A pane shattered in the window, spraying the room with shards of broken glass, and suddenly the sound became even louder.
This was no earthquake.
“Outside,” Emily yelled as the whole building began to shake. She bolted for the door as Thor raced ahead of her, closely followed by the men. But instead of running for the exit, Emily sprinted for the stairwell, pounded up the stairs, and rushed out onto the roof.
She didn’t know whether it was the cold California night air or the strange mix of fear and excitement that raised the gooseflesh over her skin, she was more concerned with the deep rumbling filling the air, like approaching thunder, bouncing from one side of the night-black hemisphere to the other.
“What the hell is it?” MacAlister yelled, struggling to be heard over the deafening roar.
“It’s no earthquake, that’s for sure,” Parsons yelled back, twisting on his toes as he tried to identify the source of the sound.
The night was suddenly rent open by a bright flash of light that appeared to the southwest, far out to sea and high up in the atmosphere. It was a bright white ball of light, already half the size of the moon and growing rapidly as it sped toward them.
Instinctively, everyone threw themselves down flat onto the roof as it roared over their heads, their eyes drawn to the sky in pure fascination, even as their instincts told them they were all about to die.
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.
CHAPTER 16
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.”