No one.
The morning papers.
Headlines…
“CHAOS IN WIND RIVER: President Orders Nuclear Strikes in Guam, Michigan” —The Post.
“ATOMIC HORROR IN MICHIGAN” —The Tribune.
“Federal Troops Evacuate Town Before Nuke” —The Herald.
“COVERUP? D.C. DENIAL!!” —The Daily.
“PRESIDENT SILENT ABOUT NUKES, TROOPS” —The Times.
“JENNINGS MEETS WITH ALIEN AMBASSADOR!! PHOTOS INSIDE!” —The National Enquirer.
The Red Room.
Jennings looked over a copy of some trashy tabloid with mild interest. Apparently he had met with the aliens that crash-landed in Michigan, and they had given him the secrets of the universe. There was even a picture of him shaking hands with a short, egg-headed creature, gray with black almond eyes.
Nice.
The door slid open, and Cervera walked in, flanked by two Marines. They stood resolutely, silent. Armed.
Jennings tapped the hidden security button below the desk with his foot. He had anticipated that this might happen.
“Cervera.” He felt the reassuring heft of the gun against his side. His heart throbbed within his chest.
“Mister President, we’re here to ask you to step down.”
Calm…“I see.”
“Your actions within the last twenty-four hours have been unjustified. We’re asking you to step down peacefully, Jennings. Don’t make us use these.”
“You make me sick, Antonia. This is quite a show you’re staging. Who’s paying you for the B-4? Is it Quebec? France? Indochine? Another backwoods Pact country?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re jumping at shadows, Jennings.”
“The threat is real.”
“What threat? You’re seeing conspiracy everywhere now, aren’t you? Would you be nuking your own country if your wife hadn’t died?”
Jennings visibly flinched.
“She wasn’t the only one to die that day.”
Rage. Jennings stood so suddenly his chair overturned.
“You’re one of them, Cervera, aren’t you?”
Cervera swung her weapon up to Jennings’ face.
“This is your last chance to step down peacefully, you crazy son of a bitch.”
Jennings faced the gun, unblinking.
Cervera pulled back the hammer.
Jennings’ eyes glanced to the left for an instant, just long enough for Cervera’s own eyes to widen in terror before the sound of two gunshots filled the room, and her Marine guards fell lifeless to the floor behind her. Cervera distracted, Jennings wasted no time in swatting the revolver from her hand and drawing his own weapon, which hung inches from her face. His Milicom guards stood in the open doorway, assault rifles trained on Cervera.
“You think you have loyalists, Tony? So do I. And I’m going to expose you as the Styxie traitor you are.”
Cervera uncertainly looked behind her at the armed Milicom troops, weapons still pointed at her. Blood had stained the neutral gray carpet a sick crimson.
“You won’t get away with this.”
Jennings grinned. “Oh, but I will. I’m the President of the Allied States of America. And I believe that the penalty for treason is death.”
Cervera’s jaw dropped and she inhaled sharply before Jennings pulled the trigger. A fine mist of blood mingled with the gunsmoke in the confined space of the room, and Cervera’s lifeless body fell with a meaty thud to the floor, head torn apart by the armor-piercing bullet.
“Get them out of here.”
Jennings’ guards bent, began to drag away the bodies. Jennings casually righted his chair, slumped back into it. He placed his now-heavy revolver on the desktop. He watched blankly as Cervera’s bloody corpse was dragged from the room. The shield door cycled shut, and he was alone.
Seconds later, there were gunshots from down the hallway.
Jennings bolted upright, startled.
Gunshots.
One of his loyal Milicom officers burst into the room, blood pouring from a flesh wound on his arm.
“Mister President, they have the White House surrounded! All of Wind River’s been cut off. Cervera’s men, they killed three of—”
“Is there any way out?”
“All the entrances have been taken by her loyalists. They’re coming this way, sir.”
“Air Force One?”
“It’ll take twenty minutes to prep her.”
“Are there any other planes down there?”
“The Spear you ordered hasn’t left for Santa Fosca yet, sir.”
“Looks like that’s our only way out, son.”
More gunshots, closer.
“Come on!” They ran to the back of the Red Room, where an express elevator led down to the White House hangar. Hearing more gunshots from above, Jennings and the soldier descended into the hangar, where a VTOL Spear-4 stood ready for takeoff.
They ran as quickly as they could to the ramp of the near-vertical jet. The launch doors slid open many stories above them. As they ascended, Jennings turned around just in time to see several of Cervera’s loyalists exit the elevator, weapons drawn. As they opened fire, the officer pulled the hatch shut behind him, and the weak lead slugs bounced harmlessly off the bulletproof surface of the plane.
“Mister President, it’s highly inadvisable for you to accompany us on this combat run. We don’t know what we’re going to find on that island.”
“I’m sure I’ll be safer with you than if I stayed behind with Cervera’s forces. Proceed with the mission, and I’ll try to stay out of your way.”
“Thank you, sir. And may I say that we’re with you all the way. My father and three uncles were killed in War Three, and I lost two brothers in the Quebec War. I don’t want to see our country forced into another war any time soon. Cervera will pay for her treason.”
“Yes, she will,” Jennings whispered. “Yes. She will.”
The plane shuddered and flew from beneath the White House into a brilliantly blue sky, leaving the Rocky Mountains behind. It picked up speed and disappeared to the west in a liquid flash of metal.
Simon.
The Judas Simon was at the front of the formation of Shadow-driven vessels. They passed through the belt of asteroids between Jupiter and Mars without incident, wary of an Enemy ambush.
((there it is.))
They could see the vessel, a dark silhouette against the sunlit face of Phobos. The red mass that was the fourth planet, Mars, loomed above them as the vessels careened toward oblivion.
“Look at the size of it.”
((it’s preparing to harvest. synthesizing the upload generators for the attack.))
“Do they see us yet?”
((no indication that they’ve been alerted to our presence. the shadows hide us.))
“So what do you think, Simon? Do we go for it?”
((we’ve never captured an enemy at this stage of harvest before. the data we could retrieve from the phase core would be priceless.))
“Do we board it?”
((it’s the only way.))
“I know, but I still hate sending troops out into close combat.”
((so do i, but it must be done.))
“Wake them up from their heavens, Simon. Wake them all up.”
The vessels sped on.
Deep within the Judas vessels, an ancient process began anew.
Valves opened. Atmosphere was pumped into chambers where lights flickered, brightened. Heating units began to discharge warmth. Artificial gravity was restored.
Hidden servos whirred; pneumatics pressurized.
In the vast expanse of chambers, the vessel decoded the genetic patterns of thousands of beings from precious files stored for centuries aboard the Judas and began the recreation process. From the base elements of the galaxy, in a primordial stew of nutrient-rich liquid, the vessel stimulated the formation of molecules, DNA strands, cells, tissue, organs, organisms. The vessel vastly sped up the growing process, and within minutes it had created thousands of perfectly viable organisms in the expanse of stasis chambers, reconstituting from ancient binary code the uploaded consciousnesses of the beings that were the Judas.