks, their naval forces are making preparations to put out to sea, and the air force is already flying CAP over the home islands. The Aussies have called up their Reserves and moved all of their remaining high-readiness forces onto alert -’