Also by PAUL ANTONY JONES:
Toward Yesterday
Extinction Point: Book One
Dangerous Places (short story compilation)
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2013 Paul Antony Jones
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by 47North
PO Box 400818
Las Vegas, NV 89140
ISBN-13: 9781477805060
ISBN-10: 1477805060
Library of Congress Control Number: 2012956119
For Jeff Wayne and Herbert George Wells Thank you for fueling the fire of my imagination
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
ALASKA
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PROLOGUE
Commander Fiona Mulligan had made a habit out of watching the sunrise.
Of course, when you were on board a two-hundred-and-forty-foot-long hunk of metal, hurtling along at just over seventeen thousand miles per hour in a low orbit above the earth and completing almost sixteen revolutions of the earth a day, you got to see a lot of sunrises.
The longest most crew members of the International Space Station got to sleep at any one time was about six hours; couple that with the disorienting effect of waking surrounded by darkness after one period, then sunlight the next, and it could play havoc with your biological clock. Fiona had found a simple solution, though; whenever the opportunity presented itself, she would try to time the end of each sleep period to coincide with one of those sunrises.
Dawns aboard the ISS were a very different affair from those the billions of souls on the gleaming blue planet beneath her feet experienced. Most earthbound sunrises could be obscured by clouds and smog and cityscapes, obfuscating the simple wonder of watching the birth of a new day. By contrast, the little market town of Dorking, in the UK where she had grown up, had given her an exemplary view of the heavens and fueled her love of space when she was just a child. But even those misty mornings and ebony nights of her childhood paled by comparison to the godlike perspective afforded her and the ISS crew, so many miles above the earth. Up here, they were simply glorious.
Watching from the cupola of Tranquility (Node 3), a room-size cylinder jutting out from just below (or above, depending on the station’s orientation at any given moment) the US laboratory Destiny, Fiona could see the lights of cities moving slowly by through the darkness beneath her. In the distance the faint glow of the rapidly approaching morning cut a laser-sharp crescent against the arch of the earth. Slowly, it expanded into a thin band of spectral blues and yellows and began to creep from the horizon across the curvature of the earth toward the station, revealing clouds floating above a blue sea and the far-off coastlines of islands and the undulating curve of the continent of Africa.
An aurora of surging light painted broad strokes of turquoise over the South Pole as the sun emerged, rising sideways like an ancient phoenix from the blackness of space. It pushed back the shadows enveloping her world, until finally the planet’s home star appeared in all its glory, welcomed by the gentle whirring vibration of the station’s solar panels as they gradually oriented themselves to collect its life-giving energy.
According to the station’s telemetry system, they were currently over the South Atlantic Ocean, rapidly heading toward Namibia. They would pass across that massive continent that had given birth to humanity, skirting Europe, and then onward over central Russia.
She had seen many sunrises during her two-month stay on the station. Each one was different in its own way, depending on the orientation and position of the station over the surface of the earth.
Sunrise the day the world ended was different for another reason.
At first, Commander Mulligan thought the anomaly was some kind of optical illusion; a refraction of light off the low-lying clouds that blanketed most of the view below them, or maybe it was some kind of visual artifact of the aurora borealis that still flickered and played far to the north. But as she continued to focus on the unusual phenomenon stretching out far below, Fiona realized this was something else altogether, something quite extraordinary.
Trailing behind the rapidly advancing dawn was a scintillating ribbon of red that began as a barely distinguishable needle-thin line south of her position toward Indonesia and extended over the horizon toward Finland. As she followed the ribbon north, she could see it was gradually expanding in width. By the time it passed over the equator, it had grown to a thick band of crimson. Fiona estimated it was at least thirty miles wide at its broadest point, from leading edge to trailing edge. As it passed over the Tropic of Capricorn, she could see the crimson line begin to taper off again before it became nothing but a slight thread in the distance and then disappeared completely a few miles short of the Arctic Ocean.
She had immediately reported the strange event to mission control while relaying the station’s incredible images back to the agency as the ISS swept over the phenomenon, continuing along its orbit.
No one seemed to have any idea what it was she was seeing. The ribbon of red appeared to be moving in an almost regimented progression across the globe. Scientists on the ground and in the ISS postulated that it might be some kind of freak weather event, or maybe the smoke from an unobserved undersea volcanic eruption. But if either of those theories were correct, then surely there would have been some kind of disruption to the consistency of the ribbon, just as a contrail of a high-altitude aircraft will slowly lose its coherence. It stood to reason that whatever this event was, over time it should begin to dissolve, pulled away by winds and disruptive weather patterns. But there was no loss of cohesion; its edges had remained sharply defined as it swept methodically onward across the globe.
And whatever this stuff was made of, it was sufficiently dense that it was impossible to see through to the sea beyond. She watched as it completely obscured a small black dot that was probably a supertanker plying its way between countries. The tanker disappeared as the red streamer passed over it before reappearing on the opposite side and continuing on its way to wherever it was bound. It seemed unharmed, and there was no sign that it had changed course or even seen the red band that it had passed directly beneath.
It was difficult to say just how high above the surface this strange red anomaly was, but judging by the ship’s unaltered course, the captain either hadn’t considered it a threat or hadn’t had time to make any evasive maneuvers
. Not that it would have helped; the ribbon seemed to be spread almost completely across the globe.
The observation port of the cupola of Tranquility had the best view of the ongoing event, but it was too cramped to comfortably fit any more than two observers at once. Each member of the crew joined the commander in turn to watch the slowly advancing ribbon and offer up his or her opinions and theories.
It was Ivan Krikalev, the team’s resident flight surgeon as well as a highly competent engineer, who finally voiced what everyone else had been thinking. “Perhaps it is some kind of alien life-form,” he whispered as he floated next to Fiona, watching through the observation port next to hers.
“What?” she said, not sure she had heard him correctly.
The implacable Russian slowly rotated to face her. “I said, perhaps it is alien in origin. The theory of panspermia is an accepted possibility of how life began on earth. Maybe what we are observing is an example of that theory in action. Who knows for certain? I have no other suggestions.”
Fiona vaguely remembered watching a documentary on the Discovery Channel at some point that briefly covered the theory behind the unproven hypothesis. “Isn’t that the idea that life on earth originally came from outer space?”
“You are basically correct,” said Krikalev. “The theory is more complex than that, of course, but it has been around since the fifth century. It is all mainly conjecture, of course—life is transferred from planet to planet by microorganisms trapped in meteors or blown on the solar winds, just like pollen travels on the wind. There are many theories, but, in the end, it boils down to life being seeded throughout the galaxy. Perhaps we are quiet witnesses to one of those very events.”
As the ISS sped onward and away from the rapidly receding thread of red bisecting the horizon like a giant bloody slash across the earth, Commander Mulligan found herself pondering Krikalev’s theory, wondering what it would mean for the planet speeding by beneath them and the life that called it home if he was right.
Approximately eight hours later she received her answer.
The crew of the ISS had slowly begun to lose contact with its global tracking stations and mission control centers.
First to go was the ISS mission control center in Korolev, Russia, closely followed by Moscow. Then, as the deadly effects of the rain swept indefatigably across the continent, the center in Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany, went dark; the Space Research and Technology Center in the Netherlands went down not long after that. By the time the ISS lost contact with the European Space Agency Headquarters in Paris, the crew had managed to piece together as clear a picture of what was going on down on the ground as was possible given their limited access to experiential data.
The station’s final contact had been with a radio operator from the Twenty-Second Space Operations Squadron based at the Kaena Point Satellite Tracking Station on the island of Oahu in Hawaii. The young operator had tried her best to sound calm as she relayed what little news she had about the events taking place worldwide.
The girl was from Colorado originally, she had told Fiona. Her family and husband still lived there, just outside Denver. She had lost contact with them hours earlier. The woman was trying to be brave as she kept the station updated with the little information that still crossed her desk, but Fiona had heard the fear gradually creep into her voice as the inevitable deadline approached the American military base. The operator had died midsentence; Fiona had heard her scream her daughter’s name before the connection had broken.
It was in that instant, as the horrified crew listened to the dying woman, that Commander Mulligan and the crew of the ISS had come to the realization that what had been their home for the last four months had, in a single instant, almost certainly become their tomb.
Of course, the station had enough fuel to maintain its orbit pretty much indefinitely, but they would all be dead long before that was exhausted. They had enough provisions to last them for the next four months or more, and the onboard oxygen-generating systems might last for at least that long, and there were also several redundancy measures built into the station that would keep them alive long past the last meal.
But what then? There was no hope of rescue, only a slow painful death as they starved.
Her crew was a pragmatic bunch, made up of the best of the best and not given to snap judgments, but there had already been calm discussion of breaking out the little red boxes the European Space Agency had considerately provided them for just such an occasion. Each box contained three pills of a derivative of tetrodotoxin, a fast-acting neurotoxin that would leave them dead—painlessly, they had been assured—within minutes of swallowing one. They had all agreed to give it as long as possible before resorting to such extreme measures, but she knew no one on board held out much in the way of hope that rescue was even the slightest of possibilities.
They had spent the next few days taking shifts on the communication systems, working their way through the military and private bands in the hope that there might be someone out there still listening or transmitting. There had to be military and government installations still left untouched by the red rain, they reasoned. Whatever the event had been, it could not have been so viciously effective at its job that it could reach out and wipe out even the secret hardened command-and-control bases they all knew existed in their home countries.
Could it?
They had picked up some minor radio chatter, fleeting and ghostlike as it crackled across the airwaves, and for a moment hope had bloomed that their situation was not as terrible as it seemed. But the transmission was in no language they recognized. “My best guess is it’s probably encrypted in some way, maybe military. Who knows? Without the key there is no way to decrypt it,” Bryant, the team’s communication expert, had explained.
As time rolled on, from the vantage point of the ISS, Commander Mulligan and her crew had an unprecedented view of the changes that had begun to unfold across the earth. With each revolution the station made, they noticed subtle changes to their planet, changes that appeared miniscule from the distance they were watching from but that must have been massive and rapid at ground level.
There had been nothing for the first day or two. The world kept revolving, storms moved across oceans, and, at night, cities still glowed as brightly as they always had done. If they had not known better, the crew would have thought they were a part of some elaborate practical joke that had just gone on for far too long.
Krikalev was the first to point it out, a slight red bloom in the air over Kirovograd in the Ukraine.
With each orbit, the astronauts could see new blotches of red, small and barely visible at first, mainly concentrated over the most densely occupied cities across the globe. The next time their orbit passed over that area, they could see those same pinpricks of red had blossomed and grown, spreading out like drops of red dye splashed into water. By day five after the event, the sky beneath the space station and the earth had become clouded with angry alien storms. Thick tendrils of swirling red reached out across continents, carried on trade winds across oceans, spreading out and blanketing the world in a gauzy web of red that grew ever thicker and more complex with each passing hour. Huge swirling hurricane-size storms had developed off the southeast coast of the United States and had begun to move inexorably toward the East Coast.
Fiona found herself transfixed by the inexorable spread of the creeping red across her planet. There was a pattern to it, she was sure, but she simply could not put her finger on what that pattern was. It was a futile exercise, anyway, she supposed. There was nothing any of them could do but watch as, day by day, the world was slowly suffocated beneath a veil of red death.
Emily Baxter had a craving. She wanted a burger…bad.
Not just any burger, either. In the four days since she had escaped from her apartment in Manhattan, she had passed by plenty of abandoned McDonald’s, Burger Kings, and God knew how many other fast-food restaurants. Those were all easily ignorable.
&nbs
p; No, what she had a hankering for was a Five Guys bacon cheeseburger with grilled mushrooms, onions, mayo, pickles, and tomatoes; hold the ketchup and mustard. She would add a large order of their fries—Cajun-style, of course—and an extra-large, ice-cold Coke. Emily felt her saliva glands begin to water at the thought of sinking her teeth into that juicy burger.
There had been a Five Guys franchise over on West Thirty-Fourth Street, just a ten-minute walk from the apartment she had left behind in Manhattan. She’d stop by there at least once a month when she had the urge to add an extra couple of inches of cholesterol to her arteries. She was already bored by her diet. Canned beans. Canned soup. Canned fruit. Canned everything. A burger would be the only thing right now that would satisfy her desire for real, honest-to-goodness all-American junk food.
Of course, that wasn’t going to ever happen, seeing as how the world had come to an abrupt, and total, end.
Maybe it was all the extra exercise she was getting? She had thought herself a pretty proficient cyclist before the red rain, but these past few days of constant pedaling had helped prove her wrong. Everything ached. She had no idea how Thor did it, poor thing. The malamute padded uncomplaining alongside her bike.
Only a few days had passed, but the event that had wiped all but a handful of humanity from the face of the earth already seemed distant and vague to her now. The red rain had fallen across the world, seemingly from nowhere. Within hours everyone and everything was dead…well, apart from her, Thor, and a bunch of scientists trapped in a research station in the Stockton Islands on the far north coast of Alaska. That was where she was heading. Alaska.
Guess there’s something to be said for the end of the world, she thought. It had certainly done a world of good for her cardio health. The post-apocalypse diet: guaranteed to trim inches from your waistline, or you’ll die trying. She could have made millions in book sales, if there had been anyone left to sell the book to.
Thor, an Alaskan malamute, had been Emily’s only companion since he had rescued her from an attack by a trio of alien creatures in an equally alien forest just outside Valhalla. In their brief time together, she had often thought he must have received some sort of training, because he responded to many of her commands and was very protective.
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