“Jesus, Sarge—”
“No more lip out of you. You’ll get your turn,” MacAlister snapped. “Wait here until either the skipper or I call you up top.”
The sailor looked displeased but fell silent under Mac’s stony stare.
Emily caught the briny scent of the Pacific Ocean wafting down to her as she pulled herself rung-over-rung up the ladder then up onto the flat observation deck at the top of the conning tower. Although her view was still blocked by the security wall that spanned the circumference of the tower she could still hear the whoosh of waves breaking over the deck of the sub below, gently rocking the vessel as it pitched and rolled with each swell.
They had surfaced a half mile offshore of Point Loma, California.
“It’s a safe enough distance for us to make a quick exit if we need to,” Captain Constantine had told Emily minutes before the sub’s ballast tanks had been blown and the sub began its ascent to the surface. “And far enough away that we won’t appear to be a threat if there’s still anyone alive in the base. Don’t want to be sunk before we even get a chance to see what’s going on, now do we?”
Emily’s eyes squinted painfully in the bright California sunshine. She couldn’t see a damn thing after spending so long in the artificial light of the submarine. She allowed her eyes a few moments to acclimate, filtering the light through the flat of her hands while she listened to the crashing of the waves and absorbed the warmth of the sun.
“My God!” she exclaimed when her vision finally cleared enough that she could see past the scintillating crest of the breaking waves.
She was staring out over a bluff, a clutch of buildings squeezed together, too distant to make out any real detail, but she could see radio masts and satellite dishes jutting out from some of the buildings’ roofs. To the right of the buildings, the land slipped gradually down to a harbor. Another submarine was moored to a quayside; it was canted away from her, its conning tower pointed inland and its curved underbelly exposed. A long jagged crack, about thirty feet in length, zigzagged along the exposed hull. She could see waves hitting the side and flowing into the interior.
Everywhere was silent, deserted. Not even a gull riding the warm thermals rising over the land disturbed this still-life portrait of a place deserted, abandoned. Emily took it all in within the first few seconds, but beyond the waves, past the rock-strewn beach and buildings with abandoned vehicles still visible in the parking lot, lay another world: an alien world.
A red world.
“Here,” said MacAlister, “take these.” He handed her a large pair of binoculars. Through their powerful lenses the distant shore seemed just feet away, and with it came the realization of how profound a change had been wrought across the world.
Where once there had been palm trees, neatly trimmed stretches of grass, roads, oak and California ash, now lay an alien jungle. Giant red fronds and creepers snaked their way over every foot of exposed surface, thick lush leaves sprouting from thin stalks (if they looked thin from half a mile away, they would be anything but, she realized). They waved in the slow breeze, wafting inland from the ocean. The alien vegetation clung to every wall, wound its way over roofs and around antennas. Leafy creepers threw long tendrils across blacktop, snaked through broken windows like thieves, cracked concrete, and levered up slabs of sidewalk until the ground looked like an 8.0 temblor had rocked the coast the naval base was built upon.
The submarine she had spotted earlier had not escaped the red vegetation; although the deck was angled away from her, Emily could still see a latticework of thick ropelike feelers spilling over the edge of the quay, obscuring the front of the hull under its swaying leafy camouflage. Red vines wound up the conning tower and dripped toward the ground like lank red hair, swaying in the breeze.
Mixed with the smell of the ocean, ozone was another less inviting one. Even at this distance from shore the aroma wafted back to the Vengeance. It smelled like mold and burned hair. There was also another less distinct, but more easily identifiable odor of something disturbingly familiar to Emily: ammonia.
“My God,” Captain Constantine mumbled, his voice barely above a whisper, his head unable to turn away from the line of red that stretched along the coast into the distance. “We might just as well be on another world.”
Emily ignored him, focusing the binoculars beyond the base, tracing the line of the coast. Wherever she looked, what should have been clear land was obscured by the same red vegetation. It covered all but a scant few buildings within the Point Loma base but seemed not to have made it to the beach anywhere along the coast surrounding the base, as though the sand-covered, pebble-strewn beaches delineated the alien world’s dominion.
Within the ocean of red flora, she could see the occasional alien tree surging into the air above the red canopy. They reminded her of the alien trees that had taken root after the red rain, but while what she looked at now were just as large, they also lacked the constructed uniformity of those first invaders; these were more natural, more recognizable as simple trees, yet undoubtedly not of this planet. They towered over the rest of the jungle. And that was exactly what this was, she realized: a freaking jungle!
Somehow, over a matter of just a few days, the red storm had raged through the old world and changed everything, converting it from what it had once been; reshaping, reorganizing, recreating it into everything that now lay before her.
Emily felt a bitter laugh escape her as she stared through the binoculars. Finally she understood what had occurred on their insignificant little rock: God had visited this planet and he had found it wanting, so he bent it to His will. And if it wasn’t God, that was okay, it might just as well have been. Because the intelligence, the technology, the sheer amount of raw power that had been harnessed to achieve this transformation was so far beyond anything imaginable it could drive you insane just thinking about it.
“Emily?” Captain Constantine’s voice sounded as though it was coming from a very long way away. “Emily!” he said again, louder this time, touching her shoulder. She allowed her arms to drop the binoculars to her waist and turned to look at him.
“It seems you were correct all along,” he repeated. “Do you have any suggestions?”
“We need to get Jacob up here to see this,” she said. “We need to get him up here right now.”
Two crewmen carried Jacob up into the sunshine of the sub’s conning tower and then supported the climatologist between them so he could get a good look over the edge of the conning tower’s observation deck.
“Ho-leee shit!” he hissed when he saw the transformation of the mainland. His eyes grew wide. Thanks to many long months cooped up in the Stockton research station, Jacob’s skin was already the wrong side of ivory, but Emily was convinced she saw him turn, as Procol Harum had so eloquently put it, a whiter shade of pale. “Holy shit! I mean… I never thought… Jesus! This is… this is just astonishing.” The sense of awe in the scientist’s voice was tangible.
“Here,” said MacAlister, handing Jacob a second pair of binoculars. The scientist glassed them back and forth over the base, then up into the jungle growing behind it. His index finger moved rapidly back and forth over the focus knob as he zoomed in as far as the magnification would allow, then out again as his head jerked, zigged, and zagged across the horizon.
“It’s everywhere,” he whispered, more to himself than the others who were watching him. He studied the coast for another ten minutes, oohing and ahing, with the occasional “Fascinating!” thrown in for good measure as his eyes caught some new feature or form within the explosion of tangled vegetation littering the landscape.