Thunder & Lightning

by Christopher Nuttall

  President Cardona made himself sit back. There was nothing he could do.

  “I have a visual,” someone shouted. The President looked up; the Space Tracking Network might have taken a beating, but there were plenty of ground-based systems to provide at least a limited substitute for the space-based radars and sensors. All of them were gone now. An image, filed directly by one of the USAF observatories, appeared; a monstrous fireball in the night, heading over America with a noise like the end of the world. “it’s coming in; projected impact point at…”

  The President glanced at the map. It had narrowed down the results now, sharing information from the remainder of the world as well; at least one asteroid was going to come down somewhere in Europe, perhaps in the Ukraine, but the real threat was in the Atlantic. It would come down a bare two hundred kilometres from the Eastern seaboard, far too close for comfort; the President silently prayed that the bunker was as strong as the designers had claimed…and that the population would have a chance to survive, somehow.

  He couldn’t see how.

  * * *

  Markus Wilhelm had been having the time of his life, much to the loudly-expressed disgust of his girlfriend, who had warned him that whatever happened in orbit would determine the fate of the world. He’d grinned at that; whatever happened in orbit, there was no way either of them would be able to make a difference. Why not just sit back and enjoy the fireworks? He’d watched, for a while, though the telescope as lights had danced and sparkled up in orbit, with the brilliant light of fusion flames and the shattering blasts of weapons sending a spectacular display all over the Earth. It was a fantastic mixture of the Fourth of July and the greatest science-fiction movie ever made; as the remains of spacecraft and defences fell into the atmosphere, they left streaks of light in the darkness.

  The radio buzzed from time to time, reporting on the battle, but static kept overloading the airwaves. The internet, the small laptop he’d brought to the roof dependent upon microbursts from satellites that – he assumed – no longer existed, had gone dead; there was no way of placing everything in context. The telescope, fortunately, compensated automatically for the blinding light of nuclear explosions in space; even so, after the third one left him blinking, he put the telescope away and leaned back with Carola on the rug, staring up into space.

  The roof had several other people on it, mainly long-term residents; the city was quieter than it had been in years. He’d glanced down the side of the skyscraper, down to the roads below, and had seen many citizens standing there, staring up at the sky. It made him wonder what else was happening; had crime taken a holiday as criminals and police alike abandoned their work and watched the battle. A handful of similar buildings were having parties, but they seemed to be subdued; everyone knew they were watching history in the making.

  “Here,” the block committee chairperson said, passing him a mug of something warm and tasty. He couldn’t identify the flavour completely; it tasted like apples and spices and something from another world. The chairperson had fought in the Wrecker War; unlike the rest of them, she had brought an assault rifle with her to the roof. Wilhelm couldn’t think why she had bothered – it wasn't as if the aliens were about to land with UFO craft and abduct everyone – but everyone had a right to keep and bear arms. When he’d been a kid, he’d read it as the right to arm bears; it had made his mother smile before she’d explained it. “You’ll need a drink out here.”

  The air seemed to be tense; the display in the heavens hadn’t ceased at all. He could feel it, right on the edge of his perception; a strange feeling of portentousness, as if something great was about to happen. It was almost a religious feeling; had the shepherds felt that way as they watched their sheep, before the angel had come to tell them that the Son of Man had been born on the Earth? Flashes of light and glittering flames danced in the heavens; something fell, shattering into a spread of falling stars that vanished before they could hit the ground. Someone ‘oooohed’ in the darkness, but there was no sense of excitement; the sense that something was about to happen was infecting everyone.

  The hair stood up on the back of his neck…

  “Look!” Carola shouted. She had been leaning back, the warmth of her body pressed against his; now she started, looking towards the west. Wilhelm turned as she moved, looking at the sky, and saw it; a massive flaming streak that moved slowly, tumbling overhead. He heard a dull roar as it passed; it seemed almost that the fireball was alive, somehow malign towards the puny humans underneath. “Markus…”

  Wilhelm caught her and held her close as the fireball passed by, seemingly moving at a snail’s pace, although he was sure that it was moving well past the speed of sound. It seemed almost close enough to touch, but as it roared overhead, it brought sonic booms and a wave of shattered windows. It passed over towards the horizon and seemed almost to touch the sea…

  …Later, he would conclude that it had fallen somewhere over the horizon, but at the time there was no time to think …

  There was a mighty flash, followed rapidly by a blast of thunder. Acting on instinct, he threw himself and Carola down onto the mat, landing on top, covering her body with his own. He heard her cry out, but there was no time to be gentle. A mighty gust of wind lashed at them, barely sheltered by the edge of the roof; it faded as quickly as it had come. He rolled off her, holding her tightly; somehow, they had survived the blast.

  The city was in chaos; he saw several fires billowing up in the darkness and heard gunshots, echoing across the city. He hoped that the police could get to the streets before the city descended into mob rule; the remains of New York had been hellish places after the nuke had gone off. For all he knew, the gangbangers had survived as well as the police; if they acted like they had in New York, there would be looting, pillage, and rape on the streets until the army shot them down like dogs.

  He clasped his pistol with one hand. It would not come to that.

  The radio was buzzing; he could barely hear one word in ten. “Asteroid…impact,” it garbled, though a hail of static. Carola snorted; he understood her disdain, but he had the sense that not everything was over yet. The skies were still bursting with tiny pinpricks of light; what was happening up there? “…Waves…possible impact…evacuate the affected areas…America…”

  A burst of music washed through the radio and then the static became too thick to hear anything. He turned his head slightly, looking out to sea, and stared; something was happening out there. He could see the lights of a USN destroyer, a missile ship that had been on station, although God only knew why the military had left it there when the real action was in space, and they were rising. For an insane moment, he wondered if the aliens were beaming it up into space, and then he saw, as a searchlight snapped on, a huge wall of water advancing towards them.

  “Tidal wave!” someone shouted. Tidal waves were rare on the East Coast, but there had been one only ten years ago that had damaged Pearl Harbour, if he recalled correctly. “It’s a frigging tidal wave.”

  The chairperson fired a single shot into the air and started to shout orders. “Everyone get down on the floor and grab on to something unless you fucking want to die!” she shouted. Carola fell to the ground at once, her hand finding and holding a secure railing; Wilhelm stared, unable to quite believe his eyes, as the wall of water smashed across the beach and advanced towards him, barely leaving the heights of the skyscrapers uncovered by the wave. The chairperson shouted at him. “Get down, you fucking fool!”

  Wilhelm threw himself down as the wave struck the skyscraper. He had thought himself used to how the building moved in the wind, even though he had found it terrifying at first; this was much, much worse. The building shook as if it was going to fall any moment, crashing down and burying them all in the wreckage. He realised the building was taking the brunt of the tidal wave full on; he caught Carola’s hand as she started to pray aloud. The shaking seemed never-ending; the noise of the rushing water was a nightmarish glimpse of hell,
a small wave splashed over them with astonishing force…

  …And then, it was over. The noise seemed to fade and die; moments later, the sound of falling buildings caused them all to scream.

  Carola held him tightly; he held her just as tightly, expecting that any moment, the building would collapse and it would be their last few moments alive. Slowly, the shaking came to an end, replaced by the noise of rushing water and gasps from some of the others on the roof. He laughed as he realised they were still alive; he glanced at Carola and saw her, soaked to the skin, revealing her curves for all to see. He felt a sudden hot rush of arousal, saw it mirrored in her eyes, and paused for a long kiss before looking over the edge of the rooftop.

  “My God,” he breathed. He could see, in the distance, the first glimmers of dawn; even so, it was a real struggle to make out anything in the gloom. “Carola…”

  The city was as dark and silent as the grave. The fires had been put out by the sheer pressure of thousands of tons of water, water that was now receding towards the sea. Wilhelm tried to remember what had happened in any of the asteroid disaster movies he had seen, but all he could remember was that they had included half-naked woman and a couple making love on a surfboard just before the wave picked them up and tossed them into a hotel room, complete with impossibly dry bed. Dawn rose, slowly, and as the sunlight started to glow, he felt as if they were all alone, an island of humanity in the wreckage of human civilisation.

  “Call that a crazy adventure?” someone was saying. He heard him as if his voice was coming from a far distance. “No adventure can be called crazy unless lesbian vampires with chest sizes that can only be described in imaginary numbers are…”

  “Stop quoting that movie, Bruno, and pay attention,” the chairperson said. Her voice was as sharp as a whip. “We have to remain up here long enough for all the water to flow back…”

  Someone else called out a question. “How long will that be?”

  “And then we might have to make our way out of here,” the chairperson continued, as if the speaker hadn’t spoken. “I don’t know how long this building is going to remain stable, but if there were some real aftershocks, there might be earthquakes and that might destroy the building. Don’t go near any bodies; they might already be spreading diseases in the water…”

  Wilhelm looked down at the ground. He could already see dying fish on the ground; the luckier ones trapped in massive puddles, others dead and dying. He held Carola tightly, realising that by a miracle, they had somehow survived.

  He almost envied the dead.

  Chapter Twenty-One: Aftermath, Take One

  Eastern Seaboard, USA

  “My God,” someone said. “They really went jihad on their asses…”

  “Silence in the ranks,” Captain Christopher Fardell said automatically. They were walking slowly, in full power armour, along the boulevard toward Virginia Beach proper… and all around them was chaos. The tidal waves had wreaked havoc right along the seaboard; he’d heard on the grapevine network that waves had smashed up the Potomac and devastated Washington. “Maintain formation; stand ready for…”

  What? He didn’t know himself; the unit had remained safely in the shelter until the first asteroid had hit, when they’d finally received orders to advance to the east and see what they found. The tidal waves might have receded in the hours since they had first struck the coast, but there seemed no limit to the devastation; they walked through a small town he’d spent time chasing a girl in, once. He didn’t recognise the town at all; the waves had shattered everything.

  They advanced in careful formation, treating the ruined coastline as if it were enemy territory, weapons raised and primed. There had been no information on what weapons might affect the aliens; they’d brought along hand cannons as well as plasma rifles, enough firepower to wreck an old-style armoured division if they encountered it through sheer luck. There was no way to know what the aliens might have to throw against them; he'd seen theories suggesting that the aliens would be complete novices at ground combat, that they might be as good as the Americans…or even better. It made Fardell wonder; there hadn’t been a Great Power war since the little spat over Taiwan a generation ago, and that had been fought mostly at sea and in LEO. Just how good were they if they had to fight a similar force on the ground? He’d trained, of course, endlessly; but training was never anything but a pale substitute for the real thing.

  Bodies lay everywhere, some almost intact, others gruesomely mutilated by the tidal wave and the debris from its wake. He'd sensed the power of the wave from their shelter; if they’d been slightly less well protected, it would have been time to really test the warranty on the suits. The aliens had wreaked horrific damage…and, from some of the brief reports flashed to him, they’d damaged or crippled many of the armed National Guards units in the area. If he had been a paranoid man, he would have suspected that the aliens had intended to wreak such havoc merely to clear the landing sites. There had to be survivors somewhere, but where? The medical services in the affected area had been crippled; who knew where they were to send refugees?

  “I can’t raise anyone at all,” the communications expert, Shawn O’Malley, said. His voice was nervous; the microburst transmissions system had vanished with the satellites, unless they were close to a relay post…and the relay posts that would normally have provided a back-up system had vanished when the wave hit. Some would be re-established by FEMA as soon as they recovered from the shock and started to carry out their duties, but until that happened the company was on its own. Radios were completely useless; between the aliens and the effects of the impact, the airwaves had been disrupted beyond easy repair. “It’s like there’s nothing out here at all.”

  The aliens had disrupted the communications network badly enough so emergency services were completely overwhelmed.

  “Don’t let it get to you,” he snapped, wishing he could find more comforting words to say. Some of the soldiers came from the same general area; their homes and families had been devastated by the alien strike. His own family, in base housing, should be safe, he thought, but if the remains of space habitats had fallen all over Earth, who knew what effect they could have on the global weather system? The entire, discredited global warming movement would have a field day. “Remain focused on the job; understand me?”

  “Yes, sir,” O’Malley said. His voice was starting to sound more professional; even so, Fardell had a sense of just how much chaos there was going to be, right over the world. The asteroid – the only one you know about, his mind whispered darkly – had come down in the Atlantic; Britain, Ireland, Europe, North Africa and Latin America would feel the impact. The waves might have wreaked chaos all over the world. “I’ll try.”

  “Good man,” Fardell said. He pushed as much confidence into his voice as he could. “Keep in line now; we’ll fuck up those alien bastards as soon as we get our hands on them.”

  The sky seemed to be changing rapidly as they advanced. Clouds, strange red ones, filled the sky, obscuring the fiery trails as pieces of debris fell and headed towards the planet below. He wondered what that meant, before remembering part of the briefing; the impact had vaporized tons of water, which now condensed in the atmosphere in preparation for falling as rain. He cursed under his breath; the rain wouldn’t have much impact on the suits, but mud would make it far harder for them to operate on the ground. He could only hope that it would blow over quickly; rescue work would be much harder even if there was only a small rainfall, and this was not small.

  “Captain,” O’Malley said. “I had a microburst from command; they want us to continue probing for survivors; someone has a camp set up for refugees and they’re working on ambulances now, but all aircraft are being shot out of the sky!”

  The aliens, Fardell thought. Human Great Power soldiers wouldn’t fire on medical evacuation aircraft, but the Wreckers would do so gleefully…and the aliens could hardly be expected to behave by what humans considered civilised standards o
f behaviour. Besides, everyone knew that orbital weapons platforms could shut down air traffic whenever they could operate freely; the USAF had devoted so much effort to building stealth fighters just to ensure that Chinese or Russian OWPs didn’t have too much success. He wondered how they would do against the aliens.

  “Good,” he said, shortly. “Get a download of whatever emergency camps they’re setting up and let us know so we can push people towards them if they’re able to walk.”

  Half an hour later, they encountered their first survivors, a group walking out with clothes torn and bodies bruised. “We were mugged,” one protested, as soon as they realised that the soldiers were American and not aliens in powered battle armour. “They took Betty and Jane and stripped us and drove us out…”

  Fardell wasn’t entirely surprised. The street gangs had been a major problem in the area, ever since the conscription program had come to an end. If the waves had slaughtered policemen and National Guardsmen, the odds were that the gangs had probably felt they could get away with anything. His lips twitched; they were in for a surprise. The President had declared a state of emergency – he wondered briefly what had happened in Washington – and he was authorised to use deadly force if in danger, or if he had to stop looting. The decision wouldn’t be hard at all.

  “We’ll take care of them,” he said. Plasma weapons were carefully regulated and, unlike chemical-propelled weapons, easy to detect and track. The police kept a close eye on what the gangs might have; a plasma weapon would have been seized under the handful of remaining gun and weapon laws. The odds were that they would have nothing that could scratch his suits. “You have to head towards one of the emergency camps.”

  He gave instructions, as best as he could, and ignored some of their questions. They finally headed off towards the camp, where he hoped they would find food and water; feeding people wasn't a problem anymore. They could be fed on algae-based foods, which had the advantage of also cleaning the water almost completely, although disease was going to be a problem. Short of nuking the entire eastern seaboard, he didn’t see any way of preventing the bodies from decaying rapidly in the unnatural heat. Disease would spread and infect the people who were trying to leave the cities…