Revelations (16 page)

The fiery orb streaked across the sky, a bright tail of flashing embers that flamed momentarily then disappeared trailing behind it. The object began to grow smaller and smaller as it thundered north, then dipped suddenly, its trajectory no longer a natural parabolic curve but a definitive course alteration, as though it had been suddenly swatted from the air by some unseen hand. It plunged rapidly toward some distant point far north of Point Loma and then hit the ground with a bright flash that almost instantly dissipated into the blackness.

There was no sound, no thunderous crash of impact or massive explosion. No pressure wave or fireball. Just the ghostly afterimage of the object burnt onto Emily’s disbelieving eyes.

They lay unmoving for what seemed like an eternity, so still that only the sound of their breathing proved they were all still alive.

Minutes passed, then a faint but audible rumble found its way to them; nothing like the one that had heralded the arrival of whatever that thing had been but almost certainly the residual shockwave of its fall to Earth.

Emily was the first to raise herself to her feet. She looked back in the direction of the piece of sky where the object had appeared. In the inky blackness, tumbling and falling in a slow arc and chased by its own blazing tail of burning debris, Emily could see something else falling toward the Earth.

When she was a child, she had witnessed the destruction of the
Columbia
that fateful day that damaged heat shielding had caused the space shuttle to disintegrate on reentry.

“Oh no,” she said, her hand flying to her mouth as she immediately made the connection with what she was seeing now; she was witnessing the fiery death of the ISS as it and its crew made their final return to Earth.

At daybreak the following morning, the glowing remains of the ISS could still be seen scorching slowly through the atmosphere as, piece by piece, it was inexorably drawn back to the planet it had originated from, tiny pieces of man’s last foothold in the stars burning brightly in the upper atmosphere like meteors.

And not just metal and plastic
, Emily thought, as she watched another flare of light burn up in the atmosphere above Point Loma. Her neck was beginning to ache from staring at such an acute angle for so long. She let out a long sigh, cracked her neck left and then right, and began making her way toward the dining area where everyone else was already gathered waiting for news.

While the majority of the crew of the
Vengeance
had not even heard the voice of Commander Mulligan, let alone spoken with her, they all
knew
of her. Her loss, along with the destruction of the space station, was a major blow to the morale of the survivors. And, judging by the sullen and disconsolate looks on the faces of the sailors as they gathered for their morning meal, the news had hit home extremely hard. While the station had circled overhead, there had been a sense of safety, of almost God-like protection afforded by their constant vigilance. Now, with the survivors’ vision forever tethered to the ground, there was a distinct sense of loneliness within the group.

“Do you think it might not be them?” Rhiannon said, picking at her food, her eyes still red from the tears she had shed when told that the commander had most likely perished. “Maybe it’s something else, one of the satellites…maybe?”

Parsons squeezed the girl’s shoulder, “Maybe,
cariad
,” he said. “Who knows, eh?” But even Parsons’s attention could not lift Rhiannon’s spirits from this latest tragedy.

“We have to figure out what we are going to do about the new arrival,” said Emily, switching the conversation to the phenomenon that they had all seen in the previous night’s sky. “Commander Mulligan said that she saw multiple objects outside the atmosphere, but we only saw the one. That means whatever they are, they were heading to different locations, and they were dispersed far enough apart that we only saw the one.”

MacAlister looked up from his breakfast of scrambled eggs (powdered, but not bad considering). “We checked the sub’s tracking radar this morning. The telemetry data we pulled gives us a good estimate of where that thing came down last night.”

Emily continued to chew her own food, and raised her eyebrows in lieu of the obvious question.

“It came down in Nevada, right around Las Vegas. Give or take fifty miles.”

“Always wanted to go to Vegas. Anybody up for some blackjack?” Parsons quipped.

Emily swallowed her food. “Do we even know what the hell that thing was? I mean it looked like a meteor but then it altered course so obviously…” She left the sentence unfinished, testing the response of the others.

“From what I saw of it,” said Jacob, “and from what everyone else described, as well as Commander Mulligan’s initial response, I think it’s patently obvious what that thing was, don’t you?”

Parsons decided to fill in the blanks. “You’re going to tell us that it was some kind of spaceship? Right? That there are little green men onboard that thing that have come to suck our brains out through our noses? Am I close?” Parsons’s words were dripping with sarcasm, but beneath the disdain, Emily could sense the rough rope of fear intertwined with every word.

“No,” said Jacob slowly and emphatically. “Not little green men.” He continued to speak quietly, refusing to rise to the bait, an honestly jovial smile creasing the corner of his lips. “But it most definitely signifies the arrival of something new. From what Commander Mulligan managed to tell us before the station was destroyed, it sounds as if my theory was correct: What she saw, what we all saw in the sky last night, was maybe a scouting party for the intelligence that created the red rain. Perhaps they are even the colonists themselves.”

Rhiannon looked aghast.

“It’s alright,” said Parsons, giving Jacob a hard stare that the scientist did not seem to notice.

Jacob appeared to have recovered a lot of the patience Emily had become familiar with during her trip across the United States, because now he used the same voice, the same quiet tone of knowledge and assuredness that she had heard when she had only been able to speak to him via her sat-phone.

Jacob continued, “My personal belief is that this is a vanguard. It would make sense that they would send a small force ahead to ensure the transformation of the planet has gone according to plan. That is, of course, assuming that these were even ships and not something entirely different. That would be my initial assessment.”

“Couldn’t this just be a coincidence?” MacAlister asked. “Commander Mulligan would have been under an enormous amount of stress, what with her predicament and all. Couldn’t she have made a simple mistake and misidentified a meteor shower? I mean it’s possible, right?”

“We can speculate about what it
might
be forever, but the only way to be absolutely certain is to go and take a look at the ship, meteor, whatever,” said Emily. She was surprised by the look of acceptance to her suggestion that she received. She had expected a straight-up no-way-José response; instead she was met with a steady gaze from each of those sitting next to her.

“I’d like a crack at these bastards,” said MacAlister. “At the very least, I want to see what kind of a being is able to bring an entire planet to its knees in a day.”

“So, let me get this straight: You’re suggesting that we travel to Nevada, track down where this thing landed, and try and make contact with them?” said Parsons.

“Pretty much,” said Emily.

“Okay, well, count me in.”

MacAlister glanced across the table at Captain Constantine, who had remained out of the conversation.

“It’s your call, skipper.”

“If Jacob is correct, and what we witnessed last night
is
some kind of an alien craft, then we need to know how much of a danger they pose,” Constantine said after a few moments’ thought. “We need to assess their capabilities and whether they pose any imminent threat to our safety here. If they do, then we will have to reassess our decision to stay here and find someplace else, somewhere safer to settle as far away from them as possible. I think it’s worth the risk to send a reconnaissance party out there and see what we’re facing. Mr. Parsons, do we still have that drone onboard?”

“Yes, sir,” said Parsons. “She’s stowed away and ready to roll out.”

“Drone?” asked Emily.

“We have a short-range aerial drone that we use for observation and reconnaissance work. It’s basically a big radio-controlled aircraft with a camera attachment that can relay live images back to a remote video unit,” the captain explained. “So, as long as you can get within three miles of the landing site, you can send the drone in and stay at a safe distance. If we decide to do this, I don’t want to unnecessarily risk lives. We have no idea what kind of a wasp’s nest we might be sticking our fist into.”

“How we get there is the next question,” MacAlister said. “From what we saw on our little walkabout yesterday, there’s no way we’re going to make the trip overland, there’s just too much growth. We could skirt back north along the coast, maybe see if there’s any kind of break in the jungle. It’s going to be a hell of a trek, though. Probably looking at weeks’ worth of walking, maybe longer if we don’t have a clear shot to Vegas and have to lug the drone along too.”

“Can anyone fly a helicopter?” Emily asked, half-jokingly. “I think I saw two across the bay.”

The crew all turned their heads to look at MacAlister.

“I may have some experience in that department,” he said, smiling. “Actually, I have about two hundred hours of flight time. So…”

Emily smiled back at him. “Well, you’re just a jack-of-all-trades, aren’t you?”

MacAlister’s smile grew into a broad grin. “Oh, I’ve been called worse…much, much worse.”

Emily climbed into the dinghy and settled down onto the wooden seat next to MacAlister. There were five more onboard with her, including the boat’s pilot who stood at the raised steering column toward the back of the boat. Emily recognized Rusty from their first exploratory trip into the wasteland created by the fire. She smiled warmly at the young sailor.

“Morning, Miss,” he said. “Thor not with you today?”

What Emily wanted to say was: “Call me ‘Miss’ again and I’ll knock you on your ass.”
God! She was barely ten years older than him
. She had not had the best night’s sleep, and it was showing in her mood. What she actually said was: “No, no Thor today.” She had left the dog with Rhiannon. She was going to be travelling with a bunch of edgy armed men, and she did not want to take the risk that her dog would be shot by some nervous, trigger-happy sailor.

With everyone fastened in, the boat accelerated quickly away from land and headed out toward Coronado Island, east of Point Loma.

The trip across the inlet was rough, the water choppy with rolling swells that rocked the boat up and down. Emily felt her stomach roll with every unexpected rise and fall of the boat, and after a few minutes she began to feel a little queasy.

The rough water didn’t seem to bother the sailors who all seemed relaxed, almost nonchalant.

“Just fix your eyes on one of the rivets,” MacAlister said, his voice struggling to be heard over the roar of the engine and whoosh of spray as the boat cut through the waves. “It’ll help with the nausea.”

She took his advice, fixing her gaze on the head of a rivet bolted into the bottom of the boat. By the time she realized it was just a clever distraction to take her mind off the trip, the boat was only a few hundred yards off the beach of Coronado Island.

MacAlister gave a quick raise of his eyebrows and smiled as she looked up from the floor.

“Clever,” she said. “Thanks.”

“I aim to please.”

Emily wasn’t sure whether that was just an innocent reply or whether he was flirting with her…again.

The boat’s pilot began to ease off the throttle as they approached the shale beach. As the nose of the dinghy cut through the pebbles and the boat came to a shuddering halt, the sailors leaped to the shore, their weapons at the ready but not raised. For some unknown reason, the alien vegetation had not managed to take as strong a hold on this extreme western side of the island, the ground and expanse of concrete and asphalt that stretched out in all directions was free from all but the occasional plant. In the distance, Emily could see a large building, its curved roof and huge doors made it instantly recognizable as an aircraft hangar. Several other smaller buildings—offices, perhaps?—were in stationary orbit around it. The hangar was the only building that appeared to have made it through the storm more or less undamaged. But beyond the cluster of buildings was an all too familiar wall of red, bisecting the island across the middle.

Several fighter planes, or what was left of them, at least, lay broken and twisted on the concrete parkway in front of the hangar. They looked as if some cruel child had reached down and snapped their backs. The two helicopters Emily had spotted when she first landed looked as though they were still in one piece. One was obviously canted to the right, though, the left side of its bottom fuselage resting against the runway. But the other helo was still upright, riding on three wheels, its four rotor blades hanging limply like wet black hair.

MacAlister raised his binoculars to his eyes and glassed the buildings then tracked across to the helos. “That’s where we need to be, lads,” he said. “Let’s get a move on.” At his command the group began to jog cautiously toward the hangar, their weapons raised to their shoulders and sweeping the scenery as they approached the building.

The team reached the nearest building and proceeded along the western edge in single file, Emily in the middle, the sailors covering angles with their weapons.

This close Emily could see the damage to the buildings was mostly cosmetic: Large chunks of stucco had been ripped from the fascia and windows had been blown out, the broken glass crunching under their booted feet. Sheets of paper, the contents of some filing cabinet, blew through the space between the buildings before collecting like snow in a drift against the wall of the hangar.

When they came to the farthest corner of the building, MacAlister flicked a quick hand signal and the two leading sailors sprinted across the open space between buildings. “Let’s go,” he whispered when the men had reached the cover of the next building and the rest of the team sprinted to join them. They continued the same leapfrogging maneuver from building to building until they were as close to the two helicopters as they could get.

Emily watched MacAlister closely, his eyes scanning the buildings and the aircraft, looking for any movement, anything out of the ordinary. When he caught her watching him, he smiled, “Ready?”

She nodded.

“Let’s go,” he said. They dashed across the concrete to the two helos, coming to a standstill next to the fuselage of the first helicopter. It was huge, far bigger than Emily had thought it would be, but then the closest she’d ever been to a helicopter was on TV.

“It’s a Black Hawk,” MacAlister said, running the flat of his hand over the machine’s nose. “Haven’t flown one of these since Iraq.”

The machine was badly damaged; a support strut for one of the two front landing wheels had snapped, tipping the Black Hawk to the ground. Two of the blades of the tail rotor, the one that would stabilize the craft in flight, had been bent, as though something heavy had hit them. The side door of the helicopter must have either been left open or blown open by the storm, because the interior was a wreck of debris and rain damage. It was useless.

“Well, I don’t think this is going to be much use to us,” Parsons said, patting the side of the machine like it was a dead horse. “Let’s take a look at the other one.”

They walked around the front of the damaged aircraft and over to the second helicopter. This one looked to be in much better condition; it was upright, the door hatches for both the passenger area and pilot’s cabin were closed, and as far as Emily could tell, everything that was supposed to be there was where it should be.

“This looks promising,” said Parsons as a rare smile bordering almost on adoration lit up his face. He skirted around the edge of the helicopter, checked underneath it, and then moved his attention to the twin General Electric T700 turboshaft engines sitting just below the main rotor on the roof of the Black Hawk. The smile faded from his face.

“Bastard!” he spat. “The damn things are full of that red shit.
’
Scuse my French.”

Emily followed the others around to the front of the helicopter to get a better look. Sure enough, the air intakes of the engines were spilling over with bunches of red veins, reed-thin stalks that had grown or were blown throughout the engine housing, clogging the intake.

“What do you need?” asked MacAlister.

“I need a metric fucking ton of weed killer, is what I need. Spray these bastards all the fucking way back to where they fucking came from.” The Welshman was red in the face. “Sorry.
’
Scuse my language again, Miss.”

“No fucking problem,” said Emily, which brought a sudden and incongruous burst of laughter from everyone on the asphalt.

Parsons reached for the handle of the hatch to the passenger area of the helo. He pulled hard and the door popped out and slid backward along the fuselage, revealing a spotless interior.

“I have to give it to you Yanks,” Parsons said as he climbed first onto the lip of the bulkhead, then eased himself up into a standing position, his body inside the helo and his head outside. “You certainly know how to build a flying machine.” With one hand holding the upper lip of the frame for support, he reached up with his free hand and began to rip out clumps of the red vegetation. The severed ends oozed red goo that dripped onto Parsons’s chest and down the front of his tunic.

Emily felt an automatic revulsion at the sight of the red fluid, memories of the red rain flooding back into her mind. She didn’t think whatever was running through the plants was anywhere near as deadly as that first fall of red rain, but still, she wouldn’t want any of that stuff on her. It either didn’t cross Parsons’s mind or he could not have cared any less; he dug in and continued to pull handfuls of the weeds out and toss them on the ground beneath the helicopter.

“Alrighty tighty,” he said after a few more clumps of red splattered on the ground. “Maybe it’s not as bad as I thought it would be. It’s still going to take me a couple of hours to clean this bugger out before we can even think about giving her a test drive. I’ll be able to give you a better idea of where we are then.”

“Anything we can do to help?” Emily asked.

“Unless you feel like keeping me company, you can make yourself scarce for a while.”

Emily turned to MacAlister. “How about we check out the buildings over there? See if there’s anything worth scavenging?”

“Sounds like an idea. Better than standing here and working on our suntans, at least. Rusty! You’re with us. Come on lad.”

The young sailor had settled himself against one of the helicopter’s landing wheels. He pulled himself to his feet, grabbed his rifle, and joined MacAlister and Emily.

“Just scream if you need us,” said MacAlister as they walked off toward the nearest group of buildings.

Emily saw a hand rise from behind the cowling, a single index finger extended.

Jesus
, Emily thought good-heartedly, these guys should have their own damn comedy show.

The buildings near the hangar rose three stories high and looked as though they had probably been used for administrative purposes. The parking lot at the front of the building was still filled with cars, a clear indication that most of the base staff had apparently remained at their posts when the rain hit. That fact made Emily oddly proud and afraid at the same time.

The approaching jungle had not yet managed to completely consume the buildings, but it lay just a matter of a few feet away, and leafy runners had already extended out in front of the main wall of vegetation, creeping over the concrete pavements.

The entrance of the nearest building was covered in the same ropelike vines Emily had spent the first few days clearing from the buildings on Point Loma. MacAlister pulled enough of the vines away from the door to clear an entrance, then pushed the door carefully open.

“Wait here, please, Emily,” he said. He was no longer the wisecracking sailor she had begun to grow so infuriatingly attached to; now he was all soldier, his rifle pulled to his shoulder as he edged his way inside the building. He swept the muzzle from left to right, checking corners and nooks and crannies, the flashlight on the barrel of his weapon illuminating even the darkest spaces. Then he disappeared around a corner and Emily felt a sudden sense of nervousness as she lost sight of him.

A few minutes later, he reappeared and walked back to the door.

“Welcome to my humble abode,” he said, holding the door open and gesturing Emily and Rusty inside with a dramatic sweep of his hand. “Let’s go see what we can steal.”