“Why didn’t it work?”
“Because the rockets needed a full week to do their job effectively. The astronauts did all they could — but they fell, one by one, to endless waves of attackers. Whatever was on the asteroid, it had planned on being able to defend it.”
“Defend it?” Anna asked. “Why? Did it want to attack us?”
Samuel nodded. “Yes. After this mission failed, the government said that they thought the mission was a success, but for reasons unknown, it didn’t work. From the Files, we know why. Ragnarok was pushed off course, but not by much. Not by enough.”
A horrible dread twisted my gut. I knew all this happened thirty years ago, but it was hard not to imagine how everyone must have felt as these missions failed, one by one.
“The Bunker Program began immediately in 2020, the beginning of what came to be called the Dark Decade. Ragnarok was to hit Earth on December 3, 2030 — Dark Day. The Bunkers were never meant to be a reality. They were only a fail-safe. The government believed that if Ragnarok did impact Earth, they needed enough people underground to come up and rebuild once it was all over. The key to this was making well-trained soldiers of all underground U.S. citizens. The Bunkers altogether, assuming no losses, had enough space to hold close to 60,000 people. Given they were all well-trained, that’s still a sizeable force for an army. But as we all know, that wasn’t to last. The world became much darker than anyone expected. Things broke down. As far as we know, there are only two Bunkers. Maybe even they are gone.”
“How come Ragnarok took so long to detect?” I asked. “You’d think they would have found it much earlier than they did.”
“In the Old World, NASA funded the NEO Program — the Near Earth Object Program, designed to do just that. Asteroids the size of Ragnarok or larger were all accounted for, but Ragnarok went rogue, somehow. It changed course in what seemed to be an impossible manner. No one knows exactly when this occurred, but it took a while before people noticed. To this day, no one knows how it was done. But we know why it was done.”
“Why?” I asked, dreading the answer. “Why did it change course?”
“Don’t you see?” Samuel asked. “We’re being invaded.”
Chapter 21
“Aliens?” Anna asked. “Real-life aliens? I can buy a virus. That makes sense. That is clear…”
“Nothing else explains the attacks on Ragnarok’s surface while it was still in space,” Samuel said, “or how something the size of Ragnarok could suddenly change course like it did.”
“Maybe something else hit it,” I said. “Another asteroid. It’s possible, right? It could have been hit and been put on a course to hit Earth.”
“The odds of that are so small that the alien scenario becomes much more likely. Given enough energy, Ragnarok’s course could have been switched. It’s mind-bending mathematically, but maybe they could do it.”
“And who are they?” Makara asked. “Those creatures that have been attacking us? Because they don’t seem to be that smart. Their strength is in numbers.”
“I don’t know everything, and the Black Files don’t speak to that. But there does seem to be something that demonstrates intelligence, something referred to in the Files only as ‘The Voice.’”
“’The Voice?’” Makara asked. “Are you kidding me?”
Samuel shook his head. “This is the meat of the Black Files. Everything I explained was only the first twenty pages. The rest of it is about this — the xenovirus, the xenofungus, and the Voice. And a day in the future called Xenofall.”
“Xenofall?” Makara asked.
“Xenofall,” I said. “Is it what I think it is?”
“Explanation, please,” Anna said.
“Let me start at the beginning,” Samuel said. “Ragnarok hit in 2030, as you all know. Almost immediately the virus took effect. The first instances were noted as early as 2031, in Bunker 23 out in western Nebraska. It was the Bunker closest to Ragnarok, and it was the first to go offline in 2034.”
“It wouldn’t be long until others went offline, too,” I said.
“That is true,” Samuel said. “And most Bunkers failed for reasons having nothing to do with the xenovirus. Interestingly, the xenovirus’s main job is not to infect life-forms on Earth. It’s to create xenofungus.”
“Why?” I asked.
“It’s the food source for all xenolife,” Samuel said. “Yeah, xenolife will eat animals, or even people, from time to time. There are nutrients there. But even I noticed in my research that xenofungus is nutrient and calorie heavy. It is death and poison to any of us, but it sustains anything infected with the xenovirus. It could be that the xenovirus is as much an enzyme as it is a virus, an enzyme that can process the fungus and make it edible.”
“So the xenofungus is like…alien farms?” Anna asked.
“Yes. That’s a good way to think of it.” Samuel paused. “It also does other stuff. It reproduces rapidly, and can survive in very harsh environments. It doesn’t need much water. It doesn’t mind the cold, or the dryness of the Wasteland. It’s as if it’s been engineered to survive almost any sort of environment, and especially environments without much sunlight. It’s perfectly adapted for surviving in a world that is cloaked from sunlight by meteor fallout, which explains how it is able to spread so easily while everything of Earth origin dies off. We’re in the process of being transformed from Earth into something not-Earth.”
“What about the monsters?” I asked. “How does the xenovirus do that?”
“It’s all encoded in the xenovirus’s DNA,” Samuel said. “It does not have a double helix, like Earth-based life. It’s a very complicated cloverleaf structure, something that is very hard to imagine evolving in the wild — at least on Earth — which is also evidence in favor of the xenovirus’s being designed. But the cloverleaf lends certain advantages. It can hold more information. It’s more adaptable. It has the capability to mix and match genes of Earth creatures, creating entirely new forms of life — hence the crawlers. The xenovirus was created.”
“Created by whom?” I asked.
Samuel shook his head. “We couldn’t have done this. We don’t have the technology. It must have been created by an alien intelligence.”
“So you’re saying the xenovirus was planted in Ragnarok?”
“Exactly,” Samuel said.
“What about this Voice thing?” Makara asked. “You didn’t explain that.”
“It’s hard to explain. It’s like a sentience for all life-forms infected with the virus. It’s all based on the fungus, somehow. The fungus, in addition to being food, is also like a giant network. Fungus in one part of the world, as long as it is connected, can communicate with fungus in another part. It’s like a giant brain that can think — and yes, speak.”
“Speak? How?”
“Most of it is internal, and can’t be heard. The communication can’t be deciphered, much less translated in any way humans can understand. But nonetheless, it takes place. It creates sound waves, sound waves that directly affect the behavior of xenolife. During the attack on Bunker One, for example, the sound waves escalated as the Bunker began to be attacked. The Voice lends sentience to the entire invasion.”
“Can the Voice be killed?” I asked.
“You’d have to kill the xenofungus,” Samuel said. “Whether the Voice is actually connected with a physical form, the Black Files don’t say. I guess they didn’t get that far.”