“That’s an affirmative. Go ahead.”
“You’d better contact Milicom. They’ll want to see this.”
Magdalene.
Dreams of cold water and gray skies and little little bathing suits that Mum disapproved of and hands-on boys whom Da disapproved of and warm cozy nights of fireplaces and rainstorms and none of the terror that her later teenage years had descended into. None of the terror at all.
She snapped awake at the gentle nudge of an alarm. Where? When?
Trapped beneath an ocean, energy fading…
She sensed three vessels floating above her at the surface of the water, and she also sensed when a fourth vessel emerged from one of the three and began a descent to her.
They had found her after all.
Barbarians at the gate.
Magdalene prepared to greet them.
Mariana Trench, 200 miles from Guam.
The tiny submersible XJ disembarked from his fathership, the Jonah. Within the submarine, two sailors reclined at their controls, preparing for the twenty-five thousand-foot drop into the Trench. They both wore bulky pressure suits to prevent their bodies’ implosion from the weight of countless billions of gallons of ocean water.
“XJ to Jonah. Prep completed. We’re ready for the dive. Drop us, Jonah.”
“Affirmative, XJ. Happy trails.”
The two docking clamps that held the XJ to the Jonah’s docking arm released, and the sub was free.
The XJ plummeted into the void, the frigid, black water, pulled by the weight of twenty tons of ballast. External lights flickered to life.
The pilots of the XJ, even in their advanced pressure suits, still felt some discomfort. Ear pain, eye pain as their eyes struggled to focus with compressed lenses.
At twenty thousand feet below sea level the XJ began to vent ballast to slow its descent. The external lights brightened, and sensors and cameras began to roll.
The Geiger counters revealed a surprising lack of radiation in the impact area.
Five hundred feet to the ocean floor.
She saw their annoyingly bright lights and felt them vent the ballast. She had been found.
She was sorry the she would have to have to eliminate them. They had done nothing to her, except discover her precious hiding place. She could not allow them to alert others to her presence at the ocean floor.
Hidden servomechanisms opened weapons hatches.
“Jonah, are you picking this up?”
“Affirmative, XJ. Remain on reconnaissance vector.”
Below them, resting on the floor of the trench, was not a meteor, not a nuclear submarine, not a crashed derelict spacestation.
Below them rested an unidentified object. A spaceship. A big one.
The XJ’s searchlights and cameras revealed a huge, matte black vessel. It was without a doubt not from the ocean, a foreign country, or even Earth. It was alien.
The vessel’s top surface laid below the XJ, stretching away into the utter darkness of the Trench. It was intact, almost beautiful in its symmetry, but it was obvious that it had not had a controlled landing. The hull was scarred and covered with small surface dents. The vessel lay placidly at the bottom of this gouge in the planet. It reflected no light at all. It was as if light were pulled into its hull and not released. The vessel was shaped as two halves, joined together by a central hub. It was beautiful; it was terrifying.
“Jonah, this is scary shit. Requesting permission to—.” He stopped speaking abruptly.
Movement.
A small panel slid open on the surface of the vessel. Something glinted within.
“XJ? Please respond.”
“Jonah, I—”
Heat. A fierce beam of white light lashed out of the hub of the vessel and sliced the XJ in half. Both pilots died instantly as the boiling water ate through their pressure suits’ valves and twenty-five thousand vertical feet of ocean pressure crushed them.
The light swept back and forth until the XJ was no more. The primary threat taken care of, the light intensified and focused upward, upward, to the surface of the ocean. It cut the three surface vessels apart, and in a hail of searing white radiance and steamy, evaporated ocean water, it ended the lives of hundreds of humans. Caught off-guard, there was no time for anyone to escape the burning hot, sinking ships. None of the ships had been able to send a distress signal, much less any information about the vessel at the ocean floor.
Magdalene was safe.
For now.
Sawyer AFB had been practically empty, except for a skeleton crew of security personnel that had been quickly, efficiently, and quietly dispatched by the men in black.
The man who sat in the dead soldier’s chair in the guardhouse next to the main gate sat up suddenly, stiffly, alerted to movement from the corner of his eye.
A car was coming down the path to the gate, a dark blue armored sedan, with a silver insignia on the driver’s door.
It was a Milicom vehicle.
It rolled up to the booth. The driver wore the standard Milicom dress uniform. There were three passengers, two grunts and a brass.
The driver’s side window rolled down.
“Official Milicom business, soldier. Clearance code tri-delta. This is urgent.”
The large man in the booth made no move to open the gate. He looked into the car coolly. He saw that the passenger in the back seat was a general, three star. Something big was going down.
“Private, open up the gate, god damn—”
He was cut off as the man in the booth swung up the dead guard’s assault rifle and a hail of armor-piercing bullets tore apart the two passengers in the back seat.
The smell of gunpowder and blood hung languidly in the air.
“Shit! Holy shit!” The driver threw the car into reverse and floored the accelerator. The car jolted backward, the tires screeching. The soldier in the front passenger seat drew his service revolver and was cut down by the man in black, wielding the rifle before him as he emerged from the booth, following the car.
The stream of bullets silenced the screams of the driver forever. The car continued backward until the gas tank was punctured, and the car was torn apart, engulfed in flames.
The fiery wreckage stood fifty feet from the main gate entrance. Inside, four bodies were sent to their gods.
The man in black’s finger held the trigger of the automatic rifle down and swept it back and forth over the flaming wreckage until it emitted only a dry, ratcheting click. He returned to the booth and sat down again. He released the long magazine from the rifle’s barrel and slammed a fresh clip in. He emotionlessly leaned the loaded rifle against the wall.
It would be a busy day.
The main hangar doors rolled open.
Reynald’s eyes lit up.
And Bingo was his name-o..
Before them stretched a veritable fleet of the most advanced warplane this civilization could yet offer, the B-4.
The men in black went to work.
The Red Room.
David Jennings paced back and forth, his hands cradling his face. His eyes shifted warily, tracing his path.
“Do you still think this is all a coincidence, Cervera? Is it still just a fluke?”
Cervera frowned. “We have no evidence that it was an attack. It could have been radiation—”
“Radiation? Do you think this is another Mir or Liberty crash? This wasn’t an abandoned space station.”
“But no one has claimed responsibility.”
“Did anyone claim responsibility for Washington?”
Cervera fell silent.
Jennings glared at her. “Look at these, General.” He pushed a button on the control panel before them. The hologram of the globe was replaced with a revolving image of the detritus of three Navy vessels. “It’s the latest Air Force recon image of the Guam site.” He pressed another control.
Close-ups revealed an ocean dotted with the bodies of young American sailors.
“Explain that, Antonia. Over eight hundred men and women, dead for an unknown reason. We lost contact with the vessels and AF recon was sent in to check out the site. That’s what they found—the wreckage of three of our best ships. Something is going on, something big, and I want to put an end to it right now.”