by C. J. Odle
Then there was a shimmer of air that left eight figures standing on the sand. The witnesses stayed immobile, the necklets glowing. Their glow brightened until even on the screen it became hard to look at. As the glow slowly faded, the necklets disappeared. Each witness blinked and wandered in a daze among the crowd, which seemed not to care they had world leaders in their midst.
Everyone was just a human now, waiting together in the dark for whatever would happen next.
“We need to go,” Vega sent. “Sirius will already be on its way.”
The screen displayed a pod streaking into the air, impossibly fast.
“We?” Sarah asked.
“You must come with me,” Vega sent. “It is the best way to ensure your safety.”
Jake didn’t care about being safe, but after the events of the trial, he couldn’t muster the energy to do anything but follow Vega as it made its way along a smaller corridor to a pod identical to Sirius’s.
The small craft gave the impression of a seed pod sprouting from a central plant. They stepped into the tail end of an oval capsule around fifteen feet long with an interior of opal-white walls three-and-a-half feet high. A large, elongated dome of clear, glass-like material topped the walls.
Vega gestured with its hands as they entered, and two extra seats extruded from the floor in the middle of the room. Jake took one while Sarah took the other. The corridor and pod apertures sealed, and Vega stepped to the pilot’s seat at the front of the capsule. In front of the alien were three vertical control levers and a panel of multicolored crystal buttons.
There was a brief sense of acceleration as the pod shot into the air, but nothing anywhere close to the amount one would expect. Jake and Sarah should have found themselves plastered back to their seats, their features distorted by the g-forces involved, or blacked out entirely from the pressure.
Instead, they were almost comfortable as the pod rose lightning fast, and any discomfort Jake felt had very little to do with the speed of their launch. Instead, he continued to agonize about the trial. He hadn’t been able to stop himself from trying to manipulate the outcome, and now billions of people were about to face the consequences.
Jake looked through the large clear dome toward the stars, and then the pod shifted direction and started to move horizontally. He gazed downward to catch the dark outlines of the desert and mountains skimming past and then saw the moon setting in the distance.
They were heading in the direction of LA. Jake recognized the landscape between the ship and his home. He’d driven it, following the path of his dreams. Would it have made a difference if he’d never come out to the dunes?
Part of Jake wanted to believe so, however pointless he knew his thoughts to be. He clasped the sides of the metallic chair and tried to dig his nails in.
The pod flew on. Below, Jake could see the lights of the small towns and clusters by the roadside leading to LA, and to their sides, the dark masses of the San Gabriel Mountains and the San Bernardino National Forest.
The pod descended rapidly to fly lower in its approach to the metropolis, and now he could make out people looking up under streetlights. Nothing seemed to happen to them as the pod passed over, but Jake guessed it would only be a matter of time.
He checked his watch—ten minutes past three.
“You’re heading for the center of LA, aren’t you?” Sarah asked beside him.
“Southwest of the center is where it must begin,” Vega answered, and now there seemed to be none of the warmth or emotion previously shown in the alien’s earlier communications. Perhaps this cold, distant demeanor was the real Vega, and the version Jake had seen before was just a façade to gain his confidence.
No. Even in the depths of what felt like ultimate despair, Jake couldn’t believe that. From the beginnings of his time on the ship, Vega had helped him.
A tiny ray of comfort came with the thought of Sarah being with him. As for the rest of it, all he could do was watch as skyscrapers appeared on the horizon, a testament to both the sheer number of people in LA and the reach mankind claimed. The towering structures thrust into the sky as though to take possession of it, stating human power, the progress of civilization. A cruel joke now, so fragile in the face of the technology wielded by the aliens.
Vega flicked the levers of the console, and the pod banked to the right and headed toward the coast.
Marina found it hard to deal with so many people expecting answers. When the witnesses suddenly appeared, shimmering into existence before them, she was the one people looked to. Then a pod launched in a beam of light, and she could feel everyone’s eyes upon her.
She told them the truth, that she had no idea what was happening, but they didn’t seem to believe her.
She had to admit the pod was beautiful as it rose silent and bright against the night sky. A minute later, a second one launched, streaking across the heavens in a similar direction. There were small differences between them when she looked closely: a slightly bluish shimmer to the first pod, a stronger reflection of light from the second.
After the glowing dots vanished into the sky, Marina turned to face the throng. She guessed some of them must have noticed her active role in organizing whatever was going on in Gemini’s tent during the trial; plus, she’d also been a figurehead for the convoy, so of course people looked to her now.
A CNN news crew stepped forward, the short reporter flanked by a cameraman and another man holding a powerful light. Marina shielded her eyes from the glare, and the reporter thrust a microphone under her face.
“Where are the pods going?”
She was just about to answer that she didn’t know when a burly soldier barged to the front and lifted the nonplussed reporter to one side.
“What happened to your secret plan?” the soldier growled. “The CIA wants to debrief you.”
“Wait!” shouted the US president as the crowd parted to allow him through.
“I’ll take it from here, Sergeant.”
“Have you any idea what’s going on?” the president asked Marina calmly.
“Where are the pods going?” repeated the reporter.
“I don’t know,” Marina said, her blue hair gleaming under the bright lights.
“How will they attack us?” growled the sergeant.
“You must know something,” called out a voice at the back.
“I don’t know.”
“Come on, tell us!”
“Yeah, tell us what you know!”
“She doesn’t know anything, so back off,” Billy yelled, thrusting his body between Marina and the crowd on her left.
Adam wedged himself in on her right. “Don’t you all have homes to go to? People you want to see? We don’t have any answers for you. It went wrong. We lost. You’re on your own.”
They came to her defense in a way that caught Marina by surprise. She normally looked out for them, yet here with their fellow hackers shoving their way through to assist, Gemini faced down the whole crowd. Adam crossed his arms and glared at the sergeant, while Billy gave the reporter the benefit of his middle finger complete with its pi tattoo.
“The end is coming,” Marina said to the president. “Don’t you have somewhere to go? Loved ones to be with?”
The president gazed into her eyes before nodding and turning around. The sergeant followed him, and then the news crew also turned to leave. The whole crowd began to back off. It was crazy, all those people backing away from Marini and Gemini, but they did.
The crowd slowly dispersed. Some of the soldiers walked to their vehicles and drove >off, presumably heading back to whichever base they’d come from. Or perhaps just fleeing as far from the desert as possible. The presidents and the pope were bundled into a Humvee and driven at speed over the desert toward the dirt road in the distance.
The TV people left too. Those with four-wheel drive vehicles near the camp lugged boxes, lights, and tripods across the sand. Most, however, abandoned their equipment in their haste to leave. Then the rest
of the onlookers followed, first in ones and twos, and finally in a rush that emptied the small patch of desert much faster than it had filled up.
Those who had been forced to walk to the spaceship from the dirt road grabbed rides back to their vehicles in trucks and jeeps and anything desertworthy. Some unfortunate individuals had to trudge the whole way across the sand as panic began to spread amid the blaring horns.
Even the shaman left, patting Marina gently on the shoulder and smiling before he wandered off deeper into the dunes in a direction only he understood.
Eventually, Marina, Billy, and Adam were practically the only ones left amongst the detritus of the desert camp.
“Do you two want to go anywhere?” Marina asked.
Billy shrugged.
“Where would we go that’s cooler than outside a spaceship?” Adam asked.
They had a point. Besides, it wasn’t like there was much for them anywhere else.
“I guess we stay and wait it out here, then,” Marina said.
The pod flew over Los Angeles, its light shimmering off the glass and steel of the buildings as it drifted across the night sky. The skyscrapers directly below might as well have been merely squares, lit by landing lights and neon signs.
High above the streets, those who could were fleeing in private helicopters or ones stolen from their work. Jake found himself wondering if the owners were on most of them, or if the pilots were stealing off alone, trying to get as far away as possible.
“Will it make any difference?” he asked. “Will they escape?”
“No,” Vega replied. “Even if people stay out of the cities, nowhere on Earth will remain beyond the reach of our technology.”
Again, the alien’s telepathic tone carried less warmth.
The pod headed up until the buildings of the city blurred together into blocks, and then into clusters and districts. From up here, the city seemed vast and so widely spread out, with points of light running in all directions. To some people, it would look like an alien landscape. Outside the pod, clouds passed by, and then the sky darkened as they flew higher into the atmosphere.
“What happens now?” Jake asked.
“Mankind will be released,” Vega explained. “It has already experienced the connection to the universal consciousness and has nothing to fear. This craft, along with Sirius’s, carries a device to intensify the connection and allow the individual beings of humanity to be drawn back into the universal stream.”
“So it will just suck up their souls like some giant vacuum cleaner?” Sarah asked.
“It is a freeing transformation,” Vega assured her. “It is painless. You both know how blissful the connection to the universal consciousness can be. No one will suffer.”
No, they would just die. Genocide on a grander scale than anything their species had managed to do to itself. All in the name of protecting the galaxy. And maybe the galaxy did need protecting. Maybe humanity was some kind of cancer, incapable of doing anything but destroying or devouring everything around it. Even so, it was hard to comprehend the idea of the whole human species just… ceasing to be.
Jake thought about the millions of people below.
“Why are you starting with LA?” he pulsed.
“To complete the process in the shortest time frame,” Vega explained. “Sirius has been assigned its own starting point. After finishing here, we will progress to other major centers, and the effects will spread quickly.”
“How quickly?” Jake asked.
Vega considered for a few seconds. “The process requires constant assessment and monitoring but should be complete in seven Earth days. The two of you will then be the only humans left alive, ready for transportation to the Pleiades.”
The space pod moved toward the west of the city, star bright and impossibly high. Jake looked down and tried to imagine the megalopolis below devoid of human life just a few hours from now.
Sirius flew out over the Pacific Ocean toward Asia, reflecting as the pod raced across the Earth. It was a being three hundred millennia old, yet its distant ancestors, the originators of the Startoucher project, had died billions of years ago, leaving the evolutionary results of their experiments for future generations to deal with. Sirius had at first argued against introducing new genetic material into the forerunners of the human species, but its superiors at the time had dismissed its objections and ordered the procedure to go ahead.
As a scientist, Sirius couldn’t help experiencing disappointment. But more than that, because of a decision taken by others so long ago, it and Vega were left with the unenviable task of removing 7.5 billion life-forms from a planet. Although other Startoucher experiments had failed, this scale of extinction of a species at such a relatively advanced stage of maturity was nearly unprecedented. It had happened just once before in the whole history of the project, with an experiment assigned to a different team of scientists.
Although the alien did not show it, the burden of this responsibility weighed very heavily upon its conscience. Sirius had been assigned to develop and foster the species, and now it would have to destroy it.
As the pod traveled west, it crossed over the international date line and the time zones began to unwind Monday night.
The scanners of Sirius’s pod picked up life below teeming beneath the waves. There were fish, of course, and whales, and other, stranger creatures. The alien flew over islands so tiny that humanity ignored them, and these also brimmed with life. Even where there were no humans present, the life of this world still suffered. There were side effects to the pollutants humanity had created and to long years of overfishing and warming waters. Distributions would have changed, species adapted. Even with mankind removed from the world, the eco system would not simply revert to its prehuman state.
The pod flew over a slightly larger island, and there were humans living below. Some looked up, and Sirius could imagine their worry upon seeing the craft, but it had no intention of starting the process of removal here. It had to be done with care, efficiency, and precision. Sirius would wait for the allotted destination before deploying the device.
A few more of this world’s days, and it would be over, although the world would never be the same again. An opportunity occurred to Sirius. In fact, there were two. The first option: the reversion of the natural environment to what it would have been if mankind had never existed. The scientific work involved to make that happen would be extensive. Whole habitats would have to be redesigned. The DNA of extinct species would have to be recovered, and Sirius wasn’t sure enough genetic evidence remained to achieve a complete reconstruction.
The second option appeared a far better prospect. The opportunity to observe the natural development of life on a planet in the wake of the Startoucher project’s withdrawal. It would serve as useful data for the future, and might even show beneficial effects in the long term. For instance, in a hundred thousand years or more. It could even be considered as stage two of the project, allowing them to salvage something from the destruction.
For now, the original mistake still required undoing. Vega would be in position very soon, and Sirius also needed to begin. Its pod shot on toward Asia, climbing higher as it flew, the surface below receding by the second.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
No one had left the war room of the Pentagon since the crisis had begun. Partly because it was the best place from which to try to manage events, secured against attack and one of the safest locations on the planet. And partly because they were all soldiers or long-serving members of the security agencies with a sense of duty that made them committed to seeing through America’s darkest hour. Mainly, however, because General Miles O’Shea had locked the door and wouldn’t hand over the key.
“We need to act!” he bellowed. He’d been bellowing a lot in the last few hours. He’d called out his opinions of the trial like an armchair fan deploring his football team’s choice of play. “Our radar tells us the enemy vehicle is on its way to LA. We need to do so
mething!”
“POTUS is on his way back to us,” the chairman of joint chiefs of staff pointed out.
“But he won’t be here before the enemy vehicle—”
“The alien spacecraft, O’Shea,” the deputy director of the CIA said. “We’ve been through this.”
“Before that thing gets to its destination!” General O’Shea stood with his hands on his hips. “We need to act now to destroy it.”
“What did you have in mind?” the secretary of state asked. “Scramble more jets to disappear?”
“That was an assault on the main craft,” the general pointed out. “We have no way of knowing if these smaller ones have the same defenses. For all we know, we may be able to end this here and now, while the enemy combatants—”
“The aliens,” the CIA man said wearily.
“—are in transit. A quick, surgical strike!”
The four-star admiral frowned in disgust. “Following the well-known strategy of doing the same thing over and over again until it works?”
The general rounded on him. “What’s the alternative? Sit here until we are all wiped out by these… by these aliens?” He spat the word out with obvious reluctance even now.
“We were just going to discuss that,” the CIA man said.
So they did. The secretary of state suggested waiting for the president, but he wouldn’t arrive for hours. The four-star admiral wanted to talk about the possibility of reinforcing buildings and creating shelters, but it would take too much time, plus no one knew exactly what measures would be necessary to protect people from whatever the aliens had planned. The head of the CDC suggested implementing evacuation protocols, but no one was quite sure where so many people could be evacuated to. The head of the NSA put forward the idea of infecting the alien craft with a virus, until someone pointed out he’d just stolen the idea from a movie.
Eventually, inevitably, it circled back to the idea of trying to shoot down the pod.
“What approach do you want to take?” the air force chief asked. “Portable ground to air might be feasible. Air to air again, using bunker busters?”